Part 5 (1/2)

Bill Bonanno stood in the living room greeting people as they walked in and embraced him, kissed him, and told him how well he looked. One of his aunts, his mother's oldest sister, had cried when she saw him, but now she was drying her tears in her handkerchief, standing in the kitchen with Bill's other aunts and his mother-in-law, who were preparing the large dinner. The women, gray-haired and with matronly figures, were making soup and pasta, roasting a variety of meat, and cooking stuffed peppers and mushrooms with side dishes of string beans and other vegetables. Rosalie moved between the kitchen and dining room, setting the table, having put a heavy linen cloth over two sizable folding aluminum tables that had been placed end to end. She wore a bright yellow dress, had a flower in her hair, and she seemed sprightly and in concert with the excitement around her.

She heard her husband in the living room recounting his jail experiences to the other men, and she knew that he was enjoying the attention he was receiving, the laughter he was provoking by his comic descriptions of the characters he had met. She was privately elated that he was home, had liked waking up in the morning and finding him beside her, and when one of the men in the living room called to her, ”How you feeling, Rosalie?” she smiled and replied, ”Like a bride.”

As the aroma from the kitchen carried through the house, the children ran freely from room to room, pus.h.i.+ng wagons, waving plastic guns, riding the giant bear, competing for their father's attention. The color television set in the den was loudly tuned to the ”Lawrence Welk Show,” which no one was watching, and in one corner of the dining room sat an elderly white-haired uncle, a tailor, sewing up the seams of Bill's trousers that had been reduced in girth. The only young person among the guests was Rosalie's teen-age sister, Josephine, who was being sent in the fall to college in Santa Clara, California, a Jesuit school about which Josephine already had some doubts.

Josephine was a serene brown-eyed girl who wore her long dark hair in a ponytail, and she possessed, but managed to conceal in front of her elders, an inquiring mind. She was beginning to question certain edicts of the Catholic church and certain values and goals that her two older sisters and brothers and her other relatives had accepted unquestioningly-namely, the quest for financial security and middle-cla.s.s respectability. Josephine, who was eleven years younger than Rosalie, was only seven when her father had died, and she had not been subjected to the insularity and strictness as Rosalie had or her other sister, Ann. who was now married to a young man of Sicilian origin and living near Santa Clara. Josephine was beginning to identify with the style of a new generation. She was reading books and thinking thoughts that she was sure her family would neither understand nor appreciate; she could not accept the submissive role of women and all the prerogatives of men in the Italo-American society she had observed at close range, and she did not wish to condone the hards.h.i.+p and suffering that had been experienced by her mother and her sister Rosalie.

Josephine had been acutely aware of the marital difficulties between Rosalie and Bill, and she remembered how frightened she was two years ago on the night that Bill and Labruzzo came to the Profaci home to reclaim Rosalie. Hearing the shouting and commotion after Bill was told by her mother that Rosalie was not at home and would not be going with him, Josephine locked herself in the upstairs bathroom with Bill's two-year-old son, Joseph; when she heard Bill climbing the steps, she quickly turned on the bathtub tap, answering his angry pounding against the door with cries that she was bathing, begging him to leave her alone, and praying meanwhile that the little boy would remain silent. Josephine did not again breathe easily until long after Bill had left the house.

Josephine's opinion of Bill was far from flattering even now, but she veiled her emotions as she helped Rosalie set the table, and she was as friendly to Bill as she was capable of being. She knew how much her mother wanted to end the family friction, to stand behind Rosalie and Bill and forget the past. Watching her mother in the kitchen, a large smiling woman of great generosity and warmth, Josephine was again impressed by her mother's capacity to withstand a lifetime of ordeals; she had been an orphan as a young girl after both parents had died in an accident, a widow before she was forty, a woman who had moved through life without bitterness with a controversial name that one of her sons would change and that another of her sons would keep in public circulation by being charged with gambling in Brooklyn. Her daughters had also been a source of suffering-Rosalie, the model child, nearly dying from an overdose of pills, and Ann, the second girl, rebelling as a teen-ager after the death of her father, keeping her own hours until her mother in a rare moment of frustration threw a plate of spaghetti at her-an incident that the family now considered amusing, one of the few amusing incidents that Josephine could recall from her childhood.

After the table was set for dinner and Bill had opened the wine and the women had come in from the kitchen carrying steaming plates, everyone sat down, and one of the aunts looked at Bill adoringly, and said, ”Oh, Bill, you look wonderful,” to which he smiled and said, ”In jail the food was terrible.”

”Did you have any Italian cooks in there?” one of the men asked.

