In the galaxy of 1960s New York nightclubs, the Copacabana shone brightest.

Getting in wasn’t easy. Celebrities, socialites and sports stars all jockeyed for a coveted table amid the bustle and faux palm trees. But one patron never had a problem.

Asked where he sat when he went there, John (Sonny) Franzese smiled and said, “Wherever I wanted.”

Franzese, then a Colombo family capo, frequented all the top clubs. But it was the Copacabana, with its roster of glittering acts and the Copa Girls dance line, where he felt most at home. If the club was filled, Franzese would go to the back door and tell workers to set a table on the stage, said his friend, Tony Napoli, whose father was a Genovese capo.

Franzese, who died on Feb. 23 at age 103,  recalled those nights recently as part of a series of interviews with Newsday over the past two years. The conversations became the foundation of a deep look into his life, the Mafia on Long Island and beyond in the golden age of the mob, and how the arc of justice played itself out.

“People would come there to see me, too,” he said over pasta e fagioli in his nursing home. “You thought I was the star sometimes, you know.”

In the ’60s, in New York City and on Long Island, he was.  

High times

While recovering from a heart attack in May 1962, Meyer Lansky, the mob’s numbers wizard, was watching a TV show on organized crime in a Manhattan hotel room. After a panelist commented on the Mafia’s size and power, Lansky turned to his wife and, in words surreptitiously recorded by FBI agents, remarked, “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.”

His wry observation was apt.  

The Mafia was riding high on Long Island, in New York City and nationwide. In addition to earning millions in traditional rackets, it steadily made inroads into government, legitimate businesses, entertainment and unions. Its grip on New York, Franzese said, was “unbelievable.”

He looked for any business opening and made a niche for himself in a range of pop culture. Money poured in from performers as disparate as the Isley Brothers, the Lovin’ Spoonful and Linda Lovelace — both on peep show loops and in her movie debut in “Deep Throat.”  

Franzese’s activities took him out of the shadows and practically pushed him in the face of prosecutors still mindful of the dozen cases they brought against him that, in toto, produced a single $50 fine on an incidental gambling charge back in 1943.

Unlike his mob confederates, who hid their faces from news photographers during arrests, Franzese looked directly at cameras. When he was out and about, he even told companions to smile for news photographers.

“All of a sudden, I started to become more famous every day, and I never knew why,” he reflected in a Newsday interview. “People just liked me. You know what I mean? I was just like a big hit with them.”    

Franzese was always nattily dressed and knew that reporters would describe his wardrobe in detail, cashmere overcoats included. “In those days,” he said, “cashmere was expensive.”

“I knew how to buy clothes, more than a lot of guys did.”

People were paying attention.

Robert F. Kennedy, the nation’s new attorney general, declared war on the mob in 1961. Two years later, Genovese soldier Joe Valachi became the first Mafiosi to break omertà, the code of silence. In televised congressional hearings, he described its structure, rackets, rituals and coldblooded violence, and he named dozens of key players.

Valachi noted Franzese’s rise, telling then-Nassau District Attorney William Cahn in a private interview, “He has a hand in everything. He’s a real big man in gambling,” a Newsday story related.

David Shapiro, a former FBI agent who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that while such bravado could help business by burnishing an image of invincibility, it also antagonizes law enforcement.

“They look at a guy like that and say, ‘How does he live like that? Where does he get his money?’”

When they did, they found that Franzese had built an expansive criminal empire, one they set out to crush.

Doing business

On Long Island, thousands of residents engaged, wittingly or not, with his business interests. In addition to controlling illegal gambling, he had hidden interests in restaurants, clubs, car dealerships and other businesses. In one particularly audacious instance, mobsters tied to Franzese were caught trying to organize 7,000 barbers into a sham union that would have yielded millions in dues to the mob.

But it was within the cultural caldron of 1960s Manhattan where his reach was most striking, and not just because, by his account, he dated Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. It extended from the peep shows of Times Square to the Top 40 rock of Tin Pan Alley to the Rat Pack glamour of the Copa and far beyond to entertainment venues across the country.

He had a secret interest in a booking agency run by Norby Walters, a longtime club owner and talent agent who had a full roster of run-ins with the law. The agency represented many of the top African American stars of the day, Dionne Warwick included. Franzese’s friends say one way or another he boosted such artists as Sam Cooke and Sammy Davis Jr. and such celebrities of the moment as Van McCoy, who sang “Do the Hustle,” and Johnny Nash, who hit the charts with “I Can See Clearly Now.”

He had the sway, by his telling, to boost the career of a group already topping the charts — The Supremes.

The story goes like this: He persuaded Jules Podell, the Copacabana’s manager and part owner, to book them in the club, which had a spotty history of featuring black performers. Franzese said he felt the group’s appeal was universal.

“‘Look,’ I said, ‘Check it out.’ So he checked it out.”

What followed was a stunningly successful run, which Franzese said paid $1,500 a week, followed by a live album and booking bonanza for other Motown groups.

The record industry

Franzese lent money to a production company run by Phil Steinberg and Hy Mizrahi, founders of Kama Sutra and Buddah Records, two hot independent labels, according to Artie Ripp, their former partner. When they fell behind on payments, Franzese became a silent partner in Kama Sutra, which produced such blockbusters as the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City,” Jay and the Americans’ “Come a Little Bit Closer” and — from its ample bubble-gum catalog — “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,” by a group called the Ohio Express.

The record business had long been a mobster playground, with hard-to-trace money and a half dozen ways to make it. “I’ll be honest with you, if I don’t get pinched, if I don’t get locked up, I don’t know how much money I’d be worth, you know?”  Franzese said while reflecting on his music business days.

The business was “full of gangsters,” Ripp said, and they fed off exploitative contracts signed by naive teenage performers, stolen song credits, mobbed-up jukebox companies and record-pressing plants, and pay-for-play payoffs to disc jockeys.

“Sonny at least was upfront about where he was at, what his business interests were, what his responsibilities were to the organization that he was part of,” he said.

One negotiating tactic in monetary disputes involved hanging performers and songwriters out a window when they demanded the royalties their contracts called for.

As Ripp explained it from the management perspective, “Somebody says, ‘Look, you got two choices:  One, OK, your signature’s on a piece of paper. Two, your face is on the sidewalk below.

“Ping! OK, then you open up the window, and then you hang the person outside the window.”

Franzese recalled using the maneuver to the desired effect.

Morris Levy, a notorious Genovese crime family associate and music industry powerhouse, had gotten into some serious financial trouble. He  needed a hit at his label, Roulette Records, and he thought he had one in a spoof of the Shangri Las’ “Leader of the Pack.” It was “Leader of the Laundromat” by the Detergents.

It included the refrain:

“My folks were always putting her down (down, down)

“Because her laundry always came back brown (brown, brown).”

The song cleaned up, rising to No. 19 on the Billboard charts. But when the Detergents asked Levy for their royalties, he told them all the records had been sent back unsold, said Ron Dante, a Detergent.

“And he actually said to us, ‘And you can check the books. I keep two sets anyway,’” Dante recalled.

Keenly aware of Levy’s connections, the Detergents backed off, but the group’s songwriter and creator, Paul Vance, stayed behind in Levy’s Brill Building office.

There, too, was Franzese, along with some associates.

Using the mob vernacular for someone associated with a Mafia family, Franzese said Levy  “was a friend of mine,” even though he didn’t like him.

“He robbed everybody,” he said. But mob code required that he help him.

Vance and Levy got into a fistfight, Vance, 90, said in a recent interview, and he knocked Levy  down. Suddenly, Franzese and his fellow Mafiosi jumped up, “The window, the window, you dumb bastard!”

“I hung him out a window,” Franzese said, telling him that if he didn’t give up the royalties, “I’d drop him right there.”

In very short order, Vance said, “You got it,” Franzese said.

“It was amazing,” Vance recalled, and afterward, as often happens in business, antagonists became friends. Franzese “helped me any way he could,” Vance said. When asked how, he replied, “With force.”

Franzese was philosophical about the music industry. “Hey, listen, you had to make money,” he said. “It was tough.” Speaking of his “friends,” he said, “They were all crooks.”

The lore about hanging people out windows by their legs lives on in the music business, where despite the denials of Vanilla Ice, the story is repeatedly told of rap impresario Suge Knight hanging him off a 15th floor balcony in a royalty dispute.

Peep shows and porn

Other parts of pop culture were on fire — the seamiest part included.

In 1964, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision held that all but the most extreme pornography was protected under the First Amendment. Massage parlors and peep shows — in which sex films or live sex acts were on display — spread through Times Square.

In the middle of it all, in paisley shirts, bell-bottoms and a walrus mustache, was a now-deceased entrepreneur from Lawrence named Marty Hodas. Known as “the King of the Peeps,” his storefront empire was fueled by an endless stream of quarters. In one year, according to testimony before the State Investigation Commission, one of his peep emporiums brought in $1.52 million, the equivalent of $10.7 million today.

That kind of money caught Franzese’s attention, according to police sources quoted at the time. In an interview, Hodas’ daughter, Romola, recalled the attention as unwanted. “My father used to come home, and he used to pace back and forth,” she said, as he repeated, “They’re not gonna get a [expletive] penny from me.”

She remembers kidnapping attempts and shots fired at the family’s home but couldn’t say who was behind them.  

The commission later determined that Franzese formed a partnership with Hodas, after he negotiated a truce with rival peep proprietors.

When police raided Hodas’ office in 1972, they found a note that said: “John gets $4,000 each week until $100,000 is received. Thereafter, he receives $1,000 for each week for the rest of the year. All new stores Marty puts up 50 percent cash with John and we are partners. Marty assumes all responsibility for running the stores.”

