Blood Covenant

by Michael Franzese

  His theatrics backfired. The judge and most of the gallery burst out laughing. Here I was, a twenty-two-year-old college kid, five-ten, one hundred sixty pounds, and I was supposed to be the big boss?

  The judge, stifling a laugh, admonished the prosecutor, "Are you sure you got your facts straight?"

  When it came my turn to speak, I was equally impassioned.

  "Your Honor, I'm going to college and trying to make a living. I don't know what I'm doing here. Every Friday, the cops come in and break down my door and stab guns in my face. Now I'm here with a bunch of guys I've never seen before in my life, and I'm their leader?"

  The judge was sympathetic, but not sympathetic enough. I was arraigned on a $25,000 bond.

  43

  The situation at the leasing office remained tense. At midweek, Morano and I had a brief argument. I had discovered that he had a weakness for gambling and had been skimming money from the business to support his habit. I'd overlooked it at first, but now I'd had enough.

  "You go back there in the shop and work it off," I said. "I don't want to see you in this office again."

  I installed Zimmerman and Frappolo as the leasing agents and went about business as usual. The plan was to send Morano a message and get him to stop his pilfering.

  Three days later, Friday afternoon, I arrived at the office with two of my father's friends, Jake and Vinnie Perozzi. As I went into the office, I saw that the place was crawling with police officers.

  "What's with you guys?" I said. "Every Friday you come to arrest me."

  I turned and looked for the Perozzi brothers, and they were nowhere to be seen. Although they had been only a step behind me, they were veteran players and had made the cops and disappeared without a trace.

  Zimmerman, Frappolo, and I were arrested and charged with coercion for attempting to squeeze Morano out of his business. The charge began to make everything clear. Morano, in deep with his gambling debts, had borrowed $10,000 from Philly Vizzari. Unable to pick a fast horse, he had squandered the loan. As a trade-off, he agreed to be wired in an attempt to set up both me and Vizzari.

  This explained the commotion the previous Friday. The detectives, listening in, had heard the Chubby Brothers going wild and making threats. They had swarmed in, only to discover that it was just two giant hotheads trying to collect a small debt. This also explained their long delay in filing charges. The whole elaborate setup had been intended to catch me. Instead, they had netted a separate gang. Figuring that their cover had been blown, they jumped on my disciplining of Morano and tried to cover their losses with the weak coercion charge.

  The whole Chubby Brothers incident turned out to be a lucky break for me. Had the brothers not bullied and blustered their way in that Friday and frightened the police into taking indeliberate action, Morano might have worn a wire around me for months, pressing me and goading me into doing something illegal. (I later became friends with Big Chubby and the rest of the guys.)

  At the precinct station, a grim-faced detective sat me down in an interrogation room.

  "If anything happens to Tony Morano, we're coming after you," he threatened.

  Weary of the harassment, I shot back, "I can't control what happens to liars."

  I paid yet another bail bond, this one for $10,000, and was released again.

  At 5:00 A.M. the following Friday morning, I was rocked out of the upper berth of the bunk beds I shared with my brother John by a voice blaring from a megaphone outside the house: "Michael Franzese, come out with your hands up."

  I looked out the window. The lawn was covered with the flashing lights of police cars. It looked like a discotheque, only these people weren't dancers but an army of police officers. A thought pierced my brain: Tony Morano must have been killed, and I'm going down for his murder.

  The next thing I saw was my mother outside on the porch.

  "He's not here," she lied.

  "We know he's in there," the megaphone responded. "We'll break the door down if he doesn't come out soon."

  "He's not here!" my mother defiantly repeated.

  Having been forced to clean and repair my office three times in as many weeks, I dreaded seeing the police bursting in and marching through the house. I pushed up the bedroom window and shouted, "I'm coming down. Just let me get dressed!"

  "You have five minutes," the response came.

  Outside, the officers roughly cuffed my hands behind my back. They were serious and nasty. I was more sure than ever that Tony Morano must be dead, and that I was being blamed for his murder.

