Between You and Me (22 page)

Minutes in 1981, since his life of crime and violence was the subject of a forthcoming book called The Last Mafioso. When I say he appeared on our broadcast, I should point out that the man viewers saw that night did not bear much resemblance to how Fratianno really

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looked. He was in the federal government’s Witness Protection Program and was being kept under very tight wraps. I have only a vague idea of where our interview took place. In accordance with the terms of our arrangement, U.S. marshals picked us up at Washington’s National Airport and took us on a meandering ride through the Virginia countryside. We eventually arrived at a government safe house on the Potomac River, and there Fratianno was waiting for us. As soon as he was disguised to everyone’s satisfaction and we had our camera set up, I got down to brass knuckles.

W A L L A C E : Jimmy, who was the first person you killed?

F R A T I A N N O : Frankie Nicoli.

W A L L A C E : Where did you kill him?

F R A T I A N N O : In my house.

W A L L A C E : How did you kill him?

F R A T I A N N O : We strangled him.

W A L L A C E : In your own living room?

F R A T I A N N O : Right.

W A L L A C E : And then he dirtied your living room?

F R A T I A N N O : A little blood.

W A L L A C E : Yeah. A little blood and a little, er—discharge.

F R A T I A N N O : Yeah. (Laughs) How did you know that? A little urine, yeah.

W A L L A C E : You smile when you think back about it?

F R A T I A N N O : Well, what are you going to do?

He thentalked about some of his other victims inthe same tone of casual self-assurance. It was obvious that Fratianno looked back on his accomplishments with a strong sense of professional satisfaction.

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W A L L A C E : You were a good killer?

F R A T I A N N O : I just had the talent to do things like that. I never made any mistakes.

W A L L A C E : A matter of some pride?

F R A T I A N N O : No. I just— Some people are a little better than others. But I think it would bother me if I killed an innocent person.

W A L L A C E : What do you mean by “an innocent person”?

F R A T I A N N O : Well, you’re an innocent person. (Laughs) W A L L A C E : I’m glad to hear you—you don’t have designs—

F R A T I A N N O : I mean somebody innocent, you know, that is not involved in criminal activities.

Fratianno’s own criminal activities began on the streets of the Italianghetto inCleveland where almost all his friends were hoodlums. By the time he was a teenager, he was regularly getting into trouble with the law. He served sevenyears inprisonfor armed rob-bery, and would go on to spend a total of almost twenty years behind bars. It was a Cleveland policeman who dubbed him “a weasel,” and the nickname became his badge of identity. In our interview, he recalled with palpable pride the day he became a “made” member of the Mafia in a ceremony that included pricking his finger to draw blood from it and kissing other Mafiosi on their cheeks. I asked him what was so special about becoming a made member of that criminal empire.

F R A T I A N N O : Well, most people get made because they want respect.

W A L L A C E : Respect from whom?

F R A T I A N N O : Well, respect when you go to another town.

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They send you to the boss and they take you around. They take care of your hotel and you meet a nice class of people.

W A L L A C E : You meet a nice class of people! You meet some other mobsters?

F R A T I A N N O : Well, you also meet some nice people. I met George Raft. . . . I know many a times I went to Vegas where nobody could get a seat. I got a front seat because I was Jimmy Fratianno.

I was amused by the example he chose to make the point that he met a nice class of people. In his heyday as a Hollywood actor, George Raft achieved some measure of stardom, but he invariably played gangsters and others who were engaged in “a left-handed form of human endeavor.” I had the feeling that Fratianno’s high regard for Raft had more to do with the characters he had portrayed than with the man himself.

One of Fratianno’s best friends in the real underworld was Chicago mobster JohnRoselli, who originally proposed Jimmy the Weasel for membership in the Mafia. According to Fratianno, Roselli was involved in a plot that could have had a serious effect on the cold war.

W A L L A C E : Did the Mob actually have a contract with the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro?

