Honor Thy Father Part 5

Bill Bonanno stood in the living room greeting people as they walked in and embraced him, kissed him, and told him how well he looked. One of his aunts, his mother's oldest sister, had cried when she saw him, but now she was drying her tears in her handkerchief, standing in the kitchen with Bill's other aunts and his mother-in-law, who were preparing the large dinner. The women, gray-haired and with matronly figures, were making soup and pasta, roasting a variety of meat, and cooking stuffed peppers and mushrooms with side dishes of string beans and other vegetables. Rosalie moved between the kitchen and dining room, setting the table, having put a heavy linen cloth over two sizable folding aluminum tables that had been placed end to end. She wore a bright yellow dress, had a flower in her hair, and she seemed sprightly and in concert with the excitement around her.

She heard her husband in the living room recounting his jail experiences to the other men, and she knew that he was enjoying the attention he was receiving, the laughter he was provoking by his comic descriptions of the characters he had met. She was privately elated that he was home, had liked waking up in the morning and finding him beside her, and when one of the men in the living room called to her, "How you feeling, Rosalie?" she smiled and replied, "Like a bride."

As the aroma from the kitchen carried through the house, the children ran freely from room to room, pus.h.i.+ng wagons, waving plastic guns, riding the giant bear, competing for their father's attention. The color television set in the den was loudly tuned to the "Lawrence Welk Show," which no one was watching, and in one corner of the dining room sat an elderly white-haired uncle, a tailor, sewing up the seams of Bill's trousers that had been reduced in girth. The only young person among the guests was Rosalie's teen-age sister, Josephine, who was being sent in the fall to college in Santa Clara, California, a Jesuit school about which Josephine already had some doubts.

Josephine was a serene brown-eyed girl who wore her long dark hair in a ponytail, and she possessed, but managed to conceal in front of her elders, an inquiring mind. She was beginning to question certain edicts of the Catholic church and certain values and goals that her two older sisters and brothers and her other relatives had accepted unquestioningly-namely, the quest for financial security and middle-cla.s.s respectability. Josephine, who was eleven years younger than Rosalie, was only seven when her father had died, and she had not been subjected to the insularity and strictness as Rosalie had or her other sister, Ann. who was now married to a young man of Sicilian origin and living near Santa Clara. Josephine was beginning to identify with the style of a new generation. She was reading books and thinking thoughts that she was sure her family would neither understand nor appreciate; she could not accept the submissive role of women and all the prerogatives of men in the Italo-American society she had observed at close range, and she did not wish to condone the hards.h.i.+p and suffering that had been experienced by her mother and her sister Rosalie.

Josephine had been acutely aware of the marital difficulties between Rosalie and Bill, and she remembered how frightened she was two years ago on the night that Bill and Labruzzo came to the Profaci home to reclaim Rosalie. Hearing the shouting and commotion after Bill was told by her mother that Rosalie was not at home and would not be going with him, Josephine locked herself in the upstairs bathroom with Bill's two-year-old son, Joseph; when she heard Bill climbing the steps, she quickly turned on the bathtub tap, answering his angry pounding against the door with cries that she was bathing, begging him to leave her alone, and praying meanwhile that the little boy would remain silent. Josephine did not again breathe easily until long after Bill had left the house.

Josephine's opinion of Bill was far from flattering even now, but she veiled her emotions as she helped Rosalie set the table, and she was as friendly to Bill as she was capable of being. She knew how much her mother wanted to end the family friction, to stand behind Rosalie and Bill and forget the past. Watching her mother in the kitchen, a large smiling woman of great generosity and warmth, Josephine was again impressed by her mother's capacity to withstand a lifetime of ordeals; she had been an orphan as a young girl after both parents had died in an accident, a widow before she was forty, a woman who had moved through life without bitterness with a controversial name that one of her sons would change and that another of her sons would keep in public circulation by being charged with gambling in Brooklyn. Her daughters had also been a source of suffering-Rosalie, the model child, nearly dying from an overdose of pills, and Ann, the second girl, rebelling as a teen-ager after the death of her father, keeping her own hours until her mother in a rare moment of frustration threw a plate of spaghetti at her-an incident that the family now considered amusing, one of the few amusing incidents that Josephine could recall from her childhood.

After the table was set for dinner and Bill had opened the wine and the women had come in from the kitchen carrying steaming plates, everyone sat down, and one of the aunts looked at Bill adoringly, and said, "Oh, Bill, you look wonderful," to which he smiled and said, "In jail the food was terrible."

"Did you have any Italian cooks in there?" one of the men asked.

"We had one," Bill said. "He was an illegal entry from Naples. For the few weeks he was there, the food was better, but then they s.h.i.+pped him back and it suddenly got worse. It was so bad that there was a hunger strike for two and half days, and then it got better, but not much better. There was one dish in jail called Baked Manzanetti, which was macaroni and wasn't bad-years ago there was a cook named Manzanetti who used to make it, and he put his name on the menu and its still there. But the conditions were so bad, the filth, the rats, that sometimes you just couldn't eat no matter what they were serving."

"Rats!" one of the women exclaimed.

"Yes, rats," Bill repeated. "They were all over. I had one rat that used to come into my cell at night, and I'd tie a piece of food on a string and play with him, and..."

"Bill," Rosalie interrupted, wanting to change the subject.

"Some of the men really got depressed in that place," Bill continued, "especially the junkies, and we had plenty of them. We also had a few suicides when I was there-one night this Puerto Rican fellow climbed up on a stool, tied his belt around his neck and hooked it to the ceiling, and told his cellmate-who was playing solitaire-that he didn't want him to call anybody or do anything. The cellmate looked up from his game and said, 'Don't worry.' The guy on the stool tightened the belt, waited for a few moments, then again looked at his cellmate and said, 'Now don't cut me down.' The guy playing solitaire became irritated, and he said, 'Look, you want to talk or you want to jump?' The guy jumped. After he was dead, the cellmate called the guards."

"Oh, how terrible," one of the women said, "how could he do such a horrible thing?"