  At the precinct house, I spotted Zimmerman and Frappolo sitting in a detective's office, leisurely drinking coffee and eating doughnuts. I couldn't believe it. Here I was, cuffed and shackled, and they were enjoying doughnuts?

  "What are you guys doing here? Having breakfast?" I inquired.

  "The police called us and told us to come down," Zimmerman said.

  What was more incredible was the upshot. I had been dragged out of bed and arrested merely because a second count had been added to the coercion indictment. It was something that could have been accomplished with the stroke of a pen and then mailed to my attorney. Instead, it had been decided that the blue army must invade under the cover of darkness, ready to break down the door and trample my mother's freshly raked carpets.

  It was no coincidence that all these arrests had occurred on Fridays. This is a common police tactic used when they want to get under someone's skin. Since judges work Monday through Friday, nine to five, like the majority of people do, a Friday arrest, especially a Friday afternoon arrest, results in a Monday arraignment, which means a weekend in jail for the suspects. There was definitely a method to their madness.

  44

  In 1974, I went to trial three times on the fur coat caper. Prior to the proceedings, Uncle Philly sold me out, blaming everything on me in an attempt to free himself from the charge. Visiting my father at Leavenworth, I informed him of his buddy Philly's "loyalty." The news infuriated him, but it didn't surprise him.

  "What did you think he was, a stand-up guy?" he said.

  "But he was always around the house. I called him Uncle Philly. I don't understand," I insisted.

  Dad just shrugged.

  I sensed my father's dismay over my legal problems, so to ease his mind, I tried passing it all off as "no big deal." But that only made him angrier.

  "No big deal! You see my clothes," he said, grasping his prison uniform. "You see these bars. You're telling me it's `no big deal'? You got more indictments at twenty-two than I've had in my entire life!"

  Calming down, Dad asked me how school was going, and that led to more bad news. I explained that I'd had too many distractions recently and wasn't able to concentrate on my studies. At that point, I confessed, it didn't look to me like I could handle the long grind of becoming a doctor, especially now with all the legal and financial problems resulting from my recent arrests.

  He looked away, for he knew in that moment that the sins of the father were being visited upon the son. He had been so proud when I legally took his name instead of Grillo's, but now the Franzese name was working to cripple me.

  Despite Philly's undermining my case, the charges against me were weak. The jury hung several times, 7-5, 10-2, and 11-1, all favoring acquittal. The fact that the case was tried a third time after a 10-2 acquittal vote was a legal rarity (and a waste of taxpayers' money), but it spoke of the prosecutors' intense desire to feather their caps with the conviction of another Franzese.

  During the third trial, Mom spotted an attractive young woman from the neighborhood on the jury. She was a substitute teacher who had taught my brother John and sister Gia. Mom alerted me, and I started giving the young woman the eye. We traded glances and smiles the whole time the trial was going on, and I figured that I was assured of another hung jury because of this.

  Unfortunately, Maria was a regular visitor to the courtroom. Near the end of the trial, I made the mistake of giving her a quick hu
g and kiss in view of the jury box. When the jurors were unofficially polled outside after the 11-1 verdict, it turned out that the only one who had voted to convict me was the substitute teacher I thought I had befriended.

  45

  The "Chubby Brothers" indictment went to trial in the hot summer of 1974. We were dubbed "the West Hempstead Seven" by the press. The prosecutor's case was even weaker than that of the fur coat caper. Even so, the trial became a major ordeal. With seven defendants and six attorneys, such mundane activities as choosing a jury took nearly a month.

  One problem was my dress and demeanor. I sat among my massive codefendants in a crisp suit and often entered the courtroom carrying my attorney's briefcase. The prospective jurors kept mistaking me for one of the lawyers.

  A few days into the trial, one of the jurors wrote the judge a disturbing note, and the judge promptly declared a mistrial. It was never revealed what the note said, but it's not hard to imagine. The juror must have suddenly realized he had a relative who knew one of the defendants, or something similar, and could therefore be considered biased. The result was that the attorneys had to start over.

  After another tedious period of jury selection, the trial chugged along in fits and starts. The courtroom was hot, and the stress was intense, and my hefty codefendants started dropping like flies. First the Chubby Brothers went down, fainting and hyperventilating. Then Jerry Zimmerman, Peter Frappolo, and the others fell ill. Everyone but me. The paramedics had to keep rushing in with oxygen, and this resulted in the judge delaying or canceling the proceedings for the day.

  "This trial must be sponsored by the Red Cross," someone cracked as yet another defendant plopped to the floor.

  At one point, the prosecutor made a dramatic announcement that someone had confessed and implicated a codefendant. A rumble was heard among the defendants. Zimmerman was certain it must be Frappolo. He began ranting in my ear.

  "I knew it. He's no good. I knew he wouldn't last. The man's a pathological liar. I knew he would break. Let me at him!"

  The prosecutor made his announcement. "The man who confessed is Jerry Zimmerman!"

  I nearly doubled over with laughter.

  Jerry shot up out of his chair and began screaming that it was a lie, that he was no rat. He was so agitated that he had to be restrained.

  As it turned out, the prosecutors had leapt to conclusions because of a vague statement the verbose Zimmerman had made during his police interrogation. It had not been a confession at all, and the judge promptly threw it out.

  The star witness of the trial was Tony Morano. I figured Morano was the state's entire case. Get to him, and the ball game would be over. My attorney didn't share this view and advised me against it. I chose to ignore this advice and had a friend set up a meeting with Morano.

  Tony was apologetic. He explained that he had gotten in deep with his gambling debts, was being squeezed by Philly, and saw no way out.

  "Don't worry," he assured me. "I'll bail you out of this. You watch."

  And Morano came through. He took the stand and doublecrossed the prosecutors by testifying in a manner that cleared me and virtually the entire gang.

  After that, all the Nassau County prosecutors had left were the tapes from Morano's body mike, and the quality of the recordings was terrible. The jurors could clearly hear the words "maim," "kill," "strangle," "murder," and "break you apart" as the Chubby Brothers performed their tough-guy tag-team act, but no one could fill in the gaps. And no one could determine who was threatening to kill or maim whom.

  When the tape evidence fell through, the prosecution's case started unraveling to an embarrassing degree. Before the prosecutors finished presenting their evidence, Zimmerman's and Frappolo's attorneys interrupted and moved that charges against their clients be dropped because of lack of evidence. When the prosecutors couldn't come up with a single reason the judge shouldn't grant the unusual motion, the two men were freed.

  After the prosecutors finished the state's case, my attorney made a similar motion, and the judge granted it as well. That left Big Chubby, Al Strauss, and Oscar Teitelbaum. (Little Chubby had been unable to complete the trial for medical reasons and was scheduled to be tried when he recovered.) The defense presented its case, and the whole gang was acquitted.

  The sad irony is that the person least involved, Oscar Teitelbaum, ended up doing time. Although he was acquitted, he had been just twenty-nine days out of jail when the cops invaded the leasing company. Consequently, the state slapped Oscar with a parole violation. All he had done was go for a ride with the Chubby Brothers. And what a long ride! It cost him two years of his life.

  The final indictment, the one based on the banishment of Morano to the body shop, eroded, and the prosecutors dropped the coercion charge down to a misdemeanor. I refused even the misdemeanor, and the prosecutors dropped it further, down to a violation. I paid a $250 fine, and the matter was ended.

  46

  Although I had successfully dodged a whole volley of law enforcement bullets, the damage to my businesses proved fatal. The bad publicity surrounding the arrests and trials, the six months spent fighting the case and the legal expenses involved dried up the leasing operation and caused us to lose our critical credit line. The body shop went down with it.

