The pickets began with just a handful of people, including Colombo himself. That was unprecedented. Suddenly, one of the most powerful leaders of a legendary secret society had surfaced from the darkest shadows and was out in the open, walking a picket line and chatting with reporters. Colombo's two other sons, Vincent and Anthony, joined Joe Jr., out on bail, in supporting their father.
At the start of the second week of protests, someone handed me a sign to carry, which read, "I am the victim of FBI Gestapo tactics. My father was framed and is serving fifty years."
The clean-cut college freshman waving the sign was a natural for the media, so I received Colombo's blessing for giving interviews and talking about my father's case. A number of newspapers, including the New York Post, wrote feature stories about it.
Each day, as word of the street action spread, the number of picketers increased. Colombo reacted by creating an organization called the Italian-American Civil Rights League. The purpose of the group was said to be to combat stereotyping and ethnic slurs against Italians, particularly the belief that all Italians were mobsters. The fact that the group's leader was himself a bona fide Cosa Nostra don and might do more to foster the stereotypes than fight them was brushed aside.
The picketing went on for months. Colombo, a short, polished man with dark, thinning hair, was tenacious. As the ItalianAmerican Civil Rights League grew in numbers and popularity, his determination grew with it.
26
I walked the picket line every chance I could, attending biology, chemistry, Italian, English, and sociology classes at Hofstra in the mornings and picketing in the afternoons. We hounded the FBI agents as they moved in and out of their offices, cursed them, painted them as villains, and generally made them as uncomfortable as possible. I found it ironic that the tables had turned. Our family had suffered harassment by law enforcement officials for many years. Now we were harassing them. I loved it.
My involvement with the league had a second, subtler effect. I began striking up friendships with Colombo's soldiers and their associates, and they educated me on their operations and even offered me slices of the pie. I wasn't about to commit myself at that point. I still had plans of becoming a doctor, but I took it all in and stored it in the back of my mind for possible future retrieval.
A few months into the protests, I was standing in front of a nearby coffee shop one day with Mom and another woman when two men in a convertible approached. They slowed down as they drew near.
"Hey, you dago," they called and cursed me.
"Come over here," I yelled back.
Before anything could happen, a uniformed officer approached out of nowhere and grabbed me.
"You should get them," I said, pointing out the men in the convertible. "Why are you jumping on me?"
"Shut up, Franzese," the officer growled. "You're just a troublemaker. Get across the street with the rest of the greaseballs where you belong."
Twenty years of what I considered abuse from policemen suddenly spun like a scratched record through my mind. I felt my blood rush and my anger swell. I clenched my fist and threw a straight right that dropped the cop to the pavement. Within seconds, a half dozen officers were climbing all over me, throwing me against a storefront wall, and pounding me with their nightsticks. I fought them back as hard as I could, cursing and lashing out.
The officers finally subdued me and proceeded to snap a pair of handcuffs around my wrists. Then they stopped traffic on Third Avenue, ushered me across the street, and shoved me rudely inside a paddy wagon. I was on my way to jail, and I was only nineteen years old.
27
When Mom saw what was happening to me, she ran screaming to alert the other picketers. Joe Colombo was quick to act. He ordered the picketers to surround the vehicle in which I had been placed and prevent it from leaving the scene. For thirty minutes, the cops and the Italians had a tense standoff, with the mob demanding my release and the cops holding firm and refusing. Finally, Colombo relented, gave the signal, and the crowd dispersed. I was taken to the precinct station, photographed, fingerprinted, and placed in a cell.
Infused with anger and pumped with adrenaline, I couldn't help taunting the processing officers. For instance, a detective told me that my father was outside and wanted the keys to the car. Knowing that it was my grandfather, not my father, I answered that it wasn't true. My father wasn't out there, and I refused to hand over the keys to him. The detective went into the lobby, returned, and repeated the request. I again refused, insisting that I knew my father wasn't there. Finally, the detective caught on.
"Okay, wiseguy," he said, "your grandfather wants the keys to the car."
With that, I turned over the keys, but I couldn't resist the taunt, "I told you it wasn't my father!"
Within the hour, Barry Slotnick, a famous New York defense attorney, was in the station house arranging my release. Slotnick, at the time, was Colombo's attorney, and he retrieved me from the cell and escorted me to a waiting car. I was surprised to find that inside the car was Joe Colombo himself.
"Are you okay?" the boss asked.
"I'm fine," I said defiantly.
Colombo laughed.
"You're bold, kid. But you have to learn. You don't fight with cops. You can never win."
I shrugged.
Then Colombo did something that changed my life.
"You're a good kid," he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a button. "I'm making you a captain in the league."
The experience left me with a far greater sense of destiny than the small gesture might have indicated. I was impressed by Joe Colombo. I was impressed by the way he had commanded his forces to stall the paddy wagon and by the way he had dispatched a prominent attorney to handle things at the jail. For the first time, I was getting a feel for both the power and the "family" aspect of my father's mysterious life. The "family" had taken care of me, and I liked that.
