Michael Franzese Tried To Walk Away – But Then Sonny Franzese Put a HIT on Him – HT

 

 

 

Michael Franesi walked away from the New York mob voluntarily. No witness protection, no fake identity, no federal deal. Just walked away from one of the most powerful crime families in American history and said he was done. Nobody does that. In the entire history of organized crime in America, you can count on one hand the number of men who left the mob and lived to talk about it without entering witness protection.

Michael Francisi is on that list. But what the documentaries and the YouTube interviews and the inspirational speaking tours leave out is the part that almost ended everything. His own father ordered his death. Sunonny Franesi, one of the most feared under bosses in Columbbo family history, a man who had personally ordered dozens of murders across four decades, put a contract out on his own son, his own blood, the child he’d raised, loved, and brought into the life.

That story, the real story of what happened between Michael and Sunny Francis is darker, more complicated, and more human than anything you’ve seen in a mob documentary. It involves betrayal, religion, loyalty, and a father who genuinely couldn’t tell the difference between his love for his son and his obligation to the organization that owned him.

This is that story. Not the version Sunny told about himself. Not the charming old man with the white hair who gave interviews in his 90s. The real Sunonny Franesi. The one law enforcement spent 30 years trying to put in the ground. Lorenzo Sunny Franesi was born in Naples in 1917 and came to America as a child.

 By the time he was 30, he was already deeply embedded in what would become the Columbbo Crime Family in New York. By the time he was 40, he was one of the most powerful figures in organized crime on the entire East Coast. The FBI considered Sunny one of the most dangerous mob figures in America. Not the most famous, not the most visible, the most dangerous.

 There’s a difference. Gotti wanted the cameras. Sunny wanted the power. He understood that visibility was a liability. He operated quietly, methodically, and ruthlessly. By the 1960s, Sunny was the under boss of the Columbbo family, second in command of an organization that controlled lone sharking, gambling, labor racketeering, and murder for hire operations across New York.

 His crew was responsible for an estimated 50 murders between 1960 and 1970 alone. 50 in a decade. Most of those were never prosecuted because witnesses had a habit of disappearing before they could testify. Sunny wasn’t just violent. He was strategic about violence. He understood that the right killing at the right time was worth a hundred random acts of brutality.

He killed people to send messages, to close problems, to maintain a structure of fear that kept his operation running smoothly. He never killed for pleasure. He killed for business. That distinction matters because it explains exactly what happened with Michael. Michael grew up watching his father operate, watching men come to the house with envelopes, watching the defence people showed Sunny in the neighborhood, watching his father be treated like royalty in a world where the legitimate rules didn’t apply to him. Sunny was

arrested in 1966 and sentenced to 50 years in federal prison on bank robbery charges. Michael was 15 years old. He watched his father go away and watched what happened to the family without Sunny’s protection and income. The bills, the struggle, the way people who had once shown respect suddenly looked through you on the street.

That experience shaped Michael. When Sunny was parrolled in 1979, Michael was already 28 and had spent years building his own operation. He’d gotten into the gasoline bootlegging business, exploiting a tax loophole that allowed him to steal hundreds of millions of dollars in federal and state fuel taxes.

 At his peak, Michael Franesi was generating an estimated $1 billion a year in revenue from the gas tax scheme alone. 1 billion per year. Fortune magazine listed him among the 50 biggest mob earners in American history. He was appearing on that list alongside men twice his age who had spent entire lifetimes building their criminal operations.

Michael had done it in less than a decade. He was also, by his own admission, a genuinely devout criminal. He went to mass. He prayed. He told himself that he could separate his faith from what he did for a living. He was wrong, but he didn’t know that yet. In 1984, Michael met a woman named Cammy Garcia, a 19-year-old dancer from California.

