In the privacy of his kitchen, Bonanno was more expansive. He was not willing to talk about current mob politics—he would not even admit that he was informed about them, though rumor had it that couriers arrived frequently from Brooklyn and took advantage of his cork-lined cellar to fill him in on what was happening and get his blessing for various decisions—but about the past he was less guarded. He chatted about Capone, the Castellamarese wars, the bootlegging connection between Joseph P. Kennedy and Frank Costello. Mr. B., it turned out, had met John F. Kennedy, and even FDR—his political connections had once been a priceless asset.
Bonanno explained at length that he, in his time, had been—still was, some might say—a don, but being a don had nothing to do with crime or even business. The term was a mark of respect to somebody who held a special kind of role in the community. A doctor might be referred to as “don so-and-so,” as might a priest, or a pharmacist. A man might be the leader of a family following “the tradition”—what we would call “The Mafia”—yet still not be a don. The don made himself available to advise, to give justice, to help those in need. His neighbors who came to him in full respect never left empty-handed. In short, a don was a community leader, and the responsibilities of being a don were heavy and had to be taken seriously. The great men of his tradition had been dons, of course, as he was. Carlo Gambino, for instance—he had been a don, a real man of the tradition. His old friend Charlie “Lucky” Luciano had been a don, though being as Americanized as he was he did not take being a don as seriously as Gambino had, or Vito Genovese, for example. Gambino and Genovese were men to whom an ordinary person could bring his problems, who would listen gravely, and do whatever they could to help. Even his cousin Stefano Maggadino, rest in peace, a man of no culture or elegance, was, in Buffalo, the don, a man who understood the tradition, even if he did not always practice it.
What about Frank Costello? I asked. Had he been a don? Bonanno poured espresso from a metal pot for each of us. He shook his head sadly. “Frank Costello was merely a pimp,” he snapped.
After lunch, we were to work on the book. Mr. B. suggested that Margaret might like to go sight-seeing or shopping. He would get her a car, and Catherine would accompany her. I took Margaret out onto the patio and told her to use the car we had rented at the airport. Bonanno’s offer was generous, and surely well meant, but who knew where the car came from or what might be in the trunk? Admittedly, this didn’t seem likely, but reality in the Bonanno family was different from our own—after all, Bill Bonanno, despite the fact that he appeared to be prosperous, had been sent to prison for using a stolen credit card to buy an air ticket home to Tucson for Thanksgiving. True, he still denied the charge; true, the feds had been (and still were) looking for the slightest slipup to nail him; true, his father claimed that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding and that a subordinate of Bill’s was responsible; still, it wasn’t the kind of thing that happened to most of us, any more than most of us would have given our driver’s license to an associate who would later present it to the state police as his own.
Smart as the Bonannos undoubtedly were, they tended to do things that the rest of us would regard as imprudent or even reckless, and when they got caught, they gave explanations that often seemed, on the face of things, either too convoluted to understand or simply implausible.
As we spoke, the two Bonanno sons were out on parole again, while their father was under indictment. Even allowing for the government’s determination to make a case against the Bonannos and for the notoriety of their name, it appeared, to say the least, that they seldom approached even the simplest of business transactions in a straight line. The truth was that the old man did not see the world the same way as most of us. We may resent the law, but we accept it. He, on the other hand, rejected the whole concept of law, except as it was laid down by his own tradition and enforced by people like himself.
In the evening, Bonanno took us all to one of his favorite Italian restaurants, a dark, discreet place, hidden away in a fold of the desert. Inside, our large party was seated at the best table, while Mr. B. chatted to the proprietor at the bar. When he was done, he walked slowly down a shallow flight of steps into the restaurant, a dapper figure in his tailored blazer and tinted aviator glasses, not at all like the prince of darkness that the FBI swore he was. As he descended the steps, a small orchestra, hidden away in the gloom at the far side of the restaurant, struck up the theme from The Godfather. Mr. B. waved at them genially and sat down with a smile. His expression was shy, rather than proud, as if this musical tribute to his status, while deserved, was yet another part of the wearisome burden he carried as a don.
