Not so today. Much of Jackson Heights has become the New York enclave of Colombian cocaine dealers and their desperate, crack-addicted clients. But that is now. This is about then. And then, Jackson Heights was happening.
"Sonny Franzese invaded the neighborhood like a one-man army," recalled Beau Matera, whose family owned the Dinner Bell Restaurant on Thirty-Seventh Avenue and Eighty-Third Street.
Dad's base had been Brooklyn, but Jackson Heights was hot after the war and began attracting the attention of everyonefrom legitimate businessmen to nightclub operators and restauranteurs, and, as always, the mobsters. Dad's invasion was a bloodless coup because nobody was about to try and stop him. His reputation had preceded him.
"Funny thing," Matera continued, "Sonny's power had nothing to do with the fact that he was a 'capo' (captain) in the Colombo family. Most people didn't know, or didn't care, who he was connected with. His power came from within himself. The neighborhood didn't tremble at the thought of hidden Colombo armies keeping watch. They shook at the sight of Sonny Franzese walking down Thirty-Seventh Avenue."
The Matera family eventually sold the Dinner Bell to Tommy Grimaldi, one of Jackson Heights' top bookmakers, and Beau moved out West. The reasons behind this are interesting.
One of Grimaldi's activities was managing the Orchid Room for Dad. Matera befriended the gregarious, well-dressed, wellconnected Grimaldi and frequently dropped by the Orchid Room to pass the time. He claims he wasn't there, however, the night it was Dad's turn to host a "drop and drag" party.
5
Those who were there recall it well. Dad was in a back corner talking with a slim young man. The patrons were aware of this because it was everyone's habit to keep one eye on Dad whenever he was in the room. Tensions were eased that evening because he and the visitor appeared to be friends. They were smiling, laughing, drinking, and talking. It was early in the morning, 2:00 or 3:00 A.M.
A shot suddenly pierced through the chatter and silenced the bar. The slim man crashed to the floor, his fingers still locked tightly around his own unused gun, drawn in an attempt to assassinate my father. Those who turned their heads say they saw Dad holding a smoking pistol. He quickly slid it back into the holster under his $500 suit and signaled for someone to take over. The slim man's body hardly hit the floor before it was dragged out of the place, and the fresh corpse was deposited on the sidewalk a block away. Before the drag men could make it back to the bar, the blood had already been mopped off of the floor.
According to witnesses, Dad then went about his business as if nothing had happened. No one prepped the crowd on how to handle what was to come. No one had to. Dad had reacted so fast that the would-be assassin never got his weapon aimed, but even a story of possible self-defense was not to be told to police. When cops arrived and questioned those remaining at the bar about the stiff down the block, no one in the Orchid Room seemed to have heard the shot. "Must have been dumped outta a car," more than one person helpfully surmised to the detectives.
Not much was ever known about the assassin. He was evidently some small-time hood nobody missed. Those at the bar that morning have trouble pinning down the exact year this happened-possibly sometime around 1948 or '49. What is significant, what they all remember, was Dad's reaction after the shooting. He sat in his usual corner, sipping a drink, talking with friends, laughing and enjoying himself, seemingly without a care in the world. He appeared oblivious to the fact that he had come within seconds of being killed, oblivious to the possibility that his life might lie in the hands of one person in the bar, one stranger, one out-of-towner who'd stopped by for a beer and didn't know the rules.
If even one person had talked about this incident, Dad would have been history. The police and the prosecuting attorneys wanted him bad. The shooting, regardless of who drew first, could have landed him a life sentence in prison. But nobody talked.
Soon after this incident, young Beau Matera was faced with the decision to either get into one of the crime families or to stop riding the edge. The reason he gave for his decision to move to Las Vegas was this: "I figured if you were gonna be a mobster, I mean really be a big-time mobster, you had to have nerves of steel like Sonny Franzese. You had to be able to take out your assassin, then sit there calmly sipping a drink while the police wandered about, asking everyone questions. I didn't have courage like that. Nobody had it like Sonny."
