Salvatore “Bill” Bonanno, the eldest son of a Mafia kingpin who died yesterday in Tucson, Ariz., of a heart attack at 75, eventually made a living off organized crime as a legitimate businessman.

As the son of Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno, Bill Bonanno followed in the old man’s footsteps in masterminding gambling and loan sharking operations.

In 1993, he emerged from the last of several prison sentences with a brighter idea about how to make money from his mob connections: by writing about them. The American public’s hunger for tales of organized crime, he discovered, is as deep and abiding as any gambler’s itch.

His autobiography, “Bound By Honor: A Mafioso’s Story,” appeared in 1999 and included bombshell allegations about the mob’s involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy, as well as the expected bildungsroman material.

Bonanno also collaborated with Joe Pistone — the real-life Donny Brasco — on a novel, “The Good Guys” (2005), and produced Mafia miniseries for CBS and Showtime.

Born November 5, 1932, in Brooklyn, Bonanno moved to Arizona as a toddler for his health — an ear condition. He thrived for a time but the family business beckoned and by age 20 he was back in New York, hanging out at the Stork Club. He married another mobster’s daughter. Tony Bennett sang at the wedding.

Tabbed as No. 3 in the Bonanno crime family, he became a target during the so-called “Banana Wars” of the mid-1960s over the leadership of organized crime in New York. Joe Bonanno was deposed in 1964 (though he survived to age 97 and died in 2002, at his Tucson home of natural causes). Around the same time, Bill Bonanno became friends with the writer Gay Talese, who told Bonanno’s story in “Honor Thy Father” (1971).

By then, Bonanno was serving a three-year sentence for extortion. He would spend half the next two decades in prison on one charge or another.

Always facile with a sentence, he reinvented himself as a writer and, he said, a cowboy. He was in demand as a speaker about Mafia-related topics, and liked to critique the Hollywood image of mobsters. Regarding “The Sopranos,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2005, “That is a completely foreign world to me. If I was to use that language in mixed company, that would probably have been enough to result in serious repercussions.” He produced his own screen versions of events that he said were more true-to-life.

He set up a Web site, and even maintained a blog.

“If you are fortunate enough to have Christmas in your heart, step outside on Christmas Eve, and search the heavens for a star, a star that shines slightly brighter than do the others,” he wrote recently. “Clasp Christmas close to you.”