Honor Thy Father (46 page)

An hour later the guests reassembled at the Los Altos Country Club, passing in the parking lot on their way to the reception a new Volkswagen camper that was Mrs. Profaci’s gift to the couple. The reception was held on the lawn of the club’s Tally Ho Restaurant, a picturesque setting surrounded by trees and rolling hills and echoing with music from the orchestra that played under a canopy. Waiters moved through the crowd carrying trays of food and champagne, and as it became darker and the outdoor lights were turned on, Mrs. Profaci could no longer contain her concern at Rosalie and Bill’s absence, and finally she approached two men she knew to be close to Bill and demanded: “Are you people holding something back from me?”

They said they were not, and one of the men excused himself to make another telephone call, although it was only a ploy—he knew, as did others, that Bill was boycotting the wedding and refused to let Rosalie attend because Josephine had failed to invite a cousin of his, a man from Castellammare who had recently moved to San Jose. When Bill had learned earlier in the day that his cousin was not on the guest list he regarded it as an insult, attaching more significance to this than to the fact that perhaps Josephine did not consider his cousin close enough to be included. But Bill preferred to believe that his cousin was not invited because, during the previous summer, while his cousin was in East Meadow helping Rosalie move the last of the furniture from the house, he had indiscreetly suggested in Josephine’s presence that Rosalie’s and Josephine’s late father had been the “brains” behind the organization headed by the famous Joe Profaci, the Olive Oil King. This view had certainly never been held by anyone in Rosalie’s family, who believed their father’s association with Joseph Profaci was merely a relationship between brothers. Bill saw the exclusion of his cousin at the wedding as a rebuff by Josephine to the expression of an opinion that Bill himself shared, and he conveyed this to Rosalie on the day of the wedding. And during the afternoon as no invitation was extended, even belatedly, Bill’s anger mounted and he finally forbade Rosalie to appear at the church. Rosalie protested, crying, it was her
sister’s
wedding, but Bill was adamant.

By eight that night they were hardly speaking to each other and the next day when Mrs. Profaci learned the truth about their absence, she too became incensed and refused to answer the phone when Rosalie tried to call to explain and apologize. For days the hostility between Rosalie and Bill continued, and Bill told friends that there might be a separation. But Rosalie’s one runaway summer in Long Island in 1967 seemed to have been the limit of her capacity to rebel, and gradually the energy to sustain the anger was too much and their life in San Jose drifted back to its uneventful routine of household details, children, waiting, and eventually forgiving.

O
N
J
ULY 21, 1969, ONE YEAR AFTER
J
OSEPH
B
ONANNO’S
home had been bombed, the Tucson police arrested a suspect—a lean, spectacled twenty-three-year-old electrical engineer employed in Tucson by the Hughes Aircraft Company. His name was Paul Mills Stevens, and he had acquired a knowledge of demolitions in the Marine Corps. At the time of his arrest, Stevens’s right hand and arm still showed the effects of being hit by the shotgun blasts fired by Bill Bonanno seconds after he tossed the bombs into the Bonanno backyard and made his escape along a dark street where a getaway car was waiting.

But Stevens was not the only one involved in the bombings. Two days after his arrest, a second man, William John Dunbar, twenty-six, was surrounded by the police at a trailer camp on the Gila River Indian Reservation, where he had been hiding out with a girl. He was returned to Tucson and, like Stevens, was held on $10,000 bond. Dunbar was once a professional auto racer, a skilled archer, a springboard diver; and though he was most recently employed in the accounting department of an auto specialty shop, he still identified himself as a car racer and kept in top physical condition through regular workouts at the local YMCA. He was suspected by the police of having assisted Stevens with the bombings, but both men were believed to have worked under the direction of someone else, an individual whose name neither man would reveal.

