15

What brings most joy to a father’s heart is peace.

In 1956 there was peace in my world. That year, as if to celebrate this peace, my older son, Salvatore, decided to marry.

—Leave everything to me, I told him. It will be a wedding no one will ever forget.

I wanted to give my son the greatest wedding in the greatest city in the greatest country in the world.

The marriage of the eldest son is a milestone in any father’s life. It marks a turning point and gives him pause to look back on his life and to look forward. When I reached that landmark in my life, I was most thankful for what I had. Fortune had been good to me. Indeed, in my most complacent moods, I imagined that the rest of my life would be placid, even dull.

I was a man of substance. I was fifty-one years old, husband to Fay and father to Salvatore, Catherine and Joseph. I owned a house on Long Island, a second house in upstate New York and a third house in Tucson, Arizona.

My fourteen-room colonial house in New York near Middletown was surrounded by 280 acres of pastures and hills. The benign atmosphere of the place inspired me to name it the Sunshine Dairy Farm. We had several steers, chickens galore and about seventy-five dairy cows, in addition to our riding horses and a menagerie of dogs. We also rotated crops of corn, barley, alfalfa and timothy.

The job of running the farm belonged to my Uncle John Bonventre, an expert dairyman. I will often choose as a business partner a man who’s either related to me or is a close friend. I like to do business as if it’s all in the family. And if to you this smacks of nepotism or patronage, it is. But whereas many attach negative meanings to those words, I give them positive connotations.

Aside from its business aspect, the Sunshine Dairy Farm served as a rural retreat. The pressure and stress of daily life in the Volcano can be terrific. Men have been known to keel over for good without so much as saying adieu.

It amused me to learn that in colonial times my farm was owned by an aristocratic family from England. You’d have to be an immigrant yourself to appreciate fully my pride in owning such an estate. I remember how proud my friend Joe Profaci was when he bought his estate in rural New Jersey. His spacious house was once owned by Teddy Roosevelt, and years after he bought it Joe would say the house was so large that there were rooms he hadn’t discovered yet.

If my business interests were doing well by the mid-1950s, so was my personal family. Our younger son, Joseph, who was born in 1945, lived with Fay and me. Catherine, born in 1934, had recently completed high school at Mt. St. Mary’s on the Hudson, a boarding school run by Dominican sisters. My older son, Salvatore, was attending the University of Arizona in Tucson. Ever since he was about nine years old, Salvatore had been living and attending schools in Arizona. He suffered from a mastoid ear infection and doctors had advised us to take him to a dry climate where his ailment wouldn’t bother him as much. It was on Salvatore’s account that I bought a house in Tucson.

Although he lived in Tucson most of the year, Salvatore would visit us in the summer or on holidays. He was taking pre-law courses at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Salvatore was tall and handsome, articulate and well-mannered. On one of his trips to the East, Salvatore met Rosalie Profaci, a schoolmate of Catherine’s at Mt. St. Mary’s and the daughter of Salvatore Profaci, a close personal friend of mine and the brother of Joe Profaci. Salvatore and Rosalie fell in love.

I was very pleased with the romance. Their marriage would bring together two eminent families. But it would be unfair to infer that I forced the marriage on Salvatore, regardless of his personal feelings. No doubt, especially when they were young, my own children saw me as an authoritarian and, at times, even a forbidding father. Nonetheless, though I desired the match between Salvatore and Rosalie, I would not have stood in his way if Salvatore had openly protested.

*   *   *

I was on top.

Men called me Padre and I was recognized as the leader of a casa—a house. I had a Family of men I was responsible for.

Being a Father was not a job in the ordinary sense of the word. Rather, I fulfilled a social function within my Tradition.

It is an injustice to the fragile network of relationships in a Family to refer to it blithely, as is done in the mass media, as an “organization.” The two terms describe different levels of cooperation.

Strictly speaking, an organization is a creature of bureaucracy. It is a legal entity. Its life is really on paper. It has a charter (actual or implied), a chain of command, division of labor. It has a purpose. It is there to do a specific task, whether to manufacture widgets or to sell insurance or to rob banks.

