Honor Thy Father (6 page)

They left that evening within the first hour of darkness. Two men to a car, they planned to meet at a large motel near Albany. Bonanno’s green Cadillac was parked a block away, under a lamplight. He approached it slowly and carefully, alert for any movement or sound around the car or along the dark street. Labruzzo followed several feet behind, holding the dog on a leash with his left hand and keeping his right hand free for his gun.

Lowering a suitcase to the ground, Bonanno walked around the car, which was covered with dust and a few fallen leaves. He examined the front fenders and the hood for fingerprints, as he always did before unlocking the door, in an attempt to detect any bombs planted within the vehicle. Confident that the car had not been touched since he had left it, he got in and turned on the ignition. The car started up immediately, which did not surprise him, for he had always maintained it to perfection, changing the batteries and other engine parts long before they ceased to function properly.

Sitting in the car waiting for Labruzzo, stretching his long thin legs and pressing his broad back against the cold soft leather seats, he felt a renewed sense of appreciation for the car, its powerful engine idling quietly, its gleaming dashboard adorned with a stereo. It was a big comfortable car for a tall heavy man of his size, and he guessed that his weight had increased by ten or fifteen pounds during the last few weeks of tension, confinement, and overeating. He was probably between 235 and 240 pounds, and he felt it. Though his legs were still lean and though his large frame could easily support extra weight, his face could not; and as he leaned toward the rearview mirror, he saw that he bore little resemblance to his recent newspaper photos. His lower jaw and cheeks were heavier, and with his beard, his plain glass horn-rimmed glasses, and the snap-brim hat that he wore as part of his disguise, he imagined that he looked like a jazz musician, a fat jazz musician. The image repulsed him. He hated being overweight, imagining that almost every extra pound he put on over 225 went to his face, especially the lower part of his face, making him jowly, squarish, double-chinned; it emphasized his heavy beard and deemphasized his attractive features, his strong cheek bones, his deep-set gentle brown eyes, his delicately arched eyebrows. In his present condition, in fact, the upper portion of his face seemed mismatched with the lower part—if a line were drawn across the middle of his face below his nose, the upper part would appear to belong to a man ten years younger than the part below: above the line the eyes were innocent, trustworthy, and the skin was light and clear; below the line was the heavy dark jaw, and the folds of flesh and puffiness of the middle-aged man that Bill Bonanno would become should he live that long.

After Frank Labruzzo deposited the dog in the back seat and the gun under the front seat, the two men began the slow ride through the side streets of Queens that Bonanno knew so well. Within a half hour they were rolling smoothly on the highway, saying little as they listened to the stereo, the lights of the city behind them. Bonanno was delighted to be leaving New York. He had never liked the city very much, and recently he had come to hate it. He often wondered why so many mafiosi, men with roots in the sunny agrarian lands of southern Europe, had settled in this cold polluted jungle crowded with cops and nosy newsmen, with hazards of every conceivable nature. The Mafia bosses in the South, or in the Far West, in places like Boulder. Colorado, undoubtedly lived a much better life than any of the five dons with organizations centered in New York City. The don in Colorado probably owned a trucking business or a little nightclub and, with only ten or twelve men under his command, ran a few gambling parlors or a numbers racket on the side. He worked regular hours, probably played golf every afternoon, and had time in the evening for his family. His sons would graduate from college, becoming business executives or lawyers, and would know how to steal legally.

The five dons in New York each commanded forces of between 250 and 500 men, meaning that approximately 2,000 mafiosi—forty percent of the national membership of 5,000—were in New York fighting the traffic and one another. The New York dons never felt secure no matter how much power they had. Why did they remain? Bonanno knew the answer, of course. New York was where the big money was. It was the great marketplace, the center of everything. Each day a million trucks came rolling into or out of New York—it was a hijacker’s paradise, a town of tall shadows, sharp angles, and crooked people from top to bottom. Most New Yorkers, from the police to the prostitutes, were on the take or on the make. Even the average citizen seemed to enjoy breaking the law or beating the system in some way. Part of the success of the numbers racket, which was the Mafia’s most lucrative source of income, was that it was illegal. If the lawmakers would legitimize numbers betting it would hurt business because it would deprive customers of that satisfactory sense of having beaten the system, of having outwitted the police and the august judiciary, with the mere placing of a bet. It was the same satisfactory sense that people got forty years ago when they dealt with their bootlegger or were admitted into an all-night speakeasy.