"In jail," Bill said, "you do things. And you don't care."

As they continued to eat, Bill felt something poking him in the back. Turning, he saw his son Salvatore, smiling, wearing a cowboy hat, pointing a toy gun at him.

"Hey, cut that out!" Bill shouted, laughing, and the little boy ran giggling into the kitchen. Bill then resumed talking, telling his guests that there were many interesting aspects to his jail experience, such as how naturally the prisoners seemed to divide themselves into social cla.s.ses that were roughly equivalent to the level of social acceptability that they had enjoyed in the outside world: the crooked lawyers in jail a.s.sociated with other crooked lawyers or stock swindlers; the pimps a.s.sociated with other pimps or smalltime pushers; and the same was true of the truck hijackers and other thieves.

"Birds of a feather stick together," somebody said, and one of the men asked, smiling, "And where did you fit in, Bill?"

Bill lifted his wine gla.s.s in a mock toast and said, "I enjoyed great social mobility." He then added, "Shortly after I arrived in prison, an interviewer who was responsible for a.s.signing us jobs asked me what I did on the outside, and I said, 'Nothing that would be of any use in here.' But I did tell him I could type, thinking he might put me in the records room, but that didn't work. Later on, after I'd worked as a painter, I got to work in the library, which I enjoyed, although there was not much to read in there. They had books by Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy that I'd read in school, but the reading level was very low. I did reread Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative Conscience of a Conservative, and I agree with a lot of points he makes-especially his point that the federal government today has entirely too much power, and the individual citizen's rights are being ignored..." There were nods of agreement from around the table, although none from Josephine who had listened quietly throughout dinner but had not offered a comment or revealed in any way what she was thinking. Mrs. Profaci smiled often at Bill during the evening, and no one would have guessed that their relations.h.i.+p had been strained in the recent past. Rosalie also continued to be in good spirits, listening attentatively and keeping her husband's water gla.s.s filled and the food within his reach.

Although they sat for nearly two hours and discussed many subjects, there was never a mention of Bill's father during the entire evening. It was as if the subject was too delicate, too private to be raised in front of so many people, too awkward or implicating. Perhaps they were also aware that the house might be bugged. Bill's mother, who had been reported missing immediately after the incident and was later speculated to be living with friends or relatives in Arizona or California, was now at her home in Tucson with her son Joseph. Bill said that his mother was ill and rarely left the house. He had no idea what his brother was doing these days; he had not received a letter from him in jail, and although Bill had written Catherine inquiring about Joseph he had received no word of him in her reply, and he was worried. Bill also felt a certain guilt with regard to his younger brother. Shortly before his father had disappeared, the subject of Joseph came up and Bill sensed that his father held him partially responsible for Joseph's drifting existence and the long-haired youths Joseph often a.s.sociated with in Arizona, an element that neither the elder Bonanno nor Bill could relate to. Bill had been too busy with his own problems in the last few years to worry about Joseph, and still he did worry about him and wonder about him; but on this evening Bill did not seek information from his aunts about his brother-he was in a festive mood and wanted to remain so, and he preferred to divert his guests and himself with general conversation related to his experiences in prison. He described for them his caution after receiving the gift candy bar from Kayo Konigsberg, he repeated words that were part of prison parlance, and he told of his acquaintances.h.i.+ps with such varied prisoners as Lowell M. Birrell, the stock swindler; with an oil executive from Long Island accused of selling secrets to the Russians; with three black militants suspected of plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty; and with a movie producer who had recently fled Mexico, where he was sought for questioning in the murder of a cast member with an underwater fis.h.i.+ng spear. It was this producer, Bill said, who had taught him how to play chess.

Bill also told how the inmates made coffee and whiskey in jail and described the night when an explosion was caused because the whiskey makers neglected to let sufficent air into the jar during fermentation.

"It sounded like m.u.f.fled gun shots," Bill recalled, "and suddenly the red telephones lit up, the guards started yelling through the intercom, and all the steel doors slammed shut. The prison-break warning was sounded and any prisoner caught outside his cell was in real trouble. We all waited to see what would happen. Soon we saw about nine guards with billy clubs dragging some Negroes away with their buckets and broken jars."

"Oh how awful," one of the aunts said.

"It's so terrible," another said, "that they would risk their lives just to make liquor."

"What's the difference?" Rosalie asked. "Bill smuggled in provolone and..."

There was silence around the table. Every one looked toward Bill, who looked at his plate, neither laughing off her remark nor elaborating upon it. Finally one of the aunts spoke up.

"That was food food," she said. "That was different."

"Yes," another woman agreed, "That was different."

Rosalie shrugged, got up to get more coffee. Bill then continued to talk, changing the subject to religion in jail, remarking on how surprised he was by the great variety of Bibles that were available to the inmates-there were dozens of different Bibles, he said, Jewish Bibles, Christian Bibles, even the Koran. Every week or so, members from Bible societies would arrive in prison to preach to those inmates willing to listen. Bill said he always attended these lectures, welcoming the opportunity of seeing new faces behind bars, and he was about to say something more when his four-year-old son, Joseph, came running into the room crying, complaining of something that his older brother, Charles, had done to him. But Bill quickly cut him off, demanding, "You want to grow up and become a stool pigeon?"

The little boy stopped whimpering.

"No," he said, "no!"

"All right then," Bill said, "so don't go telling on your brother that way."

9.

ALTHOUGH JOSEPH BONANNO CONTINUED TO ELUDE THE hunt of the FBI and the police during 1965 and was still hiding as winter turned to spring in 1966, the government claimed it was making progress in its national campaign against organized crime. It had greatly increased its knowledge of the secret society, had intensified public awareness through the cooperation of the press, and it had succeeded in hara.s.sing and arresting, if not always convicting, many mafiosi and other gang members of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds who were either employed by the Mafia or were working with it. hunt of the FBI and the police during 1965 and was still hiding as winter turned to spring in 1966, the government claimed it was making progress in its national campaign against organized crime. It had greatly increased its knowledge of the secret society, had intensified public awareness through the cooperation of the press, and it had succeeded in hara.s.sing and arresting, if not always convicting, many mafiosi and other gang members of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds who were either employed by the Mafia or were working with it.

