Honor Thy Father (47 page)

The reply that Paul Dean received from J. Edgar Hoover was a few paragraphs of formalized evasiveness; and when Dean wrote a second private note to Hoover asking for something substantial, he received nothing at all.

Although David Hale was reported to have moved to Miami, where he was said to be a security officer for Giffen Industries, Inc., he was served with a subpoena to appear for the Superior Court trial of his involvement in the bombings. When Hale did appear, he refused to testify. Walter Prideaux invoked the Fifth Amendment. Neither man was held. The two who pleaded guilty, Stevens and Dunbar, were freed, after being fined $286 each on misdemeanor charges.

After the trial, the Bonannos had no comment to make to the press. That the FBI was on the defensive was no cause for rejoicing in the Bonanno household, where it was felt that the agents would retaliate like wounded lions, unrelenting in their pursuit of revenge. The elder Bonanno and Peter Notaro had already felt the backlash of the FBI shortly after the publication of the initial press reports linking David Hale to the bombings—a simultaneous FBI raid at 7:00
A.M.
was directed at the Bonanno and Notaro homes in Tucson, arresting both men on charges of plotting to get Bonanno’s
capo
Charles Battaglia out of jail through the use of bribes, blackmail, and threats of death.

Battaglia was then serving a ten-year sentence in Leavenworth, having been fined $10,000 because he was found guilty of threatening to force a Tucson bowling alley manager to install a coin-operated pool table that would be provided by a vending firm Battaglia represented. On the day of the arrest of Bonanno and Notaro, the FBI contended that the imprisoned Battaglia had sought to win a retrial on the basis of new evidence showing that his conviction had been obtained by the illegal use of electronic eavesdropping equipment. The FBI further alleged that Battaglia’s plot to free himself had been outlined in a series of cryptic letters between himself and Bonanno, letters alluding to sums of money and certain rewards to be made to citizens who might support and assist Battaglia’s campaign for freedom, and death threats to those who would not. On Bonanno’s death list, according to the FBI, was David Hale.

The FBI’s informant was a fellow prisoner of Battaglia’s at Leavenworth, an inmate who worked as a clerk to a prison official and could send letters without censorship, and claimed to have done so in Battaglia’s behalf. But when the conspiracy case against Bonanno and Notaro came to trial in Tucson, a third prisoner surprised the jury by testifying that the FBI’s informer had admitted privately that he had lied—the government’s conspiracy case was a hoax. The elder Bonanno and Notaro were acquitted—the FBI was embarrassed; and Bill Bonanno, who was then in a New York court facing the possibility of spending many years in jail, thought apprehensively to himself,
the government will get me now. My father beat them in Arizona, but they’ll get even in this case
.

The case Bill was referring to was the credit card situation in Federal court—his having taken Torrillo’s Diners’ Club card from Perrone, having signed Torrillo’s name on more than fifty vouchers during the cross-country journey from New York to Arizona during the heat of the Banana War, a time when Bill seemed to be a most likely target in the East.

Now, almost two years after that misguided venture, he felt he was the government’s target. Though he had stood before many judges and juries in recent years, this latest court appearance was unlike any other in that it filled him with a sense of impending doom. He knew that the government had Torrillo on its side, that teams of federal agents had joined forces to fortify the prosecution’s case, and that their combined efforts could incarcerate him for years.

When he said good-bye to Rosalie and the children in San Jose prior to his flight, he was aware, and thought that they were also aware, though nothing was said, that it might be a long time before they would see one another again.

T
HE CREDIT CARD CASE AGAINST
B
ILL
B
ONANNO BEGAN
in federal court in downtown Manhattan on Monday afternoon, November 10, 1969, with the Honorable Walter R. Mansfield presiding. At fifty-seven, Judge Mansfield, a man with a full head of white hair, gentle blue eyes, and a smooth pinkish complexion, seemed so self-assured in his courtroom manner that one might have assumed that he had spent most of his life in magisterial robes; whereas, in fact, he had only become a judge three years before. It was true that he had been reared with the advantage of rank and position, and perhaps that contributed to his aura of command. His father, the late Frederick W. Mansfield, had been the mayor of Boston in the 1930s when the younger Mansfield was attending Harvard Law School; and during World War II, Walter Mansfield served as an officer in the Marine Corps, both in the European and Asiatic theaters, including duty with the OSS—parachuting behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia and working with guerrilla groups behind Japanese lines in China.

