Theresa D'Antonio, Author
Author biography. Trumpet Publishing House Authors Directory.
Who is Theresa D'Antonio?
Theresa witnessed something few people see firsthand: a crime boss living into old age. She recorded her account on seven one-hour tapes, which Bonanno approved before his death. Those recordings form the foundation of her memoir, preserving her testimony with his knowledge and approval.
Theresa D'Antonio is the author of The Last Don's Mistress. Joe Bonanno, Sr. was an Italian-American crime boss of New York City's Bonanno crime family, which he ran from 1931 to 1968, and Theresa's book is her own account of his private life and times. Theresa spent his last twenty-five years at his side, a span almost no one in his line of work lives to see, let alone shares with someone willing to tell the truth about it.
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, she spent her early years there before immigrating to Canada and, later, the United States of America. She built a life of marriage, motherhood, family, faith, and work, held together by a love of languages and the people they let her reach.
Over the course of decades, she kept a close record of the people and events that marked her life, preserving photographs, letters, and personal correspondence that appear in this volume. Known for her steadiness, directness, and quiet courage, Theresa endured the pressures that come with living close to an underworld figure, refusing to be intimidated by his reputation and determined to tell the truth as she lived it.
The result is candid, detailed, and restrained: an intimate account of a love few would have dared to live, and of the loyalty, grief, and hard-won clarity that came with it.
Who Joe Bonanno was
Joseph "Joe" Bonanno, Sr. (1905 to 2002) was a Sicilian-born American crime boss who led the Bonanno family, one of the Five Families that controlled organized crime in New York City for most of the twentieth century. He arrived in the United States as a young man, rose through the ranks during Prohibition, and by his early thirties headed one of the most enduring criminal organizations in American history.
Bonanno was known for his longevity in a line of work that rarely allowed it, surviving internal power struggles and federal investigations. He retired to Arizona in the 1960s and later published his own memoir, A Man of Honor, which cemented his reputation as one of the figures widely said to have influenced the character of Vito Corleone in The Godfather.
Theresa D'Antonio knew him away from the public record, as the man behind the reputation, and that distance between the myth and the private man is the subject of her book.
Why the book exists
The manuscript reached publication through her son (pictured above), who would not let his mother's book sit in a drawer.
That is the ordinary fate of firsthand accounts. They are written, they are kept, and they are lost, usually because the person who lived the story has no way into publishing and no reason to think anyone would want it. A great deal of what we actually know about any period survives only because somebody's child refused to let it disappear.
The book we publish, and why
Trumpet Publishing House is the first publisher of The Last Don's Mistress, in hardcover and paperback. Her debut book, The Last Don's Mistress: The Private Life and Times of Joe Bonanno, Sr., documents the years she shared with a man the world knew only by reputation, one of the bosses long said to stand behind The Godfather. It is the one account no one else could give.
The subject has been written about at length by people who were not there. What the catalog did not have, until now, was the version from the one person actually in the room, describing the private life rather than the criminal record.
The benefit is simple and it is the reason we took the book on. A reader gets primary testimony instead of secondhand history, and the account is now fixed in a permanent edition rather than depending on one family's keeping of it.
How to read it
Read it as memoir, not as history, and keep the distinction in view throughout. It is one woman's account, told from inside, with everything that gives it and everything that limits it. That is its value and its boundary at once.
Where it differs from the published histories, it is not necessarily wrong, and it is not necessarily right either. It is a different kind of source, and the honest way to read it is alongside the others rather than instead of them.
Pair it with
- Machiavelli, The Prince, for what the book describes in practice: loyalty, obligation, and what happens to both when power is involved.
- Plutarch, Parallel Lives, for the older discipline of reading a life for the character that shaped it.
Her works
- The Last Don's Mistress. Published by Trumpet Publishing House in hardcover and paperback.
Our editions
This collection grows as further editions and formats are added, so it is worth returning to.