F R A T I A N N O : John Roselli did, yeah.

W A L L A C E : Johnny Roselli, your friend, the fellow who proposed you for the Mob, had a contract to do what, for whom, under what circumstances, with whom?

F R A T I A N N O : Well, to kill Castro for the CIA.

W A L L A C E : Tell me what you know.

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F R A T I A N N O : Well, all I know is that Johnny told me that they were going to kill Castro for the government. And he says,

“Geez, if we do this, we’ll get all the favors that we want.”

The assassination obviously did not pan out, and the Mafia had to find other ways to elicit favors from the U.S. government.

For all his proud boasting about being a made member of the Mafia, Fratianno was still just a hit man, a foot soldier in the army of thugs who served in the trenches of organized crime. Two years later, I interviewed one of the generals of that army—Joe Bonanno. He, too, had agreed to abandon the sacred policy of omertà—the Mafia code of silence—by appearing on 60 Minutes because he, too, had an autobiography he wanted to promote. That book was called A Man of Honor, and when it was published in 1983, Bonanno was seventy-eight and living in retirement in Arizona. Long before his own book was written, he had achieved a kind of indirect literary fame, for it was widely believed that Bonanno was the model for the title character in The Godfather, the Mario Puzo novel that became the source for three blockbuster movies. Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that he had been a capo don, one of the most powerful of all the Mafia bosses, and since his long criminal career dated back to the 1920s, I asked him about the legendary Mob king of that era.

W A L L A C E : You knew Al Capone?

B O N A N N O : I happened to know him, yeah.

W A L L A C E : What kind of a man?

B O N A N N O : Al Capone was a very jolly guy.

W A L L A C E : Al Capone was a jolly guy?

B O N A N N O : Very jolly . . . I like him.

W A L L A C E : Why did you like him?

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B O N A N N O : For his character, for his approach, for his—the way he handle himself, and the way—the external appearance.

But I never know Capone from inside.

I met with Bonanno at his home in Tucson, and sitting in on our interview was his son, Bill, who was so amused by my startled expression when his father described the mastermind of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and other criminal excesses as “a very jolly guy”

that he burst out laughing. The conversation then turned to a longtime rival for power within the Mafia hierarchy—Lucky Luciano—

and the Bonannos, father and son, enlightened me on the primary difference between the two Mob leaders.

B I L L B O N A N N O : Here you have two young fellas coming up in the—in the world, in their own world, seemingly from the same background.

W A L L A C E : Bonanno and Luciano.

B I L L B O N A N N O : And Luciano, and instantly having a conflict of philosophy, a philosophical conflict.

W A L L A C E : And what, basically, was the conflict in philosophy?

J O E B O N A N N O : Luciano was an American product.

B I L L B O N A N N O : An American product.

J O E B O N A N N O : And I was a Sicilian product.

B I L L B O N A N N O : Right. That is the conflict, and the conflict boiled down to the Americans wanted everything to revolve around money, making money.

W A L L A C E : And your father wasn’t?

B I L L B O N A N N O : His whole life has been one of trying to live up to his own principles and his own traditions, which have come in conflict with the new traditions of this country.

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Some of their remarks had a familiar ring they would not have had if my interview with the Bonannos had taken place before 1972, the year The Godfather appeared on movie screens throughout the world. The enormous success of that film about another immigrant family from Sicily—the Corleones—and its two sequels elevated the Mafia to the stature of romantic myth, almost on par with that longtime staple of popular legend, the Hollywood western. And so, as Joe and Bill Bonanno expounded on their loyalty to family values and ethnic traditions, there were moments when I had the feeling that I was listening in on a conversation between Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and his son Michael (Al Pacino).

The sense of identification with The Godfather was even more acute when we looked at pictures of Bill’s marriage to Rosalie Profaci. The lavish reception his father had hosted on that occasion bore a striking resemblance to the opening scenes in The Godfather, which many consider to be the most festive wedding celebration ever portrayed in a movie. Included on the VIP guest list at the Bonanno nup-tials were all the major Mafia chieftains. I commented on their attendance.

