Honor Thy Father (44 page)

“Wait a minute,” De Cavalcante cut in, “now he puts this guy on the shelf, so why shouldn’t the commission put Joe Bonanno on the shelf!” Although De Cavalcante conceded that he had finally reached the elder Bonanno and had arranged to deliver the commission’s message in person, De Cavalcante added that Bonanno, getting very technical, wanted
three
commission members to deliver the message.

“Why don’t you use three people for it?” Zicarelli asked. “To make it
really
right?

“What’s the difference?” De Cavalcante said. “I’m a responsible person…” Anyway, De Cavalcante went on, as the commission was about to officially demote Bonanno, he, De Cavalcante, interceded and said, “ ‘Wait a minute, boys. Give me an opportunity. I want to see this man on my own. I’ll take full responsibility.’ That’s when you took me over to New York, right?” he asked Zicarelli. “At that time I talked to him. For an hour and a half he kept telling me what a nice guy he was! ‘Well, why don’t you do the right thing for your family? These people are not looking to harm anybody. They’re all embarrassed. You’re putting them to a point where you’re aggravating the whole situation.’ People will start to wonder what the hell has this guy done? You understand what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Zicarelli said, conceding, “maybe there’s something here that you and I don’t know about.”

“I know a little more,” De Cavalcante said. “There’s a lot of questions they want to ask. Some of them are pretty serious—but the guy can either say yes or no, that’s all. But now they figure there’s something in this that’s not kosher. So they wanted me to go back and tell him to tell these
caporegimas
in his administration that ‘We recognize you but not him. Don’t let this man lead you to where you’re all involved. This man has made a mistake.’ Its a bad situation,” De Cavalcante said, “and I’ve stuck my neck out all the way.”

“This is a rough one,” Zicarelli said.

“You know this could smash up the whole country again,” De Cavalcante said.

Zicarelli, while not disputing him, still did not understand what, if anything, Joseph Bonanno had done that was a violation of the brotherhood’s rules. And it could also be that Bonanno had been a good boss and that the membership wished to stay behind him.

“I want to tell you something,” De Cavalcante said. “You’re a soldier.”

“That’s all I am!”

“You see,” De Cavalcante said, “these people [Bonanno’s officers], none of them want to open their mouth about him. There isn’t one man in that group that’ll challenge him [except Di Gregorio].” But, De Cavalcante said, he hoped disaster could be avoided, pointing out to Zicarelli: “…there’s nobody that wants peace and harmony more than me, you know that.”

“I’m with you.”

“I’m telling you because tomorrow I don’t want to see you get involved in anything. I want you to know that the commission has nothing against any of you people.”

“Sam, maybe I don’t understand…”

“Cause this is strictly off the record,” De Cavalcante continued. “It’s between you and I, but tomorrow I don’t want you to say, ‘Jesus Christ, I hold this guy as a friend and he don’t let me know!’ ”

“I understand that, Sam,” Zicarelli said. “But,” he added, “you’re only as good as the team you’re on. You’re with the team—win, lose, or draw! How can I go the other way?”

“Wait a minute,” De Cavalcante said, “I’m not asking…”

“I know that! You say to me that in the event something happens I don’t want to see you involved. How do I duck? What kind of jerk would I be to duck?”

“Well, you see,” De Cavalcante said, “as long as nobody gets hurt…”

“See what I mean?” Zicarelli said. “Maybe I don’t understand you!”

Undiscouraged, Sam De Cavalcante persisted with his view that Joseph Bonanno was unreasonable. “This guy don’t want to listen to reason,” De Cavalcante said, “he don’t want to be kind. He’s causing so much friction amongst everybody! They been looking for this man for over a year!”

“Over a year?”

“Yeah!” De Cavalcante cried. “He said he never got the message. Now they’re gonna prove to him that messages were sent and that he received them.”

“Well,” Zicarelli said, “the man should be at least entitled to the chance to clear himself.”

“Well, does he expect the commission to come to him, right or wrong? His own uncle, who is the most respected of the commission, has pleaded with him to come up and see him.”

“Who’s his uncle?” Joseph Zicarelli asked.

“Stefano Magaddino.”

“He’s Joe’s uncle?”

“Yeah,” De Cavalcante said, “there’s a relationship. I think it’s uncle. And they treated him like dirt! This guy was crying to me—the old guy [Magaddino]. He said, ‘Sam, now you tell me this guy’s a nice guy. I sent for him. He didn’t know if I needed him to save my neck.’ Understand what I mean? Joe, if I call you up in an emergency, and you don’t show up—you don’t know why I’m calling. There might be two guys out there looking to kill me, right? And your presence could save me.”