Police identified “John” as Franzese, although Hodas denied knowing him.

Three years later, Hodas was charged with tax evasion, eventually convicted and sentenced to a year in jail, despite his novel defense that he accurately reported his taxable income after deducting payoffs of roughly $100,000 a year to organized crime.

One actress in Hodas’ hard-core film loops was Linda Lovelace, who would become the star of “Deep Throat,” a movie that was stunningly lucrative for Franzese, who helped finance it, his sons said. Conservative estimates of its gross run into the tens of millions.

Copa nights

Less than a mile from the World Theater, where “Deep Throat” premiered, stood The Copacabana, silently owned by Frank Costello, head of what was then known as the Luciano crime family, and Podell. Costello, known as “the prime minister of organized crime,” split time between Central Park West and Sands Point.

The club drew the era’s most famous performers, including Rat Pack stars like Davis, Dean Martin and, above all, Frank Sinatra. Franzese knew them all.

“All the top entertainers in the country, in the world, they all wanted to work there,” he said.

Franzese’s wife, Tina, easily held her own in that environment. Petite, movie-star attractive and always beautifully dressed, she was comfortable with celebrities.

Franzese mingled easily with them as well. Singer Bobby Darin, who died at just 37 in 1973 after open heart surgery, was a favorite. “He was very good, a nice kid,” he recalled.

Darin broke Copa attendance records, and Franzese remembers the tense rivalry between Darin and Sinatra.

“Sinatra had a voice that was unbelievable, but this kid had a voice that Sinatra couldn’t reach the notes that he reached. Sinatra could never sing ‘Splish, Splash,’ ‘Mack the Knife.’ Bobby Darin — a voice, he coulda sang anything,” he said.

“He hated Sinatra, and Sinatra hated him because he knew he was a threat to him.”

Franzese and Sinatra themselves had an uneasy relationship, as each jousted to assert dominance, in Franzese’s recollection.

“He wanted to be catered to all the time,” he said. “See, I used to play it right. When I used to see him, I made out [like] I don’t see him. I did it on spite. He used to come back to me and talk loud so I could hear him. I wouldn’t turn around.”

The women

Beautiful and famous women — among them Monroe, Mansfield and the ’50s TV bombshell Dagmar — flocked to Franzese. That’s not just according to his account.

“He was a magnet,” said Tommy Gallagher, who ran a renowned boxing gym in Brooklyn where Franzese would go to unwind.

To this day, Franzese professes not to know what women saw in him.  

“They [would] come up to me, actually pick me up,” he said. “They hit on me like I was Rudolph Valentino. I couldn’t believe it myself at times.

“I was in demand, believe me,” he said. “I never know why. I never thought I was good looking. I never really did.”

That memory led to the only instance in five lengthy interviews where Franzese expressed embarrassment.

On May 19, 1962, in an iconic moment, Marilyn Monroe sashayed onto the stage of Madison Square Garden in a skintight, rhinestone-studded dress and sang a breathy “Happy Birthday” to President John F. Kennedy.

Down in the darkened arena, a different personal drama was playing out, Franzese said. Monroe’s ex-husband, Joe DiMaggio, was trying to confront Franzese about an affair he had with her.

“He was chasing me all over the place, he wanted to talk to me,” Franzese recalled. “I didn’t want to talk to him. I was ashamed. What can I tell him? You know what I mean? So I ran away, I wouldn’t talk to him.

“I liked Joe DiMaggio. He was my hero.”

At home

Celebrity and after-hours gallivanting are seldom a mobster’s friends. Law enforcement takes notice. Fellow mobsters get jealous. And family members get hurt.

At home, Franzese would explain away his activities with lies, his son John Jr. said, but Tina was not fooled.

Their arguments were frequent and heated, according to an FBI informant quoted in a 1962 memo.

One, over his affairs, was particularly intense: “On 3/20/62, the informant advised that Franzese and his wife had a very heated argument and this pertained to Franzese allegedly dating other women. The informant was unable to identify women with whom Franzese was allegedly going with nor was he able to substantiate whether this was a valid charge by Mrs. Franzese.”

John Jr., the youngest son, witnessed many of her rages. Sometimes, she would scream at Franzese, “I know who you really are!”

During one argument, Franzese slapped her, according to notes of FBI electronic surveillance.

Tina fought with anyone she thought had wronged her, Franzese said.

“I never figured she’d die,” Franzese said. “I figured the devil didn’t want her and God didn’t want her. She was a strong-headed woman.”

Often, the children bore the brunt of it. Both Michael and John remember her beating Michael with an ashtray and a guitar. She and her daughter Gia once fell to the floor hitting one another.  

Family members have trouble understanding Tina’s violent rages, but Ripp said he thinks he does.

“Look, so a woman finds that she is disrespected in some way or another and the dream life that she expected, whatever that might be, turns out not to be the dream life,” he said. “Now what does she do with all that anger? What does she do with all that disappointment? Oh, well, the kids wind up having to bear some of that.”

Closing in

Outside the house, meanwhile, the footsteps of interested lawmen got closer, and Franzese knew it.

He became adept at evading surveillance. His friend Ori Spado recalled that when they met for dinner at a restaurant in Great Neck, Franzese often would excuse himself and go to the men’s room for an unusually long time. Spado thought Franzese had some kind of health issue, until he finally realized that his friend had been slipping out the men’s room window so he could meet privately with associates at the other end of the shopping center.

In 1963, Franzese shook off two sets of charges, consorting with known criminals and attempted extortion, winning an acquittal and a dismissal.

In 1964, a judge ordered him to appear before a Brooklyn grand jury investigating payoffs to police and telephone company employees, who could tip off mobsters about planned raids. Because grand jury testimony is not public, what he said is not known, but he was not indicted.

The following summer, the Suffolk district attorney convened a grand jury to investigate the underworld’s ties to county Republicans. These, articles at the time reported, included attempts to influence judges and prosecutors handling gambling cases.

A candidate for Suffolk district attorney that year, Charles T. Matthews, publicly accused Franzese of trying to influence the race. He said he and his associate, Felice (Philly) Vizzari, of Deer Park, “are determined to elect a candidate who will not interfere with their desire to build a Cosa Nostra empire in Suffolk County.”

Matthews told the grand jury that he got his information from Nassau district attorney’s office intelligence reports. The grand jury found that politicians mingled with mobsters but concluded there was insufficient evidence for an indictment.  

Through it all, Franzese maintained his record as a courtroom untouchable.

But, after returning from another night out, he found himself in an unsettling conversation.

“As I’m coming to my house, the garbage guys tell me, ‘Sonny — Mr. Franzese — make like you’re talking to us, that you find that there’s something wrong, an argument, because we’re going to tell you something,’” he recalled. “And he’s telling me, ‘The FBI grabs us every morning, after we leave your house. They take all your garbage. We’ve got to separate your garbage and give it to them.’”

“Dumpster diving,” or looking through garbage, is a standard investigative technique.

At first, Franzese said, he was confused about why this kind surveillance was starting up just then.

Then, it hit him: Someone had given him up —  “One of them motherless guys,” he said, “that wanted to be like me, but he couldn’t.”

John (Sonny) Franzese wanted to secure the royalties from a hit song for a friend’s record company in the ’60s, he recalled recently, so he hung the songwriter out the window of the Brill Building in Manhattan by his legs until the man said, “You got it.”

Around the same time, Franzese moved in on a Long Island trucking company, sending four men to attack the owner with baseball bats, said Gerald Shur, a former official in the U.S. Justice Department. After signing over half his business, the owner approached federal investigators but was too terrified to testify. That incident, said Shur, led him to successfully push for the creation of the Witness Protection Program.

Some years later, Franzese’s youngest son, John Jr., remembers, he was driving his father along the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn when Franzese gestured as if he were putting a gun in his belt and grunted, “Over here, son.”

At first, John Jr. didn’t understand. “I’ve got to explain to you everything!” he recalled his father yelling. “That’s why you’ll never be like me! Around here, there was some work done, and now let’s go.”

“Work” is a Mafia euphemism for murder.

I never hurt nobody that was innocent.

John (Sonny) Franzese

In these instances and many others, Franzese, the longtime Colombo family underboss who  died in a New York City veterans hospital last Sunday at 103, left an indelible imprint on Long Island and came to personify the noirish glamour of New York City’s underworld. To many, he is one of the most darkly iconic mobsters ever. When FBI agents wrote reports about him, they were often addressed directly to J. Edgar Hoover.

Having outlived the mob giants of his time by years if not decades, his passing qualifies as a final death knell for an era when organized crime infiltrated huge swatches of the nation’s life with a menacing force and bravado.

Franzese’s story has never been fully told. But after spending 35 years in prison and another 15 on parole, he started telling it himself to Newsday in a series of interviews over the last two years.

His cogent remarks, made over lunches in his Queens nursing home, displayed undiminished brashness, enduring allegiance to the Mafia’s crumbling code of silence and no regret for his life of crime. “I never hurt nobody that was innocent,” he said.

The conversations became the foundation of a deep look into his life, the Mafia on Long Island and beyond in the golden age of the mob, and how the arc of justice played itself out.

Franzese moved to his two-story house in Roslyn when most of the mob’s activity on Long Island was in its infancy and built an empire of loan sharking, extortion and gambling that comprised fully half the rackets on the Island, according to one Nassau investigator at the time.

In New York City, he cut a ruggedly elegant figure at clubs like the Copacabana and the Latin Quarter, maneuvered his way through mob wars and moved in on businesses that touched untold people in unexpected and hidden ways. He was the silent partner behind some of the biggest pop records of the day and the biggest grossing porn movie of all time, “Deep Throat.”

