Honor Thy Father (19 page)

The government also gained further evidence about the dissension, which the tabloids liked to refer to as the Banana Split, through the use of a hidden camera focused on the wedding reception of Di Gregorio’s daughter at the Huntington Townhouse in Long Island on November 14, 1965. Among those identified as attending the wedding was the Buffalo don, Stefano Magaddino, senior member of the commission and Di Gregorio’s most powerful ally. Magaddino was quickly subpoenaed, but his lawyer said he would be unable to appear because he was confined to his home with a heart ailment. As the government prepared to appoint a doctor to determine Magaddino’s condition, several other subpoenas were issued to men who had attended the reception, and subpoenas were also served to men who had been friendly with Di Gregorio in the past but had not gone to the wedding, or perhaps had not been invited.

A week before Christmas there was a rumor that certain members of Di Gregorio’s faction were trying to promote a truce with the Bonanno men, because they felt that the bitterness and mutual mistrust had lessened the effectiveness of both groups and made them more vulnerable to police surveillance and intrigue: the police were in a position to play one group off against the other, to attribute schemes to one group and leak the word to the press, and the other group had no way of knowing whether or not it was being deceived. It was also rumored that Di Gregorio was not happy with the responsibilities of leadership, was unnerved by the publicity he was receiving and by being followed by detectives whenever he left his home in West Babylon, Long Island. At sixty-three years old, he had already had three heart attacks, and his men believed that he would soon retire to be replaced by a subordinate officer, Paul Sciacca, who was acceptable to Magaddino and the other members of the commission.

Frank Labruzzo heard about Di Gregorio’s situation and the rumored desire for a truce from an informant in the Di Gregorio camp. In January Labruzzo received a message that Di Gregorio’s men wanted to have a “sit down” with Bonanno representatives in hopes of reaching some agreement, and Labruzzo relayed the word to Bill Bonanno. Bill was skeptical. He saw no reason why Di Gregorio should be more conciliatory now than he had been during the past two years, and he also sensed the possibility that he was being “set up” to be shot or captured, which he had assumed was part of the opposition’s plan since he had gotten out of jail in June. As a precaution since then, Bill had never traveled alone, had avoided predictable routines, had never arranged a meeting in a place that had not been surveyed in advance by his men, who then, hidden, stood guard. He had been wary of sniper’s bullets even as he drove from Long Island with his lawyer each morning to appear in court in Manhattan, never following the same route two days in a row. He had mapped out approximately thirty different ways of traveling between East Meadow and lower Manhattan, some direct, some circuitous.

Labruzzo agreed that Bill was wise to do this, and he shared Bill’s skepticism about the peace meeting. There was no explanation for a change in attitude from Di Gregorio or Magaddino unless they had reached some private agreement with Joseph Bonanno, and if this were true the elder Bonanno would have somehow communicated this to his own people.

A few days later, Labruzzo received another message, assuring him that the proposed meeting was a sincere attempt to make life more livable for both groups, even agreeing to meet in a place appointed by the Bonanno loyalists. Labruzzo was swayed by the last point. He discussed it with Bill, and within the week Labruzzo sent back word—they would meet at the home of one of Bill’s relatives on Troutman Street in Brooklyn, a block which both Labruzzo and Bill Bonanno were intimately familiar with, since it was in the neighborhood where Labruzzo had been reared as a boy and where Bill used to come to visit his grandfather. The German bar where Bill bought containers of beer for his one-legged grandfather was near Troutman Street, and Bill had returned to the nieghborhood regularly in recent years to visit relatives and friends who still lived in the area, which was almost exclusively Italian. Along here, forty years ago, Joseph Bonanno had built up his organization, recruiting young men from the crowded tenements occupied by immigrants from Castellammare and neighboring Sicilian villages—men like Gaspar Di Gregorio—and it seemed appropriate now, in 1966 on this bitterly cold Friday night of January 28, that Bill Bonanno and his companions would return to the scene of past unity to meet with other members of the quarreling family.

Bill and his men arrived shortly before eleven o’clock, parking a few blocks away from the appointed place and walking cautiously along the sidewalks of the narrow streets lined with rows of brick buildings. It was very quiet and bleak; few lights were burning in the apartments and houses, and Bill assumed that the elderly Italian residents were already asleep, unlike the residents of the Negro and Puerto Rican neighborhoods that Bill had driven through about five minutes ago. There the bars were crowded, the jukeboxes blared in the clamor of Friday night, the people were younger, livelier, newer to New York. But here in the Italian quarter where there had not been an influx of new people in years, it was as quiet and still as a square in western Sicily late at night, and the old people slept in houses that they had probably moved into not long after landing in Brooklyn’s Ridgewood district early in the century, replacing the Germans who had moved out. Bill remembered many of these houses and stores from his boyhood visits, and he was sure that they had looked the same during his parents’ childhood days along these blocks. The nearby church where his parents were married in 1931 was unchanged, although the parish had become smaller and poorer; and the grade school that Joseph Bonanno attended as a boy in knee pants was still there, although the elder Bonanno had only vague recollections of his education there since it was hastily interrupted in 1911 by
his
father’s decision to return to Castellammare, where there was “trouble” in the hills.

