Honor Thy Father (59 page)

In late 1974, after he had been released from Terminal Island, Bill Bonanno received and accepted a job offer in the public relations department of a large construction firm in the San Jose area. The job paid $350 a week. He also anticipated earning extra income after signing a contract with a national lecture agency that promised to send him to campuses and other sites to deliver speeches about prison reform, enlarging on an essay he had recently written for the op-ed page of
The New York Times
. In his essay he had few positive things to say about the correctional system. “The system’s interplay at every level—from the lofty judiciary to the correctional officer walking the tiers and making bed checks—is one of moral bankruptcy,” he wrote. After he had begun delivering lectures and receiving checks for his appearances, Internal Revenue agents visited the agency and directed that his fees be sent to them. They also laid claim to a portion of his weekly salary at the construction firm. It was the contention of the IRS that between the years of 1965 and 1967 Bill Bonanno had underpaid the government in the amount of $165,471, and, with the addition of interest and penalties, his bill was now $344,540. Bonanno countered by claiming bankruptcy in the latter part of 1974, and it was then that my wife Nan and I were told by our attorney Paul Gitlin that we were both required (since we filed joint tax returns) to give depositions in the bankruptcy case, responding to the government’s questions about the validity of the children’s education fund. The matter was described in an article in
The New York Times
on February 9, 1975:

At the conclusion of the trial in June the court ruled that the government could not invade the children’s education fund, which was then in excess of $80,000 and was continuing to increase as a result of the ongoing sales of the book overseas and distribution fees earned by the film; but Bill Bonanno’s petition for bankruptcy was rejected, and in the years that followed new tax offenses were brought against him, in addition to parole violations—and thus in August 1978 he was returned to prison, this time being sent to the federal penitentiary at McNeil Island, near Seattle, where he would remain for the next two years.

Rosalie meanwhile continued her job at the insurance company and, accompanied by one or more of her children, visited Bill as often as possible on weekends. Twenty-year-old Charles, the oldest and least studious of the four offspring, learned to become a welder after graduation from high school and he found work in a local auto shop. The attorney Mr. Gitlin paid for Charles’s welding school instructions as he did the tuition and related costs at the Jesuit-run Bellermine prep school attended by seventeen-year-old-Joseph and fifteen-year-old Salvatore. Joseph was the most academically inclined of the Bonannos, having developed a fondness for reading and doing crossword puzzles during his childhood when he was often bedridden with acute asthma; and because he had been impressed by the care and dedication he received from the San Jose doctor who had successfully treated him, Joseph planned to become a physician; and in the fall of 1978 he enrolled at the University of Arizona as a pre-med student. His brother Salvatore, who grew up with a keen interest in computers, would go on to study business administration at San Diego State University, while the fourteen-year-old Felippa (who had begun hiring herself out as a babysitter in the neighborhood when she turned nine) would proceed to take community-college courses in early child development, and eventually would operate a day-care center and become a kindergarten teacher in a private school.

During the late 1970s into the 1980s the septuagenarian Joseph Bonanno dwelled in enforced retirement at his home in the historical district of Tucson. It was a walled-in adobe brick residence with beamed ceilings and extra rooms for his guests, which included a full-time bodyguard and a flow of friends and family relatives, including on special occasions and holidays his grandchildren. In his heavily fortified basement, which in the 1950s had been converted into a bomb shelter, he kept his private office. In his heyday, in addition to his earnings from organizational activities, he oversaw several legitimate businesses (cheese-manufacturing firms in Wisconsin and Canada, a dairy farm in upstate New York, and real-estate investments in New York and Arizona); and at this point he presented himself in public as a law-abiding citizen of modest means and desires.

Still, his name remained in the headlines, since he was regularly being sought for questioning by law-enforcement officials, including the United States attorney in Manhattan, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who identified him as an “important witness” in the trials of several mafiosi captains and soldiers who were affiliated with one of the five crime families located in the New York metropolitan area. Of the five family bosses who had retained their positions- through the post-World War II era—Bonanno, Profaci, Genovese, Lucchese, and Gambino—only Bonanno was still alive, and as a boss he had endured the longest: from 1931 until 1965. And even though he had vacated his position during the Banana War, being succeeded by a number of marginal men who lacked both leadership abilities and long lives, the Bonanno trade name was more or less franchised in perpetuity and appeared endlessly in print in
The New York Times
and elsewhere through the 1980s into the twenty-first century: e.g.,

Striving to stay out of courtrooms and jails while his name remained newsworthy, Joseph Bonanno relied on a team of attorneys (among them the prominent defense counselor William M. Kunstler) to help him dodge arrest warrants and subpoenas on the pretext that he was no longer knowledgeable about organized crime and was concerned only (as Mr. Kunstler explained to a reporter) “with the precarious state of his health.” Although Joseph Bonanno’s ailments in the 1980s were said to include heart trouble, he was known during these years by his girlfriend, who was slightly more than half his age, to be in vigorous condition for lovemaking.

