Blood Covenant

by Michael Franzese

  I opened the door and looked sternly at my impetuous wife.

  "Why did you take such a chance?"

  "I don't care," she said. "I had to see you."

  I waved her in, locked the door, and squeezed her tightly. After we had spent some time comforting each other, I said to her, "I couldn't find a flight to Miami. I tried to charter a .let, but none was available."

  She grabbed the phone in one hand and the Yellow Pages in the other and began calling every airline. Eventually, she found an Eastern flight that could get me to Fort Lauderdale with two stops. She made the reservation in the name of her younger brother Cuauhtemoc Garcia, a name I couldn't even pronounce. In those days, before the tragedy of 9/11, you could travel under a different name without much difficulty. It's quite different, of course, today.

  We ordered room service, shared a solemn dinner, then lay on the bed for two hours hugging each other and crying.

  "Who's going to take care of me if you go away?" Cammy whimpered.

  I hadn't even left yet, and she already felt terribly lonely and afraid.

  I brushed the tears off of her cheek and looked into her huge, frightened eyes. She was just a baby, a scared child.

  "We'll get through this," I promised. "Just try to be strong. I'll call you as soon as I can. Have your family stay with you. I don't want you to be alone-not even for one night."

  Cammy cried the whole way to the airport, and it tore me up to see her in such anguish. As I drove, tears also ran out from under my glasses and down my cheeks.

  "Don't cry," I said, ignoring my own tears. "Everything will be okay."

  At the departure ramp, I gathered my things, said good-bye, and walked away. I stopped, turned, and gave Cammy a last wink. I had to be strong. She needed it in that moment.

  While I was on my way to Florida, federal agents were wisely searching airline listings to try and intercept me. They stationed men at the airports in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, but those agents were looking for Michael Franzese, not Cuauhtemoc Garcia. Cammy's quick thinking had helped me foil their plans.

  During a stopover in Dallas, I passed by a row of newspaper boxes and was struck by a headline in The New York Times announcing my indictment. I fished in my pocket for some coins, dropped them into the slot, and removed a paper. As I flew to Fort Lauderdale, I read about the mounting troubles of a young Cosa Nostra capo. The weariness of the all-night flight caused the words of the story to intermingle with scenes from my life. It was such a contrast, and I found it difficult to comprehend that I was the hunted criminal being written about on the front page of one of the world's most prestigious newspapers.

  6

  Arriving in Fort Lauderdale, I hid my face as I walked through the terminal. I flagged a cab and directed the driver to a nearby McDonald's. Jacobs had arranged for me to meet a Broward County detective at the fast-food restaurant. The friendly detective led me to his car and drove directly into the garage area of the courthouse to dodge the FBI agents staking out the building. They were intent upon intercepting me on the courthouse steps, pulling rank on the local police, and shanghaiing me to New York. Since the local Florida police didn't like the FBI's Gestapo tactics any more than I did, we were uneasy allies in that moment.

  Inside, I was charged with sixty-five counts of Florida's massive one-hundred-seventy-seven-count tax evasion indictment. I posted ten percent of a $124,000 bond and satisfied the state obligation.

  "I know," I then told the detectives after being symbolically released. "The feds are waiting downstairs."

  A heavily armed band of grim-faced FBI agents took over from there. With me in tow, they set off for the Metropolitan Correction Center in Miami, a civilized federal facility. On the way, however, a message squawked over the car radio: "Divert the prisoner to Dade County." I sunk back into my seat. They were going to take me to the same Miami hellhole that had caused my former associate Larry lorizzo to crack.

  I arrived at the North Dade Detention Center, was assigned a cell, and quickly began to understand why lorizzo had turned. The place was filthy, the inmates were filthy, the food was terrible, and hardly anyone spoke English. It was like being imprisoned in a third world country.

  All weekend long, the television blaring in the county jail broadcast news reports of my arrest, in English and Spanish. My fellow Florida inmates had never seen a real-life mobster before, and loony as they seemingly were, they were impressed. They treated me like a celebrity. Many asked in broken English how they could join "the famous American Mafia."

