| OROVILLE
-- Once an East Coast mob figure in a class with John Gotti and Al
Capone, Michael Franzese is now an author, inspirational speaker and
coaches his son's Little League team in Southern California. Talking to about 75 law enforcement officials gathered in Oroville
Thursday for a conference on fraud, Franzese said he escaped the Mafia
not through the charm and wit that rocketed him to the top of a La
Costra Nostra family, but by going to prison and outliving his enemies.
At 53, Franzese has been out of the mob for more than 15 years.
It's been 31 years since he became a sworn "made" member of a crime
family. "That was Halloween night, 1975," Franzese recalled. He said
six other men officially became La Costra Nostra members that night in
an indoctrination with several curious religious overtones. Among them,
each man was required to suffer a blood-letting cut to a finger and
hold a burning picture of a saint. Franzese said all six of the men he pledged with that night in a "blood covenant" are now dead from violent means.
The former Mafioso, once dubbed the "Long Island Don" and
"Prince of the Mafia," rose to prominence in the early 1980s by
participating in a scheme to defraud the government of federal tax from
gasoline sales. He and a partner contracted to sell gasoline to East Coast
service stations at a discount, with Franzese telling his customers he
would cover the federal tax. He collected millions from the gasoline sales, but delayed
paying the tax for a year, then absconded with the money before the
government could move in. Franzese figured he was making about 41
cents' profit on each gallon sold. It reportedly made him the biggest moneymaker in the mob since Capone.
He also participated heavily in sports gambling frauds, especially at the college level.
"It's a very easy sell," Franzese said. Mob members cozy up to a
good athlete from a college, but not a pro prospect, and get them to
shave points so the favored team doesn't cover the spread, he
explained. He said a player may earn $10,000 each time they participate.
"The problem is, they want to get out after they've done it once, twice
or three times, but the mob is greedy," Franzese said. "You get out
when we say you get out," Franzese said the players are generally told.
All Internet gambling on sports is illegal, but most is
operated from offshore, and perpetrators are nearly impossible to track
down. Identity theft collected through gambling sites is rampant, Franzese said.
Franzese said it's a misconception that organized crime simply
muscles its way into legitimate business for its own gain. "In each and
every case, and I mean every case, it was someone who came from that
business from within, an employee or somebody in a high position, that
came to me with a way to defraud that company, and they came to me
because of my connections." He admitted to the roomful of police officers Thursday that he
had participated in violent acts to enforce his schemes, but was never
charged with a violent crime. He decided to plead guilty to a
racketeering charge (not in connection with the gas tax fraud) and was
sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. He served nearly eight years in different facilities,
including Lompoc in Santa Barbara County, where he said he probably
came closest to having a hit made on him. He got six months knocked off his sentence for agreeing to
appear in an anti-gambling video being produced by the National
Basketball Association. That experience, Franzese said, launched his new career speaking and writing about organized crime and fraud.
He also formed a foundation to assist convicted criminals from reoffending.
When he got out of prison, most of the people Franzese
considered his enemies were either dead or in prison themselves. Still,
Franzese said, the government gave him a list of 500 people he was no
longer allowed to have contact with.
Some of them were dead.
"This is the last thing I thought I'd ever be doing in my life,
but I've been blessed with a second chance. You're looking at someone
who should certainly either be dead or in prison for life, that's
certainly what I earned in my life."
Franzese said the best way for the public to combat fraud of all kinds is through education.
"Anyone committing a fraud will never have the proper
documentation to back it up. People have to check into these things
before they act." "If I had to solve the problem with fraud, it would be through education and awareness," he emphasized.
Franzese's casual style and confidence at a lectern might
suggest his separation from the Mafia was easy, but nothing could be
further from the truth: In reality, he isn't completely free even now
from its code of the vendetta.
"I don't think I could go back to Brooklyn. I probably wouldn't last a day," he said.
Franzese spent three years in premed school at Hofstra
University, but had always longed for a life on "the street." He grew
up with it, recalling that his father, a kingpin in the Colombo crime
family, was almost constantly under surveillance by the FBI. "They would even follow us into a restaurant when we went to dinner," he said.
Franzese's rise through the ranks of La Costra Nostra was nearly
unprecedented, and he earned millions, perhaps billions, of dollars. When asked by a police officer what became of the money,
Franzese said he opened dozens of accounts in the Cayman Islands, and
even bought a bank in Austria. "But if it's out there, I doubt that
I'll ever have the use of it," he said. He paid restitution of $15 million at the time of his conviction on racketeering.
Franzese is married and has seven children.
Staff writer Greg Welter can be reached at 896-7768 or gwelter@chicoer.com. | 
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