Mafia Marriage - Softcover

Bonanno, Rosalie; Donofrio, Beverly

3.62

132 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312979258 ISBN 13: 9780312979256

Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks, 2003

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An Unforgettable Look Inside the Godfather's Own House

She Was A Profaci. He Was A Bonanno
Rosalie Profaci was a Mafia princess. Salvatore "Bill" Bonanno, oldest son of Mafia Don Joe Bonanno, the real-life model for The Godfather, was organized crime's crown prince. And Bill, deeply involved in his father's "business" of mob schemes thought pretty Rosalie knew what it meant to be a "Mafia wife." But the convent-raised, deeply devout Rosalie, whose innocence was protected by her doting father, had no idea...

Their Marriage United Two Mafia Dynasties...
Mafia Marriage is Rosalie Bonanno's intimate account of life inside the secretive world of the Mafia. Naming names and providing shocking details, she writes about the wild spending sprees, the mysterious absences of her husband, the other women in his-their running from the law, the abductions, and shootings. Above all, Rosalie reveals the passion that kept her virtually a prisoner to love...and her heartbreaking journey of discovering the truth and trying to break free.

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Mafia Marriage
CHAPTER 1WHEN I arrived in Mexico, I was met at the airport by a friend of my husband's who told me he would take me to Bill. The first thing I saw when I entered the restaurant was "Felice Cumplea�os, Rosalia" written on a banner. There were daisies, my favorite flower, in wine bottles placed in the middle of every table. Mexicans playing guitars began a love ballad, and when my husband walked out of the kitchen, took my hand, and led me to one of the tables, he looked different, almost like a stranger. He'd lost maybe thirty pounds, which made him seem even taller than his six feet two inches. He had grown a beard and his eyes were deeper, and darker, more intense. He seemed fragile somehow, beautiful even. I pushed at the glass of wine someone had placed in front of me, moving it a couple of inches away. I reminded myself not to be a fool and get drawn into loving Bill Bonanno again.The last time I saw him, four months earlier and about half a year after he was released from prison the last time, Bill had called to tell me he wanted to come over for dinner and talk to me and the kids. We were living separately.Since it was three days before Christmas, I prepareda festive dinner. Afterward he said he had something important to tell us. We left the dinner table and went into the living room. I noticed that he did not look at or mention the desk I'd moved into the living room or the filing cabinet or the appointment slips tacked to a bulletin board, all signs that my career was thriving, something Bill would ordinarily find hard to swallow. He waited until we all settled into chairs, then sipped ice water from a tumbler and said in his lawyerly way (a manner of speaking he'd picked up serving as a paralegal in his and his father's many legal battles), "As you know, my life has been controlled by prisons and courts for the last ten years. Grandma is dead. Grandpa is going to prison. I don't know what to do next. I have emotional and personal problems. Due to some or all of these events in my life, it's necessary for me to go away for a while to get my head together."It was true. Bill didn't look in the best of health, and he was impossible to talk to or reason with. I wondered if anyone else was after him now: the FBI, some grand jury, or other men from his world."I can't tell you where I'm going, or how long I'll be gone because I don't know myself. I won't be in touch with anybody until I get back. I'm not excluding you from anything. This is just the way it is."I watched the look on my children's faces, knowing that I didn't care and wondering if they did. Chuck and Joe and Tore, all young men now, looked understanding if a little blank. What couldthey ever say to their father anyway? Their only choice was to show respect and remain silent. My daughter, Gigi, my husband's favorite, the youngest of my children at sixteen, looked worried, but not surprised. Nobody said, "Hey, Dad, can't you at least wait till after Christmas?"After that night he was gone: no phone calls, no word, no news. This was nothing unusual, really. My husband had been missing before. Bill was not your normal, everyday nine-to-five kind of husband, who goes off to a job, returns, eats dinner, watches television, goes to bed. My husband is the son of Joseph Bonanno, who the newspapers and the government say was the head of a Mafia family and that he was his father's consigliere. This, however, is not what my husband says. My husband says Mafia is a figment of the media's imagination. He says mafia is an adjective, not a noun. To be mafioso is to be brave and honorable. He says it means being a man, audacious but never arrogant. My husband says that he and his father are men of honor who do things according to the ethos of a 750-year-old tradition transported to the United States from Sicily. The Sicilian tradition has a system of respect, of kinship, a code of behavior that tells you what is right and what is wrong. According to this code people fight their own battles and have no need to go to outside authorities such as the police. My husband tells the story of a woman whose husband has just been killed. The police say, "But who did this?" And the woman replies, "It does not matter, as long as he knows," nodding tothe baby boy she holds in