Blood Covenant

by Michael Franzese

  The plea agreement had stated that I would be allowed to serve my sentence in California, but the final decision lay with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The prison authorities were not held to plea bargain deals. Once they had me, they owned me.

  "I've got good news and bad news," I told Cammy over the phone. "The good news is that I'll be coming home. The bad news is that I don't know when. It looks like it's going to take a while to get back to California."

  "Then I'm coming there," she said.

  "No, don't come," I pleaded.

  "I want to see you," she insisted. "I'm coming."

  Cammy, Irma, and the baby flew to New York, then took a limousine to the upstate prison. She stayed a week at the Holiday Inn, eating her meals at Swensen's and Denny's.

  The only negative point at Otisville came near the end of my two-week stay there. One day, just before I entered the visitors' area to see Cammy, a guard came over.

  "What are you doing with that ring?" he asked, pointing at my diamond wedding ring. "That's not on your personal belongings list."

  "They must have overlooked it," I said. "I'm only going to be here a few more days."

  "You'll have to give it to me," he said.

  "No way," I argued. "I'll give it to my wife in the visiting room.

  "I've got to take it," he said. "You don't know what can happen. An expensive ring like that-Another prisoner might cut off your finger while you're sleeping and take it."

  "Give me a break!" I said. "I'll take my chances. Nobody's going to take my ring."

  "Turn it over," he insisted.

  We argued for a few minutes, but he refused to allow me to give the ring to Cammy. That really made me angry. Finally, I relented because Cammy was waiting and I thought the guard might cancel the visit if I didn't hand over the ring. That was the last I ever saw of the $2,000 ring.

  After Cammy returned to California, I was transferred to a federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and was assigned to K-Dorm, a basement dungeon out of some Stephen King novel. The bottom floor at Lewisburg had previously been condemned, but had been reopened after a riot at a nearby Washington, D.C., prison ended with the prisoners burning the place down. They shipped two hundred fifty of the onethousand-plus D.C. prisoners to Lewisburg and dumped them into the basement, which was nothing more than a large armystyle barracks with exposed pipes and rows and rows of filthy bunks. There were no bars or individual cells. Everyone just wandered around, made noise, argued, picked fights, and got on each other's nerves.

  The food was so bad at Lewisburg that I ate only one meal a day. In fact, it was such a hellhole that I insisted that Cammy not visit me there.

  I did have some friends on the more civilized floors above us. Among them were Tony West and James "Jimmy the Gent" Burke. West owned a bar and restaurant next to my brother-inlaw's Italian restaurant, Trattoria Siciliana, on Second Avenue and Twenty-Ninth Street in Manhattan. Burke was the Lucchese family associate Robert De Niro played in the movie GoodFellas. I wasn't sure why West was in, but Burke had been convicted of murdering Richie Eaton, one of his partners in the infamous $6 million Lufthansa Airlines theft at Kennedy Airport in 1978. Eaton had been found frozen solid in a refrigeration truck. Burke would place cigarettes, candy bars, books, or postage stamps in a small bag, tie a long string to it, drop it out an upstairs window, and lower it to me through a window in the shower room. I didn't smoke, but cigarettes and candy were like money in prison. I was able to trade them to other prisoners in exchange for their phone time.

  K-Dorm was a holding area for prisoners being sent somewhere else. The flights out were every Tuesday and Thursday, and the list of those scheduled to leave was posted after midnight the same morning. Everyone wanted to get out of there so badly that we all awoke after midnight on those mornings and trudged to the board to see if we might be on the list. Finally, after three weeks, my name was posted. I took a twohour bus ride to an airport somewhere, then turned around and took a two-hour ride right back to the prison. Apparently the plane had broken down. I could not get out until the following day.

  I was being sent to El Reno, Oklahoma, another paradise. There I was placed in the hole (in isolation) for an entire week. I passed the time reading my Bible. I was certainly interested in learning more about God at that point, but my Bible reading had not yet reached the level of impact or intensity that it would later.

  Cammy surprised me by flying in from Los Angeles. When I was told that I had a visitor, I thought it must be a mistake. When I eventually realized that it was no mistake, I asked permission to shower before seeing her because I was so grubby from my incarceration. Even then, I must have presented a horrid sight. My hair was long and unruly, and my beard was dark and stubbled. I was wearing baggy pants with huge cuffs, black shoes with rubber soles, and a khaki shirt, and I had lost fifteen pounds.

  "You look like a homeboy," Cammy joked.

  "You should have seen me before I took a shower," I said. "I couldn't come out that way."

  15

  Meanwhile, back East, things were looking grim. Undercover agents spotted my father having dinner at Laina's Restaurant in Jericho, Long Island, with a convicted gambler and loan shark named Joseph Caridi. According to Nassau County Assistant Director Attorney Elaine Jackson Stack, Caridi interrupted his meal to collect a usurious loan payment from one of the agents. My father's parole was subsequently revoked for the second time, once again for associating with known felons. He was shipped to a federal penitentiary in Petersburg, Virginia, for eight more years, beginning in April 1986.

  Mom was beyond grief. For the first time, both her husband and her son were in prison. And corrections officials made sure that Dad and I were never at the same prison. I felt helpless. Locked away myself, there was nothing I could do for him. That hurt as much as anything else.

  After my week in the hole at El Reno, I was transferred to a new prison facility, this one in Phoenix, Arizona. That was as close to California as I was to get for the next four months. Because of its newness, the Federal Correctional Institution in north Phoenix was sparkling clean.

  "My mother could do time here," I joked to Cammy, trying to ease her mind.

  The farther I got from New York, the more my mob background seemed to affect people. The day I arrived, the prison's chief lieutenant summoned me to his office.

  "This is mah prison," the beefy Texan drawled. "You ain't gonna come here and take ovah."

  "Hey, I don't recall sending you a resume for a job," I countered. "I'm just a prisoner. I'm not taking over anything. In fact, you can keep me in lockdown twenty-four hours a day if you want. Just slip my food in the door and let me out for visits. I just want to do my time and get out of here."

  After that, the guards and I got along fine.

  Cammy flew in every weekend on America West Airlines and stayed at the Westcourt Hotel. Her visits were made doubly pleasant by the prison's outdoor patio area. As the two of us enjoyed the sun and the beautiful Arizona winter, we amused ourselves by observing the domestic situation of one of my fellow inmates. The American Indian was married to twin sisters and had a girlfriend on the side. The three women visited him every weekend, sharing their time and presenting him with an assortment of children.

  At Phoenix, I met and befriended Jeffrey MacDonald, the former Green Beret captain and military doctor convicted in 1979 of killing his twenty-four-year-old wife and two daughters, ages two and five, at their Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home in 1970. I found the doctor to be a pleasant man who frequently worked out in the prison's exercise yard and staunchly maintained his innocence despite a best-selling book, Fatal Vision, and television movie that claimed otherwise. Since Dr. MacDonald was more intelligent and educated than the average prisoner, we were able to converse on a wide range of topics. For the most part, I believed MacDonald's claim of innocence. But every once in a while, when the setting sun hit the doctor's eyes, I detected a strange glint, an odd spark that made me wonder.

 
"Cammy, that man two tables over, to your right-that's Jeffrey MacDonald," I said during one of her visits.

  Cammy, who had read Fatal Vision, shuddered as if a breath of frigid air had blown over her.

  "He gives me the chills," she said, oblivious to the irony that Dr. MacDonald could point me out to his visitors, and they would probably get worse chills.

  Despite the pleasant visiting circumstance and the almost college campus atmosphere of Phoenix, the distance from Los Angeles made the trips tiring for Cammy, and when she was eight months pregnant, her doctor ordered her to stay put. I told my attorneys to push harder to get me to Los Angeles. Finally, the order came through, and I was sent to Terminal Island, a federal facility near San Pedro that was a forty-five-minute drive from the Mirabella.