And by his own admission on an FBI wiretap, he was responsible for many murders, although that’s not how he remembered it in his final Newsday interview on his 103rd birthday, Feb. 6.

“I never murdered nobody,” he said, his defiance clear, even though he was recovering from pneumonia.

Although Franzese refused to acknowledge even the existence of the Mafia or complicity in any crime he could still be charged with, he spoke proudly of his criminal career.

Asked about his reputation, he said, “I’m not a guy that scares easily. I don’t care.”

Asked if during his night-clubbing days he knew Frank Sinatra, Franzese replied, “You asked the question the wrong way. You should have asked, ‘Did Frank Sinatra know Sonny Franzese?’”

Asked if the FBI pressured him to violate omertà — the mob’s code of silence — he repeatedly professed ignorance: “What does that mean? I don’t get it.”

Still, he reflected at another point, “They wanted me to roll all the time. I couldn’t do that. Because it’s my principle.”

During the interviews, Franzese exuded an earthy charm that was well known not only to friends but adversaries. Numerous FBI agents and prosecutors told Newsday he could be gentlemanly, even while being arrested. His son Michael speaks of his “chameleon” personality.

Former FBI agent Vincent D’Agostino, who listened to hours of secretly recorded tapes, said Franzese was charismatic, funny and a great storyteller.

“There’s a duality that comes with most criminals, not just organized crime, but it’s especially pronounced with people involved in organized crime,” he said. “I’m not a psychologist, but to me [they] clearly are narcissistic sociopaths. That’s part of the way they survive.”

This was apparent in Franzese’s conversations, D’Agostino said. “He’d be talking about great food at a restaurant one minute and then the dismemberment of a body literally a minute later.”

Beyond the bonhomie and dire deeds, a more cautionary story emerges of the cost of mob life, not only from Franzese’s own words, but from extensive interviews with two of his sons and scores of friends and other family members. These interviews are buttressed by thousands of pages of prison, court and police records dating back to the 1930s.

As Franzese sat in prison for decades after a conviction for a crime he denies committing, his family disintegrated. A daughter died of an overdose. His sons did time themselves and put their lives in danger by cooperating with the feds. And his once-elegant wife, Tina, beset by increasingly irrational rages as Franzese’s devotion to the Mafia kept pulling him away, wound up sick and destitute, living briefly in her car.

“I don’t know of any family of any member of that life that hasn’t been totally destroyed,” Franzese’s son Michael said.

Although until the end Franzese was mentally sharp and a lively raconteur, still proudly boasting a full head of hair, he mostly relied on a wheelchair  and suffered a litany of physical ailments.

Once a wealthy man who jetted with his family on the Concorde and entertained bands like Kool and the Gang at his home, he got by on government benefits.

“The money,” he said, “it’s all gone.”

Brutal rise

Every mob saga seems to start in a gritty immigrant neighborhood. For toughness, it would be hard to beat Franzese’s: 1920s Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

He was one of 10 children who grew to adulthood in the family of Carmine (The Lion) Franzese, who was well respected in Mafia ranks, according to a memo from the Federal Narcotics Bureau, which preceded the FBI in investigating organized crime.

Franzese had some fond childhood memories — walking to Ebbets Field with his brother to watch the Dodgers and listening to the radio broadcast of the epic heavyweight championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Luis Firpo in September 1923.

I don’t know of any family of any member of that life that hasn’t been totally destroyed.

Michael Franzese

But then there are other memories.

When he was 2, he fought with a girl over a card and she stabbed him in the right eye with a fork, leaving him blind in that eye. At 15, he was expelled from Eastern District High School after he knocked out another boy in a brawl over a stolen cigarette lighter. His older brothers frequently called on him to settle disputes.

His brother Louie had a bread business, and a customer failed to pay him. “So I go down and I grab both testicles and I said, ‘You buy bread from my brother, right?’ He says, ‘Yeah.’” The man admitted that he was late in his payment, saying, “I’m having a little tough time.” Franzese would have none of that. “Pay him the money. ‘Tough time?’ Don’t argue. Pay your other bills, pay his bill, too.”

The man paid.

By the time he was 18, Franzese said, he was running the largest craps game in New York. A “wise guy” hosted the game, but “I was the one running it.”

Despite not finishing high school, Franzese said he did well academically and impressed his principal enough that, after he retired, he asked about his former student.

“He comes back into the neighborhood and starts asking questions about me,” Franzese recalled. “When they told him that I ran the neighborhood, that I become a wise guy, he said, ‘I expected him to become something big, but not that.’”

After Pearl Harbor, he went to an Army recruiter and insisted on enlisting, bad eye notwithstanding. “They liked me because I had guts,” he said.

Federal court records show he was dishonorably discharged for “homicidal tendencies.”

His extensive rap sheet started before the war, with an arrest for felonious assault in 1938. It was littered over the years with charges that included common gambler, suspicious person, consorting and even rape. Shown his rap sheet in an interview, Franzese laughed, looking at it as if it were a high school yearbook, with a story behind almost every entry.

He adamantly denied the rape: “This was a lie, this rape case.”

He said he had met the woman at a club and found out later that two of his friends had raped her. A detective accused him; when he denied it, the detective demanded his friends’ names.

“So I said to him, ‘No.’ I said, “I don’t know who the guys are, and I don’t know who the girl is. I ain’t gonna admit to nothin.’ And they booked me under the goddamn charge. Now we go to court, and the girl won’t show up. We go to court again, and the girl won’t show up. The judge got aggravated and he threw the case out. So how the hell, now I got a record for a rape charge that I never committed?”

Her failure to appear was a harbinger for what was to come in other Franzese court cases. There were also witnesses with memory problems and witnesses who changed their minds.  Franzese showed a remarkable ability to dodge jail time, as judges dismissed charges or he was acquitted.

He was inducted into the Mafia at an early age. John Jr. said his father was only 14 and that his induction was kept secret for two years because he was so young. Franzese was caught on an FBI tape telling an associate that he had committed his first murder at that age as a favor to mob boss Carlo Gambino, D’Agostino said.

Franzese steadily moved through the ranks of what was then known as the Profaci family, which ran numerous rackets in Brooklyn and later became known as the Colombo crime family. His reputation for ruthlessness, brains and self-discipline grew.

Making his mark

Behind it all was the threat of remorseless violence.

John Jr. recalled that there was a pool of acid at one of the family’s body shops and that it always caught his father’s eye. “Bones dissolve in the acid,” John remembers him pointing out.

The New York Times reported in 1967 that authorities believed he personally killed or ordered the killings of as many as 40 or 50 people.

Decades later, they had Franzese’s own words to back them up. In a secretly taped conversation in 2006 with a cooperating witness named Guy Fatato, Franzese said: “I killed a lot of guys … you’re not talking about four, five, six, 10.”

At his peak in the 1960s, Franzese was among roughly 100 top mobsters living in Nassau County – more than any other suburban area in the country— and a dominant local figure in the Colombo crime family.

The Colombos were the family most active on Long Island in the 1960s. They were involved in all the rackets but specialized in loan sharking. Through that, they infiltrated liquor wholesalers that supplied many bars, restaurants and clubs and moved into meat markets, pizzerias and even linen supply companies.  

Franzese was a caporegime, or captain, ranking just below the boss and underboss, according to FBI files.  Below him were his crew of soldiers and associates, who were not made men, who helped him run operations and kicked up money to him.

He didn’t smoke or drink and eschewed the wine-fueled pasta lunches other mobsters enjoyed. In one interview, he spoke of the dangers of sugar. Asked in a recent interview when he last used sugar, he replied, “1942.”

He never used the same pay phone twice. Michael remembers that when he and his father discussed business, Franzese would lead him into the bathroom and turn on the water to drown out their conversation.

Members of his crew were both fiercely loyal and utterly terrified of him. Sal Polisi, a former mob associate whose uncle was in Franzese’s crew, recalled what happened after Franzese sold his car to a Long Island dealership. A salesman told the purchaser to have it swept for bugs because it had belonged to “a hoodlum named Sonny Franzese.”

Word got back, and three thugs attacked the salesman with baseball bats. He was crippled for life, according to Polisi.

“He was hardcore,” Polisi said of Franzese.

Going strong

According to an FBI report, he owned or had interests in clubs like the 107 North Disco in Glen Cove, San Susan club in Mineola, Decameron Room in Levittown, Apple Orchard Restaurant in Roslyn and Le Tique Disco in Levittown. He also had a health spa and a motel and was moving in on labor unions.  

“I started making money and then I opened up a club, another club, another club, and I started making big money,” he said. “Never under my name though — I couldn’t get a license.”

Asked why, he said, “I was a bad guy.”

He also was a loan shark and extortionist who infiltrated legitimate businesses, according to an FBI memo.

He seems to be involved in everything.

Norman Levy, then-rackets chief of the Nassau DA’s office

In 1962, the NYPD uncovered an intimidation campaign directed at beauty parlors in Queens aimed at extorting $5,000 from each business. The Queens district attorney charged Franzese and an associate with flooding the parlors with mice, dropping off coffee containers filled with bees and sending in women “goons” who noisily demanded instant service. The charges were dismissed, for unclear reasons; the records are sealed.

“He seems to be involved in everything,” Norman Levy, rackets chief of the Nassau district attorney’s office, told Newsday in 1965.

Shur, the retired Justice Department attorney who started the Witness Protection Program, put it this way: “I don’t think there was anything he wouldn’t do to get money.”

In December 1964, the state Commission of Investigation subpoenaed Franzese to testify at a hearing about loan sharking in Suffolk County. He refused, invoking the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination 18 times.