her arms. That tradition is dying, thanks to the changing times. I have not raised the children to follow in their father's footsteps--to live staunchly within this tradition--as my husband was raised to follow in his father's.Although my husband tells me my father, Salvatore Profaci, moved in the same world and was as much an adherent of the tradition as my husband--and that surely having been raised by Salvatore I must possess an inherent understanding of that world--the truth is I have a hard time with it. To me it means I can never ask questions, such as: Where are you going? How did you get the money? or How are we going to pay the rent, or the doctor bill, or the water tax? The life-style my husband leads, which I suppose is essential to his position within the Sicilian tradition, as it has been translated into the culture of the United States, means, as far as I can tell, that he does not go to a job, has lots of cash sometimes, and no money others. It means there were times he never left the house unless he was wearing a gun, and there were times when he had at least one guy in front of him and two guys in back wherever he went. Bodyguards is one word, I believe; decoys is another. My husband is constantly engaged physically, mentally, emotionally, and monetarily in court battles (it's said that old gangsters never die, they just become lawyers) and at one time fought in what the media called a gang war. What I knew about this gang war was nothing except that there were FBI men stationed outside my front door, questioning mykids when they left for school; there were floodlights pointed at my house; and there were nights when my husband didn't come home and then one evening would break into his own house--unob--served by the FBI, the police, or whomever else he didn't want to see--blindfold me, and take me off to a motel or an empty house or the backseat of a car to make love. The blindfold was for my own good. "It's for your protection. The less you know, the better off you'll be," are words I have heard often.Bill's complex personality made him different even within his world. I never knew anyone like him. What the media doesn't know about or finds too boring to tell, are the normal times. The days when we're not dodging subpoenas. When my husband was home, he was home. But, really, even then it wasn't normal; it was more like a situation comedy, where every day is Saturday because Dad's always there. I wanted Bill to get a job, use his many talents. I wanted Bill to be different, to answer the phone or the door, take out the garbage, mow the lawn, or paint the bedroom. We had no checkbook, no savings account, no life, health, or car insurance. In fact, there were no plans. The way people plan for a vacation, put money aside, and make reservations--none of that. But one day my husband might show up after being gone for a couple of weeks--while I was pinching pennies to make whatever money he'd left me last--and say, "Pack a bag. We're going to Haiti," and then guide me through casinos, his hand on the small of myback, people paying us homage like royalty.I will say one thing: Life with my husband has been anything but boring. Our marriage has been written about. It is part of "Mafia" lore. I am Rosalie Profaci, eldest daughter of Salvatore Profaci, said to be the righthand man, the brains behind the brawn, of his brother Joe Profaci, the head of the Profaci family. When I married Bill it was said to be a marriage of a prince and a princess, the uniting of two powerful families. The problem was that I had no idea what I was getting myself into and Bill had no idea I had no idea. In other words, if I was a princess I didn't know it; and furthermore, even if I was a princess, I've been striving all my life to be a commoner while my husband has been striving to be a prince.Last Christmas, when my husband left, I felt less than a commoner. I felt a fool. I counted the years we'd been married--almost twenty-five--and the years we'd been separated because my husband was either in jail or just not home--twelve years. I thought how I felt peaceful, in charge of my own life, when he was gone; how I felt almost normal. I'd made a career for myself. I had drive and ambition. I had a budget. I paid the mortgage, the gas, the electric. I had a checking account. I had insurance. I'd painted the fence around our house a dusky blue, and I'd planted trees and bushes. I was planning on owning my house and living in it for the rest of my life. My goal was to give my children stability. Mostly, though, I'd changed the way I looked at things, the way I was inside. I'd alwaysbelieved that God was my partner in life, but now I felt him inside of me instead of up above and separate; I felt like I had more choices; I felt less a victim. I asked myself: What did God mean by "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder?" Did he really mean for me to remain in a marriage that made me unhappy? I came to the conclusion that if God forgives sins, he must forgive mistakes. In God's eyes, I was half-sure, divorce from my husband would not be a sin that would result in my burning in hell.But the fact remained that my husband, due to his Old World ways, would never allow it. And when the children were little I never would have entertained the idea either, partly because I was a different person then, but most certainly because I'd lose my children. My husband always said, "You leave with what you came with," meaning only myself. My husband is a powerful man. He would have somehow arranged it that there would be no way I could live in this world unless it was as his wife. I could go through