SAC Phoenix airtel to the FBI Director, March 22, 1979: summary of Joseph Bonanno's handwritten notes seized at Tucson, which include his account of the "Castellammarese War"

Viewer pages 138 to 142 of Part 01 of the FBI Vault’s Joseph Bonanno file are an airtel of March 22, 1979 from the Special Agent in Charge, Phoenix (file PX 183-93 in the OCR) to the Director (Bureau file 183-1001 in the OCR). The part as a whole is filed as Joseph Bonanno, Part 01. The pages were read from the viewer’s OCR.

The airtel reports that during a federal search of Bonanno’s residence in Tucson, Arizona, agents found in a basement safe “a series of papers consisting of hundreds of handwritten notes of BONANNO,” some in English and some in Sicilian or Italian, and forwards them for transcription. The agent says only “a fraction” of the handwriting was legible, that “It would appear from the notes that what BONANNO has attempted to do is to prepare his memoirs,” and that some pages draw on other publications. He then summarizes the legible part, including: “The next segment of his writings BONANNO writes at great length concerning the Castellammarese War in New York.”

What this archive takes from it. This is an FBI record that seized notes existed and what an agent thought they were. The notes themselves are one man’s unpublished memoir drafts, as an agent paraphrased fragments of them in 1979; this archive does not cite a memoir as a source of fact. None of the agent’s summary of Bonanno’s account (its dates, its causes, who was allied with whom, or who held what title) is repeated on a person page, a chart or the Castellammarese War page. The record is filed so a reader can find it; the 1963 testimony and police records are the sources this archive uses for the war.