Other mobsters appeared, but a terrifying story about Franzese’s crew captured public attention.

A trembling, middle-aged woman testified that when her North Babylon luncheonette fell on hard times, her husband turned to a loan shark for desperately needed cash. Soon, Franzese associate Felice (Phil) Vizzari and other mobsters moved in, using the luncheonette to take bets. After the woman complained in a letter to the Suffolk district attorney, two thugs showed up one night at her house and beat her.

The couple wound up leaving town.

Love at first sight

Around 1950, Franzese, then 33 and married with children, met 16-year-old Tina Capobianco. Friends invited him to the famed Stork Club because they thought he’d like Tina, a pretty cigarette girl. He was smitten immediately.

 “I fell in love with her the second I saw her,” he said. “Isn’t that something? That’s how it went. Love at first sight. She was very pretty, a very pretty girl. She knew how to dress, she knew how to walk, every goddamn thing.”

Tina became his abiding love and the one person he couldn’t tame.

“He was no match for my mother,” John Jr. said.

Tina was sophisticated, intelligent and had exquisite taste, according to family and friends. They also said she was a “gangster” herself, unafraid to go toe-to-toe with her husband, sometimes even threatening him with a knife.

“She wasn’t that scrambled-egg bimbo stereotype,” said Artie Ripp, a music producer and former business partner of Franzese, describing her as someone who could hold her own in any social situation.

Franzese said Hollywood producers wanted to sign her for a movie contract, but he was dead set against it, concerned about Hollywood debauchery. Although he would cheat on her constantly, he would not tolerate even the possibility of her cheating.

“I told her, ‘You do that, we’ll break up. You’re not gonna be my girl,’” he said. “I’m a diehard guy. You’re my woman, you’re my woman, nobody else’s.’

“She didn’t take it.”

Their courtship was rocky, marked by breakups. When she was 18, Tina married another man and had a son, Michael, but Franzese pursued her relentlessly, persuading her to marry him in 1959.

When they returned from their Mexican honeymoon, she learned for the first time that he had three children from his first marriage and that she would be caring for them.

That pattern of withholding information —an essential trait in Franzese’s business — persisted throughout their marriage, and her resentment festered.  

“The women [in the family], especially, got lied to all the time,” John Jr. said.

In short order, she had three children with Sonny – John Jr., Gia and Christina. Overwhelmed and angry at her circumstances, Tina treated her stepchildren differently, even giving them less expensive Christmas gifts, John Jr. said.  

By January 1962, the family had moved to a newly built colonial on Shrub Hollow Road in Roslyn. Franzese complained to his friend, boxer Tommy Gallagher, that he had to move to Long Island to escape cops shaking him down.

This has some confirmation in the FBI’s voluminous file on Gregory (Grim Reaper) Scarpa, a Colombo caporegime who became a valued informant in 1961. He told agents that Franzese and Joseph Colombo were paying NYPD cops $1,500 a month for protection of a single Brooklyn craps game.

Franzese was always suspicious of Scarpa, John Jr. said. Warning his son to “be very careful,” Franzese told him, “there’s something very wrong about him.”

Four former Shrub Hollow neighbors recalled Franzese’s unusual impact on the block. “I remember my parents saying there were never any robberies around because they were there,” remembered Diana DeRose Gilbert, whose brother was in the same grade as Franzese’s daughter Gia.

And having FBI agents on the block couldn’t have hurt. They surveilled the house constantly. Occasionally they would question children as they got off the school bus, Gilbert said.

Franzese could be expansive. “We used to have this ice cream man come down and there were times when he would just buy it for all the kids on the block,” Gilbert recalled.

Inside the house, life was less all-American. FBI agents had planted a bug in the kitchen wall and were listening to daily conversations. Previously undisclosed FBI notes document frequent arguments between Tina and Franzese, often over money.

One day, Franzese was angry about an overdrawn checking account. On another, Tina yelled at him sarcastically, “Does it cost a lot to support me?”

Other times, they argued about childcare chores and even whose mother was better.

More ominously, the notes show that the couple feared for each other’s safety, particularly after an epic war broke out within the Profaci family that resulted in at least a dozen murders. It started after the brash mob insurgent “Crazy Joe” Gallo and his brothers demanded a bigger share of the profits.

Tina told her mother that every time her husband went out, she was afraid she would read that he had been murdered, according to one FBI memo.

And in one argument, Franzese told her, “I was on pins and needles. I didn’t know if something had happened to you.”

Michael recalled it as “really a tense time.”

“I remember my dad being gone for days at a time, being on the lam,” he said, recalling one particular day: “He came home in the morning, it was early, with a very heavy beard. And he was with my mother and I was kind of sitting on the steps looking out. And we had two guys outside, just kind of watching everything.”

Within a year, fortunes changed. Profaci died of cancer, Gallo was in prison, and Franzese was deeply involved in brokering a truce, gaining the respect of both sides. His close friend and partner, Joseph Colombo, became the family’s leader, cementing Franzese’s reputation on the street.

On Long Island and in New York, the best, and worst, was about to come.

Reporter/writer: Sandra Peddie Project editor: Martin Gottlieb Video director: Robert Cassidy Video editor: Raychel Brightman Videographers: Jeffrey Basinger, Brightman, Cassidy, Arnold Miller, Chris Ware and Yeong-Ung Yang Photo editor: John Keating Project manager: Heather Doyle Additional editing: Doug Dutton and Robert Shields Digital design/UX: Matthew Cassella and James Stewart Additional project management: Joe Diglio and Tara Conry Digital quality assurance: Daryl Becker Social media: Anahita Pardiwalla Research: Caroline Curtin and Laura Mann Additional research: Nyasia Draper and Judy Weinberg Copy editing: Don Bruce, Ron Bittner and Martha Guevara Print design: Seth Mates

After eight years in prison, Sonny Franzese was released on parole in 1978. His family celebrated with a coming-out party at a Manhattan nightclub, where Champagne flowed as Tony Bennett performed.

“It was a big buildup to have him home,” his son Michael said, adding, “I just felt our time was coming.”

Franzese had spent the previous year in the same prison as Colombo boss Carmine (The Snake) Persico, and, according to his son John Jr., they had worked out “how things would go in the family.” Franzese was 61 and, following his release, would be the unofficial boss of the Colombos until Persico got out.

“I was up and coming, and my dad was already there,” Michael said. “And we were really going to start to make some noise in the [Colombo] family.”

Yet four years later, in 1982, Franzese was back in prison for violating his parole. It was a pattern that would repeat itself over the next 30 years, as he was caught violating parole in the most ordinary of settings — a pastry shop, a diner, a Starbucks — by associating with other felons, his friends.

In prison, he built a determined, unbowed existence in an environment where others told him what to do. “I wouldn’t let a dog go to prison,” he said in one of several interviews he gave to Newsday in the two years before he died on Feb. 23 at age 103.

His inability to stay out of prison devastated his family and ultimately turned his once-loyal wife, Tina, against him. While he was away, his family unraveled.

“He put that life in front of everything,” Michael said. “He would always say he was gonna die with his boots on, a good soldier. If there was an order, he was gonna obey it.”

In the Newsday interviews, which provided a deep look into his life and the mob, Franzese acknowledged the cost to his family of his absence. “It devastated them,” he said. “Look, it ain’t easy to be without a father.”

As the years went on, he clung to a code that mob boss after mob boss abandoned. As he sat in prison refusing to talk, two of his sons cooperated with prosecutors.

And the myth that the Mafia takes care of families while its members are in prison turned out for him to be just that, a myth.

“It hurt,” Franzese said. “I would go to sleep nights and talk to myself. I couldn’t believe it. The money I gave guys. Not one of them sent me a dime.”

From prison, he could do little more than watch as two of his children, John Jr. included, fell into drug addiction, a daughter died of cancer, his house went into foreclosure, and his wife pulled away from him. Yet, he found others to blame — the government for locking him up and Tina for spending his money and spoiling the children.

“He doesn’t take responsibility for anything that happened in the family,” Michael said. Rather, despite jury verdicts and court rulings to the contrary, he believed he was framed and blamed his family’s disintegration on that.

Michael says that while he, too, believes his father was framed, he has told him, “They didn’t frame you because you were a doctor, lawyer, a priest, a surgeon. They framed you because you were a street guy.”

“The mob life is an evil lifestyle,” Michael said. “Any lifestyle that does that to a family is evil.”

Michael’s decision to cooperate, as well as his brother’s, tested Franzese beyond anything else. It was a violation of Mafia code so severe that there could be only one response: death — and not only to the informants, but to the person who brought them into the life.

This would come back to haunt all three of them.

Making their way

In the flush of optimism after his first release on parole, Franzese taught Michael and John Jr. the family business. He used them as buffers and was careful never to be too direct.

“He used to talk to me in parables,” Michael said.

Michael said he was inducted into the Mafia in 1975.

He introduced his then-teenaged brother, John Jr., to the closed world of the mob. For John Jr., it was a revelation, helping him finally understand why his family life was so secretive and emotionally harsh. He became a trusted messenger and found himself intoxicated by the power of the Franzese name and the Mafia on the street.

“It was unbelievable because all the circles I traveled in treated these guys with massive respect, courtesy,” John Jr. said. “They seemed to know everything. And everyone catered to them.”

But at home Tina felt shut out and alone. “I think what hurt her is that he never treated her like his wife, like partners,” John Jr. said.

His father, he said, had one way of thinking: “You never tell a woman anything. You never trust them with nothing. And if something isn’t right, lie to them … and never admit it. My mother knew. She knew.”

Tina earned a six-figure salary selling high-end couture on Manhasset’s Miracle Mile, according to her tax returns. She liked nice things — she gave John Jr. a new car every year and dressed herself and her daughters in Escada. The money her husband carefully put away in savings and AT&T stock rapidly dwindled.

“I had a wife, no matter what they asked her, she done for them,” Franzese said recently. “Never thought of tomorrow.”

I mean we were into everything out here.

Michael Franzese

The mood at home was often tense. Tina was a perfectionist and fastidious housekeeper; no one dared walk on the white carpeting in the living room. “She was neurotic with cleaning — she was so obsessed with cleaning,” John Jr. said. “But there was something more to it.”

The violent undercurrent of Franzese’s life was never far from the surface.

In May 1983, the body of Lawrence (Larry Champagne) Carrozza, Michael’s close friend, was found with a bullet wound behind the right ear. Carrozza had made the fatal error of having an extramarital affair with a woman from another made member’s family — Michael’s younger sister, Gia. On top of that, Gia had gotten involved with drugs.

Carrozza’s murder devastated Gia, according to her former sister-in-law, Roberta Franzese. “That’s when she went off the deep end,” she said.

Reflecting on his friend’s murder, Michael is strikingly matter of fact.

“Did I want it to happen?” he once said. “No way. Am I responsible? Well, I knew it was going to happen, and I didn’t save him.”

Michael was making millions from illegal rackets, including a Long Island gas tax scam that at its peak brought in $5 million to $7 million a week, he and prosecutors said. He traveled in private planes, frequented nightclubs with an entourage and lived in an Old Brookville mansion with an indoor racquetball court.

“Long Island was mobbed up, no doubt about it. I mean, we were into everything out here,” he said.

A bit ironically, Franzese chided Michael for attracting too much attention with his lavish lifestyle, John Jr. said.

But out on parole and working with Michael, he didn’t reject the money his son brought in.

Tina, tired of the lies and of managing the household on her own, got an apartment in Manhattan.

“She was a strong-headed woman,” Franzese said. “She wasn’t afraid, you know. She wasn’t afraid.”

Still, he could not allow her to leave. He remained deeply in love with her, and he could not afford to be seen as a man who couldn’t control his wife. He told Michael and John Jr. to watch her apartment around the clock.

“I remember me and Michael taking shifts because we couldn’t let anyone in the family, and I don’t mean my immediate family — any guys outside me, Michael and my dad — know that my father’s having trouble with my mother. It’s not a good thing in that life,” John Jr. said.

She tried to get a divorce attorney, but, “We approached every attorney and we wouldn’t let them,” he said.

Michael said he remembers telling one attorney simply, “You don’t want to do this.”

Defeated, Tina returned home.

Doing time

Home for Franzese, more and more, was behind bars. The circumstances at first were wrenching. John Jr., who was 10 when his father entered Leavenworth, remembered walking up the steps to meet him, “and that thing was so big and I started crying.”

When his father emerged, he remembers, “He gave me a gentle smack in the face and said, ‘Hey, son, I just want you to know if you’re going to cry, cry with your head up.'”

The family made cross-country treks to prisons, though visits were limited to one day a month. The time, Michael said, was inexorably painful.

Franzese wrote letters home in neat script, urging his children to do well in school and always concluding by telling them he loved them. He once sent Tina a card with a cartoon of a lion behind bars that said, “I’m still wild about you.”

Through the years — into his 90s — other women wrote him, as well, sending him photos and love notes.

As time went on, Franzese relied on iron self-discipline and a workout regimen, running five miles daily and becoming a prison handball champion. Once, he said, he beat the New York state champion. Franzese was 78 at the time.

Bernard Welsh, a former FBI agent who has since died, recalled seeing him enter court in an orange jumpsuit. “He looked like a million dollars.”

He also continued running his businesses, using John Jr. as a messenger and calling from prison with directives. By all accounts, he was treated with enormous respect. Nicky Barnes, the Harlem drug lord, put out a feeler to meet him, but Franzese refused — he says he didn’t consort with drug dealers. The mother of John Stanley Wojtowicz, the bank robber who inspired “Dog Day Afternoon,” asked Franzese to protect her son, which he says he did.

When Franzese joined his old associate, Frank Castagnaro, at Petersburg Penitentiary in Virginia, he asked him where the mob guys sat in the mess hall. Castagnaro explained that different factions sat separately. Franzese told him, “I want everybody down at the handball court tonight,” Castagnaro recalled in a recent interview.

They all came down. Franzese ordered them to sit together because sitting apart showed weakness.

Group meals became the norm.

“That’s just who he was,” Castagnaro said.

Franzese said other inmates respected him. “They listened to me, sure,” he said, attributing that to another of his principles: “I don’t care if I lose, as long as I fight them, because if you fight them, they ain’t going to fight you again.

“I fought a guy when I was in four times. He beat me three times and the fourth time, I knocked him out. I would never give up.”

Unraveling

But his power and prestige were not enough to hold his family together.

John Jr., the favorite son, started a long slide into drug addiction and lived on the streets. He once was so desperate for a fix he used toilet water to clean his needle, he said.

Then in December 1985, the gas tax scam imploded. Federal prosecutors charged Michael and eight others with racketeering, extortion and obstruction of justice. His father’s warning had been prescient.

“He’s smart,” Franzese said of Michael. “But sometimes, you know, smart guys become dumb.”

Michael’s problems compounded. He was investigated, but never charged, for attempting to bribe the head of the federal Parole Commission to win his father’s release, according to Chris Mattiace, a former FBI agent who worked undercover on that case.

In March 1986, Michael pleaded guilty in the gas scam and was sentenced to 10 years and restitution of $14.7 million.

Three years later, something happened that no one in the family would have thought possible: Michael cooperated with prosecutors.

In exchange for a reduced sentence, he agreed to testify against his old friend and business partner, Norby Walters, who had been charged with paying off college athletes to shave points. Walters’ conviction in the case was later overturned.

Michael said that although he testified against a confederate, Walters was not a made member of the Colombo family. As such, he wasn’t testifying against one of his own — a distinction he stresses to this day.

But Tina was appalled. “That’s not the way we were brought up,” she told Vanity Fair in 1991. “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.”

It was so huge that Persico, the Colombo family boss and longtime friend of the Franzese family, ordered Michael killed, according to FBI files. “My dad, unfortunately, went along with it,” Michael said, meaning he didn’t oppose it. “I understood.”

According to FBI files, Persico ordered an additional punishment, although not the ultimate one. He directed that all rackets be taken away from his old friend, Franzese.

Furious, Franzese refused to comply and men loyal to him continued running his rackets, the FBI records said.

After Michael got out of prison in the spring of 1989, he left New York and the Mafia and moved in with his second wife, Camille. Aware he had a target on his back, he never established a routine and avoided places that might expose him to danger.

Then, in October 1990, Gia, 23, died of a drug overdose. Franzese had to attend her wake in handcuffs and could not go to her burial.

The same year, John Jr. was hospitalized for pneumonia and diagnosed with HIV, contracted from a dirty needle.

Franzese said watching his family’s travails from prison was agonizing. “It gave me a lot of heartaches.”

He also fumed as he watched his wife spend his money. “I told her, ‘Tina, look, I’m in jail,'” he said. “‘Wisen up. Worry about tomorrow. I won’t be around to help you.’

“It didn’t make any difference. She just loved to spend.”

John Jr. saw something deeper. “I think she felt he owed it to her,” he said. “I think also it was a punishment for him because he never paid attention to her.”

In December 1992, she filed for bankruptcy. It would be the first of seven such filings.

She never told her family.

Tina leaves

By the mid-1990s, John Jr.’s drug problem was out of control. He said he was reduced to using garbage bags for shoes in the winter because he always sold the sneakers his mother gave him to get money for drugs.

Relief came in 1996 in the Nassau County Jail, where he spent a year after being convicted of stealing his girlfriend’s car and gun. Jail was a place to stay warm, get meals and make friends, he said.

John Jr. made a decision in 1996 similar to his brother’s: He became an FBI informant. He justified his betrayal by saying he thought it would help his parents, whose circumstances were dire. He believed the FBI would “be more fair” to his father if he helped them, he said.

His father, after being paroled in 1994, was back in prison after violating parole yet again.

“I thought my mom needed my dad home. Not because they were madly in love, but because while he was home, the bills generally got paid,” he said.

In October 1997, before Franzese could get out, Tina lost the home to foreclosure.

Franzese was released the following February. By November 2000, he violated his parole again at a Starbucks in Greenvale.

John Jr. recalled what happened next: His father didn’t call his panicked family for three days. When he did, Tina confronted him, telling him she had seen photos of him with other criminals. He denied it, saying, “Those pictures are lies.”

Furious, Tina hung up, screaming, “I gotta live like this my whole life!”

It was the breaking point. She left her husband once and for all.

Franzese went back to prison for 2 and a half years.

Leaving the life

John Jr. went to California in September 2001 to stay with Michael. He felt a glimmer of hope.

“The first thing I thought of was, ‘holy cow, this isn’t New York. They got porta-potties here!'” he said. That meant something to someone used to living on the street. “I know it sounds crazy. And it’s California. It’s warm. They’d kill you for a porta-potty in New York.”

He went to a 12-step meeting, and this time it stuck. He doesn’t know why. “I guess I was just ready,” he said.

Other pieces fell into place. In 2004, he married Denyce Marcucci, who frequented the sober home where he lived. He also quietly stayed in touch with his old FBI handler, Robert Lewicki.

He put together a proposal for a mob-based television show, but his former associates tried to shake down a producer working with him.

If someone you bring around becomes an informant, you get killed for it.