  Upon Jacob's advice, I waived extradition to New York. He wanted to have my federal bond hearing there instead of in Florida. In retrospect, it was a questionable decision. The authorities hardly knew me in Florida, so I would probably have made bail more easily there. In New York, I was a certified, second-generation, blue-blooded gangster, so they would fight very hard to keep me locked up.

  Three long, miserable days after I arrived in South Florida, two task force members, Suffolk County Police detective Frank Morro and U.S. Postal Service Agent John LaPerla, flew to Miami. They had come to escort the "Long Island don," as the United States Congress had dubbed me, back to New York. Morro and LaPerla were decent and didn't bother to handcuff me until we arrived at Islip Airport in Long Island. Even then, the handcuffs were a show for the crowd of reporters waiting to record my arrival. The reporters aimed their cameras and shouted questions at me as I was taken to a waiting car. I was then driven to the federal courthouse in Uniondale, Long Island, and taken to a courtroom a few floors above the same basement conference room where the Michael Franzese Task Force had worked to seal my fate.

  7

  By what seemed like some stroke of very bad luck or some devious coincidence, the judge assigned to my case was Jacob Mishler-the same Jacob Mishler who had presided over my father's cases and sentenced him to fifty years in prison nearly two decades before, the same Judge Mishler who had overruled our appeals attempting to prove that my father had been framed, the same Judge Mishler whose daughter I was said to have planned to kidnap, and the same Judge Jacob Mishler whom Mom had once sarcastically applauded in open court, screamed insults at, and openly accused of being part of a vicious scheme to frame her husband.

  Great! I thought. With Mishler on the bench, the odds of my getting a fair trial were about a hundred to one.

  John Jacobs immediately filed to have Judge Mishler removed from the case, citing his long, stormy history with the Franzese family. Despite the logic behind this motion, I wasn't in complete agreement with it. There was no question that Mishler would be tough during the trial and devastating during sentencing, and under him I'd be lucky to get a "mere" fifty years like my father. On the other hand, Judge Mishler had always been lenient in awarding bail. He had allowed my father to remain free on appeal for three years following his bank robbery conviction. More than anything else, I wanted to make bail, and the way I saw it, we could motion to have Mishler bounced after the bond hearing.

  Jacobs remained adamant that Mishler had to go without delay and continued to push hard to have him ousted. Mishler countered that he hardly remembered my father's case or the threat against his daughter and that he could be fair with me. Jacobs continued to protest and demanded a speedy trial, a calculated move based upon the fact that Judge Mishler was scheduled to sit on the bench in South Florida as part of his rotating federal jurist duties. Mishler finally relented and gave up the case. It was reassigned to Judge Eugene Nickerson.

  Judge Mishler's courtroom had been in the wide-open spaces of Uniondale, Long Island, but Nickerson's courtroom was in Brooklyn. Despite my attempts to escape to the sun of Florida and California, I had come full circle. I was back in mob territory.

  In Brooklyn, I was finally able to read the twenty-eight count racketeering indictment produced by the fourteen-agency joint task force headed by the Eastern District of New York. Indicted with me were most of my top associates: Louis Fenza, Frank "Frankie Gangster" Castagnaro, Frank
Cestaro, Harold Sussman (my accountant), financier Gerard Nocera, Allied International Union boss Anthony Tomasso, union attorney Mitchell Goldblatt, and Walter Doner. Doner, my Rumplik Chevrolet partner, was a Catholic deacon and Little League baseball coach and was totally innocent. He just had the misfortune of being caught in the drift net with the rest of us.

  Once again, I was astounded by the charges lodged against me. I was accused of conspiracy, mail fraud, obstruction of justice, extortion, uttering a counterfeit security, violating federal antikickback laws, embezzlement, and wire fraud. The companies I was said to have defrauded of $5 million included such bluechip corporations as Mobil Oil, Citicorp, General Motors, Mazda Motors of America, Merrill Lynch, Chemical Bank, Beneficial Commercial Corporation, and Allied International Union.