New York was also a marvelous place in which to hide. One could get lost in the crowds of New York, could blend in with the blurring sights, movement, shadows, and confusion. People tended to mind their own business in New York, to remain uninvolved with the affairs of their neighbors, and this was a great asset for men in hiding. Bonanno knew that one of his father’s captains, a man named John Morale, had been hiding from federal authorities for twenty years and was still in circulation, living most of the time at his home in a neighborhood of nondescript houses in Queens. Morale came and went at odd hours, never following a predictable routine, and his family had been trained in ways that would not expose him by word or act.

Bonanno’s father once concealed himself for more than a year in Brooklyn, during the gangland discord of 1929–1930, a time when a rival boss had issued a “contract” for his death. Bill Bonanno was sure that if his father was still alive he could hide indefinitely in New York because he possessed the necessary discipline. Discipline was the main requirement. Disguises and hideaways, false identification cards, and loyal friends were important, but individual discipline was the essential factor, combining the capacity to change one’s routine, to adjust to solitude, to remain alert without panicking, to avoid the places and people that had frequently been visited in the past. When his father went into hiding in 1929, a time when he had been actively courting Fay Labruzzo, he suddenly and without explanation stopped appearing at her home. She heard nothing from him for several months and assumed that their engagement was terminated. Then one of her brothers-in-law noticed that the window shades of the building directly opposite the Labruzzo home, on Jefferson Street in Brooklyn, had been down for a long time, and later he saw the glimmer of rifle barrels poised behind the small opening at the bottom of the shades, obviously waiting for Bonanno to appear in front of the Labruzzo home.

Bill Bonanno was confident that, if he had to, he could hide in New York for a very long time. He believed that he had discipline, that he would not panic if the search parties were getting close, that he had a certain talent for elusiveness. Even now, driving at night on the New York Thruway, obeying the speed limit, he was aware of every car that followed him, the arrangements of their headlights in his rearview mirror. Whenever he passed a car he observed its body style, the license plate, tried to get a look at the driver, and his alertness intensified whenever a car behind him gained speed to pass. He tried to maintain a certain distance between himself and the others, shifting lanes or reducing speed when necessary. Since he had carefully studied the road map before the trip, as he did before every trip, he knew the exits, the detours, the possible routes of escape.

Whenever he planned to remain in a single town or certain area for a few days, he familiarized himself not only with the streets but also with the hill formations and arrangements of trees along certain roads that might temporarily obscure his car as he drove it from the view of drivers behind him. He actually charted out zones of obscurity into which he would drive when he felt he was being followed, particular places where the road dipped or curved and was joined by an alternate route. Whenever he sensed that he was being tailed in Long Island, for example, he led his possible pursuers into Garden City, where he was intimately familiar with several short curving roads that linked with other roads, and he knew several places where the roads dipped, then rose, then dipped again, stretches where his car vanished from sight for several seconds if his followers were keeping at a subtle distance. He also knew perhaps seven ways to get into and out of Garden City, and anyone who followed him into that city—whether federal agents or unfriendly
amici—
was almost sure to lose him.

Another reason that Bonanno had confidence in his ability to hide was that loneliness did not bother him. He had adjusted to it as a teen-ager in Arizona when he lived alone in a motel room, later in his parents’ home, each year between fall and winter while his parents were in New York—an arrangement made necessary by his eviction at the age of fifteen from his boarding school dormitory because one day he had led a group of classmates, who were supposed to be visiting a museum, into a film house showing the controversial
Forever Amber
. He remembered how embittered he was by the punishment, which permitted him to attend classes but prohibited his remaining on campus at night. He was also surprised by his father’s lack of influence with the headmaster, who had accepted generous gifts from the Bonannos in the past, including large shipments of cheese for the school from the factory in Wisconsin, and also butter when it was scarce because of World War II rationing. His parents, remaining in New York because of his father’s activities, could do nothing after the eviction but arrange for him to stay at the Luna Motel, which was owned by a friend of the elder Bonanno and was close to a bus stop where Bill could get a ride to school.

In angry response to his punishment, Bill withdrew his horse from the school’s stable. He kept the animal in a yard behind the motel. The horse and a miniature Doberman pinscher, the same type of dog that was in his car now as he drove upstate, were his main companions during those months his parents were away, and he became very independent and self-reliant. Each morning he got up by himself and made his own breakfast. He spent many evenings alone in the motel room listening to the radio. He remembered the sound of the fast-talking Gary Moore on the Jimmy Durante show and the reassuring voice of Dr. Christian. Occasionally at sunset he took long rides on his horse through the Arizona desert, passing the ranches of the rich, the smoking mud huts of the Zuñi tribesmen, the dusty wranglers and bronco riders who nodded toward him as he passed.

