Customer Reviews

Bound by Honor: A Mafioso's Story

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Who killed JFK? The CIA? FBI? Secret Service? Cubans? The Mafia? Bill Bonanno details the answer to that question and much more in the book Bound By Honor. Bonanno's accounts of what goes on t in the mafia are a first hand look into a world that has been kept secret for a very long time.

Bonanno is able to give the reader a true taste of life in the Underworld, but it lacks any real substance. Bonanno has an insight into this life style and ruler of a powerful crime family, but he only touches the surface. Bonanno was very distance in his approached to relating the facts.

I was surprised at several of the stories Bonanno relates in this book, however I was left a little unsure of the message. While Bonanno may want the reader to think that he has blown the lid off of the mafia, the reader will find that some of the "facts" cannot be corroborated.

An interesting read for almost any taste, and you should be able to walk away with the feeling that your money was well spent. I believe that if the author spent more time detailing some of the facts, the book would have been a true bestseller.

I found this book to be informative without being gawdy and violently graphic. How refreshing! The Don did a great job for an ex-wise guy who was born into a tradition of big time crime and back alley violence. I suspected for years that Puzo used the Bonanno Patriarch as the model for "Don Corleone". It only makes sense that his son Bill was the inspiration for "Michael". Which brings me to my next point: Bill Bonanno is a college educated, former organized crime figure after the finest tradition of that phrase, if there is such a thing. To have written his manuscript as well as he did, without much editing is to the book's benefit as well as the reader's. I personally despise books of this type that are pumped full of hype. This book skips the hype and simply tells a man's life story that was, for good or ill, a signifigant part of our culture through most of this century. Great reading for any student of New York's "five families" and must reading for students of 20th century American History & Sociology. As for Bill Bonanno, may he and his family live out the remainder of their lives in peace and happiness.

This book isn't about crime; it's about a broken heart. Like Michael Corleone, what Bonanno did to preserve his family destroyed it; like Corleone, once he got involved, he couldn't get out. This explains his fatalistic feeling that his role in life was preordained at birth.

Contrary to other reviews here, Bonanno DOES give new details, like why Bugsy Seigal was killed and who the second shooter was in Dallas. His explanation of who killed the Kennedys and why is worth the price of the book. He shouldn't be expected to give details about his own capers, not only because this would be self-incriminating, but because he was a strategist, not a soldier or capo. He's a policy wonk of crime.

He says the U.S. Government is the biggest mob around. If true, this not only justifies why Sicilians are as they are, but burdens the rest of us with a warning. Even if false, it indavertently supports his point that "the life" came to an end when those practicing it entered into a war of attrition with a foe more capable of maintaining it. Maybe greed wasn't to blame; maybe it was hubris.

Even if the book is self-serving or written for profit, that it exists is omerta's epitaph. It demonstrates that action for its own sake can be as addictive as heroin and harder to shake. It restates two great truths--"whatever is taken by force must be maintained by force" and "force feeds on force." It also proves that two cultures can't exist in the same place at the same time; one absorbs the other or eliminates it. A war between the Mafia and America could end in only one way. Bonanno says that his father knew this; I believe him.

I've read a few "Mafia" books in my time and this one beats them all for best fiction. "Our tradition" and "honor". These words pop in the story about a thousand times. This guy thinks he came out of a fairy tale with the holy grail tucked under his belt.

The way Billy Boy describes his traditional father as an angel of peace just doesn't stick. As one of the five Dons leading New York's underworld, Bonanno Senior was not the caretaker of some sacred tradition but a Machiavellan player who could rival with the likes of the Borgias. What? You think La Cosa Nostra was built on some divine attribute. You're wrong - it was built on greed.

In French we have an expression, "Jamais deux sans trois", which translates as, "Never two without three". This book is the third attempt by those zany Bonannos to sanitize their traditional family history. See "Honor thy Father" and "A Man of Honor" for the other two miscarried attempts. Oh! I almost forgot. His wife Rosalie wrote "Mafia Marriage", an essay into a not so traditional relationship. Good advice for all those dysfunctional couples out there.

