Sonny Franzese

• 1. Introduction

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  Sonny Franzese walked out of the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, on the 23rd of June 2017, at the age of 100. On that day he was the oldest federal inmate in the United States, and the only centenarian in federal custody. John Franzese Sr. was an American mobster and a longtime member of the Colombo crime family. His criminal career began in the 1930s and stretched across more than eight decades. How does a man stay in organized crime for that long? Where did his money come from, and how much of it passed through the entertainment business? And what could lead his own son to take the witness stand against him?

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• 2. Greenpoint to Underboss

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  On the 6th of February 1917, John Franzese was born in Naples, Italy, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. His parents, Carmine Franzese and Maria Corvola, had already immigrated to the United States and were back in Italy for a visit. After six months the family returned to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where his father ran a bakery. His mother gave him the nickname Sonny at a young age.

  His first arrest came in 1938, for assault. By the late 1930s he was working under Joseph Profaci, boss of the Profaci crime family, which was later renamed the Colombo crime family. In 1942, in the midst of World War II, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was discharged later that year, classified as "psychoneurotic with pronounced homicidal tendencies". Court papers from 1947 accused him of raping a waitress, but he was never arrested in connection with that crime.

  He became a made man in 1950 and joined the crew of Sebastian "Buster" Aloi. Aloi's son, Vincenzo, later served as acting boss of the Colombo family. Franzese is believed to have been raised to caporegime, or captain, by Profaci in the mid 1950s. By 1963, boss Joseph Colombo had promoted him to underboss.

  On paper, Franzese's occupation in the 1950s and 1960s was owner of a dry-cleaning store in Brooklyn. In practice he operated out of New York City and New Jersey, working in racketeering, fraud and loansharking. He was a regular at the Copacabana nightclub, where he often met Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. He was also a boxing fan of Rocky Graziano. The 1963 promotion put him at the family's second-highest rank, just four years before the biggest turning point of his life.

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• 3. Music and Movies

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  In 1967, Franzese gained a financial interest in a new recording company called Buddah Records. He used the label to launder illegal mob earnings. He also used it to bribe disc jockeys with payola, the practice of paying for radio airplay.

  Calla Records was another target. Its owner, Nate McCalla, found that Franzese had infiltrated his business, and Franzese made money through him. The label ceased operations in 1977. In 1980, McCalla was murdered execution style.

  Film offered even larger returns. Franzese helped finance the 1972 adult film Deep Throat, which had a budget of just $22,000. It went on to generate between $30 million and $50 million. He is also linked to the 1974 slasher film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which earned over $30 million from an investment of between $80,000 and $140,000. Decades later, in 2003, he was listed as an associate producer of This Thing of Ours, a film starring James Caan. The courtroom was never far away, though, and the first great trial of his life had begun even before Buddah Records existed.

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• 4. Trial and Leavenworth

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  In 1964, the Genovese crime family hitman Ernest Rupolo was murdered, and Franzese was accused of carrying out the killing on the orders of Vito Genovese. Rupolo had turned informant. He was shot and stabbed several times, his hands were tied, and his feet were attached to two concrete blocks. His body was dumped into Jamaica Bay.

  On the 13th of April 1966, Franzese was arrested with nine other people. During the trial, the prosecution produced records claiming that he had killed between 30 and 50 people. He was later acquitted of the Rupolo murder.

  On the 3rd of March 1967, however, a jury in Albany, New York, convicted him of masterminding four bank robberies across the country in 1965. After several denied appeals, judge Jacob Mishler sentenced him in 1970 to 50 years in prison at the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth. His son Michael alleged that Franzese answered the sentence with the words, "You watch. I'm gonna do the whole 50".

  While Franzese was inside, his nephew Salvatore reportedly headed his gambling operations. Franzese was released on parole in 1978 and returned to prison in 1982 for a parole violation. He was paroled again in 1984. From then until 2008 he was never charged with another crime, though he went back to prison on parole violations at least six times. A conversation recorded in 2006 would show how he spoke when he did not know a tape was running.