He had first ridden a horse as a three-year-old boy in Long Island, riding on weekends with his father and the other men. Many of Bonanno’s men were superb horsemen, having ridden as small boys in Sicily where horses and donkeys were the main means of transportation; and Bill had many photographs of himself galloping with the mafiosi on weekends through the woods in Long Island. His father insisted from the beginning that he ride a full-sized horse, not a pony, and his pride in his equestrianship compensated to a degree for his lack of achievement as an athlete when he got to high school.

It was not his ear ailment so much as his parents’ travel schedule that limited his participation in organized sports. He wanted to join the football team at Tucson Senior High School, but he was with his parents in New York when football practice began in August. In the winter and spring, when his parents were in Arizona, he spent considerable time with his father after school hours. His life was one of extremes: either he was entirely alone, or he was encircled by his family and his father’s friends. There were times when he wanted to escape the extremities, and not long after his eviction from boarding school he took some money and ran away. He boarded a bus for New York, a five-day journey, and on arriving at the terminal on Forty-third Street off Broadway he took another bus upstate to the family farm in Middletown, which was close to where he was driving at this moment on the New York State Thruway, and he was tempted now to pull off the main road and briefly revisit the farm that his father had since sold. He resisted the temptation, although he continued to think about his visit to the farm many years ago, remembering how upset the farmers were when he arrived, saying that his father had telephoned and had just flown to Tucson in an attempt to find him.

Within a few days the elder Bonanno arrived at the farm, angry at first, but then his anger subsided. He admitted that he had also run away at fifteen, in Sicily, and he thought that perhaps such experiences were part of a boy’s growing up. He nevertheless talked his son into returning to school in Tucson, where a new yellow jeep would await him.

Once back in Arizona, Bill also arranged to visit a doctor. He had had stomach pains sporadically during the year, and after a medical examination it was determined that he had an ulcer.

B
Y MOST PEOPLE’S DEFINITION THE TRIP BY
B
ONANNO
,
Labruzzo, and the other men through New York State into New England would hardly qualify as a vacation: it consisted largely of driving hundreds of miles each day and remaining in motels at night, watching television, and talking among themselves.

After Albany they drove through Bennington, Vermont, and continued on up to Burlington along Lake Champlain. They then headed east into New Hampshire, then south two days later into Massachusetts. The travel route was charted each morning by one of the men who was a native New Englander, and they met each night at predetermined places before they registered, in pairs, at separate motels which were close to one another and had suites with kitchenettes.

They shopped for groceries at local stores and, after walking the dogs, gathered at night in Bonanno’s suite where the cooking was done. Bonanno had brought with him in his attaché case various spices and herbs and also a paperback edition of James Beard’s cookbook. Each night he cooked and the other men cleaned up afterward. He was impressed with the modernization of motels since his boyhood days at the Luna—in addition to the streamlined kitchenettes there were the ice-making machines, body vibrators installed in the beds, wall-to-wall carpeting, color television, and cocktail lounges that provided room service.

The most relaxing part of the trip for Bonanno was the act of driving—moving for dozens of miles without pausing for a traffic jam or even a signal light—and observing the tranquillity of small towns and imagining the peaceful existence of those who occupied them. Occasionally he passed cars driven by young people with skis strapped onto the roofs and college emblems stuck to the windows and the Greek letters of fraternities that he could identify, and he was constantly reminded of how far he had drifted from the campus life he had known a decade ago.

It had been a gradual drifting, occurring so slowly over the years that he did not really know when he had crossed the border into the father’s world. During most of his college career, which had begun in the summer of 1951 and had extended irregularly through 1956, he lived a kind of dual existence. At certain times, particularly when his father seemed to be at odds with other bosses or to be hounded by federal agents, he had felt both a desire and a responsibility to stand by his father, to lend verbal and emotional support even though his father had not requested it, saying instead that he wanted Bill to remain in school concentrating on his studies. And there were times when Bill’s interests seemed to be centered entirely around the campus—he attended classes punctually, joined student groups, supported the football team. He was gregarious and generous, was popular with his classmates; he always had a car and a girl.

