Honor Thy Father (60 page)

The groom’s father might have also missed the wedding had he not been granted permission to attend it by a judge in Sacramento who was then overseeing a trial in which Bill Bonanno and four codefendants stood accused of running a mail-order business that was funneling part of its profits into organized crime activities. Even though Bonanno would later be acquitted of all charges, he remained a frustrated and resentful individual during this period of his life—a man in his mid-fifties who thought that no matter what efforts he made toward operating legitimately in the business world, he would never be legitimate enough to convince legal authorities that he was not still in the Mafia. He believed that being a Bonanno meant that his name would always be notoriously presented in the headlines no matter how specious might be the charges brought against him by prosecutors seeking publicity, or by some of his former business partners and employees who had gotten into legal jams themselves but could gain immunity from prosecution by naming him as a coconspirator.

After he had returned to California in 1980 from the McNeil Island penitentiary—where he had served two years for parole violations and tax offenses—he convinced his wife Rosalie that they should move to Mexico, explaining that he had to distance himself from the “harassment tactics” of U.S. investigators. But after he and Rosalie had lived in Mexico for a year he was arrested by the Mexican police at the behest of U.S. lawmen wanting him to face charges of violating a California conspiracy code and face ongoing allegations that he was skimming thousands of dollars from businesses he was associated with.

Meanwhile his oldest son, Charles—the adopted son who worked as a welder in an auto shop—was taken into police custody on charges of being an accomplice in a ring that traded in the sale of stolen auto parts. While free on bail and waiting to be sentenced, Charles went to his father and confided his plan to flee the country rather than going to jail. “You can run away,” Bill Bonanno told Charles, “but you’re still young, and you’ll be spending the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.” Charles Bonanno served two years in the Jamestown correctional institution in northern California.

Bill Bonanno himself managed to stay out of jail most of the 1980s, thanks to his lawyers’ legal maneuverings and skills in procrastination. But in 1989, after his conviction on charges of belonging to a partnership that had given fraudulent financial information to a bank, he was sent for a little more than three years to the San Quentin penitentiary in California. He was released in 1993 at age sixty-one. Having earlier sold his house in San Jose, he now rejoined Rosalie at their new home in Tucson, a few miles from his father’s residence. Joseph Bonanno was now eighty-eight and still affectionately acquainted with Theresa D’Antonio.

While Bill Bonanno had been away in prison Rosalie had worked for a while as a real estate agent in Tucson and then opened her own business making bridal veils. She had also written in collaboration with Beverly Donofrio a memoir entitled
Mafia Marriage
that was published in 1990. In it Rosalie explained:

In 1995 Rosalie joined her husband and the rest of the family in celebrating the ninetieth birthday of Joseph Bonanno, a black-tie event attended by three hundred guests at a ballroom in a Tucson hotel. I was among those invited by Bill, who served as the master of ceremonies, and seated at the tables around me was a local contingent of businessmen, priests, attorneys, bankers, bail bondsmen, and morticians.

The
Arizona Daily Star
assigned a reporter and photographer to cover the event, and on the following day the
Daily Star
published a second story conceding that several readers had complained that the newspaper’s birthday coverage had “glorified Bonanno” and were also upset to read that Governor Fife Symington of Arizona and Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, had sent birthday greetings. Joseph Bonanno had long claimed to be on friendly terms with Arizona’s leading political figures, tracing such relationships back to his earliest days as an Arizona property owner in the 1940s; but now in 1995, following the
Daily Star
’s birthday article, the offices of the governor and senator both released statements denying that personal greetings had been sent to Joseph Bonanno, explaining that their pro forma acknowledgments had been sent by staff members.

After listening to the tributes expressed by his children and grandchildren, Joseph Bonanno stood at the dais to describe his life as both “romantic” and “traumatic,” adding that his greatest disagreements had always been with the U.S. government—“with your government, with my government; with the law, the Department of Justice. All my life, I’ve believed that extreme justice is extreme injustice. Since I was a boy, in good conscience, I learned that the grace of God is before the law, [and that] will always stay in my mind until God calls me.”

Joseph Bonanno lived another seven years, dying in 2002 at his home in Tucson at the age of ninety-seven. He received a grand funeral in the local Catholic church and major obituaries in leading newspapers around the country, including
The New York Times
, and in several journals overseas, including
The China Post
, published in Taiwan.

The China Post
’s headline read:
JOSEPH BONANNO, MAFIA DON, DEAD AT 97 FROM HEART FAILURE;
and its story began:

After the Bonanno funeral, Theresa D’Antonio left Arizona to make her home in Louisiana, where she had relatives, while Bill and Rosalie Bonanno remained in Tucson to dispose of the elder Bonanno’s home and possessions and many of the burdens they had inherited as a result of their kinship to him. Bill Bonanno felt, for the first time in his adult life, that he now had to answer only for himself when questioned by law-enforcement authorities; and, to his pleasant surprise, they rarely questioned him at all after the passing of his father.

