Honor Thy Father by Gay Talese

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 impossible to detect their little handiwork, conceding that in this area the FBI was very creative and clever. He knew of a case in which the agents had even bugged a house before the carpenters finished building it. It happened to Sonny Franzese, an officer in the Profaci organization; the agents had apparently gone to the construction site of Franzese’s new home in Long Island after the workmen had left for the day, inserting bugs into the framework and foundation. Franzese later wondered why the agents knew so much about him.
    Bill Bonanno kept an electronic debugging device in his closet at home, a kind of plastic divining rod with an antenna that was supposed to vibrate when sensing bugs, but he was not sure how trustworthy it was. If the agents did get into his house, he was sure that they could find some things that would serve as evidence against him. They would find a few rifles in the garage and pistols in his bedroom bureau. They might find a false identification card or two and various drivers’ licenses and passports. They would discover his vast collection of quarters, several dollars’ worth neatly packed in long thin plastic tubes that fit into the glove compartment of his car and were used for long-distance calls at telephone booths. The agents would probably help themselves to the excellent Havana cigars that he remembered having left on the top of his bedroom bureau, in a jar that also contained Q-tip cotton swabs on sticks that he used for draining his left ear in the morning, the infected ear that had gotten him to Arizona, where he wished he was at this moment. The agents might be interested in some of the books in his library, which included three books on the FBI and all the books about the Mafia, including ones by Senators Kefauver and McClellan. They would find several other books that he suspected would be over the agents’ heads—the Churchill volumes, books by Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, Sartre, and the poetry of Dante. But there was one book that they would surely like to thumb through—the large photo album of his wedding. The album, which consisted of several photographs of the reception, including the crowded ballroom scene at the Astor, would identify most of the distinguished guests; and what the album failed to reveal, the movie of the wedding, packed in a tin can at the bottom of a bookshelf, would reveal. There was more than 2,000 feet of home-movie film on the wedding, and he and Rosalie had enjoyed looking at it from time to time during the past seven years. The wedding event, the extravagance and splendor of it, probably marked the highpoint of Joseph Bonanno’s life, the pinnacle of his prestige; and a social historian of the