But as a student he had limited powers of concentration, seeming to lose interest in subjects that he could not master quickly. He had grown accustomed in high school to making the grade with a minimum of effort because of his superior education in boarding school, but in college this advantage did not exist. He was also distracted by an increasing awareness of his father and by the conflicts that he began to recognize in himself. While he did not want to inherit his father’s problems, did not want to be identified with gangsterism and suffer the social ostracism that resulted from exposure in the press, he also did not want to separate himself from his father’s circumstances or feel apologetic or defensive about his name, particularly since he did not believe that his father was guilty of crimes against society. Sometimes the reverse was true, society was using such men as Joseph Bonanno to pay for the widespread sins in the system. In any case, no matter how damaging the consequences might be to himself, he could not turn against his father, nor did he really want to. His emotional link with his father was very strong, exceeding the normal bond of filial fidelity. It was more intense, more unquestioning, there was a unity in the tension they both shared and a certain romanticism about the risks and dangers involved, and there was also a kind of religious overtone in the relationship, a combination of blind faith and fear, formality and love. The many long periods of separation had in a strange way drawn them closer, had made each visit an event, a time of reunion and rejoicing, and during their months apart Bill’s youthful imagination and memory had often endowed his father with qualities approximating a deity, so impressive, absolute, and almost foreign was the elder Bonanno in person.

Joseph Bonanno was handsome in ways both strong and serene; he had soft brown eyes, a finely etched face, and a benign expression that was evident even in photographs taken by the police. Considering that police photographers and the tabloid cameramen were rarely flattering and usually made Mafia suspects appear grim and sinister, Bill thought it remarkable that his father seemed gracious and composed in nearly every one of the hundreds of news photos and police posters that were displayed in recent years—including the latest ones circulated since his disappearance.
Never let anyone know how you feel
, Joseph Bonanno told his son, and Bill tried to follow the advice. He remembered an occasion years ago when he accepted an invitation to appear on Alumni Day at his old boarding school: after he delivered a pleasant little speech to the students expressing the hope that his own children might one day benefit from the school’s fine principles, he walked across the stage smiling and shook the hand of the headmaster who had evicted him from the dormitory.

During the drive through New England he remembered several incidents from his past that had seemed inconsequential when they occurred, but now in retrospect they revealed the double life he led as a boy, the private battles he fought without knowing he was fighting. He knew then only that his life was dominated by a soft-spoken man in silk suits who arrived in Arizona every winter from New York and put an end to Bill’s loneliness, speaking in oracles, offering ancient remedies for contemporary ailments. He remembered his father directing him into the desert sun every afternoon to sit on a chair and tilt his head in such a way as to expose his left ear to the heat, saying that it would stop the draining; which it had. He remembered a summer day in Long Island when his sister cut her leg badly climbing a fence, and his father carried her into the house, placed her on a table, and squeezed lemon juice into the wound, massaging it in a special way that stopped the bleeding, and after the wound healed, there was no scar. He recalled how his father arranged with a judge to free him without penalty after he was caught speeding without a license when he was thirteen, and he remembered being extricated from other situations, too, boyish pranks or minor crimes during his hot-rodding days in high school, which was about the time he became curious and even intrigued by his father’s world.

He often wondered how he would measure up to the men around his father. Sometimes he heard them speaking casually about the danger they faced, or the jails that might await them, and he wondered if he would have been that calm in the circumstances.

The idea of jail both worried and fascinated him in those days, and he remembered when he was once arrested as a high school student. He and a group of boys were at a football game, behaving boisterously throughout the afternoon. They were pushing, shouting, and tossing paper cups which so irritated other spectators that the police finally evicted them from the stadium and charged them with disorderly conduct. They spent the night in jail, an experience that Bill found interesting during the first hour, but then it quickly palled. And yet he realized that his offensive behavior was deliberate, he really wanted to end up in jail, and he was also somewhat satisfied later that he had remained cool and controlled during confinement.

News of the incident did not reach his father, although his teachers learned of it and were disappointed and surprised. Unlike some boys in the junior class, Bill Bonanno was not thought of as troublesome or rebellious. He was regarded as a student leader; he was president of the student antiliquor club, an organizer of the blood drive, an editor on the magazine. He did not smoke cigarettes, because of a promise he had made one day to an elderly woman he met in a café, a tubercular recuperating in Tucson, that he would avoid the habit. After asking for his pledge in writing on a paper napkin, she handed him a five-dollar bill; he kept his word along with the money and napkin from that day on.

Despite the appearance of propriety and leadership in high school, there were nights when he indulged his restlessness by traveling with a gang of Mexican youths who specialized in stealing Cadillac hubcaps and other auto accessories that could be resold to used-car dealers, junk yards, or to motorists. Some gang members became involved in the summer of 1950 with an older group of gunrunners along the Mexican border, a risky and exciting operation that appealed to him, but he could not pursue it because he had to go East with his parents in June.

