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    Bound by Honor: A Mafioso's Story
    Bound by Honor: A Mafioso's Story
    Bound by Honor: A Mafioso's Story
    Ebook403 pages8 hours

    Bound by Honor: A Mafioso's Story

    By Bill Bonanno

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    No one can tell the true story of the Mafia in America better than Bill Bonanno. He was there. He lived it.

    Bill Bonanno was born into a world of respect, tradition, and honor. The son of legendary mafioso Joe Bonanno, Bill was a "made" member of the Mafia by the time he was in his early twenties. He was rumored to be the model for The Godfather's Michael Corleone and was the subject of Gay Talese's best-selling Honor Thy Father.

    Now retired, Bill is finally ready to give an eyewitness account of his life as a high-ranking captain in the Bonanno crime family, one of America's most powerful Mafia syndicates. He takes you inside the mob at its peak, when New York's Five Families-Bonanno, Gambino, Colombo, Lucchese, and Genovese-not only dominated local businesses, but also controlled national politics. For the first time, Bill Bonanno discloses the machinations behind his marriage to Rosalie Profaci (niece of the powerful don Joe Profaci), and even that cemented the alliance between the two Families with all the pomp and circumstance of a royal wedding. From the truth about the mysterious disappearance of his father to a startling disclosure about he mob's participation in the Kennedy assassination, Bill Bonanno lays bare the inner workings of his chaotic, violent, and surprisingly human world with unparalleled detail and insight.

    Bound By Honor not only recounts Bill Bonanno's tumultuous life, but also is an engrossing chronicle of organized crime. Bonanno's story provides a remarkable glimpse into all of the intriguing personalities of the underworld of yesterday to today, from Bugsy Siegel to John Gotti.

    This book is a must for readers of Mario Puzo, Gay Talese, Nicholas Pileggi, and others who have written abut the Mafia, but who have never been in the eye of the storm in quite the same way as Bill Bonanno in Bound By Honor.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 15, 1999
    ISBN9780312264437
    Bound by Honor: A Mafioso's Story
    Author

    Bill Bonanno

    Bill Bonanno lives in Arizona. He is the author of Bound By Honor: A Mafioso's Story.

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    Reviews for Bound by Honor

    3.5/5

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    • 3/5
      I've read almost every mob book ever written and this one is solid. Bill Bonanno is the son of a mob boss, and eventually took over the family. While he is a tremendous blow-hard, the book is interesting and a decent read.

    Book preview

    Bound by Honor - Bill Bonanno

    PROLOGUE

    I can see his head coming off. It slides backward like a clump of snow suddenly lifting off the hood of a car traveling at high speed and flying backward. Except that I see this in slow motion and it is not snow. There is an aureole of red where the spray of blood envelops the exploded parts of brain tissue and bone. I’ve seen this in my mind’s eye thousands of times by now. It is almost thirty-five years since it happened, and though I was two thousand miles away eating a steak, it is as though I were actually there, soaking up the sunshine, standing on the pavement or at one of those windows along the parade route, thinking about something else when all of a sudden—

    I can see the plane touching down at Love Field, taxiing to a stop away from the main terminal, in a secure area on the tarmac where the President and Mrs. Kennedy, wearing pink with a matching pink pillbox hat, step down the portable staircase, their smiles like light reflecting off glaciers, greeting local officials, nodding and glad-handing as they make their way to the open presidential limousine waiting for them. What are they talking about? The pleasant Texas weather? The great crowds that have been turning out, waving little American flags? The anti-Kennedy billboards and ads in the newspapers that have been suddenly springing up? Senator Yarborough’s political problems? Liberals in Texas? Lady Bird’s tulips? Who knows? I remember reading somewhere that Nell Connally, the governor’s wife, leaned over and told the President as their limousine was moving slowly through the city streets, past the cheering crowds, Ah, now you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President!

    I can see the line of limousines and motorcycles making its way along Houston Street, through the very heart of downtown, approaching Elm Street, turning left, moving at about fifteen miles an hour so the people can all get a good glimpse of the famous suntans and professional smiles. The cars move out from a covering of trees, heading onto a stretch of roadway that straightens out. There’s an underpass in the distance, people standing in an open grassy area to the left, facing the oncoming vehicles. Behind this knoll is an embankment that leads up to railroad tracks, a parking area, more trees. You know the rest, right? Or do you?

