She cashed her stack of checks and treated her family to dinner. It felt good, and she was able to delight them with stories about Fort Lauderdale and Miami Beach and her new boyfriend. But she couldn't tell them the whole truth-not even as much of it as she now knew. If she did, she was afraid, they would never allow her to return to Florida-and to me.
96
The Knights of the City wrap party was the high point of my professional life. All the forces that had molded my past and those that would direct my future converged during the glittery event staged at a Fort Lauderdale skating rink.
Although the $2 million, independently-produced movie was small by Hollywood standards, the wrap party was first-rate. I was still new to the movie business, but I was a pro at throwing parties. I spent more than $150,000 on food, spotlights, liquor, and decorations. The local media was invited to the all-night event and turned out in force, blinding everyone in the bright lights of the television cameras and flash photography. To add to the festive atmosphere, the big dance numbers from the movie were displayed on giant screens around the room throughout the evening.
Also present were most of my crew, including Michael Markowitz and a contingent of his Eastern European men. The combination Hollywood/Cosa Nostra/Russian affair made for some unusual scenes. Not only was I fawned over by the movie's cast and crew and all the wannabes who conned invitations, but for the first time in Florida, I was openly honored in Cosa Nostra fashion by a squadron of men greeting me with the traditional kiss on the cheek. Any intelligent person observing this should have immediately noticed that something was out of kilter. Few, if any, did. Movie parties have always been strange affairs-even under normal circumstances.
Cammy had returned to Miami earlier that afternoon. I picked her up at the airport, and we drove to my home in Delray Beach. There she changed into one of her favorite dresses, a traditional Mexican style with lots of colorful layers, and she said she felt like Cinderella going to the royal ball.
At the party, Cammy bumped into a large, graceful man who turned and smiled. It was Muhammad All. Across the room, she spotted Emmanuel Lewis, the little fellow who starred in TV's Webster. She spent half the night talking with her dancer friends and the other half by my side. She was too immersed in her "Cammy in Wonderland" dream to notice anything out of the ordinary.
Several local politicians gave speeches. Archdiocese of Miami Auxiliary Bishop Agustin Roman presented me with a Bible signed by Pope John Paul II, praising me for offering jobs and hope to disadvantaged youth. The bishop had arranged for the signing when he read about the movie in the Miami Herald.
The entire night was a great victory celebration, but that victory was about to be spoiled. Early in the morning, about 4:00 A.M., a substitute publicist informed me that a crew from the Miami NBC affiliate, WSVN, had waited all night for a chance to interview me. I had been cautious about doing interviews that evening because my regular publicist, Richard Frisch, was out sick. Frisch was under strict orders to screen all requests, to weed out the knowledgeable New York media, along with any non-entertainment journalists who might be snooping around. The substitute publicist pleaded the case for the patient WSVN crew, and I relented. I grabbed Zimmerman, and we were both wired for sound and placed under the bright lights. We expected to field some fluff questions pertaining to the movie.
Only this crew was not from the local NBC affiliate. These were top guns from NBC news. Instead of a puff-piece entertainment reporter, the correspondent was Brian Ross, a tough network investigative journalist.
After a few polite questions, Ross zeroed in on his real subject.
"Michael, isn't it true that you are the stepson of Sonny Franzese, an underboss in the Colombo crime family, and that you yourself are the capo in that family?"
"What?" I asked.
"And isn't it true that you are financing this movie with stolen gas tax money?"
I fought to stay cool because I knew my reactions were being taped.
"And Jerry," Ross said, turning to Zimmerman, "isn't it true that you are a convicted felon, convicted of perjury?"
"I'm not taking this," Zimmerman snarled, losing his composure.
The big man stood up, unclipped the microphone from his shirt, and walked away.
Ross turned his attention back to me.
"The FBI says you are a member of the Colombo Mafia family."
"The FBI can allege and say whatever they like," I answered as coolly as I could under the circumstances. "They've been doing this for many, many years."
When Ross tried to continue, I gently cut him off.
"Mr. Ross, it's very late, and it's been a long night. If you would like to continue this interview at another time, I'll be happy to accommodate you."
He ordered the cameras to follow me as I walked away, and in the process, a late-arriving underling greeted me with a kiss. I cursed the bad timing. When the television lights shut off, I located the publicist and chewed him out royally. I then scolded my inner circle for allowing a network bulldog to walk in undetected.
Cammy had observed what had happened from across the room, but she hadn't been close enough to hear Ross' revealing questions. Judging from my reaction, she feared it was something terrible, so she asked to go back to the Konover immediately. I had Louie Fenza drive her.
When I arrived at the room about an hour later, Cammy didn't ask me for details, and I didn't volunteer any. I also didn't warn her of what it all meant. Ross was obviously being fed information by a New York prosecutor, probably Rudolph Giuliani or one of his assistants, and had come to Florida to prepare a report on a pending indictment.
I instructed my attorney to contact NBC and arrange another interview, wanting to have my say, but more importantly, wanting to know what information Brian Ross had. He subsequently interviewed me for an hour at my Houston Holdings office. I denied that I was a mob captain and said that the movie was being legitimately financed. I also denied that my father was in the mob. Ross deleted all my comments when the damning segment aired on NBC news a few weeks later. It was the first of a half-dozen network news reports about me that would be broadcast over the next twelve months. The walls of my underworld existence were starting to crack.
