Authors: Gay Talese
Bill Bonanno first met Rosalie Profaci when she was a young student attending a convent school in upstate New York with his sister. At that time he had a girl friend in Arizona, a casual American girl with a flair for freedom; while Rosalie was appealing, she also was demure and sheltered. That the young couple would meet again and again, during summer months and holidays, was largely due to their parents, who were very close and whose approval was bestowed in subtle but infectious ways whenever Rosalie and Bill would converse or merely sit near one another in crowded rooms. At one large family gathering months before the engagement, Joseph Bonanno, taking his twenty-year-old daughter Catherine aside, asked her privately what she thought of the likelihood that Bill would marry Rosalie. Catherine Bonanno, an independent-minded girl, thought for a moment, then said that while she was extremely fond of Rosalie personally she did not feel that Rosalie was right for Bill. Rosalie lacked the strength of character to accept him for what he was and might become, Catherine said, and she was about to say something else when, suddenly, she felt a hard slap across her face, and she fell back, stunned, confused, then burst into tears as she ran, never before having seen her father that enraged, his eyes fiery and fierce. Later he tried to comfort her, to apologize in his way, but she remained aloof for days although she understood as she had not before her father’s desire for the marriage. It was a wish shared by Rosalie’s father and uncle. And it would be fulfilled the following year, an event that Catherine Bonanno would regard as a marriage of fathers.
The wedding, on August 18, 1956, had been extraordinary. More than 3,000 guests had attended the reception at the Astor Hotel ballroom in New York following the church wedding in Brooklyn, and no expense was spared in embellishing the occasion. Leading orchestras were hired for the dancing, and the entertainment included the Four Lads and Tony Bennett. A truckload of champagne and wine was sent as a gift by a distributor in Brooklyn, and it was arranged through Pan American Airways to have thousands of daisies flown in from California because that flower, Rosalie’s favorite, was then unavailable in New York. The guest list, in addition to the legitimate businessmen and politicians and priests, included all the top men of the underworld. Vito Genovese and Frank Costello were there, having requested and received inconspicuous tables against the wall. Albert Anastasia was there (it was the year before his murder in the barbershop of the Park-Sheraton Hotel), and so was Joseph Barbara, whose barbecue party for nearly seventy mafiosi at his home in Apalachin, New York, three weeks after the murder, would be discovered by the police and would result in national publicity and endless investigations. Joseph Zerilli had come with his men from Detroit, and so had the Chicago delegation led by Sam Giancana and Tony Accardo. Stefano Magaddino, the portly old don from Buffalo, cousin of Joseph Bonanno, was given an honored table in front of the dais, and seated near him were other relatives or close friends of the Bonannos and Profacis. All of the twenty-four semi-independent organizations that formed the national syndicate were represented at the wedding, meaning that there were men from New England to New Mexico, and the group from Los Angeles alone totaled almost eighty.
Bill Bonanno, smiling next to his bride on the dais, toasting the guests and being toasted in turn, often wondered during the evening what the FBI would have done had it gotten its hands on the guest list. But there was little chance of that since the list, in code, had been in the careful custody of Frank Labruzzo and his men who were posted at the door to receive the guests and to escort them to their tables. There were no intruders on that night. There was not really a great deal of public concern over the Mafia in 1956. The Kefauver hearings of 1951 were already forgotten, and the Apalachin fiasco was one year away. And so the wedding and reception proceeded smoothly and without incident, with Catherine Bonanno as the maid of honor; and Joseph Bonanno, elegant in his cutaway, presided over the gathering like a medieval duke, bowing toward his fellow dons, dancing with the women, courtly and proud.
After the reception, during which the bridal couple had received in gift envelopes about $100,000 in cash, Bill Bonanno and his bride flew to Europe for a honeymoon. They stayed for a few days at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, then at the Excelsior in Rome; they received special attention in each place and were ushered quickly through customs at the airport. Later they flew to Sicily, and as the plane slowly taxied toward the terminal building in Palermo, Bill Bonanno noticed that a large crowd had gathered behind the gate and that a number of carabinieri were among them, standing very close to Bonanno’s aging, bald-headed uncle, John Bonventre, who seemed rather grim and tense. Bonanno’s first thought was that Bonventre, who had once served in the United States as an underboss in the Bonanno organization, was about to be deported from his native Sicily, to which he had gone the year before to retire, having taken with him from America a lifetime’s supply of toilet paper, preferring it to the coarse brands produced in Sicily. After the plane stopped but before the door opened, a stewardess asked that Mr. and Mrs. Bonanno please identify themselves. Slowly, Bill Bonanno raised his hand. The stewardess then asked that the couple be the first to leave the plane.
