Authors: Gay Talese
Arguing in support of publicizing the wiretap disclosures were editorial writers, law enforcement officials, and several members of the New Jersey legislature who believed that the tapes were a valuable weapon against organized crime and would prove to an otherwise skeptical or lethargic public that there was indeed a Mafia. And New Jersey, which was presently sponsoring one of the most enthusiastic anti-Mafia campaigns in the nation, permitted its state police to pursue a policy of harassment, which included such tactics as ticketing the cars of individuals who were visiting the homes or business offices of reputed mafiosi and dispatching state police to the home in Deal, New Jersey, of a mafioso, Anthony Russo, each night and turning their high-beam lights directly on Russo’s bedroom.
While the disclosures revealed on the De Cavalcante tapes were said to be inadmissible evidence in court, the publicity surrounding them established Sam De Cavalcante as a national figure in crime—his face adorned the cover of a paperback entitled
The Mafia Talks
; and he was profiled in
The New York Times
’s “Man in the News” column on June 13, 1969. When his extortion-conspiracy case came up in court, he was convicted and received the maximum sentence permitted under law—fifteen years in prison.
He was visibly stunned by the decision, turning pale, his left cheek twitching uncontrollably as the federal judge, Lawrence A Whipple, revoked the $50,000 bail and ordered him jailed immediately.
After the sentencing, De Cavalcante was interviewed by the press.
“What can I say?” he asked, still seemingly confused, shaken. “I don’t know what happened. I tried to make things equal, and this is how it turned out.”
O
N READING THE TRANSCRIPTS IN
S
AN
J
OSE
, B
ILL
. Bonanno was immediately angered at being described so unflatteringly; but he also felt, after a second and third reading, that the tapes clearly reconfirmed what he and his father had concluded—the brotherhood was now overpopulated with braggarts and mini-mafiosi, and if President Nixon needed $61 million from Congress to combat such insignificant characters it surely must represent the greatest example of law enforcement featherbedding in history.
There was also something sadly comical about the De Cavalcante dialogues, suggesting to Bill an outdated parody of
Guys and Dolls
by inferior actors, or the 1940s cartoons of “Willie and Joe,” the two bedraggled GIs sitting in foxholes philosophizing about the war and the generals. It was no wonder that his father had become incompatible with the commission and had refused to be guided by the dictates of old men approaching senility and middle-aged men hardly competent.
And yet, long after Bill had put the transcripts aside, he sat in the living room alone after Rosalie and the children had gone to sleep, feeling embittered, thinking again about the situations that De Cavalcante had made reference to, remembering the years that he wanted to forget—1963, 1964, the time of friction in the organization after his elevation to
consigliere
. All of Bill’s hostility toward De Cavalcante and Zicarelli after reading their comments, and all of Bill’s self-justification and ego, did not belie the fact that the “trouble” had begun in 1963 after he had moved from Arizona to New York. And still Bill did not believe, as Zicarelli apparently did, that he was merely a product of nepotism, that he owed his position of leadership strictly to his father when in fact Bill had often felt when he looked back on it that what he had inherited from his father was a slowly sinking ship. His father had gone off to Canada in 1963, had disappeared entirely in 1964, leaving Bill with a crew of mutineers led by Di Gregorio. If the men had remained loyal, if Di Gregorio had not been so bitter and jealous, and if Stefano Magaddino had tended to his own business, they might all be better off today. Or maybe not. Bill was better off without them. Let them sink, he thought, the hell with them.
But the sensational publicity generated by the De Cavalcante tapes would undoubtedly keep the Mafia in the national headlines throughout the summer and fall of 1969, and Bill anticipated more subpoenas and visits from federal agents asking the same old questions, to which he would give the same old answers. He would say that he had played no role in his father’s disappearance, that he had absolutely no idea where his father had been during those many months, and that he would make no effort to find out. When the case came to trial—if the government could produce a witness claiming to have seen Joseph Bonanno during the period he was allegedly kidnaped—Bill Bonanno wanted nothing to do with the case. He had already told the grand jury everything he swore he knew about that situation, and he had enough court problems of his own to worry about.
The government in fact now claimed to know the elder Bonanno had been in Haiti during the months it was searching for him.
