Authors: Gay Talese
Frank Labruzzo never did work for his father; he was attracted instead to the activities of his brother-in-law, Joseph Bonanno. Bonannos’ existence seemed glamorous and exciting. He wore fine clothes, drove a new car. He was in touch with the outside world.
On Thursday evening, December 17, Bill Bonanno and Frank Labruzzo paid their weekly visit to the phone booth on Long Island. It was the sixth consecutive Thursday they had gone there. In a week it would be Christmas Eve, and on the way to the booth the two men wondered aloud if the holiday truce would be observed by the various gangs this year as it had been in the past. Under normal circumstances it would be—all organization members would temporarily forget their differences until after January 1—but since the Bonanno loyalists were technically suspended from the national union, neither Bill nor Frank knew for sure whether the holiday policy would now be followed with regard to their people. They would have to anticipate the worst, they decided, and both men assumed that they would not be spending Christmas with their wives and children.
At 7:55
P.M.
they pulled into the parking lot near the diner and parked a few feet away from the booth. It was a cold night, and Bill, turning off the radio, sat waiting in the car with the window partly open. The sky was dark and cloudy, the only reflection came from the big neon sign above the diner. There were three cars parked in front of the diner, and except for a few customers seated at the counter and an elderly couple at a table, it was empty. The food must be terrible, Bill thought, for the diner had never seemed busy during any of his visits, although he conceded the possibility that it had a late trade, maybe truck drivers, which might explain the large parking lot. Many people thought that places patronized by truckers must be serving good food, but Bill believed that the opposite was probably true. He had eaten at hundreds of roadside places during his many motor trips across the country, and most of the time he had observed the truckmen eating chicken soup and salted crackers, and he was willing to bet that most of them suffered from nervous stomachs and hemorrhoids.
He looked at his watch. It was exactly 8:00. He and Labruzzo sat silently as the seconds ticked away. He was about to conclude that it was another uneventful Thursday. Then, the telephone rang.
Bill slammed against the door, bounced out of the car, ran into the booth with such force that it shook. Labruzzo ran after him, pressing against the glass door that Bill had pulled shut. Bill heard a woman’s voice, very formal, sounding far away—it was the operator repeating the number, asking if it corresponded to the telephone number in the booth.
“
Yes
,” Bill replied, feeling his heart pounding, “yes it is.”
He heard muffled sounds from the other end, then silence for a second, then the sound of coins dropping into the slot,
quarters
, six or seven quarters gonging—it was long distance.
“Hello, Bill?”
It was a male voice, not his father’s, a voice he did not recognize.
“Yes, who is
this?
”
“Never mind,” the man replied, “just listen to me. Your father’s OK. You’ll probably be seeing him in a few days.”
“How do I know he’s OK?” Bill demanded, suddenly aggressive.
“Where the hell do you think I got this number from?” The man was now irritated. Bill calmed down.
“Now look,” the man continued, “
don’t make waves!
Everything’s OK. Just sit back, don’t do anything, and don’t worry about anything.”
Before Bill could respond, the man hung up.
T
HE EXCITEMENT, THE ECSTASY, THAT
B
ILL
B
ONANNO
felt was overwhelming, and during the drive back to Queens he heard the conversation again and again, and he repeated it to Labruzzo.
Your father’s OK, you’ll probably be seeing him in a few days
. Bill was so happy that he wanted to go to a bar and have a few drinks in celebration, but both he and Labruzzo agreed that despite the good news they should remain as careful and alert as they had been before. They would follow the advice of the man on the telephone, would sit back and wait; in a few days Joseph Bonanno would reappear to make the next move.
Yet, in the interest of efficiency, Bill thought that some preparation for his father’s return was necessary; he felt, for example, that Maloney, his father’s attorney, should be informed immediately of this development. Bill reasoned that Maloney would be his father’s chief spokesman after the reappearance, an event that would undoubtedly cause a circus of confusion and complex legal maneuvering in the courthouse, and Maloney would have to plan the elder Bonanno’s strategy for the interrogation by the federal grand jury. Bill also felt a touch of guilt about Maloney, since Bill had been very suspicious of him after the incident on Park Avenue. The veteran lawyer was forced to appear on five or six occasions since then before the grand jury to defend himself against government implications that he was somehow involved in the kidnaping, and Bill imagined that Maloney’s reputation as a lawyer had suffered as a result. On the following day, Bill Bonanno drove to a telephone booth and called Maloney’s office.
“Hi, Mr. Maloney, this is Bill Bonanno,” he said, cheerfully, picturing the old man jumping out of his chair.
“
Hey
,” Maloney yelled, “where are you?
Where’s your dad?
”
“Hold on,” Bonanno said, “take it easy. Go to a phone outside your office, to one of the booths downstairs, and call me at this number.” He gave Maloney the number. Within a few minutes the lawyer called back, and Bonanno recounted all that he had been told the night before.
