Honor Thy Father (58 page)

Indeed,
Honor Thy Father
was the first book of nonfiction to penetrate the secret society of the Mafia. Unlike such sagas as
The Godfather
and
The Sopranos
, both inspired by the creative minds of writers and directors, there was nothing imagined or made up in
Honor Thy Father
; it used real names, it described scenes and situations that truly happened. It recounted the rise and fall of the Bonannos from the inside, and thus the elder Bonanno could not denounce it without refuting the credibility of his son, his daughter, his daughter-in-law, and other intimates who had been among my sources. And even though Joe Bonanno would not speak to his son for more than a year after the book’s publication, his behavior did not affect my relationship with his son or the others. I continued to see Rosalie and the children as well as Catherine while Bill was serving a four-year prison term (from 1971 through 1974) for credit card fraud. I had easy access to him, too, since he had added my name to his guest list at the federal penitentiary on Terminal Island, near Los Angeles. And it was convenient for me to visit him during these years because I was then spending lots of time in the Los Angeles area interviewing people who would be featured in my forthcoming book, which was about the redefinition of sexual morality in contemporary America and would be called
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
.

Among my subjects were
Playboy
magazine’s publisher Hugh Hefner, who occupied a mansion off Sunset Boulevard; Diane Webber, a figure model who specialized in posing nude for art photographers along the sand dunes of southern California; and Barbara and John Williamson, a married couple who founded a free love community called Sandstone at their hillside estate in Topanga Canyon overlooking Malibu. I would devote several chapters to the Williamsons and their followers in
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
, and the fact that I was able to remain at Sandstone for extended periods as a kind of writer-in-residence was mainly due to the efforts of Barbara Williamson, who had read and liked
Honor Thy Father
and had convinced her husband and the others to cooperate with me in interviews.

One day, saying she was curious about how Bill Bonanno was adjusting to prison—he was then in the third year of the four-year term—I arranged for her to accompany me to Terminal Island and speak with him in the visitor’s lounge. I knew from experience that Bill Bonanno welcomed meeting friends and acquaintances of mine, having associated agreeably with many of them when (prior to his going to jail) I took him to such writer’s hangouts in New York as Elaine’s restaurant. At Elaine’s one evening he was pleased to be seated next to the Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist and author David Halberstam, listening as the latter discussed the U.S. government’s failed strategy in the Vietnamese war. Halberstam later mailed to Bonanno at Terminal Island a few inscribed copies of his books.

During Barbara Williamson’s meeting with Bill Bonanno she was impressed with how cheerful he seemed to be despite the confinements and deprivations of prison life. While I myself could not quite get used to seeing him in prison garb—wearing clumpy shoes and a khaki outfit with a drawstring waist rather than the custom-made suits and expensive Italian-designer shoes that had been his normal attire—I was not surprised when he told us that he was now healthier and more relaxed than at any time in the past decade. With no drinking, no smoking, no overeating, and getting plenty of exercise—playing tennis almost every day—he claimed to have removed more than fifty pounds from his six-foot-two-inch frame since coming to Terminal Island, and he proudly announced his present weight at 198 pounds. He had recently turned forty-one. His main job in prison was working in the library, where he had access to many fine books and lots of time to read them, and he also said that he had cultivated friendships with some interesting fellow inmates. He mentioned the ex—FBI agent, G. Gordon Liddy, who was convicted for his role in the 1971 Watergate break-in case that led in 1974 to the resignation of President Richard Nixon; and a former baseball player named Jerry Priddy who was currently serving time for attempted extortion but had first gained attention in 1941 as a second baseman with the New York Yankees and a double-play partner with shortstop Phil Rizzuto. Bonanno went on to say that he viewed his imprisonment as a retreat from his problematic existence, a sabbatical from unrelenting stress: the threats of rival hit men, the sleuthing of the Feds, the obligatory concealment of underworld income in a hidden economy, and his complicated ties to his wife and children while maintaining criminal links to his father and their dysfunctional Mafia family. “The only time I can escape,” he told us, “is when I’m in prison.”