Nerves of steel! Those who knew Dad well nod at the description but quickly add that even that doesn't quite capture the strange measure of the man-or the power he commanded.
6
Bob Greene, a Newsday investigations editor, chronicled Dad's life in a riveting feature, "The Hood in Our Neighborhood," published on Christmas Eve, 1965: "He is a prototype of the rising young executive-aggressive, dynamic, moderate in his habits, a good family man, careful with money and so absorbed in his work that lunch, when he manages to find time for it, is usually a quick date-nut bread sandwich at Chock Full 0' Nuts. He could be working for IBM, GM, or Chase Manhattan. But he isn't. He is John (Sonny) Franzese, 45...tabbed as the fastest rising young executive in the Cosa Nostra empire of crime. His business: supervision of underworld rackets in parts of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens and in almost all of Nassau and Suffolk counties. The tools of his trade: greed, fear and, when necessary, the gun."
Sergeant Ralph Salerno, then the Mafia specialist for the New York City Police Department, added his expert opinion: "Sonny Franzese is the big corner in the Cosa Nostra. He has an extraordinary talent for organized crime. He knows when to compromise and when to get tough; he knows how to run a business and crime is a big business and, most important, he is an expert at not getting caught."
Greene continued, "The family boss is Joe Colombo of Brooklyn, an aging executive who is gradually paving the way for Franzese to take over completely. Operating under Franzese are six or more crime lieutenants, each of whom directs from ten to thirty crime soldati [soldiers], who in turn have their own individual criminal organizations."
This was Dad's world.
As diverse as his personalities were, Dad towed the line when it came to the Cosa Nostra's strict laws, even when it affected his private life. In the early 1940s, he met and married a beautiful German blonde named Ann Schiller. After a rocky start, they settled down, had three children, and were relatively content... that is until the mob became involved.
Dad received word that his higher-ups felt the independentminded Mrs. Franzese, who longed to be an actress, couldn't be controlled. Dad was given the message that his career prospects would greatly improve in the mob if he found a more subservient Italian wife. Always the obedient soldier, he promptly left Ann Schiller, a process made easier by an obliging Mrs. Franzese.
Shortly afterward, he met my mom, Christina Capobianco, a slim, seventeen-year-old telephone operator who doubled as a coat-check girl and roving photographer at the renowned Stork Club in Manhattan. The exclusive restaurant and nightspot had a four-star celebrity clientele that included Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Ernest Hemingway, Damon Runyon, and radio broadcaster and journalist Walter Winchell. Genovese family boss Frank Costello was also a regular there, as were a healthy influx of other top-echelon mobsters. Mom was beautiful and dark-haired, and it is said that she was a pet of Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley and a special favorite of frequent club guest Montgomery Clift, the brooding movie star linked in the newspapers with Elizabeth Taylor. Dad quickly replaced Clift, who was slow to scrap with an infamous killer over a skinny coat-check girl.
Dad and Mom fell madly in love, and according to one version of their romance, they capped a whirlwind courtship by getting married on July 24, 1951, one day after her eighteenth birthday. Dad was thirty-two. They were "the Mobster and the Coat-Check Girl," and had there been television movies back then, their life together certainly would have made for a good one.
,7
As young as she was, Mom had been married before. At sixteen, she had hooked up with a handsome, dark-
haired soldier named Louis Grillo, and their teenage love affair, although it barely survived a year, had produced me. From the beginning of my Mom's second marriage, Sonny Franzese accepted me as his own, and he was, therefore, the only dad I ever knew.
Mom had to return the favor three times over when Dad's three children by his former marriage showed up on her doorstep one day after their mother left them to pursue a career. Whether this was of her own choosing or at Dad's request, no one ever knew for sure. Mom and Dad filled the house further by having three children of their own.
Despite what he did for a living, Dad was a doting father who played in the yard with us kids, took us to the local amusement park, and didn't favor any one of us over the others, despite the "yours," "mine," and "ours" nature of our brood. Sometimes he'd give Mom the night off, proclaim himself to be the world's greatest cook, and make an elaborate calzone dinner for the whole family. (This Italian delicacy consists of stuffing dough with cheese, sausage, pepperoni, peppers, and tomato sauce, or any variation of the above, and baking it in the oven.) The excitement of "Daddy's making dinner!" always made for a joyful evening.
