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Australian gangsters, who tend to have the life expectancy of your average bumblebee, would do well to study the once feared Franzese US mob family.
John “Sonny” Franzese, said by US police to have killed or ordered the murders of 50 people, died peacefully in 2020 aged 103. Which shows that the Mediterranean diet, coupled with a lack of conscience, may be the secret to a long life.
John “Sonny” Franzese (centre) is escorted to a New York police station in 1966 after his arrest on a 43-count gambling indictment.Credit: AP
Franzese was born in 1917 but was not a prisoner to the old ways. In a conversation bugged by his son-turned-snitch, John jnr, he discussed his preferred method of body disposal. “Dismember victim in kiddie pool. Cook body parts in microwave. Stuff parts in garbage disposal. Be patient.” This would indicate that Franzese snr was neither people, nor environmentally friendly.
Understandably, John jnr disappeared into witness protection before he disappeared permanently.
Franzese’s other son, Michael, became a made man and a mafia captain in the New York Colombo crime family.
The fact he is 72 and in Australia to tell his story is a testament to the Mediterranean diet and his unique survival skills. At one point he was a dead man walking. Now he is a live one talking.
Goodfellas: Michael Franzese with his Mob family.Credit: Courtesy of Michael Franzese
Michael’s sliding door moment came at 21 while he was studying medicine at university. He made an offer others couldn’t refuse – to join the family’s business after his father was sentenced to 50 years over a string of armed robberies.
This meant Michael swapped the first law of medicine, Do No Harm, for the first rule of the mafia, Do Harm If It Is Good For Business.
“I was visiting Dad in Leavenworth Penitentiary when I told him I was done with school and was going on the street. He said that if I was going to do it, then do it right,” Michael says.
John “Sonny” Franzese after his 1966 arrest.Credit: AP
John nominated him to the Colombo family, where he was eventually in charge of 300 mob members.
The mob business model may not be taught at Harvard, but it was effective nonetheless. Find a lucrative business, cut corners and then bully any competitors into retirement.
The big-ticket item was bootlegging – not Al Capone’s illicit booze but something even more lucrative – petrol.
Michael Franzese built an empire of 350 petrol stations, his own storage areas and a fleet of tankers. By using black market fuel and avoiding government taxes, he could undercut competitors. Those who were stubborn soon found their businesses firebombed. Most mob violence, he says, “was not personal, it was just business, although sometimes it could be personal”.
Franzese says that at its peak the business was generating $50 million a month, with him making $2 million a week.
He diversified into making movies, the construction business and owning car yards.
Hard to believe there was such a thing, but in 1986 he appeared on a Fortune magazine list of the “Fifty Most Wealthy and Powerful Mafia Bosses”.
Headlines like that plus owning luxury houses, a private jet and a helicopter were always going to bring police attention, and he was arrested over the petrol racket.
Looking back, he knew it couldn’t last. “Because of my father, there was a target on my back from the start.” He was arrested 18 times, indicted seven times and went to trial (and acquitted) five times.
Michael Franzese, mob boss turned public speaker.Credit: Tim Bauer
But times and his luck changed. The code of silence worked because insiders took an oath they knew if broken could cost their lives. But Michael Franzese says law enforcement started using anti-racketeering laws effectively, with threats of 100-year jail terms that turned insiders into informers.
“They began to fear the government more than the mob.”
“Law enforcement can use hi-tech surveillance, but every big case is based on flipping people. Informants destroyed my life.”
Franzese says insiders facing life in prison are offered immunity, new identities and “plenty of dollars” to turn on their mob mates. The code of silence is dead, he says.
During Melbourne’s Underbelly War, the killings stopped when the Purana taskforce flipped several key insiders, including one of drug boss Carl Williams’ hitmen, his trusted lieutenant and Tony Mokbel’s drug cook.
And for 40 years police have been pushing for US-style RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations) laws that can take isolated crimes committed years apart to establish a pattern of racketeering and can target apparently legitimate businesses that have been built on illegal funds.
Michael Franzese in Sydney.