From out of the darkness, there appeared a succession of figures, most of them his age or thereabouts, who came to pay homage to him. They leaned over to whisper in Bonanno’s ear, clasping his hand as they talked, their diamond rings sparkling in the candlelight.
The proprietor brought over a bottle of wine and uncorked it. Mr. B. tasted the wine and nodded benevolently. “I like wine more than I used to,” he said, eerily echoing Don Corleone. “Anyway, I’m drinking more of it.” He had never been a big drinker, he went on. A man had to know how to control his appetites. Habits too were dangerous. Never stick to the same schedule every day, for example. Poor Albert Anastasia had stuck to a schedule, and look what happened to him, assassinated in a barbershop.… The only habit he had kept to all his life, Bonanno said, was to drink one—and only one—shot of good cognac at night, before going to bed. It helped him to sleep, he said.
I asked if he had trouble sleeping. He sipped his wine, shook his head. No, he always slept soundly, like a baby. Why not, after all? He had a clear conscience, that’s what really mattered. About his life, he had no apologies to make.
And second thoughts? I asked.
He sat silently for a moment, his big hands on the table. A few, he acknowledged at last. There were people he had trusted, and in whom his trust was misplaced. Yes, he went on with a sigh, perhaps he had been too trusting, too reliant on the old traditions of loyalty. Still, it had been a good life. He could not complain.
He took a drink of his wine as the antipasto was served and held up his glass to toast us.
“To cosa nostra,” I thought I heard him whisper.
There was a long silence; then, after a pause, he added with a laugh, “I’m talking about our book, of course.”
IT’S NO accident that the publishing of Mafia books has become a kind of subindustry in its own right. Americans have always yearned for a time and place in which a simpler, more violent justice reigned—hence the fascination with the cowboy, which has been going on for nearly a century and a half. That the real cowboys were “saddle tramps,” underpaid, lawless, lousy, and generally despised and that most people who lived on the frontier yearned to duplicate the settled comforts of the East and replaced saloons with churches and schools as soon as they could, has been overlooked in the pursuit of a national myth. The Mafia, too, provides a myth in the national consciousness: a place where loyalties are absolute, where respect matters, and where problems are settled with a gun. Thanks largely to The Godfather, the phrase “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse” became a part of the language, and part of the enduring popularity of the movie (or movies) based on Mario Puzo’s book comes from the suggestion that “the don” metes out rough justice to street punks and enforces his own morality with an iron hand.
Until the publication of The Godfather, most people were inclined to view the members of organized crime families as a dangerous nuisance, but, to the great surprise of the wiseguys themselves, they suddenly found themselves being taken seriously and even treated with guarded respect by ordinary citizens—or at least those ordinary citizens who didn’t have to deal with them directly in their day-to-day business affairs. There had been hints of this before, as early as World War Two, when the government went to Luciano, then in prison, to secure the services of the Mafia in Sicily to prepare the way
for the Allied landings, or during the Kefauver hearings on organized crime, when some of Mr. B.’s colleagues made their first appearances on national television, and thereby made the phrase “taking the fifth” part of the language.
After The Godfather, hoods grew used to being celebrities, and not a few of them, like Joe Colombo, actually went so far as to campaign publicly for more respect (a campaign that attracted so much attention in the media that Colombo’s fellow dons had him shot while he was making a speech). Since the members of the mob were just as much against street crime as the ordinary citizen was, and since they mostly killed each other, it was not hard for them to achieve a kind of respectability, so long as they kept saying loudly enough that they were against narcotics and would kill anyone who sold drugs to children.
The truth, of course, was that they were only against selling narcotics to their children, not other people’s. No matter how many times the big bosses like Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino crime family, claimed that anybody who dealt in drugs would be killed, drug dealing remained the most profitable business of organized crime—fast, easy money that no mobster was about to give up, whatever the boss said in public. Paul Castellano never tried all that hard to enforce a ban on drug dealing in the Gambino family, but such efforts as he made were enough to get him killed outside Sparks Steak House, in Manhattan.
