Honor Thy Father (11 page)

They named him Charles, honoring Bill’s grandfather Charles Labruzzo, and although Rosalie would soon become pregnant with a son and would have two more children during the following two years, she would always be in certain ways closer to Charles than to the others. But in spite of the presence of children, which relieved her of much of her loneliness and feeling of unfulfillment, her relationship with Bill remained in a state of tension during their time in Tucson. She felt incapable of escaping this small town which alienated her and she missed her mother and relatives in Brooklyn. She could not understand Bill’s attachment to a town that seemed to reject and disown him. What she did not know was that not everyone in Tucson had turned on Bill. There were a few of his friends who, undeterred by the publicity after Apalachin, continued to treat him with courtesy and did not shun his companionship. There was also a blonde hostess in a Tucson cocktail lounge who was attracted to Bill, and she had a blithe carefree attitude that he particularly welcomed now, a pleasant contrast to the dispiriting atmosphere that prevailed at home with Rosalie.

She was in her midtwenties, was tall and graceful. She was born in Germany, had met and married an American soldier there, but was now divorced. Not long after she began dating Bill, the manager of the lounge told her that the FBI was investigating her, and she was warned that if she did not break up with Bill she would lose her job. She lost her job, found another one, and continued to see Bill. She also brought him to her Tucson apartment to meet her two young sons, who soon accepted him as part of the family and called him Daddy.

Bill was infatuated with her. She was undemanding yet seemed totally involved with him. She was resigned to his marriage and, unlike Rosalie, she was not embarrassed by the publicity that associated him with the underworld. If anything she was intrigued by it, was fascinated by Bill’s description of his father and the other men. She confided in Bill, telling him about her marriage and her parents in Germany, how their town was destroyed by bombing raids and they lived in damp cellars, how her father was taken prisoner by the Allies and was later reported dead. After the war, after her mother had married again and was widowed again, her father reappeared one day in front of the house, walking slowly up the path carrying a cane, wearing a long white beard, and his daughter thought that he was Jesus.

In 1961, Bill Bonanno conceded to himself that Tucson was too small a place in which to live under present circumstances; so he moved to Phoenix, finding a home for Rosalie and their two sons on the east side of town and a home for his girl friend and her two sons on the west side of town. He supplied each woman with a 1961 Falcon, and he divided his free evenings between the two places. Although he continued to oversee the businesses in Tucson and traveled often to New York, he also became actively engaged in managing a Phoenix supper club that he partly owned. The club was called Romulus, and he employed his girl friend as an assistant manager. When the Phoenix police began to park outside the Romulus each night questioning the customers on their way out, sometimes testing their alcoholic consumption, Bill’s business quickly declined. He filed a $100,000 lawsuit against the Phoenix police contending that his constitutional rights were being violated, but the suit was dismissed. The decision angered him and he was determined in a desperate way to fight those who wanted to drive him out of town. Yet the strain of the life he was leading, his getting little sleep and supporting two households and traveling constantly, began to take its toll. One day, mixing up bank accounts, he bounced a $1,930 check; though he made restitution, he was taken to court, received newspaper publicity, and was placed on probation for three years. Later he was charged with income tax evasion, the government agents claiming that he owed more than $60,000 in back taxes for the years 1959–1960–1961. Then his girl friend informed him that she had received a telephone call from one of Rosalie’s brothers in New York, pleading with her to leave Bill, offering her money and an airplane ticket back to Germany. She refused, but she and Bill were becoming a bit uneasy. One night a few weeks later, Bill called her home and heard her say, “Your wife is here.”

He slammed down the phone, drove quickly to the house. He discovered Rosalie and the other woman seated quietly across from one another in the living room with their children nearby. Rosalie shouted as he walked in, demanding that he immediately choose between them, but he ignored her. He led her firmly out to the car and drove her and the children home without discussing the subject. Later he confessed to Rosalie that he was emotionally involved with the other woman, although he did not admit that she was pregnant with his child and was insisting on having it. Bill was incapable at this time of choosing between the women—his whole life was in such a turbulent state that he needed them both, one complemented the other. Each gave him something the other did not; he respected and loved Rosalie, he said, but the other woman made him feel alive, free, confident. All his life he had done what was expected of him; now he had finally done as he pleased—his affair represented his first blatantly rebellious act against the Sicilian family strictures that had shaped him and sometimes sickened him. When Rosalie proposed that they separate, he said firmly that he would not let her go.