    In your mind, do the shots come from the rear or the front? Are you one of those who long ago accepted, however uneasily or certainly, that there was a lone gunman lurking in an open sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, that he leveled an old bolt-action rifle called a Mannlicher-Carcano and in just 3.4 seconds, his hand flying from the trigger to the bolt between each shot, fired three bullets, the first striking the President in the neck, exiting from an area just above his polka-dotted silk tie—surprising him like a chicken bone suddenly getting caught in his throat—where it then, somehow, continued onward, striking Governor Connally, who was sitting in a jump seat, in his back, spiraling then through his body, gnawing out a long channel of bone and tissue till it exited again from the governor’s wrist, where it would ultimately be retrieved whole and intact lying alongside him on a stretcher; then a second shot, one that missed completely, then a third, the one that took the President’s head off, impacting the back of the skull as he was leaning forward clutching his throat, his body jerking backward violently—this improbable motion of the body due to the meltdown of neurological wiring as the bullet tore through the brain?

    Or are you somewhat less credulous, perhaps believing that the shots had to come from the front, from the grassy knoll, and, therefore, involved more than a lone gunman? You would certainly have common sense—and a lot of conspiracy buffs—on your side if you leaned more toward the latter theory than the former. Bullets fired from the front certainly better account for the President first clutching his throat, for the debris of brain matter exploding upward and backward rather than upward and forward when his head was blown off. Also, believing the shots came from the front relieves the almost impossible difficulty of having to explain away three rapid-fire shots from the rear from an unwieldy Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. There are also plenty of eyewitness accounts of shots coming from the front, with virtually no testimony of them coming from the other direction. Any number of people claim they heard rifle cracks coming from the railroad trestle just above the grassy knoll. Others say they saw puffs of smoke—gunsmoke—coming from a clump of trees behind a fence at the top of that rise. Another eyewitness said he actually heard bullets whizzing by, inches from his head, as he watched the presidential motorcade from the front.

    Why any of this still matters to me, decades later, is because in a most personal sense the truth of the Kennedy assassination went far beyond the killing of a single man. It was about the falling apart of my world, the world of the so-called Mafia.

    There has been plenty written of late about how the Mafia killed Kennedy. I’ve read and reread the books and magazine articles, and like so much that’s been recorded about my world, the mix of fact, fantasy, and speculation makes it almost impossible to get at what really happened. It’s as though the public, craving the myth of Camelot, has needed to perpetuate a romantic truth rather than face a complicated set of measurable, if ugly, truths.

    Because I happened, at the time, to be the acting leader of the Bonanno crime Family, I eventually learned who shot the President—and why. What I know now—so many years later—is that the assassination, more than anything, was not a single event but, rather, was one link in a chain of events reaching back across many years, binding the lives of many people. The bullet that tore through President Kennedy’s skull was the end of an era—but not the one people fantasized about.

    1

    Nineteen fifty-four. Spring. Mass has ended. A knot of people move out of a small adobe-style Catholic church in Tucson, along white walks framed by neat flower beds filled with desert plants: blooming cactus, epiphytes with pale green leaves and deep scarlet blossoms. There are two men in the center of this slowly moving group that surrounds them and shields them from the eyes of the curious: Joseph P. Kennedy and my father, Joseph Bonanno.

    The men have known each other for almost thirty years. To all the world, these men are as different as night and day, as different as an ancestry that is Irish and privileged on one side, Sicilian and underworld on the other. But these two Joes, in my mind, are really opposite sides of the same coin. Their story is actually one, shrouded in the richness of disguise and irony: a Tale of Two Joes, an American Success set to the words of Emma Lazarus and the ideas of Niccolò Machiavelli.

    Two men. Two seemingly separate destinies. Their lives are rooted in the neighborhoods of the American immigrant communities in which they grew up, among people new to this country, struggling to survive poverty, prejudice, and political powerlessness. Joe Kennedy is from a family that would not accept those limitations—the same as Joe Bonanno.Kennedy’s father and then Joe Kennedy himself built out of the back rooms and saloons of their neighborhood a powerful answer to powerlessness. The building blocks were booze—and claps on the back: relationships. Out of the saloons of Boston’s Back Bay, Joe Kennedy was raised to understand the importance of friendship. Like his father before him, he was there with money, contacts, advice, and support for those in need; in turn, he got back the kind of willing support and loyalty that allowed him to extend contacts and friendships: to the cop on the beat, the neighborhood shopkeeper, the local ward boss, the councilmen, representatives, mayors, and governors who supposedly ruled over them.

    Joe Bonanno’s father, Salvatore, my grandfather, at the turn of the century was also a man with a saloon and a thousand friendships, who understood that the nature of fellowship was decidedly political. But in the Sicilian wards of Brooklyn, political power worked a little differently. English was not spoken; relationships with the high and mighty were built more clandestinely. But the building blocks were the same. The men and women who did not have enough to eat or to pay their rent or to find good doctors for their children went to the Bonannos for help—which they received and for which they paid back in support and loyalty all that had ever been extended to them. Joe Bonanno and Joe Kennedy, from the time they were kids, understood this basic principle of friendship. That is what joined them at the hip (that and Prohibition). That was what made them men of

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