The Born-Again Don

HIS PARENTS want­ed him to be a doc­tor, so he duti­ful­ly enrolled at a local col­lege on Long Island and majored in biol­o­gy. Michael Franzese was expect­ed to do well. The only time his father ever hit him was upon being told—falsely—that the boy’s A aver­age in Catholic school had slipped. But he dropped out of col­lege mid­way through his stud­ies, and soon after that, Franzese paid a call on his father to announce that he was being drawn into the old man’s pro­fes­sion.
     Their meet­ing place, the fed­er­al pen­i­ten­tiary at Leav­en­worth, was a stark reminder of where that pro­fes­sion could lead. John “Son­ny” Franzese, a caporegime in the Colom­bo crime fam­i­ly, had got­ten fifty years in a bank-rob­bery case. Son­ny was a shark-eyed, bull­necked hood­lum who looked like John Garfield in Body and Soul, a leg­endary enforcer giv­en cred­it for dozens of mur­ders; a man who had been tossed out of the U.S. Army as a “psy­choneu­rot­ic with pro­nounced homi­ci­dal ten­den­cies.”
     Son­ny was not sur­prised at the news. Though Michael was an adopt­ed child, he had raised the boy from infan­cy, and, he told his son, “I seen that spir­it in you.” As long as Michael was going to be “on the street,” Son­ny want­ed to give him “a prop­er intro­duc­tion” to cer­tain of his friends. But first there was an impor­tant mat­ter to clear up.
     “Let me ask you a ques­tion,” Son­ny said. “If you had to kill some­body, do you think you could do it?”
     Michael thought for a moment. “If the cir­cum­stance were right,” he said. “For the right rea­sons, I’d do it. Yeah.”
     Son­ny arranged for Colom­bo sol­dier “Joe-Joe” Vitac­co to reach out for his son, and Michael Franzese began his for­mal school­ing in “the life.” In 1975, at age twen­ty-four, he was deemed ready for induc­tion into the Mob. Tom DiBel­lo, act­ing head of the Colom­bo fam­i­ly, presided over the solemn cer­e­mo­ny in the back room of a cater­ing hall in Brook­lyn. The Colom­bos laid out a sym­bol­ic gun and knife, mur­mured in Sicil­ian, and drew blood from Franzese’s shoot­ing fin­ger. He was now a “made” man.
     With­in a decade, Franzese had become a caporegime like his father, one of the biggest earn­ers the Mob had seen since Capone, and the youngest indi­vid­ual in For­tune magazine’s sur­vey of “The 50 Biggest Mafia Boss­es.” His far-flung ensem­ble of busi­ness­es includ­ed high-rise con­struc­tion, car deal­er­ships, a secu­ri­ty guards’ union, and the pro­duc­tion of B‑movies. But his biggest scam involved sell­ing mil­lions of gal­lons of boot­leg gaso­line in sev­er­al states and rob­bing fed­er­al and state gov­ern­ments of the excise tax­es. Franzese’s per­son­al take: an esti­mat­ed $1 mil­lion to $2 mil­lion a week.
     Before too long, how­ev­er, the law caught up with him. By 1985, Franzese was under indict­ment in New York and Flori­da, and although he had beat­en five cas­es in the past, this time it looked bad. A fed­er­al judge locked him up with­out bail after hear­ing evi­dence of his vio­lent ten­den­cies, includ­ing claims—which he still denies—that he ordered a competitor’s head bashed in with a ball-peen ham­mer.
     Defeat­ed, Franzese copped a plea to rack­e­teer­ing and con­spir­a­cy. He would do ten years at Ter­mi­nal Island and pay near­ly $15 mil­lion in fines and resti­tu­tion. It appeared he had come full cir­cle, end­ing up like his father.

TODAY, Michael Franzese, thir­ty-nine, is a free man, hav­ing served about a third of his sen­tence. He has not paid a nick­el of his resti­tu­tion. He lives in a $2.7 mil­lion home in a swank Los Ange­les neigh­bor­hood with his sec­ond wife, twen­ty-sev­en-year-old Cam­my Gar­cia, a for­mer aer­o­bics instruc­tor who danced in one of his movies. They dri­ve a Mer­cedes and a Porsche. Franzese gives his occu­pa­tion as movie pro­duc­er. He is rep­re­sent­ed by ICM, a lead­ing tal­ent agency, which recent­ly sold CBS the rights to a four-hour mini-series about his life. John Tra­vol­ta and Tony Dan­za were both men­tioned as pos­si­ble leads. The series is now on hold—Franzese didn’t like the script. But lat­er this year, Harper­Collins will pub­lish his mem­oirs, writ­ten with best-sell­ing author Dary Mat­era.
     Why has the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment been so good to Franzese? He has become that most prized of commodities—an infor­mant. Which explains every­thing, until you look at whom he has giv­en up. To date, Franzese has pub­licly tes­ti­fied against two people—a Jew­ish book­ing agent and a black janitor—neither of them, to be sure, a mem­ber of orga­nized crime.
     Law­men who strug­gled to bring Franzese to jus­tice are appalled. To them, he has played expert-lev­el Monop­oly with the fed­er­al sys­tem and drawn the “Get Out of Jail Free” card. The F.B.I. and the Orga­nized Crime and Rack­e­teer­ing Sec­tion of the Jus­tice Department—representatives of which all declined to be inter­viewed on the sub­ject of Franzese—are pro­tect­ing him in the appar­ent hope that he will some­how prove a star wit­ness. Mean­while, police and local pros­e­cu­tors in sev­er­al states can­not get per­mis­sion to ques­tion him about seri­ous crimes, includ­ing unsolved mur­ders. They say Franzese has pulled off the scam of his life.
     “When I heard he was coop­er­at­ing, I laughed,” says Jer­ry Bern­stein, a for­mer Brook­lyn-strike-force lawyer who spent three years pur­su­ing Franzese—and then got frozen out of the mobster’s secret nego­ti­a­tions with Wash­ing­ton. “Coop­er­at­ing, bull. He’s the kind of per­son who does things on his terms.” Ray Jermyn, who worked side by side with Bern­stein, is even more blunt: “He’s mak­ing a jerk out of the sys­tem.”
     But even his detrac­tors in law enforce­ment can­not fath­om how Franzese expects to stay alive. His refusal to join the Fed­er­al Wit­ness Pro­tec­tion Program—and then embark­ing on a high-pro­file life in the enter­tain­ment business—seems almost sui­ci­dal. And con­sid­er this: in a twelve-hour inter­view span­ning three days, Franzese freely iden­ti­fied mem­bers of crime fam­i­lies, denounced the Mob in scat­o­log­i­cal terms, and bragged about hav­ing best­ed Gam­bi­no boss John Got­ti in a busi­ness deal. He promis­es more of the same in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy. Such con­tempt for Mafia con­ven­tion is sim­ply not tol­er­at­ed.
     Franzese says his sweet but deter­mined wife is the cat­a­lyst for his new life-style. As improb­a­ble as that may sound, he does appear almost mes­mer­ized by her. “I myself observed that she has a Sven­gali-like hold over him,” says Ray Jermyn. “In her pres­ence, he’s like a lap­dog.” (The orig­i­nal work­ing title of the Franzese mem­oirs was Quit­ting the Mob: The Yup­pie Don and the Bil­lion-Dol­lar Mafia Empire He Gave Up for the Woman He Loved.) Franzese fur­ther claims that his wife has con­vert­ed him to the born-again-Chris­t­ian faith, which seems a stretch to peo­ple who recall his rep­u­ta­tion for vicious­ness.
