A Man of Honor by Joseph Bonanno

Author:Joseph Bonanno
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

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The sensational publicity created by Apalachin affected me tremendously, because up to then I had been relatively inconspicuous. Publicity can maim and destroy. Apalachin destroyed Joe Barbara. His business license was revoked. His fine estate went up for sale. Joe’s son had to drop out of college because of the harassment and bad publicity. Joe suffered a fatal heart attack.

To understand me and others of my Tradition, one must have an open mind and an open heart. One must learn to think in terms of another culture, whose values are different from standard American culture. The bad publicity generated by Apalachin helped destroy any hope for an intelligent examination of my Tradition. Instead, the publicity perpetuated a myth … the myth of the “Mafia.”

* * *

In 1950–1951, U. S. Senator Estes Kefauver held his celebrated committee hearings on organized crime in gambling. The Kefauver Committee made the not-so-startling discovery that illicit gambling outlets existed in just about every major city in the United States. These bookie operations or numbers games, to take but two examples, were run by private businessmen. Because these forms of gambling were illegal, Kefauver, and police in general, referred to these private businessmen as “crime syndicates” and referred to their gambling enterprises as “organized crime.”

Gambling, like moneylending, is one of those human activities that defy government intervention, no matter how well-meaning. That should have been obvious during Prohibition when the government tried to ban the selling of liquor. People didn’t put up with it. They found a way to buy their liquor. It wasn’t the bootleggers’ fault that people wanted liquor. Bootleggers simply filled a demand. The government finally gave in. It allowed private businessmen to sell liquor, taxing their profits. The same can be done with gambling.

It is not my place to denounce or defend these activities. I merely wish to point out that if people, ordinary people, didn’t demand such services as gambling and moneylending, no one would bother to supply these services. If you truly wanted to crack down on gambling, for example, you would have to eradicate the wish to gamble in the hearts of ordinary people.

It is difficult for me, therefore, to take seriously government attempts to dislodge the entrepreneurs who provide such services. Such attempts are misplaced and self-defeating in the long run. If you remove the current private individuals who provide illicit gambling services, for example, other individuals will take their place, because there will always be customers.

Men of my Tradition (Family members), some of whom were involved in illicit gambling operations, understood the human condition and provided these services, which society demanded. The naive view is to believe that a certain group of people, such as Sicilians, somehow force these activities on society, thereby infecting it and corrupting it.

In the book he wrote after the committee hearings, Kefauver stated that behind the “crime syndicates” in this country was a sinister, secret criminal society called “the Mafia.” If Kefauver had merely said that some of the men who ran

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