Authors: Gay Talese
The coffee-making process was relatively simple: they cut off a piece of cord from the electric floor polisher that was kept in the hall closet, and, after attaching wire from the cord to the metal handles of two broken spoons and lowering the spoons into a cup of water, the men inserted the plug into an outlet in the cell to heat the water. Then they added the stolen coffee, sugar, and milk.
The whiskey making, however, required more planning and patience. The prisoners began by stealing ajar or vase and putting into it pieces of apple, cucumber, potato, and also raisins that they had picked out of the raisin bread at breakfast. They added yeast, which they obtained from the prison baker in exchange for packs of cigarettes. (From the size of the bread on the breakfast table each morning, Bill could tell whether or not the yeast content was low; if it was, he assumed that somewhere in the prison whiskey was being processed.) The yeast and the other ingredients were kept in a jar half-filled with water for nearly a week, hidden behind brooms and mops in closets that had air vents that permitted the smell of fermentation to escape. When the brewing process was considered complete, a prisoner would pour the liquid in the jar through a towel into another jar, and the men would drink it. Bill had tried it only once, and his stomach burned for days.
The drink was consumed mostly by black and indigent white prisoners, not inmates who had money or influence on the outside. These men could often bribe the guards into smuggling in name-brand whiskey in the tiny bottles served on airplanes. Equality among men, Bill quickly learned, was as varied in jail as it was outside; money signified power on either side of the wall—prisoners with money could have favors done for guards on the outside in return for privileges within; and these prisoners could also have money deposited with the commissary each month in the name of indigent prisoners who would kick back part of the amount in items purchased, such as cigarettes, or would repay the debt by relieving their benefactors of prison chores, such as cleaning the cell or stealing extra clothing from the stockroom. While the amount of money was small—no prisoner was allowed to exceed fifteen dollars a month credit in the commissary—there were several prisoners whose family or friends on the outside could not afford to send even fifteen dollars, and it was these prisoners who became the servants of the more affluent.
There were social levels within a society of imprisoned men, and while Bill Bonanno tried to avoid becoming part of any clique, he tended to associate more with the affluent white-collar criminals—the stock swindlers, the crooked lawyers, the business executives who had misappropriated company funds. These men were more articulate and interesting than the others, and during leisure time in the evenings Bill learned many thing, including how to play chess. But he also sensed about them a quality of deceit and hypocrisy that went beyond any he had felt in his father’s world—these men knew crime on its most genteel level, perpetrating their corporate vices on carpeted floors in paneled offices, and even their presence in jail did not seem to tarnish their veneer of respectability. They suggested what they were underneath, however, by their interest in him, their expressed desire to see him when they all were again free. They said they had propositions that might interest him, and he could imagine what these propositions were, consisting no doubt of intimidating one of their business competitors or subtly threatening a stubborn labor leader or harassing a landlord who refused to sell out to a big land developer or avenging a personal insult or a social snub or beating up a wife’s lover.
The newspapers usually described these men as “respectable” executives who had been corrupted by mobsters, but Bill thought that just as often it was the executives who lured others into doing the dirty work. In any case, Bill Bonanno was not interested in any of their propositions. He enjoyed their company while in confinement, was curious about how their minds worked, but once he was released from jail he did not care if he saw any of them again.
Rosalie visited the prison every week, bringing a different son each time. The boys were growing up and already having problems of their own. The eldest, Charles, was doing poorly in school. The second boy, Joseph, was very competitive with Charles; he seemed extremely intelligent and alert but was frequently ill with asthmatic bronchitis and often bedridden. The youngest son, Salvatore, who reminded Bill of his own childhood photographs, was a determined boy with a hot temper and Rosalie found it difficult to control him. The only glowing reports that Bill received in jail concerned his one-year-old daughter, Felippa, who was beginning to walk and had dark hair, bangs, and whose ears were pierced to hold tiny diamond earrings.