all the legal channels, I could even get the divorce papers in my hand, but there is no wall thick enough or high enough, no country strong enough, to keep my husband from me, so certainly no piece of paper was going to do it.But my husband had seemed different the last few years: sad, calm, a little distracted. His letters from jail had become philosophical and bitter, as though, because of something I'd done, there was no way he could love me anymore. His mother haddied a few months before Christmas. His father had been convicted of an obstruction of justice charge and was facing prison at age seventy-eight; he wasn't well and it was possible that he could die there. My husband's world seemed to be shifting. When my husband had left that evening before Christmas, I'd even felt like embracing him, which was not a feeling I'd had for some time. Family and ritual have always been important to my husband, yet he was not spending Christmas with his family. Maybe, finally, he would let me go. Maybe we could go our separate ways. Maybe I could get a divorce.So, one brisk March morning I put on my dark green suit, the one I save for important business, and, accompanied by my lawyer, walked into the Santa Clara County Courthouse and filed for divorce.Three days later I got a phone call to go to the Good Samaritan Hospital and wait for a call at a public phone. It was a routine I'd grown accustomed to over the years because of government intrusions into our private lives. This time the reason my husband had to be careful was because since he'd left he'd been accused of committing grand theft, a charge the government had been working on since 1975. It was now 1981. The specter of yet another court battle looming in the future had made divorce all that more appealing. Also, the realization that my husband might be in hiding strengthened the possibility that I could actually get away with a divorce, because if he returned he'd be arrested.This gave me a false sense of security and autonomy.When I picked up the phone, my husband did not say hello before he said, "You do not do this behind my back." His voice had that cold menacing commanding tone he used when there would be no discussion allowed. This was an order. "You do this to my face.""I couldn't," I said, gathering all my courage, "I don't know where you are.""I'm out of the country," he said. "If you think I won't come back there to stop you, no matter what goddamn court has what charge out against me, you're out of your mind. I've been making plans to come back anyway, and when I do I'll need ties to the community, a residence, to get bail. I don't need you running around up there causing trouble. You don't run out on me when I'm down. I want you to withdraw those papers.""I can't.""What do you mean, you can't? Nobody puts me into a corner, especially you. You do not divorce me. Divorce is not a thing you do. When we married, we married for life. Commitments are a promise to God, and to break them has serious consequences both in this life and the next."He had softened his tone. It was turning my knees to jelly. I had to admit I agreed with him.He said, "We've made it this long, Rosalie. After all we've been through. We can start over. We can make it work. You can't throw it away now. I need you."I grew sadder and sadder, and more confused, and that was how I ended up withdrawing the divorce papers, and in Mexico with my husband on my birthday."Look at her, mira, mira," he said. "Forty-five years old and doesn't look a day past twenty-five." The Mexicans nodded deeply and smiled. The owner of the restaurant, Saro, another Sicilian, raised his glass and said, "To Rosalia."
Mexico was a bold and wild place. In the beginning, when we were still in a hotel room, screaming birds woke us every morning. We took long rides past craggy cliffs and strangled trees. Past hillsides shouting with color. We walked on the beach. We sat on rocks and stared at the waves, relentlessly approaching, crashing on rocks, spewing white spray as the seagulls jetted toward the sun, their cries splitting the air.I wanted to like Mexico. But it was so wild: dead dogs and cows left on the side of the road, sidewalks begun and then abandoned when they ran into trees, storms bursting from the sky and shattering a previously peaceful afternoon. Nothing was planned. People lived in the moment. This country was a place where my husband could thrive, but it was not a place for me. I like order. Everything in its place. I like to plan. To know where I am so I know where I'm going. I wanted to leave but it was hard to get away. I had my work waiting. My daughter still in high school. I went home a couple of times to handle some of my customers,to put some things in order, to sell some jewelry so we could live on the money. I wanted to go home another time, but he wouldn't let me.I said, "But Gigi needs me. I've got to check up on her. I can just imagine what she's eating. Nobody's there to make sure she goes to school every day.""Gigi can take care of herself," he said. "She's sixteen years old. By that time I'd been on my own for years. She's got a town full of relatives up there. You're making excuses."I pictured my daughter alone in the house. I imagined her eating peanut butter and jelly, or nothing at all. She'd told me everything was fine, but I still pictured her wandering from room to room, lost. Wondering how her mother could desert her. My son Joseph was taking state board tests for medical school, my son Tore was a freshman at San Diego State. They certainly could get by without me. Chuck, my...

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