led to his being transferred to schools in the dry climate of Arizona. His father selected a boarding school in Tucson and would come to Arizona with his wife to visit Bill for the entire winter, renting an apartment there at first, later buying a house. Within four or five years Bill gradually became aware of the many men who frequently visited his father there, men who seemed respectful and deferential. These were many of the same men he remembered seeing around the house as a boy in Long Island; and he also recalled a particular cross-country automobile trip that the Bonanno family had taken years before, when Bill was about eight years old, traveling from New York to California, visiting the Grand Canyon and other sites, and in every large city in which they stopped his father seemed to know numbers of people, friendly men who made a great fuss over young Bill and his sister.
After Bill Bonanno got his driver’s license, which was obtainable at sixteen in Arizona, his father sometimes asked him to meet certain men arriving at the Tucson train station or the airport, men Bill knew well now and had become fond of—they were like uncles to him. When he eventually began to recognize these same men’s photographs in newspapers and magazines and to read articles describing them as thugs and killers, he concluded, after a brief period of confusion and doubt, that the newspapers were uninformed and prejudiced. The characterization of the men in the stories bore little resemblance to the men he knew.
Perhaps his first personal involvement with his father’s world occurred while he was a student at Tucson Senior High School in 1951, on a day when he was called out of class and told to report to the principal’s office. The principal seemed upset as he asked, “Bill, are you in any kind of trouble with the law?”
“No,” Bonanno said.
“Well, there are two men from the FBI in my outer office,” the principal said, adding, “Look, Bill, you don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to.”
“I have nothing to hide,” he said.
“Would you prefer that I be present?”
“Sure, if you want to.”
The principal led Bill Bonanno, who was seventeen, into the outer office and introduced him to the agents, who asked if he knew anything about the disappearance and possible murder of the Mafia boss Vincent Mangano. Bill Bonanno said that he knew nothing about it. He had heard that name before, but it had been in connection with James Mangano, who had an asthmatic daughter and had rented the Bonanno’s Tucson home one summer when they were away. The agents took notes, asked a few more questions, then left. Bill Bonanno returned to his classroom somewhat shaken. He felt the eyes of the other students on him, but he did not face anyone as he took his seat; he felt separated from his classmates in a way that he had not felt before.
It was a feeling, he was sure, that Rosalie never had as a girl, and he even wondered if she had it now. She seemed totally unaware and naïve about his world. While he occasionally interpreted this as self-protectiveness on her part, a determination to ignore what she disapproved of, he also believed sometimes that his wife was genuinely remote from reality, as if her parents had really fulfilled their ambition to separate Rosalie from the embarrassing aspects of their past. But this could not be entirely true, for if they had really wished to separate her from themselves they would never have condoned her marriage to him. Still, for whatever reason, his wife’s quality of detachment irritated him at times, and he hoped that now, following his father’s disappearance, she would respond to the emergency and do nothing foolish or careless. He hoped, for example, that when she left their house with the children she would remember to lock the front and back doors and would be certain that all the windows were securely bolted. He was worried that FBI men, posing as burglars, would break into the house and infest the interior with electronic bugs. They often did this, he had heard. They would enter a house and overturn a few pieces of furniture and plow through the bureau drawers and closets, giving the impression that they were thieves looking for valuables, but what they really were doing was installing bugs. Once the agents got into a house, he knew, it was nearly