Authors: Gay Talese
The affair with the divorcee was conducted at her apartment, continuing for more than a year without his parents’ knowledge. While there had never been talk of marriage he was very possessive of her, and he became infuriated when he heard that she had dated, in his absence, a jockey who was in Arizona for the racing season. The fear of losing her, the first girl he thought he had ever truly had, and the shocking realization that she could make love to him and then date other men filled him with despair. For the first time in his life he recognized his capacity for violence.
He remembered waiting for her in the apartment, then seeing her come up the path with two tiny men, both tailored to the toes in an expensive but flashy way, their small suntanned faces drawn tight across their cheek bones. As she opened the door, laughing at something one of them had said, Bill stepped forward, towering over them, shouting. When one of the men yelled back, Bill grabbed him and shook him, then began to slap him hard against the wall as the girl screamed and the other jockey ran.
Soon the police arrived to arrest Bill for assault. Later in court, however, it had somehow been arranged, perhaps through his father’s influence, to have the case heard by a judge who was then rumored to be having an affair with another man’s wife. Whether the judge feared that his own indiscretion might be exposed if he ruled harshly in the case, Bill never knew; he knew only that the case against him was dismissed.
The end of the romance was part of a depressing year in general. He was doing poorly in college; the girl in San Antonio informed him that she was going steady with a Texas football star; and then his father suffered a heart attack and left Tucson to recuperate in a quiet spot near La Jolla, California. Bill was again alone in the house through the winter and spring, and through another session of summer school.
He spent part of the summer at an ROTC camp, preparing for a commission in the army. He adapted easily to the routine of military discipline, and he was soon promoted to drill sergeant in the cadets’ elite marching unit, the Pershing Rifles. On the firing range he was a superb marksman with a rifle or pistol—he had had previous target practice at boarding school and was on familiar terms with guns since his boyhood days, when he noticed them bulging from beneath the jackets of men who came to visit his father. But it was after leaving New York for Arizona that he had become most aware of guns, seeing them carried openly and casually by people in cars or on horseback by ranchers, wranglers, and Indians, and he sometimes felt that he was on the set of a cowboy film. And he liked the feeling.
He also liked the clothes, becoming quickly accustomed to wearing boots, hip-hugging pants, and string ties, and his father did the same in Arizona. So did some of his father’s men during their extended visits, although the fatter ones always looked uncomfortable and comical in these clothes, their Western buckles lost under their bellies. Nevertheless, a kinship of sorts probably did exist between these men and the legendary American cowboy, Bill thought, impressed by the similarity between the tales of the old West and certain stories he had heard as a boy involving gun battles between mounted mafiosi in the hills of western Sicily. He had heard that his grandmother in Castellammare sometimes packed a pistol in her skirts, a kind of Ma Barker, and the Sicilians of that region today still honor the memory of the bandit Giuliano, a leader of a gang of outlaws who shared what they stole with the poor.
Although Giuliano was a hero in western Sicily he might easily be regarded elsewhere as a common thief—it depended largely on one’s point of view, and the same could be said when appraising the life of any man, the activities of any group, the policies of any nation. If Bill Bonanno had learned anything from reading the memoirs of great statesmen and generals it was that the line between what was right and wrong, moral or immoral, was often thin indeed, with the final verdict written by the victors. When he went to ROTC camp, and later into military service with the Army Reserves, he was trained in the technique of legal killing. He learned how to use a bayonet, how to fire an M-1 rifle, how to adjust the range finder of a cannon in a Patton tank. He memorized the United States military code, which in principle was not dissimilar from the Mafia’s, emphasizing honor, obedience, and silence if captured. And if he had gone into combat and had killed several North Koreans or Chinese Communists he might have become a hero. But if he killed one of his father’s enemies in a Mafia war, where buried in the issues was the same mixture of greed and self-righteousness found in all the wars of great nations, he could be charged with murder.
