Authors: Gay Talese
The silence in the booth was intense, reminding him of boyhood moments waiting in a confessional, fretful seconds before the stern priest slapped open the sliding screen. At 8:00 his senses were so sharp and expectant that he could almost hear ringing sounds piercing deep within his mind, and, looking down at the green plastic instrument, he searched for the slightest sign of vibration. But it hung motionless, quiet in its cradle.
He looked through the glass doors, seeing the parked car with Labruzzo behind the wheel. Labruzzo sat perfectly still, but the dog was jumping in the back, paws against the closed window. Bonanno then heard sounds coming from behind him—three men were leaving the diner, talking and laughing, getting into a station wagon. They did not look in his direction. Soon they were gone. He waited. Finally, he looked at his watch.
It was 8:04. It was all over for tonight, he thought. If his father did not call on the dot, he would not call at all. He also knew that his father would not want him to linger and possibly attract attention. So he reluctantly pulled open the door of the booth and walked slowly toward the car. Labruzzo flashed on the headlights. They drove in silence back to the apartment in Queens.
The rest of the week and the weeks that followed through November into December were for the most part monotonous. Bonanno and Labruzzo resumed housekeeping in their hideaway. They ventured out at night, remaining indoors during the day.
On Thursdays, however, their mood changed. Each Thursday was the highpoint of their week; it began in the morning with a sense of anticipation and it heightened during the late afternoon, building with each mile of the trip to the booth. The trip was taking on a strange, almost mystical, meaning for Bonanno and Labruzzo—it was becoming an act of faith, a test of fidelity, and the booth, a solitary glowing structure in the vacant darkness, was approached almost reverentially. They drove slowly up to it, neither man speaking. Then Bill, after getting out of the car, would stand in the bright enclosure for two minutes—from 7:59 to 8:01. Conceding the silence, he would step out, betraying no emotion as he walked to the car. There was always another Thursday ahead, another visit to be made to the telephone booth that might finally link them to Joseph Bonanno.
The longer the government search continued without a trace of his father or the discovery of a bullet-riddled body, the more encouraged Bill Bonanno became. It was now six weeks since the disappearance, and if the elder Bonanno had been killed, that fact would presumably have already circulated through the underworld by his father’s ecstatic rivals, or it would at least have been hinted at in Mafia gossip. But so far the speculation about Bonanno’s death was largely limited to the newspapers, whose information came from the government, which was no doubt becoming embarrassed by its inability to find Bonanno after so much searching.
The younger Bonanno was also now encouraged by his own efforts during his father’s absence. Quickly recovering from the initial shock, he assumed the responsibility of trying to hold the organization together by eluding his potential captors and by demonstrating always a sense of confidence and optimism. In spite of his youth, he believed that he was now accepted by most of the men as their interim leader; their attitude toward him had changed considerably from what it had been when he first joined the outfit in the midfifties as “JB’s kid” and when the respect shown him was in deference to the name. Aware of that situation, his father had contemplated denying him a place in the “family” and having him join the organization headed by Albert Anastasia. Anastasia, a close friend of Joseph Profaci, came to know Bill during Bill’s summer vacations from college, occasionally taking him to the Copacabana, and he would eagerly have found a spot for him. It might have been advantageous for Anastasia, for it would have fostered closer ties with both the Bonanno and Profaci groups and perhaps ultimately formed a tight three-family alliance that could have dominated the two larger gangs in New York, one headed by Vito Genovese, the other by Thomas Lucchese.
But Joseph Bonanno finally decided that he wanted his son with him, sensing perhaps the Mafia hierarchy’s growing dissatisfaction with Anastasia, an autocratic and ambitious man with a tendency to overstep his boundaries—a tendency that would cost him his life. So Bill Bonanno, having quit college without a degree, followed in his father’s path, although he straddled two worlds for a while—operating legitimate businesses in Arizona, including a wholesale food market and real estate trading firms, while being affiliated with the Bonanno organization, whose small southwestern branch was involved in bookmaking and other illegal gambling activities.
