Honor Thy Father, the 1971 story documenting the lives of the Bonanno family during the underworld conflict know as the Banana War and its aftermath, goes beyond the sensational and tells a story of a young man living a difficult existence trapped between worlds of an ancient culture of his father and its ideals and the mainstream American values, never fully at home in either. Gay Talese succeeds in making this existence understandable. And he infuses it with uncommon humanity for the subject.
Talese became interested in the story of Bill Bonanno when he was sent by the New York Times to cover the young man's 1965 arrest. As Talese watched the young Bonanno in the courtoom, he wondered what the life of a young man growing up in the Mafia was like. It was the desire to satisfy this question that would lead him to approach the younger Bonanno, with the proposal of writing a book about him and his world, and eventually to enter the secret world of the Bonanno family.
While most men his age worried about things like paying the mortgage and getting ahead, Bill was worried about men with guns. And about the police. All this on top of the more mundane concerns about money and family. The life of Bill Bonanno as son of a Mafia don carried with it numerous burdens unknown and incomprehensible to most other young men of his era.
One of these burdens is the ever present threat of violence from members of the other crime families. To underscore this menace, the Honor Thy Father opens with a mysterious kidnapping of Joseph Bonanno by unidentified gunmen several days before his scheduled appearance in front of a federal grand jury in Manhattan. In the ensuing struggle for power between rival factions, Bill himself becomes a target of assassins sent by a bitter former friend of his father. Bill's world was one where the law and the courts were suspect or even the enemy and you settled disputes on your own. It was a medieval existence in the middle of 20th century America: in the era of the Moon missions, armed men in New York were carrying out secret vendettas.
Closely allied with violence was suspicion. It followed the abduction of the elder Bonanno as Bill tried to figure out who could have been responsible and whether someone inside the 300 hundred-man Bonanno organization could have betrayed them. One man who stood out among the suspects was Joseph Bonanno's long-time associate Di Gregorio, a man whose desire to assume the position of third in command of the organization was dashed when Joseph Bonanno elevated his son to the post. There was also jealousy and fears of ambition. Di Gregorio's jealousy seemed to consume him so completely he turned against his old friend. Some in the underworld also feared that the elder Bonanno planed to expand his influence, perhaps becoming the boss of bosses, at their cost, and saw Bill's promotion as part of that plan. Both the jealousy and the fears and suspicions played into an underworld war that would ultimately bring down the Bonannos. But there was boredom, too; there was waiting: Bill and his closest associates spent weeks holed up in an apartment, fearing to venture out following the abduction of his father.
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