In New York City alone in 1965, more than 400 arrests were made in organized crime, and throughout the nation there were continuous raids against bookmakers and loan sharks, operators of illegal gambling casinos and other enterprises that the government called "mob-controlled." Fourteen bolita operators were arrested in Tampa, Florida, by the Internal Revenue Service; 34 pimps, prost.i.tutes, and gamblers were arrested in Columbus, Ohio, by the local police; 68 persons were arrested for illegal gambling in Chester, West Virginia, by the state police. Sixty gamblers were convicted in Nashville, 34 gamblers were arrested in St. Paul, 31 in Denver, 24 in St. Louis. The FBI relayed 180,000 items of criminal information to various investigative units on the federal, state, or munic.i.p.al level, and there was also cooperation between law enforcement officials in the United States and overseas. The police in Sicily interrogated many Mafia suspects in Castellammare about the Bonanno case, and in Germany, agents from Interpol, the international police organization, looked up Bill Bonanno's former girl friend to ask if she knew anything about the elder Bonanno's disappearance. She said she did not, never having met Joseph Bonanno, although she did admit having seen him once a few years ago sitting with another man in the c.o.c.ktail lounge in Arizona where she had worked. She guessed that he had come to see for himself the woman who had attracted his son, and after he had finished his drink he left the lounge without comment and with a generous tip.

Although the government contended that organized crime was the most lucrative business in America, experts quoted in newspapers and magazines were unable to agree on how many billions of dollars were derived each year from illegal enterprises run by gangs. Their estimates ranged from $10 billion to $40 billion annually; and even the more conservative reports conceded that organized crime probably netted more profit each year than the combined earnings of United States Steel, AT&T, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Electric, Ford, IBM, Chrysler, and RCA.

About three-quarters of the crime revenue was contributed by citizens who bet on horse races and other sports events with bookmakers, or played the numbers. While the typical numbers bettor might be a Harlem housewife on welfare who deposits 25 cents each morning with a neighborhood "runner," hoping to overcome 1,000-to-1 odds and "hit" the daily number, which by prior agreement might be the last three digits of the total money bet at the local track that day, and while the typical patron of a bookmaker might be an auto mechanic or a porter who invests $2 on a horse each day, there are enough of these gambling citizens in America-millions to whom a small bet is a daily tonic and who cannot afford to go in person to a track-to support the fabulous industry of illegal gambling, an industry that has been flouris.h.i.+ng for many decades despite the tactics of crime busters and the will of puritanical lawmakers.

The numbers game is the national pastime of city slums, is a source of hope, however small, for the urban poor crowded into blocks of 10,000 people, living in teeming tenements each with its "runner," each with its corner store that may be a "drop" for numbers slips that are later picked up by "collectors" and delivered to "controllers" who record the data and later pay the winners. The controllers, who usually work with their aides in private apartments that are protected by alarm systems and lookouts, are answerable to the neighborhood "banker," who represents the mob that oversees the whole network and covers the bets. If a "runner" or other employee is caught by the police, it is the controller's responsibility to pay for the bail and legal fees out of his profit; but the bribery of the police, whose cooperation is essential for numbers racketeering to function, is handled by a representative of a Mafia "family" or whatever ethnic gang is backing the "bank" in a particular section of the city.

While police graft is expensive, with gangsters complaining that the police sometimes take almost half of the profit (and more when there is pressure from headquarters to "clean up" crime), there nevertheless is enough money after the payoffs and other operational costs to keep hundreds of numbers couriers running each day and the "banks" booming with business. It was estimated in The New York Times The New York Times that the numbers lotteries in Harlem alone earned $ 1 billion a month in profits and that the Vito Genovese "family," which was heavily involved in several Harlem banks, had twenty-seven millionaires among its "soldiers." that the numbers lotteries in Harlem alone earned $ 1 billion a month in profits and that the Vito Genovese "family," which was heavily involved in several Harlem banks, had twenty-seven millionaires among its "soldiers."

The Lucchese "family" was also active in the Harlem numbers, and so was a Puerto Rican syndicate under the leaders.h.i.+p of Raymond Marquez, known in the newspapers as "Spanish Raymond." Marquez's father many years ago was a runner for Genovese's men, but Marquez is his own boss, has his own gang, and reportedly earns more than $3 million a year from his banks, although a few are believed to be affiliated with mafiosi and sharing the profits. The numbers kings in the South Bronx are Jewish-Samuel and Moishe Schlitten, whose banks are said to be even more profitable than Raymond Marquez's, but the Schlitten brothers, too, are reportedly in partners.h.i.+p in certain areas with members of the Genovese and Lucchese organizations.

There is probably not a densely populated lower- or middle-income neighborhood in New York that does not support numbers racketeering; and the bookmakers are everywhere. Some of the more respectable business firms in the city have a bookmaker or two among its employees, men who do their jobs and book bets on the side-and it has long been possible to bet through bookies even in courthouses, law offices, and the New York Times Building, where the editorial writers denounced racketeering in print while certain staff members and editors supported it with their betting.

Many bookies in midtown Manhattan, particularly on the West Side and in the Garment Center, were linked to the Lucchese and Bonanno organizations, and the Bonanno men also worked with Jewish and Puerto Rican racketeers in bookmaking and numbers on the Lower East Side. All the "families," including the Bonannos and the Profacis, had well-coordinated numbers networks in Brooklyn and parts of Queens, and their most persistent bettors were not only the blacks but also Italians and Latin Americans, many of whom had begun playing numbers in their native countries where lotteries were usually legal. While many black Americans worked in organized crime as runners, and a few became controllers, it was largely in the wake of the civil rights movement that black gangsters finally began to demand and achieve equal opportunities. By the early 1960s, the police were able to conclude that a few banks in the black ghettos of Brooklyn were being run by black men, some with Mafia ties, some not.