     Out­ma­neu­ver­ing the gov­ern­ment is sec­ond nature to Franzese—he’s made a career of it. Defy­ing the Mafia is some­thing else. Per­haps he is doing it for his wife’s sake. But unless he holds an ace up his sleeve, orga­nized-crime experts warn, his dis­re­spect for the Mob code is going to get him killed.

Everbody’s try­ing to fig­ure out my angle.”
     Michael Franzese is smil­ing. Despite his rep­u­ta­tion, he has a most-pop­u­lar-boy-at-school charm. But at odd moments his gaze turns icy, and one can pic­ture him order­ing an act of bru­tal­i­ty. “Don’t be fooled,” warns Lar­ry Ior­iz­zo, a for­mer part­ner in crime, now a pro­tect­ed wit­ness. “He’s a stone-cold gang­ster. Nev­er was any­thing else.”
     Franzese (pro­nounced Fran-zeace) has declined to be inter­viewed at his home, and requests that his address not be pub­lished. Instead, he has select­ed as a meet­ing place the lounge of a Bev­er­ly Hills hotel. He pulls up to the front entrance behind the wheel of his black Porsche, which has a “Jesus Saves” fish decal on the rear hood. There is no body­guard. He appears rel­a­tive­ly at ease, though he seats him­self where he can observe the entire room. Franzese is hand­some, with high cheek­bones, of about aver­age height, and well mus­cled. His dark-brown hair is gray around the edges and touch­es his col­lar. He dress­es casu­al­ly; his trade­mark is a pair of avi­a­tor sun­glass­es. Though he grew up on Long Island, his bari­tone voice has faint traces of Brook­lyn.
     As Franzese explains it, his only “angle” is a desire to put fam­i­ly before Fam­i­ly. He now has three chil­dren with Cam­my: Miquelle, aged five; Aman­da, four; and eigh­teen-month-old Michael junior. Then there are his three old­er chil­dren, who live with his ex-wife in New York. Franzese says he made a deter­mi­na­tion for their sake to avoid the fate of his father, who has spent all but three of the last twen­ty years behind bars. He cur­rent­ly resides at the fed­er­al pen in Peters­burg, Vir­ginia, and is not sched­uled for release until 1994, when he will be sev­en­ty-five.
     “My father went through twen­ty damn years of aggra­va­tion,” Franzese says. “My mother’s a ner­vous wreck, my broth­ers and sis­ters are all wrecks. Where is all this hon­or and this baloney? You can’t believe in this damn oath when you’ve got a fam­i­ly to think of. What about them? My mother’s been alone for sev­en­teen years. So which is the more hon­or­able stand? My father’s posi­tion is: This is how I’ve lived all my life, and I don’t want any­body to ever say that I was a rat or a snitch, so I’m gonna die this way. O.K. I guess I can relate to that. But I’m in a dif­fer­ent posi­tion. I’m thir­ty-some­thing years old. I’ve got six chil­dren, I’ve got a young wife. And I’ll be damned if I’m gonna put them through what my fam­i­ly had to go through. Espe­cial­ly for some­thing I no longer believe in.
     “When I first got into the life, I had a very ide­al­is­tic view,” he con­tin­ues. “My father was my idol, and any­thing he was part of had to be the great­est thing in the world. And when Tom DiBel­lo sat me down and described the life, it sound­ed great. It was a group of men, there was hon­or, you had friends all over the world. And jus­tice and fair play was the stan­dard. A guy can get killed because he’s in the drug busi­ness. A guy can get killed if he mess­es around with somebody’s wife. To me, what I felt to be hon­or­able things.”
     Now he pro­fess­es to feel oth­er­wise. “The Mob is no good, it’s full of shit, it’s a mon­ey-hun­gry oper­a­tion, and it’s not some­thing that should be idol­ized. I’ve seen guys afraid to walk into a meeting—they may not come out. I’ve heard guys com­plain­ing that every time they turn around, somebody’s grab­bing mon­ey off of them. This is not how it was sup­posed to be. It’s all bull­shit. And if admit­ting that is gonna cause me a prob­lem, then so be it.”
     Because he was such a spec­tac­u­lar earn­er, Franzese says, he need­ed to pro­claim pub­licly that he had quit the Mob or every wiseguy in cre­ation would be knock­ing at his door. And that, he insists, is the main rea­son he agreed to tes­ti­fy for the government—not so that he could get sprung from jail. “Show me one guy that ever got on the wit­ness stand who is now run­ning around with the Mob. This was my way of mak­ing a state­ment that I’m out. How­ev­er, I got­ta say, I would rather walk out this door and get killed than have any­body think I’m a cow­ard, or that I rat­ted out every­body and ran into the wit­ness pro­gram. I couldn’t live with that.”

TINA FRANZESE sees things dif­fer­ent­ly. Learn­ing that her son had turned infor­mant was a ter­ri­ble blow to her. It seemed to inval­i­date all that she had suf­fered for, her long, lone­ly vig­il for Son­ny. The past two decades have been full of hard­ship. Her mon­ey has run out, and she fears los­ing her home. A few years ago, she was arrest­ed for cred­it-card fraud. In 1974 a Colom­bo sol­dier named Carmine Scia­lo, who, it was rumored, had been atten­tive toward her, was found buried in a cel­lar with a gar­rote around his neck and his gen­i­tals stuffed in his mouth—an appar­ent sig­nal of Sonny’s dis­plea­sure.
     “My hus­band and I have been on dif­fer­ent wave­lengths for years,” she says, “but I respect him thor­ough­ly. He’s a great man. He has the kind of the­o­ries and moral­i­ties that we could use today.”
     Tina receives her vis­i­tor at the kitchen table of her immac­u­late home in Roslyn, where Michael grew up. The white stuc­co walls are cov­ered with mir­rors; the fur­ni­ture is mod­ern. Still love­ly at fifty-six, Tina wears a black rib­bon in her hon­ey-blond hair, speaks in a soft voice made husky by cig­a­rettes, and seems fre­quent­ly on the verge of tears.
     “I don’t respect Michael for what he’s done,” she says. “When you went to school and some­one threw a paper and the teacher asked, ‘Who threw it?’ how many raised their hands and said, ‘He did it’? That’s not the way we were brought up. Why do that to peo­ple that didn’t hurt you? I can love him till I die, but I can’t for­give him. Because it’s too huge. I’m hurt­ing every day. He could have hung on in jail anoth­er two years and then chose what­ev­er he want­ed to do—but no wit­ness stand. And then I would still have my son.”
     It pains Franzese that his moth­er has cursed him for turn­ing infor­mant. Sonny’s opin­ion of his son’s heresy is not known. The elder Franzese has epit­o­mized the good sol­dier and “stand-up guy,” deter­mined to walk out of prison ram­rod straight. He plays rac­quet­ball with oth­er inmates sev­er­al hours every day—and gen­er­al­ly wins. At sev­en­ty-one he looks no old­er than fifty. “The guy could prob­a­bly take on ten of us,” says a police detec­tive. One sus­pects that Son­ny is none too proud of Michael, with whom he has not spo­ken since 1985. There was even a sto­ry cir­cu­lat­ing for a while that he had a con­tract on his son. “I laughed it off,”    Michael says qui­et­ly.