The next day he was again with his girl friend, although he noticed a change in her attitude. She had been more upset by the encounter with Rosalie than he had imagined she would be, and now she agreed with Rosalie that it would be better for all of them, including the children, if he made a choice—either leave Rosalie or leave her. But Bill continued to procrastinate. A week later, on arriving at her home, he was told by a baby-sitter that she had gone out for the evening. Abruptly discharging the baby-sitter, Bill waited for her return. He shut the lights in the living room and sat in the dark facing the door.

Shortly before midnight, hearing a car stop, he saw her with another man. Then she walked alone up the path. When she flipped on the light switch she saw Bill glaring at her. She was wearing a black off-the-shoulder evening dress, his favorite, a dress he had recently bought her before a weekend trip they had taken to Las Vegas. Seeing that dress now seemed to drive him berserk. He grabbed the dress by the top, ripped it off, and began to tear it into several pieces. As she screamed he charged into her bedroom closet and began to rip other dresses. When she fought to stop him, he hit her, knocking her across the room. After the floor was littered with shredded clothing, he left.

Still, the couple continued to see one another. They both lacked whatever it took to end the relationship, even though both agreed that it must stop. Bill in particular recognized the potential danger in continuing; he had heard that word of his affair had gone beyond the Profaci family and had been mentioned by some important figures in the underworld. Although the Profaci organization was not as powerful as it once was, it was still part of the national network, and Rosalie had relatives who had married into formidable families around the nation. Two of her cousins, daughters of Joseph Profaci, had married into the Zerilli and Tocco families of Detroit, and the Profacis were also kin to a family in California. While infidelity was no more uncommon in the underworld than anywhere else, great effort was always taken to protect a wife from embarrassment, and Bill’s behavior was considered scandalous. His father appeared one night and appealed to his sense of family honor. “Don’t be the first to dirty our name,” Joseph Bonanno said. “Our name has been clean so long, for so many generations, don’t be the first…”

But even his father’s visit did not immediately influence him, and Bill was surprised by his own resistance, his independence, wondering if it was not a good sign. Then Rosalie was again pregnant; and after the birth of a son, their third, in March 1963, she took an overdose of sleeping pills and was ill for several days. When a doctor described it as possibly a suicide attempt, it made newspaper headlines, and when Bill returned home he was surprised to be greeted at the front door by his sister Catherine, who had flown in from San Mateo, and he was even more surprised when she told him that his mother-in-law was in the bedroom with Rosalie.

“She is sleeping,” Mrs. Profaci said as Bill walked in, feeling very much the intruder in his own bedroom. He stood silently for a moment. Mrs. Profaci sat next to the bed. A large woman with dark hair, an angelic face, and a kindly disposition under normal circumstances, she was at this moment cold and distant. He removed his jacket, loosened his tie. He turned toward the closet for something more comfortable to wear, wondering if his mother-in-law would leave the room long enough for him to change. He slipped out of his shoes, took off his shirt. Mrs. Profaci did not move. Then he began to unzip his trousers. Mrs. Profaci abruptly stood and left. “I’ll be out in a minute,” he called after her. “We’ll have coffee.”

Mrs. Profaci and Catherine remained for days, both wanting to help. But Bill felt the tension every moment, particularly between him and his mother-in-law. She clearly resented his treatment of her daughter, and every time he walked into the bedroom she seemed to bristle; she was like a mother lion protecting her cub. Even though Catherine was critical of her brother, she felt that Rosalie should also share in the blame. She remembered at the convent her impressions of Rosalie as a spoiled and sheltered young girl, and she remembered her reservations about Rosalie before the marriage, thinking that Rosalie lacked the strength to help her brother through the inevitably difficult life—and she recalled how angry the elder Bonanno had become when she expressed this opinion. But Catherine was certain that her brother would not have sought the companionship of another woman during the last two years if Rosalie had fulfilled her role as a wife, and when this viewpoint was subtly conveyed at various times during conversations at dinner Mrs. Profaci was not pleased.