Seeing Rosalie in the visitors’ room, her reddish hair stylishly arranged, her large brown eyes very expressive, her trim figure attired in her most becoming clothes, reminded Bill of how pretty she was and made him wonder why he had strayed as he had in Arizona. Of couse it was difficult in jail for him to feel what he had felt during his final years in Tuscon and Phoenix, to remember exactly how maddening his life had been and how necessary his affair had then seemed. Now Rosalie seemed more understanding and aware of his commitments to his father, although she still was reserved and remote, having undoubtedly not forgiven him for what he had done to her. Her visits seemed more an act of duty than anything else, and yet he reminded himself that he should expect no more from her in this place—the visitors’ room was strange and inhibiting, with Rosalie and Bill forced to sit facing one another between a glass wall and to speak through telephones. The boys were completely confused by the surroundings, could not understand why their father was living there. During one visit Rosalie repeated to Bill what their younger sons had replied when asked by a neighborhood child where their father was. He was living in a phone booth, they said, a very large glass booth where they talked to him through a telephone without paying a dime.
O
N THIS DAY, AS ON SO MANY OTHERS, ROSALIE BONANNO
felt a sense of loneliness without a sense of privacy; she believed that her telephone was tapped, suspected that her home was being watched sometimes by men with binoculars, that even the sound of her footsteps was being recorded by tiny hidden gadgets and if she ventured beyond her door she might become exposed still further to strangers and to herself, for what she was and was not, by the lights of the cameramen who occasionally cruised by.
Her past had not prepared her for the present. As a girl the reality of her family’s world was kept from her; the first of three daughters, she was protected like a precious jewel, closely observed, polished, admired, displayed on special occasions. She was sent at seven to a convent school on a gentle hill in upstate New York to dwell in a state of grace and innocence, to learn about God and man from the Dominican nuns. She was awed by the beauty of the place, its atmosphere of obedience and its identity with virtue, and she was saddened when her parents reclaimed her during her twelfth year so that her approaching womanhood could be attained under her mother’s guidance.
At home in Brooklyn she continued to live a sheltered existence, attending school during the day within the walls of Visitation Academy, taught by cloistered nuns, and never going out at night except in the company of a member of her family. It was one of the ironies of her life that she had never slept alone until after she was married. At the convent upstate, there was either a nun or classmate sharing the bedroom, and when she returned to live in Brooklyn there was always one of her sisters. After her marriage to Bill, however, she experienced nocturnal solitude for the first time, and she began to dread the night as she never had as a child, and she remained awake pondering the uncertainties of her adult life—the fact that when her husband left the house in the morning she never knew what time he would return or
if
he would return; the unexplained origin of her first son, Charles; the mysterious disappearance of her father-in-law. She did not know why the monthly payments on the home in East Meadow were made in the name of a stranger or why the mailman frequently left letters addressed to people she did not know or whether the various men she had seen across the street observing the house were detectives or reporters or gangsters or merely neighbors whose curiosity had been aroused by photographs of the house in the Long Island press.
On the exterior, the house was not unlike the other modern ranch-type structures along Tyler Avenue, except that the shrubbery was trimmed lower and at night the lighting outside was brighter. There was a patio in the rear and a swimming pool which was boarded over because Rosalie feared that one of the younger children might fall in. The house had eight newly furnished rooms, an enormous basement, and a two-car garage cluttered with bicycles, baby carriages, golf clubs, a lawn mower, old furniture, and cardboard cartons that Rosalie had not yet unpacked. What distinguished the home on the interior from ordinary suburban dwellings was not immediately obvious, although there were items here and there that suggested a preparedness for danger and confinement. There were rifles among the paraphernalia in the garage, and also a rifle in the guest room behind a bureau on which was a statue of the Christ child. A storage room in the basement was lined with shelves packed with canned goods, boxes of pasta, tins of coffee, bottles of wine—there was enough food and drink there to make it unnecessary to shop for months. There was an unloaded pistol on top of Bill’s bureau in the master bedroom along with a plastic tube of quarters. There was the debugging device in one of the lower drawers. Rosalie knew that her husband kept other tubes of coins and private possessions and papers in his bureau, too, but she did not pry. His bureau was off limits to her and the children—whatever was on the bureau could be touched by none but himself, and Rosalie always placed his freshly laundered shirts, underwear, and socks at the foot of the bed for him to put away himself. If the children were squabbling over a toy, he threatened to “put it on the bureau,” which meant they could not again touch it until he returned it.
He was a good father, strict but also attentative and warm-hearted, and, except for the privacy of his bureau, he did not believe in obscuring any part of his life from them, be it a pistol or a newspaper featuring his picture. He had disagreed with the way Rosalie had been reared, and he told her that as soon as the children were old enough to understand, he would attempt to explain his life to them. Rosalie knew that one of the boys had already asked him why he carried a pistol, and Bill had replied that there were certain people who might wish to harm him, or to harm people he knew, and that a pistol was one way to discourage them. The two older boys now accepted the fact of his carrying a gun as readily as they accepted Hopalong Cassidy or the other cowboys, detectives, or soldiers they watched each day on television. Someday they would demand a fuller explanation, but Rosalie did not want to worry about that now any more than she wanted to explore her own bewilderment. She sometimes felt that her sanity and security depended on her not knowing and not wanting to know: she did not want to know where her father-in-law was, what her husband did when he was not at home, where her son Charles had come from. She was only too thankful to have Charles, and if she had any regrets about him it was in not having had him sooner, in not having been able to send out birth announcements, although she had done the next best thing—with the birth of her son Joseph in January 1961, she had sent cards to friends and relatives announcing with pleasure “the birth of a brother for Charles.”
Rosalie was surprised by her emotional attachment to her children because for years she had not contemplated marriage or a family, considering that her vocation was to become a nun. She felt she was incapable of close human relationships, wanting love on an ethereal level, not a physical one. It was not an escape from reality that made the nunnery seem desirable but rather a longing to remain within the walled-in world that she recognized as reality. She felt safe within the walls, felt comfortable with rules, obedience; she would not have to make any more decisions as a nun than she had as a young woman—the questions were all answered, the path was defined, the rewards guaranteed. She was accustomed to restrictions and denial.
As a teen-age girl she was not permitted to date boys. The only boys she saw aside from her brothers were the cadets that her older brother sometimes brought home from military school. She remembered one she found attractive in manner and appearance, a wealthy South American boy whose parents lived in Acapulco. She liked talking with him, overcoming her natural shyness, and when he wrote her a letter a correspondence had begun. Because of him she learned Spanish in school, thinking that some day they might wish to express things in letters that her parents should not read, but their acquaintanceship never got that far, and during the summer of 1953 she became aware of the presence of Bill Bonanno.
Her parents had been friendly with the Bonannos for years, and Rosalie had always sensed that there was something special about the Bonannos by the extra effort that was made whenever they came to visit the Profaci home. Mrs. Profaci would spend most of the day in the kitchen preparing an elaborate meal, and the table would be set with the best china and silver, and the finest wine would be served. Her father seemed honored whenever the elder Bonanno was in his home, and Rosalie felt the need to respond to these occasions in a certain way, but unable to decide which way was appropiate, she usually became more shy and hesitant than before. Mr. Bonanno was so different from her father, even different from her rich uncle, to whom she compared many older men.
Her father, who was not poor, seemed poor. Though he had interests in real estate, a clothing factory, and a shoe business, he was endlessly frugal and humble, allowing himself one luxury, a modest-sized cabin cruiser, on which he lived during the hay fever season. He dressed in a casual haphazard way that Rosalie knew was embarrassing at times to her older brother in military school, particularly when her father would arrive at the academy to bring her brother home for the holidays in a battered car, wearing a shirt without a tie under a faded Eisenhower jacket and needing a shave. Her father had once bought a farm in upstate New York not far from the convent to which she returned after three years at Visitation, but Rosalie remembered the farm house as a ramshackle place on a hill with a lopsided porch and an even more lopsided picnic table across which wine that was spilled would flow from one end to the other.
By way of contrast, her uncle Joseph Profaci, then the largest single importer of olive oil and tomato paste in the nation, displayed his wealth with ostentation. He adorned his family and himself with jewelry and expensive clothes, and in addition to his comfortable home in Brooklyn, he had a winter place in Miami and a gigantic hunting lodge on a 328-acre estate in New Jersey that was once the summer retreat of President Theodore Roosevelt. Rosalie remembered summers there as a girl with dozens of her cousins, uncles, aunts, and friends of the family, remembered the tremendous feasts and the many children frolicking through the thirty-room house, and how shocked she was when a few young boys sneaked into Joseph Profaci’s private chapel and drew moustaches and nipples on the statues of saints.