  My savings were all depleted, and I was suddenly down to my last $10. I sat in a Greek restaurant with Maria, scrutinized the menu, and tried to determine how we could both eat, tip the waitress, and stay within my limited budget. I found the need to think that way depressing, as I did the fact that I walked out of the restaurant with only thirteen cents in my pocket. That day I vowed never to have to face such an afternoon again.

  With some doors closing on me, another interesting one suddenly opened. Vinnie Vingo, a friend from the Italian-American Civil Rights League, was operating a bustling weekend flea market on the grounds of the Republic Field Airport in Farmingdale, Long Island. He asked me to help manage it and offered me a salary of $300 a weekend. I accepted and soon found the flea market to be a great opportunity.

  There were six hundred spots available in the flea market and a list of two thousand vendors trying to get in. Since I was in charge of handing out locations, I began fielding offers of $20 to $100 to reserve a prime spot. I told Vinnie about it, and we shared the bonus.

  But I had an even better plan. Many of the vendors who rent spaces needed money to replenish their stock, so I figured that the market was ripe for a good loan-sharking operation. Most of them were regulars whose livelihoods were tied to their slots, so they could be depended upon. I began farming out my salary, charging a point a week on any loan more than $1,000 ($10 a week until the principal was paid) and up to ten points on smaller loans in the range of $100 to $300.

  Although I had been repeatedly arrested, indicted, and brought to trial, this was the first time, aside from punching the cop, that I had ever broken the law. Still, lending money to momand-pop flea market vendors didn't make me feel that I was in the same league with Jack the Ripper. Truthfully, it didn't feel like crime at all. I looked at it as providing investment capital for my clients' small businesses. It was a service they happily lined up to take advantage of.

  I guessed right about the vendors' dependability. They were good customers, paid back their points on time, restocked their stands, and dutifully paid back their principals. Within six months, I was clearing $1,000 to $2,000 a weekend in shylock interest, and I could look at a restaurant menu again without worrying about having enough to pay the tab.

  The flea market shylock operation had a limited life. Police officials continued to track me and started snooping around Vinnie's market. That made Vinnie nervous. He didn't need the attention my presence attracted, especially since I was operating a lucrative loan-shark operation. He suggested that I take time off, and I didn't argue. Vinnie had done enough for me, and it was time to move on.

  47

  I decided to make an attempt at getting back into some legitimate business. The
auto business still intrigued me, and I now went in search of a bank or credit company to finance a new leasing operation. In the process, I kept hearing the same thingbanks preferred new-car dealerships, so I set about trying to get my hands on one. I put out feelers and got wind of a Mazda dealership on Main Street in Hempstead that was for sale. Mazda had introduced its bold new rotary engines in the early 1970s, but by 1974, the cars were dying with startling regularity. The problem proved to be faulty seals between the five pancake-like engine sections. As immobile Mazdas began littering the countryside, the public became wary of buying Mazdas, and business hit the skids.

  Because of this situation, I was able to buy the Hempstead dealership from a man named Joe Aveni for the fire-sale price of $75,000. I put down $25,000 (flea market shylock cash) and financed the rest. I then found a new partner, a wild kid named John Marshall who was making a mint with a fleet of "roach coach" sandwich trucks. I sold Marshall a partnership for $50,000 gleaned from the pockets of hungry workmen on construction sites. His money provided me with some working capital.

  The problem we faced now was how to make money with cars no one wanted, and the answer proved to be from factory warranties. While everyone was deserting Mazda, I saw gold hidden in all those broken-down cars. I refurbished the dealership's service area, beefed up the staff, and then phoned Mazda and said that I wanted my shop to be the main service point in the district.

  Mazda, fighting a public-relations disaster, was ready to stand behind its warranties and was paying dealerships $1,200 per car to repair the hemorrhaging seals. The materials cost next to nothing, and the repairs took about five hours. So, after paying the mechanics, there was still a profit of $900 on each repaired engine. Within weeks, our service bays were full, and we had broken-down cars backed up all over our lot.