Life
magazine had already published this, and
True
magazine was about to report it in greater detail. According to
True
, the CIA and the Justice Department had gathered “hard” information earlier in the year that Joseph Bonanno personally knew President François Duvalier of Haiti; he had had private talks at the palace in Port-au-Prince with Duvalier in 1963 when he had acquired the Haitian casino concession; and after he vanished on Park Avenue in October 1964, Bonanno reappeared in Port-au-Prince and lived there under Duvalier’s protection for a full year. The kidnaping, according to
Life
and
The New York Times
and other publications, was legitimate and had been executed by gunmen working for the commission who took Bonanno to a hideaway in the Catskills, where he met with other dons and talked his way out of his assassination by vowing that his death would start a national gangland war and also by promising to relinquish his leadership in repayment for his life. He was believed to have been released under these conditions in December 1964, whereupon he traveled to Haiti, perhaps by ship, leaving unresolved the matter of his succession. Since the United States had poor diplomatic relations with Duvalier, who suspected the Americans of repeatedly attempting to overthrow his regime with guerrilla infiltrators trained by Special Forces and spies, Joseph Bonanno found Haiti ideal because it considered the CIA and FBI as archenemies.
Bill doubted that his father would ever confirm or deny these reports; he believed that the circumstances surrounding his father’s disappearance, and the place and manner in which his father had lived during the nineteen-month period, was a dark fascinating secret that Joseph Bonanno would take to his grave.
What most surprised Bill Bonanno about the De Cavalcante tapes was the commission’s theory that Joseph Bonanno had poisoned Magliocco, which Bill knew was absurd, having lived in Magliocco’s house with Rosalie and the children at the time of his uncle’s death. Nevertheless, on the basis of De Cavalcante’s statement the government ordered Magliocco’s body removed from the vault where it had been for more than five years, and a second autopsy was performed. It failed to show any trace of poison, and the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office in Long Island announced that the inquiry into the death of Joseph Magliocco was closed.
The taped references to Magliocco, however, as well as to some of Magliocco’s relatives in the Profaci family caused much discomfort among some of the second generation of that family—one such individual was Rosalie’s older brother, Salvatore Profaci, a quiet stout man in his midthirties who lived in New Jersey and was in the real estate business. The publicity that Profaci received in the New Jersey press, though not incriminating in a legal sense, disturbed him, and he was upset when he arrived in California on the second weekend in June to attend the wedding of his youngest sister, Josephine.
Slumped in a patio chair at the home of his sister Ann, where Sunday dinner was being prepared for a gathering of Josephine’s family on the day before the wedding, Salvatore Profaci shook his head and said that the state of New Jersey was conducting an inquisition, and he repeated, slowly and sadly, that the association of his name with the De Cavalcante publicity would have a ruinous effect on his business opportunities. Bill Bonanno, who sat casually, drink in hand, with Profaci and some other men, disagreed, saying that his brother-in-law was overreacting, that things were not that bad, and that public clamor over De Cavalcante would eventually subside as the FBI and the media discovered something else to exploit. But Bill realized that his attempt to comfort Sal Profaci was having little effect—Profaci, unlike himself, was unaccustomed to having his surname in the national press in recent years. The decline of the Profaci organization in the early 1960s and the ascension of Joseph Colombo after the death of Magliocco in 1963 had taken the focus off the nephews, uncles, cousins, nieces, wives, and sons of the late Olive Oil King, Joseph Profaci, or The Fat Man, Joseph Magliocco. Such people as Bill and his father had replaced the Profacis in the headlines, and there were times in recent years, at family gatherings, when Bill sensed that a few of Rosalie’s close and distant relatives would have preferred to disown him. It had little to do with his problems with Rosalie, though they might have justified it for that reason, but rather with “what he stood for.” He could not prove this, he just felt it, believing that he reminded them of a life style that they would prefer to forget. And so, hearing the lamentations of his brother-in-law Sal Profaci, on the patio, Bill felt along with sympathy a slight perverse sense of delight in Sal’s discomfort. It was nice, for a change, not to be the house gangster; and he was strongly tempted to gently poke fun at Sal, to mockingly complain at dinner in front of the assembled Profaci clan that Sal was “giving us a bad name.” While prudence triumphed in this instance, Bill was later unable to resist saying teasingly to Josephine, the bride-to-be, that the next day the FBI might be among the wedding guests. Josephine was repelled.
“They’d better not!” she snapped. She glared at him, and was not amused.
The sprawling green lawns of the campus were almost abandoned at 6:00
P.M.
except for the people moving up the stone steps of the Stanford University Memorial Chapel. It was bright and sunny at this hour, the air was clear and still. It was a perfect day, a perfect time for a wedding.
