Authors: Gay Talese
The state he knew best, of course, was Arizona. He had covered every corner of it by car, horse, or on foot, or in the small airplane that he had learned to fly years ago, a plane owned by one of his father’s partners in a cotton farm that was located forty miles north of Tucson. Bill had flown the plane low along the Mexican border between mesas, skimming the tops of cactus plants and Indian reservations, and he had flown westward to the California line, eastward toward El Paso.
He had driven his car up into the White Mountains of northeastern Arizona to go trout fishing, and he had gone deer hunting along the northern Arizona border into Utah. After his marriage to Rosalie in 1956, he returned to Arizona and lived during the next seven years in various parts of the state, beginning in the high regions near the Grand Canyon, in the scenic city of Flagstaff. With an altitude of nearly 7,000 feet, Flagstaff was a center for winter sports activity. It also was the locale of Northern Arizona University, and shortly after Rosalie and Bill settled in Flagstaff they registered for courses there. The people of Flagstaff were outgoing and hospitable, and almost immediately the Bonannos made friends with other couples, were being invited home to dinner, and were reciprocating. And not long after Bill’s first few deposits in the local bank, the word spread through the community of 15,000 that he was a man of means.
He invested in real estate and in a small radio station in the nearby town of Holbrook. He joined the Kiwanis Club, was a leader in the March of Dimes campaign and other charity drives, and in his entire life he had never felt more relaxed and free. He was 260 miles from Tucson, was remote from New York in every way. His calls and visits to his father were becoming less frequent, less expected. The elder Bonanno, leading a relatively easy life of his own at this time, was not very demanding.
In Tucson, where he listed his occupation as that of a retired cotton broker, Joseph Bonanno went unchallenged. The limited publicity he had received during the Kefauver days was now forgotten, and he was considered socially acceptable by nearly everyone in town. He lived in a comfortable, unostentatious home on East Elm Street, where he often entertained politicians, priests, and business investors who sought his financial support. He was often seen walking through the business district wearing Western clothes, smiling easily, and being pleasant with everyone he met. His wife participated in civic activities and charities, and she usually attended Mass each morning. Joseph Bonanno was traveling out of state less often, his interests in New York, Wisconsin, and elsewhere were adequately handled by partners or subordinates, and in October 1957 he found time for a short vacation in Sicily, where he revisited old friends and relatives in Castellammare.
But shortly after his return to the United States, an event happened that suddenly changed the life style and image of both Bonanno and his son, an event that within hours of its public disclosure would destroy the tranquillity and social acceptance that the Bonannos had enjoyed, replacing it with rejection and national notoriety. It happened on November 14, 1957, in the upstate New York village of Apalachin, with a police raid on a gathering of nearly seventy “delegates” to a Mafia “summit meeting” held in the home of Joseph Barbara. The purpose of the session, according to the later analysis of crime experts, was to discuss pressing problems in the underworld—the tendency of some members to become involved in narcotics despite the opposition of the dons (who opposed it partly on moral grounds, partly from fear of long imprisonment, and also because they wanted nothing to do with the erratic Cuban and Puerto Rican gangsters and undisciplined youths who were running so much of the operation); the unresolved issues following the murder of Albert Anastasia, who had persistently intruded upon the Carribbean gambling enterprises that were in the Florida Mafia’s domain; the practice of certain dons to initiate more members into their “families” despite a national policy opposed to new membership in the interest of maintaining balance between the individual organizations. There were other subjects under discussion, too, but the whole session came to an abrupt end when it was discovered that the police were observing Barbara’s home. Several of the men ran out to their cars and drove quickly down the road toward the highway but were intercepted by the police roadblock. Other men dashed into the woods, ripping their clothes on tree branches and vines, and many managed to escape. But most of them were caught, and while no guns were found, a search of their pockets uncovered almost $300,000 in cash. The men’s explanation that they had visited Barbara’s home because they had heard he was ill and wished to cheer him up was jocularly reported in the press, and although the conviction of twenty-one of the men was later reversed by the court of appeals, it did generate months of highly publicized trials and editorial comment that exposed and embarrassed the men. It also assisted the federal agencies in their efforts to obtain more funds from Congress for combating organized crime and more cooperation from the courts with regard to the use of wiretapping and bugging.