In the Mafia today were many American veterans of World War II, one a decorated infantryman who became Joseph Bonanno’s bodyguard. This veteran wore a metal plate in his forehead and had several scars on his body as a result of combat against the Germans. He had fought in the North African campaign and also participated in the invasion of Sicily in which the Americans employed local mafiosi as intelligence agents and underground organizers against the Nazi and Fascist forces. Many such agents were rewarded with lawful authority by the Allies after the war, a fact documented in many books about the Mafia that Bill had read; some of them became the mayors of towns and officials in the regional government because of their strong antifascism and hatred of Mussolini. During the Fascist regime in Italy, Mussolini sponsored a campaign of terror against the Mafia, torturing many Mafia suspects and without a fair trial killing many more. When Mussolini himself was captured and killed, Bill remembered the satisfied reaction of his father and his father’s friends. His father was forced out of Sicily during his days as a student radical because he had opposed certain Fascist policies, and as a result he settled in the United States. Otherwise he might have remained in his native land, and Bill wondered what it would have been like if he, too, had been born and had remained in Castellammare. Perhaps life would have been better. Perhaps it would have been worse.
Although the trip through New England taken by Bill Bonanno, Frank Labruzzo, and the other men was pleasantly uneventful and restful, there gradually developed within Bonanno a slight nagging feeling that he could not explain. It was as if he had forgotten something, was ignoring an obligation, compromising a trust, was somehow failing to fulfill all that his father might have expected of him. Whatever it was, he reasoned that it must be relatively unimportant, otherwise he would have no difficulty in defining it; and yet it continued to bother him as he drove south along Massachusetts Bay and then headed west toward Concord.
It was getting dark. Soon he and Labruzzo would be stopping at a motel where they would be joined later by the other men for dinner. They had now been on the road for a week, and during that time there had been nothing in the newspapers or on the radio to indicate that the situation had changed in New York. The gangs apparently were still remaining out of sight. There had been no message on Bonanno’s answering service requiring an immediate response. The government’s search for his father had revealed no clues. Some police officials believed that Joseph Bonanno was still hiding in the Catskills, others believed he was dead. Bill did not know what to believe, and during the past few days he had managed not to think too much about it. Maybe that was what was bothering him. He did not know.
After dinner he wandered off by himself to walk the dog along a narrow dirt road near the highway, leaving the men seated around the television set in his suite. They were watching a crime serial called “The Untouchables,” which was based loosely on the Mafia and had angered many Italo-Americans around the nation because the scriptwriters tended to give Italian names to the gangster roles. But the real-life gangsters enjoyed watching the show, Bonanno knew, although they appreciated it on a different level than the producers had intended. The gangsters saw this show, along with others like the FBI series and Perry Mason, as broad comedy or satire. They laughed at lines that were not intended to be funny; they mocked the dim-witted caricatures of themselves; they hooted and jeered the characters representing the FBI or the police, turning television watching into a kind of psychodrama. They seemed mostly to enjoy the Perry Mason serial, whose murder mysteries they could usually solve before the second commercial and whose courtroom scene at the end of each show—a scene in which a prime suspect always collapses under cross-examination and jumps to his feet proclaiming his guilt—they found ridiculously amusing.
Returning to the motel, uncomfortably cold and unaccustomed to eastern climate after so many winters in Arizona, Bill thought of Rosalie and the children, wishing that he could call them. If only Rosalie were reachable at a phone that was not tapped, he would call her at this moment; and as he thought about this he slowly became excited—he was clarifying what it was that had been bothering him.
He recalled a conversation with his father four months ago in late July immediately after the elder Bonanno had been evicted from Montreal and had returned to the United States. At that time Joseph Bonanno recounted his legal hassle with the Canadian immigration authorities, the frustration of appearing all day in the Montreal courthouse and then not being able to reach Bill at night to talk freely on an untapped phone, and he said that should they ever again be separated for an extended period, they should have some system that would permit them to communicate. Joseph Bonanno then devised a plan—a workable system, Bill had thought at the time, but during the hectic months that followed, culminating in his father’s disappearance, Bill had forgotten about his father’s proposal. Now, on this November night in Massachusetts, it came back to him.
