How We Came to Publish The Last Don’s Mistress
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Seven hours of tape, recorded while Joseph Bonanno was still alive, and approved by him.
The public's picture of the American Mafia came from fiction until 1983, when one of the men said to have inspired The Godfather sat down and confirmed how much of it had been real. Joseph Bonanno published A Man of Honor that year, followed it with a 60 Minutes interview, and became something the films had never offered: a man from inside that world, on the record.
He had taken over a New York crime family in 1931 at the age of twenty-six, the youngest boss in the country, and stood among men associated with the founding generation of modern American organized crime: Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello, Carlo Gambino. By the time he wrote his own account, he was one of the last living links to that entire generation. In an odd twist Theresa D'Antonio calls ironic in her own memoir, prosecutors were later said to have used his book as a roadmap in the 1985 Mafia Commission Trial. That is the Bonanno most of the world grew up knowing: a settled piece of history.
Theresa D'Antonio spent twenty-five years inside that world, close enough to be trusted with its most private moments, and never fully of it.
She had come to know Joseph Bonanno years earlier through her marriage to his close friend and attorney, Lawrence “Larry” D'Antonio, and through her friendship with his wife, Fay, who became one of her dearest friends. It was only after Larry and Fay died, within weeks of each other, that two people already grieving found comfort in a shared loss, and what began as companionship between two widowed friends slowly grew into something else.
She was brought into a fiercely private family and lived alongside its everyday life for a quarter of a century, but she was never the wife. She was the mistress, which the title does not soften, and that one distinction gave her an unusual vantage point on his private life. He told her himself, more than once, that if he had been twenty years younger he would have married her on the spot. She writes that she was flattered, but that in her heart she doubted she could have carried the weight of that name.
Near enough to see everything, and outside enough, in the end, to be free to tell it.
The tapes
Her son, Aaron, reached out to us directly, and once we sat down with his mother's manuscript we understood why. Aaron had watched her keep her journals for years. That part was familiar to him, and he says as much in the book's foreword.
What none of us expected surfaced in a phone call with Theresa just before we approved the final manuscript. She told us she had also recorded her account onto seven separate one-hour tapes while Joseph Bonanno was still alive, and that he had personally approved them. After his death, she says, his son reviewed and approved them too.
Even Aaron had not known that part. As he put it to us: it is, quite literally, a voice coming from the grave.
Speaking with Theresa, what stays with you is how precise she still is. She corrects a date, a detail, the number of tapes, without hesitation, and it is the same exactness that shaped the book. She sounds exactly like the woman on the page: funny, disarmingly honest, and entirely unwilling to give ground. We have never met anyone quite like her.
Two books in one manuscript
What struck us most, reading it as publishers, is how differently the same pages land.
One of us read it as Theresa's story first. A young immigrant from Alexandria, Egypt, who became, through a series of turns she could never have planned, a mother once widowed and once divorced, and who spent the back half of her life loving a man forty years her senior through his old age and decline, in a relationship that cost her as much as it gave her.
The other read the same manuscript and found a different book entirely. Joseph, seen not as the boss of the Commission but as the private man Theresa alone knew well enough to show whole.
What makes it work on either reading is that Theresa does not write around the hard parts. She is candid about their private life in a way memoirs rarely are, and just as candid about the friction, the arguments, and the years that tested them. It reads less like a tribute than like a real relationship, lived on the page, with all of its warmth and all of its weight intact.
Near the end of the book, she leaves no doubt about what it came down to for her:
“I loved him, not because of the Bonanno name, but because of who he was. It is very difficult for me to say 'he was,' as he is no longer with me. I have lost a person very dear to me, not the man who was a Mafia boss, but a man who was my true friend, a father figure at times, a confidant, and most importantly, my love.”
The Last Don's Mistress: The Private Life and Times of Joe Bonanno, Sr. by Theresa D'Antonio is published by Trumpet Publishing House. Read more about the book.
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