Honor Thy Father

Honor Thy Father is a 1971 book by Gay Talese, about the travails of the Bonanno crime family in the 1960s, especially Salvatore Bonanno and his father Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno. Background In 1965, Gay Talese left his job as a reporter at The New York Times to focus on magazine writing, such as 1966's "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" and longer projects, like his 1969 book The Kingdom and the Power. During this period, however, Talese had begun to research a book about the Mafia. The research for the nonfiction novel began when Talese introduced himself to mafioso Salvatore "Bill" Bonanno in a courthouse in 1965. That same year, Talese signed a $30,000 advance to write the book. For nearly seven years, Talese interviewed Bonanno and other members of the Mafia extensively. Talese even traveled to Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily to research the ancestral origins of the subjects of his story. Talese feared, during the research, that the government would subpoena him to find out what he learned about the Mafia, though this never came to pass. He also fretted that he would be mistaken for one of Bonanno's associates by his enemies. Story The book begins when Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno is kidnapped from the streets of New York in 1964 and the Bonanno crime family is thrown into disarray for two years in a power struggle called the Banana War, culminating in an armed-ambush in Brooklyn in which Joe's son Bill Bonanno is nearly killed.