Joseph Bonanno had somewhat the same aura of opulence as her uncle, but in a more quiet and discreet way. Rosalie could see that Mr. Bonanno liked carefully tailored suits and fine automobiles, but there was a cosmopolitan quality about him and his family that was not so evident in the Profacis. She knew from attending the convent with Catherine Bonanno that the Bonannos frequently took family trips all over the country, read books, went to the theater, were interested in world affairs. Mr. Bonanno spoke French, having lived briefly in France where one of his cousins was a successful painter, and he had also traveled extensively throughout Latin America. Rosalie knew that the Bonannos’ eldest son was attending school in Arizona, which she thought of as some exotic place in another world, and when she saw Bill during the summer of 1953 in New York she found it hard to believe that he was, like her, of Sicilian origin—he seemed so American in a lanky casual way, so tall in his Western clothes, he looked like a cowboy, a rancher, there was an inexplicable manner about him that she found different and exciting.
The couple saw a lot of one another that summer, but always in the company of relatives. One day her parents arranged for her to take a motor trip with the Bonannos to Albany and Syracuse, and during the Christmas holidays Rosalie and her older brother were flown to Arizona to visit the Bonannos. In June 1954 she graduated from the convent, but later that summer her father was killed in an accidental explosion of his boat, and she did not go directly into college in the fall. The guardian of her family became Joseph Profaci, who removed the wall dividing the backyards of their neighboring houses in Brooklyn, and Rosalie was then answerable to her uncle, finding him as strict and puritanical as her father had been. When Bill was in town to take her out to a movie or show, it was expected that one of her sisters or cousins sould also go along; Bill had to buy tickets not in pairs, but in threes.
Bill gradually began to resent this custom, and one night he spoke privately to her uncle about it. Although Rosalie never knew what was said, the next night she went out with Bill alone. She was proud of him, impressed by his ability to deal with her uncle, and she was never more happy than on the summer evening in 1955 when, before an assembled gathering of Profacis, in the center of which sat Joseph Profaci in a high-backed red chair, Bill spoke in Sicilian of his “intentions” toward her. Their engagement was formally announced on January 1, 1956, and Rosalie left Finch College during her freshman year to prepare for the wedding in August. She designed her wedding gown and those of the bridesmaids and accompanied Bill to various hotels to meet with banquet managers to select a ballroom large enough to accommodate the 3,000 reception guests.
Rosalie remembered going from the Plaza to the Pierre, from the Sherry-Netherland to the Waldorf-Astoria, standing in the palatial splendor of empty ballrooms hearing her comments echoing from above. She was impressed with the grand ballroom of the Waldorf, but she and Bill agreed that the gilded boxes of the balcony were too remote from the main floor and that guests occupying them would undoubtedly feel isolated. Rosalie rejected the St. George Hotel without inspecting it because it was in Brooklyn.
I no longer want to be a girl from Brooklyn
, she thought to herself, and she was opposed to the Commodore Hotel’s ballroom because that was where Joseph Profaci’s two daughters had held their receptions, a reaction she revealed somewhat shamefully to Bill, who seemed to understand. Through most of her lifetime she had been aware of how her father and his other brothers had been overshadowed by her uncle Joseph, and how his branch of the family seemed always to be the first in the Profaci clan with anything new—the first with a new seasonal wardrobe, the first with a television set when such things were not common in homes; and Rosalie was determined that on her wedding day she would not follow her cousins to a “Profaci hotel,” which is how she described the Commodore to Bill. Her wedding would be unique and her own: the priest would be flown in from Arizona, thousands of daisies would be sent from California, and she would marry a tall thin man whom she liked to think of as an American cowboy.
When they finally saw the ballroom of the Astor, noting how intimate the large room seemed, its low balcony close to the main floor, they both decided that it would be ideal. And it was. The wedding and the reception was everything that Rosalie had hoped for, as was the honeymoon in Europe and their first year together in Arizona. Even when things began to change, when Bill began to spend more time away from home and Rosalie knew that she had not married a cowboy, it took a while for her to recognize the deterioration of her dream because at first his frequent absences merely added to his mystique, accentuated his separateness from the simplicity of her past.