A second source of revenue for organized crime was loan-sharking, which most crime spokesmen estimate earns more than $1 billion in annual profits. Though the interest rates might be twenty percent, customers are always available because several thousand Americans, many of them black, can not borrow from legitimate sources, since they have poor credit ratings. Some of these people are on welfare, some are gamblers down on their luck, others are small businessmen struggling because of mismanagement or other personal failings. To such people the loan shark represents the primary source of quick relief.

If they do not repay the debt, however, they will undoubtedly receive threatening phone calls, and they might then seek expiation by going to work in the crime industry. If they have a business, they might accept a gang member for a partner, under whom the business most likely would go bankrupt because the a.s.sets were drained. Occasionally a victim of loan-sharking, rather than try to pay or become more deeply involved, will go to the police and become an informer, but such men sometimes pay with their lives.

Another source of money for organized crime in the 1960s was narcotics, which while said to be less than half as profitable as loan-sharking and more risky in every way, nonetheless attracted many members of the criminal establishment in spite of the disapproval of most Mafia dons. The dons could not govern the behavior of each underling any more than a general could control the acts of every soldier, and if the underlings managed to smuggle in a large heroin s.h.i.+pment without getting caught and if they shared the profit with their superiors, questions might not be asked. But a permissive policy toward narcotics by a Mafia boss sometimes backfired when the smugglers were caught, and in 1959 the federal agents were able to link Vito Genovese with a narcotics case and he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Joseph Bonanno had a strong policy against narcotics trafficking, once vowing that if any of his men were caught they would be put in one of the ovens of a bakery he owned; however, during one of his extended absences from New York, a key officer in his organization, Carmine Galante, was charged with involvement in a narcotics ring, and Galante was convicted and given a twenty-year sentence.

The marijuana market, according to federal agents, had not enticed the Mafia or their a.s.sociates because marijuana was too easily gotten through the Mexican border and because the trade was overrun with free-lance gangsters and youthful adventurers. But if government agents succeeded in limiting the supply, if tougher laws inhibited and lessened the number of importers and drove up the price, the expert smugglers in organized crime might flock to marijuana as they had to bootlegging during Prohibition. Meanwhile, they had all they could handle in their present endeavors, reportedly making so much money that their main problem was hiding the money or investing it in places that would return a profit but would not expose them to charges of tax evasion. One favorite outlet for such investments was in real estate, where it was not uncommon for the owners of property to function behind "fronts." It was long suspected by the government, for example, that Frank Costello was the secret owner or part owner of the Lucayan Beach Club in the Bahamas as well as the Copacabana nightclub and the Pompeii Restaurant in New York; and there was hardly a name in crime that was not listed in government files as owning either a bowling alley or bar, a trucking company or food-packing concern, a laundry or stretches of undeveloped land.

Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans don, was said to own tracts of land in the path of a federal highway soon to be constructed; and Carlo Gambino, the New York don, was allegedly the owner of several million dollars' worth of real estate in New York City. Newspaper reporters in 1965 were told privately by the United States Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, that his office had information indicating that Mafia groups owned the downtown property in which The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal was published, owned the midtown building in which was published, owned the midtown building in which Vogue Vogue was published, owned the building on East Sixty-ninth Street where the FBI had its headquarters, and owned the Chrysler Building. Although an extensive job of research by was published, owned the building on East Sixty-ninth Street where the FBI had its headquarters, and owned the Chrysler Building. Although an extensive job of research by New York Times New York Times reporters failed to produce the evidence to support the disclosures, the reporters failed to produce the evidence to support the disclosures, the Times Times did quote in one article a federal investigator who said: "If the black flag of the underworld were to unfurl atop one of the tallest skysc.r.a.pers in New York, it would be a fit symbol of how the Mafia has gained control of that building and many other real estate holdings." did quote in one article a federal investigator who said: "If the black flag of the underworld were to unfurl atop one of the tallest skysc.r.a.pers in New York, it would be a fit symbol of how the Mafia has gained control of that building and many other real estate holdings."

Morgenthau had three grand juries probing into organized crime during 1965 and 1966. One jury focused on the overall picture of the syndicate, the relations.h.i.+ps between "families," a second jury delved exclusively into the affairs of the Lucchese family, and a third jury concentrated on the Bonanno family and its missing leader. Hundreds of witnesses were subpoenaed, most of them uncooperative, but the government nevertheless ama.s.sed enormous amounts of information that gave new insight into the life style of the men who dominate the crime charts of the McClellan committee and other investigative units. The government files noted certain gangsters' mannerisms, their styles in dress, their favorite hangouts and restaurants, their hobbies, the great efforts that some took with their lawns and in being good neighbors, and the efforts that such men as Thomas Lucchese made in keeping agents and other interlopers from invading the privacy of his home in Lido Beach, Long Island. All windows of his residence were wired by the Supreme Burglar Alarm System. There was a large two-way mirror in the front door, and a large mirror on a pole in front of the house which allowed anyone looking through the two-way mirror at the mirror on the pole to observe all vehicles entering or leaving Royatt Street from Lido Boulevard. There was a photoelectric eye in the windows and anyone walking by the windows could set off an alarm. There was a large bell alarm system on one side of the house under the eaves. There were spotlights on all sides of the residence.

The government's special probe into the Bonanno organization was becoming increasingly irritating to many of the members; while they proclaimed their innocence or ignorance of organized crime in their testimony, they were constantly being recalled to answer more questions every time the government produced a morsel of new information or conjecture about increasing dissension within the Bonanno "family." Since the government did not always know which gang members were Bonanno loyalists and which had joined the Di Gregorio faction-indeed, many of the men themselves did not know, since there was so much fence-straddling, suspected disloyalty, and confusion-the government agents paid particular attention to the mannerisms of the men gathered in the courtroom corridor waiting to testify, looking for hints that might reveal which men were friendly and which were hostile. Aware of this, the gang members tried to conceal their feelings, and a few proved to be good actors, although many were not.