After the war, separated from the marines with the rank of major, he became an Assistant United States Attorney for the New York Southern District, where he prosecuted and tried a variety of criminal cases that included customs violations, crimes of theft on New York piers, bankruptcy frauds, narcotics activities, illicit still operations, counterfeiting, confidence swindles, and mail frauds. In 1948, a year after his marriage at the age of thirty-five, he went into private practice with the firm of Donovan Leisure Newton & Irwine, of 2 Wall Street, remaining there until becoming a federal judge in 1966.

A skier, golfer, tennis player, swimmer, and gardener, hobbies he pursues when he leaves his Park Avenue home on weekends for his residence in New Canaan or his travels into New England, Walter Mansfield’s sedentary existence as a judge has not diminished his vital energy, a fact that was apparent in the spry manner with which he strode into the courtroom on this Monday in November. Climbing the steps to the bench, acknowledging the assembled jury, Judge Mansfield seemed anxious to begin the proceedings that had been delayed the previous Friday by the task of selecting a jury that would not be prejudiced by the notoriety of the Bonanno name. On that day, fifteen of the first twenty-seven prospective jurors had been excused or challenged. But now the twelve jurors were impaneled—eight women, four men—and the judge leaned back in his chair waiting for the government prosecutor to walk to the rostrum to deliver the opening statement. The judge momentarily looked toward the rows of spectators, the reporters in the front row, and he also observed with apparent satsfaction that the windows were partially open to let the cool November breeze into his courtroom on the eleventh floor overlooking Foley Square. Mansfield, a New Englander, relished fresh air and ran a cool courtroom.

The prosecutor, a tall, thin dark-haired man named Walter Phillips, who was about forty and wore a gray suit and a thin blue-striped tie, was about to speak. Bill Bonanno stopped whispering to his attorney, Albert Krieger. To Bill’s right at the big table that was behind the government’s table, was the codefendant, Peter Notaro, a burly man in his midfifties; and on Notaro’s right was his attorney, a soft-spoken sandy-haired man in his forties named Leonard Sandier.

“May it please the Court, Mr. Foreman, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Mr. Sandier, Mr. Krieger,” Phillips began. “As His Honor has already stated to you, my name is Walter Phillips, and I am an Assistant United States Attorney, which means that I am representing the government in this prosecution of this case. I say prosecution because this is a criminal case. There are criminal charges which have been brought against this defendant or these defendants.”

“What happened,” he continued, looking at the jury seated to his left, “is that a grand jury sitting in this courthouse made up of people just like yourselves returned an indictment charging these defendants”—he nodded toward Bonanno and Notaro—“with certain crimes, and they have pleaded not guilty to this indictment, which is the reason that we are here today, and you have been chosen as the triers of the fact. It is your function to determine the facts of this case. How are facts proven? Facts are proven through witnesses, witnesses merely being a fancy name for human beings who come here, take the witness stand, and testify under oath to things that they have observed; that is, seen or heard.

“Facts are also proven by exhibits which are introduced into evidence and which you can see. Now, this particular case, the indictment charges the defendants with three separate crimes—conspiracy, mail fraud, and perjury.

“Now conspiracy merely, as His Honor will charge you in much more detail, is merely an agreement to do an unlawful act. It is an agreement between two or more people. In this case the agreement was to commit mail fraud by use of a Diners’ Club credit card not belonging to either of these defendants, and not with the permission of the true cardholder, the person who actually owned the card. The mail fraud is the actual use of the Diners’ Club credit card.