”We had one,” Bill said. ”He was an illegal entry from Naples. For the few weeks he was there, the food was better, but then they s.h.i.+pped him back and it suddenly got worse. It was so bad that there was a hunger strike for two and half days, and then it got better, but not much better. There was one dish in jail called Baked Manzanetti, which was macaroni and wasn't bad-years ago there was a cook named Manzanetti who used to make it, and he put his name on the menu and its still there. But the conditions were so bad, the filth, the rats, that sometimes you just couldn't eat no matter what they were serving.”

”Rats!” one of the women exclaimed.

”Yes, rats,” Bill repeated. ”They were all over. I had one rat that used to come into my cell at night, and I'd tie a piece of food on a string and play with him, and...”

”Bill,” Rosalie interrupted, wanting to change the subject.

”Some of the men really got depressed in that place,” Bill continued, ”especially the junkies, and we had plenty of them. We also had a few suicides when I was there-one night this Puerto Rican fellow climbed up on a stool, tied his belt around his neck and hooked it to the ceiling, and told his cellmate-who was playing solitaire-that he didn't want him to call anybody or do anything. The cellmate looked up from his game and said, 'Don't worry.' The guy on the stool tightened the belt, waited for a few moments, then again looked at his cellmate and said, 'Now don't cut me down.' The guy playing solitaire became irritated, and he said, 'Look, you want to talk or you want to jump?' The guy jumped. After he was dead, the cellmate called the guards.”

”Oh, how terrible,” one of the women said, ”how could he do such a horrible thing?”

”In jail,” Bill said, ”you do things. And you don't care.”

As they continued to eat, Bill felt something poking him in the back. Turning, he saw his son Salvatore, smiling, wearing a cowboy hat, pointing a toy gun at him.

”Hey, cut that out!” Bill shouted, laughing, and the little boy ran giggling into the kitchen. Bill then resumed talking, telling his guests that there were many interesting aspects to his jail experience, such as how naturally the prisoners seemed to divide themselves into social cla.s.ses that were roughly equivalent to the level of social acceptability that they had enjoyed in the outside world: the crooked lawyers in jail a.s.sociated with other crooked lawyers or stock swindlers; the pimps a.s.sociated with other pimps or smalltime pushers; and the same was true of the truck hijackers and other thieves.

”Birds of a feather stick together,” somebody said, and one of the men asked, smiling, ”And where did you fit in, Bill?”

Bill lifted his wine gla.s.s in a mock toast and said, ”I enjoyed great social mobility.” He then added, ”Shortly after I arrived in prison, an interviewer who was responsible for a.s.signing us jobs asked me what I did on the outside, and I said, 'Nothing that would be of any use in here.' But I did tell him I could type, thinking he might put me in the records room, but that didn't work. Later on, after I'd worked as a painter, I got to work in the library, which I enjoyed, although there was not much to read in there. They had books by Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy that I'd read in school, but the reading level was very low. I did reread Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative Conscience of a Conservative, and I agree with a lot of points he makes-especially his point that the federal government today has entirely too much power, and the individual citizen's rights are being ignored...” There were nods of agreement from around the table, although none from Josephine who had listened quietly throughout dinner but had not offered a comment or revealed in any way what she was thinking. Mrs. Profaci smiled often at Bill during the evening, and no one would have guessed that their relations.h.i.+p had been strained in the recent past. Rosalie also continued to be in good spirits, listening attentatively and keeping her husband's water gla.s.s filled and the food within his reach.

Although they sat for nearly two hours and discussed many subjects, there was never a mention of Bill's father during the entire evening. It was as if the subject was too delicate, too private to be raised in front of so many people, too awkward or implicating. Perhaps they were also aware that the house might be bugged. Bill's mother, who had been reported missing immediately after the incident and was later speculated to be living with friends or relatives in Arizona or California, was now at her home in Tucson with her son Joseph. Bill said that his mother was ill and rarely left the house. He had no idea what his brother was doing these days; he had not received a letter from him in jail, and although Bill had written Catherine inquiring about Joseph he had received no word of him in her reply, and he was worried. Bill also felt a certain guilt with regard to his younger brother. Shortly before his father had disappeared, the subject of Joseph came up and Bill sensed that his father held him partially responsible for Joseph's drifting existence and the long-haired youths Joseph often a.s.sociated with in Arizona, an element that neither the elder Bonanno nor Bill could relate to. Bill had been too busy with his own problems in the last few years to worry about Joseph, and still he did worry about him and wonder about him; but on this evening Bill did not seek information from his aunts about his brother-he was in a festive mood and wanted to remain so, and he preferred to divert his guests and himself with general conversation related to his experiences in prison. He described for them his caution after receiving the gift candy bar from Kayo Konigsberg, he repeated words that were part of prison parlance, and he told of his acquaintances.h.i.+ps with such varied prisoners as Lowell M. Birrell, the stock swindler; with an oil executive from Long Island accused of selling secrets to the Russians; with three black militants suspected of plotting to blow up the Statue of Liberty; and with a movie producer who had recently fled Mexico, where he was sought for questioning in the murder of a cast member with an underwater fis.h.i.+ng spear. It was this producer, Bill said, who had taught him how to play chess.

