OTB Meets Ex-Mafia Boss Michael Franzese


“My dad was a young guy when Lucky went to prison, but had met him. He told me talk on the street about Lucky was always good. ‘Made’ guys looked up to him, because of the way he carried himself. He was a real tough guy. He said Lucky knew that the real money was in legitimate business, he might have learned that from Lansky. Curiously, my dad always preached that to me when I was a young guy in the life. Maybe he got it from Lucky?”
This doesn’t really tally with the young and headstrong mobster Terrence Winter gives us in the early Prohibition era, although admittedly Luciano would have been older and presumably wiser by the time he bumped into Franzese’s father some years later. “Lucky’s character in Boardwalk Empire seems a bit more reckless then Lucky would have been,” he agrees. “But that’s just my take on him. We had a high regard for a lot of them, because our lives were founded off the back of their work. Some guys they spoke well of, others not too well of. Lucky was definitely one of the architects of the whole system and he was always spoken of fairly well, my dad knew him and actually liked him.”
Franzese and his contemporaries might laud those who operated during the prohibition era as the.. *ahem* ..Godfathers of the mafia, but the truth of the matter is that if Terrence Winter & Co. had decided to make a series circa 1980, Franzese the character would have seen a fair amount of screen time and he is widely considered one of the biggest earners in modern mafia history. “I was heavily involved in the gasoline business and basically we were stealing taxes from the government on every gallon of gasoline we sold. Back then I was told that it was the most money we saw at any one time since the time of prohibition.” According to a Federal report, Franzese made more money for a crime family than anyone since Chicago Outfit boss Al Capone.
“I’m sure the mafia wish they had those days back!” he jokes.
Coincidentally, after rumours began circulating that he was deceiving bosses by skimming the profits of his gasoline racket, he was called into a meeting that “put him on his guard” about the dangers of life in the mob – as if he needed reminding.
“I was making a lot of money for my boss, maybe a couple of million dollars a week from the gas business and other things we were doing, and I got called into a meeting one day where I was told that the word on the street was that I was making billions rather than millions. It was a pretty serious meeting and I never forgot it. I thought to myself ‘for all I’m doing, to get challenged like this, this isn’t right’. After I got indicted I started to watch guys flip and turn, I remember thinking ‘this thing’s over’. But I never thought about walking away from the life until I met my wife. Something clicked and I said to myself ‘I need to plan an exit strategy’. I wanted to do it quietly, kind of drift away, that’s why I took a plea to a racketeering charge and made a deal to do my time out in California, hoping that after 10 or 12 years the guys in New York would forget about me. I’d either be dead or in prison for the rest of my life if I hadn’t left. One way or another it was going to take me down.”
“Do I miss it? Some parts. The most attractive part of the life was the camaraderie among the guys. To have this brotherhood, I don’t think there’s anything stronger than that when you’ve got guys watching your back. I miss that – I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, we had a lot of good times and the money was rollong in. But the other side of it doesn’t make it worth it.”
The pre-war years may have been a golden era for the mob, but the last couple of decades have been anything but admits Franzese. “It’s in trouble there’s no doubt,” he says after explaining that he’s still in touch with people from the family. “The government have put an onslaught on it in the last 20 years, which has been very damaging. They took away a lot of the power bases the mafia had with the unions and other things, so it’s in turmoil right now.
“But the mob is pretty resilient. Over the last couple of decades the FBI may have been pounding on the mob and putting people away, but then terrorism came along and they took some agents off and the mob now has a chance to rebuild itself and grow again. I don’t think we’ll see its demise in my lifetime.”
Who knows, maybe one day a reformed mobster will be telling a journalist stories that his old man told him about Michael Franzese?
http://channelhopping.onthebox.com/2012/01/09/otb-meets-ex-mafia-boss-michael-franzese/

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