     He also frets about being lumped in with famous stool pigeons like Joe Valachi, Jim­my “the Weasel” Fra­tian­no, and Hen­ry Hill, all of whom joined the wit­ness pro­gram. Hill is the sub­ject of the best-sell­ing biog­ra­phy Wiseguy and the recent hit film Good­Fel­las, which has won praise as an accu­rate depic­tion of the Mob’s deprav­i­ty. Franzese says he “got sick” watch­ing Good­Fel­las, because of the vio­lence. “If you couldn’t walk out of there and say, ‘These guys are fuck­ing ani­mals,’ there had to be some­thing wrong with you.” But he was glad that Hen­ry Hill was not made a hero; to Franzese, he was “a lowlife” for giv­ing up Luc­ch­ese boss Paul Vario. “Paulie treat­ed this kid real good.”

ONE WILL NEVER con­fuse Michael Franzese and Hen­ry Hill in terms of their use­ful­ness to the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. Hill not only tes­ti­fied against Vario but helped nail mob­ster Jim­my Burke on mur­der charges. And Hill was a low-lev­el sol­dier, not even a made man. Franzese is the high­est-rank­ing Mafia apos­tate of the past decade. Fed­er­al law enforcers seem to go limp at the prospect of ensnar­ing a “T.E.,” or “top ech­e­lon” infor­mant.
     It appears that Franzese exploit­ed the allure of his name to nego­ti­ate an unprece­dent­ed one-year coop­er­a­tion agree­ment with the gov­ern­ment. Signed on May 18, 1989, it com­pels Franzese to coop­er­ate only in cas­es filed through April 30, 1990. Upon set­ting his name to the doc­u­ment, Franzese was let out of prison. “I’ve nev­er heard of any­thing like that being done,” says one state pros­e­cu­tor. Hen­ry Hill’s agree­ment, to be sure, has no expi­ra­tion date.
     It prob­a­bly didn’t hurt that two months before Franzese signed the agree­ment he helped the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chica­go win a rack­e­teer­ing case against Nor­by Wal­ters, a for­mer night­club own­er and a long­time friend of Sonny’s. (As a boy, Michael knew him as “Uncle Nor­by.”) Over the years, Wal­ters had built a New York book­ing agency for black pop stars that was sec­ond to none—clients includ­ed Dionne War­wick and Kool & the Gang. In 1985, Wal­ters sought entrée into the sports-agency busi­ness, with $50,000 in seed mon­ey from Michael Franzese, deliv­ered in cash in a brown paper bag.
Franzese’s tes­ti­mo­ny, how­ev­er, had more to do with extor­tion charges involv­ing Michael Jack­son and his broth­ers. In 1981, Wal­ters had made a bid to han­dle the book­ings for the Jack­sons’ nation­al con­cert tour. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, Ron Weis­ner, at the time one of the group’s co-man­agers, wasn’t keen on him. Franzese tes­ti­fied that, at Walters’s request, he flew to Los Ange­les for a sit-down with Weis­ner: “I explained to him that, if Nor­by wasn’t involved in the tour in some man­ner, there might not be a tour.”
     “It was threat­en­ing,” Weis­ner assured the jurors. As it turned out, a watch­ful L.A.P.D. picked up on Franzese’s activ­i­ties and per­suad­ed Weis­ner to hang tough. As a safe­ty mea­sure, Weis­ner kept the Jack­sons away from the Nas­sau Col­i­se­um, on Long Island—Franzese’s backyard—and Wal­ters nev­er did get a piece of the tour. (Wal­ters was sen­tenced to five years for rack­e­teer­ing, and his for­mer part­ner and co-defen­dant, Lloyd Bloom, to three. But last Sep­tem­ber a fed­er­al appeals court over­turned the con­vic­tions of both men on the grounds that the judge gave faulty instruc­tions to the jury and that Bloom should have been grant­ed a sep­a­rate tri­al.)
     Franzese’s only oth­er appear­ance in open court thus far has been to point a fin­ger at a jan­i­tor, Ornge Tutt, who worked for Frank Cam­pi­one, Son­ny Franzese’s ex-dri­ver. As luck would have it, Tutt’s “girl­friend-fiancee” sat on a 1984 grand jury inves­ti­gat­ing Michael Franzese. For $1,000, Tutt leaked him infor­ma­tion about the probe. Last sum­mer, a fed­er­al court in Union­dale, Long Island, con­vict­ed Tutt of obstruc­tion of jus­tice.
     Chances are good that Franzese will tes­ti­fy at least once more, against real-estate devel­op­er Ger­ald Guter­man, indict­ed last year on charges that he con­spired with union offi­cials and Mob con­trac­tors to defraud the I.R.S. Guter­man is per­haps best remem­bered as the man who char­tered the Queen Eliz­a­beth 2 in 1986 to throw a Bar and Bas Mitz­vah cel­e­bra­tion for a son and two daugh­ters. He alleged­ly used Franzese to buy labor peace and pro­vide Mob pro­tec­tion for work done on apart­ment com­plex­es in New York and New Jer­sey. Franzese says the gen­er­al-con­tract­ing com­pa­ny he formed with Guter­man was among his most lucra­tive ven­tures.
     Still, Guter­man qual­i­fies as a white-col­lar defen­dant; Franzese has yet to tes­ti­fy against a mem­ber of orga­nized crime. He received a sum­mons to appear at the extor­tion-and-labor-rack­e­teer­ing tri­al of New Jer­sey Mafia boss John Rig­gi, but nev­er made it to the stand. “They had me on the wit­ness list,” Franzese recalls. “I said, ‘Fine, put me on—but I’m gonna con­flict with your main wit­ness.’” Spe­cial Assis­tant U.S. Attor­ney Bri­an Gillet, who won a con­vic­tion against Rig­gi all the same, won’t com­ment on why Franzese was not called.
     “He’s pick­ing and choos­ing who he’s gonna tes­ti­fy against, which to me is rep­re­hen­si­ble,” says Ray Jermyn, the rack­ets chief of the Suf­folk Coun­ty D.A.’s office. Recent­ly, Jermyn sub­poe­naed Franzese to appear before a Suf­folk grand jury in a Mob loan-shark­ing case. After he failed to show up, Jermyn hit him with an arrest war­rant. It proved an emp­ty ges­ture. When Jermyn asked some L.A.P.D. offi­cers to take down Franzese’s license-plate num­ber and get his address—a rou­tine procedure—their efforts were quashed by the F.B.I. “The Feds are run­ning inter­fer­ence for the guy,” Jermyn grous­es.
     Franzese seems to think his slip­per­i­ness as a wit­ness has made him a less like­ly tar­get for the Mob. Sure, he says, some­one could jus­ti­fy a con­tract on him mere­ly for tes­ti­fy­ing. “But I think peo­ple mea­sure things more on, Is he a threat to me? And maybe the point is becom­ing clear­er that I’m not gonna be a big star wit­ness.” Espe­cial­ly, he adds, after the Rig­gi case.
