Hillside Stranglers (10 page)

Yet it was not so much the serial childbearing: Candy’s Latin background had conditioned her for that. Nor did Angelo fail to support his multiplying family while it lasted. He was becoming skilled at auto upholstery now and could always find a job. And when the family needed something they could not afford, he could always steal it. He had become more adept at avoiding the law and was not arrested frequently during the marriage: in 1962 he served five days and in 1964 sixty and another five days for petty theft associated with automobiles. No, it was Angelo’s violence and sexual behavior which finally drove Candy to divorce.

She did not like Angelo’s calling her a cunt, and she was disgusted when he referred to Jenny by the same word. And he made her feel like one. One night during their first year together, he appeared in their bedroom with rope in his hands, tied her spread-eagled to the bedposts, and raped her so violently that she feared for her life. More and more as the years passed, her pain seemed to give him his greatest pleasure, and when she failed to respond to his pinches and slaps and pile-driver poundings, he would tell her she was “a dead piece of ass.” Nor did she share his passion for anal intercourse. But Angelo was not a man to be denied. Although he never drank, he beat and kicked her when she failed to please him, and far from caring whether the children witnessed the beatings, he seemed to want them to watch.

One afternoon in 1963, when the children ranged in age
from one to seven, she refused him what he considered his prerogative and he decided to teach her a lesson. He dragged her into the living room, threw her down on the floor in front of the children, and forced himself up her backside.

It was about this time that Angelo accused Candy of having an affair with his cousin Joe. She at last decided that no matter what she would be facing trying to raise the children alone, she had to get rid of him. In her divorce complaint of May 1964, she cited extreme cruelty as cause, mentioning the beatings, and the court responded by awarding her a hundred and fifty dollars a month in support—not per child but in total. She did not ask for alimony. But to avoid paying anything at all, Angelo started spelling his name Bono instead of Buono, and Candy was forced to draw on the county for assistance as an abandoned mother whose husband had disappeared.

She stayed in the house on Glover, and he moved to an apartment in Glendale. But not long after they had separated, Candy’s fears for her children’s survival got the better of her and she went to visit Angelo to see about a reconciliation. He responded by handcuffing her, forcing her into his car, and driving into the hills, where he ordered her out and up against a tree. There he shoved a pistol into her stomach and announced that he was about to kill her.

He did not, but Candy gave up the idea of reconciliation.

Angelo was not long without a mate. In 1965 he began living with Nanette Campina, a twenty-five-year-old from New York whom he had met on a blind date. Although this union was never made official by church or state, it lasted as long as his marriage to Candy and resembled it in many ways. Nanette already had two children, Annette and Danny, but Angelo’s paternal urge was still unspent, and he sired Tony in 1967 and Sam in 1969. By his thirty-fifth year he had multiplied himself eight times, with enough sons to ensure that the Buono/Bono line would not vanish with him.

He beat Nanette as he had Candy, but this time he told his woman that if she ever so much as considered leaving him, he would kill her or have her killed. He had friends, he said, powerful
people he called “the boys,” and they would hunt her down no matter where she went. She stayed.

In March 1968, Angelo had his most serious brush with the law up to that time. Trying to stop a rash of auto thefts, the police had staked out a parking lot at the comer of Vermont and Marathon in Hollywood, from which several cars had disappeared. They observed Angelo as he and a friend, Ralph Harper, worked a wire coat hanger into the window of a Thunderbird, sprang the lock, and started to remove the hardtop. The police closed in, and, searching him, they found handcuffs in Angelo’s pocket.

The judge, noting that Mr. Bono (sic) was a family man with children to support, sentenced him to three years’ probation, with fifteen weekends to be served in the county jail. In September 1968, however, the courts recognized Bono as Buono, and Angelo was ordered to serve a year in the county jail for failure to provide support for his five children by Candy. This sentence was suspended on condition that he pay Candy no less than a hundred and ninety dollars a month and obey all laws. He did neither. By 1971, in consideration of his faithful weekend attendance at jail, and because he had managed to elude the scrutiny of probation officers, his auto theft conviction was reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor.

