Ex-crime boss Bill Bonanno dies at 75

Bill Bonanno, who survived a mob shootout in Brooklyn before he retired from organized crime, had a heart attack at his Tucson home and died at Tucson Medical Center around 9 a.m., said his daughter-in-law, Kathleen Bonanno.

Bonanno, a tall, sometimes charming man who liked to talk about the history of Sicily, moved to Tucson from New York as a young boy when his father began dividing his time between the East Coast crime family and a home in Tucson, where Bill attended the University of Arizona.

FBI officials said Bill Bonanno served as consiglieri of the Bonanno crime family and then as acting head when his father went missing in the 1960s.

Bonanno served federal prison terms in the 1970s and 1980s following two convictions, including one for a stolen credit card.

Bonanno said he retired from organized crime in 1968. The FBI said that was when his father lost control of the Brooklyn-based criminal organization he had ruled for decades. The organization that bore their name was infiltrated in the 1980s by FBI Agent Joe Pistone and was portrayed in the film "Donnie Brasco."

In 1980, the elder Bonanno, who died in 2002 at 97, was convicted of obstructing a federal grand jury's investigation of an alleged money-laundering scheme involving his sons Bill and Joseph Jr.

A crime novel that Bill Bonanno co-authored with retired agent Pistone and another writer came out last year.

Bill Bonanno was the focus of the best-selling book "Honor Thy Father," by Gay Talese, in 1971.

In 1999 Bill Bonanno co-produced a nearly five-hour-long Showtime series on the life of his father. A former U.S. attorney who had prosecuted organized crime when the elder Bonanno was a powerful don said the Bonannos "had a lot of nerve" exploiting their notoriety.

Soon after, Bill Bonanno published his own book, "Bound By Honor: A Mafioso's Story."

In his book, Bonanno made the unsubstantiated claim that mobster Johnny Roselli confided he shot President John F. Kennedy from a hiding place in a storm drain in Dallas' Dealey Plaza. He also recalled that he ran an illegal betting parlor with his mafia crew in the early 1960s in a building on East Broadway in Tucson.

He also took credit for arranging G. Gordon Liddy to be released from segregated lockup when they were in prison together.

"Liddy wasn't a rat like (Watergate witness) John Dean. He was a loyal soldier. I was told he would be perfectly safe."

Daughter-in-law Kathleen said Tuesday, "The mystique of the Bonanno family we did not know about because to us he was a wonderful, kind and giving father, grandfather and great-grandfather."

"He stopped at nothing to come to the aid of his children," she said. He often spoke to them of their family heritage in Italy and Sicily and took his grandchildren there.

Bonanno was celebrating the holidays with his relatives and recently wrote to them: "Nothing can exceed the joy of Christmas when a father and a mother and their children and their children's children come together in a conscious awareness of Christmas' true meaning."

Survivors include his wife of 51 years, Rosalie; sister Catherine Bonanno Genovese of Pleasant Hills, Calif.; sons Charles and Joseph of Phoenix, and Salvatore of Scottsdale; daughter Felippa "Gigi" Pettinato of Grass Valley, Calif; 18 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements were pending with Bring's funeral home on Broadway.