She was everything his world wasn’t. Not connected to organized crime, not from New York, not carrying the weight of a family legacy built on murder and extortion. Michael fell completely in love with her. They married in 1985. And that marriage began the chain of events that would eventually lead Sunonny Franesi to conclude that his own son needed to die. It didn’t happen overnight.

 It happened slowly, the way most irreversible things happen. Cammy was a Christian, not culturally, not nominally, but genuinely and seriously. She believed what she believed and she lived it. and living in proximity to that kind of faith started doing something to Michael that no law enforcement agency, no competing crime family, no federal prosecutor had ever managed to do.

 It made him question whether the life was compatible with who he wanted to be. Michael began talking to Cammy about leaving. not immediately, not with a specific plan, just the idea of it, the possibility. And Cammy, to her credit, and to Michael’s eventual salvation, encouraged it without ultimatums. She didn’t say, “Leave or I go.

” She said, “I believe you can be something different.” And that was somehow more powerful. By 1986, Michael was already facing federal indictments related to the gasoline scheme. The government had been building a case for years, and it was becoming clear that prison was coming regardless of what he chose. He began cooperating with the idea in his own mind that prison might be the exit ramp from the life that God or fate or whatever force he was increasingly taking seriously was offering him.

 In 1986, Michael Franesi plead guilty to racketeering charges. He was sentenced to 10 years. He served several years in federal prison and in that time his transformation deepened. He converted more completely to Christianity. He wrote, he thought, he prepared himself in his own mind to walk away from the Columbbo family permanently.

When he got out, what he didn’t fully account for was what walking away would look like to the people he was walking away from. To the mob, a member who walks away creates problems, not primarily emotional problems, structural ones. A man who walks away knows too much. He knows operations, personnel, hierarchies, methods.

 He knows who ordered what and when and why. A man who walks away is by definition a potential informant. Even if he never talks, even if he has no intention of talking, the potential is there. And in organized crime, potential threats are managed the same way actual threats are managed. They’re eliminated. Michael was released from prison in 1989 and made it clear that he was done.

 He wasn’t entering witness protection. He wasn’t cooperating with the government. He was just leaving. He told associates. He told his crew. He told people connected to the Columbbo family hierarchy that he was out. And then word reached Sunny. Sunonny Frani by this point in his 70s and back in prison on a parole violation received word that Michael was attempting to exit the organization.

And Sunny did what Sunny had always done when presented with a structural threat to the organization. He called for a meeting to discuss options. In mob language, discussing options regarding a person who has become a liability means one thing. It means discussing whether that person should be killed. Multiple sources, including former Columbbo family associates and accounts Michael himself has given over the years confirm that the question of whether to kill Michael Franesi was formally raised within the family structure, not as a

hypothetical, as a proposal. A serious proposal backed by serious people who had serious concerns about what a man who knew as much as Michael Franesi might eventually decide to tell the government. And Sunny did not immediately shut it down. That is the part that cuts deepest in this story.

 Not that Michael’s enemies wanted him dead. Enemies always want you dead. That’s what enemies are for. The part that cannot be explained away or softened or contextualized into meaninglessness is that Sunonny Francesi, Michael’s father, the man who had held him as a baby and brought him into this world and into this life, did not immediately say no. He sat with it.

He weighed it. He considered the organizational logic of eliminating his own son because that’s who Sunny was. That was the world he lived in. Love and murder weren’t opposites in that world. They were just two tools in the same toolbox used for different purposes. The specifics of how he found out are murky.

 Mob intelligence moves through informal channels, through conversations overheard, through associates who owed him loyalty, through the kind of ambient information that circulates in criminal organizations the way gossip circulates in offices. But Michael became aware that his name was being discussed in the context of whether he should continue to exist.

 By his own account, he didn’t panic. He prayed. That detail sounds almost absurd given the circumstances. A man finds out his father may have authorized his murder, and his response is to pray, but it tells you everything about where Michael was psychologically and spiritually at that point. He had genuinely come to believe that the framework he’d built his adult life on was wrong and that a different framework, one based on something other than violence and leverage and fear, was available to him. He was betting his

life on that belief literally. He also made calls. He reached out to people who still had standing and credibility within the Columbbo family. people who could speak on his behalf, people who could make the argument that Michael Franacei walking away quietly going legitimate living a Christian life in California with his wife was actually less of a threat to the organization than Michael Franesi being murdered because a living Michael who wasn’t talking was manageable.

A murdered Michael created FBI investigations, news coverage, public attention, and the kind of scrutiny that mob families spent decades trying to avoid. Killing him solved one potential problem while creating several definite ones. That argument, the cold organizational logic of letting him live, was what ultimately saved his life.

 Not love, not Sunny’s paternal instinct, organizational logic. They didn’t stop speaking. Michael continued to visit Sunny in prison. Sunny continued to receive his son. On the surface, the relationship of a father and son continued. Beneath the surface was the knowledge shared by both of them and never directly addressed that Sunny had considered having Michael killed.

that the only reason Michael was alive was that the math had worked out in his favor. Michael has spoken about this in interviews with a kind of careful measured language that itself tells you how complicated the reality was. He loves his father. He says that clearly and consistently. He also acknowledges what his father was, what his father did, and what his father was willing to consider when organizational necessity seemed to demand it.

 He holds both of those things simultaneously, the love and the knowledge. He doesn’t resolve the contradiction because it can’t be resolved. It just exists. The way complicated truths about complicated people always exist. Sunonny Francisi died in May 2020 at the age of 103. He was at the time of his death the oldest living former federal prisoner in American history.

He had survived prison, murder attempts, federal prosecution, and a century of existence in one of the most violent criminal organizations in American history. Michael was there at the funeral, grieving his father. He became a motivational speaker, a Christian speaker. He speaks at churches and conferences and corporate events about redemption and second chances and the possibility of changing the direction of your life regardless of what direction it’s been traveling.

He has a YouTube channel with millions of subscribers. He does podcast appearances. He’s written books. He talks about his father. He talks about the life. He talks about what cocaine actually smells like and how they moved money and what it felt like to sit across the table from men who could order your death with the same emotional investment most people bring to ordering lunch.

 He does all of this without witness protection under his real name publicly visibly. There are people who find this suspicious. Former law enforcement officials, mob historians, and some former associates have raised questions over the years about how Michael Franesi managed to walk away from the Columbbo family without consequences, without witness protection, and without being killed.

 The answer he gives is faith. The answer others give is more complicated. But here’s what is not disputed. Michael Frances is alive. He walked away from one of the most powerful criminal organizations in American history. His father considered having him murdered and didn’t. And Michael has spent the 35 years since that decision talking about it openly in front of anyone who wants to listen.

The mob is the setting, not the subject. The subject is a man watching his father weigh the organizational value of his death against the inconvenience of his survival. The subject is what you do. When the person who is supposed to love you unconditionally turns out to love you with conditions attached, conditions written in a language of violence and institutional loyalty that was never meant to include the word unconditional in the first place.

 Most people never face that question in those terms. Most fathers who love their children imperfectly do so in ways that are painful but not homicidal. Sunonny Francesi loved his son while sitting in a room where men discussed whether his son should be killed. Michael Francisi survived that. He walked away from it. He built something on the other side of it.

 Whether that something is redemption or business or both is a question Michael’s critics debate endlessly. But the fact of his survival, the fact that he’s alive and his father isn’t, the fact that he sat at that funeral and grieved that man, that is not a debate. That happened. All of it happened. And the truth of it, the real truth, is more disturbing and more human and more complicated than any mob movie has ever managed to show.

 Because movies need villains and heroes and clean lines between them. Real life gives you a father who loves you and orders your death in the same breath. Real life gives you a son who prays for the man who considered killing him. There’s no movie ending for that. Just two people, a father and a son, and everything that was true and terrible and irreducible between