In that year Nanette finally got up the courage to leave him. She decided that she would rather risk death than remain with Angelo, and she suspected, or hoped, that his threats were empty. Her daughter Annette, by then fourteen, had begun complaining that Angelo was fondling her too intensely and making obscene suggestions to her, and Nanette feared that Angelo had achieved more than that with the girl. “She needs breaking in,” Angelo had been saying. “I’ll break her in.” Without telling him, one day Nanette put herself and the four children on a plane to Florida and never came back.

A year later Angelo married a girl named Deborah Taylor at the Silver Bell Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas, but this was a mere lark; they never lived together, and they never bothered to get divorced. Angelo was learning not to take women too seriously. He changed apartments often, moving from Glendale
over to the Oakwood Apartments above Forest Lawn Drive, then back to Glendale on Chevy Chase, and for a time he shared a place in the Silver Lake District, known locally as the Swish Alps, with Ralph Harper. Harper was an aspiring actor who joined Angelo in auto theft only when between roles. He appeared in productions of
Hello, Dolly
and
Gaily, Gaily
but lost out to Archie Moore, the light heavyweight champ, for the part of Nigger Jim in the movie of
Huckleberry Finn.
Harper’s stage name was Artie Ford, and he was proud to be buddies with Jay Silverheels, who had played Tonto in the
Lone Ranger
television series. Through Artie Ford, Angelo met a lot of Hollywood people and began building his reputation as one of the few auto upholsterers who could work with classic and antique cars. He did not yet have his own shop, but it was during this period that he fixed up a sports car belonging to Frank Sinatra and a limousine that was said to be Joe Bonnano’s. Angelo had a fine Italian hand with cars.

Life in the Swish Alps suited Angelo for a time, but Artie Ford found him a difficult apartmentmate. He was obsessively neat, Ford thought. He would complain when anything, even a telephone receiver, was not put back properly, and he was constantly dusting and cleaning. And he had some peculiar habits. Their apartment overlooked a high school, and sometimes Artie Ford would catch Angelo looking through binoculars at the students and playing with himself. Normal enough, Artie thought, but he did not know what to think of Angelo’s boast that he had “banged” his stepdaughter, Annette Campino, who he said was just the right age, because young girls’ “pussies smell real good, like cheese.” Angelo also claimed with pride that he had turned Annette over to his sons, so that they could have a go at her, and that they had. Everyone had banged Annette, Angelo said. And when Angelo’s son Peter told Artie Ford that Angelo had had sex with
him,
too, Artie thought that Angelo was probably a little strange. But when Angelo told Artie that he was so angry with Candy that he had snuck into her house and turned the gas on when she was out, hoping that she would light a cigarette when she got home and blow herself up, Artie was alarmed.

“My God,” Artie said, “what about the kids?”

“Fuck the kids,” Angelo said.

Still, Angelo and Artie were good friends and remained so after Angelo moved out.

In 1975, Angelo finally got what he had been thinking about for some time, his own shop, when he found the place at 703 East Colorado Street. Now that he had resolved his financial responsibilities to his wives and children, he had been able to save enough money for a down payment on the property, and he was handy enough to do most of the painting and plumbing and carpentry himself. By the middle of that year, he was moved in and open for business, and he began living the kind of life that he knew was right for him, a bachelor’s life filled with women who could be dismissed when they had fulfilled their function, and an independent businessman’s life, with no one to call boss. Now he could set his own hours, and when an opportunity presented itself, he could seize it. He worked alone. When he needed someone to clean up or run an errand, he hired Frankie Anderson, a local kid whose nickname was Goofy. Angelo had no use for an employee with an inquiring mind.

For Angelo, the set-up on Colorado was perfect. With his shop behind his house, he hardly needed a car, and when he did need one he would drive one of his customers’. The location between the car wash and the glass shop gave his business exposure during the day and gave him privacy at night, and the metal awning he put up between the shop and his house shielded his activities from the view from the Orange Grove apartments behind. He already knew the neighborhood well. It took him no time at all to establish himself and settle into his diurnal-nocturnal routine and its variations.