“Now you ask yourselves, what does mail fraud or what does the use of a credit card have to do with mail fraud? Well, the fraud is the scheme to defraud Diners’ Club and/or other establishments who have contracts with Diners’ Club out of money or property and that they do this by the use of the mails or that the mails are incidental thereto…

“Now what is perjury? Perjury is a very simple thing. Perjury is merely testifying willfully and falsely under oath before a competent tribunal such as in this case the grand jury. In this particular case the grand jury was investigating into the alleged fraudulent use of this particular credit card, and the two defendants appeared before the grand jury and as you will see, and as I will explain to you, they testified falsely when they did appear.

“Now the government, of course, has the burden of the proof, as it does in every criminal case. It is necessary for the government to come forward with the evidence, the proof. And what the government will prove in this particular case is that the defendant Bonanno went into a Mexican restaurant in Tucson, Arizona, and that he treated five other people, including Mr. Notaro, to a meal in that Mexican restaurant, and you will hear from the cashier of that Mexican restaurant. You will also hear testimony that Mr. Bonanno went into a department store in Tucson, Arizona, and that he attempted to purchase almost two hundred dollars’ worth of sweaters and clothes…

“You will hear that he was later called before the grand jury to testify concerning the use of this credit card, which was in the name of Don Torrillo, and he testified that he was given permission by a Mr. Samuel Hank Perrone to use this card that was given to him by Mr. Perrone, and he said as soon as he learned or immediately upon Mr. Perrone’s death, he stopped using the card. You will hear testimony that this same Hank Perrone was killed, shot on March 11, 1968…”

“Your Honor!” cried Sandier, Notaro’s lawyer, getting quickly to his feet, “I object to this statement and I move for a mistrial.”

“I join in that application, Your Honor,” said Krieger, furious that within the first ten minutes of the trial, the prosecutor had suggested to the jury the vision of a gangland murder.

Judge Mansfield, frowning, said, “I didn’t quite get the significance of it,” and he permitted Krieger and Sandler to explain their objection to him at the sidebar, beyond the jury’s hearing. “Your Honor,” Krieger said, “this is totally irrelevant, this is just designed to prejudice these defendants before the jury.” Mansfield paused, then agreed that the manner of Perrone’s death had nothing to do with this credit card case, and so he instructed the jury to disregard Phillips’s statement about the death. But the judge denied Sandler’s motion of a mistrial, and asked Phillips to proceed.

“You will also hear,” Phillips continued calmly, innocently, “that Mr. Bonanno testified that while he was in Tucson, Arizona, he asked certain attorneys out there about the propriety of his using this particular credit card. You will hear from each one of these attorneys that Mr. Bonanno didn’t discuss this with them at all. And finally you will hear that Mr. Notaro also testified before the grand jury and that he said before the grand jury that a certain signature was not his, that he had not made the signature, and he had not seen certain airline ticket envelopes. You will hear that this was false, too, from one person who saw him make this signature.

“Now, finally, you will hear the testimony of Mr. Torrillo, Don Torrillo, the person who owned this credit card. You will hear that early in January he purchased airline tickets for Mr. Bonanno and Perrone to fly to the Coast and that he was never paid for these tickets and that sometime at the end of January of 1968 that Mr. Perrone came to his house and literally demanded from him the credit card and that he turned over the credit card and thereafter started incurring bills from all over the country.

“This is the government’s proof. I have said to you what the government will intend to prove. In effect, in a way, I am indebted to you now—I owe you a debt because it will be your function to determine whether I have lived up to my word, whether I have in fact, whether the government has in fact, proved what they said they were intending to prove…. I am sure at the conclusion of the case you will be convinced not only beyond a reasonable doubt but beyond any shadow of a doubt that these defendants are guilty of the crimes that they are charged with. Thank you.”

