Honor Thy Father (14 page)

O
N THE MORNING OF
J
ANUARY
5, 1965, B
ILL
B
ONANNO
climbed the stone steps of the massive gray federal courthouse in lower Manhattan to appear before the grand jury. He was carefully dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and striped silk tie under his blue cashmere overcoat and new gray hat; and he was clean-shaven, having discarded the disguise. He was neither tense nor worried as he entered the building, was actually quite calm, relieved that things were finally becoming resolved, and confident that he could handle himself well in court. He had spent the weekend reviewing his case, guessing which questions he would be asked, deciding which cuestions he would answer and which he would not, and he vas prepared for the consequences if his limited cooperation displeased the jury.

He was accompanied by his attorney, Albert J. Krieger, one of the best young criminal lawyers in New York. Krieger was a broad-shouldered man in his early forties who wore horn-rimmed glasses and had shaved every hair off the top of his head in the style of actor Yul Brynner; but there was nothing theatrical about Krieger in a courtroom. He avoided dramatic gestures, lengthy oratory, or tactics that merely delayed the proceedings, which was one reason why he was popular with judges, and he was always well prepared and alert for every legal advantage, which had contributed to his high standing among his colleagues in the profession. Bill Bonanno considered himself fortunate to have Krieger on his side.

As they stepped toward the elevator on the fourteenth floor, photographers rushed toward them with flashbulbs popping, and reporters asked:

“Is your father alive?”

“Where do you think he’s hiding?”

“Who’s behind the kidnaping?”

Bill Bonanno continued to walk in absolute silence, impassive, while Krieger shook his head, saying, “Neither I nor my client has anything to say at this time. We will make no comment whatsoever.”

In the grand jury room on the fourteenth floor, which was barred to the press, it was quickly apparent to the younger Bonanno that the government had invested considerable time and money in its investigation of him, and he could not help but be impressed by the depth of its research. It was not the government’s probing into his illegal activities that surprised him or its evidence that revealed he was part of his father’s organization or its knowledge of his hideaway in Queens (the exact location was not yet known); it was rather the government’s close scrutiny of his private life that impressed him; irritated him. From the questions he was asked he could deduce that the government was aware of his extramarital affair, his illegitimate child, his problems with Rosalie; it knew about his own problems as a young man and college student, his business ventures in Flagstaff and Phoenix, his pilot training in Tucson, which had led some government attorneys to suspect that he had been flying his father back and forth between various secret places in recent months.

While he issued a denial, he was intrigued by the possibilities of such methods of escape and reminded himself that he should keep up with his flying. In nearly all of his testimony, he was as candid as he could be, admitting for example that he was acquainted with Sam Giancana, having met him at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, and that he knew Stefano Magaddino, describing him as a “distant cousin.” He would not state if he had ever met Carlo Gambino or Thomas Lucchese and said he had never met Vito Genovese. He said that his business interests in New York were in real estate investing, and in his pocket he carried business cards listing himself as an executive vice-president of the Republic Financial Corporation of 140 Cedar Street. Regarding his personal life, he admitted being the father of his mistress’ child, adding that he felt a moral and financial responsibility to them both but that Rosalie and his four children came first. He had no idea where his father was, he said, or if his father was indeed alive; beyond that, he would not comment on his father’s disappearance, including the fact that it was he who had telephoned Maloney on December 18 with word that his father was alive.

It was Bill Bonanno’s contention that the conversation with Maloney was privileged information protected by the rights of a client-attorney relationship—he felt that Maloney at the time of the call was not merely the elder Bonanno’s lawyer but also the legal representative for Bill and his sister, Catherine, who had also been summoned to testify before the grand jury. In her instance, Maloney’s role was not contested; he in fact submitted reports from West Coast physicians that Catherine’s small children were suffering from tonsilitis, that she herself was undergoing treatment for an intestinal ailment and sinusitis, and therefore could not serve as a witness. (The judge countered by appointing another physician in California to examine Catherine and verify her incapability of appearing in New York.) But the legal argument over Bill’s relationship with Maloney went on for days, during which several other developments were reported to be occurring on the outside.