He remembered that trip as a strange, tense journey of long silences and new insights into his father’s way of life. He had expected his father to let him drive much of the way through Arizona into Texas and onward toward New York, as his father had done during previous trips to New York for the summer, but on the trip in 1950 his father would not relinquish the wheel, and in addition to his mother and baby brother, there was one of his father’s men in the car. The route his father followed was different from what had been familiar in the past; they drove through El Paso and Van Horn, avoiding the customary visit to Dallas, and then remained for two days in Brownsville, Texas, where other men arrived to speak with his father. He remembered while stopping for the night in St. Louis that his mother and father were not registered together at the hotel; the elder Bonanno and his companion took one room, and Mrs. Bonanno and the two sons shared a suite elsewhere in the hotel. They left St. Louis in the middle of the night and drove toward Wisconsin, not along the usual roads toward New York.

Through June and most of July they remained in Wisconsin, living in motels or cabins near the lakes north of Green Bay, not arriving in New York until the end of July. Then they settled in a house on the north shore of Long Island, living in seclusion except for the visits of men. It was a mournful summer in which conversations seemed leveled to a whisper and dinner was served every night without the usual clattering of plates or rattling of silver. Bill asked no questions. But he knew what was happening—his father and many of his father’s friends were feeling the pressure of the Kefauver committee, and they were trying to avoid subpoenas that would summon them to testify before the Senate and the television cameras.

Although the main target of the committee was Frank Costello, whose appearance was marked by his ill temper under the hot lights as the cameras focused on his nervously tapping fingertips, other names were mentioned in the press that Bill Bonanno was personally familiar with. Joseph Profaci was prominently cited on the Senate crime charts, and so was Joseph Magliocco.

While Joseph Bonanno was also mentioned, he did not receive great attention, and he successfully avoided an appearance before the investigators. Nevertheless, Bonanno was deeply disturbed by the publicity he did get, because it was the first time in years that he was openly associated with organized crime. The elder Bonanno was especially upset because the exposure introduced his daughter to the charges against him, and Catherine, who was then sixteen, broke down and cried for days. But the revelation did not diminish her affection for him. She, like Bill, was filled with compassion, and she actually felt closer to her father than she had before.

After that summer Bill left New York to begin his final term at Tucson Senior High. He borrowed a company car from the Bonanno cheese factory, and accompanied by a school friend, he drove quickly across the country, loving the buoyant sense of escape he felt behind the wheel. He arrived in Arizona a week before classes began. Then he drove an additional 1,200 miles alone to San Antonio to visit a girl he was fond of, the sister of a classmate from his boarding school days. Her father, an industrialist in Michigan, raised polo ponies, and Bill remembered riding them during the visit, galloping over the turf imagining the good life of men in white helmets and jodhpurs, swinging mallets through the sky.

His final year in high school dragged on listlessly, the single memorable event being his father’s graduation gift, a new Chevrolet Bel Air hardtop. He began at the University of Arizona that June, contemplating a degree in prelaw, but soon he switched to agricultural engineering, believing it would provide a useful background for the day when he would inherit part of his father’s share in a large cotton farm north of Tucson. On reaching twenty-one, he would have in his own name not only land but certain income-producing properties that his father, a skillful real estate speculator, had acquired since coming to Arizona. Bill looked forward to earning his own money, for his father had always been tight about allowances, an inconsistent trait in an otherwise generous man. It was typical of his father to buy him a new car but to provide so little spending money that Bill was usually out of gas.

As a result Bill was compelled to take part-time jobs after school, which was what his father wanted; the elder Bonanno abhored idleness, and one of his favorite expressions was
the best way to kill time is to work it to death
. Bill had begun working during his early teens, and during his college days he worked at night at a drive-in hamburger stand, where he met a pretty blonde waitress, a divorcee with whom he had his first sexual affair.

Before this time, his experience consisted largely of heavy petting with girls like the one in San Antonio and quick ejaculations into a town tart who first seduced him in the projection room of the Catalina movie house in Tucson on a day no film was shown. Although he had had opportunities with other girls and could have used his parents’ home, he never took full advantage of their many absences. He was somewhat puritanical in those days, incapable of sexual activity in his mother’s linen, and he did not even hold parties there with his young friends because there was the possibility that outsiders might snoop through his father’s things.