When his business partner in the petrol scam was prepared to testify, Franzese knew the gig was up.
Faced with a possible life sentence, he took a massive gamble – he would talk, just enough to cut a deal but not enough to end up dismembered in his dad’s kiddie pool. He was on a tightrope with crooks on one side and cops on the other.
He promised to give up mob bosses but talked only about his crimes without implicating anyone else. “I wasn’t going to put people in jail.”
Then the prosecution played a ruthless hand. They listed Franzese as a state witness in multiple prosecutions, telling him he was now a marked man and the only way to stay alive was to inform and jump into witness protection.
He kept sending messages from prison that he was not informing, “But everyone does that.” It was when he didn’t turn up to testify and was still in jail that his former colleagues saw he was true to his word. Although some in his mob family would never forgive him for walking away. He suspects if family boss Carmine Persico had not been jailed he would probably be dead.
Even so, for many years he made sure his movements couldn’t be predicted, moving several times, walking his dog at different times and locations and never going regularly to the same restaurants.
Compare this with our crooks who have been gunned down and seem to have kept more regular timetables than the railways.
In 1985, the Mafia bosses Carmine “Junior” Persico (left), Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo (centre) and Anthony “Fat Tony” Salemo were sentenced in New York to 160 years’ jail each for membership of The Commission, which had settled disputes, divided loot and occasionally ordered murders for the Mafia.Credit: AP
Franzese was sentenced to 10 years, served five, paid $15 million in restitution and had $5 million in assets seized as proceeds of crime. He returned to jail for another three years (he says the government wanted to pay him back for not testifying) before finding God and realising he could make a lucrative and safe living talking and writing about crimes rather than committing them.
On his forearm he has tattooed Proverbs 16-7, which is, “When a man’s ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.” In Franzese’s former business you need all the help you can get.
He has taken the skill of talking just enough to cut a deal onto the speaking circuit – providing an insight into the mob, without giving enough specifics to get himself thrown into prison or cooked in a microwave (how many minutes for a head, one wonders). He is a fan dancer who knows exactly when to cover up.
He says that at his shows he is always asked three questions: Where did he hide the money, did he kill anyone, and what happened to missing teamster Jimmy Hoffa?
“You’ll have to come to a show to find out.”
While he has reformed, he warmly remembers the old days. “I miss some of the guys and the good times. There were more good times than bad.”
But, he says, it ends badly for most. “Just about every one of them ended up dead or in jail. Trust me, I am one of the few survivors.”
Franzese travels the world speaking (this is his fourth trip to Australia) to give his inside story on the mafia. He says there is a fascination with and at times a romantic image about the mob, fed by countless books (he has written several) and Hollywood movies. He tries to separate the reality from the myth, he says.
Perhaps our own crook turned author and public speaker Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read summed it up best. “Posh people love gangsters.”
Even gangsters fall for the Hollywood image. Drug dealer Rocco Arico was one of many to have framed pictures of Scarface in their homes, gangland murder victim Mario Condello could quote reams of the Godfather word-perfect, and 1950s standover man Freddie “The Frog” Harrison was a regular at the Forum cinema to watch the latest Jimmy Cagney black and white gangster flick.
Al Pacino in Scarface.
Perhaps Melbourne and Sydney gangsters should take a break from watching re-runs of The Sopranos and head off to one of Franzese’s shows, where they could learn that for crooks a low profile is better protection than a bulletproof vest.
In both Sydney and Melbourne, hoods are shooting and bombing each other at an unhealthy rate that results in tit-for-tat retaliations, major police responses and multiple arrests.
Franzese observes: “When guys are getting killed on the streets, it is usually a power struggle. If you want to be the boss, there isn’t an election. You have to go to war.
“But a war is bad for business. When it is in the public and in your face, law enforcement has to respond.”
In conversation with Michael Franzese; Palais Theatre, St Kilda, today at 8pm. Ticketmaster. Sydney: Enmore Theatre, Sunday. Ticketek.
Coming later this month. Naked City, the book: Pan Macmillan – The biggest launch since Sputnik 1.
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