Bill did not enjoy his involvement with his father’s world during these years; he had no objection to it on moral grounds, but he resented his lowly status among his father’s men. Whether Bill was in New York or Arizona, his father gave him little to do, and he invariably dismissed Bill’s suggestions promptly. His father seemed to be constantly second-guessing him, questioning him, and Bill resented it. He remembered one occasion when he fought back, losing his temper completely and screaming uncontrollably at his father; and he remembered the look of shock on his father’s face. The elder Bonanno apparently had never been shouted at before in such an unrestrained manner, and he did not know how to react, at least not toward his own son. Bill quickly tried to pass over the situation, saying, “Look, I was born to lead, not to follow.” After a pause, his father replied with quiet firmness: “Before you can lead, you must learn to follow.”
After that, Bill managed to control his temper in front of his father, and although he did not refrain from disagreeing in private when he felt justified, he learned to follow orders. When he was told to be at a certain place at a certain time, he was there at the precise moment, remaining until he was instructed to leave. He remembered one morning when he drove his father to a drugstore and was told to wait outside. He waited for one hour, then a second hour. Then he left the car and looked into the drugstore and saw his father seated at a booth talking with another man, drinking coffee. Bill returned to the car and continued to wait. The afternoon passed, extending into early evening. Finally, twelve hours after he had entered the drugstore, his father walked out. He nodded toward Bill but did not apologize or explain what had taken so long.
Now, years later, looking back on that incident and similar incidents, Bill realized how his father had tested his patience and discipline, seeing how he would respond to a condition that was necessary and common in the organization and yet was unnatural to most men. In Bill’s case, however, waiting had been no problem. He spent most of his life waiting, especially for his father, waiting as a teen-ager in Arizona for his father’s reappearances each winter, as expectantly and hopefully as he was waiting now. His past had prepared him for the present, he thought, and he believed that he was now truly disciplined, capable of withstanding the worst that might come along, and this possibility pleased him very much.
He was also pleased by the behavior of the men during this ordeal. While it was true that maybe fifty or even seventy members had defected to join Gaspar Di Gregorio’s faction, that number was low considering the the fact that the Mafia’s national commission had ousted his father and had urged a mass walkout of the men and also the fact that none of the men knew for sure whether Joseph Bonanno would ever return. Bill was particularly indebted to his uncle who during the last six weeks had been a source of strength as well as a sensitive and compatible friend.
Bill did not have to prove anything to Labruzzo, his mother’s brother, a man who had become like his own brother, understanding by instinct. Though they were twenty years apart and had lost touch during Bill’s years in Arizona, they shared the knowledge of a similar past and were united on so many personal levels. Bill was intimately familiar with the neighborhood in which Labruzzo grew up, the Brooklyn house in which he lived, the almost exotic Sicilian exiles that were Labruzzo’s parents, Bill’s grandparents. Labruzzo’s father, domineering and proud, was not unlike the elder Bonanno in some ways, and Bill sensed the conflict in Frank Labruzzo and recognized it in himself.
To be born of such foreign fathers and to remain loyal to them throughout one’s lifetime, was to bear the burden of being an outsider and being alienated from much of America. Bill thought that the only thing that might have separated Frank Labruzzo and himself from their present circumstances would have been total rebellion, a complete break with their fathers’ past and present, but for the younger Bonanno and Labruzzo this was not possible. They were too close, too involved, were the products of people who believed intensely in family loyalty; and although they themselves were a generation removed from the clannish hills of western Sicily and had both had the benefit of higher education, they were still influenced by certain values of the old country and they sometimes felt like strangers in their native land. They were fractional Americans, not yet totally acceptable nor receptive to the American majority, and Bill believed that they were also different from the sons of most other Italian immigrants—they were less malleable, more deeply defined, more insular.
