HONOR THY FATHER by Gay Talese. 526 pages World. $10.
The man next to Bill Bonanno on the morning commuter flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles wanted to talk football. Why not? The day before, the Colts had defeated the Cowboys in the Super Bowl. At 38, Bill—tall, his excess pounds disguised by gray pin stripes—looked much like the sort of man who tunes out the wife and kids each Sunday during football season to lose his cares in patterns of precision violence.
But Bill Bonanno remained silent. He had on his mind what would probably amount to the first half of his life—in many ways, as Gay Talese shows, a peculiarly American life. In less than two hours, he was scheduled to present himself at the L.A. Federal Building to begin serving a four-year prison term. The humiliation lay not in the illegality of what he had done, but in its insignificance. As the elder son of the once powerful New York Mafia Boss Joseph (“Joe Bananas”) Bonanno, Bill was used to stripping down rolls of hundred-dollar bills to pay for his incidentals. Now he stood convicted of fraudulently using another man’s Diners Club card.
His shortage of cash was directly related to Mafia difficulties in recent years: A summit conference at Apalachin was raided; Joe Valachi revealed all their secret handshakes on television; the Government began to penetrate their rule of silence with a law requiring testimony under a grant of immunity.
Throwing the book at a Mafioso like Bill Bonanno for a white-collar crime is not new. But the dynastic story of how Bill Bonanno was reduced to using another man’s credit card is absorbing—especially when reported and assembled by Gay Talese, the golden retriever of personalized journalism. As in The Kingdom and the Power, his best-selling chronicle of traditions and feuds at the New York Times, Talese drops more at the reader’s feet than anyone knows what to do with. Honor Thy Father is a jumble of you-are-there re-reportage, underworld history, fictionalized interior monologues, and a long courtroom scene. But it is never dull.
To date, the best-known Bonanno has been Bill’s Italian-born father, Joseph, who made headlines in 1964 when he disappeared after two men forced him into a car as he was about to enter his lawyer’s New York City apartment building. According to a witness, one of the men said: “C’mon, Joe, my boss wants to see you.” Bonanno must have had a long wait in the outer office. Nineteen months later, wearing a tan and the gray silk suit that he vanished in, Joe Bonanno walked unannounced into New York’s federal courthouse and, with a straight face, said to a judge: “I understand that the Government would like to talk to me.”
Feudal Power. Some people believe Joe Bonanno was actually kidnaped and got his captors to release him by agreeing to give up his New York activities. He was then supposed to have reneged and fled to Haiti, where he had gambling interests under the protection of the late dictator, François (“Papa Doc”) Duvalier. Whatever happened, the result was a New York Mafia power struggle known as the Banana War. It ended with at least seven dead. In 1966, Bill Bonanno was almost killed in a Brooklyn ambush. After Joe Bonanno reappeared, his house in Tucson, Ariz., was bombed. It turned out not to be the Mafia. The assault, in fact, was carried out by an FBI agent with the assistance of a few soldier-of-fortune types.
Talese notes other moments of excitement. Yet he shows better than anyone else that the life of a Mafioso can be pretty dull. Much of the time it is bounded by family reunions, television watching, overeating and taking circuitous auto trips to avoid surveillance.
This was a life that Bill Bonanno was not suited for. Recording the resulting stress upon young Bonanno, Talese unifies his narrative with a most compelling theme—tradition and change in America. On the surface, Bill Bonanno is a homogenized American who went to the University of Arizona, studied business administration and belonged to the ROTC. But in his bones he is heir apparent to a kind of feudal power and respect that has its roots in Sicily. There is no indication that Bill ever seriously thought of doing anything else but go into his father’s business. Such an attitude was a sign of love and loyalty that undoubtedly pleased Joe Bonanno as much as his son’s marriage to Rosalie Profaci, a daughter of the Brooklyn Mafia family whose patriarch, Joseph Profaci, provided Novelist Mario Puzo with a model for the “Godfather.” Still, the strain of serving the old while being conditioned by the new showed in obvious and dramatic ways. Young Bill, reports Talese, had an ulcer at 15. As he grew up, his temper became shorter and more violent. At college, he beat up a jockey who dated his girl.
Classic Cynicism. Fortunately for the book, Gay Talese and Bill Bonanno look at the world in somewhat the same way, because it is Talese’s use of fiction techniques to convey the charged moments in Bill Bonanno’s life that gives Honor Thy Father its drive. Talese once wrote: “Whether men’s ambitions are fulfilled in the arena of politics or banking or business or crime, it makes little difference; and the most brutal acts are easily justified in the name of necessity and honor.”
That is the classic cynicism of the outsider looking in. Gay Talese has had his own flawless Italian nose pressed against the glass window of America ever since he was a boy growing up in the seaside resort city of Ocean City, NJ. As the son of an immigrant Italian tailor, young Gay was actually a minority within a minority. What Catholics there were in town were mostly Irish. The situation undoubtedly sharpened his eye for differences. The most different man in town was his own father. “A supreme individual,” recalls Talese, “a man with a mustache in a town where there were no mustaches, dressed in flamboyant tweed suits that he designed himself.” Talese is also an elegant dresser and a hard-working individualist.
Talese’s individualism gained him a reputation as a prima donna at the New York Times, where he began as a copyboy in 1953 and left as a hot-shot feature writer twelve years later. His specialty was the out-of-the-way, the offbeat, the loser, the star that has fallen or faded. Bill Bonanno was a natural for Talese. But how does a journalist get close to the Mafia? Very slowly and very carefully. Research on the book took nearly seven years from the time in 1965 when Talese first introduced himself to Bonanno in a courtroom corridor. One of Talese’s fears in producing Honor Thy Father was that the Government would subpoena him to testify about any criminal activities he might have come across. At one point, Talese says, his credit card was canceled. When he inquired why, he was told that his entire file was missing from the company’s records. The presumption was that the FBI was examining his receipts. Another worry was that Bill Bonanno’s enemies might mistake Talese for a Banana warrior.
The experience has left Talese a little jumpy, which probably accounts for the way he stares at every car that passes his front porch. As for Bill Bonanno, says Talese, who recently visited him at the federal prison in San Pedro, Calif., “he never looked better. He has slimmed down, has plenty of time for reading, and appeared as relaxed as he probably has ever been.”
—R.Z. Sheppard
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