Bill and his companions continued to walk slowly toward the Troutman Street address, passing certain buildings that had been “drops” many years ago for numbers runners, and he noticed a birdbath on the tiny front lawn of a house that he had played around as a boy, a birdbath that was covered with ice on this evening. He guessed that the temperature was below twenty degrees, too cold to talk as he hunched his shoulders and walked with his ungloved hands in the pockets of his overcoat, his right hand clutching the cold metal of a gun.

Suddenly Bill felt a companion’s arm shove him abruptly to one side, and he heard the frantic yell: “Bill,
Bill
, watch out!”

A shotgun was being extended through the slowly opening front door of one of the houses, and as Bill leaped toward the sidewalk, falling beside a parked car, he heard gun blasts and sharp-sounding bullets pierce the icy street, striking the stone walls of buildings around him. He and his men fired back at the sniper, who quickly retreated into the building, but bullets continued to come from another direction, perhaps from an upper floor of one of the buildings across the street, hitting where Bill had been standing a few seconds before.

He crouched lower against the fender of the car while the other men, including Labruzzo and Notaro, dashed ahead for cover, firing as they ran, twisting and turning in frantic formation as they sought to escape the ambush. Bill, separated from his companions, knew that if he followed them he would be in the line of fire; so he remained where he was, tense and angry, swearing silently at Di Gregorio. He turned to see if the sniper had reappeared in the doorway; then he turned back toward the street, rising slightly on his toes as he peeked through the windshield of the car, over the dashboard statue of a plastic saint, trying to see from which building the other snipers were firing. He could not tell. He did not see anyone on the roof ledges, and the only figures in the windows were those people who had just turned on their lights and lifted their shades in response to the noise below.

Bill remained absolutely still for a few moments, breathing into his overcoat so that the visibility of his exhalation on this freezing night would not mark him. Then, pistol in hand, he jumped up from his crouched position and began to run, head down, close to the line of parked cars, running faster than he knew he could, concentrating so intently on his escape that he no longer heard the shooting, did not know whether or not he was being observed and shot at. He headed south along Troutman Street toward Knickerbocker Avenue, and at the corner of Knickerbocker he leaped to the right and, without looking back, ran past Jefferson Street, where his grandfather’s house had been, then past Melrose Street, up George Street to Central Avenue, right on Central, left on Flushing Avenue, where he quickly turned around; but no one was following him. He slowed down to catch his breath, leaning against a wall in the shadows. He saw a diner on Flushing Avenue and headed toward it, intending to use the phone, but as he was about to enter he spotted a policeman at the counter drinking coffee. Bill turned around and walked quickly to Bushwick Avenue, where there was a tavern on the corner with a coinbox inside; there he called one of his men, Sam Perrone, who supervised some of the bookmaking operations on the Lower East Side and was at this moment sitting in a Bonanno organization hangout on Second Avenue and Nineteenth Street, in lower Manhattan, called the Posh Place. Perrone said he would come immediately.

As Bill waited in the bar for Perrone he heard the sirens of police cars, saw them speeding through the intersection, red lights twirling. He looked at his watch and knew that Perrone could drive across the Williamsburg Bridge and reach Bushwick Avenue in twelve or fifteen minutes if there were no delays. Bill ordered a beer and stood at the bar, not far from where a few middle-aged couples sat watching television, oblivious to the distant sound of sirens. He felt his heart pounding, his body exhausted from the run. He wiped his face with his handkerchief and blew his nose, still feeling the frost in his nostrils, and he wanted to sit but remained standing so that he could get a full view of the street. He sipped the beer and watched television for a while, and then he saw Perrone’s car pulling up at the curb, and he quickly ran out and got in.

On the way to East Meadow, Bill told Perrone what had happened, and Perrone listened gravely. Labruzzo and the others appeared to have escaped, Bill said, but he was not sure about injuries. He also did not know which of Di Gregorio’s men had tried to kill him but he vowed he would find out. The whole thing had been a fiasco, and he conceded to Perrone that he had been very naive in thinking that Di Gregorio and his men could be trusted. But Di Gregorio was in deep trouble now for bungling the job, and an explanation to the commission was perhaps the least of Di Gregorio’s problems. He had set off a shooting war; it might be costly and brutal, and the inevitable headlines arising out of tonight’s escapade would undoubtedly result in tremendous pressure from the police, tougher decisions from the courts, and longer jail terms for those convicted. Bill was not so angry as he was disgusted and depressed.