What I had done that day, hitting a police officer, was a serious offense, and some have done hard time in prison for less. My case actually was much worse. I had assaulted a half-dozen officers and verbally abused them, and yet I was out of jail within the hour. The charges were later downgraded from felonious assault to harassment, and I was slapped with a small fine of $250.
I was impressed indeed.
28
When Dad learned of my arrest, his reaction was odd. The only thing that bothered him about it was that I had been identified in the newspapers as his stepson. "Where do they get this `stepson' stuff?" he growled over the phone from Leavenworth. "Why do they write that?"
I said I didn't know. I also didn't know why it bothered him so much-since it was true.
But where did I go from there? Despite my promotion within Colombo's fringe organization and my first taste of family power, I was quickly becoming disillusioned with the Italian-American Civil Rights League. I had joined solely to help Dad, and I wasn't seeing any progress on that front. When I visited him at Leavenworth and told him about what the league was doing, he cautioned me not to expect too much. As usual, he didn't spell out what he meant by that. What he knew and wasn't saying was that few of his associates were in a big hurry to see him get out of prison. With him in jail, the rest of them could move up a notch. And they could have a share of his former cut. In addition, Joe Colombo himself had to be breathing easier, for Dad's power had begun to rival that of the boss himself.
The press had touted my father as the future don, going so far as to proclaim him the real force behind the family. Although the newspaper stories said that his rise had come with Colombo's blessing and that he was being groomed to take over, those inside the mob knew differently. Dad wasn't being groomed for anything, except maybe a coffin or a prison cell. This explains why he advised me and Mom to focus on the legal details of his case instead of wasting time and energy with the false hope of help from Colombo's league.
Since Dad wouldn't explain this, I had to figure it all out for myself, and that took time. M
eanwhile, I was lost when it came to understanding the treacherous inner workings of the organization. It was hard to conceive of the fact that Dad's loyal confidants would turn their backs on him at a time like this.
A month later, at one of the league's Tuesday night meetings, my eyes were opened. Between scheduled speeches, a squat Jewish man with a gravelly voice stood and made an important point.
"What you are doing is great," the man said, "but what about Sonny Franzese? What's being done for him?"
I recognized the speaker as Artie Intrada, a friend of my father's outside the mob who often invited us over to his spacious home for Passover dinner. Intrada, a shop steward for the laborers' union in Manhattan, had slid me into the closed union the previous two summers so I could work in construction for union wages of $400 to $500 a week-not bad for a teenager.
Anthony Colombo was standing at the podium as Intrada spoke that night. After fumbling for a second, he started saying that my father was important and was to be remembered. Before he could finish, however, Joe Colombo sprang from his chair, took the microphone, and changed the subject. The boss signaled for Joey Brancato, who was responsible for Artie, to muzzle his charge. I watched in confusion as Brancato, the peg-legged war hero who had been my father's closest blood brother, removed Intrada from the meeting. Intrada later reported that he had been given a verbal thrashing.
Apparently, that wasn't punishment enough. Two months later, I received a call from Artie's hysterical wife. Through her sobs, she told me that her husband had been murdered. I drove to her house in Queens to see what I could do to comfort her.
29
At the funeral of Artie Intrada the following day in a temple on Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills, a friend of the Intrada family took me by the arm and ushered me up front. We stopped in front of a closed casket surrounded by red, yellow, and blue flowers.
"I want you to see what these animals did to Artie," the woman said, lifting the coffin lid.
I recoiled in shock. Artie's head was bluish purple and swollen to three times its normal size. Even his neck and hands were rubbed raw and bruised. The tough union steward had apparently gone down fighting. His body had been dumped among the flies and rotting fruit in a trash heap on a side street in Manhattan. Besides being beaten half to death, he had been shot once through the back of the head.
As I sat through the ceremony, the horrifying image of Artie's swollen face spun through my mind. I was further unnerved by the piercing wails of Artie's son, who, at four, was just old enough to sense that something terrible had happened. I stared at Artie's wife and his pretty teenage daughter, two formerly happy, outgoing women who now sat in a trance, the life drained from their faces.
The air was thick with grief and fear that seemed to radiate from the casket. I felt queasy and wanted to run outside into the fresh air. It was all I could do to make it through the sullen ceremony.
Few inside the temple understood what had happened. Artie had not just been murdered. His death was being used to send a message. My father's reign was over. He was in prison, where the family apparently wanted him to stay. And anyone who questioned this would end up in the garbage with Artie.
At the time, I refused to accept or believe what seemed obvious. But I immediately made reservations to fly to Kansas and consult with Dad, pushing up a scheduled visit two weeks.
"I couldn't even recognize him, Dad," I said in the visitors' area at Leavenworth. "Artie spoke out for you at the meeting, and they're saying that's why he was killed. Could it be true?"
"I don't know, Michael," he said with only a trace of emotion. "Could be. Could be that hurt him."
"Why?" I asked incredulously. "Why would they go that far? What's going on? Why did they do this?"