His work habits were generously punctuated by women. He would arise early and go to breakfast with a friend, Dave Stuart, who ran a gas station, at one of the local restaurants, Henry’s or the Copper Penny, both within walking distance. Soon Bob Brinkman, who owned Henry’s, brought his gull-wing Mercedes coupe to Angelo for repair, and the waitresses
brought themselves. Angelo liked to kid the waitresses. His favorite line was a mild insult, something like “You ought to get your teeth fixed, honey. Then I might take a second look.” Said in the right way, with his rough voice and the hint of a grin, a remark like that would usually get them going:

“How would you know? My boyfriend don’t complain. I bet you’d like to see more.”

“Nah, you’re too ugly for me,” Angelo would say, eyes fixed on her chest.

“You’d be surprised.”

“Yeah? Well, surprise me. I like surprises.”

It was easy. Women were drawn to Angelo. They liked his swagger and his big hands and the way he looked straight into them. He let them know right away what was on his mind, and he followed through. They would take him up on his invitation to visit his shop. He might offer to make them floor mats or sew up a torn car seat for nothing.

One of the Henry’s waitresses, Tonya Dockery, a little brunette teenager, got to like Angelo so much that she gave him a dog, Sparky, and later a couple of rabbits. She was living with a man, but Angelo said she could drop by anytime, and she did. When she would complain about her lover, Angelo would tell her not to act like a cunt, and she liked that: it made her feel that her lover couldn’t get her down, and it gave her the illusion that Angelo believed that she was capable of acting like something other than a cunt. Sometimes she would come by Angelo’s late at night with a bottle of wine.

“I don’t drink,” Angelo would say. “It eats your brain cells.”

So Tonya would drink the wine and spend the night with Angelo on his big water-bed.

Tonya introduced Angelo to her friend Twyla Hill, and soon Angelo was servicing Twyla, too. But when Angelo would put his penis down Twyla’s throat until she gagged and then refuse to take it out, telling her that she should like it that way and that if she passed out sucking on him she would get “a terrific head-rush,”. Twyla would get angry and pound on him with her fists. “Go ahead,” Angelo would say. “Go ahead and
fight. It makes my dick hard.” And one night when Tonya and Twyla were at Angelo’s together and Tonya suggested that it might be fun if all three of them got into bed, Angelo was all for it, but Twyla backed out once she had her clothes off. Angelo said she was a bitch and told her to get into bed. When she refused, Angelo grabbed her and said he was going to put her ass outside.

“I’ll scream!” Twyla said.

“Go ahead,” Angelo said. “Nobody will hear you.” And to prove it, he did put her outside naked for a minute, but he let her back in when she promised to behave. She called Angelo a motherfucker, but she behaved.

Soon Angelo was known throughout the neighborhood as an excellent upholsterer and a stud. The girls came around so often and in such numbers that Angelo did not get a great deal of work done. You can’t fuck that much and become a millionaire, as someone said, but the situation suited Angelo just fine. He would chat up the girls everywhere he found them, in restaurants, on the street, in local businesses. He liked them young, the younger the better. Cristoforo Guglielmo Salvaggio, who owned a gutter shop and was Angelo’s partner in a Christmas-tree lot at the corner of Glendale and Chevy Chase every year, was amazed at the number and the youth of Angelo’s girls.

“Hey, Angelo,” Cristoforo said, “some of these broads you got, they’re so young, they don’t even know how to wash their pussies yet.”

“I show them how,” Angelo said.

Melinda Hooper was one. Angelo had broken her in when she had been only thirteen, in 1973. She was the girl who lived with her parents way up on Alta Terrace. Angelo was her mentor, as it were, and she kept returning to him even after she had other boyfriends, including one she had gotten herself put in jail for when she had gone all the way to Oklahoma to help him break out of the state prison there. She liked Angelo so much that she introduced him to her parents and invited him to dinner at her house, but when the parents saw that Angelo was forty years old, they objected, so Angelo would usually drop
Melinda off at the corner of Alta Terrace and La Crescenta after seeing her.

Angelo’s sons’ girlfriends provided another source. Not only could they introduce him to other young girls, sometimes they offered themselves. Peter Buono for a while was dating Dawn Vaiarelli, who was sixteen, and Angelo managed to sleep with her on several occasions and with her friend Julie Villaseñor, who was dating another of his sons, Danny. It was a close family situation.