Blood Covenant

by Michael Franzese

  "I'm good friends with Ed Meese," he said, strutting about and dropping the name of the current attorney general. "I have contacts everywhere. It'll be a snap. I'll need $50,000 cash up front and then $200,000 when the indictment is dropped."

  "I'll tell you what," I countered. "I'll give you $500,000 if you can get the indictment dropped. But you get nothing up front."

  Cohn continued to demand the advance. Suspecting that it was nothing but a cheap hustle, I held firm in my position.

  "I'm offering you twice what you wanted," I explained. "All you have to do is wait a few weeks. If you can do what you claim, that should be acceptable."

  I never heard from Cohn again.

  Neither Cohn's alleged connections nor my arguments before the prosecutors had any effect. I was indicted along with the others.

  When I read the indictment, I was surprised to discover that I was again portrayed as Mr. Big-just as I had been in my college days. I was accused of providing most of the money-more than a million dollars-and the muscle for the loan-sharking operation.

  The seriousness of the charges was not to be underestimated. Regardless of my innocence, I faced one-hundred-forty years in prison if convicted.

  As I studied the names of my codefendants, the confusion started to lift. There appeared to be two separate groups involved in the case. The first was a band of eight men, headed by four Jews. The second group was a disconnected mix of seven Italians. From what I could tell, the Jewish group, including the rabbi, had the greatest exposure. It was their operation. The Italians, which included several made men and associates from four of the five New York Cosa Nostra families, were probably innocent, or at least well-insulated. I guessed that the Italians had been swept in at random for their publicity value. Indict four Jews and the media yawn, but salt the proceedings with seven Italian gangsters and the press goes wild.

  Despite the arrest, or maybe because of it, my whirlwind romance continued unabated. I took Cammy to Las Vegas at the end of August to celebrate her twentieth birthday. We stayed at the Sands Hotel, and I told her to pick out anything she wanted at the gift shop, and I'd win the money to buy it. She chose a molded metal sculpture of a circus wagon and various animals pulling it. The price was $1,000. Twenty minutes and a few blackjack hands later, I had the grand and then some, and she had her memento.

  Later that evening, as we looked at the stars from my penthouse suite, an unusual series of patterned lights hovered high in the distant sky. It appeared to us to be a UFO, and it also attracted the attention of the local newspaper and everyone who could pull himself away from the gaming tables.

  "I had it fly by just for your birthday," I joked to Cammy as we watched the unearthly looking phenomenon.

  102

  Back in New York, I worked feverishly on my case, often arriving home late in the evening. Cammy invited her younger sister Sabrina to fly to New York to keep her company. My late evenings and frequently delayed dinners began to grate on the sisters. I promised to make it up to them one night by cooking a special pasta dish. When I arrived home two hours later than promised, however, Cammy coldly told me not to bother.

  In that moment, I had a rare loss of cool.

  "Don't you realize I'm fighting for my life here?" I told her. "If I don't win this case, I'll be gone for forty years! If I don't win, you and I will never be together!"

  These words seemed to knock down some locked doors in Cammy's mind. She had blocked out my problems the way she blocked out so many negative things about our unusual relationship. Now she was unable to sleep, and she lay in bed crying. She cried off and on for the next few days and steeled herself for the worst, promising to wait for me forever. When you're young and in love, you just don't realize what's really happening.

  After that, the good times mixed with the bad like an everspinning yo-yo. From the Halloween night I was sworn in as a member of La Cosa Nostra, I knew that one day I'd have to do time. I had accepted it as part of the price to be paid for my underworld membership. Everyone had done it. It was not the end of the world, I knew. I had visited my father enough to know that prison could be survived. Because of that, although I never looked forward to it, neither did I fear it.

  But that was before I met Cammy. Now, the thought of being locked up and kept from her for any period of time tortured my mind. This was one of the reasons I had never wanted to fall in love. Love always makes a man dread prison.