John Franzese Jr.

“I went ballistic,” John Jr. said, explaining that it was the first time he had done something without relying on his father’s name, and still his old associates wanted a piece of it. “It kind of pushed me over the edge,” he said.

He reached out to Lewicki.

“I had always planted the bug in his ear,” Lewicki said. “When you were down and out in the street, did anybody come to help you? Nobody did.’ I said, ‘You owe them nothing.'”

This time, John Jr. went beyond what he had done before: He wore a recording device.

The position he put himself in could not have been more fraught. Franzese, on parole again, returned at the age of 88 to his old business, and John Jr. was his trusted messenger.

If John Jr.’s wire turned up evidence, he would have to testify. Even if he didn’t ensnare his father — which he said he worked to avoid — the cost would be huge.

“If someone you bring around becomes an informant, you get killed for it,” he later testified.

John Jr. traveled between California and New York. Denyce thought the trips were for his television show, she said in an interview.

On Sept. 17, 2006, John Jr. told her he was spending the night at a friend’s. “He said, ‘Love you, D, see you in the morning,'” she recalled.

“That’s the last time I saw him.”

John Jr. had entered the federal Witness Protection Program, which was started in 1968 after his father’s associates savagely beat a Long Island trucking company owner who feared for his life too much to testify against them.

John Jr. and Denyce had never talked about splitting up. John Jr. later testified that he left because she was using drugs. Denyce said in an interview that she believes he left because they had spent all her money.

Soul on ice

In January 2007, as word of John Jr.’s flip spread, Franzese went to the home of an associate, Guy Fatato, and woke him, FBI agent Vincent D’Agostino testified at Franzese’s trial. He said he cocked his hand as if it were a gun and told Fatato that he might have to “call his son” and that he wanted Fatato to help him do it, according to the testimony.

Fatato understood that to mean Franzese wanted John Jr. killed.

Franzese would later learn that Fatato, a man he had met in prison and was grooming for bigger things, was cooperating. In an interview, D’Agostino said that the two had developed a father-son relationship of their own and that the FBI was somewhat dubious about the threat.

John Jr. said in an interview that he doesn’t believe his father ever told anyone to kill him, that, in fact, he was just posturing because he always had to be Sonny Franzese, the ever-loyal adherent to the Mafia code. Michael, however, is convinced his father was so loyal to that code that he was capable of it.

Despite his son’s transgressions, Franzese avoided retribution once more.

The following June, federal prosecutors unsealed a 17-count racketeering indictment against Franzese and 11 other men. Franzese was charged with extorting an Albertson pizzeria and two Manhattan strip clubs, the Hustler and the Penthouse, that he visited with associates.

He was 91 years old.

The trial began in 2010. Sonny, by then 93, entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. John Jr. spent four days testifying. At one point, he glanced at the defense table, but his father wouldn’t make eye contact.

“He looked beaten,” he said, “not because of the case but because of me.”

The jury convicted Franzese and he was sentenced to eight more years.

His son’s betrayal both pained and confounded Franzese. Asked about it in his nursing home, he said softly, “I don’t know what happened to him. Maybe all the drugs he took screwed his mind up.”

In April 2012, Tina died.

Her death was “my tough break,” Franzese said. “When I needed her, she died.”

Toward the end, she was penniless and sick with emphysema and breast cancer, family members said. Reduced to living in her car, she tearfully called her former daughter-in-law, Roberta, who took her in.

“God bless her, wherever she is,” Franzese said. “May the good Lord have mercy on her, she went through hell. Gotta give her credit, she waited a lot of years for me, and to die like that, you know?”

The end

After he was released from prison at age 100, 2 1/2 years ago, Franzese lived in a nursing home one loyal friend called “a home for indigents.”

He had his share of visitors, including Michael, and most dramatically, John Jr., who left the Witness Protection Program, in part because he hoped to reconnect with family and friends.

In February he surprised his father with an early morning visit, timed to avoid being noticed by anyone who still wants to kill him. By his account, his father at first didn’t recognize him, but then embraced him. Then his father gently admonished his son for testifying against him.

“I never meant to hurt you,” John Jr. said he replied.

He said his father told him, “Well, you’re my son, and I love you. But you’ve always been crazy.”

With an eye on the clock, Franzese hustled him out before anyone else arrived; he was still disciplined enough to focus on the dangers of the street.

Determination, he told Newsday, got him through a lot.

“I learned one thing in jail: Determination is stronger than anything.”

On a bright day in August 1964, as Sonny Franzese was at his apex, a 16-year-old boy came upon a gruesome sight on the shore of Jamaica Bay near Far Rockaway: the bloated body of Ernest (The Hawk) Rupolo, 50, a one-eyed hit man from Baldwin.

A heavy rope was looped around his neck and wrists and two concrete blocks were tied to his body. He had been shot five times, stabbed 18.

Journalists reported he had been killed because he was a stool pigeon, having once testified that mob chieftain Vito Genovese ordered a murder that he committed.

But others, including his widow, Eleanor, said Rupolo was killed for a different reason: He had tried to muscle in on Franzese’s rackets.

“They hated each other. They really, really did,” she told a magazine writer.

The Hawk’s murder opened an extraordinary legal onslaught against Franzese that culminated two years later, when prosecutors from four different jurisdictions — Manhattan, Queens, Nassau and the Justice Department’s Eastern District of New York — went after him.

In a single year, they charged him not only in the homicide but with running a $10 million bookmaking ring in Manhattan, conspiring to rob banks across the country and a home invasion targeting an Oceanside jukebox company owner.

By then, Franzese, who ran rackets from Brooklyn to Deer Park, was a celebrity at New York City’s brightest night spots, with a profile so high that tabloids referred to him simply as “Sonny.”

Franzese, who died on Feb. 23 at age 103, recalled those events as part of a series of interviews with Newsday over the past two years. The conversations became the foundation of a deep look into his life, the Mafia on Long Island and beyond and the system of justice itself.

“Sonny Franzese back in 1966 was one of the preeminent organized crime figures in New York, if not the United States. And everybody wanted to get glory,” said Ed McDonald, former chief of the federal Organized Crime Strike Force in Brooklyn.

What resulted was an epic confrontation between seasoned prosecutors and a man who epitomized organized crime and its hold on society.

The showdown raised questions about the integrity of a judicial system where verdicts turned on oddly fuzzy memories, last-minute witnesses and shaky testimony by admittedly terrified people.

The one trial Franzese lost left its own troubling questions. To this day, Franzese and his friends, and even some people in law enforcement, believe he was wrongly convicted in an effort to bring him down.

When Manny Topol, Newsday’s veteran legal affairs reporter, developed information challenging Franzese’s conviction, he said he met a wall of resistance from law enforcement sources who told him the evidence was beside the point. “The guy’s an animal,” he said they told him. “We gotta get him off the streets.”

To the prosecutors who charged Franzese, his guilt in the single case they won, as well as his proclivities for violence, were beyond dispute.

Implicating Franzese

The Rupolo murder case remained open for more than a year before an unusual break.

The FBI was getting a bead on five similar bank robberies over 44 days, from Oceanside to Denver.

That led them to a house in Bethel, Connecticut, on Oct. 1, 1965. Hiding out there was John (Blue Boy) Cordero, a wiry, fidgety man with a heroin addiction. According to an FBI report, they also found $10,000 in cash, a rifle, jewelry and Cordero’s new wife, Eleanor.

Eleanor was Rupolo’s widow.

Cordero, 26, of Lynbrook, quickly admitted to his role in the bank robberies, court records show, and within days the FBI was rounding up his henchmen: Richard Parks, 32, of Corona, an experienced gunman; James Smith, 30, of Brooklyn, the “vault” man who jumped over counters and scooped up money; and Charles (Blackie) Zaher, 22, of Woodhaven, the wheelman in two robberies. Eleanor, 34, was arrested with them but never charged.

It took three months for Cordero to name Franzese. His co-defendants quickly backed him up in separate FBI interviews, according to records. So significant was their testimony that they became witnesses in three of the four cases against Franzese. The fourth case, involving the bookmaking charge, was resolved with a plea.

Their story

As spun out in FBI reports, their story was this:

Nearly a year after Rupolo’s body was discovered, Cordero said, he took Eleanor to the John Doe Room, a bar at the Kew Motor Inn in Jamaica. In walked Joseph (Whitey) Florio, 40, a member of Franzese’s crew. Eleanor shouted across the bar that Florio had killed her beloved Ernie, as stunned patrons looked on.

Florio later told Newsday in 1966, “I ask the bartender, and he tells me this broad is The Hawk’s wife,” Florio said. “I say I didn’t, but I don’t say anything else, even though she is foul-mouth, ’cause I am a gentleman.”

Cordero hustled her out. In the parking lot, he said, he heard a door open and close behind them, turned, and saw Florio with his hand in his pocket. Cordero fired five shots at Florio but missed.

The incident was so serious — shooting at a member of his crew was unacceptable — that Franzese had to convene a mob sit-down, or Mafia court, according to a January 1966 FBI memorandum.

A sit-down was described vividly in FBI memorandums and by the bank robbers, but not by Franzese. He said it never happened.

He said it would have violated his long-standing rule of insulating himself through middlemen. “I was a firm believer that if a guy knew something about you, you had to worry about it,” he said in one of several interviews with Newsday recently.

The bank robbers, though, described a sit-down in great detail. They said it took place at the Aqueduct Motor Inn in Queens, owned by Franzese associate Anthony Polisi. Cordero and Zaher later said Franzese told them the hostilities had to be straightened out, in no small part because he had ordered the Rupolo hit and wanted to know if Cordero was going to come after him in revenge.