But Maloney was dissatisfied with the brevity of the details. He wanted more specific information. He wondered on what day the elder Bonanno would appear, where he would be staying, how he could be reached now and through whom. Bill said he did not know anything other than what he had already told, adding that as soon as he knew more he would contact Maloney at once. When Maloney persisted with more questions, Bonanno cut him off. He had to run, he said. He hung up.
He returned to the apartment. Labruzzo had arranged for certain men to be there that evening, having already informed them of the news. The pace was quickening, there was activity, anticipation, and Bill Bonanno was confident that soon a few things would be resolved, soon he and the other men might get some relief from the wretched routine of hiding. The reappearance of his father should stabilize the organization to a degree and lessen the uncertainty. His father had undoubtedly come to some terms with his captors or he would not be alive; the next hurdle was the government. His father would appear before the grand jury, and Bill and the other men who were sought would probably do the same. They would come out of hiding, would accept their subpoenas, and after consulting with their lawyers, they would present themselves in court. If their answers displeased the judge, they might be sentenced for contempt, but at this juncture they had few alternatives. Their terms could be for a month, a year, or more, but it would not be intolerable so long as some stability was reestablished within the organization and perhaps their status regained in the national brotherhood. Hopefully they would not enter prison as underworld outcasts. Their existence behind bars was much easier when they were known to be members in good standing; they were accorded a respect not only by the other prisoners but also by the prison guards and certain other workers, men for whom favors could be done on the outside. The “man of respect” serving time also knew that during his confinement he need not worry about his wife and children; they were being looked after by organizational representatives, and if they required help they received it.
While Bill Bonanno sat in the living room of the apartment reading the afternoon papers, Labruzzo took a nap, undisturbed by the noise from the television. It was too early for the evening news, and neither man had paid much attention during the last few hours to the series of quiz shows, soap operas, or comedies that monopolized the screen.
Suddenly, there was an interruption of the program—the announcement of a special news bulletin. Bill Bonanno looked up from his newspaper. He expected to hear that war was declared, Russian bombers were on the way. Instead he heard the announcer say
Mafia leader Joseph Bonanno, who was kidnaped and believed to have been killed by rival mobsters in October, is alive. Bonanno’s attorney, William Power Maloney, made the announcement today. Maloney also said that his client would appear before the federal grand jury investigating organized crime, at 9:00
A.M.
on Monday, and…
Bill Bonanno was stunned. Labruzzo came running in to watch. Bonanno began to swear quietly. Maloney had not only called a press conference but had also identified him as the source of the information. Bonanno buried his head in his hands. He felt heat racing through his body, his sweat rising and seeping through his shirt. He knew he had made a horrible mistake in talking to Maloney in the first place, then in not swearing him to secrecy. Now he did not know what was ahead for his father. He recalled the words of the man on the phone saying
don’t make waves…don’t do anything
. And, stupidly, he had done it. He had possibly ruined everything, for the announcement would make page one all over the country, would drive the elder Bonanno deeper into hiding, and it would intensify the investigation, activating those agents who had been lulled into thinking that Joseph Bonanno was dead.
The television set displayed a picture of Maloney, then a picture of the Park Avenue apartment house, and suddenly Bill was sick of the whole episode—reaching for a heavy glass ashtray on a nearby table, he threw it hard at the set, hitting the screen squarely in the center. It exploded like a bomb. Thousands of tiny pieces of glass sprayed the room, tubes popped, wires curled and burned in varicolored flame, sparks flared in several directions—a remarkable little fireworks show of self-destruction was playing itself out within the 21-inch screen, and Bonanno and Labruzzo watched with fascination until the interior of the set had nearly evaporated into a smoldering hole of jagged edges and fizzling filament.
A week passed, nothing happened. Joseph Bonanno did not make the appearance before the grand jury that Maloney had predicted, and the lawyer was summoned to explain in court. The younger Bonanno and the other men remained in hiding. On Thursday evening, Christmas Eve, Labruzzo and the others slipped away to meet with their families at the homes of relatives or friends most remote from police surveillance. Bonanno told Labruzzo that he was meeting Rosalie at the home of one of the Profacis in Brooklyn, but this was not true. He was sure that Rosalie’s movements would be carefully watched by agents during the holidays, making it too risky to meet her, and he also felt so miserable that he really preferred being alone.
At 8:00
P.M.
he visited the telephone booth in Long Island, expecting it to remain silent, and it did. Not wanting to return to the apartment, he kept driving through Queens. It was snowing, and there were Christmas lights strung on many of the houses that he passed. He decided to drive into Manhattan, to take a walk through Times Square, lose himself in the crowd.
Finding a parking space on a side street east of Broadway, he locked the car, began to walk through the snow and slush. He was glad that he had not forgotten his rubbers but wished he had left his gun in the glove compartment. The gun had become such a natural part of his anatomy in recent months that he was usually unaware of carrying it. But he did not feel like returning to the car now; so he continued to walk with the gun strapped to his chest under his jacket. His blue cashmere overcoat was warm and light, and his gray fedora was slightly forward on his head and pushed down so that it would not blow off in the wind. He had never felt comfortable in hats; as a boy he hated them because they messed up his long wavy hair, a source of great pride, and although his hair was now short he still reacted negatively to hats, tolerating them only as part of a disguise.
