Blood Covenant

by Michael Franzese

  This airing of our dirtiest laundry in public was terribly embarrassing, but Dad seemed to take it in stride. He advised everyone who called to appear before the grand jury and tell the truth. The police and prosecutors surely knew that nothing of substance would result from this tedious and expensive effort, but in the annals of government harassment, it was a move worthy of the Guinness Book of World Records.

  A few weeks before I turned eighteen, Dad called me into his room and handed me some legal papers.

  "You're changing your name," he said. "It's all been taken care of. I want you to go see the lawyers."

  I found it peculiar that he hadn't asked me if I wanted to change my last name to Franzese. In fact, I did, and I was overjoyed that he had arranged it. Still, I was curious about why he hadn't asked me first.

  Especially right then. The previous year, the Franzese name had been back in the headlines as we suffered through a series of highly publicized trials, the charges ranging from extortion to murder. A law enforcement blitz led to a further spate of newspaper and magazine articles starring my father as a mob kingin-waiting. I again fought to ignore the stories, ignore the stares of my classmates and the insults of the policemen, and lead a normal teenage life. I had, for the most part, succeeded.

  I wasn't nearly as successful in ignoring the effects of the trials themselves. The court proceedings and their aftermath made a very deep impression on me, one that would eventually alter the course of my life.

  21

  My father's downfall began with the arrests of four low-level bank robbers in 1965 and their implication of him in a case in which he was, strangely enough, innocent. Two of these bank robbers, John Cordero and Charles Zaher, were heroin addicts, and the other two, Jimmy Smith and Richard Parks, were criminals of minimal style. Their modus operandi was to sweep into a targeted bank, freeze everyone in the sights of their guns, and send Smith, the designated "jump man," bounding over the counter to grab all the loose cash he could. Then they'd split, usually in a waiting car driven by Zaher or Cordero's wife, Eleanor. The fact that the critical "wheel man" was often one of the heroin addicts didn't speak well for the group's mental abilities. After completing a half-dozen or so of these reckless robberies, the gang had grown important enough to be targeted by an opportunistic snitch. Their arrest was the first step in what would be a classic example of the criminal food chain.

  In prison, the four bank robbers banded together and decided to do some snitching of their own. They agreed to offer up a midlevel mob associate named Tony Polisi as their mastermind. Polisi was promptly arrested, tried, and convicted.

  But the bank robbers were not happy. They had been cooperative, but what they got in return was rather small. Although some time was shaved off of their sentences, they still faced long years in prison. It was never hard to surmise what happened next. Their comrades in prison no doubt chided the robbers for having played their trump card for so small a pot. If you're going to sell somebody out, the jailhouse logic goes, you might as well sell out somebody big and go for a reduction of the entire sentence.

  It wasn't long before the four robbers called the prosecutors back into their cells and said it was all a mistake. Tony Polisi had only been an errand boy. Sonny Franzese was the real mastermind. On the basis of this testimony, Dad was arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit bank robbery, and he was given the police treatment afforded mob superstars. Everywhere he went, from booking rooms to court hearings to jail cells, he was escorted by a dozen or more shotgun-toting, uniformed officers, prison guards, police detectives, or federal agents.

  The charges against Dad were difficult for us to believe. It was unthinkable that he would have thrown in with a band of drug addicts and losers. I didn't realize it then, but the two heroin addicts were proof of his innocence in this matter.

  A strictly enforced La Cosa Nostra policy at that time forbade a member's involvement with narcotics, under penalty of death. And Dad was unfailingly loyal to his La Cosa Nostra oath. This is illustrated by a story I learned years later. When Buddah Records began coming unglued, Dad could have marched in and taken over. Inwardly, he would have liked nothing better. He enjoyed the music scene, with its stars and excitement, and the entertainment business had long been a source of relatively clean income. Buddah was a money factory, and, as I said earlier, Dad was a close friend of the owners. Still, when the lucrative record company was at its most vulnerable, Dad backed off. The reason for this was that his friend, Buddah co-founder Phil Steinberg, had gotten himself addicted to speedballs, a potent combination of pharmaceutical speed and cocaine.

  "When I became an addict, any plans Sonny and the Mafia had for Buddah Records disappeared," Steinberg confirmed. "They used to be everywhere, all over the building. Then boom, they vanished. We had our corporate throats exposed, and suddenly they were gone"

  Unfortunately for my father, such dramatic testimony could not be offered at his trial. In the cagey world of the law, defense attorneys would never consider going into court and saying that their client had sworn a blood oath to the mob that forbade him to have any dealings with drugs or drug addicts. Nor would the attorneys add that if such were the case, the jury need not trouble itself with a verdict. If the accusation were true, then my father's own "family" was sworn to swiftly enact the death penalty upon him. Such a courtroom strategy would have been too risky and far too subtle for a jury to comprehend. The legal rule of thumb back then was that if it came out during the trial that the accused was a mobster, the jury would convict-regardless of how the facts of the actual case stacked up. This did not bode well for my father.

