Convicted mob boss John “Sonny” Franzese is so old, his recent extortion trial became nap time — even when his turncoat son took the witness stand against him.
However, a federal judge decided on Friday that Franzese was not so old that he can avoid prison.
Franzese, 93, was sentenced to eight years in prison for extorting Manhattan strip clubs and a pizzeria on New York’s Long Island.
The jailed Franzese appeared alert while sitting in a wheelchair in federal court in Brooklyn, but when asked if he wanted to speak, he managed only a fragmented mumble: “I never got a fair …”
Federal prosecutors had sought at least 12 years behind bars for the underboss of the Colombo crime family — in effect, a life term.
To bolster their argument, they had an FBI agent testify on Friday that Franzese bragged about killing 60 people over the years and once contemplated putting out a hit on his own son for becoming a government cooperator.
“For him to die in prison is not an inappropriate response to the life he’s led,” Assistant US Attorney Christina Posa said.
Defense attorney Richard Lind argued that because of Franzese’s advanced age and array of chronic illnesses, a long sentence was pointless.
He labeled the talk of gangland carnage “pathetic boasting.”
Sentencing a nonagenarian wasn’t easy, US District Judge Brian Cogan said.
However, he also said he needed to send a message that “you can never escape the consequences of a lifetime of organized crime.”
The sentencing was the latest chapter of a criminal career dating to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Franzese’s first arrest, for assault, came in 1938. Prosecutors say he was kicked out of the army four years later after displaying “homicidal tendencies.”
In 1947, court papers say, he raped a waitress in a garage. In 1966, he beat a murder charge accusing him of killing a rival and dumping the body — cement blocks chained to the feet — into a bay.
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 New York’s five Italian mafia crime families.
According to mafia lore, Franzese was a big spender and a regular at the Copacabana nightclub, where he hobnobbed with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. He also once had a stake in the classic porn film Deep Throat.
Although in court papers, the government said Franzese’s true legacy was something more akin to Goodfellas.
The main reason Franzese dodged arrest in other murders is that he became good at making bodies disappear, the papers said.
Investigators caught him on tape in 2006 describing his favorite recipe for that: Dismember victim in kiddie pool. Cook body parts in microwave. Stuff parts in garbage disposal. Be patient.
“Today, you can’t have a body no more,” the latest court papers quote him saying. “It’s better to take that half an hour, an hour, to get rid of the body than it is just to leave the body in the street.”
The FBI arrested Franzese in a mob take down in 2008. A jury found him guilty last year on racketeering and other charges.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of