Whether Cordero answered the question is unknown, but he explained why he shot at Florio and complained that bank robberies he had done for Polisi had been beset by foul-ups, a Newsday story related. “There will be no foul-ups from now on. Starting now, I am going to take personal charge of the operation,” Franzese told the bank robbers, according to federal sources cited in the story.

Leaning forward in his wheelchair recently, Franzese said, “Please believe me. I know it’s hard to believe, but I never met them.”

“I’ll take a truth serum today. Not even a lie detector, but truth serum. Never happened.”

Closing in

Prosecutors believed otherwise, and the indictments came in an avalanche. They commanded front-page stories filled with Franzese lore and descriptions of his looks and wardrobe.

In March, the Manhattan district attorney charged Franzese with being the “muscle man” in a $10 million Garment District bookmaking ring. The Daily News described him as “ruggedly handsome.”

They all come after me like I was the last gangster in the world.

John (Sonny) Franzese

In April, the U.S. Attorney’s Office charged him with conspiring to rob the banks. The front-page Newsday headline read, “FBI Nabs Franzese as Super-Dillinger.”

In October, the Queens district attorney indicted him in the Rupolo homicide, along with the four men who allegedly carried it out on his orders, including Florio. After his arrest, Newsday said, Franzese looked more “like an executive posing for an Esquire clothing ad than a man charged with first-degree murder.”

And in December, the Nassau district attorney accused him of engineering the home invasion of an Oceanside jukebox company owner whose two teenage sons were handcuffed and gagged.

Looking back at the indictment blitz, Franzese said, “I was in the limelight too much and they resented it.”

He said it seemed personal. “They all come after me like I was the last gangster in the world.”

Bank robbery trial

Franzese was arraigned on the bank robbery charges on April 12, 1966. There he met the man who would become his lifelong nemesis, U.S. District Court Judge Jacob Mishler, a no-nonsense jurist who had a reputation for evenhandedness keeping control of his courtroom.

When Franzese’s lawyer objected to the $150,000 bail — the equivalent of $1,187,000 today — Mishler took note of Franzese’s suit. He estimated it cost $500, or about $4,000 in today’s dollars. The bail stood, but Franzese made it.

Nine months later, in January 1967, the trial got off to a false start in Brooklyn. Mishler deemed the press coverage so overheated he declared a mistrial and approved a defense motion to move the proceedings to Albany. Franzese said recently that his lawyers’ motion was “the biggest mistake they ever made.”

It ensured the case would be heard far from Franzese’s home turf, where Mafia intimidation and influence was pervasive.

In Albany, the prosecution sought to put the Mafia itself on trial. Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Gillen argued that while Franzese hadn’t held up the banks, he planned robberies, gave the do-or-die orders that they be carried out and claimed half the proceeds.

Gillen’s first witness, James Smith of Brooklyn, ticked off a litany of mob violence. Asked about conversations with Franzese about murders and assaults, he responded, “Well, he had told Mr. Parks in front of me, he says, ‘When I tell you to do something, you do it. If I tell you to pipe somebody, you pipe them. If I tell you to kill somebody, you kill somebody.'”

Asked what it meant to “pipe somebody,” Smith replied, “That is to hit somebody over the head with a pipe.”

Franzese’s attorney, Maurice Edelbaum, a rumpled, theatrical lawyer often used by mobsters, indignantly pointed out the witnesses’ criminal pasts and history of lies to investigators.

Through his questioning, he got Smith to acknowledge that he initially told the FBI Polisi directed the robberies.

Smith explained that he had been too afraid to name Franzese. “There’s no place you can hide in jail,” he said.

Smith’s fears, and those of his fellow bank robbers, hung in the air, as each recalled receiving death threats from Franzese emissaries.

Zaher testified that the head jail cook told him that Franzese said it was fine if he testified against any of his co-defendants, “but if you go any further, you’re dead.”

Gillen, in his summation, underscored the palpable terror of his witnesses. “You could smell the fear,” he shouted. “These men knew that death could follow them into jail.”

Edelbaum tried to defuse it: “Fear was dragged into this trial to prejudice you.”

The jury rendered its verdict just after midnight on March 3: Guilty.

Franzese remained composed. His wife, Tina, buried her face in her hands and wept, according to news accounts.

They wanted me to roll all the time. I couldn’t do that because it’s my principle.

John (Sonny) Franzese

The impact of the verdict, after decades in which he thwarted prosecutors at virtually every turn, was compounded a few months later when Mishler handed down his sentence: 50 years.

There was also a $20,000 fine and the judge’s stipulation that the sentence be indeterminate, meaning that authorities could grant parole if, say, he agreed to give up other mobsters, which FBI agents were trying to get him to do in vain.

“They wanted me to roll all the time. I couldn’t do that because it’s my principle,” he said recently.

Franzese was freed on bail pending appeal.

Despite the seeming finality of the sentence, he was so confident of winning his appeal that, family members said, he didn’t designate a trusted hand to succeed him.

And they believed in his innocence. As one friend, Tony Napoli, said in an interview, Franzese never would have allowed low-rung criminals to know he was behind the bank robberies. If they knew, he would have had them killed.

Homicide trial

Franzese’s legal drama extended through three more cases and nine appeals, with his fate uncertain amid twists and turns of every sort.

Special security measures were taken when the Rupolo homicide trial began on Nov. 2, 1967, and “there were no seats in the courtroom,” recalled Serphin Maltese, who was deputy homicide chief of the Queens District Attorney’s office.

Rupolo’s murder was as grisly as his life. Cops said he once bragged that he made his living by “stabbing, killing, burglary or any other crime I get paid for.”

The slaying took place outside the Skyway Motel near Kennedy Airport, according to Parks, who said he happened upon it while doing an errand for the mob. He later told investigators he saw four men lifting a body from a car, when it came to life and began struggling. One man grabbed a gun but was warned it would be too noisy. He then grabbed a knife and stabbed the victim until he stopped moving.

When they put the body in the trunk, his head rolled, and Parks recognized him. The patch over his right eye — which Rupolo, according to later news accounts, had lost in a shootout — fell off.

Parks saved it as a souvenir.

A little more than two weeks later, Rupolo’s body was discovered.

The case consumed the district attorney’s office, Maltese said. Rupolo’s widow, Eleanor, who never testified, camped out there, directing people to bring her soda and sandwiches. And the prosecutors indulged in macabre humor: They used one of the concrete blocks that had been tied to Rupolo’s body as a doorstop.

Three of the bank robbers — Zaher, Cordero and Parks — queued up against Franzese. They were more agitated than they had been during the bank robbery trial. They had been moved from prison to prison and kept in virtual solitary confinement to keep them safe. They became petulant and demanding, asking for conjugal visits and better food.

Although most of the court records are unavailable, the trial was well-documented in newspapers and a Life magazine article.

Zaher came to the stand first and testified that he heard Franzese say “I ordered the Hawk hit” at the Aqueduct Motel sit-down.

The defense pushed back, prodding Zaher to recount his history as a bank robber, car thief and drug addict. He admitted he shot up a few hours before the sit-down.

Cordero was next and said he, too, heard Franzese say he ordered the hit. As he testified, Tina put her right hand to her temple and extended her forefinger as if it were a gun. Cordero saw it, paused and took a sip of water.

Parks calmly recounted what he saw of the murder, even as Edelbaum screamed skeptical questions at him.

The bank robbers had come through, but the prosecutor, James Mosley, knew he needed someone outside this clique for corroboration. He found him in John Rapacki, the first of dueling jailhouse witnesses who claimed to have heard critical and conflicting conversations.

Rapacki testified that Franzese’s co-defendant, William (Red) Crabbe, had told him in jail that Franzese’s crew killed Rupolo: “We took care of him. The boss ordered it.”

Nervous and intense, Rapacki seemed desperate to convince jurors he was telling the truth. Mosley was feeling confident when jury deliberations began. But Parks, familiar with the ways of the Mafia, warned him: “They’re gonna come up with a story.”

It came in a last-minute letter to the judge.

An inmate on Sing Sing’s death row named Walter Sher had briefly shared a cell in the Nassau County Jail with Rapacki. He testified that Rapacki told him he had killed Rupolo. Mosley was furious, but unable to shake him from his story.

“How in the hell could they have ever gotten to this guy in the death house at the last minute?” Maltese asked recently.

The answer was simple, said Sal Polisi, a former mob associate who is Anthony Polisi’s nephew: “The mob ran the prisons.”

Frantic, Rapacki demanded truth serum and screamed at the prosecution team, “I thought they’d kill me. But I never thought they’d do this. If Sonny hits the street, he’ll kill my wife. I know they’ll kill her!”

Within hours, the jury returned with a verdict: Not guilty. Franzese smiled for photographers as a younger man helped him on with his silk-lined overcoat. Tina sobbed hoarsely, saying, “He did it, he did it,” meaning he beat the charge, Newsday reported.

That night, Franzese said recently, he celebrated at the Copa.

Mosley, meanwhile, headed for a courthouse bar frequented by cops, angry and dejected. The case had taken a year of his life, working round-the-clock, baby-sitting recalcitrant witnesses and facing death threats, two of his children said recently.

Home invasion trial

The Nassau home invasion case started in March 1969, with three of the same witnesses: Cordero, Parks and Smith.

It was a chilling story, told through news accounts and recent interviews with two brothers who were the victims.

Abraham (Al) Ezrati had a jukebox company, an all-cash business. His car had been stolen in June 1963. A week later, a man called his Oceanside home to say he had insurance forms for him to sign. Ezrati’s 18-year-old son, Milton, answered and said his parents wouldn’t be home until 5 p.m. The man assured him he was “old enough” to sign.

