Bonanno in the famous Brooklyn gang war of 1930, and a year later he was the best man when Joseph Bonanno married Fay Labruzzo. He was also Bill Bonanno’s godfather, a friend and adviser during the younger Bonanno’s years as an adolescent and student, and it was difficult for Bonanno to figure out when and why Di Gregorio had decided to pull away from the Bonanno organization and lure others with him. Di Gregorio had always been a follower, not a leader, and Bill Bonanno could only conclude that Magaddino had finally succeeded after years of effort to use Di Gregorio as the dividing wedge in the Bonanno organization. Di Gregorio took with him perhaps twenty or thirty men, perhaps more—Bill Bonanno could only guess, for there was no easy way to know who stood where at this point. Maybe fifty of the three-hundred-man Bonanno family had defected in the last month, influenced by the commission’s decision to suspend the elder Bonanno and encouraged by Magaddino’s assurance that the commission would protect them from reprisals by Bonanno loyalists.
No matter what the situation was, Bill Bonanno knew that he could only wait. With his father gone, perhaps dead, it was important that he remain alive to deal with whatever had to be done. To venture outdoors at this point would be foolish and maybe suicidal. If the police did not spot him, Magaddino’s men might. So Bonanno tried to suppress the fury and the despair that he felt and to resign himself to the long wait with Labruzzo. The phone was ringing now, the third code call in the past five minutes—the captains were reporting in from other apartments, available for any message he might wish to leave with the answering service. He would call in a few moments to let them know that he was all right.
It was noon. Through the venetian blinds he could see that it was a dark, dreary day. Labruzzo was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, the dog at his feet. The pantry was well stocked with canned goods and boxes of pasta, and there was plenty of meat and sauce in the refrigerator. Bonanno, a fair cook, would now have lots of practice. They could exist here easily for several days. Only the dog would miss the outdoors.
Bonanno and Labruzzo lived in confinement for nearly a week, sleeping in shifts with their guns strapped to their chests. They were visited at night by the few men they trusted. One of these was a captain named Joe Notaro. He had been close to the Bonannos for years and was respected for his judgment and caution. But on his first visit to the apartment, Notaro admitted with regret and embarrassment that he had probably been indirectly responsible for the elder Bonanno’s capture.
He recalled that on the day of the kidnaping he was sitting in his car discussing Joseph Bonanno’s plans for the evening with another officer, speaking in a tone loud enough to be heard by the driver. Notaro’s driver was a meek little man who had been with the organization for a number of years and had never been taken seriously by the members. As Notaro was later astonished to discover, the driver was then working as an informer for the Di Gregorio faction. The driver had apparently held a grudge against the organization ever since one of the captains had taken away his girl friend, and Joseph Bonanno was too preoccupied at the time with other matters to intercede in the driver’s behalf. The fact that the offending captain was later sentenced to a long jail term on a conspiracy charge in a narcotics case had not soothed the driver’s wounded ego. After Bonanno’s capture, the driver had disappeared, and Notaro just learned that he was now driving for Di Gregorio’s group.
Among other bits of information picked up by Notaro and his fellow officers from their sources around town—from bookmakers and loan sharks, from the men who work in nightclubs and in related businesses linked socially to the underworld—was that Joseph Bonanno was not yet dead and was being held by Magaddino’s men at a farm somewhere in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York. The FBI and the police were reported to be concentrating their efforts in that area, and they had also visited Bonanno’s home in Tucson and were keeping watch on the late Joe Magliocco’s mansion, considering it an ideal hideaway because of its protective walls and the private dock.