The government also gained further evidence about the dissension, which the tabloids liked to refer to as the Banana Split, through the use of a hidden camera focused on the wedding reception of Di Gregorio's daughter at the Huntington Townhouse in Long Island on November 14, 1965. Among those identified as attending the wedding was the Buffalo don, Stefano Magaddino, senior member of the commission and Di Gregorio's most powerful ally. Magaddino was quickly subpoenaed, but his lawyer said he would be unable to appear because he was confined to his home with a heart ailment. As the government prepared to appoint a doctor to determine Magaddino's condition, several other subpoenas were issued to men who had attended the reception, and subpoenas were also served to men who had been friendly with Di Gregorio in the past but had not gone to the wedding, or perhaps had not been invited.

A week before Christmas there was a rumor that certain members of Di Gregorio's faction were trying to promote a truce with the Bonanno men, because they felt that the bitterness and mutual mistrust had lessened the effectiveness of both groups and made them more vulnerable to police surveillance and intrigue: the police were in a position to play one group off against the other, to attribute schemes to one group and leak the word to the press, and the other group had no way of knowing whether or not it was being deceived. It was also rumored that Di Gregorio was not happy with the responsibilities of leaders.h.i.+p, was unnerved by the publicity he was receiving and by being followed by detectives whenever he left his home in West Babylon, Long Island. At sixty-three years old, he had already had three heart attacks, and his men believed that he would soon retire to be replaced by a subordinate officer, Paul Sciacca, who was acceptable to Magaddino and the other members of the commission.

Frank Labruzzo heard about Di Gregorio's situation and the rumored desire for a truce from an informant in the Di Gregorio camp. In January Labruzzo received a message that Di Gregorio's men wanted to have a "sit down" with Bonanno representatives in hopes of reaching some agreement, and Labruzzo relayed the word to Bill Bonanno. Bill was skeptical. He saw no reason why Di Gregorio should be more conciliatory now than he had been during the past two years, and he also sensed the possibility that he was being "set up" to be shot or captured, which he had a.s.sumed was part of the opposition's plan since he had gotten out of jail in June. As a precaution since then, Bill had never traveled alone, had avoided predictable routines, had never arranged a meeting in a place that had not been surveyed in advance by his men, who then, hidden, stood guard. He had been wary of sniper's bullets even as he drove from Long Island with his lawyer each morning to appear in court in Manhattan, never following the same route two days in a row. He had mapped out approximately thirty different ways of traveling between East Meadow and lower Manhattan, some direct, some circuitous.

Labruzzo agreed that Bill was wise to do this, and he shared Bill's skepticism about the peace meeting. There was no explanation for a change in att.i.tude from Di Gregorio or Magaddino unless they had reached some private agreement with Joseph Bonanno, and if this were true the elder Bonanno would have somehow communicated this to his own people.

A few days later, Labruzzo received another message, a.s.suring him that the proposed meeting was a sincere attempt to make life more livable for both groups, even agreeing to meet in a place appointed by the Bonanno loyalists. Labruzzo was swayed by the last point. He discussed it with Bill, and within the week Labruzzo sent back word-they would meet at the home of one of Bill's relatives on Troutman Street in Brooklyn, a block which both Labruzzo and Bill Bonanno were intimately familiar with, since it was in the neighborhood where Labruzzo had been reared as a boy and where Bill used to come to visit his grandfather. The German bar where Bill bought containers of beer for his one-legged grandfather was near Troutman Street, and Bill had returned to the nieghborhood regularly in recent years to visit relatives and friends who still lived in the area, which was almost exclusively Italian. Along here, forty years ago, Joseph Bonanno had built up his organization, recruiting young men from the crowded tenements occupied by immigrants from Castellammare and neighboring Sicilian villages-men like Gaspar Di Gregorio-and it seemed appropriate now, in 1966 on this bitterly cold Friday night of January 28, that Bill Bonanno and his companions would return to the scene of past unity to meet with other members of the quarreling family.

Bill and his men arrived shortly before eleven o'clock, parking a few blocks away from the appointed place and walking cautiously along the sidewalks of the narrow streets lined with rows of brick buildings. It was very quiet and bleak; few lights were burning in the apartments and houses, and Bill a.s.sumed that the elderly Italian residents were already asleep, unlike the residents of the Negro and Puerto Rican neighborhoods that Bill had driven through about five minutes ago. There the bars were crowded, the jukeboxes blared in the clamor of Friday night, the people were younger, livelier, newer to New York. But here in the Italian quarter where there had not been an influx of new people in years, it was as quiet and still as a square in western Sicily late at night, and the old people slept in houses that they had probably moved into not long after landing in Brooklyn's Ridgewood district early in the century, replacing the Germans who had moved out. Bill remembered many of these houses and stores from his boyhood visits, and he was sure that they had looked the same during his parents' childhood days along these blocks. The nearby church where his parents were married in 1931 was unchanged, although the parish had become smaller and poorer; and the grade school that Joseph Bonanno attended as a boy in knee pants was still there, although the elder Bonanno had only vague recollections of his education there since it was hastily interrupted in 1911 by his his father's decision to return to Castellammare, where there was "trouble" in the hills. father's decision to return to Castellammare, where there was "trouble" in the hills.

Bill and his companions continued to walk slowly toward the Troutman Street address, pa.s.sing certain buildings that had been "drops" many years ago for numbers runners, and he noticed a birdbath on the tiny front lawn of a house that he had played around as a boy, a birdbath that was covered with ice on this evening. He guessed that the temperature was below twenty degrees, too cold to talk as he hunched his shoulders and walked with his ungloved hands in the pockets of his overcoat, his right hand clutching the cold metal of a gun.

Suddenly Bill felt a companion's arm shove him abruptly to one side, and he heard the frantic yell: "Bill, Bill Bill, watch out!"