Walking down the ramp into the hot Sicilian sun, mountains rising in the distance behind sloping villages of tan stone houses, Bonanno sensed the crowd staring at him, moving and murmuring as he got closer. The old women were dressed in black, the younger men had fixed dark expressions, children were milling everywhere, and the statuesque carabinieri, flamboyantly dressed and brandishing gleaming silver swords, stood taller than the rest. Then the uncle, Bonventre, bursting with a smile of recognition, ran with arms outstretched toward the bridal couple, and crowd followed, and suddenly the Bonannos were surrounded by clutching kissing strangers, and Rosalie, blushing, tried without success to conceal the awkwardness she felt in the center of swarming unrestrained affection. Her husband, however, seemed to enjoy it thoroughly, reaching out with his long arms to touch everyone that he could, leaning low to be embraced by the women and children, basking in the adoration and salutations of the crowd. The carabinieri watched impassively for a few moments, then stepped aside, clearing a path that led toward a line of illegally parked automobiles waiting to take the couple to the first of a series of celebrations that would culminate with a visit on the following day to Castellammare del Golfo, the town in western Sicily where Joseph Bonanno was born and where the earlier Bonannos had long ruled as
uomini rispettati—
men of respect.
Rosalie had hoped that they would also visit her father’s birthplace, a town just east of Palermo called Villabate, but her husband, without ever explaining why, indicated that this was impossible. Moments after he had landed at Palermo his uncle had whispered a message just received from the United States from the elder Bonanno insisting that the couple avoid Villabate. A number of friends and distant relatives of the Profacis still living in Villabate were then struggling with a rival gang for control over certain operations, and there had already been seven murders in the past ten days. It was feared that the enemies of Profaci’s friends in Villabate might seek revenge for their dead upon Bill Bonanno or his wife, and although Rosalie persisted in her request to see Villabate, her husband managed to avoid the trip after making endless excuses and offering a busy itinerary of pleasant distractions. He was also relieved that Rosalie had not questioned, nor had even seemed to notice, the quiet group of men that followed them everywhere during their first day of sightseeing in Palermo. These men, undoubtedly armed, were serving as bodyguards for the Bonanno couple, even sitting outside the couple’s hotel door at night to guarantee that no harm would come to them in Sicily.
The journey to Castellammare del Golfo, sixty miles west of Palermo, was the highpoint of the Sicilian visit for Bill Bonanno. As a boy he had seen on the walls at home framed photographs of his father’s town, and he later noted references to it in history books and travel guides, although the references were very brief and superficial—it was as if the writers, with few exceptions, had quickly driven through the town without stopping, perhaps being intimidated by one published report claiming that eighty percent of Castellammare’s adult male population had served time in prison.
There was no social stigma attached to this, however, because most of the local citizens regarded the law as corrupt, representing the will of invaders who had long sought to control the islanders and exploit the land through the conqueror’s law. As with most of Sicily, the history of Castellammare had been turbulent for centuries, and Bonanno remembered reading that the island was conquered and reconquered no less than sixteen times—by Greeks, Saracens, and Normans, by Spaniards, Germans, and English, by various combinations and persuasions ranging from Holy Crusaders to Fascists. They had all come to Sicily and did what men do when away from home, and the history of Sicily was a litany of sailor’s sins.
As the caravan of cars arrived at Castellammare, having driven for two hours along narrow mountain roads above the sea, Bill Bonanno felt a sudden sense of familiarity with the landscape that was beyond mere recognition from pictures. He felt united with all that he had imagined for years, all that he had heard as a boy from the reminiscing men gathered around his father’s dinner table on Sunday afternoons. The town was actually quite beautiful, a tranquil fishing village built along the bottom of a mountain, and at the very tip of the land, on a jagged rocky edge splashed by waves, stood the old stone castle that gave the town its name. The castle, built many centuries ago by the Saracens or Aragons, no one was absolutely certain, had served as the town’s lookout for spotting invading ships; but now it was a decaying structure of no purpose, and the elder Bonanno and the other men had recalled playing in it as boys.
