Honor Thy Father (22 page)

Half of the men got out at the barbershop on Forty-eighth Street, while the others went to park the cars. As Bonanno sat in the barber’s chair, a bodyguard sat waiting inside the shop and another man was posted outside the door at the top of the steps. Both men were armed.

Less than an hour later, they assembled at La Scala; they were given a large table, and drinks were quickly ordered and delivered. Most of the waiters seemed to know him and shook his hand, and other people in the restaurant recognized him from his photographs and stretched to get a look at him. He sat at the head of the table, made several toasts in Sicilian, and thanked the men for their loyalty. After a second round of drinks, there was much laughter at the description of how the FBI agent had grabbed Bonanno’s hat in the detention pen and had looked without luck for labels or dry cleaner’s markings that might serve as a tip-off as to where he had been. There was more laughter with the description of Morgenthau’s crestfallen face on being told that Bonanno had just walked into the courthouse, and the stories continued for nearly an hour—then, suddenly, the laughter stopped. Joseph Notaro, one of Bonanno’s most trusted captains, an individual who had devoted himself tirelessly to the organization throughout the chaos, sat slumped forward at the table. The men could not revive him. Notaro had just had a heart attack and was dead.

N
OTARO’S FUNERAL IN THE
B
RONX WAS ATTENDED BY
dozens of members of the organization and also by several detectives and FBI agents who recorded the license plates of the cars and took photographs of the mourners. Joseph Bonanno swore silently as he passed the agents on his way to the casket but he did not display his feelings openly. He was overcome with grief. His old friend, Notaro, dead at fifty-six, had been suffering from a heart ailment for years and yet his energy and loyalty remained constant throughout the ordeal following Bonanno’s disappearance. On ten occasions Notaro had been summoned before the grand jury and asked questions about Bonanno and the organization, and each time Notaro was worried by government agents’ hints that if he did not cooperate, his son, a young lawyer, might suffer the consequences, might possibly be disbarred from New York State; but Notaro held out against the pressure, saying nothing for which he would later be ashamed and not weakening as he continued to receive notices from the jury ordering him to reappear and to testify again. Notaro was scheduled to testify on the day following his death.

When the funeral ceremony was completed, Joseph Bonanno returned to his car and was driven to his son’s home in East Meadow. The elder Bonanno traveled under heavy protection—armed men sat on each side of him in his car; two cars with other men drove to the front and rear along the highway; and two men also accompanied him inside his son’s home, sleeping there at night and remaining on the alert there through the day. The newspapers that had given frontpage coverage to his surprise visit to Judge Frankel also reported the omnipresent threat of rival gunmen:
The New York Daily News
’s headline read
BANANAS BACK, FEARED RIPE FOR KILLING
. There was also speculation in the press that Bonanno had chosen to return at this time to direct a full-scale battle against the opposition, realizing, after his son’s experience on Troutman Street, that there was no peaceful way in which to deal with Di Gregorio’s faction or the Mafia commission led by Stefano Magaddino.

Oddly, one of Bonanno’s bodyguards in his son’s home was Stefano Magaddino’s first cousin, Peter Magaddino, a stocky gray-haired man who was once close to the Buffalo don, but after repeated disagreements with his older cousin, whom he came to regard as overbearing, he moved to New York City and became reassociated with Joseph Bonanno. It was Peter Magaddino who had concurred in Bonanno’s worst suspicions about Stefano Magaddino during 1963–1964—that is, Stefano’s aim to control the Bonanno organization through the puppet leadership of his brother-in-law, Gaspar Di Gregorio.

Peter Magaddino met Gaspar Di Gregorio many years ago in Buffalo after Di Gregorio had married Stefano’s sister, and he concluded then that Di Gregorio was completely dominated by Stefano and would never be otherwise. Since Peter Magaddino had little respect for Di Gregorio and was appalled by what he considered his cousin’s avariciousness, it was a simple decision in 1964 for Peter Magaddino to side with Bonanno—he admired Bonanno, whom he had grown up with and had known intimately as a young man in Castellammare del Golfo.