And when it finally did become known, it was not through Stevens or Dunbar but rather through a twenty-one-year-old girl who was a friend of their’s and had been privy to their plottings, a girl who had been engaged to marry Dunbar’s brother before his death in a motorcycle accident. Her allegations in Superior Court caused sensational headlines in Arizona’s newspapers as well as shock and disbelief in Tucson and embarrassment in Washington. The man who instigated the bombings, who picked the targets and drove the getaway car, she said, was an agent for the FBI.

While she did not give his full name, saying only that he was “an FBI agent named Dave,” Bill Bonanno knew immediately who “Dave” was after the newspapers reported the story—David O. Hale, the FBI’s Arizona expert on Mafia affairs, an agent who had regularly tailed Bill around Tucson and who, on the day that Hank Perrone was murdered in New York, had visited the elder Bonanno’s Tucson home and told Bill, “Well, I see your friend got it.” Bill recalled the angry exchange that had followed between Hale and himself, and he also remembered that it was David Hale who had tried to induce the friend of Joseph Jr., the young blond Texan who had been the Bonanno’s houseguest, into informing the government on the routine of the Bonanno household.

When the press confronted David Hale with the charges against him, he refused to comment; nor would anyone from the Justice Department or FBI headquarters in Washington reveal any information. But as the press persisted in its investigative reporting, the Tucson police finally acknowledged that David Hale was a suspect, among other citizens, and before long Stevens and Dunbar pleaded guilty to the bombings in court and told most of the story.

They testified that the bombing raids had been planned by Hale in the early summer of 1968, which was an auspicious time for such a scheme in Tucson. Editorials had already advocated that the Bonannos and other underworld figures leave the city, and many influential citizens throughout the state were in agreement with the national crusade against the Mafia—which, having reached a peak under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and having declined under Attorney General Ramsey Clark (who thought that the Mafia was overrated), had been revived by President Nixon and his Attorney General, John N. Mitchell. It was not difficult in the charged atmosphere that existed in Tucson in 1968 for David Hale to find citizens who shared his concern about Mafia infiltrators, and he was thus able to interest the president of the Southern Arizona Bank in sponsoring a series of crime seminars. He also received enthusiastic moral support from such respected businessmen as Walter I. Prideaux.

Prideaux, fifty years old, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, had once taught school in Arizona and had briefly tutored Joseph Bonanno, Jr., so that he could pass the entrance requirements for the University of Arizona. Prideaux had been the general office manager of the Complete Auto Supply Company in Tucson in 1968 when he was approached by Hale with a plan to finally purge Tucson of the Mafia. Hale’s plot was to explode bombs on the property of Mafia leaders, which he hoped would provoke a feud by making them suspect that each was trying to eliminate the other. Since Hale’s plan might at the very least drive mafiosi from Tucson, Prideaux agreed to help the FBI agent carry out his mission. David Hale then approached Dunbar, another employee of Complete Auto, whose participation was encouraged by Hale’s promise that Dunbar’s record of a 1963 theft conviction—Dunbar’s only encounter with the law but one which prevented him from getting higher-paying jobs—would be cleared from his record. Dunbar then recruited Stevens, who he knew had had experience with explosives while serving in the marines. Stevens became an accomplice because, as his defense attorney later explained in court, Stevens “was in awe of law enforcement.”

Stevens and Dunbar both testified that on the night of July 21, 1968, they drove to Peter Licavoli’s ranch with David Hale and Walter Prideaux. Stevens said that he accompanied Hale over fences and across a field to the ranchhouse, but when Hale instructed him to bomb the house, which had a light burning that indicated someone might have been inside, he refused; so Hale settled for planting dynamite in the garage. They then hurried back to the car, and with Prideaux driving they raced to a point three miles from the ranch before the first of two explosions could be heard, damaging four vehicles and knocking a hole into the roof of the carport.

