He Guarded Bonanno for 6 Years. He Was Killed When He Tried to Retire – HT

 

August 16th, 1968, approximately [snorts] 10:17 in the evening. The North Rosemont neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona is quiet the way desert neighborhoods are quiet after dark. The kind of silence that makes sound travel. Two explosions rip through it roughly 30 seconds apart. Close enough together that the second one arrives before the first is finished echoing [music] off the stucco walls of the houses on either side.

The blasts originate from outside the home at 1331 North Rosemont, a modest residence belonging to a man named Peter Notaro. He is inside when the bombs go off. The explosions are heard 20 blocks away. Windows shatter. Neighbors dial the [music] police. When the squad cars arrive, Notaro is standing.

 He is not injured. He [music] does not speak to reporters. He does not file a public statement. He does not leave. The Tucson police examine the damage, [music] photograph the scene, and add it to a file that is getting thicker by [music] the week. No one is ever convicted for the bombing of Peter Notaro’s house.

 The reason no one was convicted, and the reason the bombs were there in the first place, has everything to do with the man Peter Notaro worked for. If you know anything about the American Mafia, you know the name Joseph Bonanno. You know he ran one of New York’s five families for more than three decades. You probably know he retired to Arizona and lived to 97.

 One of the only bosses in the history of La Cosa Nostra to die in his own bed of natural causes, surrounded by family. You might even know he wrote a memoir, a 350-page autobiography called A Man of Honor, in which he cast himself as the last true practitioner of a dying code. What you almost certainly don’t know is the name of the man who stood next to him during the worst of it.

 The man who followed him from New York to the Arizona desert, who guarded his home while bombs fell on the neighborhood, who was indicted on federal charges for protecting Bonanno’s interests, and who does not appear, not once, not by name, in the book Bonanno wrote about loyalty. That man was Peter Notaro. And his story is the one nobody told because the man he protected made sure of it.

By the summer of 1968, Joseph Bonanno wasn’t retiring. He was retreating. The Bonanno war, the internal family conflict that had torn his organization apart since 1964, had finally ground him down. It started when the commission discovered Bonanno’s plot to assassinate rival bosses Carlo Gambino, [music] Tommy Lucchese, and his own cousin Stefano Magaddino.

 A scheme designed to make himself [music] the boss of all bosses. The commission dethroned him. They installed Gaspar Di Gregorio in his [music] place. The family split. Soldiers loyal to Bonanno’s son Bill went to war against soldiers loyal to Di Gregorio and later Paul Sciacca. Men were shot in Brooklyn restaurants. An elderly capo was hit at a soda fountain.

On January 28th, 1966, Bill Bonanno walked into what was supposed to be a peace meeting at a house on Troutman Street in Bushwick. Di Gregorio’s men opened fire from doorways and rooftops. Over 100 rounds were exchanged. By some miracle, nobody died. But the war was far from over. A capo named Joseph Little Joe Notaro, a loyalist, possibly a relative of Peter’s, though the exact connection has never been publicly documented, had his Bronx home firebombed on April 24th, 1966.

Three weeks later, on May 17th, when Joe Bonanno finally resurfaced at Foley Square after 19 months in hiding, Little Joe Notaro sat down to a celebratory dinner at La Scala Restaurant in Manhattan. He suffered a heart attack at the table and died [music] right there, surrounded by the men who’d just been toasting Bonanno’s return.

The boss came back. His loyal capo didn’t survive the celebration. The war continued without either of them giving it much pause. By 1968, after suffering a heart attack of his own, Joe Bonanno told the commission he was done. He’d leave New York. He’d move to Tucson full-time. He’d never come back. The commission accepted.

 They stipulated that if he broke the terms, he’d be killed on sight. Bonanno agreed. He packed his life into the modest stucco house at 1847 East Elm Street in the Catalina Vista neighborhood, a home his family had owned since the 1940s, where his children had attended Saints Peter and Paul School. His wife Faye was inside, sick.