Near the castle, along the small beach, were the fishermen, weatherworn and ruddy, wearing black berets; they were pulling in their nets as the Bonanno party passed but were too busy to notice the line of cars. In the town square, near a church built four hundred years ago, were many men walking slowly, arm in arm, making many gestures with their hands. The stone houses, most of them two or three stories high with balconies in front, were arranged in tight rows along narrow cobbled roads over which was heard the clacking sounds of donkeys pulling colorfully painted wagons between the motor traffic. Here and there, sunning themselves in front of their doors, were groups of women, the unmarried ones seated with their backs to the street, possibly following a fashion inherited a thousand years ago when the Arabs occupied Sicily.
In front of one particularly well-constructed house on Corso Garibaldi, a crowd had gathered. When the procession of cars was spotted, the people stepped up to the curb, waiting. They were about thirty in number, dressed in dark clothes except for the children, one of whom held a bouquet of flowers. They were standing in front of the home where Joseph Bonanno was born, and the arrival of his son was regarded as an event of historical proportions. An indication of the Bonanno family status in Castellammare was the fact that the ceremony surrounding Joseph Bonanno’s baptism in 1905 had marked the end of a shooting war between the local mafiosi and those in the neighboring village of Alcamo; and when Joseph Bonanno’s father, Salvatore Bonanno, died in 1915, he was buried in the most prominent plot at the base of the mountain.
After the bridal couple was greeted by, and disentangled themselves from, the embracing crowds and had coffee and pastry with their cousins and
compari
, they went to the cemetery; and Bill Bonanno, standing before a large gravestone that exhibited a proud picture of a man with a handlebar moustache, sensed something more about his own father’s relationship to the past. The eyes looking out from the gravestone were penetrating and dark, and Bill Bonanno could readily accept what he had heard of his grandfather’s persuasive power, although he found it difficult to believe that this authoritative-looking photograph was of a man who had died at thirty-seven. His grandfather seemed to be a tall man—lean and tall unlike Sicilians. Perhaps this is because the Bonannos were not Sicilian by origin. Hundreds of years ago they had lived in Pisa, according to Joseph Bonanno, and had left rather hastily following a dispute with the ruling family. Joseph Bonanno, who kept a family coat-of-arms hanging in his home in the United States, a shield decorated with a panther, had compiled a history of his ancestry that claimed kinship with Charles Bonanno, engineer of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
After Bill Bonanno returned from his honeymoon in September 1956, he urged his father to visit Castellammare. And a year later the elder Bonanno visited the town. But the recollection of the pleasant experiences of that trip were somewhat negated by certain events that followed in 1957 and other subsequent events. There was the publicity attached to the Anastasia murder and the Apalachin meeting, and in 1963 there was the Senate testimony of Joseph Valachi, the Mafia defector, who identified Joseph Bonanno as his sponsoring godfather and as the leader of one of New York’s five “families” as well as a member of the nine-man national commission. Also in 1963 there was the dissension within Bonanno’s organization, internal differences between a few old friends who had left Castellammare forty years before. And now, in October 1964, hiding in the apartment, Bill Bonanno, the son, was a partner in the tension and intrigue.
He was tired of it, but there was little he could do. He had not seen Rosalie or his four young children in several days, and he wondered about their well-being and wished that his relationship with his in-laws, the Profacis, had not declined as it had in recent years. He and Rosalie had now been married for seven years, and much had happened since their honeymoon, too much, and he hoped that he could repair the damage. What was required, he felt, was a new start, a second attempt in another direction, and he thought that they were moving toward this earlier in the year, in February, when they moved into their new home, a ranch-type house on a quiet tree-lined street in East Meadow, Long Island. They had finally left Arizona, which Rosalie had come to hate for a number of reasons, not the least of which was a certain woman in Phoenix, and they came East to live for a few months in the mansion of Rosalie’s uncle Joe Magliocco in East Islip, Long Island, before getting their own home. The time spent at Magliocco’s place was hectic, not only for them but also for their children.