On the following evening the four men drove to the Bonanno house, first passing the front of the home on East Elm Street, then turning onto Chauncey Lane, where Hale parked the car near a corner, leaving the motor running, and dispatched Dunbar and Stevens with the dynamite to blow up Bonanno’s brick wall. After they placed the dynamite at the wall and after Dunbar tossed a small bomb over the wall, they turned to run; but Stevens was then hit by the shotgun blasts, and, confused, he proceeded to run, staggering, in the wrong direction—away from the car. Hale became nervous and impatient, Dunbar later recalled in court, and wanted to drive off without Stevens; but Dunbar insisted that they get Stevens, which they did, taking him first to Prideaux’s home and then to St. Mary’s Hospital.

During the months that followed, Hale continuously assured the other men that, since they were assisting the FBI and the government, they would be protected from prosecution if they were arrested. Convinced that it was Peter Notaro who had shot at Stevens the night of the Bonanno bombing, Hale approached Dunbar with a plan to avenge Stevens’s injury by killing Notaro; knowing that Dunbar was a skilled archer, Hale suggested that death by crossbow would be an interesting method. Dunbar refused.

On August 16, Notaro’s house was bombed, and by then Hale had drawn up a list of other locations to be hit, still convincing his accomplices that they were acting under government orders. Stevens told the court that once Hale even visited him in the hospital, carrying sticks of dynamite under his coat, asking Stevens to “crimp a cap into a fuse”; but Stevens, without the use of one arm, was unable to oblige.

Dunbar, Prideaux, and Stevens, however, were not Hale’s total cadre against the Mafia, for he was sometimes joined on other raids by a pretty blonde divorcee named Frances Angleman, who was completing her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Arizona and who hoped to do an anthropological study on the Tucson-based Mafia for her doctorate thesis. The story about her relationship with Hale was revealed in an article in the Arizona
Republic
, which obtained its information from individuals in whom Frances Angleman had confided.

According to her friends, she was with Hale on the evening of July 3, 1968, when he used a shotgun to blast out the large picture window at the Oro Valley home of Anthony Tisci, son-in-law of Chicago’s Sam Giancana. She frequently wore a brunette wig when traveling with Hale, and she affected a Sicilian accent while sitting with him in Tucson nightclubs she believed were frequented by mafiosi. It had possibly been Frances Angleman seated in the cream-colored Chevrolet that Bill Bonanno observed during the summer evening of 1968 cruising slowly with its headlights off in front of his father’s house when dynamite had been tossed out the car window, but had failed to detonate.

But Bill would never be able to confirm this from her personally, because before the FBI plot became public knowledge, she was found dead in her apartment with a .22-caliber pistol in her right hand and a bullet in her head. The police called it a clear case of suicide, noting that before her death—she was discovered by her mother on May 14, 1969—she had left notes requesting that certain books and other items be returned to their owners and that she had also left a typewritten will and a diary. David Hale was mentioned in her will, a fact confirmed by her father, a retired lawyer for Hughes Aircraft; and while her friends believed that her diary contained notations about the bombings, her father was quoted in the Arizona
Republic
as saying that he had thrown the diary into the rubbish without reading it.

Not long before her death, she was reported to have been in an extremely nervous state, believing, according to her friends, that the Mafia was following her and was aware of her involvement in the bombings. She had also claimed to have found, on the floor outside her apartment door, an empty shotgun shell.

On August 12, 1969, three weeks after the arrest of Dunbar and Stevens, David Hale resigned from the FBI and quickly disappeared from town, unavailable for comment to the press. His attorney later stated that United States Attorney General John Mitchell had ordered Hale not to testify about anything he had learned in his official FBI capacity or to disclose anything contained in FBI records. Although the Arizona press was dissatisfied with this, it was unable to reach by telephone cooperative spokesmen in Washington for either the Justice Department or FBI. The editorial writers who had once been condemning the mafiosi were now condemning federal law enforcement authorities, and the columnist for the Arizona
Republic
, Paul Dean, expressed the sentiments of many citizens of Tucson in his “Open Letter” column to J. Edgar Hoover dated August 18, 1969: