When Tucson police approached the car of real estate promoter Lewis Sirotta over a traffic violation, they noted that Sirotta's passenger was mob boss Joseph Bonanno.
It was 1958. Eighteen months later, police again approached Sirotta's car, parked this time on the outskirts of the city. They found Sirotta dead in the trunk.
Someone wrapped a cord around Sirotta's neck and strangled him while he bit through his tongue, according to a report on the unsolved slaying in Bonanno's FBI file.
Just as HBO's Tony Soprano ended his fictional reign as mob boss on an inconclusive note, questions have persisted about the extent of Bonanno's criminal activity.
Tuesday's heart-attack death of his son, Salvatore "Bill" Bonanno, means the pool of people who might have answers is nearly dry.
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"You might say it's the passing of an era — from father to son to nobody," said Ed Cempura, who was a Tucson Police Department officer when he gathered intelligence on the Bonannos as late as 1978.
Nothing released from Joe Bonanno's FBI file in recent years implicates him in Sirotta's unsolved slaying or any others in Tucson, and it is not clear why the Sirotta traffic stop and subsequent killing are mentioned in Bonanno's FBI files. The FBI blacked out large portions before releasing the documents.
Bonanno divided his time between homes in New York and Tucson starting around 1941.
Over three decades, according to FBI intelligence reports obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Bonanno became boss of one of New York's five original La Cosa Nostra crime organizations, ordered the slayings of several mob soldiers in a New York street war, was suspected of profiting from heroin that flowed to the United States through Canada, and invested heavily in Arizona real estate that helped support him after he was forced out of the New York mob scene in 1968.
At his funeral in 2002, mourners placed his body in a crypt at Tucson's Holy Hope Cemetery and recalled him as a neighborly man who brokered peaceful solutions and did favors for his family and friends.
"When the old man came out here, he really didn't want any trouble," said Cempura, a Tucson resident since 1946. "He didn't want the spotlight, so he tried to maintain a low profile."
FBI files show that officials in Milan, Italy, warned the United States in 1940 that Bonanno was a leader of a Sicilian crime gang operating in Europe and the United States.
One year after the confidential warning, Bonanno visited Tucson for the first time. Here, he became known as a businessman in the cheese and cotton-farming industries.
The bureau did not investigate him in depth until August 1961. At that time, special agents spent one month interviewing people who knew him and examining his real estate transactions, which often were conducted through blind trusts before they became illegal.
FBI agents reported that a national commission of mob leaders booted Bonanno in 1964 when it learned he plotted unsuccessfully to assassinate three other members. Trying to regain control over his divided New York crime family, Bonanno ordered the slayings of several men in the street war. Several Bonanno loyalists also died before he took up full-time residence in his Tucson home in 1968.
Bonanno attended a meeting of Sicilian underworld figures in Cleveland in November 1929, when police raided a hotel room and seized 13 handguns from the 20 men present, the FBI records show.
In 1930, Bonanno was arrested in New York City on a charge of grand larceny, and he was involved with two other men in transporting machine guns to Al Capone's gang in Chicago, the FBI reported. Bonanno was acquitted on both counts.
In 1940, treasury officials in Milan notified the U.S Treasury Department that Bonanno was one of nine Sicilians on a "grand council" that oversaw the so-called Castellemare gang of Sicilian criminals.
"Before a criminal is accepted into the Castellemare branch of the underworld, he must meet the test of a rigorous investigation and examination," and "he must be highly recommended by other notorious criminals," an FBI agent wrote.
An FBI report quoted informants who described Bonanno as the "iron-willed, truculent ruffian" of the underworld leadership.
In Tucson, his sons Bill and Joseph Jr. also lived under surveillance and under the notoriety of the family name.
"It was common knowledge that Little Joe was a little more of a hothead," recalled Ron Perrin, who was with Tucson's police intelligence unit from 1971 to 1975.
"If there was a fight to get into, he'd be the one to get into it rather than Bill. Bill was more laid-back."
Former Tucson Police Chief William Gilkinson recalled that Bill "had a ready smile . . . and would be willing to shake hands and sit down and talk to you, apparently thinking he was convincing everybody that he was really an easygoing, pleasant man."
After serving two prison terms around the 1970s, Bill turned the notoriety of the family name into a profession, writing and speaking and chatting on the Internet about the mob, and working on a cable-TV miniseries that in 1999 painted a more sympathetic portrait of his father's life.
As Joseph Bonanno's notoriety spread in the 1960s and 1970s, state, federal and local law enforcers at times watched him around the clock, but they never convicted him of anything more serious than obstruction of justice.
Sometimes when he emerged from his Midtown home, Bonanno would amiably approach the officers who had him under surveillance.
"He'd walk up and say 'Hey, boys, how are you? All I'm going to do is go down to the deli,' " Perrin recalled. Bonanno would invite the officers to leave if they wanted to, because he would be coming home soon and would be staying home all night. They didn't leave, and he came home as he said he would.
"I don't think there was a time when he lied to us," Perrin said.
Several retired law officers agreed that the violence of today's gangs exceeds what they saw with the old-time Mafia.
"They got more ruthless. Innocents don't mean anything to them anymore," Cempura said.
"Not that the old-time boys didn't do their share of killing, but (in that era) it was basically one bad guy against another," he said.
The Mafia in general has been romanticized in books and film, but there are many victims "who would testify otherwise," Gilkinson said.
"I think there was a viciousness behind all this. That's how people exercised their control — by showing how vicious they could be when needed."