A shotgun was being extended through the slowly opening front door of one of the houses, and as Bill leaped toward the sidewalk, falling beside a parked car, he heard gun blasts and sharp-sounding bullets pierce the icy street, striking the stone walls of buildings around him. He and his men fired back at the sniper, who quickly retreated into the building, but bullets continued to come from another direction, perhaps from an upper floor of one of the buildings across the street, hitting where Bill had been standing a few seconds before.

He crouched lower against the fender of the car while the other men, including Labruzzo and Notaro, dashed ahead for cover, firing as they ran, twisting and turning in frantic formation as they sought to escape the ambush. Bill, separated from his companions, knew that if he followed them he would be in the line of fire; so he remained where he was, tense and angry, swearing silently at Di Gregorio. He turned to see if the sniper had reappeared in the doorway; then he turned back toward the street, rising slightly on his toes as he peeked through the winds.h.i.+eld of the car, over the dashboard statue of a plastic saint, trying to see from which building the other snipers were firing. He could not tell. He did not see anyone on the roof ledges, and the only figures in the windows were those people who had just turned on their lights and lifted their shades in response to the noise below.

Bill remained absolutely still for a few moments, breathing into his overcoat so that the visibility of his exhalation on this freezing night would not mark him. Then, pistol in hand, he jumped up from his crouched position and began to run, head down, close to the line of parked cars, running faster than he knew he could, concentrating so intently on his escape that he no longer heard the shooting, did not know whether or not he was being observed and shot at. He headed south along Troutman Street toward Knickerbocker Avenue, and at the corner of Knickerbocker he leaped to the right and, without looking back, ran past Jefferson Street, where his grandfather's house had been, then past Melrose Street, up George Street to Central Avenue, right on Central, left on Flus.h.i.+ng Avenue, where he quickly turned around; but no one was following him. He slowed down to catch his breath, leaning against a wall in the shadows. He saw a diner on Flus.h.i.+ng Avenue and headed toward it, intending to use the phone, but as he was about to enter he spotted a policeman at the counter drinking coffee. Bill turned around and walked quickly to Bushwick Avenue, where there was a tavern on the corner with a coinbox inside; there he called one of his men, Sam Perrone, who supervised some of the bookmaking operations on the Lower East Side and was at this moment sitting in a Bonanno organization hangout on Second Avenue and Nineteenth Street, in lower Manhattan, called the Posh Place. Perrone said he would come immediately.

As Bill waited in the bar for Perrone he heard the sirens of police cars, saw them speeding through the intersection, red lights twirling. He looked at his watch and knew that Perrone could drive across the Williamsburg Bridge and reach Bushwick Avenue in twelve or fifteen minutes if there were no delays. Bill ordered a beer and stood at the bar, not far from where a few middle-aged couples sat watching television, oblivious to the distant sound of sirens. He felt his heart pounding, his body exhausted from the run. He wiped his face with his handkerchief and blew his nose, still feeling the frost in his nostrils, and he wanted to sit but remained standing so that he could get a full view of the street. He sipped the beer and watched television for a while, and then he saw Perrone's car pulling up at the curb, and he quickly ran out and got in.

On the way to East Meadow, Bill told Perrone what had happened, and Perrone listened gravely. Labruzzo and the others appeared to have escaped, Bill said, but he was not sure about injuries. He also did not know which of Di Gregorio's men had tried to kill him but he vowed he would find out. The whole thing had been a fiasco, and he conceded to Perrone that he had been very naive in thinking that Di Gregorio and his men could be trusted. But Di Gregorio was in deep trouble now for bungling the job, and an explanation to the commission was perhaps the least of Di Gregorio's problems. He had set off a shooting war; it might be costly and brutal, and the inevitable headlines arising out of tonight's escapade would undoubtedly result in tremendous pressure from the police, tougher decisions from the courts, and longer jail terms for those convicted. Bill was not so angry as he was disgusted and depressed.

Approaching East Meadow, Perrone stopped the car so that Bill could use a pay phone and tell Rosalie to turn on the outside lights of the house. Five minutes later, Perrone's car pulled into the brightly lit driveway. Both men smiled forcibly as they entered the house and greeted Rosalie. She made coffee and they sat around the kitchen table for a while speaking in a general way, keeping their voices low so as not to disturb the children. Rosalie had no idea where Bill had been during the evening, nor would she ask, nor would he tell her. From his easy unconcerned manner, she could have a.s.sumed that he had spent Friday night playing pinochle with the boys or had gone bowling.

10.

THE NEXT DAY BILL HEARD FROM LABRUZZO THAT EVERYone had gotten home safely but that the police might have found some discarded weapons along Troutman Street and perhaps also the car that Bill had left parked in the neighborhood. The car was parked legally, however, and there was a chance that one of the men could retrieve it before it was ticketed and towed away on Monday, if the area was not surrounded all weekend by the police. Labruzzo, speaking from a telephone booth in Queens to Bill in a booth in Long Island, with Perrone standing guard outside, said he had no idea what the police were now doing or what conclusions they had come to-there was nothing in the morning newspapers or on the radio about the shooting, but Labruzzo felt sure that a police statement would be issued later in the day, and after that the Bonanno men would be in a better position to decide on their next move.

Bill left the booth quickly and returned home with Perrone. They spent the rest of the afternoon listening to the radio, watching television, and playing with the children. Bill was not overly concerned that Di Gregorio's men would make another attempt on his life right away, not with so many people on the alert; and the presence of Perrone in the house through the day and night did not strike Rosalie as being particularly unusual. Her husband's friends often spent the night, sometimes several nights in East Meadow, using the room that Elisa had used or sleeping on cots in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and Rosalie found Perrone far more acceptable as a houseguest than most of the other men. He was neater, more cheerful, and he amused the children. A few years older than Bill, with whom he was in partners.h.i.+p in a trucking business in Brooklyn, Perrone was a short, stocky, pleasant-looking man with dark hair and a wide smile. Like most of Bill's friends, Sam Perrone chain-smoked; unlike them, he was attentative and tender toward Rosalie, to a degree that made her slightly uncomfortable at times. He had a habit, when arriving at the house to pick up Bill, of greeting her with a kiss-not on the cheek but on the mouth. Though she knew it was an innocent gesture, it nonetheless unsettled her. It was too trivial to mention to Bill, who had witnessed it anyway and seemed unabashed, but the fact remained that whenever Rosalie opened the front door for Perrone she instinctively leaned to one side as he entered; but she never seemed out of range for Sam Perrone.