Bill also told how the inmates made coffee and whiskey in jail and described the night when an explosion was caused because the whiskey makers neglected to let sufficent air into the jar during fermentation.

”It sounded like m.u.f.fled gun shots,” Bill recalled, ”and suddenly the red telephones lit up, the guards started yelling through the intercom, and all the steel doors slammed shut. The prison-break warning was sounded and any prisoner caught outside his cell was in real trouble. We all waited to see what would happen. Soon we saw about nine guards with billy clubs dragging some Negroes away with their buckets and broken jars.”

”Oh how awful,” one of the aunts said.

”It's so terrible,” another said, ”that they would risk their lives just to make liquor.”

”What's the difference?” Rosalie asked. ”Bill smuggled in provolone and...”

There was silence around the table. Every one looked toward Bill, who looked at his plate, neither laughing off her remark nor elaborating upon it. Finally one of the aunts spoke up.

”That was food food,” she said. ”That was different.”

”Yes,” another woman agreed, ”That was different.”

Rosalie shrugged, got up to get more coffee. Bill then continued to talk, changing the subject to religion in jail, remarking on how surprised he was by the great variety of Bibles that were available to the inmates-there were dozens of different Bibles, he said, Jewish Bibles, Christian Bibles, even the Koran. Every week or so, members from Bible societies would arrive in prison to preach to those inmates willing to listen. Bill said he always attended these lectures, welcoming the opportunity of seeing new faces behind bars, and he was about to say something more when his four-year-old son, Joseph, came running into the room crying, complaining of something that his older brother, Charles, had done to him. But Bill quickly cut him off, demanding, ”You want to grow up and become a stool pigeon?”

The little boy stopped whimpering.

”No,” he said, ”no!”

”All right then,” Bill said, ”so don't go telling on your brother that way.”

9.

ALTHOUGH JOSEPH BONANNO CONTINUED TO ELUDE THE hunt of the FBI and the police during 1965 and was still hiding as winter turned to spring in 1966, the government claimed it was making progress in its national campaign against organized crime. It had greatly increased its knowledge of the secret society, had intensified public awareness through the cooperation of the press, and it had succeeded in hara.s.sing and arresting, if not always convicting, many mafiosi and other gang members of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds who were either employed by the Mafia or were working with it. hunt of the FBI and the police during 1965 and was still hiding as winter turned to spring in 1966, the government claimed it was making progress in its national campaign against organized crime. It had greatly increased its knowledge of the secret society, had intensified public awareness through the cooperation of the press, and it had succeeded in hara.s.sing and arresting, if not always convicting, many mafiosi and other gang members of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds who were either employed by the Mafia or were working with it.

In New York City alone in 1965, more than 400 arrests were made in organized crime, and throughout the nation there were continuous raids against bookmakers and loan sharks, operators of illegal gambling casinos and other enterprises that the government called ”mob-controlled.” Fourteen bolita operators were arrested in Tampa, Florida, by the Internal Revenue Service; 34 pimps, prost.i.tutes, and gamblers were arrested in Columbus, Ohio, by the local police; 68 persons were arrested for illegal gambling in Chester, West Virginia, by the state police. Sixty gamblers were convicted in Nashville, 34 gamblers were arrested in St. Paul, 31 in Denver, 24 in St. Louis. The FBI relayed 180,000 items of criminal information to various investigative units on the federal, state, or munic.i.p.al level, and there was also cooperation between law enforcement officials in the United States and overseas. The police in Sicily interrogated many Mafia suspects in Castellammare about the Bonanno case, and in Germany, agents from Interpol, the international police organization, looked up Bill Bonanno's former girl friend to ask if she knew anything about the elder Bonanno's disappearance. She said she did not, never having met Joseph Bonanno, although she did admit having seen him once a few years ago sitting with another man in the c.o.c.ktail lounge in Arizona where she had worked. She guessed that he had come to see for himself the woman who had attracted his son, and after he had finished his drink he left the lounge without comment and with a generous tip.

Although the government contended that organized crime was the most lucrative business in America, experts quoted in newspapers and magazines were unable to agree on how many billions of dollars were derived each year from illegal enterprises run by gangs. Their estimates ranged from $10 billion to $40 billion annually; and even the more conservative reports conceded that organized crime probably netted more profit each year than the combined earnings of United States Steel, AT&T, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Electric, Ford, IBM, Chrysler, and RCA.