As always, Dad measured his words in the careful manner I sometimes found so frustrating. He always spoke as if every conversation, even those with his family, was being recorded by the FBI.
"Don't think that these people, this league of Joey Colombo's, don't think that they will do anything for me," he said. "You keep working with the lawyers."
On the plane back to New York, I struggled to comprehend what was happening. What mystified me were the actions of Joey Brancato. Joey would have given his life for my father without hesitation. How could he have turned? It would take years for me to understand. Brancato was a good soldier, and regardless of his decades of friendship and loyalty, if the word from the top was that Sonny was to rot in prison, that was the policy he must follow. This was the way of the family.
I continued being active in the league and continued believing the family that had so easily rescued me from jail could do the same for my father. I wasn't afraid that my efforts might cause me to suffer the same brutal fate as Intrada. A son was expected to fight for his father-at least until directly told to do otherwise.
30
The Italian-American Civil Rights League expanded rapidly, and by 1971, membership had soared into the thousands. Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Vic Damone, and Connie Francis, among others, lent their celebrity to the cause and gave benefit concerts to raise a war chest. The donations coming in totaled millions. Unwittingly, Joe Colombo had stumbled upon a vast new source of clean revenue. Italian pride apparently equaled big bucks.
But not everyone was overjoyed about what was happening. Colombo's bizarre social activism was frowned upon by the ruling commission of the five Cosa Nostra families. The remaining bosses, led by Carlo Gambino, were aghast at what Colombo was doing and that he was operating so openly. They were seeing him give interviews on the evening news and reading about him in the newspapers. They were also suspicious of what he was doing with the donations that were pouring in and that he wasn't sharing fairly with the other families.
In time, the commission met and ordered Colombo to curtail his civil rights activities and get back to the business of organized crime, but Colombo refused. Not only did he rebuff the commission, he made plans for the biggest gathering yet by organizing an Italian unity day rally for Columbus Day, 1971, at Columbus Circle in Manhattan.
Colombo nailed up posters and sent out a kingly proclamation that all stores in the surrounding area should close for the holiday-like celebration, but both Gambino and rival Colombo capo Crazy Joe Gallo ordered the stores to remain open. Gallo and his men went around ripping down the posters promoting the rally. The merchants, caught in the middle of a vicious tug of war, didn't know what to do. Most made their decision based upon whose men were in their store last.
On the morning of the rally, I was surprised when my mother decided not to attend. She was a longtime friend of Colombo, was active in the organization, and had been anticipating the big event. That all changed when she awakened that morning shaken by a vivid nightmare of Colombo being gunned down. She reasoned that if she went, it would happen as she had dreamed.
Others received more direct warnings.
"Don't go to the rally," Crazy Joe advised FBI agent Bernie Welsh, one of the few feds the mob guys respected. "There's gonna be a stampede."
Welsh reported the tip to his superiors and discovered that there was a loud buzz on the streets that something bad was going to go down during the event. The rumors proved correct.
31
When I arrived in the square that day, nearly fifty thousand people had gathered. Colombo, flush with victory, was standing at the podium, going over his speech and preparing for the grandest moment of his life. He spotted me and called me over. Handing me a stack of programs that outlined the afternoon's events, he asked me to distribute them.
"Look at this crowd," Colombo beamed. "Let them try and stop me now."
I nodded, turned, and was walking down the steps when I was suddenly rocked by two successive explosions. They were so loud that I instinctively covered my ears. My first thought was that someone had tossed a pair of bombs into the crowd, but I turned my head just in time to see Colombo drop to the floor.
"Joey's been hit! Joey's been hit!" someone y
elled.
Then I saw some men pounce on a black man clutching a pistol. The "explosions" had been only gunshots, but I had been so close to the discharging weapon that the sound had been deafening.
I heard two more bangs, almost as loud but from another direction. FBI agents on the scene later explained the second set of shots. In a scene reminiscent of Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, one of Colombo's soldiers had stuck a pistol through the legs of a policeman and blasted the black man while he lay handcuffed on the pavement. Once he had fired, the soldier dropped his gun and vanished into the crowd. Within seconds, a half dozen more revolvers bounced like live hand grenades on the pavement as Colombo's associates rid themselves of their guns before police backup could swoop in.
Meanwhile, the crowd screamed and ran in every direction, crashing into each other and nearly creating a deadly stampedejust as Crazy Joe had predicted.
My first thought was to find my sister Gia and my girlfriend, a blond Hofstra student named Maria. I spotted them standing dazed in the surging, panicked crowd near the stage and directed them into a nearby coffee shop. Ordering them to stay inside, I went back out to see if I could learn what had happened. The word among the family was that everyone should go home. Joe Colombo had been shot and was on his way to the hospital. He was alive, but barely. The man who had tried to assassinate him, Jerome Johnson, was dead. There was nothing more anybody could do.
I returned to the coffee shop, rounded up my charges, and drove them home. There I found Mom distressed both by Colombo's attempted assassination and by her eerie dream that had foreseen it.
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