When he wanted to discourage us from various harmful activities, Dad would resort to making up wild stories. We sons, for instance, were discouraged from owning or riding motorcycles by his vivid tale of a grisly accident that transformed a handsome athlete into a drooling, brain-dead paraplegic. His anti-drug speech was dressed up by the tragic story of another "friend" who descended from being a successful businessman with a beautiful wife and family to being a crazed freak who crawled the gutters, coughing, vomiting, and debasing himself a dozen different ways to feed his habit. These stories had their desired effect because they frightened us.
8
Dad's ability to adapt, learn, and then control every situation can be seen in how he operated his "other" family, especially in how he handled their interests in the entertainment industry. He had a piece of the infamous Linda Lovelace film Deep Throat, which revolutionized the motion-picture industry by bringing hard-core pornography out of the shadows and into neighborhood theaters. He also had a cut of the classic blood-and-gore horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
But his strongest suit was recognizing very early on the changes coming to the music industry and becoming a pioneer of sorts in the record business.
In January 1964, the record music industry changed dramatically when the Beatles hit No. 1 on Billboard's music chart with "I Want to Hold Your Hand." The song stayed there for seven weeks and was finally toppled by another Beatles song, "She Loves You." By the time the mop-haired Englishmen crossed the Atlantic to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, they were already a sensation here. And their appearance on that television show marked the long-awaited explosion of rock and roll (which had been burning like a lit fuse all during the previous Elvis decade).
Most of the entertainment-minded mobsters rejected this new longhaired music. They deemed it a passing fad, preferring to place their bets on the continuing success of the kind of music being recorded by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Steve Lawrence, Perry Como, Nelson Riddle, Andy Williams, Connie Francis, Brenda Lee, and the McGuire Sisters. But Dad saw the future, and the future rocked. He made New York's famous Tin Pan Alley part of his rounds, as we saw earlier. He kept a close watch on what was happening in the infant rock business, made friends, and took notes. Then, in the mid-1960s, he formed a lucrative booking agency with Norby Walters, which began with popular New York area performers and rock groups, and later branched out to include a glittering array of black superstars. However, it was Dad's relationship with Phil Steinberg and his upstart record company that provides the most insight into this multidimensional man.
As we have seen, during his Tin Pan Alley rounds, Dad befriended Steinberg, and he subsequently allowed the young record producer to become one of the few people outside the Mafia who were close to him
Steinberg's own story is not without drama, so much so that it was optioned as a television miniseries. Much of the drama involves how his life intertwined with my father's. Steinberg was a dead-end Brooklyn street kid who teamed up with his two partners to form a record company in the early 1960s. They were in the right place at the right time, and the company took off. Along with the previously mentioned superstar acts, the Kama Sutra/ Buddah roster included the Isley Brothers, Lena Horne, Rod McKuen, Paul Anka, Charlie Daniels, Curtis Mayfield, Bill Withers, Captain Beefheart, Melanie, and dozens of others. By 1975, the company had crashed and burned, a victim of sex, drugs, bad business, vicious infighting, relentless investigations, and its ominous reputation as a mob company.
The improbable rise and fall of Buddah Records was aided by my father all right-but not in the way it was commonly believed. And not in the way the IRS, the FBI, and the New York State attorney general's office, which hounded Buddah for years, suspected.
Dad admired Steinberg and became, for lack of a better description, his guardian angel. According to Steinberg, it was all on an unspoken level. To this day, he doesn't even know for certain that Dad intervened in the Moe Levy incident.
"Who knows?" Steinberg said. "You never knew. He was my friend, a close friend, but I never knew. That was Sonny's way. He had a thousand people who owed him favors. But he had ten thousand who thought they owed him a favor but weren't sure. You had to go through that dance in your own mind. That was one of Sonny's strengths, the illusion that a debt was owed to him."