  "Baby, I'm home," I told Cammy over the phone after I arrived.

  "Home" was better than most of the other prisons I'd been in and was certainly survivable.

  My new home, however, turned out to be anything but a pleasant experience for Cammy. The facility was grossly overcrowded, and she would often have to wait in a line of unruly visitors for up to two hours every time she wanted to see me (three times a week). By the second week, she realized that it had taken less time and stress for her to fly to Phoenix and take a cab to the prison there than it did to see me at Terminal Island. But after fighting so hard to get close to Los Angeles, it was too late for me to ask for a transfer. I wouldn't have anyway. Knowing Cammy was nearby compensated for the poor conditions.

  16

  I requested and almost was granted permission to attend the birth of our second child, but two days before Cammy went into labor, the New York prosecutors overruled that decision, deeming me to be such a high-level organized crime figure that I should not be afforded any privileges whatsoever. Fortunately, this time Cammy didn't need her human scratching pole. She was in labor only four hours, and this birth was a breeze compared to the first. We had a second Cammy-look-alike daughter, Amanda, born January 22, 1987.

  "I hope you're not upset that it's not a boy," Cammy said when I called.

  "No, baby, I'm not upset at all," I assured her.

  Since Terminal Island was my long-term facility, I was given a job there. After some basic training, I was designated a "psychiatric aide" and was assigned to B-Dorm, the prison's psychiatric ward. It was just like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, only worse. Every day, I'd have to ride herd over the crazies. I'd assist the doctors, prevent the patients from attacking the nurses or each other, and do my best to keep things at a tolerably insane level. None of that was easy.

  The characters in B-Dorm were unbelievable. One guy had taken female hormones in preparation for a sex-change operation, then he changed his mind at the last minute and took male hormones to reverse the effect. The male hormones made him grow hair all over his body, and he looked like a monkey. This seesaw act with his gender must have cooked his brain, because he was a mess. One minute, he would be a woman, giggling and flirting with some of the men, and the next moment, he'd be a macho man. He was in prison because he had written a threatening letter to President Ronald Reagan. He hadn't signed the letter, but his boyfriend turned him in after they had an argument.

  Another man thought he was President Reagan, and he played the part pretty well. He was a mad professor type with disheveled hair and clothes, but he talked intelligently about government and world affairs. It sounded like he'd once been a real politician. His main problem was that he had a thing about stuffing trash into mailboxes, and that's why he was in prison. He was caught dumping garbage into a blue postal box. In prison, he'd sound good one minute, espousing his presidential decrees, then the next minute, he'd try to sneak off and dump junk down the prison's mail slot.

  "Hey, Prez," I'd say. "What are you doing?"

  He'd get this weird grin on his face and try to hide the garbage behind his back.

  "I'm carrying out my presidential duties," he'd say.

  "No, you're not," I countered. "You're stuffing trash in the mail slot again. Cut it out now. That's how you got in trouble in the first place. What's with you and this garbage thing?"

  He never offered an explanation.

  For a while, the constant tension and anxiety of never knowing what some B-Dorm lunatic was going to do next made the time pass and helped get me through the long days. After about eight months of that, though, it had become so mentally and physically taxing that I requested a transfer out of there before I began stuffing trash down mail slots along with the Prez.

  I was able to form a long-lasting friendship with Kelly Hamilton, another psychiatric aide. Hamilton was better known in the Northwest as "the 1-5 Bandit." The way he told it, he was watching the Steve McQueen and All MacGraw movie The Getaway one afternoon and decided to spice up his life by becoming a bank robber like McQueen. A bright guy, Hamilton successfully robbed a string of banks along Interstate 5 before getting caught. He never used a weapon. He just handed the teller a note demanding cash, smiled, and made off with the money, usually just a few thousand dollars-enough to get him to the next town. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years. Character-wise, the 1-5 Bandit was the most stand-up guy I met in prison, and our daily battles with the denizens of the psychiatric ward helped solidify our friendship. Hamilton was released from prison in the mid-1990s, after serving some fourteen years. To this day, I consider him to be a very decent human being and a most trusted friend.

