Splitting Loyalties: One Mobster, Two Families

Inside an Arizona funeral home, the most prominent image at the Jan. 6 wake for the former mobster Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno showed him at his 1956 wedding, days after he had made a confession to his bride.

Salvatore "Bill" Bonanno in 1999 (Reuters)

He was already married, Bonanno told Rosalie Profaci, his wife-to-be — not to another woman, but to the Mafia.

“I am married to a philosophy, a way of life,” Bonanno said, according to his 1999 autobiography, “Bound by Honor: A Mafioso’s Story.” “And that will always come first.”

The ceremony joined two of the most powerful Mafia families in New York. Bonanno was the eldest son of Joseph Bonanno, leader of the Bonanno crime family, and Rosalie was the niece of a mobster who ran another one.

In his book, Bonanno compared his wedding to the coming together of royalty.

Thousands of daises were flown in from California, congressmen and Mafia dons were among the guests, and the singer Tony Bennett was one of the entertainers.

At the time, Bonanno had no intention of actively joining the family business. But a decade later, he would find himself in the middle of a power struggle that would largely define the dichotomy in his life: balancing the code that governed the Mafia with the desire to be a family man.

Bonanno died of a heart attack on Jan. 1 in his Tucson, Ariz., home. Family and friends remembered him at his funeral and burial on Jan. 7 at SS. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church.

Bonanno’s three sons and one daughter each gave tributes to their father. They, unlike he, grew up far removed from the Brooklyn, N.Y., streets where the Bonanno family gained its notoriety.

Joseph, 47, is a pediatrician in Phoenix. Salvatore, 44, is a software engineer in Scottsdale. And Charles, 49, is a long-haul truck driver based in Phoenix. Bonanno’s daughter, Felippa “Gigi” Pettinato, 43, lives in Grass Valley, Calif. She made it a point during her eulogy to thank her father for allowing her to marry a man who was not Sicilian.

“It certainly is the passing of an era for his family,” said Gay Talese, the author of “Honor Thy Father,” a 1971 book that chronicled the rise and fall of the Bonanno family.

Talese, who attended the funeral, remained longtime friends with Bonanno. The two would often have dinner in New York.

Family members carried Bonanno's coffin at his funeral. (Aaron Montoya/NYT Institute)

Bonanno, born in Brooklyn on Nov. 5, 1932, moved to Tucson when he was 10, after he developed an ear condition and a doctor suggested the family live in a warmer climate.

In Tucson, Talese said, Bonanno enjoyed “a rather privileged upbringing.” He attended boarding schools, Tucson High School and the University of Arizona.

The Bonanno family owned a cotton-and-cattle ranch about 20 miles north of downtown Tucson. At one point, Bonanno studied agriculture in hopes of running his father’s ranch.

Even as Joseph Bonanno provided a comfortable life for his family in Arizona, he remained firmly in control of his thriving crime organization in New York.

An immigrant from Sicily, Joseph Bonanno, who was known as Joe Bananas, began his life in the mob as a bootlegger during Prohibition. For more than three decades, the Bonanno family profited from loan sharking, gambling, labor racketeering and even investing in garment businesses.

An obituary of Joseph Bonanno that appeared in The New York Times in 2002 mentioned his autobiography, “A Man of Honor.” In it, Bonanno said he was one of the original members of the “Commission,” a small group of mob chiefs established to resolve disputes among the 20 or so Mafia organizations in the United States. At one point, he served as the Commission's chairman.

But in the 1950s, he came under scrutiny by law enforcement authorities, most notably in a 1957 raid of a meeting of Mafia leaders in Apalachin, N.Y.

He also started losing his grip over his family with the deaths of some key allies, including Joseph Profaci, the leader of the Profaci family. A disagreement over who should become the new boss split the mob families, and Bonanno plotted to kill two of his opponents, according to the Web site ganglandnews.com.

During this turbulent period, Bill Bonanno dropped out of college and moved to New York to help his father.

“He confided in me not so much because he mistrusted his closest aides but because I could help him as they could not,” Bonanno wrote in his autobiography. “I was his son, his strong right arm. Whatever my inexperience, my loyalty would never be in question.” Joseph Bonanno’s problems worsened when he decided to make his son his consigliere, the crime organization’s second-in-command. Other members of his family resisted, believing there were more deserving candidates. That move, along with the disagreements with other mob families, led in 1966 to what would become known as the “Banana War.”

On his way to a peace meeting with rivals in New York, Bill Bonanno and his bodyguards were greeted with dozens of gunshots. No one was injured.

Gay Talese, who wrote a book in 1971 that chronicled the rise and fall of the Bonanno family, attended the Tucson funeral. (Aaron Montoya/NYT Institute)

Joseph and Bill Bonanno went into hiding during the conflict, which claimed the lives of many Mafia family members. To survive, they agreed to leave New York and sever ties to the Bonanno crime organization.

After a brief stay in California, Bill Bonanno joined his father in Tucson. But even there, the Bonanno family could not escape its reputation.

“Kids at school would tease me, you know, call me ‘Joe Bananas,’ ” Joseph Bonanno, Bill’s son, said in a telephone interview. At first, he said, he didn’t understand what they were talking about, “because I never did see that side of it.”

At Bonanno’s funeral, his children acknowledged their father’s mobster past. Joseph made reference to the 12 years his father spent in jail for contempt, conspiracy, grand theft and other charges.

But Bonanno’s relatives, in recalling him, focused more on other memories.

Joseph Bonanno recalled a summer trip when his father let him steer a houseboat. One of Bonanno’s nephews, Gregory Genovese, remembered seeing his uncle for the last time at Halloween and described how excited his children were to show off their costumes. Bonanno’s daughter laughed after saying her father would call her several times a day just to ask what she was doing.

Talese said Bonanno would have liked to have been remembered as “an honorable man,” and for “a sense of honor that wasn’t always in accordance with what the FBI defined as honor or the Justice Department,” but one “defined by his own upbringing.”

Joseph Bonanno said his father strived to balance responsibilities to two families — the one to which he had sworn an oath, and the one formed on his wedding day — and to keep the two separate.

“People think he’d come and he’d hang up his gun in the closet, but we never saw that,” he said. “He carried a briefcase just like the guy next door.”