In "Bound by Honor", we are once again brought to believe the Joe Bonanno, a man of tradition, was kidnapped in 1964 by his not so honorable cousin, Steve Maggadino. Actually, Joe Bananas faked his own kidnapping to escape the Feds and his mob "friends". Another ludicrous idea is that Joe Senior was never into heroin. It just wasn't part of his tradition. Oh come on Bill. You're telling us your daddy was heartbroken when he learned that Carmine Galante was indicted for dealing in smack in 1959. Read "The Canadian Connection" by Jean-Pierre Charbonneau to get the true story. Bonanno was probably the biggest heroin dealer in the fifties and sixties. That's what the Mafia power struggle in that period was all about - control of New York City's heroin market. (Bill, that honorable kind of guy, simply is trying to whitewash all the white powder resting on his father's conscience and the thousands of lives that were destroyed by his activities.)

If you're interested in conspiracy, Bill also solves that great riddle wrapped in an enigma - "The Kennedy Assassination". In the Tale of the Two Joes, Bill compares his father with Joe Kennedy and yes you've guessed it, he compares himself with Jack Kennedy. Somehow we are also led to believe that Joe Bananas was the puppetmaster behind Kennedy's 1960 election. It goes on and on... I also forgot to mention that Bill believes he is the real life model behind the character of Micheal Corleone with the clout to call Commission meetings. Yeah, right.

I got to give it to you Bill. You really turned out to be one fine "con artist".

Too bad Junior can't come up with the truth his almost century-old father could give that would make Joe Valachi's account sound like a bedtime story. Then we'd really have a read.

I found this book an enjoyable read, but having finished it I now have my doubts about all of the name dropping. Why would a "man of honor" suddenly be divulging the twenieth century's most guarded secrets, and why wasn't there a huge media outcry about these revelations at the time of publication. (if there was I don't remember it)

... Sammy the Bull however states that the Bonanno's seat at the "Commission" was revoked due to heroin trafficking.

Makes you wonder if these tell-alls are just ploys to protect their own interests.

This is probably the second worst book about the mafia I have ever read, after "man of honor" by his father Joe Bonanno. As his father did, Bill Bonanno filled his book with so much worthless information about Sicilian tradition, honor, and customs that it's insulting to american born mobsters. First of all, he was born into a mafia family. If his dad wasn't boss, this guy wouldn't have lasted ten seconds in the mob. This whole book is very vague and superficial, never really going into detail about actual crimes or murders. If he would have wrote more about experiences and the inner workings of the families this book might have been readable. As it is, it's just some fake mobster trying to glorify himself. Do not waste money on this book, and if you already have it, burn it.

Despite Bound by Honor's title, it should serve as exhibit A that there is no honor among thieves. Frankly, this thief is really pathetic, too: from writing a tell-all about a group that considers it a matter of honor and pride that they don't tell all, to claiming the Mafia killed Kennedy, and worst of all because of the pride with which he relates how horribly he treated his wife and ignored his children. Don't waste your time on this one: at least in the Mob accounts labeled as "fictional," the main characters aren't insecure and pathetic.

Most people would agree that the word "honor" is a fairly abstract one that means different things to different people. That is, in essence, the biggest problem with Bill Bonanno's book. Although written in what seems to be straightforward English, the values he espouses and particularly the manner in which he espouses them are so impenetrable to the average reader that BOUND BY HONOR might as well be written in Sanskrit.

Part autobiography, part history, part memoir and part apologia, BOUND BY HONOR is Salvatore "Bill" Bonanno's personal record of growing up inside one of New York's Five Families. Bill Bonanno was the first of the Mafiosi to go public with his written reminiscences, being the subject of this book and Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father which is also recommended. His father, Joseph Bonanno later wrote A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno, and his wife Rosalie, Mafia Marriage.

As autobiography, BOUND BY HONOR is engrossing, although it is clear almost from the outset that Bonanno is not a reflective man able to step outside himself and evaluate his life with any real objectivity. The truth is that Bonanno is more comfortable with the concept of living in eighteenth century Sicily than twentieth century America, and apparently internalized and romanticized the values of the Sicilian Vespers without questioning them. Bonanno speaks well of "family," "honor," and "pride," and deplores their erosion in the United States, speaks robustly of "our world," but never remarks on the inherent contradictions of internecine gangland warfare which pitted brother against brother, literally, too often ending in death.