     He doesn’t deny that his life is at risk. But so what? “It’s not new to me to have the feel­ing that, hey, today, tomor­row, some­body may take a shot at me. I under­stood that when I was in the life. Why should it be any dif­fer­ent now that I’m out of it? But I make pro­vi­sion. I’d like to think that I’m pret­ty astute and know what’s going on around me. If somebody’s gonna get me, they’re gonna have to work at it. I’m not walk­ing around with my head up my ass.”

CAMMY FRANZESE has just arrived from a dance class; her cur­rent goal in life is to become a chore­o­g­ra­ph­er. On her neck­lace are a fig­urine of a dancer and a cru­ci­fix. She wears a tight-fit­ting green blouse, a black skirt, and cow­boy boots, and is alto­geth­er voluptuous—no more the image of an anorex­ic bal­le­ri­na than she is a clas­sic Mafia wife.
     As she takes a seat beside her hus­band, he warms per­cep­ti­bly. Thanks to Cam­my, Franzese was bap­tized in a wad­ing pool at their church about a year ago—a decade and a half after his induc­tion into the Cosa Nos­tra. His pas­tor advised him that to be a Chris­t­ian it was nec­es­sary only to believe, but Franzese dis­missed that as “too easy,” and the immer­sion appealed to his feel­ing for rit­u­al. “I said, Wait a minute, this is some­thing I can relate to. Like, now I’m part of some­thing.”
     Cammy’s first words upon sit­ting down are “God had a plan for Michael.” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the thought seems to have crossed her mind late­ly that maybe God’s plan does not cor­re­spond with her own.
     “I just wor­ry about him,” she says. “Some days my faith is so strong, I know, God, you’re gonna take care of my hus­band. But then, the oth­er day, we saw this retard­ed film, Good­Fel­las. I was in the ladies’ room and I had tears in my eyes. It real­ly fright­ened me. Could that hap­pen to Michael?”
     Franzese puts a reas­sur­ing hand on her arm. “I don’t believe I’m meant to go down in a hail of bul­lets,” he says. “I think I have a good grasp on my rela­tion­ship with God.…”
     “I do sense he’s aware of what’s going on around him,” she tells her­self. “We’ll go to a restau­rant and he’ll say, ‘I’ll sit here and you sit there.’ And I’ll notice him look­ing around the room.” She turns to her hus­band. “Every day, I always tell you, ‘Please be care­ful.’ But is it ever gonna end? Will we be able to live our life some­what nor­mal? It gets to you. When I came out of that movie the­ater, I was upset with him. My God, was he ever a part of that lifestyle? No, I would nev­er see him being so mean and vicious as the men of that movie.” Franzese shakes his head.
     A col­lege dropout, Camille Gar­cia was twen­ty-one when she mar­ried Franzese in a hasty cer­e­mo­ny at the chapel of the Cir­cus Cir­cus casi­no in Las Vegas. It was Jan­u­ary 1985, and he had just been indict­ed in a loan-shark­ing case that would end in acquittal—his last such vic­to­ry. There was a lot about his life that Cam­my didn’t appre­ci­ate at the time, but it began to sink in after Vin­cent “Jim­my” Roton­do, her husband’s co-defen­dant, was blown away by gun­fire a few years lat­er.
     “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “In front of his house! In his car! They killed him! I used to watch The God­fa­ther. These men were interesting—tall, dark, and hand­some. They walked into a room and peo­ple respect­ed them. I liked it, but I thought it was fic­tion. When I real­ized it was true, it hit me: This is ter­ri­ble!”

GROWING UP, Michael Franzese him­self was kept in the dark about a lot of things, includ­ing any infor­ma­tion about his sup­posed real father. When he was born, on May 27, 1951, his moth­er, Chris­tine “Tina” Capo­bian­co, the daugh­ter of a tran­sit work­er, was mar­ried to one Frank Gril­lo. He dis­ap­peared after Son­ny arrived on the scene. Set­ting a pat­tern that Michael would vir­tu­al­ly dupli­cate, Son­ny came with three chil­dren from a pre­vi­ous mar­riage, then had three more with Tina, putting Michael in the mid­dle. In 1961 the fam­i­ly moved from New Hyde Park to a two-sto­ry Colo­nial house in Roslyn, Long Island, where the future gang­ster grew up as Michael Gril­lo, until he turned eigh­teen and Son­ny adopt­ed him. But Michael always saw him­self as a Franzese, and to this day believes it pos­si­ble that Son­ny is his nat­ur­al father after all.
     Born in Naples in 1919, Son­ny Franzese seemed des­tined for the Mob. (His father, Carmine, known as Tut­tie the Lion, was a man of not­ed bru­tal­i­ty who ran a bak­ery shop in Brook­lyn and was leg­endary for stuff­ing adver­saries in the oven.) As a young man, Son­ny was arrest­ed a dozen times for crimes includ­ing felo­nious assault and rape, but was con­vict­ed only of minor gam­bling offens­es.
     Son­ny latched onto what was then the Pro­faci fam­i­ly and worked his way up as an enforcer. A shade over five eight, he was crew-cut, crag­gy, men­ac­ing, and, unlike most oth­er mafiosi, abstemious. Also cheap. “He had a rep­u­ta­tion for being very tight with a buck,” recalls for­mer F.B.I. agent Bernie Welsh. “An infor­mant told me that one time Son­ny sup­pos­ed­ly went into an S. Klein’s depart­ment store in Hemp­stead and stole the Christ­mas tree. And bragged about it.”
     Offi­cial­ly, Son­ny owned a dry cleaner’s in Brook­lyn. Unof­fi­cial­ly, he was becom­ing the reign­ing gang­ster of Long Island, with an inter­est in restau­rants, clubs, top­less bars, and sev­er­al record labels. Sonny’s liveli­hood was nev­er dis­cussed in the Franzese home. The Colom­bo sol­diers who fre­quent­ly dropped in were all “uncles” to Michael. But he felt the effects of the life dur­ing the Gal­lo-Pro­faci war of 1961 through 1963. “Crazy Joe” Gal­lo and his two broth­ers were attempt­ing to wrest con­trol of the fam­i­ly from Joseph Pro­faci; for two years, it rained bul­lets, and Son­ny nev­er ven­tured out­side with­out a body­guard.
     The war proved for­tu­nate for Son­ny. He remained a neu­tral par­ty, trust­ed by both sides, and won the favor of Joe Colom­bo, who became head of the fam­i­ly in 1963. On Christ­mas Eve of 1965, News­day pub­lished Bob Greene’s ground­break­ing pro­file of Son­ny Franzese, “The Hood in Our Neigh­bor­hood.” Greene assert­ed that the aging Joe Colom­bo was “grad­u­al­ly paving the way for Franzese to take over com­plete­ly.… The Cosa Nos­tra accepts him as a com­ing king.” Son­ny said noth­ing about the arti­cle, but after it appeared, the Franze­ses’ Eng­lish maid, Pauline, sat Michael down and explained to him that his father was a mem­ber of orga­nized crime.
     He felt no shame at the news: “By this time I viewed the gov­ern­ment as the ene­my. We had cops sit­ting out­side our house and fol­low­ing us in heli­copters.” Once, when he was six­teen and “in a mood,” Michael got into his father’s car and led some police detec­tives on a high-speed chase, for which he was near­ly arrest­ed. Son­ny was livid. “Do you think this is a game?” he asked Michael. “These guys are treach­er­ous.” Anoth­er time, Michael recalls, two police­men fol­lowed Son­ny and fam­i­ly into a local din­er and began to harass him at the table. Son­ny lost his tem­per, and one of the offi­cers ges­tured toward his hol­ster. “Go for your gun—I want you to,” Son­ny said, glow­er­ing. “You seen the cop was scared stiff,” Michael says.
     Son­ny held court at two famous night­clubs, the Copaca­bana in Man­hat­tan and the San Su San on Long Island. Artists such as Sam­my Davis Jr., Bob­by Darin, and—one of Sonny’s per­son­al favorites—Tiny Tim con­vened at his table.
     But Sonny’s pub­lic appear­ances would soon draw to an end. It had become a high pri­or­i­ty for J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. to get him off the street. The rea­sons for this remain obscure; Hoover seemed far more inter­est­ed in Red-bait­ing than in the Mafia, whose very exis­tence he denied. Tina Franzese claims that fed­er­al agents bugged the house in Roslyn—even the bed­room. In the mid-six­ties Son­ny was hit with four indict­ments, all based on the tes­ti­mo­ny of four “skells” who had paid trib­ute to him from the pro­ceeds of their pet­ty crimes. Two state cas­es involv­ing theft end­ed in acquit­tal. He was also cleared in the mur­der of Ernie “the Hawk” Rupoli, a Mob hit man whose corpse—shot, stabbed, and weight­ed with cement blocks—had washed ashore on a Long Island beach.
     But Son­ny was con­vict­ed on fed­er­al charges that he con­spired with the skells to rob banks. Iron­i­cal­ly, it was per­haps the weak­est of the four cas­es and may have been a frame. An F.B.I. agent who requests anonymi­ty thinks it more like­ly that Son­ny learned of the rob­beries after the fact and mere­ly demand­ed his “whack­up.” In 1967, he was sen­tenced to two con­sec­u­tive twen­ty-five-year terms. He remained free on bail for three years as the process of appeal dragged on, but in 1970, Son­ny was shipped to Leav­en­worth to begin serv­ing his time.
     A few months lat­er, Michael Franzese, then a fresh­man at Hof­s­tra Uni­ver­si­ty, got a phone call from a for­mer mem­ber of Sonny’s crew. Joe Colombo’s son had been arrest­ed, and Colom­bo senior was form­ing a new orga­ni­za­tion, the Ital­ian-Amer­i­can Civ­il Rights League, to protest per­se­cu­tion. The boss planned a ral­ly in front of F.B.I. head­quar­ters on Third Avenue.
     Michael joined the thou­sands-strong pick­et line with a sign that read: I AM A VICTIM OF F.B.I. GESTAPO TACTICS. MY FATHER WAS FRAMED FOR 50 YEARS. In the course of the ral­ly, he had words with a police­man. “He pushed me, and I hit him,” Franzese recalls, “and then all hell broke loose.” Franzese says he was beat­en, cuffed, thrown into a pad­dy wag­on, and charged with assault­ing an offi­cer. Joe Colom­bo arranged for not­ed Mob lawyer Bar­ry Slot­nick to defend him. He plead­ed guilty to dis­or­der­ly con­duct and was fined $250.
     It was on the pick­et line in front of F.B.I. head­quar­ters that Michael Franzese was drawn into the life of crime. The wiseguys took a lik­ing to him. He had the Franzese name, and, he adds, “they could see I was a hus­tler.”
     Now in his ear­ly twen­ties, he found him­self in a crew of men con­sid­er­ably old­er than he. Some were hulk­ing giants, like “the Chub­by Brothers”—John and Robert Ver­ras­tro, both more than three hun­dred pounds—and Phillie Viz­zari, a Colom­bo sol­dier who had report­ed to Son­ny. Their base of oper­a­tion was an auto­mo­bile-leas­ing out­let on Long Island that belonged to a man named Tony Mora­no. Nas­sau Coun­ty detec­tives suc­ceed­ed in mak­ing an infor­mant of Mora­no, who had a gam­bling habit and was in Dutch with Colom­bo loan sharks. He was fit­ted with a body mike. Soon after that, Franzese’s part­ners sus­pect­ed that Mora­no was embez­zling from them and, accord­ing to Franzese, threat­ened to kill him. Believ­ing their informant’s life was in dan­ger, police burst in—one of them aimed a shot­gun at Franzese’s head—and arrest­ed the entire crew. Still in col­lege, Franzese faced four indict­ments, on charges of con­spir­a­cy, grand lar­ce­ny, pos­ses­sion of stolen prop­er­ty, coer­cion, and extor­tion.
     The cas­es were weak, and Mora­no dam­aged them fur­ther with an unhelp­ful per­for­mance on the wit­ness stand. “I think he had a change of heart,” Franzese sug­gests. Two cas­es end­ed in acquit­tal, one was set­tled with a fine, and the fourth was dis­missed after three hung juries. But the process dragged on for two years, at the end of which Franzese was broke, unem­ployed, and no longer in col­lege. By then, he had only one ambi­tion: to make mon­ey with a vengeance.
     It was 1974, and the Colom­bo fam­i­ly had decid­ed to “open the books” and make new mem­bers for the first time in two decades. To become a made man, Michael would need to serve a year’s intern­ship. One of his jobs was chauf­feur­ing Tom DiBel­lo, who was act­ing as sur­ro­gate don while the true head of the fam­i­ly, Carmine “Junior” Per­si­co, await­ed release from jail. “I went around and met every­body from the dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies, and learned what this life was all about,” Franzese says. “And I was avail­able at all times. They said, ‘You might get called tonight, you might get called a year from now.’ I said O.K.” Called for what? “In case any act of vio­lence had to be done.”
     Franzese knows the con­ver­sa­tion has tak­en a dan­ger­ous turn; his plea agree­ment does not grant him immu­ni­ty for mur­der. Over the years, his name has been men­tioned in con­nec­tion with sev­er­al killings, among them the 1983 gang­land-style slay­ing of Lawrence “Cham­pagne Lar­ry” Car­roz­za. A for­mer mem­ber of Franzese’s crew, Car­roz­za is believed to have “dis­hon­ored” one of Michael’s sis­ters.
     Franzese vehe­ment­ly denies involve­ment in Carrozza’s death. But isn’t it true, he is asked, that in order to be made you have to kill some­body?
     “Yeah, that is the rule,” he says. But “they were mak­ing a lot of guys, and there’s only so many peo­ple to kill. With guys like me, because my father was who he was, I guess they felt it was in the blood. So there was a cou­ple of us that were told, You’re gonna be made, and when the time comes, if you have to do some­thing, you got­ta be ready.”
     But it nev­er hap­pened?
     Franzese paus­es for a long instant.
     “Not at that time,” he says.

AROUND THE TIME of his induc­tion, Franzese mar­ried a neigh­bor­hood girl, Maria Cor­rao. They moved to Com­mack, Long Island, and, after Franzese began to make his for­tune, advanced to a mil­lion-dol­lar man­sion in Brookville, New York, com­plete with an indoor rac­quet­ball court. Their first child, a daugh­ter, was born in 1976.
     In late 1978, Son­ny Franzese was paroled, after serv­ing only eight years of his half-cen­tu­ry term. (There have long been rumors of bribery—the F.B.I. even inves­ti­gat­ed a mem­ber of the parole commission—but noth­ing was ever proved.) Michael was now placed under the elder Franzese; he would run Sonny’s oper­a­tions and shield him from open involve­ment with con­vict­ed felons, which could lead to his parole being revoked.