Steinberg's description of Dad was filled with the usual contradictions. It was easy to see that he considered Dad to be a benevolent father figure in his life, and yet he stated, "Sonny was what we called an `iceman.' When he walked into a room, everyone's blood ran cold."
Sometimes the two sides of Dad could be seen at once. Steinberg recalled, "We were going to a boxing match at Sunnyside Gardens one night. I'm walking with Sonny, and he bumps into some big guy in the crowd. Nothing hard, nothing intentional, just a typical bump. The guy freaks out and starts screaming and yelling and calling Sonny vile names. I couldn't believe it. I'm figuring Sonny's going to blow him away any second or rip out his throat with his bare hands. Instead, Sonny just calmly walked away.
"So the idiot follows, still cursing and threatening Sonny. Now I'm getting mad. I'm about to deck the guy when Sonny holds me back. He shakes his head, shrugs, and talks in a soft, calm voice: `Phil, let it go. Let it go. Who cares? He's nothing. We don't have to do anything. Guys like that, somebody will do it for you.' I was amazed at how calm Sonny was and how, with all his power, he didn't let the guy call his hand."
"Of course," Steinberg added, "for all I know, Sonny had the guy followed and seriously harmed before he got home."
9
Another incident that was burned into Steinberg's mental file could have imperiled their relationship.
"It wasn't long after I first met Sonny," Steinberg remembered. "How we met I can't really remember, but at the time, we weren't that close. We were at a party, and I brought my wife. She didn't drink much, so when she had a drink at the party, it loosened her up. Sonny came over, and I introduced them. My wife stared at him for a couple of beats, then brightened up and became animated.
"`I know you!' she exclaimed. `I've seen you in the newspapers!' She then brought her arms down like she was holding an imaginary machine gun. `You're the guy who goes rat-tat-tat-tattat-tat!'
"I cringed, as the room suddenly went silent. It was like one of those E. F. Hutton commercials where everybody shuts up and leans in to listen. Only this time everyone was holding his breath. The silence lasted for what seemed like an eternity. Then Sonny started laughing. Relieved, everybody else started laughing. Sonny put his arms around my wife and said, `Phil, you got yourself some lady here."'
Dad's power extended beyond Brooklyn, Jackson Heights, Manhattan, and Tin Pan Alley. It coursed throughout the Colombo family, was felt by the other families, and even reached across the country. Famous people knew and respected him.
"A little later, Frank Sinatra comes over to our table. Sinatra leaned down, took Sonny's hand, and kissed his ring. Kissed his ring! Right in front of Colombo. Unreal!"
There was more than one reason that Sinatra was so respectful to Dad that evening. Dad usually had a ringside table whenever Sinatra, or Sammy Davis Jr., or any number of entertainers opened anywhere in New York. He was a regular in their dressing rooms backstage. He was not an unwanted presence, because the superstars were keenly aware of the power Dad wielded.
Another reason Sinatra paid his respects to Dad that night was because Dad had treated his son so well. In 1963, some years before the incident Steinberg witnessed, Frank Sinatra Jr. was playing at the San Su San nightclub off the Jericho Turnpike in Mineola, Long Island. The crowds were thin, and the young singer, struggling to step out of his father's immense shadow, was bombing. A call came to Dad from Chicago. The next night and for many nights afterward, it was standing room only at the San Su San. The crowd, made up mostly of hit men, mob soldiers, bookmakers, and extortionists accompanied by their floozies and favorite prostitutes, cheered wildly and treated every Frank Jr. number as if it were the greatest thing they'd ever heard. Standing ovations followed virtually every song. Buoyed by this boisterous response, young Sinatra cranked it up a few notches and gave a rousing performance equal to the unexpected adulation. The entertainment press was alerted to the San Su San happening, captured the unrestrained enthusiasm in the room, and dubbed Frank Jr. a hit. That brought in the legitimate crowds and, no doubt, the elder Sinatra's ring-kissing gratitude. It wasn't the first or the last time Dad packed a house for a struggling entertainer, and if Dad had a good time, there was no favor to repay.
Blood Covenant Page 3