Bonanno handles his history fairly well, although to hear him tell it, the Bonanno Family was the most powerful, most well organized, and most effective of the Five Families (other authors would dispute this hotly). He claims that his father, Joseph Bonanno was the inspiration for "The Godfather," Vito Corleone and that he himself was the inspiration for Michael Corleone. (This reader at least saw in his actions more of Sonny Corleone.) He also spends much of the earlier portion of the book drawing parallels between his father and Joseph Kennedy, and himself and JFK. Bonanno utterly misses the irony in comparing even Joseph Bonanno the Mafioso to the base, amoral, manipulating and serpentine senior Kennedy, never recognizing that that such a comparison is no honor to his own father.

As memoir, Bonanno is careful to move deftly around self-incriminating facts and circumstances. Since there is no objectivity between these covers, there is no way of assessing whether he has altered the facts to fit his view, but that is a virtual certainty. He attempts to minimalize the urban "Banana War" of the mid-1960s, reporting that little violence actually occurred, but he is unable to explain away (nor does he try to explain) the deep schisms in the Bonanno Family which led to this conflict. He denies and ignores the Bonanno Family's documented involvement in the drug trade. He describes the ill-fated Commission meeting at Apalachin (broken up by the local police) as a comedy of errors, but he cannot ignore the long repercussions of that day in 1957. Vice, illegal gambling, and other illicit activities are described as of minor importance to the Family and of no real harm to the community. Bonanno, however, is indefatigable in recalling his involvement with every subpoena, every grand jury, every hearing, every wiretap, and every government-machinated attempt to discredit the Families. His sense of outrage at having to do prison time for credit card fraud is manifest, though he glosses over most of his jail time and the reasons for it in a brief paragraph toward the close of the book.

In his apologia, Bonanno blames the downfall of the Families on attrition, essentially on the succession of "Americanized" leaders over the older Sicilians as they died off. In this, he may well be right. The stable nexus of "Family" unquestionably withered as the old Sicilian blood ties were replaced with alliances of convenience. He derides a rat like Valachi and a histrionic Don like Gotti with venom, pointing out that the "Dapper Don" ruled his Family for mere years not decades. More to the point, Bonanno sees the downfall of "his world" not as the result of vast societal changes in the 1960s and 1970s, but as the result, ultimately, of a single act, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He posits that it was one of Sam Giancana's crew, Jimmy Roselli, who was the triggerman in Dallas. Since Roselli is dead and there is no corroboration available, Bonanno ends his book, Sphinxlike, with an intriguing, but essentially unanswerable riddle.

As laypersons, we all would like to believe that an "expert" such as Mr. Bonanno is telling us the truth about such a fascinating subject--after all, most of us have no personal knowledge of the matters he writes about. His story is so well written that he almost succeeds in making me believe it, except for a couple of major flaws. First, it is highly unlikely that one person would know the answers to so many prominent conspiracies of our day: the JFK and RFK assassinations, the Hoffa disappearance, even J. Edgar Hoover's bisexuality. But he really blunders when he writes about the JFK assassination, which is perhaps one of the most heavily researched and written about subjects in our history. Those of us who have read alot about the JFK assassination know that although there are many crazy theories out there, there is a set of immutable facts about the assassination that even Warren Commission supporters such as Posner have trouble dealing with. Unfortunately, Bonanno's "revelation" about the JFK assassination flatly contradicts those known facts. Either Mr. Bonanno is fabricating his alleged conversation with Mr. Roselli, or he was an unwitting pawn in some sort of disinformation scheme (which cannot be dismissed as a possibility--according to investigations and research done by both the the Church Committee and House Assassination Committee in the 70's, Roselli, although he apparently also had mob ties, was an intelligence operative, heavily involved in the Miami JM/WAVE counterintelligence operation). Either way, Bonanno's credibility is called into question, casting doubt on his numerous other "revelations". But the sensational "revelations" no doubt help sell the book, which may be the only reality about them! Perhaps if Mr. Bonanno had been able to learn another income-producing trade after his "retirement" he would have written a more believable story.

This book is on the low end of any of the mob book I have read. The real take home story is the Bill Bonannano would not have been in that "family" if he wasn't Joe's son. He really has an outsiders few. He grew up in Arizona on a country club?