  I decided to channel my frustrations and my nervous energy into fighting the case. The first step would be to hire another lawyer. Howard Borg was good at what he did-making deals, setting meetings, handling appeals, negotiating and pushing for parole; but a federal court trial was something else. I needed a young, aggressive courtroom fighter who had worked as a prosecutor in the same courts where the legal battle would be fought. I wanted someone who knew all the players on a personal level. I also didn't want to use an attorney like Barry Slotnick, who was known for defending mobsters. The attorney I eventually selected was John Jacobs, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York. Jacobs fit the criteria.

  I also wanted to find a nontraditional private investigator. My experience with private investigators hired to help free my father had soured me on the breed, most of whom I felt were worthless. I opted for hiring a former IRS agent named Don Taylor, then working for a record company in Atlanta. I liked Taylor, and he was a whiz at paperwork.

  My team assembled, I began the difficult task of building a defense. And it was difficult. A guilty man knows where he'll be attacked, but an innocent man is in the dark. I didn't have a clue about what evidence the prosecutors had, nor did I know how they intended to link me to the loan-shark operation. I would have to fight this case blind.

  103

  In September, I went to my dentist in Long Island one morning to have a filling replaced, but before I could enter the office, I was swarmed by Nassau County detectives.

  "Michael Franzese, you're under arrest."

  "What's the charge this time?" I asked.

  "Aiding and abetting assault."

  "What is that?"

  The unusual charge stemmed from a four-year-old incident in which the landlord of my Mazda dealership, Thomas Trimboli, was beaten with a ball peen hammer by a tough, whom one of my men, Frank "Frankie Gangster" Castagnaro, had recruited. Castagnaro, a short, rough guy, earned his nickname because he loved being a gangster. Trimboli told prosecutors that the only reason he survived the hammer attack was that his thick grayand-brown toupee had cushioned the blows to his skull. I knew little about the conflict beyond the fact that Frankie G. heard that I'd had some heated words with Trimboli a few months earlier and enlisted the guy to score points against me. My only involvement had been to post bond for the assailant as a favor to Frankie G.

  The hammer man, William Reese, had been convicted and did nearly four years. For some reason, Nassau County had decided to resurrect the stale case and pin it on me. This was nothing more than an opportunity for Nassau County prosecutors to wrestle some headlines from their counterparts in Manhattan.

  As I saw it, there was a disturbing wave of prosecutorial competition sweeping New York. Because I operated in such a wide territory, I had become the target of both the Nassau County and Suffolk County prosecutors, along with prosecutors in two of New York's most powerful districts, Giuliani's Southern District (which had declined sending a representative to the Michael Franzese Task Force) and Raymond Dearie's Eastern District. Whenever one made an indictment, it appeared to infuriate the others and prompt an intensification of their own investigations. In this case, the Southern District's indictment lit a fire under Edward McDonald and the joint task force meeting in Uniondale. McDonald's Organized Crime Strike Force assistant, Jerry Bernstein, was so determined to put me behind bars that he delayed his scheduled move into private practice for three years. With lorizzo in the fold, Bernstein and friends were certain to come up with something stronger than "aiding and abetting assau
lt."

  I dealt with the indictment by plunging deeper and deeper into the sheltered world I had created with Cammy. In late December, a few weeks before the scheduled beginning of the trial, we went together to Peppone, a romantic Italian restaurant in Brentwood. After dinner, I ordered a bottle of Taittinger Rose champagne, clutched her hand, and took a deep breath.

  "I love you, Cammy," I began. "You've changed my whole life, and I want us to be married."

  I told her to close her eyes. When I told her to open them, she was surprised to see the soft light sparkling off of a three-carat, emerald-cut diamond ring perched in a black felt box.

  "Do you like it?" I asked.

  Cammy was so awed that she could not answer.

  The waiter spotted the jewel and spread the news about the happy occasion, and a parade of diners dropped by our table to scrutinize the ring and wish us their best.