At one point Mrs. Profaci became so upset during an exchange with Bill that she left the table in tears and ran to Rosalie in the bedroom, locking the door behind her. Bill quickly followed, banging on the door. Rosalie woke up screaming, her mother cried out, and Catherine tried to pull Bill away from the door. When he yelled at her, Catherine answered sharply, “Don’t talk to
me
that way! I’m not your wife, I’m not your mother…”

She continued to pull against him, a tall girl very much in control of her emotions, and when she noticed her brother’s anger rising and thought that he might slap her, she said, “Go ahead, do it! I dare you.”

Bill felt his sister’s breath upon him, heard the wailing and weeping from the bedroom, felt suffocated by the encircling closeness, and in a fit of exasperation he clenched his fist and smashed it through the wall. The house seemed to shake, blood gushed from his knuckles, pain jolted through him. He felt piercing, throbbing sensations and chills, he thought he was close to madness. His whole life seemed to be crumbling with the falling plaster, and he was disgusted with everyone around him, hated them, thought he could kill them, and understood for the first time crimes of passion. Most murders were committed by relatives or friends of the victim, and he remembered all the headlines he had read in tabloids,
MAN KILLS WIFE, CHILDREN, SELF
, and now he understood why.

He bent in pain, clutching his wounded hand that would be scarred for life, felt Catherine’s arms around him leading him toward a chair. She kissed him on the cheek and held him close as he lowered his head and tears came into his eyes. The room was still, there were no sounds from the bedroom. Catherine sat next to her brother in silence, closer than she had ever felt before. She knew his misery and thought about her father’s part in all this. Her father had ruined him, she believed. Bill did not belong in that world, was not hard enough, cold enough, although he tried to be; he was by nature easygoing, she thought, a kind and giving man who wanted to be loved, desperately needed love. He was more like his mother or his uncle Frank; he was by nature a Labruzzo. His father had made him into a Bonanno, and now Catherine wondered and worried about what would happen to him.

Two days later, emotionally spent, Bill consented to his mother-in-law’s fervent request that Rosalie return to Brooklyn and recuperate under her care. Bill would join Rosalie later. Their being apart for a while might be helpful to him as well, allowing him time to think things over and perhaps arrive at a decision. He knew that his days with two women were over, and he was relieved.

He drove them to the airport—Rosalie, Mrs. Profaci, and the three children, Charles, five, Joseph, two, and the baby Salvatore, two months. After they had gone, he returned home and spent the rest of the day and evening by himself. He welcomed the quietude, not having to speak or listen to anyone. His right hand was bandaged and painful but not broken. Within himself he felt empty, queasy, filled with remorse for Rosalie.

On the following evening he had dinner with his girl friend, and she also was distracted by a feeling of guilt and hopelessness. She sensed that Bill would never leave his wife, nor would his wife leave him, because neither was fully in control of their lives—other people had a hand in every move, and she believed that the only sensible thing to do was to return with her children to Germany. She could account for her third child, Bill’s child, by explaining to her relatives in Europe that she had married again but that her husband had died—she could use the surname of a bookmaker friend of Bill’s, a bachelor they both had liked and who had recently died in Tucson. And so she made up her mind, she would return to Germany, and when she suggested this to Bill he did not discourage her.

A week later, in early June, Bill called New York and told Rosalie that he wanted to see her. She did not sound enthusiastic, but he found comfort in the fact that Rosalie had not sounded enthusiastic about anything in years. He left for New York and stayed at Frank Labruzzo’s home. The next day he asked two of his aunts in Brooklyn to go to the Profaci home to get Rosalie and the children; he did not know what sort of reception he might get from her family, and he thought this way might be easier on his mother-in-law and himself. But later his aunts called to say that Rosalie refused to come.