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• 5. The Taped Workshop

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  In 2006, Franzese sat down with Gaetano "Guy" Fatato, a Colombo associate, to discuss how mob murders were carried out. He did not realize that Fatato was a government informant, or that the conversation was being taped. On the recording he said, "I killed a lot of guys - you're not talking about four, five, six, ten."

  He offered practical advice on avoiding evidence. He said he put nail polish on his fingertips before a murder so that he would leave no fingerprints at the scene. He also suggested wearing a hairnet, so that no stray hairs could be analyzed for DNA.

  His most detailed advice concerned the body. He described dismembering it in a kiddie pool, drying the parts in a microwave oven, and then running them through a commercial-grade garbage disposal. He explained why the effort was worth it: "Today, you can't have a body no more... It's better to take that half-an-hour, an hour, to get rid of the body than it is to leave the body on the street." Two years after that recording, in June 2008, he would face a new indictment.

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• 6. Indictments and Return

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  The 2004 imprisonment of John "Jackie" DeRoss opened a vacancy at the top of the Colombo family. Thomas Gioeli filled it by promoting Franzese to underboss again. It was the first time he had held the post since his imprisonment in 1967. In May 2007, though, Franzese was returned to prison for a parole violation.

  In June 2008, while still incarcerated, he was indicted on charges of participating in murders during the Colombo Wars of the early 1990s. The charges also covered stealing fur coats in New York City in the mid-1990s. They further covered home invasions in Los Angeles in 2006, carried out by men impersonating police officers.

  On the 4th of June 2008, Franzese was indicted along with other Colombo mobsters. The charges were racketeering, conspiracy, robbery, extortion, narcotics trafficking and loansharking. On the 24th of December 2008, he was released from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. According to law enforcement, he remained the official underboss of the Colombo family. The case that finally sent him away again would lean heavily on his own son.

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• 7. A Son Testifies

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  In 2005, John Franzese Jr. wore a wire to record his own father. He was allegedly also responsible for his father's fourth parole violation. Franzese Sr. nevertheless took him back into his confidence after the son denied the accusation in tears, saying, "I would never do that, no matter what kind of trouble I had."

  Franzese Jr. testified against his father twice. The last time, his father attempted to have him killed, and he later lived under witness protection. In 2010, he admitted that he had received $50,000 from the FBI as a cooperating witness. He is the first son of a New York mobster to turn state's evidence and testify against his father.

  On the 14th of January 2011, the 93-year-old Franzese Sr. was sentenced to eight years in prison. The charges were extorting two Manhattan strip clubs, running a loanshark operation, and extorting a pizzeria on Long Island. Prosecutors had asked for 12 years. His lawyer asked for leniency because of a variety of ailments: partial blindness and deafness, gout, and heart and kidney problems. Franzese was denied compassionate release in July 2016.

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• 8. Family and Last Years

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  Franzese was married to a woman with whom he had three children. While still married, he got Cristina Capobianco, a 16-year-old cigarette girl at the Stork Club in Manhattan, pregnant with his son Michael Franzese. To avoid a scandal, Capobianco married Frank Grillo. After the mob allowed Franzese to divorce his first wife, Grillo disappeared, and Franzese married Capobianco. Michael had initially believed that Franzese adopted him after Grillo vanished, and that Grillo was his biological father.

  Franzese and Capobianco had four more children together, and she died in 2012. In all, Franzese had eight children, 18 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

  In 1969, Michael entered a pre-med program at Hofstra University, because his father did not want him in organized crime. In 1971, shortly after his father's 50-year sentence for bank robbery, he dropped out to help his family earn money. Michael was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1986, was released in 1994, and retired to California in 1995.

  In 2019, John Franzese Jr. visited his father at the nursing home where he lived and reconciled with him. He had previously left the Witness Protection Program voluntarily. Franzese died in a New York City hospital on the 24th of February 2020, at the age of 103. His funeral was held at the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and he was buried at St. John Cemetery on the 28th of February.

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