There was the announcement in Rome by the news agency Italia that Joseph Bonanno was believed to be hiding out in Sicily; attributing its information to unidentified sources within the police department, the agency stated that FBI agents were now searching the island and it suggested that the elder Bonanno had sailed from the United States on a Panamanian merchant ship under an assumed name and went ashore on a fishing boat.

There were also news reports about an underworld meeting in a Long Island restaurant that had been held to discuss the Bonanno situation; among those present were Sam Giancana of Chicago, Thomas Eboli, reputed leader of the Vito Genovese organization during Genovese’s imprisonment, and Carmine Tramunti, an officer in the Lucchese organization. The restaurant in Cedarhurst was closed to regular patrons on the night of the meeting, and as a result the proprietor was subpoenaed along with the others to testify before the grand jury.

Although nothing of great significance seemed to emerge from their testimony, the exposure of that gathering and similar ones in 1965 kept organized crime in the headlines and focused constant attention on such men as Sam Giancana, who had once been able to travel freely between fashionable gambling casinos and night spots in the United States and overseas without interruptions and questioning from agents. But as the media accelerated its coverage of the Mafia, a trend concurrent with the intensified anti-Mafia campaign begun initially at the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and gradually endorsed by J. Edgar Hoover, there was no longer much privacy for Giancana and other reputed dons; almost everything they did was observed and made available to the press, and the publicity not only affected them but anyone with whom they were seen in public. Giancana’s travels with singer Phyllis McGuire were widely reported, as was his acquaintance with Frank Sinatra. Giancana’a relationship with Sinatra, specifically his presence at Sinatra’s Cal-Neva lodge at Lake Tahoe and his inclusion elsewhere in Sinatra’s entourage, caused a dispute between Sinatra and the Nevada gambling authorities and was believed to have been instrumental in Sinatra’s decision to sell his interst in the Cal-Neva lodge and in The Sands motel in Las Vegas. But the pursuit of the slim, dapper Giancana continued, haunting him even on the golf course as agents trailed him from tee to green, causing him finally to file charges against the agents in a Chicago court. The judge ordered the agents to stay at least one foursome behind Giancana, but a United States appeals court later overruled the judge’s surveillance restrictions.

The Supreme Court meanwhile had rejected an appeal by the family of the late Al Capone on their invasion of privacy complaint against the CBS television series “The Untouchables,” which dramatized Capone’s activities during the heyday of Chicago gangsterism. However, Capone’s fourty-eight-year-old son, Albert Francis Capone, Jr., of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, did suceed in having his name legally changed to Albert Francis, claiming that his father’s reputation “pushes me into the glare of publicity for even minor violations of the law.”

Bill’s brother also changed his name, though never legally or consistently, when he was concerned about getting part-time work on television Westerns or in rodeos or was trying to arrange bookings for the teen-age musical groups he sometimes managed. Nevertheless he, too, was subpoenaed in January 1965 by the grand jury to testify about his father’s disappearance, and his photograph was printed in
The New York Times
and other publications. Joseph Bonanno, Jr., remained in New York for one day, during which he had no comment to make to the jury or the press, and he did not smile as the camera lights flashed into his face while he stood waiting outside the courtroom door. After he was released from further questioning, he returned quietly to Phoenix College.

Bill Bonanno appeared twenty-one times before the grand jury during January and February, contending throughout that what he had said on the telephone to Maloney was privileged information that should be legally withheld from the jury. But the government attorneys disagreed, and the Assistant United States Attorney, Gerald Walpin, insisted that “the unanswered questions are of vital importance in our efforts to learn what happened to and the whereabouts of Joseph Bonanno.”

Bill remained adamant. He had already made one big mistake in calling Maloney, disregarding the warning
don’t make waves, don’t do anything
, and he feared that his father’s life might be in greater jeopardy if he again ignored the advice and discussed the substance of the call he had received at the phone booth and the call he had made to Maloney afterward. So he persisted in his silence as the government interrogators became increasingly irritated, and finally the question of what to do next was placed before Judge Charles H. Tenney.

