And even if someone obeyed, if someone followed the oath without yielding, what good was it? My father had blindly followed. He had never bent. He was the ultimate mob soldier. And what good had it done him? He had been framed for a crime he knew nothing about, for twenty years he had rotted in jail, and he still faced thirty more where those came from.
Some had said that the mob set my father up in the first place. Maybe the enemy wasn't the prosecutors and the FBI but the mob itself.
And still, he kept quiet, for ten then twenty years in prison. He was the iron man, a man of rare honor and integrity. Everybody deserted him, but still he didn't testify. He accepted no plea bargains, no deals-no nothing. He had also not received any lasting parole, just fifty years in prison.
And who cared? Who cared about Sonny Franzese rotting in some Virginia prison? And now I was supposed to follow in my father's footsteps?
Even my mother waffled on her stance. She had initially supported my decision, expressing a disdain for Walters and inciting me with tales of how Walters had been disrespectful to her and my father. She repeated how Dad's long imprisonment had torn at her and her family. But Mom could shift directions in the blink of an eye. She confided to others that she was repulsed at the thought of her son testifying. She even went so far as to put me in the same class of men who falsely testified against my father. She proclaimed Norby Walters to be a dear family friend and decreed that I should stay quiet and be a good soldier like my father.
Mom's declarations didn't just sting, they hurt me deeply. I loved her very much. We had been through a lot together, and although we had often clashed, sometimes fiercely, it hadn't changed the way I felt about her.
No matter what Mom or Dad would say, I now saw no honor in remaining silent. Norby wasn't a "brother," just a fringe player who boasted about his organized crime clout whenever it benefited him.
And Norby had disobeyed. Norby broke the code by refusing a direct order to take a plea. Norby wasn't thinking of the good of the family. Norby didn't care if someone had to do an extra seven-or seventy-years. He was trying to save himself from a six-month sentence.
And besides, as much as I loved her, my mother's opinions didn't carry much weight with me anymore. They had been supplanted by my feelings for another Franzese woman-Cammy Franzese. And Cammy needed me out of prison.
25
In March of 1989, two marshals came to Terminal Island, handcuffed me, and clamped leg irons on me. Then they chauffeured me to Los Angeles International Airport for the trip to Chicago. Stopping at the terminal, they ordered me out of the car.
"I'm not going out like this," I protested, nodding toward the leg irons. "You must be out of your mind!"
"We can't do that," the lead marshal said.
"I'm not shuffling two miles through a crowded airport chained like a slave," I protested. "You can turn around and take me right back to Terminal Island."
The marshals huddled for a few minutes. "Okay, we'll take them off, but if you try to make a run for it, remember, we've got guns.
"Give me a break," I said, not happy with the humiliation. "Just get these stupid things off of me."
The trial of Norby Walters and Lloyd Bloom was a star-studded affair played out before a courtroom mobbed with reporters. The media conglomeration at the U.S. District Court in Chicago was a strange mix. The hard-news reporters were there, covering it as a news story. The sports press was there, covering it as a major sports scandal and reveling in the parade of big-time sports stars who took the stand and testified about wads of dirty money and threats of broken legs, arms, and hands. The longhaired rock press also fought for seats, dispatching reports to Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Cash Box, and other music magazines about the music biz angle. They perked up when the Jacksons and Dionne Warwick's people, Weisner and Grant, testified about my visits.
In the midst of all this sensational testimony, I took the stand and hushed the courtroom audience with my mere introduction: "Michael Franzese, capo in the Colombo crime family."
Few of the spectators, even among the hard-bitten journalists, had ever seen a real live Cosa Nostra captain up close, and I could feel the jury hanging on every word as I went through my lines. I talked for ninety minutes on direct, and another sixty on cross-examination, about my partnership with World Sports and Entertainment, my father's involvement with Walters, and my visits with Grant and Weisner. I was the connection that would juice the headlines in the newspapers and magazines. I was the link from the mob to both sports and rock and roll.
As the prosecutors predicted, what I said didn't matter, not even with the media. They were able to fill in the blanks.
The show closed after five weeks, the jury huddled and then threw the book at Walters and Bloom. They were convicted of conspiracy, racketeering conspiracy, conspiracy to commit mail fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, and extortion. The judge sentenced Walters to five years and Bloom to three. (As it turned out, Walters never served one day in prison. His sentence was later reduced to probation. Bloom was murdered gangland style at his home in Malibu, California, before ever serving a day in prison. His murder was believed to be the result of a drug deal gone bad.)
After the whole affair was over, I returned to Terminal Island, and a few weeks later, I was released. I was sure it was all over and that I could now look forward to the future.
At last, I was a free man, and I could get on with my new life.
26
One of the most important things I wanted to do after my release was be baptized in water. The ceremony was arranged for Sunday, October 15, 1989, and the scene that day has been vividly described as follows by Dary Matera, co-author of my book, Quitting the Mob:
They were standing high above the congregation, waist-deep in the warm blue water. Bronze organ pipes lined the walls on both sides, occasionally crying out piercing notes. Above them, the ornate Gothic ceiling was too high to make out the carved rafter patterns and checkerboard bursts of color. Down below, in the water, the two men wore white robes tinged pale crimson by the light bouncing off the blood-red carpet that bathed the entire building.