  There were other prisoners at Terminal Island who I wanted nothing to do with. One afternoon in the prison yard, I ran into someone who looked familiar. When he saw me, he nearly freaked out. It wasn't until later that I realized it was Henry Hill, the lowlife Lucchese family associate from the book Wiseguy and the movie Goodfellas. I barely recognized Hill because he now looked so old, broken, and haggard. He was no Ray Liotta, the actor who played him in the movie. Hill had wandered in and out of the Witness Protection Program after ratting on everybody he knew, including my friends Paulie Vario and Jimmy Burke, and he was now in jail for crimes he'd committed while back on the street.

  Soon, the prison's chief lieutenant, Henry Navarra, called me into his office. "Michael, Henry Hill spotted you in the yard and came in here as white as a ghost."

  "I thought I recognized him," I said.

  "He demanded to be put into solitary," Navarra told me. "He says you'll kill him."

  "I'm not gonna touch that guy," I said. "He's got nothing on me. He's not worth killing."

  But Hill remained so terrified that they shipped him out within the week to another prison facility.

  17

  The officers at Terminal Island treated me well-sometimes too well. Some of them offered to take me out for a night on the town. They were actually going to sneak me in and out of the prison. I told them they had to be crazy. I always tried to treat them with respect. In return, they would afford me some perks that were small by social standards, but huge within the confines of prison society: extra visits, more access to the telephone, better food, a color television in my cell. One time, a rather grumpy unit manager confiscated my television. While she was giving me a verbal discipline session in her office, another television was being delivered to my cell.

  Another time, after being transferred from Terminal Island to the Boron federal prison in Victorville, California, I was allowed to leave on an eight-hour pass. There was a mistake in the paperwork that said I was to return the following day instead of that same evening. When I returned eight hours later, I knew I was going to have trouble. Prison guards don't like to do paperwork unless they have to.

  "Franzese, get out of here," the guard at the gate said. "You're not due back until tomorrow. Nobody comes back early. You must be nuts."

  "The return date is a mistake," I argued.

  "If it says tomorrow, that's when you return. Go home," the guard ordered.

  I thought of spending the night with Cammy at a hotel in nearby Silverlake, then thought better of it. Someone could
have caught the mistake during the night, and they would have had a fugitive warrant out for me by dawn. They could have arrested me as an escaped felon and ruined my chances for parole. I had to get back inside that prison.

  I argued with the guard some more, but he wouldn't let me in. It seemed that the only way I could get back into that jail was to break in. What a twist that would have been! Eventually, I convinced the guard to fetch the lieutenant.

  The lieutenant read my orders and told me to come back the next day.

  "Look, you can put me in the hole," I offered. "You don't have to do the paperwork until tomorrow. Just let me back in."

  Finally, he relented-reluctantly-and I avoided the potential catastrophe.

  My fellow prisoners, almost to the man, wanted to join my gang. I never had any problems with anyone in any of the prisons. Made men are considered kings among criminals, and the strict underworld social structure holds true in prison much the same as it does on the outside.

  I could have taken advantage of the standard business opportunities in prison, from bringing in illegal contraband to directing criminal activities on the outside, but I declined. All I wanted was extra visits and phone privileges, my television, and sometimes a better meal. Other than that, I played it straight. I wanted to rack up all the gain time I could get. Each day I was a good prisoner, I would get two days knocked off of my sentence. If I stayed out of trouble, I could be free in three and a half years. And that thought consumed me and guided my every move. I had too much to live for now to spend more time needlessly behind bars.

  18