He walked uptown under the bright marquees of the Broadway cinemas, past a noisy jazz band in the Metrodome bar. He smelled the hot dogs cooking on Nedick’s sidewalk grill, felt the distant nearness of a thousand people all around him, watched their faces changing color as they walked under the lights; their tourist faces seemed satisfied, peaceful, unconcerned, so distant from the tiny private province of hell that he had inherited. On Fifty-third Street, waiting for a traffic light to change, a mounted policemen galloped within a few feet of him, and he inhaled the familiar aroma of a horse. Then he crossed to the other side of Broadway, walking downtown past Jack Dempsey’s and Lindy’s, then past the Astor Hotel, where he paused momentarily.
The hotel seemed unchanged, even the red-coated doorman whistling for a cab seemed familiar. Bill remembered again the wedding reception and remembered, too, how excited and concerned his father was on the following morning when he found out that a piece of Bill’s luggage was missing just as the bridal couple’s car was being loaded on the sidewalk outside the hotel. Then Frank Labruzzo quickly deduced that the doorman had mistakenly put that suitcase in the limousine that had just pulled away from the curb with Joseph Barbara and some of the men from upstate New York. Bill remembered the sight of Labruzzo running after Barbara’s limousine, which had fortunately stopped for a traffic light; Labruzzo rapped on the rear fender, inviting frowns from the men within, but they stopped when they recognized him and graciously returned the suitcase. They had no idea that it contained about $100,000 in gift envelopes.
Bill passed the Astor thinking of Rosalie—and, remembering that a Western Union office was two blocks away, he walked to it and sent her a Christmas telegram with flowers. Tired of walking in the slush, he approached a cinema on Forty-second Street and, without looking up to see what was playing, bought a ticket. He spent the next three hours watching a double feature, a slightly risqué foreign film followed by a second-rate Western. When he came out at 1:00
A.M.
, it had stopped snowing but had gotten colder. Broadway was no longer crowded, and the prostitutes and homosexual hustlers were more conspicuous.
He got into his car, drove along the West Side Highway toward the Battery Tunnel, passing the hulking silhouettes of ocean liners docked along the piers. In Queens he passed many houses with parties in progress, with people standing in crowded rooms holding drinks, trimming trees, or dancing; his block, which was in a Jewish neighborhood, was relatively quiet. He circled the block twice to be sure he was not being followed. Then, locking his car, he crossed the street ready to reach for his gun at the sound of movement behind the bushes or trees. But everything was silent and still.
Unlocking his apartment door he could hear noise from the television set, a new one that Labruzzo had bought. Bill always left the television on after leaving the apartment, thinking the noise might discourage anyone from breaking in. He watched a late-late show until 4:00
A.M.
Then he went to bed. He considered it the worst Christmas Eve of his life.
He woke up on Christmas Day shortly before noon. Hearing the dog’s impatient growl, he got out of bed and opened a can of chopped meat. The apartment seemed strangely empty without Labruzzo. He turned on the television set, then peeked through the venetian blinds. It was cloudy, the streets were covered with slush, and the small patches of snow along the sidewalk had already been darkened by polluted air. He started to think about his children, what they were doing at this very moment in East Meadow, but he quickly blocked these thoughts from his mind.
He continued to look out the window at the few people on the street, bundled up in coats and mufflers and boots, looking drab and unhealthy, and he wished, as he so often did, that he were back in Arizona. And suddenly, he became consumed with a desire to go there. It might seem absurd, but at this moment he did not care. He had been existing in absurdity for several weeks, and a trip to Arizona did not seem in the least irrational, the more he thought about it. There was nothing for him to do in New York during the holidays, no one that he could see, and he still considered Arizona his home. His younger brother would be there, on holiday vacation from Phoenix Junior College, and a few of his father’s friends would also be there. He could get some money while there, could also check on the condition of his father’s house and various properties.
He decided to go. He went to a telephone booth and called a young man who was available to the organization for odd chores and asked him to help with the driving. Bill spent the rest of Christmas Day in the apartment. He went to bed early and awoke at 4:00
A.M.
Accompanied by his dog, Bill picked up the man at a nearby corner and began the 2,600-mile journey to Arizona.
In more than twenty years of shuttling back and forth between New York and Arizona, beginning in 1942 as a ten-year-old student in Tucson, Bill Bonanno had gained an intimate sense of American geography, a familiarity with winding back roads and small bridges and endless towns stretching from the industrial marshes of the northeastern coast to the dusty flatlands of the West. He had developed an ear for regional dialogue, an eye for the folkways of people, a taste for the kitchen specialties of hundreds of roadside restaurants. He knew the varying prices of gasoline, the tolls of tunnels, the graffiti on mountain rocks, the prayers on billboards. He was attuned to the chatter of disc jockeys, the changing rhythms of regional radio. Without consulting a map he could travel through back roads in each state, knowing the best ways to avoid overpopulated centers, rush-hour traffic, icy roads, radar traps.