[1] His father had come from Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, with his grandparents, Catherine and Salvatore, and became boss of the Bonanno crime family a year before he was born.

In order to aid in treating this ailment, his parents enrolled him in a Catholic boarding school in the dry climate of Tucson, Arizona.

Bonanno agreed and suggested his grand-uncle's house on Troutman Street in Brooklyn as a meeting site.

In 1968, after a heart attack, his father ended the family warfare by agreeing to retire as boss and move to Arizona.

[5] After the trial was postponed nine times since 1981, Bonanno was convicted in November 1985, of conspiracy and theft, and sentenced to four years in prison on March 27, 1986.

[1] He also co-wrote the novel The Good Guys (2005) with former undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone and scriptwriter David Fisher.

[1] In his memoir, Bonanno theorized that Cuban exiles and the Cosa Nostra murdered President John F. Kennedy.

Bonanno said that he realized the degree of Cosa Nostra involvement in the assassination when he witnessed on television Jack Ruby, an associate of Chicago Outfit mobster Sam Giancana, killing Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald while in police custody.

[16] George Anastasia wrote that the book "is not a mob tell-all, but rather a treatise on the demise of the American Mafia told from the perspective of someone ... who witnessed and experienced it firsthand.

"[17] According to Anastasia, Bonanno "writes longingly of a better time when honor and loyalty, not guns and money, were the cornerstones of the Mafia.

"[17] Publishers Weekly said in its review that the book is "big on bluster and short on substance" and that the author's "only apparent goal is to exalt the world of his father".

[16] Discussing the allegation that Roselli fired from a storm drain in a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, PW said: "overblown claims are just part of a bloviating style windy with references to 'our tradition' and 'our world,' phrases that would have struck a more resonant chord in the mid-70s, when Mario Puzo's books and Francis Ford Coppola's movies introduced the country to the peculiar mix of honor and violence that Bonanno crudely celebrates.

"[16] Emil Franzi of the Tucson Weekly wrote: "This slice of high-level Mafia existence definitely belongs on the shelves of two different libraries -- collections on organized crime and those on the Kennedy assassination.