Bill Bonanno (Arizona Star Obituary)
Bill Schenley
Son of Notorious Mafia Don Has Coronary at Tucson Home
Photo:
http://www.ganglandnews.com/bill%20bonanno02.jpg
FROM: The Arizona Daily Star ~
By Enric Volante
Salvatore "Bill" Bonanno, the former acting head of one
of New York's Mafia families and son of Prohibition-era
crime boss Joseph Bonanno, died Tuesday at 75.
Bill Bonanno, who survived a mob shootout in Brooklyn
before he retired from organized crime, had a heart attack
at his Tucson home and died at Tucson Medical Center
around 9 a.m., said his daughter-in-law, Kathleen Bonanno.
Bonanno, a tall, sometimes charming man who liked to talk
about the history of Sicily, moved to Tucson from
New York as a young boy when his father began dividing
his time between the East
Coast crime family and a home in Tucson, where Bill
attended the University of Arizona.
FBI officials said Bill Bonanno served as consiglieri of the
Bonanno crime family and then as acting head when his
father went missing in the 1960s.
Bonanno served federal prison terms in the 1970s and 1980s
following two convictions, including one for a stolen credit
card.
Bonanno said he retired from organized crime in 1968.
The FBI said that was when his father lost control of the
Brooklyn-based criminal organization he had ruled for decades.
The organization that bore their name was infiltrated in the
1980s by FBI Agent Joe Pistone and was portrayed in the film
"Donnie Brasco."
In 1980, the elder Bonanno, who died in 2002 at 97, was
convicted of obstructing a federal grand jury's investigation
of an alleged money-laundering scheme involving his sons Bill
and Joseph Jr.
A crime novel that Bill Bonanno co-authored with retired agent
Pistone and another writer came out last year.
Bill Bonanno was the focus of the best-selling book "Honor
Thy Father," by Gay Talese, in 1971.
In 1999 Bill Bonanno co-produced a nearly five-hour-long
Showtime series on the life of his father. A former U.S. attorney
who had prosecuted organized crime when the elder Bonanno
was a powerful don said the Bonannos "had a lot of nerve"
exploiting their notoriety.
Soon after, Bill Bonanno published his own book, "Bound By
Honor: A Mafioso's Story."
In his book, Bonanno made the unsubstantiated claim that
mobster Johnny Roselli confided he shot President
John F. Kennedy from a hiding place in a storm drain in Dallas'
Dealey Plaza. He also recalled that he ran an illegal betting parlor
with his mafia crew in the early 1960s in a building on East
Broadway in Tucson.
He also took credit for arranging G. Gordon Liddy to be
released from segregated lockup when they were in prison
together.
"Liddy wasn't a rat like (Watergate witness) John Dean. He was
a loyal soldier. I was told he would be perfectly safe."
Daughter-in-law Kathleen said Tuesday, "The mystique of the
Bonanno family we did not know about because to us he was a
wonderful, kind and giving father, grandfather and
great-grandfather."
"He stopped at nothing to come to the aid of his children," she
said. He often spoke to them of their family heritage in Italy and
Sicily and took his grandchildren there.
Bonanno was celebrating the holidays with his relatives and
recently wrote to them: "Nothing can exceed the joy of Christmas
when a father and a mother and their children and their children's
children come together in a conscious awareness of Christmas'
true meaning."
Survivors include his wife of 51 years, Rosalie; sister Catherine
Bonanno Genovese of Pleasant Hills, Calif.; sons Charles and
Joseph of Phoenix, and Salvatore of Scottsdale; daughter
Felippa "Gigi" Pettinato of Grass Valley, Calif; 18 grandchildren;
and two great-grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements were pending with Bring's funeral home on
Broadway.