He remembered how insular Frank Labruzzo’s neighborhood in Brooklyn had been. Except for the absence of a mountain, it could have passed for a Sicilian village. The dialect and manner of the people were the same, the cooking was the same, the interior of the homes seemed the same. The old women wore black, mourning death on two continents, and the unmarried young women lived under the watchful eyes of their parents, who missed nothing. Bill recalled hearing from his mother and her sisters how strict his grandfather Labruzzo had been during their courting days, not permitting them to wear lipstick or eyebrow pencil or cut their hair in the contemporary fashion or smoke or be outdoors after dark. Charles Labruzzo, who neither spoke nor wrote English despite living in America for thirty-two years, made few concessions to the modern world except for the purchase of an automobile, which he drove without a license.
Charles Labruzzo was born in 1870 in the western Sicilian town of Camporeale, in the hilly interior southeast of Castellammare, into a family of sheepherders and cattle raisers. A strapping broad-shouldered man, he worked as a blacksmith in Camporeale, married a local girl, and sired the first of his twelve children. Then one night, after a violent fight with an uncle who tried to cheat him of his inheritance, he abruptly left Sicily for Tunisia, thinking that he had killed the uncle during an exchange of body blows. Later his wife joined him in Tunisia, continuing to let him believe that he was wanted for murder in Sicily though she was aware of his uncle’s recovery; she had had enough of Sicily and knew that by withholding the information she could avoid going back.
After a few years in Tunisia—during that time was born their daughter Fay, Bill’s mother—the Labruzzos immigrated to the United States. Industrious and shrewd, Charles Labruzzo prospered in America in the butcher business and in real estate investing. On Jefferson Street in Brooklyn, during the 1920s, he owned a comfortable home with a large backyard in which he kept chickens and a milk-bearing goat; a commercial building leased to a clothing manufacturer; and a four-story tenement in which he rented apartments. His butcher shop was on the ground floor of the tenement and under it was a pipeline through which flowed wine from his home two doors away. He was the envy of several Sicilians in the neighborhood, and his quick temper and touchiness contributed to his unpopularity. The sight of his chasing someone down the street, swearing in Sicilian, was not uncommon, and once after a painter standing on a ladder yelled down an insult, Labruzzo grabbed a shotgun, aimed it at the painter and forced him to jump thirty feet to the sidewalk. The panicked man, after landing without injury, ran for cover.
Labruzzo was often intercepted and calmed down during his angry pursuits by a soft-spoken young man who offered to settle his difficulties, wanting nothing in return except peace and quiet in the neighborhood. The man was Joseph Bonanno. Charles Labruzzo knew the Bonanno name from the old country, and he liked the younger man’s style, his self-assurance, and he was delighted later when Bonanno married his daughter—and in 1932 presented him with a grandson, Salvatore Vincent Bonanno, who would be known as Bill.
The child was born during an otherwise miserable year in Labruzzo’s life. He had just lost a leg during an operation for diabetes, and he became bitter and depressed, drinking great quantities of wine and cursing his fate. He banged his crutches angrily against the walls of his room when he wanted one of his daughters to attend to his needs, and his only unintimidated companion during this period was a pet chicken who followed him everywhere and slept on his bed at night, often on his chest. Whenever the Bonannos came to visit and left young Bill for a few days, the old man was pleased.
Bill remembered his grandfather as a heavy white-haired man sitting in the sun in front of the house reciting Sicilian proverbs—ancient truths from a stoical society—and occasionally the old man would send him to a nearby tavern for a container of beer or into a drugstore for a single cigarette, which could be bought for a penny. When his grandfather wished to go up to his room, Bill would tuck his shoulder under the stump of his grandfather’s leg, and they would slowly climb each step; although the weight was borne by the crutches, Bill was providing moral support, and he liked the appearance of being needed and being close.
Sometimes when the old man was asleep, the youngest son, Frank, would take Bill for walks, looking after him as he would later in life. Frank Labruzzo was then in his twenties, working at odd jobs during the Depression years, including part-time work as an undertaker in a funeral parlor partly owned by Joseph Bonanno. Bill remembered how horrified his grandmother was when she heard that Frank had become a mortician and how she screamed whenever he entered the house, warning him not to touch anything. Frank would merely shrug in his casual way, not offended by her attitude or embarrassed by his work, which he preferred to working in a butcher shop.