Among those named by the police as having visited Barbara were Joseph Profaci, Joseph Magliocco, and Joseph Bonanno. Rosalie was at home alone in Flagstaff when word of the raid was announced; Bill had gone off for a weekend of deer hunting near Utah, and the news was two days’ old when he returned to his anxious wife waiting in seclusion. She had received numerous calls from relatives during the weekend, including several cryptic messages from the elder Bonanno, who had somehow slipped past the state police in New York and was now waiting impatiently in Tucson, unknown to local authorities, for Bill’s arrival.
When Bill reached Tucson that evening, he discovered his father at home sitting in the brick-walled patio sipping brandy, a benign expression on his face. As Bill got closer, his father stood, kissed him gently on both cheeks. Then the elder Bonanno shook his head slowly and began to laugh. The whole idea of the meeting was so stupid, so carelessly arranged, he said, that it was comical, hilarious. The sight of grown men running frantically in all directions from the barbecue pit as the police closed in was a scene out of burlesque. But, he continued, the consequences of the gathering would not be so funny. There would be the endless public hearings, the herd of photographers charging through the corridors each day, the rhetoric of judges and investigators, the call for reform by politicians, the legal fees and theatrics of lawyers, the defamation of the defendants, who served as society’s scapegoats—this spectacle, he said, he wanted to avoid at all cost. And so he planned to leave Tucson for an undisclosed spot in California, and he would keep on the move, one step ahead of the subpoena servers if possible, until the public clamor had subsided and he knew what was ahead.
Bill could sense without having to be told what this meant for him. He would have to look after his father’s interests during his absence. He would have to look after his mother and the homes and property in Arizona and would also take a more active role in his father’s affairs outside the state. He would do this because he had to and because, in a strange way, he wanted to. It was an interesting discovery, his awareness that he wanted to do it, wanted to become deeply involved in what he knew was precarious. It meant giving up the life in Flagstaff, the respectable conventional life that most Americans led and that he thought he could lead, wanted to lead. But now he was not so sure, doubting that he truly belonged even though he gave the appearance of belonging. He probably did not belong anywhere except at his father’s side or in his father’s shadow because, in spite of his education, he was not really qualified to do anything important in the so-called legitimate world.
He had not studied hard in school, had not concentrated on any one subject, had not passed the courses necessary for a degree. His attention span had been too short, his ego had perhaps been too large, his father’s existence perhaps too distracting for him to progress normally through the educational system—he did not know or care. He did not know to what degree the system had failed him, or he it. He did not know which of his failings were attributable to his background and which to his inability or desire to rise above that background.
If he did not have his father’s resources to fall back on, he might be better off, or worse off, depending on one’s point of view. He was confident that he could earn a living on his own, although he suspected that in the legitimate world he was at a tremendous disadvantage. With his name, with his incomplete education, he would probably have to start off at the bottom without influential family friends pulling him upward. He would be restricted to menial tasks in an office, which would bore him, or he would work as a traveling salesman or would punch a time clock in a factory. Or perhaps with his pilot’s experience he could become a crop duster, but the money was not all that good and the work was probably as dangerous as any in his father’s world—crop dusters had to fly so slowly and so low that when their planes stalled, which was often, they usually hit the ground before regaining power.
But all this reasoning was not the major factor in Bill Bonanno’s decision to commit himself to his father. The main reason was that he loved his father, was part of him, and could not, would not, disassociate himself from him during this difficult period. This was a time when he was needed. It was the first time in his life that his father really needed him, and Bill found this both flattering and challenging. Also, he did not feel that his father’s activities, or the activities of any of the men at Apalachin, were of a grave criminal nature. Most of the men were primarily involved in gambling which, although illegal, was part of human nature. The numbers racket, off-track betting, prostitution, and their other illegal endeavors would go on whether or not there was a Mafia. The mafiosi were really servants in a hypocritical society, they were the middlemen who provided those illegal commodities of pleasure and escape that the public demanded and the law forbade.