Still, he missed the frequency of seeing Rosalie and their four children, he said, adding that they rarely visited Terminal Island more than once a month. For his wife it was a long eight-hour car trip downstate from their home in San Jose, where she held a full-time job as a computer programmer in an insurance firm and where the children, when not in school, were employed part-time in fast-food enterprises or other places in or near their local shopping mall. When Bill was first sent to Terminal Island his children ranged in age from thirteen to seven. The eldest was his green-eyed and fair-skinned adopted son, Charles (who had been obtained at eighteen months of age from a cocktail waitress in San Diego who had been abandoned by a U.S. Navy man); and next came Charles’s brown-eyed Bonanno kinsmen: ten-year-old Joseph, a frail and sickly youth who suffered from asthma; eight-year-old Salvatore, an outspoken and pugnacious child who was difficult to control; and seven-year-old Felippa, who, as the only girl, grew up doted upon and whose pierced ears held tiny diamond earrings.

When I had first met the children in the mid-1960s, the Banana War was in progress, and the floors and sofas of their home in Long Island were regularly occupied at night by snoring bodyguards whose outstretched legs the children sometimes tripped over in the morning on their way to school. On one occasion Charles went crashing to the floor and split open his head on a piece of furniture and left a trail of blood along the rug.

Police cars regularly cruised through the neighborhood, and sometimes members of the press gathered along the sidewalk taking pictures of the home and approaching the children as they walked together toward the nearby school. “Where’s your grandfather?” they would ask, usually directing the question at Charles, who was then eight and unhesitatingly assumed the role of the senior family spokesman. “We don’t know,” he would reply. “And where’s your father?” “We don’t know,” he would repeat. I often wondered at the time, and I would continue to wonder in the later years after the family moved to San Jose—where Charles and his younger brother Salvatore would sometimes throw pieces of fruit at the parked cars of Federal agents positioned across the street—what would happen to the Bonanno children after they had become adults and perhaps were married and had children of their own? Would they inhabit homes without bodyguards? Would they change their surnames? Would they deny their upbringing? To what degree could the offspring of the Mafia find social acceptance if they conformed to the laws of the larger community?

As a source of continuing financial support, the Bonanno crime family was clearly in a decline—this seemed clear to me in 1971 when
Honor Thy Father
was published; and it was then, after I knew that the book would become very successful in a commercial sense, that I decided to divert a percentage of
Honor Thy Fathers
film earnings and the book’s foreign sales toward an educational trust fund that would cover the cost of the children’s college tuitions and other school-related expenses. Not a nickel of the trust money was to be available to the parents nor to anyone else who might presume to represent the children’s interests. Only my attorney would control the assets, serving as the college fund’s sole executor—he being Paul Gitlin, of the New York firm Ernst, Cane, Berner & Gitlin. Schools would submit their bills directly to Mr. Gitlin, who, after reviewing them, would pay them from the account established for this purpose. It was my hope that the Bonanno children would have the chance, as I phrased it in the trust agreement, “to be educated out of their tradition and ties to the notoriety of their surnames.”

Of course it would be impossible to know in the early stages of the trust whether or not its goals were being realized. I reminded myself that the children’s father had received a higher education and
still
ended up in the Mafia. It was also true, however, that there were now fewer financial opportunities for Bonanno kinsmen in the crime world due to the outcome of the Banana War. In any case I felt that since
Honor Thy Father
’s dramatic narrative had benefited from the inclusion of the children’s stories—exploiting to a degree these otherwise blameless children merely because they had been reared within the Bonanno household—it was fair and appropriate for me to offer them something in return, and the only thing that I could think of was a college trust fund. In addition, I did list their names on the dedication page in the front of the book:

In my early discussions with Mr. Gitlin I was concerned that Internal Revenue agents would lay claim to the children’s education fund, identifying it as income to the Bonanno family that should go toward repaying several thousand dollars in unpaid taxes that Bill Bonanno allegedly owed the government. It was for this reason that I did not consult with Bill or Rosalie Bonanno prior to setting up the fund; to do so might have suggested a cooperative arrangement between us, a trade-off or a partnership of some kind that could have cast doubt on the fact that I was operating independently from the Bonanno family. In my early appeal to Bill Bonanno for his cooperation on the book I promised only that I would produce an honest and sensitive account of his relationship with his wife, his children, his parents, and the family business he had unwittingly committed to. While my book would remain
my
book, I assured him that it would not ignore
his
point of view, and it was therefore a rare opportunity for him to enlarge upon the profile of his life that would otherwise be narrowly defined by crime reporters, and eventually by obituary writers, whose information about him would come mainly from federal prosecutors and the police. I believe that my words made an impression upon him, leading me in time to getting the “inside” story I wanted; but during my years of research and writing I continuously reminded myself that I was an “outsider,” a reportorial observer beholden only to my publisher and the readers, and I was careful not to complicate my working relationship with my sources by agreeing to potentially compromising arrangements, nor did I accept personal gifts. When I first took my wife and two daughters out to Long Island for a Sunday afternoon visit with the Bonannos, I was driving my white 1957 TR3 sports car, a British-made vehicle with a backseat barely large enough to accommodate the very slender figures of our girls. After we had pulled into the Bonanno driveway, which was lined with large sedans, we were greeted by the bemused comments of Bill Bonanno regarding the tight fit of our “family car.” The next day he called to tell me that there was a new Cadillac he had no use for, and would I like to borrow it for a few months at no cost? I politely refused.

When he and I dined together in restaurants I never allowed him to pick up the check, although he often volunteered to do so, especially on those occasions when we were joined by some of his men. But I always explained that I was writing them off as a “business expense,” and indeed after returning home I would list their names on the back of the restaurant bill and then file it in a desk drawer where I kept all my records of spending while interviewing people for the book. At the end of the fiscal year I would total the figure and submit it via my accountant to the IRS with the request that it be used to reduce my taxable income. I also provided the IRS with receipts pertaining to my airplane trips to California when I was visiting with Bill Bonanno and the gas I bought for his car while we were traveling together in California and Arizona. I paid him a total of nine thousand dollars for the exclusive use of his personal papers and some documents from his father’s files as well as fifty photographs from Bonanno family albums—such photos as those taken at Bill and Rosalie’s wedding; childhood pictures of Bill, including several with his father; and photos of the elder Bonanno and a few of his associates when he was a young man on the rise within the Mafia. I resold many of these photos to magazines in the United States and overseas in 1971 in connection with the printed excerpts from
Honor Thy Father
. The sums of money involved in these transactions were of course noted on my tax returns, and I also wrote letters to Bill Bonanno and his attorney, Albert Krieger, reminding them that they should not forget to include the nine thousand dollar income figure on Bill Bonanno’s tax returns. I did not know whether or not this was done, but I kept on file copies of my letters to Messrs. Krieger and Bonanno.

I always assumed that the day would come when I would be called upon to testify with reference to Bill Bonanno’s tax problems—just as I assumed that the FBI had been tapping my home phone ever since I had made the connection with him; and I assumed as well that IRS agents were scrutinizing my tax returns since I had begun claiming the names of illegitimate men as legitimate business expenses when dining and wining them in restaurants. In 1970 and again in 1971 I had difficulty renewing my American Express card, which was the card I most frequently used. In the past I had always received a new card prior to the termination date of the older one, but during these two years there were extended delays despite my repeated calls of complaint. I was told that my new card was in the mail, but weeks would pass without my receiving it; and only once did I get an explanation. It was said that the file containing my records seemed to have been misplaced, which I took to mean that it was in the hands of investigating agents. The agents were probably scrutinizing my signatures while searching for examples of forgery, for allegations of forgery and mail fraud had been levied against Bill Bonanno during the time he was using an unauthorized Diner’s Club card and in this case would lead to his becoming (as he phrased it) a “guest of the government” at Terminal Island between 1971 and 1974.