What now?
97
When the film wrapped, I felt unusually vulnerable and wanted Cammy to remain close. I encouraged her to stay with me in Delray Beach longer than she had planned. When she was around, I was able to forget, at least temporarily, the serious charges I knew were pending.
After a few weeks, Cammy went back to California and I returned to New York. I felt tense and agitated there, however, and I was being followed everywhere I went, so I decided to go to California to see her. California was even farther from New York than Florida, and that was an added advantage. I checked into the Westwood Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles, called Cammy, and asked her to meet me there that evening. In the meantime, I had a meeting with some of my people.
When my meeting ended, I rushed to my room to see Cammy, but she wasn't there.
"In here," a voice echoed from the bathroom.
I laughed when I saw her standing in the dry bathtub, marveling at its huge size. It was the biggest bathtub she'd ever seen. I jumped in and hugged her tightly.
"I missed you so much!" I said, kissing her all over her beautiful face. "What have you done to me? What have you done to my life? I can't think. I can't work. How did this happen?"
I withdrew from the embrace long enough to lead Cammy out of the tub over to the dresser. There I removed a long, black felt box and handed it to her. Inside was a gold necklace with the word "Michael's" spelled out in fat diamonds, including the apostrophe. She nearly fainted.
"For me?" she asked, clearly delighted with the gift.
- 98
I had suspected from the start that Cammy didn't live in Beverly Hills, but when I parked my green Jaguar sedan in front of her parents' house in Anaheim, I had to look around a few times before leaving the ca
r. The neighborhoods had steadily declined in quality as she had directed me through Anaheim, where her family had moved from Norwalk. For Cammy, the perspective was entirely different: it could have been a lot worse. She could have been taking me to one of her former homes in the Norwalk barrios.
The Garcia house was small and overflowing with people. There were nine members of the immediate family, plus a swarm of friends and relatives. Cammy's brothers and their friends were break-dancing in the garage. Although it was crowded, it was a lively, happy place that obviously was the center of neighborhood activity.
I took Cammy's parents out to dinner that night to a spruced-up Black Angus in Anaheim, and there I spent a great deal of time talking with her father. He told me that when he had been a teenager, he had lost five teeth and had been shot in the leg when a gang of Mexican-born drug pushers ambushed him and his friend Alex Moreno after a New Year's Eve party in San Diego in 1959. His face had been slashed with a straight razor and his chest gashed with a flattened can opener. His teeth had been dislodged by a gang member wielding a lead horseshoe stake. The drugged sociopath had been about to crush his skull when Moreno whipped out a .22 pistol and shot him in the stomach. Moreno shot a second pusher in the groin before the gang scattered.
A one-hundred-fifty-pound, fifteen-year-old Moreno then lifted Seferino's bleeding, one-hundred-sixty-pound body from the pavement and carried him six blocks through a thick fog to Seferino's sister Eva's house. There the teenager hid his gun in the toilet tank, along with the .38 Seferino had never gotten out of his belt. Although Moreno had saved Seferino's life, the police were not impressed. He was convicted and forced to do eighteen months in a tough youth prison for his heroics.
Seferino told me he'd ducked the police by traveling across the border to Tijuana and giving a horse doctor a few pesos to carve the bullet from his leg. The doctor had done it without anesthesia while Seferino screamed in pain. Seferino told the veterinarian he'd been shot by the border patrol. He returned to San Diego and was brought to Paradise Valley Hospital, where doctors mended his face, mouth, and chest with 160 stitches. He told the American doctors that he'd gotten into a fight while in Mexico.
After he healed, Seferino said, he plotted his revenge. He hunted the remaining gang members down like an urban terrorist. He and a friend cornered one in the lights of his friend's 1955 Chevy, knocked him down, then ran over his legs, crushing them. Tipped that another gang member had been arrested and was going through heroin withdrawal at the San Diego Jail, Seferino had himself brought in and jailed on a minor charge. When he had located the sick and emaciated drug addict, he beat him nearly to death.
It was some story, and Cammy's father had the scars on his face and leg to back it up. After hearing all this, I was even more convinced that when the truth came out about who I was, this family would not be dismayed by it, although Cammy did not personally condone the type of activity her father was describing.
After dessert, I floored everyone by making a little speech. "I want to thank you for allowing Cammy to come to Florida. I love your daughter very much, and I intend to marry her."
Cammy nearly dropped her fork. The first chance she got, she confronted me.
"You didn't tell me you were going to say that, Michael!"
"I didn't intend to," I assured her. "It just came out. Now I really have to marry you," I joked.
99
After visiting the cramped Garcia home, I decided that Cammy needed her own apartment, and we spent the rest of the week looking at condominiums around West Los Angeles. Every one of them looked perfect to Cammy, but I was more exacting. Finally, I chose an expensive unit in Brentwood, an exclusive area on the west side of L.A. near the beach.