Soon after he became an act­ing cap­tain for his father, Franzese found him­self at odds with a man who held the same title with­in the Gam­bi­no fam­i­ly, a ris­ing star named John Got­ti. Accord­ing to Franzese, an asso­ciate was run­ning a Long Island flea mar­ket, and he asked Franzese to chase off a part­ner who was deal­ing drugs on the side. Franzese, who had an inter­est in the oper­a­tion, did so, only to be told that the drug deal­er had ties to Got­ti. He report­ed­ly shot back, “Fuck John Got­ti.”
     Accord­ing to Mob Star, a recent biog­ra­phy of Got­ti, Franzese was sum­moned to the Our Friends Social Club in Queens to dis­cuss the prob­lem; he left shak­i­ly after get­ting a taste of Gotti’s con­fi­dent terrorism:

     As Franzese rose to leave, Got­ti told him: “There is a guy run­ning around the city say­ing, ‘Fuck John Got­ti.’ What do we do with a piece of shit like that? Should we beat him up? Kill him? He’s a dog, right?”
     “Yes, any­body who said that wouldn’t be a friend, they would be a dog,” Franzese replied.

NOT QUITE, says Franzese. “I’d like to think I was intel­li­gent enough not to walk around and say, ‘Fuck this guy’—especially because John was a good fel­la. And there’s no way in God’s cre­ation I’d have sat at a table and let any­body talk to me like that. Junior [Per­si­co] would have said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’ Did Got­ti try to show his mus­cle and make you think he was more impor­tant than you? That was John’s style. He would want you to believe that he was more pow­er­ful than any boss that ever lived, even at that stage of his life. When John talks, his voice is nat­u­ral­ly an octave above every­body else’s. He’s got a tremen­dous ego.” The upshot of the meet­ing, Franzese adds, was that he per­suad­ed Got­ti to buy out his inter­est in the flea mar­ket for about $70,000. “And three or four months lat­er,” he says with a smile, “it col­lapsed.”
     Franzese soon became involved with anoth­er famous New York­er, the Rev­erend Al Sharp­ton, the civ­il-rights activist. Franzese met Sharp­ton through mutu­al acquain­tances in the record indus­try, where the rev­erend is noto­ri­ous for aggres­sive fund-rais­ing. Sharp­ton won a patron­age job as a com­mu­ni­ty-rela­tions direc­tor for the Jack­sons’ 1984 Vic­to­ry Tour, alleged­ly by threat­en­ing to orga­nize a boy­cott of the con­certs if the black community—apparently mean­ing Sharpton—was kept “off the gravy train.” He and three asso­ciates were paid more than half a mil­lion dol­lars for their services—an impres­sive score, con­sid­er­ing that Franzese’s ear­li­er efforts to shake down the Jack­sons had come to naught. (Sharp­ton claims that his out-of-pock­et expens­es on the tour exceed­ed his pay.)
     Franzese says that Sharp­ton offered to assist in anoth­er shake­down scheme in 1984. The mob­ster had cor­rupt­ed Allied Inter­na­tion­al, a large union of secu­ri­ty guards, and he hoped to per­suade the guards at Atlantic City hotels to become mem­bers. “Sharp­ton seen dol­lar signs through me,” Franzese says. “He came up to me in Nor­by Walters’s office and says, ‘Michael, let me help you. I’ll go down to the hotels and tell them the guards are black, and if they don’t join the union, I’ll have ten bus­loads of five thou­sand nig­gers in front of the hotels every day.’” Franzese liked the plan, but before it could be imple­ment­ed, the union pres­i­dent, Daniel Cun­ning­ham, was indict­ed for rack­e­teer­ing. “That’s absolute­ly ludi­crous,” Sharp­ton says when asked about Franzese’s account. “I offer to help and I didn’t ask any­thing in it for me?”
     Although Michael was run­ning inter­fer­ence for his father, Son­ny began to slip into famil­iar ways, min­gling with oth­er con­vict­ed mafiosi at a club in Brook­lyn. In 1982 he was caught, and a fed­er­al judge sent him back to prison.
     With Son­ny Franzese in jail, Michael was soon ele­vat­ed offi­cial­ly to cap­tain, the Mafia’s equiv­a­lent of senior vice pres­i­dent. His crew includ­ed Frank Ces­taro, known as “Frankie Body Shop,” to sig­ni­fy his day job, and two alleged enforcers, Louis Fen­za and Frank Castag­naro, or “Frankie G.” The G stood for gang­ster. Castag­naro was a big man with a short tem­per: among oth­er things, he alleged­ly blud­geoned an auto deal­er with a tele­phone and advised a bank­rupt­cy trustee who tried to evict him that his car would be blown up.
     In the Mob, there is no faster tick­et to star­dom than to be seen as an “earn­er,” and Michael Franzese was about to set new records. His secret was the mag­ic of his father’s name com­bined with supe­ri­or intel­lect. He col­lab­o­rat­ed with sev­er­al white-col­lar crim­i­nals to defraud cor­po­ra­tions, but for his biggest scam Franzese teamed up with Lawrence Ior­iz­zo, head of Van­tage Petro­le­um, a large chain of unbrand­ed gas sta­tions on Long Island and in New Jer­sey. A career con man, Ior­iz­zo had attract­ed the atten­tion of two West Coast wiseguys who want­ed to seize con­trol of his busi­ness. Ior­iz­zo had turned to Son­ny for help. The two wiseguys backed off, and in 1981, Michael Franzese became a silent part­ner in Van­tage. The company’s assets were bled dry so that he and Ior­iz­zo could form a new out­fit, Galleon Hold­ings. With­in a few years, Galleon com­prised hun­dreds of sta­tions, stor­age ter­mi­nals, and fleets of tankers, and sold mil­lions of gal­lons of gaso­line in New York, Flori­da, and New Jer­sey.
     Lar­ry Ior­iz­zo stood more than six feet tall and weighed close to five hun­dred pounds. It was said he could con­sume nine piz­zas at a meal. He was also a bigamist with two Long Island homes—one for each wife. “I take my hat off to him,” Franzese says. “Huge as he was, he moved around.” Ior­iz­zo played fast and loose with the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice as well. Gaso­line whole­salers are sup­posed to pay state and fed­er­al excise tax­es, but Ior­iz­zo set up a daisy chain of dum­my com­pa­nies to pass along the tax bill until it end­ed up at a “burnout” company—one that went bust right before I.R.S. agents showed up at the door. After each bank­rupt­cy, a new daisy chain was formed. To fur­ther con­found the tax man, some of the dum­my com­pa­nies were incor­po­rat­ed in Pana­ma, where Ior­iz­zo boast­ed a res­i­dence, a pho­ny pass­port, and, he claimed, a friend­ly rap­port with Pres­i­dent Manuel Nor­ie­ga.
     Because Galleon paid no tax­es, it was able to under­sell the com­pe­ti­tion; soon, even name-brand fill­ing sta­tions like Tex­a­co and Chevron and Shell were wel­com­ing Galleon tankers—after dark. Ior­iz­zo claims that Franzese drew as much as $100 mil­lion from the oper­a­tion.
     Franzese sup­plied men to run the gas sta­tions and fend off competition—”all the mus­cle we need­ed,” Ior­iz­zo says over the phone. Ior­iz­zo and Franzese have been none too friend­ly since the for­mer joined the wit­ness pro­gram in 1984 and set in motion the events lead­ing to Franzese’s down­fall. “He was always threat­en­ing peo­ple and throw­ing his weight around,” Ior­iz­zo asserts. “If it weren’t for his father, who was a real old gang­ster and tough son of a bitch, Michael would have been hunt­ed down like a dog and whipped.”
     Yet Ior­iz­zo is the first to admit that Franzese took a num­ber of “bril­liant” steps to expand the oper­a­tion. The most impor­tant was his deci­sion in 1983 to com­bine forces with a key com­peti­tor, Michael Markowitz, a mem­ber of the so-called East­ern Bloc Mafia, who oper­at­ed a gas scam sim­i­lar to Iorizzo’s. Markowitz seemed intim­i­dat­ed by Franzese, and agreed to the small­er end of a 75–25 split. (In 1989, with Franzese long out of the pic­ture, Markowitz was shot dead behind the wheel of his sil­ver-and-maroon Rolls-Royce. The mur­der hasn’t been solved.)
     Franzese and Ior­iz­zo spent their prof­its lav­ish­ly. “We had yachts, we had jet planes,” Ior­iz­zo recalls. They also bought a $350,000 mobile home in Flori­da, where the gas busi­ness was boom­ing. It was there, in 1983, that Franzese found­ed Mia­mi Gold, a movie-pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny that laun­dered some of Galleon’s prof­its, though its orig­i­nal pur­pose was to expand the Colom­bo family’s pres­ence in the film indus­try. Franzese had already dab­bled in the screen trade as an exec­u­tive pro­duc­er of Mau­soleum, a low-grade shock­er fea­tur­ing self-defrocked min­is­ter Mar­joe Gort­ner. Bit­ten by the film bug, Franzese put up mon­ey for sev­er­al more pic­tures, includ­ing Sav­age Streets, star­ring B‑movie god­dess Lin­da Blair. Mia­mi Gold’s first and only pro­duc­tion was Knights of the City, a teen-gang musi­cal. To com­mem­o­rate the launch of the movie com­pa­ny, Mia­mi Beach gave Franzese the keys to the city and, in an act of excru­ci­at­ing irony, made him an hon­orary police com­mis­sion­er.
     Knights proved a dis­as­ter at the box office, but Franzese would nev­er regret mak­ing the pic­ture. For the break-danc­ing finale, the direc­tor flew in a Cal­i­for­nia troupe called Dance Machine, fea­tur­ing nine­teen-year-old Cam­my Gar­cia. She made an instant impres­sion on her future hus­band. “I was sit­ting by the pool with Frankie Body Shop, and I seen Cam­my,” he recalls. “And she caught my eye. But I said, ‘Frankie, you know what? I got­ta stay away from that kid. That inno­cent look in her—she’d be trouble.’”

Franze­se’s whirl­wind of activ­i­ties had not gone unno­ticed by law enforce­ment, but the boom land­ed first on Ior­iz­zo, who in 1984 was con­vict­ed of mail and wire fraud and inter­state trans­porta­tion of stolen prop­er­ty. As Ior­iz­zo await­ed sen­tenc­ing, Franzese grew ner­vous. “I was com­ing to grips with the fact that, look, the guy’s five hun­dred pounds—he just couldn’t do jail time. Plus, he was weak.” So, Franzese says, he encour­aged Ior­iz­zo to fly to Pana­ma with his pho­ny pass­port. Noth­ing more. But as Ior­iz­zo tells the sto­ry, the mob­ster was a bit more heavy-hand­ed: “They took my son to Franzese’s office. And Franzese told my son, ‘If your father don’t do the right thing, we’re gonna kill you.’”
     Ior­iz­zo did trav­el to Pana­ma City, on his pri­vate jet. But his stay was cut short when two uniden­ti­fied locals kid­napped him at gun­point and put him on a plane to Mia­mi. He arrived into the wel­com­ing arms of F.B.I. agent Dan Lyons. Ior­iz­zo claims he has no idea who kid­napped him or why. “Things hap­pen strange in Pana­ma,” he con­cludes.
     Franzese, new­ly mar­ried to Cam­my, was soon hit with indict­ments from the state of Flori­da and the Brook­lyn strike force, based heav­i­ly on Iorizzo’s grand-jury tes­ti­mo­ny. Franzese sur­ren­dered in Mia­mi, but then fed­er­al agents brought him up to New York to face felony charges along with eight mem­bers of his crew, includ­ing Frankie Body Shop, Frankie G., and Louis Fen­za.
     Pros­e­cu­tors gave evi­dence that Franzese was a threat to soci­ety. They claimed that he had arranged for a com­peti­tor in the auto-leas­ing busi­ness to be hit over the head with a ham­mer, and warned a Ben­e­fi­cial Com­mer­cial Cor­po­ra­tion employ­ee who was pres­sur­ing him to repay a loan to back off or Franzese would “cut his heart out.” It was also dis­closed that Son­ny Franzese’s no-non­sense parole offi­cer, Jim Stein, had received an anony­mous death threat over the phone only two days after Son­ny was ordered back to jail and Michael had con­front­ed Stein out­side the court­room. “We were nose to nose,” Stein recalls today. “And he used cer­tain profanities—‘scumbag,’ ‘prick,’ and ‘fuck­ing G‑man’—to express his feel­ings toward me.” Short­ly before Christ­mas of 1985, Franzese was remand­ed with­out bail.
     Behind bars for the first time, Franzese began to assess his chances, and they did not look good. He explained to Cam­my that if he went to tri­al and lost he could be sent up for at least twen­ty years. In March 1986, Franzese struck a plea bar­gain: he would accept a ten-year term in the Brook­lyn case and nine in the Flori­da case, to run con­cur­rent­ly. He would pay $4.7 mil­lion in civ­il penal­ties by liq­ui­dat­ing a num­ber of prop­er­ties, includ­ing the house in Brookville belong­ing to his first wife, Maria. The U.S. gov­ern­ment would also acquire the rights to Knights of the City.
     In addi­tion, Franzese agreed to pay $10 mil­lion in resti­tu­tion. He pro­posed to raise part of the mon­ey by mak­ing a sound­track-album deal for Knights and set­ting up a lux­u­ry-car leas­ing oper­a­tion in Her­mosa Beach, which Cam­my would learn to run. In order to per­form these tasks, Franzese sug­gest­ed that he be let out of jail for the three months before his sen­tenc­ing and kept under sur­veil­lance in a con­do on Wilshire Boule­vard in Los Ange­les. Nat­u­ral­ly, he would pay the expens­es of the U.S. mar­shals guard­ing him. Flush with vic­to­ry in the plea bar­gain, the Brook­lyn strike force con­sent­ed to the plan.
     It would prove an embar­rass­ment. The NBC News team of Bri­an Ross and Ira Sil­ver­man had been fol­low­ing Franzese’s escapades in the gas busi­ness. They filmed him cruis­ing around Los Ange­les in his Cadil­lac Eldo­ra­do, with the mar­shals trail­ing behind. At one point, the mar­shals drove off for lunch and left Franzese unat­tend­ed for fif­teen min­utes. When this footage appeared on the evening news, “I got a sink­ing feel­ing,” Franzese says. His fate was sealed when it was also learned that he had giv­en the mar­shals $8,000 in bad checks. Franzese was sent back to jail.
     By ear­ly 1987, he was serv­ing his sen­tence at Ter­mi­nal Island, a medi­um-secu­ri­ty fed­er­al prison in San Pedro, Cal­i­for­nia. He found prison life more than bearable—he worked as a clerk and typ­ist in an air-con­di­tioned office and pro­cured a tele­vi­sion from the ath­let­ic depart­ment.
     Short­ly before his con­fine­ment, Franzese had held secret dis­cus­sions with Brook­lyn-strike-force head Edward McDon­ald. A charis­mat­ic for­mer bas­ket­ball play­er, McDon­ald was the man who had wrung coop­er­a­tion from Hen­ry Hill, and he can be seen play­ing him­self in the final min­utes of Good­Fel­las. McDon­ald hoped he could get Franzese to roll over, but the Colom­bo capo insist­ed he had no desire to become a gov­ern­ment wit­ness.
     Then, some months lat­er, F.B.I. agents in Chica­go not­ed a rela­tion­ship between Franzese and Nor­by Wal­ters, who hap­pened to be under inves­ti­ga­tion. In ear­ly 1988, Franzese was escort­ed to a secret meet­ing place in Illi­nois for a tête-à-tête with Chica­go U.S. attor­ney Anton “Tony” Valukas.
     Here was a man quite dif­fer­ent in tem­pera­ment from the hard-ass­es in Brook­lyn, some­one Franzese could deal with. Valukas explained that if Franzese agreed to tes­ti­fy against Wal­ters he would ask McDon­ald to rec­om­mend a sen­tence reduc­tion. Franzese decid­ed to take up Valukas’s offer. “By that point, I had made up my mind that I was out of the life,” he says. “So I didn’t have a moral prob­lem with tes­ti­fy­ing. My prob­lem was, I didn’t know if I was gonna like myself.”
     His will­ing­ness to tes­ti­fy astound­ed the Orga­nized Crime and Rack­e­teer­ing Sec­tion of the Jus­tice Depart­ment in Wash­ing­ton, and McDon­ald was ordered to renew talks with Franzese to try to get him to sign a coop­er­a­tion agree­ment. Franzese didn’t like McDon­ald, and the nego­ti­a­tions dragged on incon­clu­sive­ly for weeks. Then McDon­ald had an inspi­ra­tion. “We stuck him in a coun­ty jail in some jerk­wa­ter town in rur­al Illi­nois,” he recalls, laugh­ing. “Here’s this major mafioso from New York get­ting checked out by all these low-lev­el pet­ty thieves. The next day was when we nego­ti­at­ed in earnest.” In May 1989, a month after Nor­by Wal­ters was found guilty, Franzese set his name to the coop­er­a­tion agree­ment and walked out of jail.
     McDon­ald defends the agree­ment, argu­ing that Franzese had as lit­tle as one year left to serve and that he has put his life in jeop­ardy. He also pre­dicts that Franzese will be com­pelled to tes­ti­fy in the so-called win­dow case, filed short­ly before Franzese’s agree­ment expired; Gen­ovese boss Vin­cent “the Chin” Gigante and oth­er top-ech­e­lon mob­sters are accused of rig­ging the bids for the win­dows in pub­lic hous­ing projects.
     Franzese agrees that he may be asked to tes­ti­fy in the win­dow case. But, he adds sly­ly, “we’ll have to see what hap­pens. They had the abil­i­ty to call me in the Rig­gi case, and I nev­er got to the stand. So I don’t know.”

NOT SURPRISINGLY, Franzese and his long-suf­fer­ing moth­er have bare­ly spo­ken since he got out of prison. “I enjoy the dis­tance between us,” he says sim­ply. For a while, Cam­my prayed for a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. She always got along famous­ly with Son­ny, who gave her pas­ta recipes by phone from prison. And when she first met Tina, “she was as sweet as can be,” Cam­my says. But then word came back that Tina was call­ing her a “dirt-poor Mex­i­can bomb­shell.” Now she thinks it’s best to leave Tina alone: “She’s just not a nice per­son.
     As for Tina, she has a the­o­ry about why her son grav­i­tat­ed toward his wife’s born-again evan­ge­lism.
     “Michael need­ed to excel,” she says, “and maybe it’s hurt­ing him that he couldn’t han­dle what he chose. He got into trou­ble right away.”
     In oth­er words, he had to embrace reli­gion because he failed as a crim­i­nal?
    “That’s right. He could not cut it. So he has to look for a believ­able cause. That’s my mater­nal feeling.”

TINA FRANZESE may be strug­gling to get by, but it appears her son is doing all right, although he claims that his two lux­u­ry cars are leased. One source famil­iar with his house con­firms that it has a mar­ket val­ue of $2.7 mil­lion, and says that Franzese is qui­et­ly pur­chas­ing it through a lease option.
     Indeed, if Franzese has out­foxed the crim­i­nal sys­tem, he’s made an absolute mon­key out of the civ­il divi­sion. The gov­ern­ment does not appear to have col­lect­ed much of the $4.7 mil­lion he owes in for­fei­tures: the rights to Knights of the City proved worth­less, and Maria Franzese still owns her home in Brookville. As for Franzese’s resti­tu­tion, the I.R.S. has received noth­ing. “He owes me 10 mil­lion bucks—I haven’t got­ten a pen­ny,” says an I.R.S. agent.
     Mean­while, the mon­ey Franzese made in the boot­leg-gas scam has nev­er been account­ed for. “It’s gone,” he says. “Where did it go—out on a date?” says Lar­ry Ior­iz­zo. Franzese tes­ti­fied that he had no for­eign bank accounts, but Ior­iz­zo recalls that “he would take our pri­vate jet, fly to the Cay­man Islands and Europe, and stash mon­ey. It’s been well invest­ed and shel­tered.” Ray Jermyn has his own the­o­ry. “Know­ing his per­son­al­i­ty, he would have to keep it close to home. I think it’s prob­a­bly buried in the ground some­place. Lit­er­al­ly. With tal­cum pow­der on it, to keep it from going bad.”
     Franzese seems almost amused by the spec­u­la­tion. Even friends and fam­i­ly, he admits, are sure he is worth mil­lions. Well, he says, they’ll just have to wait until 1993, when, because of the statute of lim­i­ta­tions, he can no longer be charged with per­jury for hav­ing tes­ti­fied in 1986 that he had no hid­den assets. “But until that time, I’ve told the gov­ern­ment, ‘If you find it, come and get it.’
     For now, Franzese wants to work at build­ing up his film com­pa­ny, Cam­my­Co Pro­duc­tions. He has a cou­ple of scripts in devel­op­ment, includ­ing a thir­ty-page treat­ment he wrote him­self, about prison life. And if the movie busi­ness doesn’t work out, he’ll find anoth­er way to sup­port his fam­i­ly. But, he vows, return­ing to crime is not an option. “I’ll nev­er get back with these guys,” he says. “I’ve still got it in me. I’m still a street guy. I’m lev­el­ing with you—there’s times I get tempt­ed to cross the line. But so far I haven’t. And hope­ful­ly, if things work out for me, I nev­er will.” ♦