Approaching East Meadow, Perrone stopped the car so that Bill could use a pay phone and tell Rosalie to turn on the outside lights of the house. Five minutes later, Perrone’s car pulled into the brightly lit driveway. Both men smiled forcibly as they entered the house and greeted Rosalie. She made coffee and they sat around the kitchen table for a while speaking in a general way, keeping their voices low so as not to disturb the children. Rosalie had no idea where Bill had been during the evening, nor would she ask, nor would he tell her. From his easy unconcerned manner, she could have assumed that he had spent Friday night playing pinochle with the boys or had gone bowling.

T
HE NEXT DAY
B
ILL HEARD FROM
L
ABRUZZO THAT EVERY
one had gotten home safely but that the police might have found some discarded weapons along Troutman Street and perhaps also the car that Bill had left parked in the neighborhood. The car was parked legally, however, and there was a chance that one of the men could retrieve it before it was ticketed and towed away on Monday, if the area was not surrounded all weekend by the police. Labruzzo, speaking from a telephone booth in Queens to Bill in a booth in Long Island, with Perrone standing guard outside, said he had no idea what the police were now doing or what conclusions they had come to—there was nothing in the morning newspapers or on the radio about the shooting, but Labruzzo felt sure that a police statement would be issued later in the day, and after that the Bonanno men would be in a better position to decide on their next move.

Bill left the booth quickly and returned home with Perrone. They spent the rest of the afternoon listening to the radio, watching television, and playing with the children. Bill was not overly concerned that Di Gregorio’s men would make another attempt on his life right away, not with so many people on the alert; and the presence of Perrone in the house through the day and night did not strike Rosalie as being particularly unusual. Her husband’s friends often spent the night, sometimes several nights in East Meadow, using the room that Elisa had used or sleeping on cots in the basement, and Rosalie found Perrone far more acceptable as a houseguest than most of the other men. He was neater, more cheerful, and he amused the children. A few years older than Bill, with whom he was in partnership in a trucking business in Brooklyn, Perrone was a short, stocky, pleasant-looking man with dark hair and a wide smile. Like most of Bill’s friends, Sam Perrone chain-smoked; unlike them, he was attentative and tender toward Rosalie, to a degree that made her slightly uncomfortable at times. He had a habit, when arriving at the house to pick up Bill, of greeting her with a kiss—not on the cheek but on the mouth. Though she knew it was an innocent gesture, it nonetheless unsettled her. It was too trivial to mention to Bill, who had witnessed it anyway and seemed unabashed, but the fact remained that whenever Rosalie opened the front door for Perrone she instinctively leaned to one side as he entered; but she never seemed out of range for Sam Perrone.

Bill and Perrone spent the rest of the evening indoors; they were visited by other men and listened to each hourly news broadcast. There were no references to the shooting. On the following day, Sunday, when there was still nothing in the press, Bill began to wonder. It was as if the explosive experience on Friday night had been merely a nightmare, a grade-B gangster movie conceived in his own mind. He could not understand how the newspapers, which had been so aggressive in recent years in its coverage of the Mafia, devoting unlimited space to the most infinitesimal facts and unconfirmed rumors about underworld characters, publishing sneak pictures of alleged mafiosi eating in restaurants or attending weddings, printing complete transcripts of tapped telephone talks between reputed dons discussing the weather, he could not understand how the press could miss this story, which was one of the few legitimate gangland stories in several years. Two rival factions did indeed wake up a Brooklyn neighborhood with bullets flying in every direction; yet now, two nights later, not a line had been published about it in any newspaper and not a word about it on any radio station in New York, the communications capital of the nation.

The only conclusion that Bill could come to was that on weekends the media was lazy. Or that newsmen were totally dependent on government spokesmen for news leads and these spokesmen had taken the weekend off. Or—and this possibility bothered Bill—it might be that the police were deliberately keeping everything quiet until Di Gregorio’s men could get another shot at him. As improbable as it seemed at first, Bill decided that Di Gregorio or someone higher up could very likely have bought off the desk sergeant or a lieutenant in the precinct that covered Troutman Street, assuring laxity from the police. And yet Bill himself had heard the sirens on Friday night, knew that the police had arrived promptly, and he assumed that there must have been witnesses in the neighborhood who might have called a newspaper or radio station during the weekend. Bill was mystified.