Bill and Perrone spent the rest of the evening indoors; they were visited by other men and listened to each hourly news broadcast. There were no references to the shooting. On the following day, Sunday, when there was still nothing in the press, Bill began to wonder. It was as if the explosive experience on Friday night had been merely a nightmare, a grade-B gangster movie conceived in his own mind. He could not understand how the newspapers, which had been so aggressive in recent years in its coverage of the Mafia, devoting unlimited s.p.a.ce to the most infinitesimal facts and unconfirmed rumors about underworld characters, publis.h.i.+ng sneak pictures of alleged mafiosi eating in restaurants or attending weddings, printing complete transcripts of tapped telephone talks between reputed dons discussing the weather, he could not understand how the press could miss this story, which was one of the few legitimate gangland stories in several years. Two rival factions did indeed wake up a Brooklyn neighborhood with bullets flying in every direction; yet now, two nights later, not a line had been published about it in any newspaper and not a word about it on any radio station in New York, the communications capital of the nation.

The only conclusion that Bill could come to was that on weekends the media was lazy. Or that newsmen were totally dependent on government spokesmen for news leads and these spokesmen had taken the weekend off. Or-and this possibility bothered Bill-it might be that the police were deliberately keeping everything quiet until Di Gregorio's men could get another shot at him. As improbable as it seemed at first, Bill decided that Di Gregorio or someone higher up could very likely have bought off the desk sergeant or a lieutenant in the precinct that covered Troutman Street, a.s.suring laxity from the police. And yet Bill himself had heard the sirens on Friday night, knew that the police had arrived promptly, and he a.s.sumed that there must have been witnesses in the neighborhood who might have called a newspaper or radio station during the weekend. Bill was mystified.

When Monday morning came and went with nothing reported, Bill decided to leak the news to the press himself. It was to his own advantage to do this. He wanted word of Di Gregorio's blunder to be known to every don in the nation, and he also wanted to force the police to stop playing games and to patrol the streets and inhibit Di Gregorio's gang from arranging another ambush.

Bill had become acquainted with several New York newspapermen during his court appearances since 1964, individuals who had often tried to interview him about his father. One of the more persistent ones had worked for The New York Times The New York Times, and it was this man that Bill contacted, and he in turn relayed the information to the Times Times's metropolitan editor. On the following day, Tuesday, February 1, after the Times Times had confirmed only part of Bill Bonanno's story with the police in Brooklyn, an article was published under the headline GUN FIGHT LEAVES POLICE PUZZLED. had confirmed only part of Bill Bonanno's story with the police in Brooklyn, an article was published under the headline GUN FIGHT LEAVES POLICE PUZZLED.

A gang shot up a Brooklyn street Friday night, leaving behind seven guns of various kinds, bullets imbedded in buildings, and a mystery that had police still puzzled yesterday after questioning more than a hundred persons in the neighborhood.Although residents of Troutman Street, between Knickerbocker Avenue and Irving Avenue, heard more than twenty shots around 11:00 P.M., detectives and patrolmen who rushed to the scene from the Wilson Avenue station house, six blocks away, found no victim and not a single bloodstain. Nor has any complaint appeared.Detective Lieutenant John W. Norris discounted rumors yesterday that the shoot-up may have been a skirmish between Mafia factions seeking to take over the underworld "family" of Joseph (Joe Bananas) Bonanno..."If this was meant to be a professional job, they need a refresher course in shooting," Lieutenant Norris said. "It doesn't have the earmarks of organized activity. It doesn't make sense the way they abandoned all those guns. In all my twenty-three years in the police I've never seen such an erratic action."

Bill was amused on reading this in the Times Times, and he was also interested in the fact that none of the residents in the neighborhood would admit to the police that they had heard guns blasting in the street. Some said they had been sleeping. Others, like Joseph Taranto, who identified himself as a demolition worker, said he thought the noise was from firecrackers. Another resident of Troutman Street, John Bosco, a handyman, was quoted in the Times Times as explaining, "We go to bed early on this street. We're working people who have to get up early." as explaining, "We go to bed early on this street. We're working people who have to get up early."

The only person among the more than the one hundred interviewed who would admit to an unusual occurrence on Troutman Street was Mrs. Joseph Cipponeri. It was she who had telephoned the police on Friday night, saying that a man had just broken her door and had run through her living room and kitchen and out into the backyard, smas.h.i.+ng the gla.s.s of a storm door. When the first of five carloads of police had arrived, they found two revolvers in Mrs. Cipponeri's hallway and another gun at the kitchen door. Mrs. Cipponeri could not describe the interloper because her rooms were dark; all she saw from her bed was a blurred figure of a man racing wildly through her apartment.

The article in the Times Times quickly led to several follow-up stories in all the newspapers and networks, and this put pressure on the police to unravel the mystery and to supply more information to the press, to the public, and of course to Bonanno's men. Within a few days it was fairly well established by the newspapers that Bill Bonanno had been the primary target and that Di Gregorio's men were involved, although the police preferred to hedge a bit because the weapons they found had not been registered in the New York area and they were not listed in FBI files as stolen. quickly led to several follow-up stories in all the newspapers and networks, and this put pressure on the police to unravel the mystery and to supply more information to the press, to the public, and of course to Bonanno's men. Within a few days it was fairly well established by the newspapers that Bill Bonanno had been the primary target and that Di Gregorio's men were involved, although the police preferred to hedge a bit because the weapons they found had not been registered in the New York area and they were not listed in FBI files as stolen.