With that done, it was time to bring Cammy to New York so she could be with me while I took care of things there. I put her up at a hotel in Garden City, Long Island. The first morning, I left her a note along with an envelope. The note encouraged her to amuse herself shopping while I worked. Inside the envelope were twenty $100 bills.
"Shopping?" she told me later. "I could buy a store with all that! I could live on that!"
I next rented a small, one-bedroom unit in the Fairhaven Apartment complex in Woodbury, Long Island, and moved her into it. I explained the coziness by telling her, "When I'm in the living room, I want to be able to see you in every room."
Soon afterward, I came home one day with an American Express card with Cammy's name on it. She had once said that her dream was to have a credit card.
"This is for you," I said. "Buy whatever you want."
Just touching the cool green plastic seemed to send a charge through her body. She couldn't believe that the card had her name on it, but there it was-in raised plastic letters.
I was a little afraid that Cammy would get what I called the financial bends. We were heading into our third month together, and she already had a condo in Brentwood, an apartment on each coast, and a magical American Express card. Or at least it seemed magical to her. No matter what she bought or how much she spent, the bills seemed to vanish into the stratosphere.
But I couldn't help myself. It made me feel very good to buy her things. I wanted to give her everything, to fulfill her every dream. That's how madly in love with her I was.
100
After spending a few weeks in California, I was at the Los Angeles airport preparing to fly to New York. I phoned my secretary, and she told me that two men I knew, financier Mel Cooper and Dr. Jesse Hyman, had been arrested with half a dozen others for loan-sharking and racketeering. Included among the others was a rabbi, Chaim Gerlitz, fifty-three, a cantor and teacher at Temple Israel in Great Neck, Long Island.
When I arrived at Kennedy International Airport in New York, Frankie Cestaro was there to pick me up. Two men approached us the instant we left the terminal.
"Michael Franzese, you're under arrest," one of them said.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"FBI," was the answer.
Within seconds, a dozen more agents materialized and surrounded me. I emptied my pockets of my wallet, money, and keys and gave them to Frankie.
"Call Cammy," I told him. "Tell her I've been arrested and I'll talk to her later tonight. Tell her not to worry."
A three-car FBI caravan ushered me from the airport. I was surprised to see the cars head toward Manhattan instead of Brooklyn or Long Island, where I would normally have been arrested (and where the joint task force operated).
"What's this all about?" I asked.
"We're arresting you in the Jesse Hyman case," the lead agent said.
"Are you kidding?" I responded. "What have I got to do with that?"
The agent didn't answer.
When I learned the charges against me, I was amazed. I had been hit with seven counts of loan-sharking and racketeering based upon a Lake Success, Long Island operation run by Cooper, Hyman, and the rabbi. It almost made me laugh. I was reportedly stealing $100 million a month in gasoline taxes, and here's Rudy Giuliani and his Southern District forces trying to toss me into somebody else's loan-sharking indictment.
Actually, the indictment proved to be more complicated than I realized. The Southern District was apparently trying to jump the gun on the Michael Franzese Task Force, the investigative army that I still wasn't aware of.
Cammy was at her parents' in Anaheim when Frankie called.
"Cammy, Michael's been arrested. He's in jail."
"Why? What for?"
"He'll explain when he bails out. He's okay. He just doesn't want you to worry."
Cammy initially took the call in stride. After all, her father had been arrested eight times, and some of her uncles had been arrested and jailed. So it wasn't a total shock to get a call saying that her fiance had been arrested. She viewed this as she had come to view everything having to do with me: I would take care of it, and everything would be perfect again.
I put up my Brookville home, where Maria and our three children were living, to cover the
$350,000 bail bond slapped on me, and was released within hours of the arrest. I called Cammy and was surprised at how well she was taking it. It wasn't until later that I realized she had figured my arrest would be like those of her father and uncles. They had gone to jail for a day or so, and that was the end of it. My trial was certain to be long, grueling, and stressful for all of us.
101
The next day Cammy caught a jet to New York. Once she arrived, I sat her down and tried to explain why I had been arrested. She didn't understand what either racketeering or loansharking meant. I explained that racketeering was a pattern of at least two criminal acts committed within a ten-year period. Loan-sharking, I said, was lending out money at unlawfully high rates of interest. I passed these both off as "white collar" charges that businessmen often get slapped with and assured her that they were false charges.
My first move in my defense was to take a shot at trying to talk my way out of the still-pending indictment. I had been arrested on "an information," a legal maneuver that allows police and prosecutors to round up and process suspects prior to the actual indictment. Such a policy gives them the critical element of surprise. The twenty-one-day gap between arrest and indictment offered me room to prepare a defense strategy.
I contacted my attorney, Harold Borg, and had him schedule an appointment with prosecutors Bruce Baird and Aaron Marcu, and FBI agent Stanley Nye. At the meeting, Borg and I spoke for two hours trying to convince our adversaries that I was innocent and should not be indicted. They all listened attentively and took notes.
While awaiting the prosecutors' decision, I received a call from infamous attorney and fixer Roy Cohn. Cohn said that he could help me and invited me to his Manhattan office to talk. With dramatic flourish, Cohn assured me he could get the indictment dropped.
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