When Monday morning came and went with nothing reported, Bill decided to leak the news to the press himself. It was to his own advantage to do this. He wanted word of Di Gregorio’s blunder to be known to every don in the nation, and he also wanted to force the police to stop playing games and to patrol the streets and inhibit Di Gregorio’s gang from arranging another ambush.

Bill had become acquainted with several New York newspapermen during his court appearances since 1964, individuals who had often tried to interview him about his father. One of the more persistent ones had worked for
The New York Times
, and it was this man that Bill contacted, and he in turn relayed the information to the
Times
’s metropolitan editor. On the following day, Tuesday, February 1, after the
Times
had confirmed only part of Bill Bonanno’s story with the police in Brooklyn, an article was published under the headline
GUN FIGHT LEAVES POLICE PUZZLED
.

Bill was amused on reading this in the
Times
, and he was also interested in the fact that none of the residents in the neighborhood would admit to the police that they had heard guns blasting in the street. Some said they had been sleeping. Others, like Joseph Taranto, who identified himself as a demolition worker, said he thought the noise was from firecrackers. Another resident of Troutman Street, John Bosco, a handyman, was quoted in the
Times
as explaining, “We go to bed early on this street. We’re working people who have to get up early.”

The only person among the more than the one hundred interviewed who would admit to an unusual occurrence on Troutman Street was Mrs. Joseph Cipponeri. It was she who had telephoned the police on Friday night, saying that a man had just broken her door and had run through her living room and kitchen and out into the backyard, smashing the glass of a storm door. When the first of five carloads of police had arrived, they found two revolvers in Mrs. Cipponeri’s hallway and another gun at the kitchen door. Mrs. Cipponeri could not describe the interloper because her rooms were dark; all she saw from her bed was a blurred figure of a man racing wildly through her apartment.

The article in the
Times
quickly led to several follow-up stories in all the newspapers and networks, and this put pressure on the police to unravel the mystery and to supply more information to the press, to the public, and of course to Bonanno’s men. Within a few days it was fairly well established by the newspapers that Bill Bonanno had been the primary target and that Di Gregorio’s men were involved, although the police preferred to hedge a bit because the weapons they found had not been registered in the New York area and they were not listed in FBI files as stolen.

Soon the district attorney in Brooklyn began a wide investigation of the case, and among those sought for questioning was Gaspar Di Gregorio. When the police arrived at Di Gregorio’s home in West Babylon, his relatives insisted that he was not there. The police waited, however, and within an hour an ambulance arrived with a doctor, and Di Gregorio was wheeled out of the house on a stretcher. He was said to be suffering from a heart attack. The police served him with a subpoena.

The police also visited the Bonanno residence, but Bill, after recovering the car one morning before daybreak, had disappeared. Having taken the heat off himself by leaking the news of the gun battle to the
Times
, he decided to vanish until he could learn more about the fate of his adversary, Gaspar Di Gregorio.

Within a few weeks Bill heard that the commission was infuriated at Di Gregorio for the Troutman Street failure and the unwanted publicity that had followed, and the next thing that Bill heard was that Di Gregorio was stepping down as the leader of the dissident faction and was being replaced by Paul Sciacca.

During the winter and spring of 1966, as dozens of reluctant witnesses appeared before a Brooklyn grand jury to answer questions about the shooting, Joseph Bonanno was reported to be living in Tunis, the North African birthplace of his wife and a traditional hiding place for Sicilian fugitives. For many generations there had been a large Sicilian colony in Tunis, a city accessible across the sea, and sources in Palermo were quoted in
The New York Times
as saying that the elder Bonanno was residing in North Africa under the aegis of the Sicilian Mafia. One of his visitors there was identified as Frank Garofalo, an elderly distinguished-looking man from Castellammare who was once an officer in the Bonanno organization in the United States. Garofalo had left the United States on a visit to Sicily before the Apalachin exposure of 1957 and had decided to remain there.

Before the agents could verify that Bonanno was really in Tunis, there were other reports claiming that he was elsewhere. During the year various newspaper accounts placed him in Canada, Mexico, Haiti, and other countries. On May 11, a United States government spokesmen said in
The New York Times
that Bonanno was definitely hiding in Europe, although declining to specify where.

A week later, on Tuesday morning May 17, as Bill Bonanno was driving across the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan planning to meet one of his men at a café, he heard a radio bulletin announcing that Joseph Bonanno was in New York City. Bill was about to discount this as another fanciful rumor. But then, amazingly, the announcer went on to say that Joseph Bonanno, accompanied by an attorney, had during the previous hour surprised everyone by walking into the courthouse.