All eyes riveted on the chiseled features of the younger man, the slight, dark-haired parishioner to the right of Pastor Myron Taylor in the small, watery chamber. Many in the congregation knew who he was and what he was. Openly, they had accepted him into their flock. It was the Christian way. There was even historical precedent that demanded their acceptance: Jesus himself had reached out to the man who had hung beside him on the cross. They all knew the story. It was one of the Bible's most memorable tales, symbolizing forever how easily one can slip into heaven, right up to the last breath of life, simply by believing. One can lead a lifetime of greed, evil, lust, and murder and still escape the postdeath sentence of spending an eternity in a fiery lake merely by whispering a deathbed request to be forgiven.
The example was unmistakably clear. They could argue among themselves about other passages, other verses, and other parables, but not about this one. There was no gray area regarding the thief on the cross. They were thus charged with accepting the stranger into their flock, welcoming him with joyful hearts, smiling when they shook his hand, trying not to let their tension reveal itself through muscles jerked tight down the sides of the neck and around the edges of the mouth.
It was God's way.
But, privately, they doubted.
Privately, many were afraid.
The good people of Westwood Hills Christian Church in the trendy Westwood section of Los Angeles weren't used to a young man like this one among the congregation of their stately, nondenominational church. The oldfashioned cathedral, which sits precariously between the glitz of the Westwood Marquis Hotel and the youthful glamour of the UCLA campus, was modeled after ones constructed in Scotland centuries before. Stone arches, varnished pews, and silk-screened shields fill the interior. A large steeple topped by a cluster of sharp-pointed spires dominates the exterior. The church survived as the neigh
borhood around it grew wild....
Only now, this morning, something dark and frightening, something far worse than the congregation ever imagined, had ventured inside.
It wasn't so much that this man was in a church that was so disturbing. The congregation had seen the movies. They knew such men weren't strangers to churches. On the contrary, many had been portrayed as devout. But it was the Roman Catholic Church that had to deal with them, accept their tainted money, hear their bloody confessions, and minister to their meek, prayerful wives and well-behaved children.
They were the Catholic Church's problem.
No longer. Now, one had come their way. A powerful one. A famous one. One who had been in all the newspapers, made all the network news shows. A thirty-eightyear-old Long Island native who had been part of one of the most infamous Mafia families and had sprung directly from one of the most feared crime bosses: an enforcer so cold-blooded and deadly that he had evoked as much fear among his minions as the devil did among his.
That man's son was now standing before them, participating in their most sacred ceremony. And no matter what they thought, how much they feared, Jesus had ordered them to accept. Not to judge, not to cast stones, not even to question the man's sincerity. They were to accept.
It was supposed to be a quietly joyful moment, a humble rebirth for the man who brought himself into the water. The rite is performed many different ways by many different denominations, but this congregation's method, shared with the Southern Baptists and other Protestant sects, was the most dramatic.... Their way was total immersion. In the case of the gangster in the baptistery, the water would surely bubble and turn black as the night.
They also knew about the woman, the one who usually sat among them and was now in the chamber alongside the two men. The story was titillating and romantic. She had brought him here. She had succeeded where all the prosecutors and government task forces and police detectives had failed-she sent him to prison. He went, the story was, out of his all-consuming passion for her. He gave up the money, the power, the family tradition and spent three years locked up because of his love for her.
He put his very life at risk, in the past, in the future, and at that very moment. All for her.
The women in the congregation, those who pondered such things, were skeptical. They couldn't see it. What was so special about this woman? She was pretty, they admitted, maybe even beautiful if one is partial to the dark and exotic. She seemed nice enough and appeared to be a good mother and a faithful wife. She was even a true believer. But to abdicate from an empire, even a criminal empire, for her? To go to jail? To give up millions? For this Mexican woman who sat among them each Sunday with her two little girls and baby son?
The men, those who pondered such things, were less skeptical. In fact, it was the woman who heralded the first ring of truth to the whole bizarre story. She was more than just pretty. They could sense it, almost feel it. Something about her made the heart pound and the knees weak. Maybe she truly had gotten inside him, first making him crazy with lust, then insane with love. The combination could have consumed his every thought and led him down whatever path she desired, including the renouncement of his secret life.
Love can do that. Lust certainly can do that. Combined, they can be an addiction more consuming than money, power, or the strongest drug. Fused together, they can be more enticing than crime practiced at the highest, most profitable levels.
Fanciful thinking. A good story, certainly-the kind of which movies are made. And not surprisingly, Hollywood had called. A television miniseries was in the works. It would be America's version of Samson and Delilah, played out, fittingly, by a mobster and a Latin dancer.
The cynical among the congregation scoffed. Nice story; heck of a movie.. .now wake up. Lovesickness overtaking a man who reigned over a violent world where the slightest show of weakness could be fatal? Giving up everything and going to jail when he could have kept it all, stayed free, and probably gotten the girl anyway?
