Sonny Sanctioned The Hit On His Own Son

Michael Franzese sits in a nondescript room, the weight of a multi -million dollar empire replaced by the silence of a man who knows exactly how much a human life is worth in the eyes of the Colombo crime family. In the mid -1980s, Michael was the Yuppie Don, a capo who moved 500 million gallons of gasoline a month. generating nearly eight million dollars in cash every single week. But the spreadsheets and the shell companies in Panama couldn't protect him from the one thing the mafia values more than money.

Absolute, unwavering loyalty. When Michael decided to walk away from that life, he didn't just leave behind the fast cars and the Long Island mansions. He left behind a father, John Sonny Franzese, who had spent decades serving as the iron -fisted underboss of the family. The betrayal was so deep, so foundational to the code they lived by, that Sonny did the unthinkable. He didn't just disown his son. He sanctioned a contract on Michael's life. To understand how a father could sign his son's death warrant, you have to look at the man Sonny was and the world he built for Michael to inherit.

Sonny Franzis was a legend of the old school, a man who allegedly boasted of 60 kills and who treated the Mafia's code of Omerda as a holy scripture. He was the kind of man who would go to his grave before speaking to a federal agent, a principle he proved by serving decades in prison without ever breaking. In the 1960s, Sonny was the king of the Copacabana, rubbing elbows with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., while simultaneously masterminding rackets that reached into every corner of New York.

But in 1967, the government finally caught up with him. Sonny was convicted of masterminding a nationwide string of bank robberies. The evidence was built on the testimony of men like Richard Parks and James Smith, Bank robbers who flipped to save themselves. When the judge handed down a staggering 50 -year sentence, Sonny didn't flinch. He looked at the bench and famously declared that he would do the whole 50. It was a moment of pure defiant mob theater, but it left his family in a tailspin. Michael was a pre -med student at Hofstra University at the time.

A kid Sonny had wanted to keep legitimate. But with the breadwinner facing a lifetime behind bars, Michael felt he had no choice. He dropped out of school and walked into the world his father had tried to keep him from, eventually taking the blood oath on Halloween night in 1975. The gasoline scam Michael pioneered wasn't just another mob racket. It was a masterpiece of white collar crime. that he realized that while the government was focused on traditional mob activities like gambling and loan sharking, the excise tax on fuel was an untapped gold mine.

Michael set up a daisy chain of dummy companies. Here is how it worked. A wholesale company would buy the gas tax free, then sell it through a series of shell corporations. By the time the IRS showed up at the end of the chain to collect the nine cents a gallon in federal tax. the company responsible for the bill had vanished, declared bankrupt, or simply dissolved. Michael was pocketing the tax money that should have gone to the state and federal government, moving so much volume that he was arguably the most profitable earner in the history of the American mafia since Al Capone.

He had an army of soldiers, a private jet, and the yuppie don title, but the higher he rose, the more of a target he became. When federal indictments finally rained down in 1985, one in New York and a massive 177 -count indictment in Florida, the government didn't just want his money. They wanted his cooperation. They wanted him to bring down the very infrastructure his father had spent a century defending. The fracture began when Michael did the one thing Sonny could never forgive. He took a plea deal and eventually agreed to testify in a case against sports agent Norby Walters.

While Michael maintains he never gave up, made members of the mafia to save himself. In the eyes of the Colombo family, and especially in the eyes of Sonny, any cooperation with the feds was a death sentence for your reputation. By the mid -90s, When Michael walked out of prison and moved his family to California to start a new life, the contract was already out. Sonny didn't just know about the hit. He endorsed it. To Sonny, the mafia wasn't just a business. It was a family higher than blood. If his son had become a rat, then his son was no longer his son.

Michael has described the chilling reality of being told by FBI agents that his own father had sanctioned his murder. It is a level of psychological warfare that few can imagine. The person who taught you how to walk and talk is now the person who has given the green light for your execution to maintain his standing in a dying criminal society. But the tragedy of the Franzese family didn't end with Michael's exit. The true collapse of Sonny's legacy came years later, and it didn't involve Michael.

It involved his other son, John Franzese Jr., unlike Michael, who had been a high -earning capo. John Jr. was an associate struggling with a severe drug addiction. In 2005, John Jr. did something that shattered the last remnants of the Franzese name in the underworld. He wore a wire. He recorded his own father, then in his late 80s, discussing mob business and shaking down strip clubs in 2010. The world watched as John Jr. took the witness stand in a Brooklyn federal court. Sonny, then 93 years old and nearly deaf, sat at the defense table, occasionally nodding off, earning the nickname the Nodfather from the tabloids.

But there was no humor in the testimony. John Jr. was the first son of a high -ranking New York mobster to testify against his father in open court. He told the jury how Sonny had groomed him for the life and then watched as Sonny was sentenced to eight more years in prison, a term that meant the centenarian would likely die behind bars. The legacy of the Franzese family is a story of two sons who took different paths out of a dark world, but both left their father behind in the ruins of a code that no longer worked.

Sonny lived to be 103, finally walking out of prison at the age of 100 as the oldest federal inmate in the country. Before he died in 2020, there was a quiet, fragile reconciliation. Michael visited him in a nursing home and John Jr. eventually met with him too after years in witness protection. Sonny reportedly told his grandchildren to stay out of the life not because of some moral awakening but because he believed there was no more money in it. The man who had sanctioned a hit on one son and been sent to prison by the other died as a relic of a time.

when the family meant everything and blood meant nothing. Michael Franzese is still here, a living testament to the fact that you can survive the mob, even when the person who wants you dead is the man who gave you life. If you found this look into the dark heart of the Colombo family compelling, share this episode with someone who enjoys a story of true crime and complicated legacies. And that's how I heard it.

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