  I told Cammy I wanted to get married before the trial. Then I changed it to during the trial. And finally, I took the more sensible approach and decided to wait until the verdict had been delivered.

  104

  Hovering like a storm cloud over the pending marriage were the New York Times and Newsday stories and NBC television reports that portrayed me as a vicious criminal. They were disturbing, but Cammy refused to accept them. She had the same reaction that my mother had decades before: the man in the newspapers and on television was not the man she knew. This had to be a mistake. Cammy was sure of it, too.

  I did something without thinking one evening that forced her to reevaluate her view. She was in her Woodbury apartment when I called and said that I would be coming there, but late, because I was having some business problems. I must have sounded jumpy, and the agitation in my voice made her worry.

  She went on to bed, but her worry made her toss and turn, and she kept peering at the clock on the nightstand and wondering what had delayed me. It was 1:00 A.M., then 2:00 A.M., then 3:00 A.M., and still I hadn't arrived. By then, she thought I must be dead.

  Shortly after 3:30 A.M., Cammy heard the pounding footsteps of someone running up the stairway into the apartment. I burst into the room, threw down my coat, and began frantically tossing things around. I reached under a bed and pulled out a black handgun. I opened up the chamber, checked to see if it was loaded, snapped it back in place, then stuck the gun into my belt.

  Cammy couldn't believe what she was witnessing. It must have seemed as if the man she knew was gone and the stranger in the newspapers had suddenly appeared.

  "Michael, what is this?" she said in a panic. "What are you doing?"

  "Don't worry. Everything's okay," I said.

  "Don't go," she said, crying.

  "Got to," I said, grabbing my coat.

  "Don't leave me," she pleaded.

  I flashed her a brief "you must be kidding" look, gave her a quick hug, and kissed her forehead.

  "I've got to run, baby. Everything's okay."

  "Call me!" she cried as I disappeared out the door.

  She dialed my beeper number so many times over the next three hours that I eventually had to shut it off. She paced the room, then sat on her bed and squeezed a large stuffed monkey. She cried and drank NyQuil in a fruitless attempt to put herself to sleep.

  A hundred different scenarios passed through her mind, and the peculiarities of our relationship crystallized. There wasn't a single person she could call in that moment to check on me. She couldn't call the police. And she had never even met my parents. If something happened to me, she would have to read about it in the newspapers.

  And what about those newspapers? She opened a drawer in her nightstand and pulled out an article she had saved. Staring down at my photograph and the word "mobster" in the headline, she wondered for the first time if what they were writing about me might be true. I had told her that I was charged with whitecollar crimes, harmless paper crimes, and she had, until then, refused to believe that I could be involved in violence, gambling, murder, and prostitution-like the stereotypical gangsters in the newspapers and movies. But what she had just witnessed somehow shattered the illusion. I'd had a look in my eyes that she'd never seen before, and I had brushed her aside and rushed out into the night, packing a pistol.

  I didn't come back until 6:30 A.M. the next morning. For me, it had been an uneventful night. But not for Cammy. I found her sitting on the floor in the corner, trembling and clutching the monkey. Her eyes were bloodshot from crying, her face swollen.

  She was relieved when she saw me, then quickly became furious. She glared at me and refused to talk. When I finally prodded her enough to speak, she exploded.

  "You ask what's wrong? You come here at 3:30 A.M. like a maniac, looking like you're about to strangle someone. Then you pull out a gun and count the bullets right in front of me. You don't explain. You just run off. You don't call. You don't answer when I beep you. I don't know if I should wait, pack up and go home, or what! I don't know who to call to ask about you-to ask `Do you know where Michael is? Do you know if he's killed someone? Do you know if he's still alive?' How could you do this to me?"

  "I'm sorry," I offered. "I couldn't get to a phone."

  "Where did you go? Why did you need a gun?" she demanded.