It bears repeating how different a Family is from an organization. A Family, as an association of persons, doesn’t have a specific economic task. In an organization you get paid according to your job title. But in a Family you don’t receive a salary simply because you’re someone’s brother or cousin; you have to earn your own money. An organization is judged by such factors as profit and productivity. But a Family is judged by such factors as unity and harmony.

I did not get paid for being a Father. My recompense was in terms of influence and respect—which in turn made many other things possible. It was this prestige, not any forced servitude, that enabled me to command men.

Picture, then, an assortment of relatives and friends who share a common Tradition and who, although pursuing different activities (most legal and some illicit), do so within the framework of a Family because this enhances their chances of success. The Family members can be from all walks of life. Some of them have a high character and some of them have a low character. Some are rich and some are poor. Some are bad and some are good. To make this form of cooperation work they have to give allegiance to one man, the Father. He’s the symbol that holds them together. He’s the coordinator and the conciliator. He’s the mediator and the fixer. He makes connections. He puts things in order when life gets complicated.

The Father has to be somewhat of a universal man. He has to deal with a variety of people, both within the Family and outside it. He has to deal with men of reason and with men who only understand force. Like a head of state, a Father has to be adept in the use of diplomacy as well as in the use of force. This is a fundamental condition of mankind.

As Machiavelli said in The Prince:

“For a man who, in all respects, will carry out only his profession of good, will be apt to be ruined among so many who are evil. A prince, therefore, who desires to maintain himself must learn to be not always good, but to be so or not as necessity may require.…

“You must know that there are two ways to carry out a contest; the one by law, and the other by force. The first is practiced by men and the other by brutes; and as the first is often insufficient, it becomes necessary to resort to the second.”

By 1956, among the other Fathers in my world, both in New York and nationwide, I was highly respected. My Family was not the largest nor the wealthiest, but of the highest quality. Other Fathers often turned to me for counsel. Of all the Fathers, I was the most successful in bridging the gap between how our Tradition worked in Sicily and how we tried to make it work in America. Indeed, I was one of the few Fathers in the United States who knew how to approach Fathers of our Tradition in Sicily. I was one of the youngest Fathers, but since I had become a Father at such an early age I was also one of the most experienced Fathers. I was educated, a rarity. I knew the history of our Tradition better than most. I enjoyed a reputation for fairness and tact. Not everyone might have agreed with me but they always knew where I stood.

That which speaks more effectively for my prestige than anything else is that when my son Salvatore was married in 1956 no one had ever seen a wedding reception attended by so many important men from my world.

*   *   *

The festivities, that August day in 1956, began in the shrine church of St. Bernadette, a modest church in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, the neighborhood of the bride’s uncle, Joseph Profaci. Salvatore and Rosalie were married by a friend, Father Sylvio Ross of Casa Grande, Arizona. People jammed the church, overflowing into the street. But this crowd of several hundred was but a fraction of the number of people invited to the wedding reception afterward.

We held it in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Astor in Manhattan. About three thousand guests attended. The wedding cake was seven feet tall and had six tiers on it; you could have skied on it. A band entertained us, as well as the singing group The Four Lads. Tony Bennett crooned until very late. One or two opera singers whose names I can’t remember also sang. Choruses of Sicilian folksongs wafted from the balcony. People tinkled their glasses to indicate they wanted to see Rosalie and Salvatore kiss or take to the dance floor.

As I go on now to identify some of the guests, it should not be assumed that they were limited to men of my Tradition. The majority of the guests were simply friends, a representative mixture of businessmen, working people, politicians, clergymen, doctors, lawyers and sundry others. One of the guests was Congressman Victor Anfuso of Brooklyn. Another was Fortune Pope, publisher of the Italian-language newspaper in New York called Il Progresso Italo-Americano.