“Yeah, right,” Zicarelli said.

“You can’t take it upon yourself to ignore these things,” De Cavalcante said. “Joe, if you called me, no matter what time, I’m gonna be down there. And if you’re gonna go down, we’ll go down together, right?”

“That’s right,” Zicarelli agreed. “But in the same sense—if your boss is your friend and you have committed yourself to him, right or wrong, where are you going?”

“That’s why the commission feels bad,” De Cavalcante said. “Because they know that he lied to them. The commission wants your people to know the truth. Then decide if you still want him.”

Zicarelli said that the commission should convey this to the officers in the Bonanno family, which De Cavalcante acknowledged was the right thing to do except that the officers were still under Bonanno’s control.

“That proves they still recognize him as the boss,” Zicarelli deduced.

“I understand that!” De Cavalcante said. “Hey, I’m not saying they didn’t do the right thing. The commission also knows that it’s under Joe Bonanno’s orders…But the commission supersedes any boss.”

“He ought to know that,” Zicarelli finally conceded.

“Better than anybody,” said Sam De Cavalcante.

On October 16, 1964—five days before Joseph Bonanno disappeared on Park Avenue—Sam De Cavalcante was again in his office discussing developments with his own man, Majuri. De Cavalcante was upset about a meeting he said he had in Brooklyn with Joseph Colombo, who had somehow failed to impress him, and De Cavalcante wondered aloud at how Colombo could have been elevated to a place on the commission.

“What experience has he [Colombo] got?” De Cavalcante asked. “He was a bust-out guy all his life.”

Majuri had no comment.

Despite his closeness to the situation, De Cavalcante seemed no less surprised than the average newspaper by the headlines concerning Bonanno’s disappearance on October 22, 1964; and a month later the FBI recorded a conversation in which De Cavalcante was asked by one of De Cavalcante’s men, Joseph La Selva, to explain the Bonanno mystery.

“So what happened?” La Selva asked.

“He [Bonanno] pulled that off himself,” De Cavalcante said.

“That figures,” said La Selva.

“Well, who the hell is he kidding?” De Cavalcante asked. And then answered his question, “He kidded the government.”

“Yeah,” La Selva agreed.

“It was his own men,” De Cavalcante said. “We figure it was his kid and Vito [possibly meaning Vito De Filippo, his captain with gambling concessions in Haiti].” De Cavalcante went on, “This guy [Bonanno] has got a lot of government appearances…but he left everybody in trouble.”

“Yeah,” said La Selva.

It was to La Selva that De Cavalcante also confided that Joseph Bonanno in 1963 had been the mastermind behind Joseph Magliocco’s scheme to dispose of the two commission dons, Carlo Gambino and Thomas Lucchese, and that when the plot failed, the commission was convinced that Joseph Bonanno arranged for the murder of Magliocco.

“They feel that he poisoned Magliocco,” De Cavalcante told La Selva. “Magliocco didn’t die a natural death,” he added, disregarding the medical report that Magliocco had died of a heart attack—Bonanno poisoned him because Magliocco was the only one who could accuse him of plotting against Gambino and Lucchese.

“See,” De Cavalcante went on, “Magliocco confessed to it. But this Joe [Bonanno] didn’t know how far he went. Understand? So they suspect he used a pill on him—that he’s noted for it. So he knows the truth of all the damage he done…”

La Selva listened without comment as De Cavalcante continued to regale him with tales learned from the highest authorities in the secret society, tales that seemed right out of medieval Florence, but all that La Selva could finally express was a sense of remorse for the dishonored Bonanno.

“It’s a shame,” La Selva said. “What was he, fifty-eight, fifty-nine years old? And the prestige he had! What was he looking for anyway?”

De Cavalcante had no answer.

“It’s really bad for the morale of our thing, you know?” La Selva continued. “When they make the rules and then break them themselves. He’s been in twenty years.”

“Thirty-three years he’s been in,” said De Cavalcante.

By December 30, 1964, with the elder Bonanno still vanished after five weeks, with many people believing him dead, and with the commission now applying increased pressure on certain labor unions to keep Bonanno followers out of work, it was apparent to Sam De Cavalcante that his friend, Zicarelli, had achieved a certain wisdom rather quickly. Zicarelli, who had during the previous month been so staunch in his loyalty to his boss, Joe Bonanno, was now on Caspar Di Gregorio’s side.