  The bulk of the charges involved wild accusations of fraud and extortion in my auto dealerships and in my association with the security guards' union. There was even a charge for credit card fraud based on a $500 rubber raft someone had given me as a gift. There was just a single count pertaining to the gasoline business and only $3 million allegedly stolen. Part of that was based upon lorizzo inflating the figures on a financial statement filed for a fuel-tax bond.

  I was charged with knowing the statement was false-which I hadn't. I rarely saw that kind of paperwork. Similarly, I had no idea that the $100,000 treasury note that was put up as collateral for the $500,000 Rumplik floor plan loan was counterfeit. I thought it was stolen.

  The last count of the indictment was a "Kline conspiracy," a blanket accusation that every business I was ever involved with was created for the sole purpose of stealing taxes. The indictment indicated that I owned twenty-one separate or related businesses spanning the construction, auto, and motion picture industries, and traced the spending of millions of dollars.

  The one-hundred-seventy-seven-count Florida indictment listed twenty-six codefendants-including Austrian Duke Henri Alba-Teran d'Antin-and dealt solely with the gasoline business. I didn't know a dozen or more of the codefendants, including the duke, and had no idea why they were included. Others I knew well. They included Frankie Cestaro, Vincent Aspromonte, William Ferrante, Sebastian "Buddy" Lombardo, Peter Raneri, Jerry Zimmerman, Michael Markowitz, David Bogatin, and Leo Persits.

  My first thought upon reading the indictments was that I could beat these charges. The union embezzlement charges were imprecise, and I was insulated from them. The rest of the charges were a mishmash of truth, fiction, other defendants' crimes, and routine business practices. The accusations could easily be attacked. Despite the millions I had been stealing in gasoline taxes, it appeared that the government was still unable to build a solid case against me.

  8

  I was among friends at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York. Included among my fellow inmates on the ninth floor were family boss Carmine "the Snake" Persico Jr., Colombo underboss Jerry Langella, and Genovese family boss Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno. It was said that there were more of us in MCC than there were on the street at the time.

  We were all there because Rudolph Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney in Manhattan and later mayor of New York City, had indicted the bosses of all five families for racketeering in what came to be called the "Mob Commission Case." Under his tenure, there was intense and unprecedented scrutiny of the mob as he was determined to bring it down.

  Also in MCC at the time was a band of Sicilian mobsters awaiting trial in the "Pizza Connection" drug case. My cellmate was a terrorist who had been involved in a number of bombings in Chicago and New York. Although he explained his organization, motive, and cause at length, it meant little to me. These men did not make for pleasant company.

  Cammy and I argued about whether or not she should fly to New York. I didn't want her to suffer through my ordeal, but she wanted to be there with me, and in the end, she prevailed.

  Cammy, Sabrina, and the baby flew to Kennedy Airport the next day. John Jacobs booked her into the Lombardy Hotel, an old stodgy structure that was nevertheless quite expensive. Cammy found it so gloomy that she called around the next day for a brighter hotel and found three she liked. I vetoed them, saying that they were too close to wretched Forty-Second Street, a thoroughfare infested with pimps, prostitutes, muggers, street crazies, and aggressive panhandlers and winos. We finally agreed that she would stay at the Parker Meridien Hotel off Central Park.

  The first time she visited me at MCC, Cammy was roughly searched, had a handheld metal detector run up and down her body, and was ordered to check her fur into a locker. She filled out some forms, squeezed herself into a packed elevator, got off at the ninth floor-the mob floor-and was directed to a cramped visiting room overflowing with people. When I appeared, she rushed to me. I gave her a restrained hug and explained that emotional displays were frowned upon at MCC. She asked if I was okay, and I said I was.

  Cammy remained in New York for the rest of December and all of January, as my bond hearing kept getting postponed and extended to accommodate Judge Nickerson's vacation and to enable the prosecutors time to build a stronger case. She was allowed to visit me only for an hour every Tuesday and Thursday, and during that time, her mood alternated between enthusiastic optimism and complete despair. Most of the time, however, her mood reflected mine. When I was up, she was up, and when I was down, it plunged her into despair.