  22

  The trial commenced, and the four felons repeated their synchronized stories about meeting with Dad in a Long Island motel room in July 1965 so he could map out their reckless bank robberies. Few people believed this testimony, not even the journalists who had hounded my father for years

  "That's not the way it's done," flatly stated Newsday's Bob Greene. "The guys at Sonny's level, they insulate themselves. They have a soldier deal directly with robbers. Even if he were involved, he would have worked through an intermediary."

  Greene had said something similar in his story "The Hood in Our Neighborhood": "Franzese follows a basic Cosa Nostra policy of protection, police say. It is a policy called insulation. The man who makes book or robs a motel is five persons removed from Franzese himself. Franzese gives the orders over a public phone or in a walking conversation, and they are then transmitted down the line through three to seven people before they reach the man who commits the actual criminal act.

  "So even if the criminal is caught, it would require three to seven people to admit that the original orders had come from Franzese. Somewhere along the line, one of those people would keep silent. This, authorities say, accounts for the inability of law enforcement agencies to imprison him for crimes they know he is masterminding."

  Many years later, Greene stated, "It's my own personal feeling that the testimony was entirely out of context. Having seen the way Sonny operated in the past, having investigated him, and having talked with law enforcement officials who had Sonny under surveillance, it just didn't add up. Sonny was extremely careful. He was the rising star in the Colombo family. At the time, the family was in disarray, and Sonny was the guy everyone expected to straighten it out and emerge as the boss. He had brains, he conducted himself with dignity, and he was highly regarded among his associates. For him to do something like that, sitting down with a bunch of flaky guys, masterminding minor bank robberies, something so out of control like that, it didn't fit.

  "Sonny was one of the highest-profile mobsters around at the time. He was being written about a great deal and was being looked on as a comer. The feds might have targeted him."

  Another Newsday reporter, the late Tom Renner, monitored the trial and sat in on some of the testimony. Renner, regarded as one of the foremost organized crime writers and authors in the nation, supported his colleague's view. />
  "I was shocked-really shocked," he said. "That was not Sonny's bag. He didn't get involved with clowns like that. He had such a strict sense of carefulness on who he dealt with and how he dealt with them. This was low-level crime, and Sonny was a high-level criminal. Gambling. Entertainment. Bookmaking. He wasn't a two-bit bank robber. It didn't make sense, and it still doesn't make sense."

  The government tried the case, the bank robbers testified, and the defense attorneys did their best. But in the end, Dad was convicted. Judge Jacob Mishler completed the dispensation of justice by sentencing my beloved father to fifty years in prison.

  This was an extremely harsh sentence. In early 1990, a judge in Phoenix, Arizona, sentenced a bank robber to no jail time at all, just 240 hours of community service.

  "Fifty years is definitely a long sentence for bank robbery," Greene said. "Sonny got the years because of who he was. Back then it was different. That was before the Godfather movies came out and humanized the Mafia. Before that, they were thought of as inhuman thugs who had to be put away. The Godfather was the best thing that happened to the Mafia."

  Marlon Brando and Al Pacino came along five years too late to help Dad. The general feeling was that justice had been served, and the details were said to be unimportant. A "bad man" got what was coming to him, a "bad man" the government feared was becoming too big and powerful. He was being put away for the rest of his life so that he could not later emerge and continue his climb up the ranks.

  It was a big win for the guys in the white hats, but no one considered the impact the trial and its proceedings would have on a teenage boy who watched part of the trial from a seat in the front row. At the time, I was an honor student heading to college and medical school and a career as a doctor.

  I had struggled all my life with the confusing concepts of good and evil and how they related to our family. I idolized Dad, and despite the fact that the newspapers had often said that he was a criminal, I refused to believe it. I knew him as good. I knew him as the strong, honorable man I saw every night at the dinner table, the man who treated my often demanding mother so tenderly, and who loved my brothers and sisters so intensely, the man who embraced an insecure stepchild and treated him as a blood son.

  If he was evil, then I wanted proof. I wanted to see facts presented that would show who was right and who was wrong. I wanted to see for myself who was just and who was unjust. Surely a trial in an American courtroom would serve that purpose.

  I sat in that courtroom and waited for evidence of the alleged evil that justified portraying my father as such a horrible man in the eyes of the whole world. I waited, and it never came.

  I also wanted to see, in comparison, the good in the upstanding citizens who were pitted against my father-the judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers. I had to understand who was right and who was wrong so that I could know which side to choose.

  Sadly, what I observed during the trial were federal judges and prosecutors who accepted without question the improbable and self-serving statements of junkies and robbers. I heard police officers and FBI agents swearing to God to tell the truth in a court of law and then telling lies so transparent that even a teenage boy could see through them. The trial left me totally confused.

  Later, I listened as my father's associates spoke of a system that worked on the theory that the ends justified the means. I listened, and I remembered.

  23

  Within months of his bank robbery conviction, while free on appeal, my father was arrested again. This time the charges were much more serious-murder.

  Dad was held in jail without bond and brought to trial, charged with ordering the 1964 gangland slaying of veteran hit man Ernie "the Hawk" Rupoli. The Hawk had been shot six times, stabbed twenty-five times, bound, fitted with cinder blocks, and buried in the waters off a Long Island beach. Despite this "expert" work, his mangled body had surfaced three weeks later.