Entering De Cavalcante’s office, Zicarelli said, “Gasparino sends you his regards.”

“Yeah?” De Cavalcante said. “Did you tell him you saw me?”

“I told him, ‘Sure, I see him three or four times a week!’ ”

While apparently pleased that Caspar Di Gregorio was gaining additional support from such former Bonanno soldiers as Zicarelli, De Cavalcante could not resist reminding Zicarelli of his recently expressed pledge to die for Joseph Bonanno.

“I said until I see different!” Zicarelli corrected him. Zicarelli asked, “What do you mean, I want to die? I said if somebody looks to hurt him before I get a chance to see different, certainly I’m gonna help him.” Then, switching the subject to Bill Bonanno, Zicarelli ventured that he thought Bill was a little crazy, or else “he’s immature to a point where from being born with a silver spoon.” And Bill “don’t know what hardship is—he thinks he’s running a cowboy camp here. A Wild West show!”

“You can’t,” Zicarelli went on, “take a kid out of a cradle and put him in a tuxedo and let him boss people in the gutter if he can’t talk their language.”

As De Cavalcante continued to listen, Zicarelli announced: “I told him one time to his face—I said, ‘You got three strikes against you, kid.’ He said, ‘What are they?’ I said, ‘One, you can’t talk to everybody on
their
level. Number two, you’re the boss’s son. And number three, you’re too young and inexperienced. These are the three strikes that are gonna destroy you.’ I told him this the day they made him
consigliere
. We were sitting in Wentworth Restaurant.

“He went and told his father, and his father sent for me. [He said] ‘What do you mean and this and that.’ You know, it took me until five one morning to get out of that. I told him, ‘This is the way I feel. Now if I can see this picture, you, who came up the hard way from all the wars you say you’ve been through, you should see it too. If it was my son, I’d never put him in—in a million years! I wouldn’t even make him a friend.’ ”

“That’s right,” De Cavalcante agreed.

“Unless the kid was a wayward kid,” Zicarelli amended, “and I knew that he knew all the angles.”

Near the end of February 1965, however, the luster that Caspar Di Gregorio seemed to have as a leader of men was no longer so obvious to Sam De Cavalcante, who had been witness to complaints and who had himself noticed negative qualities about Di Gregorio in recent weeks.

“I think it’s going to his head,” De Cavalcante said, speaking with one of his underlings, Louie Larasso, in the plumber’s office.

“Well,” Larasso said, “He’s no kid. What is he, sixty-two or sixty-three years old? He’s been around a long time that guy.”

“He’s been around as long as Peppino,” De Cavalcante said. “He’s done as much work for that outfit as Peppino did.” But Larasso agreed with De Cavalcante’s declining opinion of Di Gregorio.

“Gasparino looks…no good,” Larasso said. “They should have waited a long time before they made a boss. Cause there’s too much undercurrent.”

These recorded revelations, which represent a small fraction of the tonnage of tape that the FBI has drawn from Mafia privacy might have remained beyond the reach of public scrutiny had it not been for a strategic error on the part of De Cavalcante’s attorney in 1969 before the trial of De Cavalcante and two codefendants in an extortion-conspiracy case in federal court in Newark.

Contending that the indictments against De Cavalcante and the other defendants had been obtained illegally through wiretapping, the defense attorney called for a bill of particulars and disclosure as to whether or not electronic eavesdropping had been used. The attorney, who had once served as an Assistant United States Attorney in New Jersey, believed that the government would, as usual, refuse to release the transcripts and thus be forced to drop the indictments. But the attorney, by his own admission, was astounded when the government turned over to the court the 2,300 typewritten pages of recorded conversations, which then became public property and accessible to the press and which by their circulation would produce repercussions and debates that went far beyond the issues in the case against De Cavalcante or even the Mafia. Many individuals with no connection with the Mafia were mentioned in certain tapes released in 1969 and 1970; dozens of politicians, businessmen, public entertainers, policemen, laborers, and even lawyers would be publicly linked to the Mafia because of the tapes—some justifiably, some only because of the boasting of small-time mafiosi, and some would protest. Among those who did complain were Mayor Thomas Dunn of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who, while admitting taking $100 or $200 from De Cavalcante during a 1964 mayoral campaign, insisted that he had no idea that De Cavalcante was a mafioso. Representative Cornelius E. Gallagher of Bayonne, New Jersey, issued a statement in Washington denying any connection with Zicarelli, claiming that he was merely a victim on tape of Zicarelli’s name-dropping.