His girlfriend was Theresa D’Antonio, who had begun having an affair with him in Tucson in 1982, two years after the death of Bonanno’s wife, Fay, to whom he had been married for 49 years. Theresa D’Antonio had met both Joseph and Fay Bonanno in the mid-1970s when she was dating one of Bonanno’s lawyers in Tucson, a man in his fifties named Lawrence D’Antonio. The latter had been introduced to Joseph Bonanno in Brooklyn during the late 1940s while working his way through law school in a butcher shop owned by a Sicilian who was friendly with Bonanno; and when D’Antonio decided to practice law in Tucson, Bonanno bought him a custom-made suit and a set of golf clubs, secured his membership in the El Rio Country Club, and became one of his clients.

In the 1970s D’Antonio contracted cancer and was suffering from it in 1979 when he married Theresa in Tucson. The following year, at the age of sixty-one, he was dead. A month later, in September 1980, Fay Bonanno also passed away; and as Joseph Bonanno and Theresa D’Antonio spent lots of time consoling one another during the next two years, they eventually became physically intimate, and neither sought to conceal this from their relatives and friends. Theresa D’Antonio often stayed overnight at Joseph Bonanno’s home, sometimes serving as the hostess at birthday and holiday gatherings attended by Bonanno’s children and grandchildren. The couple also traveled on vacations together, once to Florida, once to Mexico, and it was during this time that Theresa began keeping a written account of their relationship, a journal in which she included descriptions of his courtly style, his cunning nature, his greed and generosity, and, with words of admiration and astonishment considering his advanced age, his sexual prowess.

It was her hope to someday write a book about her affair with Joseph Bonanno, and when she tentatively mentioned this to him she was surprised when he unhesitatingly gave his permission. “If you want it to sell you’d better include lots of sex,” he told her. Theresa thought that he had changed considerably from the man he had been when they met, remembering him initially as humorless and aloof, serious and set in his ways; and she credited herself for influencing these changes: getting him to laugh at her risqué jokes, arguing with him in ways that he tolerated and that Fay would probably not have dared, and also encouraging him to do things he normally would have avoided, such as getting him (a nonswimmer) to accompany her into the ocean during their Mexican vacation, an episode he did not rebuke her for, though his feet were left bloody and swollen from the effects of a stingray.

Although he was understandably secretive due to the nature of his work, he was quite candid with her, once volunteering the information that his highly publicized “kidnapping” in 1964 had actually been staged by himself and two of his subordinates (neither of whom was his son Bill, who was then unaware of the ploy that enabled his father to avoid going to jail for failing to testify before a federal grand jury).

Joseph Bonanno told Theresa that during his nineteen months in hiding he lived in various secured sites in New York City, adding that he often strolled through the streets in disguise, wearing tattered clothing and an eye patch and allowing his beard to grow inches below his chin. He carried a cane, walked slowly, and affected the posture of an elderly individual with back problems. He was fifty-nine at the time, but he was convinced that if his fellow pedestrians paid any attention to him they probably dismissed him as a harmless slow-stepping vagrant in his mid-eighties.

Theresa was also surprised when Joseph Bonanno told her in 1982 that he was planning to write his autobiography, being assisted by a Tucson journalist named Sergio Lalli. The fact that Joseph Bonanno had condemned his son Bill for cooperating with me on
Honor Thy Father
in 1971 obviously did not dissuade the elder Bonanno from cashing in on his own notoriety. His book was entitled
A Man of Honor
, and indeed most of what Bonanno wrote was self-serving; still, it sold well and received much attention in the media. Mike Wallace of CBS’s
60 Minutes
traveled to Tucson to interview him; but when U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani sought and failed to get Bonanno to talk about the managerial methods of the Mafia’s national commission (a subject Bonanno had alluded to in his book), Joseph Bonanno was cited for civil contempt. For several months his attorneys were successful in delaying his imprisonment on grounds of ill-health, but in the latter part of 1985, when Joseph Bonanno was eighty-one, he was taken into custody and sent to a federal facility in Lexington, Kentucky.

Although he would serve for less than fourteen months he was nonetheless very upset because his jail time prevented him from attending, in May 1986, the wedding of his twenty-five-year-old grandson and namesake, Dr. Joseph Bonanno, the recently graduated medical school student who was Bill and Rosalie Bonanno’s second son. The son had met his future bride years earlier when they were fellow students at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and they would make their home in Phoenix, where Dr. Joseph Bonanno would begin his medical career as an intern in pediatrics at St. Joseph’s Hospital. While the couple was receiving wedding toasts in a crowded banquet hall in Arizona, the groom’s imprisoned grandfather in Kentucky somehow managed to gain access to the warden’s telephone, and, in a prideful tone of voice, he said through a speaker on the dais: “I regret that I cannot spend this glorious day with you…but as you know I am still on vacation in the Mediterranean Sea.”