Krieger then stood and walked toward the rostrum next to the jury box. “As I am sure you recall,” he said, “I represent the defendant Salvatore Bonanno, and my name is Albert J. Krieger.” Krieger’s head was still shaved bald in the manner made famous by Yul Brynner, and he spoke in a loud voice, his broad shoulders held firmly as he paced up and back in front of the jury. After expressing confidence in the jurors’ capacity to render a fair verdict with regard to Bonanno, “to drive from your minds the prejudices which we may carry with us,” Krieger assured the jury that the defense was “not interested in taking up the time of this court, in taking up your time, by engaging in any game of charades as to who signed what on such and such a date.” Bonanno, he said, had already appeared before a grand jury and had admitted that he had signed the name “Don A. Torrillo” on numerous vouchers, having done so in the belief that the credit card had been obtained for his use through legitimate means. “The issue which you people will ultimately have to resolve,” Krieger said, “is, number one, was the credit card extorted? A dirty word, extorted, but I think that it is what we are going to get down to here. Was the credit card extorted?

“Two, if it was extorted, did Mr. Bonanno have anything to do with the extortion? Number three: if it was extorted and he didn’t know it was extorted by Perrone at the time that he started to use it, did he subsequently find out and use some kind of illegal means to prevent a complaint being made about the use of the card?

“This,” Krieger said, still pacing slowly back and forth, “is what we are going to be dealing with, not whether he went to a restaurant some place in this country and treated four or five people to dinner. That means absolutely nothing. You will hear the stipulations in this court where he concedes use of the credit card because the use is meaningless insofar as this case is concerned unless the government can prove the fraudulent intent which we respectfully submit to you the government cannot.

“The perjury count is window dressing. The perjury counts arise from exactly the same circumstances as would come about if in the course of this trial I, as a lawyer, decide that it’s pertinent and material for Salvatore Bonanno to get on that witness stand and tell what his recollection is as to certain pertinent facts here, and you reject that explanation. Is that perjury? I don’t think that it is.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am very anxious and I believe that you are, to start hearing the witnesses. I believe very, very strongly that any defendant who comes into an American courtroom wants one thing, and that is justice. The government never loses a case because whether the verdict is guilty or not guilty, justice has been done so long as the jury has fulfilled its function.

“I am going to sit down, and look forward to this evidence. Please evaluate the evidence as carefully and with the same attention, once again, to duplicate some phraseology of His Honor, as if you were one side or the other. Pay that same careful attention. Don’t let a word go by. Judge these witnesses, judge Torrillo, because Torrillo is the keystone to the government’s case, not a bill in a restaurant, not an airline ticket. Torrillo’s credibility is going to mandate your verdict. Thank you.”

Leonard Sandler then stood, speaking in behalf of Peter Notaro, and emphasized that when Notaro had taken the cross-country motor trip in February 1968 with Bonanno and Bill’s elderly uncle, Di Pasquale, that Notaro had no knowledge of the credit card that Bonanno was using for gasoline, meals, and lodgings; Notaro had merely gone to Arizona to help Bonanno with the driving and to take a short vacation. Before the trip, Sandler said, Notaro had worked in a trucking business that was going bankrupt, and since he was inactive at the time, he welcomed the opportunity to accompany Bonanno to Arizona, which Notaro had never visited.

“The facts will show,” Sandler said, “that [Notaro] did not use the credit card on the trip, didn’t use the credit card for a month, during which period he was in the company of Mr. Bonanno, who occasionally used the credit card with him, occasionally used it when he was not present. Nothing is done by him with regard to the credit card for virtually a month after its alleged original acquisition. Finally, in March of that year, his vacation has been extended and he is thinking of staying in Arizona and perhaps going into business there.

“Mr. Bonanno calls up the airport for a ticket for some other person who is coming from Canada and a kind of invoice, a preticket invoice, is prepared, and the name of Torrillo and the Torrillo credit card is given over the phone so it can be ready when it is picked up, and Mr. Bonanno asked Mr. Notaro to accompany him to the airport. When he gets to the airport he cannot park. He is a few feet away. Rather than take a parking space, he says to Mr. Notaro, ‘Here, take this credit card, pick up the invoice, sign the name,’ in substance. And he does so without any feeling he is doing anything illegal, without any feeling that this is so extraordinary a thing.