The plan specified that if they lost contact without explanation, Bill was to go to a particular telephone booth in Long Island on each Thursday evening at eight o’clock sharp until the elder Bonanno was able to call him there. The booth was located next to a diner on Old Country Road between Hicksville and Westbury, and Joseph Bonanno kept a record of that number as he had of dozens of other booths that he had used in the past at prearranged times to speak with one of his men. This specific booth was selected for his son because it was not far from Bill’s home and because it had not been used so often in the past that it was likely to be under police surveillance. The booth was also chosen because there was a second telephone booth near it that could be used if the first was busy.
Excitedly, entering the motel, Bill announced to the other men that he was returning to New York early the next morning. He explained the reason, adding that the next day, November 12, was a Thursday. But the men thought it unlikely that the elder Bonanno would call; even if he was alive and unharmed and had not forgotten his arrangement of four months ago, he would probably be too cautious or otherwise unable to make the call, they said. Bill, however, would not be discouraged. If his father was alive, he would make the call, Bill said. If he did not make it this Thursday, then he would make it next Thursday, or the Thursday after that, and Bill said he would be there every time, just in case, until he was convinced that his father was dead. He also pointed out, in a low tone that seemed almost self-accusatory, that when they had left New York a week ago, on the night of November 5, it was a Thursday, and perhaps he had already missed one of his father’s calls.
It was agreed that they would return to New York. The other men were to go directly to their apartments, informing the subordinates that they were back in town, while Bonanno and Labruzzo would go on to Long Island.
They arrived in New York shortly before 7:00
P.M.
, the distant skyline glowing softly in the early-evening light, the last of the commuter traffic moving swiftly out of the city. At a quarter to eight, Bonanno and Labruzzo arrived at the diner on Old Country Road. They turned into the parking lot, stopping near the booth. It was glass-paneled and trimmed in green aluminum, and it was empty. They sat in the car for a few minutes, the motor running, the headlights off. Then, at five before eight, Bonanno got out, walked into the booth, and stood waiting.
He was relieved that the coin slot was not covered with the familiar yellow sticker reading “out of order”; and after depositing a coin and getting the reassuring sound of a dial tone, he replaced the receiver. The condition of coinbox phones was of vital importance to him and the other men, and he knew how infuriated they had all been at one time or another by malfunctioning phones and how they swore vengeance on the petty thieves who tamper with outdoor phones. Whenever they discovered one that was jammed or broken into, they reported it to the telephone company and later checked back at the booth to be certain that the repairs had been made and also to be sure that the number had not been changed. If it had been, they recorded the new number on a private list they kept in their cars—a list containing not only the telephone numbers and booth locations, but also an identifying number that distinguished one booth from another. These last numbers were memorized by the Bonanno men as faithfully as baseball fans memorize the numbers on the backs of players, and the system had greatly reduced the organization’s communications problem in recent years. It had enabled the elder Bonanno, for example, to use his home telephone, which was tapped, to call his son’s home, where the phone was also tapped, and to engage his son in a folksy conversation in Sicilian dialect into which he slipped two numbers that indicated he wished to speak privately with Bill: the first number identified the locale of the booth that Bill was to go to, the second established the hour to be there. Then, just before the appointed hour, Joseph Bonanno would go to a booth, would dial his son at the other booth, and they would speak freely without worrying about being tapped.
This system was similar to what Joseph Bonanno had proposed in July, except that Bill had been told then to go automatically to booth number 27—the one near the diner—each Thursday at 8:00
P.M.
and to wait—as he was now waiting on this night in November. He felt chilly and cramped within the four glass walls that pressed him from all sides. He must go on a diet, he thought; he was becoming too large for phone booths. Raising his left arm, he looked at his watch, a diamond-studded gold watch given him months ago by a few of his father’s men. It was 7:59.