Mob kingpin Joseph Bonanno remained a web of contradictions until the second he drew his final breath.
Articulate, polite and impeccably dressed, the mob boss was nonetheless at the epicenter of gangland violence for nearly 50 years.
The 97-year-old Mafia titan – who died Saturday morning in a Tucson, Ariz., hospital – always insisted he was a “man of honor,” unlike the current dumbfellas.
Yet the elder-statesman image Bonanno cultivated is bitterly at odds with his role as “Boss of Bosses” when he was dispatching Murder Inc. hit men to rub out hundreds of rivals, rats and low-rent rounders.
Bonanno’s remarkable achievement was surviving a brutal and bloody business that left lesser peers toe-tagged on a slab in the morgue.
“He was the last survivor of an era that made history in this country, and now he’s gone, too,” his son Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno told the Arizona Daily Star.
“His public persona did not make sense to anyone who knew him. He would have led his life by the same values and principles if he was running the ‘mob’ or General Motors.”
In a criminal career that stretched from Prohibition onward, he led the Brooklyn-based Bonanno family until the late 1960s when he was exiled in a gangland power play.
People who knew Bonanno – also known as “Joe Bananas” – said that “Godfather” author Mario Puzo modeled Don Vito Corleone after the Dante-quoting master criminal.
And like the Marlon Brando character in the film, they say, Bonanno refused to dance on a string for anyone.
Bonanno was born Jan. 18, 1905, in Castellamare del Golfo, Sicily, where his father was patriarch of a powerful family. When waves of Italian immigrants hit these shores, they brought the Mafia “tradition,” as Bonanno called it, with them.
The serious young man sneaked into the United States in 1924, helped by his cousin Steffano “The Undertaker” Maggadino, who ruled the Buffalo mob.
Author Gay Talese – who wrote the mob classic “Honor Thy Father” about the Bonannos – was informed by The Post that his friend was dead.
“This is the last real godfather,” Talese said from Taiwan. “He had a very good life and, remarkably, spent very little time in jail.”
Talese said the keys to understanding Bonanno were his old-world manners and fierce belief in the time-honored codes and traditions of the Mafia. As the American mob has unraveled in the past two decades, Talese said, Bonanno was horrified.
“He never violated the code of silence, he wasn’t a rat like Sammy ‘the Bull’ [Gravano], and he wasn’t an arrogant showoff like John Gotti,” the author said, adding that he had attended the ganglord’s 90th birthday party.
That black-tie celebration was a long way from the streets of Brooklyn where Bonanno got his start working in Salvatore Maranzano’s bootlegging and gambling operations.
After Maranzano was clipped in 1931, Bonanno, a handsome 26-year-old, found himself at the top of the family pyramid. Bonanno’s mob had its fingers in many pies, including labor, numbers, prostitution, gambling and scores of legitimate businesses.
But Bonanno always denied participating in violence – or drugs.
“He was very opposed to drugs,” Talese said. “After the war, he resisted the lure of drugs, although he always said some of his family members were involved. The Corleone character was also against drugs.”
But law-enforcement officials suspected Bonanno of being the mastermind behind the infamous French Connection heroin-smuggling route. Like many other charges against him, it didn’t stick.
Privately, the gangster was stylish and discreet, wearing only the best clothes. Talese added that the don was very well-read – “he’d quote Dante” and had a superb grasp of Roman history.
Bonanno, in his autobiography “A Man of Honor,” described himself as a “venture capitalist.” Indeed, many of his most lucrative enterprises were investment opportunities offered by straight businessmen who craved his many connections.
In 1957, Bonanno was among the scores of underworld chieftains nabbed by cops during a secret conference at Apalachin, N.Y. The shattered conference was, in retrospect, the apogee of mob power in America.
However, the most sensational – and controversial – chapter of Bonanno’s bloody legacy came in October 1964 when he was “kidnapped” during an underworld power struggle.
For 19 months, Bonanno was off the New York stage. A bloody gang war – called the “Banana Wars” after his nickname – came to an end with the boss apparently ceding control of his Big Apple enterprises. The gangster said he bowed out after a heart attack.
Talese doubts that the wily criminal could have been so easily snatched.
“He never said anything about it, but I always believed it was staged and he did it because there was too much heat in New York,” the writer said. “It was the beginning of the end for the mob.”
Despite the move to Tucson, trouble was never very far from Bonanno. His home was bombed, and he remained under the watchful eye of the FBI.
“They don’t impress me . . . these dragons, these octopuses with their Gestapo tactics,” he said in 1978.
He was convicted in 1980 of obstructing a grand jury’s money-laundering probe involving his sons and was jailed a year.
Bonanno was also jailed for 14 months the following year for failing to testify about the National Commission he created.
But Talese said the elderly godfather could have succeeded in any sphere.
“If he was head of Arthur Andersen, he’d get the numbers straight, and there would certainly be a stricter code of corporate ethics,” Talese said. “He was a remarkable man.”
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