They were born in neighboring hillside houses, which overlooked the sea, to families that had intermarried in the past and had been allies in the feuds with the mafiosi in nearby towns. The Bonannos and Magaddinos were both large families with many branches, and for several generations they influenced the order by which people lived in that section. They subsisted from their farms, producing grain, olives, tomatoes, and other vegetables, and they raised sheep and cattle for slaughter or trade. They controlled jobs for which the government appropriated small funds, and they had influence along the pier and among the merchants, receiving tribute for their protection. They literally controlled the towns in that area as surely as had the ancient princes and viceroys before them, taxing their subjects for services rendered, services that included the arbitration of neighborly disputes, the recovery of stolen property, personal assistance in all family problems, personal redress for wrongs to one’s honor or one’s wife. They interceded with the judge at the trials of their countrymen and received favors from the politicians in Palermo in return for solid support in the hills. They often did things illegally, but their law was largely their own. For centuries their region’s poverty and pestilence was ignored by the Sicilian government, by the parliament in Rome, by dozens of previous rulers overseas; so finally they took the law into their own hands and bent it to suit themselves, as they had seen the aristocrats do.

They believed that there was no equality under law; the law was written by conquerors. In the tumultuous history of Sicily, going back more than two thousand years, the island had been governed by Greek law, Roman law, Arab law, the laws of Goths, Normans, Angevins, Aragonese—each new fleet of conquerors brought new laws to the land, and no matter whose law it was, it seemed that it favored the rich over the poor, the powerful over the weak. While the law opposed vendettas among villagers, it allowed organized brutality and killing by government guardsmen or king’s armies—wars were allowed, feuds were not—and the first to be conscripted into the king’s armies were the sons of the soil. The laws regulating food, drink, dress, drugs, literature, or sexual behavior were usually extensions of the life style of the nobleman in power. They reflected his past, they varied if his background was prudish or permissive, if he was Christian or Moslem, if he was of an Eastern or a Western culture, if he was merciful or mad. The Germanic tyrant King Frederick II decreed that adulterous women should have their noses cut off, whereas other despots, lax and licentious, condoned concubines in court and the pursuit of other men’s wives at will. The fact that the law was often inconsistent from generation to generation and was sometimes even contradictory to existing laws seemed of mild concern to the lawmakers, who were mainly interested in controlling the masses and remaining in power.

Under such an unenlightened leadership, feudalism was permitted to exist until the nineteenth century, and illiteracy prevailed in much of Sicily through the midtwentieth century, particularly in the barren mountain villages of the western region. Here in an atmosphere of neglect and isolation, families became more insular, more suspicious of strangers, held to old habits. The official government was often the enemy, the outlaw often a hero; and family clans such as the Bonannos, the Magaddinos, and numbers of other large families in neighboring seaside villages or interior towns were held in awe by their townsmen. Though certain of these leaders were vengeful and corrupt, they identified with the plight of the poor and often shared what they had stolen from the rich. Their word was nearly always good, and they did not betray a trust. Usually they went about their business quietly, walked arm in arm with the village priest through the square, or sat in the shade of cafés while lesser men stopped to greet them and perhaps seek a favor. While they bore the humble manner of other men in the town, there was nevertheless an easy confidence about them, a certain strength of character. They were more ambitious, shrewder, bolder, perhaps more cynical about life than their resigned
paesani
, who relied largely upon God. They were often spoken of in hushed tones by other men but were never called mafiosi. They were usually referred to as the
amici
, friends, or
uomini rispettati
, men of respect.

Since the ancestors of Joseph Bonanno and Peter Magaddino had long been part of the
amici
in Castellammare, the two men had a certain status at birth, and they were courteously treated wherever they went in the town. As a boy, Joseph Bonanno particularly liked to travel through the town on horseback, to swim near the old castle, to sometimes ride beyond the mountain through the wild pastures to his father’s farm near the ancient temple of Segesta, a majestic structure with its thirty-six columns still intact though built during the classical period of the Greeks.

He also traveled once to the city of Monreale to see the great cathedral that was constructed in the twelfth century under the Norman ruler William II, a cathedral whose interior was covered with seventy thousand square feet of exquisite mosaics and whose tremendous bronze doors were sculptured by Bonanno of Pisa. He read and reread the history of Sicily as a student, and he often wondered, on seeing such grandeur in towns of such poverty, why there had not been more citizens’ revolts against the extravagance of the nobility and the church. But he knew how successful the church was in convincing the people that the reward for their suffering would be found in heaven. He was also aware that those who were capable of organizing the masses were often absorbed into the ranks of the
amici;
and the
amici
were not reformers. They did not seek the overthrow of the system, which they doubted they could do even if they wanted to. They had learned to work within the system, to exploit it while it exploited the country. There was only one dramatic example in Sicilian history where the island’s impoverished, embittered population was able to organize a successful national revolt against their oppressors, who in this instance were the French. The cause of the revolt occurred on Easter Monday in 1282, when a French soldier raped a Palermo maiden on her wedding day. Suddenly a band of Sicilians retaliated by butchering a French troop, and as word of this reached other Sicilians, more French soldiers were killed in town after town—a frenzied spree of xenophobia quickly spread through the island as gangs of men wildly attacked and murdered every Frenchman in sight. Thousands of Frenchmen were murdered in a few days, and it was claimed by some local historians that the Mafia was begun at this point, taking its name from the anguished cry of the girl’s mother running through the streets shouting
ma fia, ma fia
, my daughter, my daughter.

