#SONNY FRANZESE TRIAL#

“You’re gonna do things the right way,” Sonny would say, referring to everything from schoolwork to table manners. He was always home for dinner and loved to cook calzones for the kids.īut he had rules.

Sonny was a devoted father with an uncanny ability to separate work and family. Sonny adopted Michael, Tina’s son who was said to be from a previous marriage, but who Michael attests was his biological father. The family occupied one of the biggest houses on Shrub Hollow Road it had a 40-foot-long pool, a putting green, and a “museum room” filled with art. But everyone liked the little guy who spent his days singing as he romped around Roslyn, a prosperous village on Long Island’s North Shore. Wanted them dead.” In moments like this, when he’s visited by the past, his impish warmth briefly betrays a clenched ferocity that evokes his father. “I think of all the people I called rats and all the ways I hated rats,” John says. His small, semimonastic life is devoted to living clean and transcending his legacy as a criminal and a rat-a word that agitates him far more than his lingering fears he has about personal safety. This explains why John, the man who would be kingpin, ended up living in Indianapolis. According to the FBI, his father considered having an associate whack his own son. Despite all better judgment, he couldn’t shake the urge to see his old man one last time-or to die trying. Even in exile, even with a price on his head, he never thought of himself as Michael Carter or John Maggio or any other of his “new” identities.

Such is the family’s grip that John never fully escaped it, because he never wanted to. And that was just the King Lear element of the Franzese (pronounced: “fran-zees”) family saga, an epic stew of betrayals and tragedies, twists and redemptions that suggests a wiseguy version of the British royals.

#SONNY FRANZESE TRIAL#

The trial marked the first time that a New York Mafia boss watched his own son (and erstwhile heir apparent) testify against him in open court. Having worn a wire for the FBI, he served as the star witness against the last of the great New York mobsters, Sonny Franzese, underboss of the Colombo crime family. has been looking over his shoulder since 2006, when he became one of the most famous turncoats in Mafia history. But occasionally, when visited by certain sights or sounds, he feels a primal shudder unique to anyone who’s spent years in the Federal Witness Protection Program, living a ghostly life of assumed identities and midnight relocations. His new life of sobriety and repentance generally keeps him too busy to dwell on the past. It’s not an everyday thing, the feeling it hits him less and less as the bad old days-“the days when I was a lying degenerate,” John says, “the days when I was a thieving, disgusting animal”-recede in his rearview. “Three or four cars-it’d be done and over in no time…”

Sonny franzese