Several men, wearing sunglasses and mustaches drawn on with eyebrow pencil, arrived. Milton opened the door. They showed him a gun. And heeding his father’s warning to never risk his life for money, he put up no fight.

They handcuffed Milton and his 14-year-old brother, Lester, to poles in the basement — denying Lester’s request to leave the TV on — and duct-taped their mouths. The men left with sacks of money and Ezrati’s cuff links, worth about $3,000 in total. The teens were freed when their grandmother discovered them.

The link to Franzese came first via Smith, who testified that they were acting on orders from him. Then Cordero testified that after the incident, he heard Franzese call Ezrati.

“He said to Al, ‘We have our differences that I don’t understand, but I don’t want your kids to identify anybody,'” Cordero said.

They didn’t.

Lester, now 70, said in an interview that he couldn’t pick out the robbers. Milton, now 74, didn’t, either.

Franzese’s lawyers painted Cordero, Smith and Parks as liars. And, as in the Rupolo case, they produced a surprise witness — another convict who heard a jailhouse confession.

Edward Winkle testified that while he was in the Nassau County jail, he overheard Smith telling Cordero, “(Nassau District Attorney) Cahn knows we did it and wants to know if we want to get out of here.”

On April 17, 1969, after deliberating four hours, the jury acquitted Franzese. A joyous scene followed with Franzese hugging his family and thanking the judge.

Milton wrote a short story in college about the experience but said he didn’t get a good grade: “Not enough drama.”

Appeals

The following year, the betting-ring case was resolved. Franzese pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of aiding and abetting bookmaking and received a 1-year sentence — peanuts compared to what he had been facing and nothing that would disrupt his enterprises.

“I beat them in three and I couldn’t beat them in the bank robbery,” he said recently. “They should have admired me for it. I mean, I fought them and I beat them. Who the hell does that?”

Franzese’s lawyers immediately appealed the bank robbery conviction, ultimately taking it to the U.S. Supreme Court. In March 1969, they got welcome news: It ordered a hearing to determine whether bugs installed in Franzese’s kitchen tainted evidence at trial.

The case went back to Mishler. He ruled that because the tapes had not been used in the case, the conviction stood.

By Easter 1970, Franzese couldn’t stave off prison any longer. He entered the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas.

His lawyers filed two more motions. Each time, Mishler denied them.

Now, it was Tina’s turn. She wrote letters to Mishler, harangued prosecutors and proclaimed Franzese’s innocence to anyone who would listen.

“She was a fighter,” Franzese said recently. “Listen, I’ve seen her, I’ve seen her fight like a maniac for me.”

In 1973, she taped a body recorder to Jerome Zimmerman, a car salesman who worked with her husband and son Michael. He claimed that an IRS agent in a separate investigation offered to give him documents that would help Franzese. In return, he said, Zimmerman would have to lie to help the agent in the other case.

Wearing the recorder, Zimmerman met the agent at a Holiday Inn in Westbury, with Tina and a friend sitting nearby, according to Newsday reports.

She took Zimmerman’s tapes to prosecutors, who had a forensic expert examine them. He found something damning: They had been tampered with.

Zimmerman was charged with perjury and found guilty.

Undaunted, the family continued its efforts. Michael approached Eleanor Cordero, who had changed her story and said that Franzese was framed.

Her affidavit spurred a motion for a new trial in March 1975.

At the hearing there was testimony from FBI agents that Michael paid for her new story.

Mishler, who eventually denied the request, oversaw the hearing and noted without emotion that there had been a threat to kidnap a relative of his, but, with a pointed reference to Tina, said this would not influence him:

“Each time, Franzese’s motion has been before me, Mrs. Franzese has been in the courtroom, caused a disturbance, made general threats; and I just wanted her to know that this is on the merits — no amount of threats is going to make a difference to me.”

The FBI reported there was another threat a month later after Mishler denied Franzese’s motion.

At 5 p.m. on Jan. 21, 1976, Mishler’s law clerk got an anonymous call, according to an FBI memo: “Just tell the judge he made a fatal mistake in the Franzese motion today.”

How the threat was investigated is not clear from files, and most of the people involved have died.

Tina, in a seven-page letter to Mishler dated Feb. 18, 1976, denied making the call or telling anyone to do it. She went on to describe her fight for her husband’s freedom:

“The last six years have been a long and lonely vigil for my family and myself. It has just been myself against a whole administration.”

As his family continued to fight for his release, Franzese made the best of his time in prison but bridled against his incarceration.

In November 1977, he took an unimaginable step, writing a strikingly deferential letter to a man he has promised to meet in Hell.

“I realize you are a very busy man and have no time for answering foolish letters,” he began. “On the other hand, I feel certain you will not mind taking a few minutes out to ease the mind of a confused man serving fifty years in prison. Therefore, I trust you will be able to unravel a few things for me that have caused me to stay awake many nights in the near eight years I have been incarcerated.”

He asked Mishler to help him “get at the truth” because he was no longer a young man. “I am in the winter of my life where every year counts,” he wrote.

He was 60 years old.

Like any film buff, Sonny Franzese has a favorite movie. His is “The Godfather.”

“Terrific movie. I think it’s one of the best movies ever made,” Franzese said in an interview at his nursing home. The sequel, “Godfather Part II,” was “fantastic.”

His appraisal was based, in part, on the lead actors, several of whom he said he knows. Al Pacino, who played mob patriarch Vito Corleone’s son Michael, was his favorite. “He’s a nice guy, Al,” Franzese said. “Hell of an actor, hell of an actor. I think he’s about the best actor around today.” Pacino, he said, can “play anything.”

He also liked Robert De Niro, who portrayed a young Vito Corleone in “Godfather Part II.” “De Niro is a good, uh, second,” he opined.

Franzese’s critical eye was informed by his unique expertise, as well, according to his son, John Jr. When they watched “Godfather Part II” together, the story of Vito Corleone’s early life as a young Italian immigrant in Hell’s Kitchen, Franzese had particularly acute insights.

That became evident during the scene of the funeral for Vito’s wife, the mother of the movie’s three dissimilar sons. There, Michael, the son now leading the family, and Fredo, the older brother who had betrayed him, embrace.

Up to that moment, John Jr. said, “Michael was never going to kill him.” Then his father tracked the moment when Michael’s feelings changed. “He said if you notice when Michael hugged him, [Fredo] came with a gun,” John recalled.

A close viewing of the scene shows no obvious gun, just a hand with a watch — Michael’s hand — on Fredo’s back. It pauses briefly, as if he felt a gun, although it is not clear. But to Franzese, that moment was crystal clear.

As John Jr. related, “The fact that you brought a gun to a funeral to meet your family meant that you didn’t feel safe anymore when Michael said come back.”

If he didn’t trust them, they couldn’t trust him. Fredo had to go.

In John’s view it was the kind of insight into Mafia life that only someone who lived it could have, which is why Franzese refused to believe the movie was a work of pure fiction. Mario Puzo, who wrote the 1969 bestseller on which the movie is based and who died in 1999, always insisted it was.

“He had to get it from a mob guy,” Franzese said. “Puzo couldn’t get that information himself. He had to get it from somebody.”

And Franzese believed Corleone’s oldest son, the libidinous and hot-tempered Sonny, was named for him. He said the idea could have been planted with Puzo by mob boss Joe (Joe Bananas) Bonanno, who was unpopular within the Mafia because he constantly maneuvered against other bosses.

Bonanno, Franzese said, wanted to make him look bad because he was jealous of him.

Puzo, who wrote a memoir before he died, denied knowing any gangsters. He did, however, admit to heavy gambling, which, through bookmaking and loan-sharking, was the province of mobsters.

“Puzo knew me good,” Franzese said, declining to elaborate.

Gianni Russo, the actor who played Carlo in the film, said he also knew Puzo. He said Puzo told him his characters were composites of mobsters he researched, adding that Franzese was “a legend.”

Regardless of the work’s genesis, the movie never would have been made without the help of the Colombo family.

After hearing of filming plans in New York in 1970, Joe Colombo, then head of the Colombo family, used his Italian-American Civil Rights League to protest what he said would be an ethnically biased film. Colombo publicly denied there was a Mafia, calling it an ethnic slur.

The pressure escalated when the movie’s producers found themselves blocked from working at already approved locations and getting threatening phone calls, according to news accounts at the time.

They sat down with Colombo and reached an agreement: In exchange for hiring some Colombo associates as extras and striking the words “Cosa Nostra” from the film, their troubles would be over, according to a 1972 New York Times article and Russo. Among those who gained employment was Lenny Montana, a 300-pound Colombo enforcer who played the loyal hit man Luca Brasi and who happened to be the uncle of a Nassau detective who once arrested Franzese for a parole violation.

Such business dealings were Franzese’s special area of expertise. Tony Napoli, the son of the late Genovese capo Jimmy Napoli, said Franzese was a “consultant” on the film.

“The word ‘consultant’ is not the word that they used,” Napoli said in an interview. “They would come to a man like Sonny, different areas, OK them to do shooting there. Otherwise, your trailers would be missing, if you know what I mean.”

Asked about that, Franzese denied it emphatically.

He was in prison at the time of the filming, though friends say he conducted business even behind bars.

Franzese also professed a close connection to actors in the movie, in particular James Caan, the actor who played Sonny. Franzese said he got to know him “through the picture.”

That connection emerged in film credits later on when the crime drama, “This Thing of Ours,” about the Mafia and starring Caan, was made in 2003. Franzese is listed as an associate producer, even though he was not impressed by the final product.

“That was a baloney movie,” he said.