W A L L A C E : Every—forgive me—mobster in the world, it seemed, in the United States, was at that hotel in New York.

Detroit was there. Cleveland was there. Buffalo was there. Los Angeles was there.

J O E B O N A N N O : All United States was there.

W A L L A C E : All United States was there.

J O E B O N A N N O : Yeah. Like congressmen was there. Judges was there.

B I L L B O N A N N O : Frank.

J O E B O N A N N O : Frank Sinatra got— He couldn’t come and

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sin g . . . Ben n ett—Tony Bennett sang all night with a nice voice.

B I L L B O N A N N O : The Four Lads were entertaining.

J O E B O N A N N O : Yeah, yeah.

B I L L B O N A N N O : Some opera singer was there.

J O E B O N A N N O : Opera singers was there.

B I L L B O N A N N O : There were three thousand people there, and I venture to say, according to FBI statistics, that there are not more than four thousand, quote, “Mafia members,” unquote, in the whole United States.

Mingling with all the Mafiosi were the congressmen and the judges and the lawyers and the bankers and all the others who, for one reason or another, felt obliged to attend Bill Bonanno’s wedding out of respect for his father. Moreover, it’s a safe bet that, over the years, Joe Bonanno benefited from having such influential connections in the legal and political arenas. For all his high-profile reputation as a Mafia boss, the only crimes for which he was convicted were obstruction of justice and contempt of court. And for those rather modest white-collar offenses, he spent only twenty-six months behind bars.

Following our interview, he lived for another two decades, until 2002, when, at the ripe old age of ninety-seven, Joe Bonanno finally passed on to his eternal reward, or whatever.

C o n M e n

M O B S T E R S L I K E J I M M Y F R A T I A N N O A N D Joe Bonanno represented, each in his own way, the hard-core domain of organized

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crime, where murder and other acts of violence came with the territory. But before I turned my attention to those Mafiosi, I had already done quite a few stories on swindlers and other rogues who special-ized in soft-core crime. All things considered, it was better to fall into the clutches of one of those white-collar criminals than to incur the displeasure of the Mafia. Victims of con men might get fleeced out of their hard-earned life savings, but they ran little risk of getting their kneecaps broken or “sleeping with the fishes.”

By the early 1980s, I’d done so many pieces on nefarious scams of one kind or another that investigative journalism was regarded by many to be my principal métier. Oh, I was commended every now and then for my reporting from the Middle East and for my interviews with political leaders in Washington and such cultural icons as Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Horowitz. But those assignments rarely provoked the kind of visceral response from viewers that some of my investigative stories did. And what was true of my work was, to a large extent, true of 60 Minutes in general.

That was not what we had in mind when we started out in the fall of 1968. At the time of our debut, Don Hewitt openly acknowledged that insofar as he was influenced by print journalism, his model for 60 Minutes had been Life magazine. Like Life, we were picture-oriented, tightly edited, and we sent cameras all over the world to cover major events. At the same time, we kept an alert eye for lively features and human-interest stories so that we could offer the kind of balance that had made Life such a huge success. That formula was our guiding light during our first few years on the air.

The event that thrust us into the investigative realm was the Watergate scandal. Like so many other journalists, we were drawn into that deluge when it battered the White House in 1973, and for the next year or so, we did several pieces on the stunning disclosures that

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eventually destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency. But that was just part of its impact. The scandal also had a profound effect on American journalism.

Watergate sparked a wave of enthusiasm for investigative reporting, and as the infectious fever spread through newsrooms across America, we were among those who caught the bug. For us, there was a special challenge, because the prevailing view at the time was that television could not deal with that kind of journalism. The assumption was that because the camera was such an intrusive presence, TV reporters could not engage in the stealthy tactics that were so often needed in order to expose corruption and other misdeeds.