Inside the high-ceilinged chapel the pews were empty row upon row, and beyond the altar rail the wedding guests filed into the choir stalls flanking the altar. On the left were the Profacis, formal, dressed in dark suits and silk dresses. In the first pew, alone, was Mrs. Profaci, serene and maternal, wearing a well-tailored pink damask dress. Behind her was her younger son, an attorney, with his wife; her daughter Ann and her husband, Lou; Mrs. Joseph Bonanno and Catherine, whose hair was elaborately curled and carefully coiffed; other relatives, friends, children. As yet, Rosalie and Bill had not appeared, but since one of their children was ill, they were expected to be a few minutes late.
On the right were the Stantons—tweedy, bright flowered or print dresses, lean young women with long straight hair, long-haired college boys in sports jackets, including one youth who attended the tape recorder at the right of the altar from which the wedding music would come. The groom’s parents, in the front row, were a handsome couple exuding the good health of the suburbs, and with them was the groom’s grandmother, elegant in old age, looking very much the dowager.
In the center of the altar stood the chaplain, a tall distinguished man with gray hair, blue eyes, an eagle’s gaze. He stood waiting, eyes fixed on the long empty aisle stretching ahead of him, although once he flashed a quick look to his right at a noisy child on the Profaci side. It was not a sign of reproof but of awareness.
Standing in front of the altar was the groom, Tim Stanton, wearing a new tan suit, loafers, his long blond hair neatly combed, a pink carnation in his lapel. Next to him was his best man, wearing the blue cornflower that Josephine had intended for Tim.
As the music was turned on at the tape deck—it was the Latin American folk Mass,
Misa Criolla—
Josephine Profaci, on the arm of her brother Sal, walked slowly up the aisle, looking poised and lovely, her dark bright eyes and hair in sharp contrast to the white veil and Juliet cap she wore. Her long white gown was of silk organza, with single rows of lace running vertically, and while it seemed to have been specially designed for her, she had in fact selected it in twenty minutes, much to the dismay of her mother who had spent months with Rosalie and Ann searching for their gowns. Josephine’s bouquet was of blue cornflowers, pink carnations, and white baby’s breath, which she had made herself, disliking the ones usually produced by florists.
Continuing up the aisle, Josephine felt a warm, deep attachment to her brother Sal, who, possibly even more than her mother, had initially found it difficult to accept her break with Catholicism; and if he had been part of the typical bull-headed “over-thirty” crowd that she saw as abounding in America today, he would never have come to this nondenomi-national ceremony. But she felt at this moment that she was walking between two traditions—her own family’s on the left, with which she still symbolically identified herself by wearing a white wedding gown, and Tim Stanton’s on the right, which she saw as closer to the independent spirit she felt as a modern young woman. Both of Tim’s parents were democratic individuals in a suburban community that revolved around the right school, the right church, the right clubs; and while Tim’s brother and sisters seemed to have accepted the more traditional values of that community, in the same way that Josephine’s brothers and sisters had accepted the values of their’s, Tim had somehow remained remote from his surroundings as Josephine had from her’s. Tim’s closest boyhood friends in suburban New York had not been the sons of stockbrokers but rather the sons of an actor, a well-driller, and a black garbage man who had since been driven out of business by the Mafia. After Tim had gone West to attend Stanford, he seemed to Josephine to be as lonely and as searching as she was herself; they shared, in a quiet and un-dramatic way, a rebellion away from the values of their parents’ societies, and yet they also shared an abundance of love and acceptance from their parents. And so while Josephine recognized her own past as provincial and dull, she had never been tempted to turn her back on her family or to deny her origins, and the proof was right here, as she on the arm of her brother Sal reached the altar, approaching Tim Stanton.
As the chaplain delivered a short sermon on the challenges and meaning of marriage, Josephine looked at Tim, thought him very handsome, admired his new tan suit, and noticed that he was wearing the wrong boutonniere. After the vows and rings were exchanged, and the young man on the side of the altar pressed the button on the tape deck, the sound of “O Happy Day,” a Negro spiritual, was heard; and Mr. and Mrs. Tim Stanton turned and walked down the aisle toward the vestibule of the church.
Outside, a photographer snapped pictures of the couple walking down the steps, and soon all the guests gathered in front of the chapel, standing very close but not really mingling. They nodded toward one another, shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, but they continued to talk within their own circles along the sidewalk. Only the bridal couple and their parents moved freely between the two groups, kissing, shaking hands.
Mrs. Profaci appeared to be very much the mother of the wedding, a large smiling woman who had just married off the fifth of her five children; she seemed very comfortable in this situation, and she knew all the guests by name, including the couple’s classmates from Berkeley and Stanford. Still, Mrs. Profaci saw no sign of Rosalie and Bill; and when the only explanation that she could get from one of Bill’s friends was that Bill’s home telephone did not answer, she became worried and mildly irritated.