His son Bill sat in a backyard tree with a shotgun cradled in his arm, watching for assassins. The family’s German Shepherd, Rebel, paced the patio, toenails clicking on flagstone. And standing near the door with fists that a journalist would later describe as lumpy, the kind of hands that had done work no one wrote down, was Peter Notaro.

What the historical record contains about Peter Notaro can be summarized in fewer sentences than most men’s parking tickets. The FBI classified him as a Mafia member who had followed Bonanno from New York to Tucson. The Arizona Daily Star identified him as Bonanno’s bodyguard. He appears in at least two newspaper photographs from the period, one showing him physically assisting the aging boss as Bonanno arrived in Tucson to visit his Catalina Vista home, his hand steadying the older man’s arm with a gesture that reads less like [music]

professional security and more like care. The kind of instinctive [music] reach that comes from years of proximity, not from training. His home address was 1331 North Rosemont, Tucson. He was known to law enforcement. He was unknown to everyone else. That’s the entire public biography of a man who spent years standing between a Mafia boss and the people trying to kill him.

 No birth date in the accessible record, no obituary that surfaced in any archive, no memoir, no interview, no cooperating witness testimony that paints him in three dimensions. He exists in the documentary history of the Bonanno family the way a shadow exists in a photograph. Present because the light demanded it, shaped entirely by the figure casting it.

And the peculiar cruelty of that position is that it wasn’t accidental. Peter Notaro wasn’t forgotten because he was unimportant. He was invisible because his job required it. A bodyguard who draws attention is a bodyguard who has failed. Notaro succeeded at the craft of invisibility for years. And his reward for that success was that history recorded the man he protected in extraordinary detail and recorded him not at all.

The bombing of Notaro’s house didn’t happen in isolation. It was one strike in a campaign that terrorized Tucson for months and exposed something no one expected, that the violence wasn’t coming from [music] rival mobsters. It was coming from the FBI. On July 21st, 1968, shortly before 9:30 in the evening, a car pulled over near the University of Arizona Hospital, just around the corner from the Bonanno residence on East Elm Street.

What happened next? Who lit the fuse? Who drove away? No one saw clearly. But a bomb went off at the Bonanno home. Two sticks of dynamite had been thrown into the yard. Nobody was injured. The night before that, two dynamite charges had damaged several cars in a shed at Grace Ranch on the northeast side of [music] Tucson, the property of Peter Horseface Licavoli Sr.

, a retired Detroit mob boss and long-time Bonanno associate. The blasts knocked out the electrical power to the ranch. [music] Then came the Notaro bombing on August 16th. Two explosions 30 seconds apart heard across the north side of the city. Then, on September 16th, the Wig Beauty Salon at 2739 East Speedway was bombed.

17 minutes later, the front room of a home belonging to Robert Thomas Smith, a close associate of another Tucson mob figure, Salvatore Spinelli, was destroyed in a separate explosion. The receptionist at the Wig Beauty Salon was Joyce Battaglia, the former wife of Charles Bats Battaglia, himself a Bonanno associate with a history tangled enough to fill its own script.

Nobody was killed in any of the bombings, but Tucson was terrified. The Wig Beauty Salon would be bombed again the following year. The reaction was enormous [music] and immediate. Mayor James Corbett publicly invited underworld figures to live elsewhere. Congressman Morris Udall, a Democrat and former Pima County Attorney, asked FBI Director J.

 Edgar Hoover to send reinforcements, citing Police Chief Bernard Garmire’s warning that the Mafia aimed to make Arizona the future criminal playground of America. Senator Barry Goldwater declared that the reign of the princes of La Cosa Nostra must end. Newspaper editorials demanded Bonanno leave the city.

 Citizens formed a crime commission. FBI agents and local police assembled anti-mob strike forces. The Bonannos, for their part, were genuinely bewildered. Privately and publicly, they could not understand who was attacking them. The strikes didn’t fit the pattern of professional mob violence. They were clumsy, amateurish, designed to intimidate rather than kill.