Sure.
But the woman had made him weak. Even the cynics could see that. And she made him strong.
Every now and then, the free-floating speculation was interrupted by a scent of death hovering in the distance. Sometimes it floated closer, so close you could feel it pressing against the skin. Would the young man rise out of the water? Would he walk out of the church and make it safely to his car? The underground buzzed with news about the contract. You can't walk away, they say. He had. He had created an unprecedented situation that needed to be corrected. He had violated the Mafia's most sacred oath, the one he had sworn to on Halloween night fourteen years before.
The whispers claimed that his public repudiation had caused such fury that his own father had ordered his death.
Wash away his sins, blow away his life, all in one mad fusion of water and blood and exploding gunpowder mixed with pipe organ music. Keep an eye on the door. Get ready to duck. The assassins feared the other church, the one with the statue of the Virgin. But did that fear hold true for this one? Or would they just come slithering in and take him out right there where he stood, so vulnerable in Pastor Taylor's arms, waistdeep in a pool of warm water in a blood-red Protestant church?
"Michael Franzese, will you repeat after me: `I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus is Lord."'
The voice that followed was deep and resonant, exactly the voice the congregation expected to hear-a voice more suited to ordering death than to praising a resurrected Savior.
"I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus is Lord."
"Michael Franzese, upon the profession of your faith in Jesus Christ, you are baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen."
Pastor Taylor put a handkerchief over the young man's mouth, braced his right hand against his back, and leaned him backward into the water. Michael Franzese arose a few seconds later, dripping wet, his thick black hair pushed back as if it were heavily gelled for a night on the town. He looked down at the congregation, then over to his wife. She had been immersed moments before.... Their eyes locked. She looked more beautiful at that moment than he'd ever seen her before.
The mobster Christian. The born-again don. The yuppie capo, now going onward as a Christian soldier. The senses spin. The brain rejects it. The billion-dollar Mafia swindler. The brilliant schemer who took the blood, guts, and hot lead out of the mob and streamlined it into a smooth, white-collar operation that made money faster than any old labor union, bank, or financial institution, then took down the oilmen. He wrapped himself in crisp button-down shirts, Italian silk ties, and Pierre Cardin suits, smiled, winked, and played a blinding billion-dollar shell game on Uncle Sam.
The son proved to be as lethal in the skyscrapers of the business world as the father had been on the streets.
And even after he turned himself in, after he unbuckled his six-guns, raised his hands in surrender, and looked longingly at the Mexican cantina girl, little changed. He merely put on his open-collar shirts, his California-casual Gucci loafers, his Giorgio Armani suits, smiled, winked, and brought the feds back to the table. Follow the pea. Watch closely. Which shell is it under this time? Switch, shift, roll. The hand is quicker than the eye. I'll cop a plea in return for three years in prison, some of it to be served in a halfway house with weekends off. Switch, shift, roll. I'll pay back whatever I owe. Fifteen, twenty million? Okay. I don't have the money now, of course. The billions? The newspapermen exaggerate. It's all gone! Expenses. The family. Those wild and crazy Russians. Everyone taking their cut. Hardly any left for me. But no sweat. Switch, shift, roll. Just let me out so I can work my magic and turn the money faucets back on. And don't worry. I'll do it clean this time! In Tinseltown! The land of stars and dreams and overnight fortunes! We'll be partners: Michael Franzese and Uncle Sam. Got a nice ring to it. And I'll do all the work. What a deal!
What a deal indeed. Uncle Sam squinted down through his bifocals,
turned over the shell, and, for once, thought he'd found the pea.
There remain cynics. Not only among the Westwood Hills Christian Church flock but among the FBI, the Organized Crime Strike Force, and the state attorneys in California, Illinois, Florida, and New York. And especially among the Mafia itself. Could this guy possibly be for real? And what's this born-again thing? Is it another great con? Part of the big picture, the Franzese all-theworld's-a-sucker megascam?
If so, what's the angle? He's out of prison. The extraordinary deal he wrangled out of the feds had been cut. He hadn't used his born-again conversion to impress the parole board. And he was baptized after he was out, his time served, with seemingly no one left to scam or impress.
There was no accompanying media extravaganza like at boxer Mike Tyson's baptism. No CNN cameras to record the moment. Just a private ceremony in a midsized Los Angeles church. A public proclamation of faith before a congregation of strangers. A dunking that most people, particularly a man of his stature, would find a bit embarrassing. An event that had indeed made the ironwilled Mafia prince so nervous that he found it difficult to stand.
Where did this religious transformation fit into the master plan? What was the master plan?
Was he doing it for himself? Or was he truly paralyzed by his love for the dark-eyed Latin woman in the wet, clinging white robe? Was this, again, her doing?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
I'm sure the writer was correct in reporting the many opinions others held about my intentions that day. Only I knew the truth. Although I was happy to be publicly declaring my new faith, I was a long way from being a strong Christian. But I was on my way.
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