Word: bonanno
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...