An elderly gangster who struggled to stay awake while his turncoat son testified against him at his racketeering trial was convicted on Wednesday of charges that he shook down New York strip clubs and a pizzeria.
A jury in Brooklyn federal court found 93-year-old John “Sonny” Franzese — reputed underboss of the Colombo organized crime family and one-time acquaintance of Frank Sinatra — and three co-defendants guilty on its fifth day of deliberations.
Franzese, who had been out on bail, was jailed after the verdict was announced. Prosecutors say he faces up to 20 years in prison.
At trial, prosecutors used John Franzese Jr, a former Colombo associate-turned-paid informant, to help convince jurors that his father’s frail appearance was deceiving. The defendant briefly dozed off on the first of his son’s three days on the witness stand.
“I’m not talking about my father as a man,” Franzese Jr testified. “I’m talking about the life he chose ... This life absorbs you. You only see one way.”
The 50-year-old son testified that he tried to follow in the footsteps of his father, who used him to pass messages to other mobsters, but after developing a crack cocaine addiction, he said he sought “to make up for what I had done in my life” by becoming a government witness.
The jury also heard secretly recorded conversations of the elder Franzese coaching his son and a Colombo captain on how to handle an extortion victim:
“If he don’t give it to you, leave him on the floor,” he said.
Defense lawyer Richard Lind had argued that his client, dubbed the “Nod Father” by the Daily News, hadn’t been a threat since “the age of Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson and maybe the age of George Washington.”
In his heyday, Franzese was a regular at the Copacabana nightclub, where he mixed with Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. He also had a stake in the classic porn film Deep Throat.
Franzese was convicted in 1967 in a bank robbery, sent to prison and paroled in the late 1970s. Though never convicted of another crime, authorities say he rose to second-in-command of the Colombos, one of the city’s five Italian crime families.
He also kept meeting with mob associates in restaurants and other public places — a habit that violated his parole and landed him in prison multiple times. In 2008, he was arrested on a racketeering indictment and later freed on US$1 million bail.
Before the conviction, Frazese had told reporters outside court he was unfazed by the prospect of returning to prison.
“Who cares?” he said. “I gotta die someplace.”
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS