Winners’ Circle … and Then Some

When Always Dreaming crossed the finish line first to win the Kentucky Derby convincingly, he carried more than a talented jockey with him. The horse’s owners, joined together as Brooklyn Boys with a formidable stable of race horses, are two wealthy men well known in New York: Vincent Viola, recently offered the post of Secretary of the Army, and Anthony Bonomo, an insurance leader who has appeared in these pages many times as head of PRI, insurer of 13,000 New York doctors and scores of healthcare facilities. While both, evidently, are risk takers of a high magnitude, both heads of accomplished families, both fond of their roots, and both philanthropists, the important link, to me, is that wealth and good fortune have not compromised either man. This is not about two Italian-Americans and their Brooklyn roots, working class families, Sunday dinners en famille, or any of the other “local boy makes good” stories—it is that, but more.

The ethnic clichés are easy. “Giving back” to one’s community is easy, especially for men of means, but what is not easy is doing it with real affection and without that pasted smile condescension that marks so many “returning” sons. For years this writer has watched Anthony Bonomo in action. He helps everyone—generous, no strings, no worship needed, no “ask back” and no secondary agenda. Each year he and his brother Carl have supported the largest Italian Festival in Brooklyn , maybe New York, the famous Giglio Festival, and Anthony has been there actually assisting in the carrying of the giglio and helping the local parish materially and through that reliable spiritual bond that is ever ineffable. Anthony has supported local colleges, universities, creative individuals writing plays, films, and books and, all the while, he has never asked for his name to be plastered on anything or exalted. Viola is the same way—service first, good before self.

As head of the company that has operated PRI for better than 25 years, Bonomo’s sometimes-stressful gamble on one of the most difficult lines of insurance has paid off for the insureds—providing the one real alternative market for medical practice in New York, for the staff of 300-plus employed in Roslyn, and for the risk taker himself. It is a formula that has worked, despite an often insane trial bar, usually unbridled awards from activist judges, often unappreciative regulators, a legislature that never seems to catch up with the realities of the marketplace, and from some unduly well-publicized predators who have taken advantage of a generous friend’s willingness to offer help to some who proved quite mal-intending. It is the mark of a good man that he never suspects evil in others, never dreams that a friend would saddle him with the weight of deceit. It is the mark of one who is always dreaming of a better condition for those he cherishes and for what he cherishes.

And so in this year’s Kentucky Derby two good men won deservedly. As Insurance Advocate and as advocates ourselves, we cannot help but take pride in Anthony Bonomo’s win in particular, especially after the uphill, muddy track race he has run in medical malpractice insurance, and in the defense of a company and a market that will never really repay him fully for the stamina and determination he has shown throughout the race. When he was in the Winner’s Circle that Saturday afternoon, he had his customary self-possession and actually apologized on national TV to his grandniece for missing her First Communion party back on Long Island.

That was no staged anything; that is who he is and why he has run his race so admirably. SA