FBI informers initially claimed a rival crime boss had hired a hitman who bungled the job. But nothing about the bombings made operational sense. They targeted associates and property, not people, [music] and used methods no serious mafia crew would employ. Months later, the answer arrived. And it was worse than anyone had imagined.

Police arrested two men, Paul Mills Stevens and William J. Dunbar Jr., who both admitted to carrying out the bombings. But they claimed they’d been hired by FBI Special Agent David Hale, the Bureau’s own mafia expert assigned to Tucson. According to the bombers and corroborating witnesses, Hale wanted to provoke a war between rival mob factions in Arizona.

As one source who later provided court testimony put it, the agent wanted the two heads of the mafia to fight so there’d only be one head. Other witnesses backed the story up. The FBI declined to comment. Hale resigned without facing charges. Stevens and Dunbar pleaded guilty, paid $300 fines each, and served no jail time.

Bill Bonanno had actually wounded Stevens with a shotgun [music] blast the night of the Elm Street bombing, the son defending his father’s house against what turned out to be a federal provocation. Joe Bonanno, who’d spent his entire life on the wrong side of the law, found himself cast as the victim of the institution that was supposed to be pursuing him.

 He didn’t miss the irony. He called it a cover-up and said, “Hale almost got away with murder.” Peter Notaro took two bombs for this, not for a mob war, not for the consequences of his boss’s criminal empire, for a rogue federal agent scheme that his own bureau refused to investigate or prosecute. The man who guarded Bonanno’s life absorbed the blast, radius of an operation designed by the very institution that was supposed to be pursuing them both.

And nobody, not the FBI, not the courts, not the press, ever asked what that was like for the bodyguard. The question never occurred to anyone. Because the bodyguard wasn’t the story. The bodyguard was never the story. That was the whole point of him. After the bombings came the courtroom. Notaro was indicted alongside Charles Bats Battaglia on charges of illegal use of the mails and conspiracy to obstruct [music] justice.

The charges stemmed from an alleged attempt to persuade a fired Tucson police sergeant to testify falsely, to claim that an illegal wiretap had been used to gather evidence in Battaglia’s earlier 1967 extortion conviction. It was a convoluted case built on the testimony of a disgraced cop about the intentions of two men trying to undo the legal damage inflicted on a third.

Both Notaro and Battaglia were acquitted. Battaglia’s own record was tangled enough to resist any clean summary. A Tucson extortion conviction, a later plea deal on insurance fraud that saw heroin smuggling charges dismissed in exchange for a guilty plea and 1 year of a 3-year federal sentence, and a history with Bonanno that different sources describe in flatly contradictory terms.

 Some called Battaglia one of Bonanno’s most loyal bodyguards. Others placed him closer to Carmine Galante’s orbit. Still others described him as a capo from Los Angeles who’d once tried to have Bonanno killed. The conflicting accounts themselves tell a story about this world. At this level of the mafia, even the people closest to you were understood differently depending on who was doing the understanding and what they stood to gain from the telling.

Battaglia died of a heart attack in Tucson on May 27th, 1983, at 66 years [music] old. His family found him unconscious at home. He was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Mary’s Hospital. The acquittal is the last moment Peter Notaro appears in the documentary record with any specificity. After it, he fades completely.

 No further indictments, no further newspaper photographs, no death notice that has surfaced in any accessible archive. He enters the kind of silence that, in organized crime, can mean several things. Quiet retirement, relocation under a different name, protection by people who owed him favors, or something darker [music] that no one commits to paper.

The record simply stops, the way a road stops at the edge of a desert. If you’re finding this story worth knowing about, a subscribe keeps these coming. What fills the space where Notaro’s record goes silent is Joe Bonanno’s voice. And >> [music] >> it is loud. In April of 1983, Bonanno and his son, Bill, [music] appeared on 60 Minutes interviewed by Mike Wallace.

 Later that year, Bonanno published A Man of Honor, the autobiography of Joseph Bonanno, a 350-page account of his life in which he presented himself as the [music] last authentic practitioner of the Sicilian tradition, a man of the old ways, a keeper of a code that the modern mob had abandoned. The book [music] was extraordinary for several reasons.