It behooves me for the purposes of this book, however, to concentrate on the men of my Tradition. Within my own Family, my second was Frank Garofalo. Don Ciccio, as he was known to his close friends, was born in my hometown of Castellammare, the son of a leatherworker. After immigrating to the United States, he went into the export-import business and did well. Although he was about a dozen years older than I, Mr. Garofalo and I were very compatible. He was a self-educated man and could talk about literature and history. We were both cultured; we respected etiquette and decorum. He dressed as well as Cary Grant. His manners were impeccable. What I especially admired about him was his self-taught facility in English, which made him valuable as an intermediary between me and some people with whom I couldn’t readily converse. He was an urbane and sophisticated man with a fondness for good opera, good food and good conversation.

Mr. Garofalo also had the good sense to know when to retire. In fact, not long after Salvatore’s wedding, Mr. Garofalo went to Sicily, and he spent the rest of his life there. Not many men would have walked away from what he had. He was in his mid-sixties when he retired, and his graceful, level-headed removal made a deep impression on me.

Also at the wedding were three others in my Family who figure in our story. They were Johnny Morales, John Tartamella and Gaspar DiGregorio. Morales, who started out as my driver and bodyguard, had a quick mind and readily accepted even the most dangerous assignments. Tartamella was the consigliere; he was the president of a barber’s local in Brooklyn and had connections in the hierarchy of the CIO. DiGregorio was my oldest friend of the three, and was a group leader within the Family. He was the brother-in-law of my cousin Stefano Magaddino of Buffalo and the godfather of my son Salvatore. Of the three men, Gaspar was the most deficient in leadership qualities.

In making the seating arrangements, I allotted separate tables to each of the Families. A prominent place was given to Joe Profaci, leader of his own Family. With Profaci was his right-hand man, Joe Magliocco, who was also related to my son’s wife, Rosalie, on her mother’s side.

The other three New York City Families were represented by their respective leaders: Tommy Lucchese, Vito Genovese and Albert Anastasia.

Of the out-of-town Fathers who attended the wedding, I want to single out Joe Zerilli of Detroit and Stefano Magaddino of Buffalo.

Zerilli was born in a village about ten miles away from Castellammare; his son was married to Joe Profaci’s daughter. Of all the Fathers, Stefano and I, of course, knew each other the longest and had the deepest kinship ties.

The guest list didn’t stop there. New Orleans was there, Pittsburgh was there, Los Angeles was there, St. Louis and Kansas City were there, Milwaukee was there, Chicago was there, Boston was there, Philadelphia was there … I think all the United States was there.

The wedding symbolized unity, although to be sure there were sour notes here and there. Among the guests, Vito Genovese and Albert Anastasia still had their long-standing animosity. I made sure to seat them at opposite sides of the hall. But at least they came. They were making an effort to be nice.

I was very proud of the truce I had arranged between them, not only because it showed the respect both Genovese and Anastasia had for me but also because it avoided yet another of those internecine rampages that give my Tradition a bad name.

Little could I guess at my son’s wedding how fragile was the architecture of peace. At the time, I rather complimented myself for having been responsible for a sort of Pax Bonanno.

What can I say?… I don’t want to appear to be casting stones to make myself seem immaculate. Some of us might have been better or worse than our peers, but we were not any of us saints. We lived in a rough world.

Another errant note, which was to grow louder and more discordant, came from my cousin Stefano Magaddino. Through others at his table I learned that Stefano seemed rather disconcerted by the lavishness of the reception and the number of important people who attended. At the wedding he was heard to remark:

—Look at all these people! It’s going to go to Peppino’s head.

Since the marriage of Stefano’s son had not attracted nearly as many luminaries, I saw in Stefano’s words the unmistakable tincture of envy.

The wedding was a milestone in my life at a time when I was perhaps at the apex of my prestige. As I gazed over the assembly, I felt a profound sense of harmony. For the moment, everyone was happy; no strife troubled us. We were all related through bonds of friendship. We were all connected to one another, each of us a piece of a beautiful mosaic, each of us in his place, each of us indispensable to the design—or so it seemed.