Soon the district attorney in Brooklyn began a wide investigation of the case, and among those sought for questioning was Gaspar Di Gregorio. When the police arrived at Di Gregorio's home in West Babylon, his relatives insisted that he was not there. The police waited, however, and within an hour an ambulance arrived with a doctor, and Di Gregorio was wheeled out of the house on a stretcher. He was said to be suffering from a heart attack. The police served him with a subpoena.

The police also visited the Bonanno residence, but Bill, after recovering the car one morning before daybreak, had disappeared. Having taken the heat off himself by leaking the news of the gun battle to the Times Times, he decided to vanish until he could learn more about the fate of his adversary, Gaspar Di Gregorio.

Within a few weeks Bill heard that the commission was infuriated at Di Gregorio for the Troutman Street failure and the unwanted publicity that had followed, and the next thing that Bill heard was that Di Gregorio was stepping down as the leader of the dissident faction and was being replaced by Paul Sciacca.

During the winter and spring of 1966, as dozens of reluctant witnesses appeared before a Brooklyn grand jury to answer questions about the shooting, Joseph Bonanno was reported to be living in Tunis, the North African birthplace of his wife and a traditional hiding place for Sicilian fugitives. For many generations there had been a large Sicilian colony in Tunis, a city accessible across the sea, and sources in Palermo were quoted in The New York Times The New York Times as saying that the elder Bonanno was residing in North Africa under the aegis of the Sicilian Mafia. One of his visitors there was identified as Frank Garofalo, an elderly distinguished-looking man from Castellammare who was once an officer in the Bonanno organization in the United States. Garofalo had left the United States on a visit to Sicily before the Apalachin exposure of 1957 and had decided to remain there. as saying that the elder Bonanno was residing in North Africa under the aegis of the Sicilian Mafia. One of his visitors there was identified as Frank Garofalo, an elderly distinguished-looking man from Castellammare who was once an officer in the Bonanno organization in the United States. Garofalo had left the United States on a visit to Sicily before the Apalachin exposure of 1957 and had decided to remain there.

Before the agents could verify that Bonanno was really in Tunis, there were other reports claiming that he was elsewhere. During the year various newspaper accounts placed him in Canada, Mexico, Haiti, and other countries. On May 11, a United States government spokesmen said in The New York Times The New York Times that Bonanno was definitely hiding in Europe, although declining to specify where. that Bonanno was definitely hiding in Europe, although declining to specify where.

A week later, on Tuesday morning May 17, as Bill Bonanno was driving across the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan planning to meet one of his men at a cafe, he heard a radio bulletin announcing that Joseph Bonanno was in New York City. Bill was about to discount this as another fanciful rumor. But then, amazingly, the announcer went on to say that Joseph Bonanno, accompanied by an attorney, had during the previous hour surprised everyone by walking into the courthouse.

11.

JOSEPH BONANNO, SUNTANNED AND RELAXED, WEARING A gray silk suit, a dark gray hat, white s.h.i.+rt and dark tie, stepped out of a car on Pearl Street and slipped into a side entrance of the federal courthouse on Foley Square. While one of his lawyers ran ahead to push the elevator b.u.t.ton, the other lawyer remained close to Bonanno, anxious that they get into the building and into the courtroom on the third floor before being spotted by the police or the FBI. If the agents got Bonanno before he was in the custody of the courtroom, where procedure was prescribed and the law precise, there was no telling what might happen; at the very least the agents would probably take Bonanno to their uptown headquarters, would hold him as long as they could, would claim credit for his capture, and would attempt to force concessions and make other face-saving gestures to compensate for their inability to find him during their nineteen months of searching. gray silk suit, a dark gray hat, white s.h.i.+rt and dark tie, stepped out of a car on Pearl Street and slipped into a side entrance of the federal courthouse on Foley Square. While one of his lawyers ran ahead to push the elevator b.u.t.ton, the other lawyer remained close to Bonanno, anxious that they get into the building and into the courtroom on the third floor before being spotted by the police or the FBI. If the agents got Bonanno before he was in the custody of the courtroom, where procedure was prescribed and the law precise, there was no telling what might happen; at the very least the agents would probably take Bonanno to their uptown headquarters, would hold him as long as they could, would claim credit for his capture, and would attempt to force concessions and make other face-saving gestures to compensate for their inability to find him during their nineteen months of searching.

But none of these things seemed to concern Joseph Bonanno as he walked casually across the marble-floored corridor at 10:30 A.M. toward the elevator, removing his horn-rimmed gla.s.ses and tucking them into the breast pocket of his jacket. Soon he would be facing news cameras and he preferred being photographed without his gla.s.ses. He was a handsome man, and he knew it; the reasons for his handsomeness were his softly expressive eyes, his arched eyebrows, the strong lines of his face-features he did not wish to have diminished by spectacles, particularly since he believed that they tended to accentuate his broken nose, a present from the police force many years ago. He had often thought of having the nose fixed but had always decided against it, unwilling to concede such a blatant admission to vanity.

Across the corridor he could see one of the lawyers, Albert Krieger-who had been hired in Maloney's place because of Maloney's awkward involvement with the case-standing in a phone booth trying to reach the United States Attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau. Krieger wanted to inform Morgenthau of Bonanno's presence in the building. But Morgenthau's line was busy. Before Krieger could get out of the phone booth, the door of the elevator containing Bonanno slammed shut; so Krieger dashed up through the back steps to Morgenthau's office on the fourth floor to inform him that Joseph Bonanno was en route to the courtroom.

Bonanno removed his hat as he entered room 318, a large chamber with high ceilings and rows of wooden pews and with jury boxes on both sides of the high polished bar of the judge. The courtroom activity was characteristically quiet and humdrum, and in the pews sat a scattering of spectators, a few of them sleeping. Even the federal judge, Marvin E. Frankel, appeared to be listening almost listlessly to the routine cases being processed below his bench. When the judge noticed the gray-haired man in the gray silk suit walking up the center aisle toward him, he did not recognize him, and he was visibly startled a few moments later when the man, after an appropriate apology for interrupting, said, "Your Honor, I am Joseph Bonanno. I understand that the government would like to talk to me."