If people would obey the law, there would be no Mafia. If the police could resist graft, if the judges and politicians were incorruptible, there would be no Mafia because the Mafia could not exist without the cooperation of the others. Before there was a Mafia in the United States catering to the crime market, thriving first as bootleggers during Prohibition, there were other ethnic gangs supplying illegal demands and gradually buying their own way out of slums. When the Mafia dies out in a generation or two, by which time the grandsons of mafiosi will have learned the art of tax dodging and legal subterfuge in large American corporations, the key jobs in organized crime, which is a kind of lower-caste civil service, will be occupied by Latin American gangsters or blacks, the element that has already gained control of the lowest rung in the criminal pecking order, the narcotics trade.
But all the sociological speculating by Bill Bonanno in 1957 did not improve his situation—he was a member of a generation caught in the middle; he had followed his father’s course, and now, after Apalachin, he felt as trapped as any of the men cited by the police. Nevertheless he accepted his fate, and after his father left for California, he disposed of the house in Flagstaff and returned with Rosalie to Tucson.
As he had anticipated, the life there was suddenly difficult, not only for himself but also for his wife, his mother, and anyone else who chose to remain friendly. The Tucson newspapers, following the trend of the national press after Apalachin, expanded its coverage of organized crime, focusing particular attention on the Bonannos, and began a campaign to get them out of town. Bill Bonanno’s presence in Tucson and his appearances at the local airport before or after trips to New York were watched by the FBI and reported in the newspapers. The tax agents began to investigate his income from the wholesale grocery business he owned in Tucson and also from the property that he held in his own name or in partnership with his father or other men. The Catholic parish to which the Bonannos had made large contributions in the past asked Bill if it could buy back the mausoleum he had bought near a statue of Christ in the Holy Hope Cemetery; angrily, Bill agreed, refusing repayment.
His mother continued to attend Mass, but she went only to the early morning service in order to minimize the embarrassment to herself and other parishioners who might wish to avoid her. Rosalie despised Tucson, and she became resentful toward Bill because of his insistence on remaining there. She had no friends, and, except for visits to her mother-in-law, there were few places that she could go and feel at ease. In her own home Rosalie had to be careful of her conversation on the telephone, could not speak freely in front of the cleaning lady who came occasionally. She could not open charge accounts in stores, because her record of spending might be used against her husband by tax investigators; she had to pay cash for everything, making it more difficult to return purchases if she wished and requiring that she constantly go to Bill for money.
She was also disillusioned by the direction her marriage had taken. She thought that when she moved West after the wedding that she was escaping forever the routine of secrecy that encircled her elders in Brooklyn. But now she could see how naïve she had been, and she felt cheated, deceived. With Bill traveling so often, she became increasingly lonely and even envious of the strong bond that existed between her husband and his father. Then in October 1958 she sank deeper into depression and despair when her first child, a daughter, died shortly after birth.
When she could not become pregnant again during the next year Rosalie began to doubt her capability for bearing other children, and Bill decided they should adopt one. He felt, however, that he could not apply to a regular agency, not with the publicity he was receiving and with his reluctance to respond to the extensive questioning; so, without consulting Rosalie, he contacted various men he knew in California and Arizona and asked that they call him if they should hear of the availability of a child. Soon he was told that a young woman in Phoenix, who had left her home in Virginia, was about to have a child that she wished to place with a family that would cherish and support him. Bill arranged for her to enter the University of Colorado Medical Center at Denver; there, within a week, her infant son was born, with green eyes and of Scotch-Irish ancestry, and Bill returned with him to Tucson, exhilarated and proud, arriving home at night after Rosalie had gone to bed. He woke her up and, without a word of explanation, he placed the baby by her side.