About three-quarters of the crime revenue was contributed by citizens who bet on horse races and other sports events with bookmakers, or played the numbers. While the typical numbers bettor might be a Harlem housewife on welfare who deposits 25 cents each morning with a neighborhood ”runner,” hoping to overcome 1,000-to-1 odds and ”hit” the daily number, which by prior agreement might be the last three digits of the total money bet at the local track that day, and while the typical patron of a bookmaker might be an auto mechanic or a porter who invests $2 on a horse each day, there are enough of these gambling citizens in America-millions to whom a small bet is a daily tonic and who cannot afford to go in person to a track-to support the fabulous industry of illegal gambling, an industry that has been flouris.h.i.+ng for many decades despite the tactics of crime busters and the will of puritanical lawmakers.

The numbers game is the national pastime of city slums, is a source of hope, however small, for the urban poor crowded into blocks of 10,000 people, living in teeming tenements each with its ”runner,” each with its corner store that may be a ”drop” for numbers slips that are later picked up by ”collectors” and delivered to ”controllers” who record the data and later pay the winners. The controllers, who usually work with their aides in private apartments that are protected by alarm systems and lookouts, are answerable to the neighborhood ”banker,” who represents the mob that oversees the whole network and covers the bets. If a ”runner” or other employee is caught by the police, it is the controller's responsibility to pay for the bail and legal fees out of his profit; but the bribery of the police, whose cooperation is essential for numbers racketeering to function, is handled by a representative of a Mafia ”family” or whatever ethnic gang is backing the ”bank” in a particular section of the city.

While police graft is expensive, with gangsters complaining that the police sometimes take almost half of the profit (and more when there is pressure from headquarters to ”clean up” crime), there nevertheless is enough money after the payoffs and other operational costs to keep hundreds of numbers couriers running each day and the ”banks” booming with business. It was estimated in The New York Times The New York Times that the numbers lotteries in Harlem alone earned $ 1 billion a month in profits and that the Vito Genovese ”family,” which was heavily involved in several Harlem banks, had twenty-seven millionaires among its ”soldiers.” that the numbers lotteries in Harlem alone earned $ 1 billion a month in profits and that the Vito Genovese ”family,” which was heavily involved in several Harlem banks, had twenty-seven millionaires among its ”soldiers.”

The Lucchese ”family” was also active in the Harlem numbers, and so was a Puerto Rican syndicate under the leaders.h.i.+p of Raymond Marquez, known in the newspapers as ”Spanish Raymond.” Marquez's father many years ago was a runner for Genovese's men, but Marquez is his own boss, has his own gang, and reportedly earns more than $3 million a year from his banks, although a few are believed to be affiliated with mafiosi and sharing the profits. The numbers kings in the South Bronx are Jewish-Samuel and Moishe Schlitten, whose banks are said to be even more profitable than Raymond Marquez's, but the Schlitten brothers, too, are reportedly in partners.h.i.+p in certain areas with members of the Genovese and Lucchese organizations.

There is probably not a densely populated lower- or middle-income neighborhood in New York that does not support numbers racketeering; and the bookmakers are everywhere. Some of the more respectable business firms in the city have a bookmaker or two among its employees, men who do their jobs and book bets on the side-and it has long been possible to bet through bookies even in courthouses, law offices, and the New York Times Building, where the editorial writers denounced racketeering in print while certain staff members and editors supported it with their betting.

Many bookies in midtown Manhattan, particularly on the West Side and in the Garment Center, were linked to the Lucchese and Bonanno organizations, and the Bonanno men also worked with Jewish and Puerto Rican racketeers in bookmaking and numbers on the Lower East Side. All the ”families,” including the Bonannos and the Profacis, had well-coordinated numbers networks in Brooklyn and parts of Queens, and their most persistent bettors were not only the blacks but also Italians and Latin Americans, many of whom had begun playing numbers in their native countries where lotteries were usually legal. While many black Americans worked in organized crime as runners, and a few became controllers, it was largely in the wake of the civil rights movement that black gangsters finally began to demand and achieve equal opportunities. By the early 1960s, the police were able to conclude that a few banks in the black ghettos of Brooklyn were being run by black men, some with Mafia ties, some not.

A second source of revenue for organized crime was loan-sharking, which most crime spokesmen estimate earns more than $1 billion in annual profits. Though the interest rates might be twenty percent, customers are always available because several thousand Americans, many of them black, can not borrow from legitimate sources, since they have poor credit ratings. Some of these people are on welfare, some are gamblers down on their luck, others are small businessmen struggling because of mismanagement or other personal failings. To such people the loan shark represents the primary source of quick relief.