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Bill bonanno chatting { May 11 1999 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.time.com/time/community/transcripts/1999/051199bonanno.htmlhttp://www.time.com/time/community/transcripts/1999/051199bonanno.html
A Chat You Can't Refuse:
Former Consigliere Bill Bonanno
Transcript from May 11, 1999
Timehost: We're very pleased to be joined tonight by Bill Bonanno, former consigliere of the Bonanno Family. He's just written a book about his life, and the life of his family, and his father Joe Bonanno. The book is called "Bound By Honor: A Mafioso's Story." Welcome, Mr. Bonanno.
Bill Bonanno: Thank you for having me here. This is my first time online. This is all Greek to me.
Timehost: Well, it's our first time talking to a former consigliere. Let's take the first question from online. Let's start at the beginning...
jakob1286 asks: How did you join the Mafia?
Bill Bonanno: It wasn't so much about my joining... there was no period of time today when I can say I wasn't yesterday and tomorrow I am. In my case it is more that I come from a tradition and a philosophy of life, and I was born into it. And as I grew older, I exhibited those qualities which exemplified our tradition.
Het_Nikik_1 asks: Did you feel you where blessed with your life or cursed?
Bill Bonanno: Sometimes the responsibility of living up to this tradition was a burden, but more times than not it has been a good life. I have very few regrets, and most of my regrets are based on hindsight.
merlotncaviar asks: Do you miss the excitement ?
Bill Bonanno: What excitement? Contrary to public perception, this lifestyle is more waiting and waiting for long periods of time for something to happen, and then short bursts of activity. I guess I haven't really answered your question: I can't say that I miss the excitement Those few times when it was exciting, most of the time were negative times in my life.
Timehost: Here's an issue you discuss at great length in your book...
Het_Nikik_1 asks: Who was truly involved in the Kennedy Assassination?
Bill Bonanno: This is going to be a long answer....
Bill Bonanno: I can only relate to you what has been related to me. And in order to do that, we have to go back and understand the situations that were happening at that period of time, the late Fifties and the early Sixties. When Kennedy became President, he was immediately faced with a 3-prong attack on his administration. Number 1 was the Diem situation in Southeast Asia, where he and his administration backed the Diem government and then in later years, as the story goes, they dumped Diem. Diem fell out of favor with Washington. Kennedy had sent Maxwell Taylor to Southeast Asia and later Cabot Lodge... so that was one thing. And then the second prong of the three-prong attack was the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban situation. And the third prong was his and Bobby's relentless attacks on the people in our world, and for the sake of clarity, the people that were involved in the Mafia. So at a given period of time in the early sixties he had the French against him, the Cubans against him, and the Sicilian Italians against him. Madame Nhu, who was the wife of the brother of President Nhu, and the acting First Lady of South Vietnam If you recall your history, she went off to Paris where she was enlisting the aid of the French OAS to support her brother-in-law. So you have a very complicated situation in the years 1960 and 1963. It came to my attention many years later in 1971 while I was a guest of our government at the federal institution in San Pedro, California, that there was more to the assassination than a lone gunman. One day while I was sitting in the yard, with a number of other inmates, Johnny Roselli, out of Chicago, was very upset, infuriated in fact, about the treatment that he was being given by his people in Chicago. One of this group had made a remark about Jack Ruby, and Johnny made the statement that "Jack was a lot more loyal than that (expletive) Sam." Whether or not it actually happened the way it was related to me, I don't know I do know this: That Johnny Roselli told me that he was the shooter in the sewer below the grassy knoll. And that there were others that were backups behind the wall of the grassy knoll. They were Frenchmen. I've been asked many times whether I believe him, and I irrevocably believe him, because I have known Johnny for a long time. I know the type of person he was, and there would not be any purpose of him saying it if it were not true. Because he knew the people that he was talking with that day in the Yard. It was not a long gunman. In reality, Lee Harvey Oswald was the fall guy.
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