The newfound fascination of Americans for the mob was, in its own way, as unrealistic as the transformation of Western gunfighters into national heroes. After all, Billy the Kid, a nasty little psychopathic killer in real life, was transformed into a national hero while he was still alive and killing, and that was back before television and the movies. Given this, it is hardly surprising that there exists such continuing interest in glamorizing the affairs of a bunch of people who specialize in breaking heads, committing usury and extortion, selling cigarettes without tax stamps, and beating up tavern owners who don’t want to pay exorbitant fees for a jukebox.
I suppose I’m as guilty as anyone. My second venture in organized crime publishing was Wiseguy, a big best-seller by Nick Pileggi, which told the story of Henry Hill’s rise and fall in the Brooklyn mob and was later made into the movie Goodfellas. This, as it happened, was something of a milestone in publishing, since New York State tried to prevent S&S or Pileggi from paying royalties to Hill under the “Son of Sam” law, written to stop criminals from participating in any profits from a book or movie based on their crimes. S&S contested the law, more out of respect for the First Amendment than out of any concern for Hill, and took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of S&S, thus establishing that a person doesn’t have to be a good guy to make money out of his life story.
Hill and Pileggi’s success set off a rush to acquire Mafia books among the major publishers. In this, S&S was fortunate to be ahead of the curve. As with any other profession, word of mouth was the key to success. In wiseguy circles, the fact that S&S had published Bonanno’s and Pileggi’s books was enough to make us, for some time, the favorite publisher of organized crime. From telephone booths all over New York City I received calls from gravel-voiced gentlemen whose names ended in vowels, eager to sell me their story of life in the mob.
Some worked, some didn’t. A contract with a mob lawyer who promised to reveal where Jimmy Hoffa was buried didn’t work out, nor did a book on the bloodletting in the Philadelphia mob by one of the principal bloodletters. On the other hand, a relapsed mobster named Joseph (“Joe Dogs”) Iannuzzi, after failing with his autobiography, hit one out of the ballpark when he conceived of The Mafia Cookbook. Joe Dogs, an amiable felon whose beating at the hands of one Tommy Agro encouraged him to become a federal informant and witness, was an expert cook, having in better days prepared food for Agro’s crew in many a hideout. His cookbook became an instant success.
Joe had honed his skills while cooking for the marshals who guarded him and the FBI agents who came to question him about his former associates. In the end, it was partly due to Joe Dogs’s testimony that the heads of the major New York families were eventually convicted. There was a certain irony in the fact that a mob hanger-on, not even a “made man,” better known as a cook than as a criminal, had brought low such major organized crime figures as Tony Salerno, Carmine Persico, John Gotti, and Vincent Gigante, not to speak of the fact that Joe Dogs’s revelations about the mob were the indirect cause for the assassination of the Boss of Bosses himself, “Big Paul” Castellano.
It was the kind of thing that would have brought a faint smile of irony to the lips of Joe Bonanno. He had always believed that his colleagues were letting the wrong kind of element into their world, and neither Joe Dogs, with his pots of sauce, nor Tommy Agro, an undersize enforcer with a ridiculous hairpiece and a hair-trigger temper, would have seemed to him altogether serious as men of honor.
Cosa nostra had descended in one generation from the sublime to the ridiculous. The world that Gay Talese had written about with such seriousness in Honor Thy Father and that Bonanno himself had described so lovingly in A Man of Honor was reduced to grotesque comedy, enacted by buffoons. The “men of honor” had once controlled the streets, enforcing what they thought of as justice (of a fairly predatory nature, to be sure) by their own brutal code. Then, they had lived in the neighborhood; now they had mostly moved to the suburbs, and came into the city like any other commuters: warily, unwillingly, complaining about the dangers of being mugged by black or Hispanic kids. Mobsters no longer went out in the streets to run the numbers game or deal in drugs or loan money—they were afraid to. They drove in from Staten Island, or Westchester, or the Island, and huddled in the safety of their Cadillacs, paying black and Hispanic kids to do the grunt work for them. Their sons—those who had not gone to college to become doctors or lawyers—knew they didn’t own the streets anymore, that they had lost the neighborhoods to “the coloreds,” that the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn was more violent than they were, that the Chinese, the Vietnamese, and the South American criminal organizations were carving away what had once been sacred Sicilian territory, even in “Little Italy.” Of course, the Sicilians still had the garbage business, the labor unions, Fulton Fish Market, and so on, or would for a while, but it was no longer a growth business and was in the process of rapidly becoming folklore, a legend of the past.
