Honor Thy Father

In 1965, Gay Talese left his job as a reporter at The New York Times to focus on magazine writing, such as 1966's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" and longer projects, like his 1969 book The Kingdom and the Power. During this period, however, Talese had begun to research a book about the Mafia.

The research for the book began when Talese introduced himself to mafioso Salvatore "Bill" Bonanno in a courthouse in 1965. That same year, Talese signed a $30,000 advance to write the book.^[1] For nearly seven years, Talese interviewed Bonanno and other members of the Mafia extensively. Talese even traveled to Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, to research the ancestral origins of the subjects of his story. Talese feared, during the research, that the government would subpoena him to find out what he learned about the Mafia, though this never came to pass. He also fretted that he would be mistaken for one of Bonanno's associates by his enemies.^[2]

The book begins when Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno is kidnapped from the streets of New York in 1964 and the Bonanno crime family is thrown into disarray for two years in a power struggle called the Banana War, culminating in an armed ambush in Brooklyn in which Joe's son Bill Bonanno is nearly killed.^[2]

Though punctuated by life-threatening encounters, Talese also recounts how much of a mafioso's life is as tedious as any person's: days filled with television, overeating, time spent with family. Prominent mafiosi, like Vito Genovese, Lucky Luciano, Joseph Profaci, feature in Talese's account, but the story is focused on Bill Bonanno's thoughts about his life as a mafioso. Talese notes the similarities of Bill's life to many ordinary Americans — homogenized from his ancestors' culture, an alumnus of the University of Arizona where he belonged to ROTC. But as son of Joe Bonanno, he was an heir to his father's empire, which was a source of great stress for Bill. The book's title was suggested by Bill's wife Rosalie as acid commentary on the deleterious effect of Joe Bonanno on her husband's life.^[3] The intensely introspective account that Talese extracted from Bill Bonanno prompted Time magazine to label him "the golden retriever of personalized journalism".^[2] A review in The New York Times wrote that Talese "conveys the impression that being a mobster is much the same as being a sportsman, film star or any other kind of public 'personality.'"^[4]

Talese concludes with the controversial thesis that the Italian Mafia was little different than gangs that came with previous waves of immigration, such as Irish gangs in the century before, or black and Latino gangs that Talese saw as following. Talese attributed the rise of the gangs as a consequence of a majority that oppresses a minority group.^[4][5]