  Dad swore that he had never even heard of the man. The witnesses against him were the same four bank robbers who had testified against him in the previous trial. And after deliberating for only three hours-a very short time for a three-week murder trial-the jury found him and his codefendants innocent. His friends gathered at our house, and we threw a big champagne party to welcome him home.

  The next morning, and every morning afterward for the following six weeks, Dad awakened at six, as he had been forced to do in jail. He'd walk down the hall into our bedroom and wake me in the upper bunk. He used the ruse that he needed someone to make coffee (Mom being a late sleeper) and designated me for this task. I suspected that he was just lonely, so I never complained. I loved spending the quiet morning hours alone with him, watching the sunrise, talking sports, trading jokes, laughing, and telling stories. By the second week, my eyes would pop open at 5:45 A.M. as I eagerly awaited Dad's summons to the coffee machine.

  His court victory didn't stop the prosecutors in an adjacent district, Nassau County, from trying to get some headlines of their own. Also using some of the same bank robbers as witnesses, they charged my father with masterminding a particularly heinous home burglary that had been highlighted by the robbers tying up the children in the basement. Dad was infuriated that he would be linked to a crime against children, but he also understood that the bigger the smear, the better the chance of conviction against him.

  He decided that Mom should stay out of the courtroom this time. He didn't want to risk any more stories about her threatening the witnesses with hand gestures. I took her place and watched most of the proceedings, usually sitting up front with a Colombo family capo named Joey Brancato, a World War II hero with a wooden leg.

  As the jury announced its decision, Brancato was so nervous his peg leg began knocking loudly against the bench. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight.

  The jury found Dad not guilty. He turned around and winked, embraced his attorney, then walked from the defense table and hugged me. Outside the courtroom, Dad, Brancato, and I waited for the jury so that we could thank each member individually. One of the jurors, an older, gray-haired man, walked over to me and said, "You take care of that father of yours and keep him out of trouble."

  It was a very large order, one that I was incapable of obeying.

  24

  Dad's attorneys managed to delay his bank robbery sentence for three years while they appealed the case. During that time, Mom worked feverishly trying to gather evidence that would reverse the verdict. But as hard as she tried, she couldn't come up with anything to sway the judge.

  On Holy Thursday, 1970, when I was nineteen, the day of reckoning finally arrived, for Dad's lawyers had exhausted all but one appeal, and a ruling on that final appeal was imminent.

  Before my father left home that day, he took me aside.

  "They might remand me today, Michael," he said, using the legal term for being handed over to the prison system. "If they do, I'm depending on you to take care of your brothers and sisters and mother for me."

  As he expected, his appeal was rejected. He was taken into custody and transported to Leavenworth, Kansas, where he began a fifty-year sentence for a crime he never committed.

  The whole family was stunned. Our beloved father and husband had remained free on bail for so long after the initial conviction that we had come to believe he would probably never have to serve time. Following the first trial, there had been two court victories and big, post-verdict celebratory bashes. It was now hard to comprehend that the long-forgotten, bogus bank robbery conviction, which seemed like little more than a bad dream, could take him from us. I drove around and around the neighborhood that afternoon trying to come to grips with my grief.

  By then I was in my first year of premed studies at Hofstra University, and classes had finished for the day. After driving around aimlessly for a while, I somehow found my way to my grandfather's house. There I searched the backyard barbecue cabinet until I found a pocked and fading pink rubber ball in a drawer where my grandfather kept paper pla
tes and plastic forks, and I began throwing it against the chimney.

  I did this softly at first, then harder and harder, until the ball hit the ledge with such force that it sailed over the neighbor's seven-foot hedges. I didn't bother to search for the tunnel I had burrowed through the hedges when I was younger in order to retrieve errant rebounds. I had other things on my mind.

  "Five points, Dad," I said to myself in a voice choked with emotion. "We'll get you out. I won't rest until we do."

  25

  Returning home, I was dismayed to realize that my parents had never sat any of the children down and prepared them for this moment. Dad had walked out of the house that morning and had never come back, and we would each have to deal with this loss in our own way.

  With Dad behind bars, Mom began working even harder to dig up some nugget of evidence that could prove he had been framed, but her understanding of the often frustrating intricacies of the law was limited. In her eagerness, she had her attorneys rush into the courtroom with motions based on bits and pieces of evidence that appeared important to her but that, in reality, held little legal value. We all tried to get her to slow down and let the attorneys build a better case, but she wouldn't listen. From her perspective, the frame-up that had put our father behind bars was so obvious and the evidence in his defense was so compelling, why make him sit in jail one day longer?

  While we debated among ourselves what our next move should be, I received a call from Joey Brancato. He said that family boss Joe Colombo was furious over the FBI's arrest of his son, Joe Jr., on the flimsy charge of melting coins for their silver content. Colombo was planning to counterattack by picketing the FBI's Manhattan office at Sixty-Ninth Street and Third Avenue, and, Brancato said, Colombo wanted Mom and me to join him.