This story was told to Joseph Bonanno as a boy in Castellammare by his father, who had heard it from
his
father, and while certain historians consider many aspects of the incident to be highly romanticized or exaggerated, there was no doubting that the massacre abruptly terminated French rule of the island. But the French were soon followed by other rulers like themselves, corrupt, exploiting the land and inhabitants, and giving nothing in return except to the Sicilian aristocracy, who were the most corrupt of all. For hundreds of years Castellammare was a feudal estate, part of a dowery that noble families transferred from generation to generation, and even Sicily’s unification with Italy in the mid-1800s did not improve living conditions for the average citizens—most continued to live in stone hovels without water or sanitation facilities, and with so many children they were unable to afford more than two meals a day. The only escape was through immigration, and by the early 1900s more than a million Sicilians had left the land, some going to South America or Canada and many more going to the United States.

Among those to leave was Joseph Bonanno’s father, Salvatore Bonanno, a lean six-footer with a handlebar moustache who was one of the few whose departure was not provoked by poverty. Salvatore Bonanno was extremely bored and restless with life in Castellammare. As a young man he had given serious thought to becoming a priest, a career pursued by many ambitious youths in quest of wealth and social prestige (one of Bonanno’s granduncles had been a bishop); but before Salvatore progressed very far, he became disenchanted with the church, resentful of the great treasury it hoarded, and one day he decided to reduce that treasury a bit by stealing several jeweled chalices, gold sacramental plates, and an ornate gold candelabrum. Then he left the monastery with his booty and returned home without guilt.

Soon he was helping to run the family cattle business, which included smuggling animals from North Africa, and he also supervised a family farm and vineyard that produced figs and grapes. At the age of twenty-five, he was cheered by the birth of a son, and he might have resigned himself to life in Castellammare if he had not heard so many enticing tales about America from those immigrants who sent back word. In 1906, at the age of twenty-six, with his twenty-one-year-old wife, Catherine, and his one-year-old son Joseph, Salvatore Bonanno sailed for New York. Upon arriving he was met by numbers of Castellammarese, who took the couple to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn where hundreds of Sicilians had settled before the turn of the century. Soon Salvatore obtained an apartment and purchased a restaurant and bar on the corner of Roebling Street and North Fifth. The
amici
had already established themselves in small numbers in Brooklyn, operating an Italian lottery, trying to control the cheap labor market that their countrymen were providing American business, and selling their “protection” service wherever they could. But none of the
amici
tried to extort money from Salvatore Bonanno; his family’s position in Sicily was well known, and the New York
amici
were hopeful that Salvatore might bring whatever skills and cunning that he possessed to their Brooklyn operation.

But the Sicilian and Italian gangsters were of little significance at this period in New York, and Salvatore Bonanno did not greatly concern himself with their affairs. The big gangs in New York and other eastern cities were predominantly Irish or Jewish. The same elements were powerful in Chicago, and further to the West and Southwest, the big names in crime were Anglo-Saxon, spiritual descendants of the James boys, the Barkers, and Pretty Boy Floyd. Although some
amici
were receiving kickbacks and other considerations along San Francisco’s Fishermen’s Wharf, where many of the fishermen were Sicilian immigrants, the only city in which Sicilian or Italian gangs had made headlines was in New Orleans in 1890, and that episode turned out horribly for the gangmen. The headlines concerned two Sicilian factions battling for control of illegal waterfront operations in New Orleans and the efforts of a vigilant police chief to expose the racketeers. After the chief had ignored bribes and the threatening advice that he not probe further, he was shot in the street one night and died shortly after. A grand jury investigation blamed the murder on a “secret organization known as the Mafia,” and nineteen Sicilian immigrants were brought to trial as principals or conspirators. When the suspects were not convicted, a group of enraged citizens, including the mayor and the press, voiced their disapproval, and many people suspected that the jury had been bribed. A large group of protesters marched to the jailhouse, and many of these citizens later broke into the prison where, while the guards were occupied elsewhere, they lynched or shot to death eleven of the Sicilians. News of this traveled around the world, and the Italian government severed diplomatic relations with the United States; although relations were later restored when President Harrison apológized and authorized an indemnity of approximately $30,000, it was many years before law-abiding Sicilian and Italian immigrants felt at home in New Orleans.