  The various members of the Garcia family took turns staying with her. When Sabrina had to leave, her mother, father, or brothers flew in to take her place.

  MCC was a real drag. We were locked down all day with no exercise, activities, or even a breath of fresh air. One afternoon, I watched as a pair of Chinese Dragon gang members, in prison on murder charges, beat a bulky weight lifter bloody with a pair of broomsticks. The bodybuilder was a bully who threw his weight around, especially in the telephone area, and the Chinese guys had finally had enough. They were as quick and deadly as mongooses and ended up breaking the bigger man's arm.

  What was more disturbing to me, however, was the fate of my fellow mobsters. They kept going to trial, losing, and getting hammered with harsh sentences. Every other day, it seemed someone was coming back with a thirty-, forty-, fifty-, seventy-, or even one hundred-year sentence. The city seemed to be engulfed in a wave of mob hysteria, and the prosecutors were on a roll. This didn't bode well for me, especially considering that it was the ringleaders who were being hit the hardest. And I was the youngest of the clan.

  During my bond hearing, the prosecutors dredged up every damning indictment from my past, including the alleged death threat on my father's probation officer. lorizzo was hauled out to repeat his lies that I had tried to kill his son and had ordered him to hide in Panama. This time, he added that I had also threatened to kill him. (On an interesting side note, this same Lawrence lorizzo was convicted of gasoline-tax fraud some ten years later, in 1996. His son Larry Jr. testified against him at trial. He was sentenced to serve one hundred eighty-eight months in federal prison, where he resides today.)

  Taped conversations from various points of my life materialized as if by magic. I learned for the first time that Luigi Vizzini, one of the men who had tried to entice me into offering a bribe to national parole board director Benjamin Malcolm, had been an informant and had taped our conversations. Vizzini had later been murdered, and the prosecutors implied with their questions that I had found out about the setup and had killed Vizzini. It made for a nice story, but it wasn't true. I hadn't known until that court proceeding that I had been set up. I hadn't even been aware of the fact that Vizzini was dead.

  The prosecutors trotted out everything they could to try to convince the judge that the "Yuppie Don" was actually an oldfashioned, blood-and-guts mob killer who was a menace to society and unworthy of any bail, and by calling witnesses who twisted the facts, they were doing a pretty good job of it. When the hearing ended, Judge Nickerson reserved his decision until an unspecified date.

  It didn't surprise me when he ruled, a week or so later,
that I was to be held without bond. By comparison, John Gotti and a gang of his associates were, at the same time, awaiting trial in Nickerson's court for charges ranging from murder to drugs, and none of them had been remanded. How ironic! Except for a few poorly supported extortion counts, I had been charged with white-collar crimes. My continued detention was difficult to accept. Quite honestly, it wasn't God I turned to. I knew that I had some serious work cut out for me if I wanted to hit the streets and be with Cammy again.

  9

  Cammy took the judge's decision even harder than I did, and her ordeal made my predicament seem even harder. It was exactly what I had not wanted, exactly the kind of situation I had always avoided getting myself into. I had wanted to do my inevitable jail time clean, without destroying anyone else's life. I had witnessed firsthand how my father's imprisonment had devastated my mother and ruined the lives of my younger brothers and sisters. And here I was, doing the same thing to my families. I was confident that Maria would be strong and would be able to take care of our children. She was mature, steady, resourceful, and in control of her emotions. Cammy, on the other hand, was a totally different creature. Although she was street-tough and a fierce fighter, she was extremely emotional and empathetic. She would be dying each day I spent in prison.

  I had to get out of jail, at least for the stressful time prior to and during the trial. There had to be a way, so I again reviewed all the angles.

  Another inmate told me about a new law that allowed prisoners with complicated cases to be released for part of the day to work on their defense. Since my Florida indictment included twenty-seven coconspirators on top of my twenty-eight count federal indictment, I figured I was a natural to test the law. Jacobs, my attorney, discouraged me, calling it an extreme long shot and a "frivolous motion." I wrote most of the briefs myself and ordered Jacobs to present the request to the judge.