While his wife continued to earn income from her bridal veil business in Tucson, he hired himself out in Hollywood as a consultant and coproducer to movie companies planning to make feature films or television shows dealing with the endlessly popular subject of the Mafia. He also wrote a book entitled
Bound by Honor: A Mafioso’s Story
, and while promoting this and other projects he was sometimes a guest on TV talk shows and even participated in a chat on
Time
magazine’s Web site:

Although I had not written anything about the Bonannos since the publication of my own book in 1971, I did remain in regular contact with Bill and Rosalie in the decades that followed, always seeing Bill whenever he was in New York publicizing one of his projects, and on other occasions we dined together in either California or Arizona.

In 2007, however, I received a call from the newly appointed managing editor of
Newsweek
, Daniel Klaidman, who, after telling me that he had recently reread
Honor Thy Father
, wondered if I would do an updated piece for his magazine explaining how Bill and Rosalie’s four children were getting along these days. I immediately telephoned Bill and Rosalie to see if they would arrange a family reunion in Tucson for my benefit, and, after a date had been agreed to in the middle of May, I flew to Tucson to be reintroduced to the four younger Bonannos, whom I had not seen in several years.

The oldest of Rosalie and Bill’s three sons, Charles, was now forty-nine. He was a six-foot-two, 240-pound bachelor employed as an interstate truck driver. He told me that he carried all types of cargo coast-to-coast in an eighteen-wheel vehicle in which he also stored his golf clubs, his fishing tackle, and clothing appropriate for wearing on those rare occasions when he took women to dinner in places more refined than the roadside diners and fast-food drive-ins that he frequented when alone.

After serving his two-year prison term during the 1980s, he remained out of trouble during the following decade while working in a Costco auto-repair shop in Phoenix, and then he quit to become a long-distance trucker. But his surname still shadowed him. One day, after being assigned to deliver merchandise from Fresno to British Columbia, he informed the dispatcher that he was not carrying a passport. “Oh, don’t worry,” came the reply, “you won’t need it.” At the Canadian border, after submitting his driver’s license to a customs official who checked his credentials though a computer, the official turned to him and asked: “Are you in any way related to either Joseph Bonanno or Bill Bonanno?” “They’re my grandfather and father,” Charles answered, and the response was: “Well, then you’re on the nonentry list.”

Charles Bonanno returned across the border and, after notifying the dispatcher, he lived in his truck for three days until a second driver arrived with a packed van for him to deliver within the United States while the newly arrived driver took over Charles’s van and proceeded with it into Canada.

Rosalie and Bill’s second son, Dr. Joseph Bonanno, often bedridden from acute asthma as a schoolboy, made use of his isolation by preparing himself academically for his future acceptance to college and medical school. Unlike the frail youth he had been, Dr. Bonanno was now a robust 46-year-old individual who stood nearly six foot two, weighted 230 pounds, and, physically favoring his father, had deep-set brown eyes, dark hair, and broad shoulders. Since his marriage in 1986, and during the birth of three sons now in their teens, Joseph had practiced pediatrics at a hospital near his home in Phoenix. While treating his young patients and listening to their complaints, he was invariably reminded of how he had felt as an ailing youngster decades before, and he often came to their bedside attired in clothing that he hoped would cheer them up—his shirts and even his neckties depicting a cast of well-known characters from children’s literature and Disney cartoons.

He told me that after he had been affiliated with the Phoenix hospital for a year or more, he was approached one day by a senior medical colleague who, after complimenting him on his work, said: “You know, we almost didn’t accept you because of your name.”

“Well,” I commented, “I guess you’ve overcome your surname.”

“I’ve overcome it,” said Dr. Bonanno, “but I didn’t escape it.”

The third Bonanno son, Salvatore, was now a high-strung and muscular man of forty-four who stood five-foot-eleven-inches tall, weighed 250 pounds, wore a goatee, and had slightly graying neatly-trimmed brown hair. He resided in Scottsdale, Arizona, working as a projects manager with a computer firm, and had been twice married, most recently in 2003. He had four children, two with each wife. His first-born child was now an 18-year-old woman attending college in Oregon, his next a teenaged boy in high school, and his last two a son and daughter of preschool age. Salvatore; his present wife, Christine; and the four children were all at the Bonanno family reunion in Tucson, and, since the gathering took place near the end of the final episode of the long-running television series
The Sopranos
, I asked Salvatore and the others what they thought of this fictional representation of family life within the Mafia.

Only Salvatore and his brother the doctor claimed to be regular watchers, if not admirers, of the show; and this admission led Salvatore to remind me of how furious he had become during the previous year when
The Arizona Republic
published an article comparing the program’s main character, Tony Soprano, to his late grandfather Joseph Bonanno. Tony Soprano as depicted in the show was a vulgar lowlife, Salvatore insisted, lacking any of the courtly shrewdness and dignified demeanor of his grandfather. Salvatore went on to say that when the story was published he was working as a senior projects manager with a company under contract to install security systems within a casino located on an Indian reservation in Arizona. On the day the article appeared, Salvatore said, his boss informed him that he was being shifted from the casino job to another assignment because someone who had read the article believed that it was bad public relations for a casino to be serviced by a member of the Bonanno family.