 It was the first time a sitting or former commission member had written a memoir. It broke, or at least bent, the code of omertà in ways that stunned the underworld. His own father-in-law had been a man who believed that silence was the only currency worth holding. And it was, by Bonanno’s own framing, a book about loyalty, about what it meant to live inside a system where your word was your bond, and your bond was your life.

He wrote about the men who served him. He wrote about tradition, about the father-son relationship between a boss and his soldiers, about the debts of honor that ran between men who’d shared danger. He wrote about his family, his home, his philosophy. He wrote about the kidnapping on Park Avenue.

 He wrote about the war that tore his family apart. He included an introduction that read like an epitaph. “Whatever your opinion of me, the truth is I am the last survivor of an extinct species of a bygone way of life.” Peter Notaro’s name does not appear in the book, not once, not in any variation, not in any context, not even as a passing reference to the men who’d followed him [music] to Tucson.

The man who physically guarded Bonanno during the most dangerous years of his exile, who was bombed in his own home because of that service, who was indicted on federal charges arising from his proximity to the Bonanno operation, who appears in newspaper photographs literally holding the old man’s arm. That man does not exist in the version of the story Bonanno chose to tell.

 350 pages about honor, zero words for the man who took the blast. A man writes a book about loyalty and leaves out the person who was most loyal to him. That contradiction, what does it tell you about what loyalty actually meant inside that world? I’d like to hear your answer in the comments.

 The question isn’t whether the omission was deliberate. Of course it was. Bonanno was meticulous about the book. He controlled the narrative the way he’d once controlled the family, with precision, with patience, with an understanding that what you leave out shapes the story as much as what you put in. The question is what the omission means.

And there are only two answers, and neither one is kind. Either Bonanno considered Notaro too insignificant to name, which means the years of service, the bombs, the indictment, the physical act of guarding another man’s body with your own, all of it registered as nothing to the man who received it. Or Bonanno considered Notaro too significant to name, [music] too connected to the operational reality of what the Tucson years actually looked like, >> [music] >> too close to the truth that retirement was a word Bonanno used for the

commission and the public while continuing to run what he’d always run. Naming Notaro would mean admitting Notaro existed. And admitting Notaro existed would mean admitting that a retired Don needed a full-time armed bodyguard, which would mean admitting the retirement was a fiction, which would mean the entire premise of the memoir, the man of honor who walked away clean, was a lie.

So, Peter Notaro became no one. Not because he failed at his job, but because he succeeded at it so completely that acknowledging him would have cost the boss more than ignoring him ever did. That is what loyalty purchased inside the world Joseph Bonanno built. Not gratitude, not a mention, not a paragraph in 350 pages. Silence.

The same silence Notaro had practiced his entire career turned back on him as a rasher. Joe Bonanno’s former home on East Elm Street in Tucson is still standing. It’s owned now by the University of Arizona, absorbed into the expanding campus [music] of what became Banner University Medical Center. Inside there’s a room accessible only through a bookcase, a hidden space built into the architecture of a man who trusted no one enough to leave his walls ordinary.

In the back fence, someone cut an eye-level porthole, a sightline designed to see who was coming before they arrived. The paranoia is built into the structure itself, >> [music] >> preserved now as a curiosity, a relic of the years when a mafia boss lived in a quiet Tucson neighborhood and kept a man with lumpy fists by the door.

Bonanno died on May 11th, 2002 at 97 years old at St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson. He faded peacefully surrounded by family. Hundreds attended the funeral at Saints Peter and Paul Church, the same church where his children had been educated, the same parish where his wife Fay’s funeral had been held 22 years earlier.

FBI agents took photographs of the mourners from a dark van parked outside. [music] Bill Bonanno delivered the eulogy. “If there is one word that identifies Joseph Bonanno,” he said, “that word is tradition.” The headstone went up. The cameras went away. Whether Peter Notaro was among the mourners that day, whether he was still alive to be among them, the record does not say.

It has never been said. That is the tradition.