  "It was just a raccoon wandering around outside," I said, shooting her a grin. "I didn't want it to get into the trash."

  I fawned over her the rest of the day, buying her roses and stuffed rabbits and teddy bears. I never explained what had happened that night, and she didn't ask. I took her in my arms and promised that nothing like that would ever happen again, and she believed me. The man she loved had returned, and the memory of the chilling look in my eyes gradually faded away-until it seemed as if it never had happened.

  But it had, and I knew there would be more nights like this one. It was part of the life I had chosen. It came with the territory. And now I knew that Cammy would never be able to handle it.

  105

  As 1984 ended, the prosecutors scored another major victory. New York indicted Michael Markowitz on fourteen counts of tax evasion. The Rumanian promptly rolled over-although "flopped around" may have been a better description. Double-talking, selling old news, and veiling himself behind a feigned lack of understanding of the English language, Markowitz gave his captors fits. He also played both ends and alerted me to the state and federal prosecutors' moves. How much of a threat the crazy Rumanian posed to me was impossible to determine.

  What was not hard to determine was the effect this was having on the gasoline business. There was apprehension on the street about where the operation was going and who would be going down with it. With both Markowitz and lorizzo rumored to be singing, and my indictment a reality, the cash pipeline began to shrink.

  I kept all of this from Cammy, and she continued to be my respite from the growing nightmare. When we were together, nothing else seemed to matter. My only fear was that the looming troubles might cause me to lose her. I was torn over how to handle that reality. If we married before the verdict, it would lessen the odds of losing her if I was convicted. On the other hand, if I was given a long sentence, marriage to me would sentence Cammy to a miserable life.

  The loan-sharking trial began January 7, 1985, on a cold and overcast morning, and lasted through the winter and into the spring. For the first seven weeks, I sat like a spectator as the prosecutors built their case against the Jewish defendants and their cohorts. My name was never mentioned. When they did get around to bringing me into the case, the connection was weak. To bolster their case, they brought in their literal and figurative big gun, the massive Lawrence lorizzo. While I sat stunned, my good friend and business partner gave a rambling testimony that included charges that I had forced him to hide out in Panama and had tried to kill his son Lawrence Jr. The dramatic accusations had nothing to do with the loan-shark indictment, but they did spice up the tedious proceedings.

  lorizzo refused to look at me while he spewed out his lies, but he wasn't shy about scrutinizing the
courtroom gallery. When Frankie Gangster walked in during his testimony, the fat man freaked. He no doubt had a flashback of Frankie G. holding the gun to his head and threatening to kill him if he ever hurt me. lorizzo's reaction was so extreme that the trial was interrupted and Frankie G. was escorted from the courtroom.

  From Cammy's perspective, the four-month court trial was a revealing experience. Her father had regarded the police and prosecutors as the enemy for most of his life, and this attitude had been ingrained in her early. As she matured, it had faded, but now, watching me on trial and hearing the foolish charges being used against me, these feelings grudgingly began to return.

  She was allowed to attend only a few sessions because Jacobs felt that her presence-and the silver fox coat that I had bought her-might have an unfavorable effect upon the jurors. What she saw in the sessions she did attend was enough to make her believe me when I claimed my innocence. For instance, after testifying about numerous illegal deals, a witness was asked to point me out in the courtroom. Instead, he pointed to the codefendant Mel Cooper, the financier. The prosecutor quickly regrouped and asked the witness to try to identify me again. This time he pointed to a man sitting in the front row of the audience. The prosecutor had to virtually stand behind me and wave his hands before my alleged "business partner" got it right. The same witness later testified that he beat his wife "only when she needed it," a statement that infuriated Cammy and most of the people in the courtroom, including the jurors.

  Another government witness, a loan-shark victim, saw mobsters under every rock. He testified that he knew Catholic priests who were part of the mob. When asked how many people he owed money, the witness responded, "Everybody. I must even owe you money.