Before he became a presidential candidate or even New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani came to U.S. District Court in Tucson to challenge Joseph Bonanno's claims of ill health.
In a September 1985 hearing, then-U.S. Attorney Giuliani pressed Bonanno's daughter-in-law, Rosalie Bonanno, to admit that the elder Bonanno had a history of claiming illness when he faced giving testimony or being arrested. When she denied it, Giuliani recited this list:
● 1959: Bonanno was indicted but did not go to trial based in part on the claim that he'd had a second heart attack.
● 1964: Imprisoned in Montreal, Bonanno was transferred to the prison hospital based on his allegation that he was suffering heart and blood pressure problems.
● 1969: Arrested by the FBI in Tucson, Bonanno had to be arraigned in bed because he said he was too ill to go to court.
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● 1969: Bonanno was indicted for disappearing on the eve of his scheduled appearance before a New York grand jury. The case was dismissed in part because of his claim of a serious heart condition.
● 1979: Bonanno was excused due to poor health from complying with a grand jury subpoena issued by a federal strike force in San Francisco.
● 1980: Midway through his trial for obstruction of justice, Bonanno complained that he felt ill, and a doctor who was a friend of Bonanno's son testified that continuing the trial would threaten Joe Bonanno's life.
Then Giuliani asked: "So it's fair to say that your father-in-law has had at least a 26-year-long history of claiming to have serious health problems, having doctors testify that he's in serious jeopardy, but somehow we're 26 years later and the last time you saw him he was still alive, wasn't he?"
"Yes," the daughter-in-law answered.
In one 1987 report, a geriatric psychiatrist concluded that Bonanno had "an early dementia of mild severity" that compromised his ability to make decisions.
The report noted that under stress, Bonanno's blood pressure would shoot up, and he would become agitated and confused. Those symptoms strongly suggested a physiological cause. But the psychiatrist, Sanford I. Finkel, also noted that Bonanno "has a history which suggests malingering" and that he could not completely rule out that Bonanno was deliberately causing his blood pressure to rise.
A Tucson attorney who represented the former Mafia boss, Alfred "Skip" Donau, told the Arizona Daily Star after Bonanno's death that he "clearly had documented medical problems" and that arguments in the commission case focused on his physical health — including the threat of another heart attack — rather than mental health.
"The fact that he lived to the age that he did was one of the biggest surprises," Donau said.
Joe Bonanno died in 2002 — 46 years after his first mention of heart ailments in court proceedings.
