About the Author: Theresa D'Antonio
For twenty five years, Theresa D'Antonio was the closest companion of Joseph Bonanno, Sr., the last surviving boss of the American Mafia's founding generation. He was the bridge between the old world of Lucky Luciano and the modern American Mafia, and he is widely named among the real bosses said to have inspired The Godfather. No journalist had that seat beside him. No historian had that door. She did.
Her debut, The Last Don's Mistress: The Private Life and Times of Joe Bonanno, Sr., is a memoir twenty years in the making and the only firsthand account of those years that exists. It draws on a journal she kept privately throughout, along with letters and photographs she has never released until now.
Theresa was born Theresa Kupelian in Alexandria, Egypt, to a family of Armenian heritage, and left for Montreal, Canada, in the early 1960s, when the Nasser regime took over Egypt. She worked for a time as a flight attendant with Air Canada, which is where her path first crossed with the man she would later marry and move to Tucson, Arizona, with.
It was in Tucson, after that marriage ended, that she met and married Lawrence "Larry" D'Antonio, a local attorney and close friend of Joseph Bonanno, Sr. Through Larry, she came to know Bonanno and his wife, Fay, as friends long before anything more. Widowed within weeks of each other, Theresa and Bonanno found their way to each other and stayed there until his death in 2002.
She is not a trained writer. She says as much herself. What she is, instead, is the one person who lived beside a man the rest of the world only ever saw from a distance, and who wrote it all down while it was happening.
The Last Don's Mistress is the result: not another history of Joseph Bonanno, Sr., but a record of the private man only she knew.
Theresa now lives near her son, Aaron, and her grandchildren, who grew up alongside the story this book tells. Aaron, who watched his mother keep that journal for years, wrote the book's foreword himself.
"May our roads cross one day, may we find a good brandy to share, and may the good Lord bless you as you meet all the people who touch your life... Take care to take care."
From the closing pages of The Last Don's Mistress