On March 1 the judge announced his ruling—a client-attorney relationship had not existed between Maloney and the younger Bonanno at the time of the call in December, and the judge therefore ordered Bonanno to reveal the substance of the conversation. Bonanno, facing the judge, replied, “With all due deference and respect to the court, I decline to answer on the grounds of attorney-client relationship.” Judge Tenney, suddenly impatient, cited Bonanno for contempt of court. He sentenced him to jail immediately, for an indefinite term, and denied bail pending appeal.

Bill Bonanno displayed no sign of emotion as he was led by court authorities out of the room to the elevator, then down to the basement where, in a large dimly-lit room, several handcuffed prisoners sat waiting to be driven across town to jail. Bill was searched and relieved of his wristwatch, ring, pocket hankerchief and other personal possessions by a guard who noted the contents on a document that Bill signed. Then he was handcuffed to a large black man with facial scars and a vague expression about the eyes. The black man did not speak, did not even look at Bill as their wrists were linked.

Soon they were lined up with the other prisoners and marched through a corridor up a ramp into a faded green bus. The crosstown ride over the narrow cobblestone streets of downtown Manhattan was slow and bumpy. Bill looked out the window at the crowds of people going home from work, jamming themselves into subway kiosks, waving at cabs. The other prisoners paid no attention to the street; they sat looking at the floor or straight ahead and Bill guessed that they had taken this ride before.

Many of the prisoners were black, a few were Puerto Rican, a few were white and had hard aging faces and hollow eyes common on the Bowery, except these men did not have the shakes and their hands were strong and steady, hands of a safecracker. Most of the men were probably small-time thieves and dope pushers, pimps and numbers runners, rapists and maybe even killers, but Bill did not sense any great strength of character about them; they were doubtless part of the anonymous mass of criminals who dominate the national statistics but never make a name. Bill was the only one in the bus who was well dressed; the rest wore shirts without ties, tattered coats or leather jackets over rumpled trousers and scuffed shoes, and they sat slumped in the bus looking tired and hopeless, a team of losers after the game.

The bus turned into West Street near the waterfront along the Hudson River, a neighborhood of warehouses, loading ramps, and trailer trucks parked for the night under the elevated roadway still busy with commuter traffic. The bus stopped in front of one sturdy-looking stone building that looked like a warehouse but was in fact the jail, although it was too dark for Bill to see the building clearly from the outside. He heard a guard yelling in the front of the bus, heard the clicking sound of handcuffs as the prisoners filed out in twos, then walked with his companion past large steel doors that clanged quickly behind them after they entered the Federal House of Detention.

They passed through small rooms with barred windows; then, in a large room, they were halted, uncuffed, lined against the wall. They waited in line for at least an hour as guards and an orderly inspected each newly arrived prisoner, forcing each prisoner to remove his clothes and stand naked for inspection. While certain guards examined the shoes, particularly the heels where hollow portions might contain drugs, other guards probed between the prisoners’ toes, teeth, into the ears, anus, under the testicles. The shoes were returned to the prisoners, although the clothing was confiscated for the term of confinement; cotton robes were issued, and the men, wearing their shoes without socks, were led into the record room. There they were interrogated by desk clerks who collected personal data for the files, then they were fingerprinted and given medical examinations, finally they were led past stock clerks who issued each prisoner a pillowcase and a single sheet for a cell bunk.

Bill noticed that several uniformed prisoners were assisting the jail staff in processing the incoming men—the clerk typists were prisoners, the medical orderlies were prisoners, so were the men in the stock room. These prisoners were more lively and alert than the group Bill had come with, and he also assumed that the holders of these positions held a certain power over the other inmates. But what impressed him most at this point was the deferential manner in which these men were treating him. They had been noticeably attentive as he moved through the lines, a few had smiled at him, and one prisoner—confined to a cell near the corridor—had called out his name, saying, “Hi, Bill, we heard you were coming.” The man looked vaguely familiar. He was a white man in his fifties who seemed healthy and relaxed, possessing an air of innocence.