Maybe it was in the cards the moment members of the mob started to write about their world. Maybe it had always depended on silence and secrecy. Maybe Bonanno himself, in his attempt to justify the world he lived in and set the record straight from his point of view, had helped to bring about the end of it by raising the curtain on what went on behind the stage.
The mob, it turned out, had been better served by omertà than by best-sellers, and in the end all that was left of it was a collection of recipes for people with hearty appetites who liked Italian food.
IT WENT largely unnoticed by those who criticized S&S for publicizing or enriching Mafia figures that we published even more books by cops and FBI agents—so much so that at one time when I was visiting One Police Plaza (headquarters of the NYPD), I remarked that everyone in the building seemed to be spending his time at a typewriter writing an outline or looking for an agent.
I began, as it were, at the top, by publishing the autobiography of Patrick Murphy, Mayor John Lindsay’s controversial NYPD commissioner. Murphy was controversial, in fact, only within the ranks of the NYPD—elsewhere he was universally admired. His view that it was not sufficient for an officer merely to refuse graft and bribes, that he must actually report on fellow officers who were corrupt, was regarded as revolutionary in the 1960s and still is. Murphy always seemed to me to be a man who would have been more comfortable as a Jesuit than as a police officer, but we worked well together and produced a very good book, Commissioner, which dealt in detail with most of the problems that still haunt the NYPD today. This was no small achievement. Before Murphy (and for the most part after him), it was unthinkable for a police commissioner to actual
ly admit in print that there might be anything wrong with the NYPD, and the reaction to Commissioner within the NYPD was pretty similar to that of Bonanno’s among the bosses of organized crime—a combination of shock and outrage.
Murphy was good-natured about the fuss. In his own quiet way, he was a pretty tough cookie, and being a cop himself, cops didn’t scare him—nor mayors either, for he proved to be famously resistant to Mayor Lindsay, who had been under the impression that his police commissioner would take his orders from City Hall. Perhaps because we both enjoyed target shooting, Murphy and I became friendly, and I developed a certain interest in policing. At the time, Murphy had stirred up a lot of bad feelings in the NYPD by opening up more command positions to officers who weren’t of old Irish police stock, and had even suggested that a black and a white officer might share the same police car, a notion so radical that mass resignations were threatened. Once, when I visited Murphy on the top floor of police headquarters, I pointed out to him jokingly that while big changes were being made at the precinct level, practically everybody on his floor, right down to the sergeants, was of Irish descent. It might well be Grabowski and Vitigliano in a prowl car, but on the way to the commissioner’s office the signs on the doors announced an endless succession of sons of Erin among the chiefs, deputy chiefs, and their staff. Murphy was not amused. It had apparently never struck him as strange.
IT WAS because of my friendship with Murphy that I went out to Detroit to meet with an even more radical police commissioner. Ray Girardin was a reporter who had been criticizing the Detroit police department for years, until a reform mayor, in a move that surprised everyone, put Girardin in command of Detroit’s police, with instructions to shake things up. In addition to the usual problems of a big-city police department—corruption, cronyism, antiquated equipment and methods—Detroit was saddled with a racial problem that made New York City look like the New Jerusalem. In Detroit, a predominantly white police force clamped down hard on an inner-city population that was mostly black and poor, in the interests of a white upper middle class that had long since moved out to the suburbs. Girardin became something of a hero—everywhere but in Detroit, needless to say—by rolling up his sleeves and forcing change on the Detroit police department. Many of those changes—“community policing,” a civilian review board to examine charges of police brutality, nondiscrimination within the department—remain major and controversial issues in other American cities more than thirty years later. It was Girardin, largely forgotten, who first tried to put them into effect.
Another Life Page 53