Former Mob boss reveals the most powerful Godfathers in Mafia’s ‘golden era’
A former top mobster who turned his back on New York’s murky underworld – and lived to tell the tale – has given his verdict on the most powerful bosses during the Mafia’s ‘golden era’.
Michael Franzese, 72, was a captain in the Colombo crime gang which, alongside the Genovese, Gambino, Lucchese and Bonnano borgatas formed the city’s infamous ‘Five Families’.
Having masterminded a huge gasoline tax swindle which netted his crew a staggering $9million each week, he was featured on Fortune Magazine’s list of the ‘Fifty Most Wealthy and Powerful Mafia Bosses’ – and was even portrayed in Martin Scorsese’s gangster classic ‘Goodfellas’.
Franzese has never taken the list seriously, maintaining ‘there’s no way the government knows how much they really earned’. But during a sit-down with Metro, the ‘Mafia Prince’ revealed who the most powerful mob bosses really were during Cosa Nostra’s prime between the 1940s and late 1980s.
‘I’m not downgrading the guys on the list,’ he says. ‘I just said it was a silly list because there’s no way the government knows how much they really have, and it was all about wealth and power.
‘But at least during my era, number one in New York was “Chin” Gigante, and he was probably number one in the country because he was the most powerful guy and he called the shots.’
Vincent Gigante was nicknamed the ‘Oddfather’ in the media after spending decades painstakingly maintaining the ruse he had dementia in a bid to avoid prosecution.
He would often be seen shuffling through his Greenwich Village neighbourhood wearing pyjamas and a bathrobe while mumbling away to himself incoherently.
Even his archnemesis – Gambino kingpin John Gotti – grudgingly recognised Gigante’s shrewdness, famously telling his underboss Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano: ‘He’s crazy like a fox.’
That sentiment was shared by the FBI squad assigned to bring his clan down, whose leader said: ‘He was probably the most-clever organised crime figure I have ever seen.’
Gigante, whose ‘Chin’ moniker derived from a shortened version of his mother’s preferred name for him – ‘Cincenzo’, ascended to head the Genovese family in the early 1980s, reigning for more than two decades as it became the nation’s most powerful organised crime faction.
Such was his own status, Michael claims Gigante once offered him a place in his crew.
‘I walked Houston Street with him in Little Italy twice,’ he says, before adding with a smile: ‘We had two very nice conversations I would say.
‘He had the bathrobe, slippers, unshaven, the whole bit. It was a sight to see, but he was crazy like a fox. He was very alert and bright when I spoke to him and he liked my father a lot, he had a lot of respect for my dad.
‘In turn, he treated me very well and he actually offered me a position in his family. He said if you have any trouble at all over there, you come and be a captain with me.
‘I said thank you very much. I took it as a compliment, I was kind of surprised honestly, but I felt good about it knowing who he was and the stature that he had. I felt good about it.’
Gigante’s ‘crazy act’ shielded him from indictment in the landmark Mafia Commission trial which saw most of Cosa Nostra’s upper echelon sent to prison with 100-year sentences.
Those figures included Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, who served as Gigante’s front boss to hide his real status and Paul ‘Big Paul’ Castellano, who succeeded Carlo Gambino as the reputed ‘boss of bosses’ of New York’s Five Families and was assassinated before the trial on Gotti’s orders.
Franzese named both gangsters on his list of top mobsters, saying each was ‘very powerful at that time’, as well as Tony ‘Joe Batters’ Accardo, who headed the ‘Chicago Outfit’, and Tampa boss Santo Trafficante, long rumoured to have been one of the Mafia figures behind the assassination of President John F Kennedy.
Franzese's top Mafia bosses
Paul Castellano
‘Big Paul’ Castellano inherited his role as head of the Gambino crime family following the death of his cousin Carlo Gambino in 1976.
The borgata had by then split in two, with one side led by Castellano and the other loyal to Gambino’s underboss Aniello Dellacroce, who kept a rein on his younger, more aggressive soldiers.
But when Dellacroce died of a heart attack those soldiers, led by Gotti, plotted to overthrow Castellano after growing increasingly resentful of the boss’s greed and aloofness.
That resent turned to hatred when Castellano failed to attend Dellacroce’s wake.
Two weeks later, he and underboss Thomas Bilotti were ambushed and shot dead by a hit team under the command of Gotti and Gravano as they arrived at Sparks Steak House in Manhattan.
Incensed by the unsanctioned whacking of a boss, fellow Commission members Gigante and Anthony Corallo, head of the Lucchese family, tried to kill Gotti in a revenge car bombing that blew up his underboss instead.
Anthony Salerno
Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno served as consigliere, underboss, and acting boss of the Genovese family.
Law enforcement believed Salerno took control of the gang in 1981. But he was merely the front boss for Gigante.
Five years later, prosecutors still believed him to be head of the family and indicted him as the lead defendant in the Commission trial.
Also in 1986, that same Fortune Magazine article listed Salerno as America’s top gangster in power, wealth and influence.
Salerno was convicted in the Commission trial and handed a 100-year sentence.
But it later emerged they and FBI agents bugging his conversations had missed clues from the mouths of wiseguys themselves as to who really wielded control.
As Selwyn Raab notes in his magisterial Mafia history ‘Five Families’, agents overhead a conversation between Gotti and Angelo ‘Fat Ange’ Ruggiero about Gigante being equal in power to Castellano.
On the Commission imposing the death penalty on any members caught dealing drugs, Ruggiero explained: ‘Paul and Chin made a pact.’
Another bugged conversation caught Salerno complaining that the nicknames of soldiers proposed to be inducted into another family had not been included on the list.
‘I don’t know none of them. They don’t put the nicknames down there,’ he moaned. ‘But anyway, I’ll leave this up to the boss.’
Anthony Accardo
Anthony ‘Joe Batters’ Accardo’s career as a mobster spanned eight decades, taking him from a small-time hoodlum to head of the ‘Chicago Outfit’.
He got his nickname after using a baseball bat to beat three mobsters to death for betraying the gang, prompting the legendary Al Capone to remark: ‘Boy, this kid’s a real Joe Batters.’
Accardo was given his own crew when Frank Nitti became boss and was named Paul Ricca’s underboss when he took control of the Outfit in the 1940s.
The two men ran the Outfit for the next 30 years until Ricca died in 1972, leaving Accardo in power. He died in 1992 aged 86.
Santo Trafficante
Florida boss Santo Trafficante Jr was one of the last of the old-time Mafia dons.
He ran mob operations in Tampa and Miami and was the dominant US Mafiosi in Cuba before revolution brought Fidel Castro to power in 1959.
His hatred of the new dictator attracted the attention of the CIA, which had begun hatching plans to topple the leftist regime.
Trafficante was enlisted alongside Los Angeles’ John Roselli and Chicago big shot Sam Giancana.
In a declassified CIA report from 1975, Trafficante was stated to have been persuaded to poison Castro, an allegation he denied.
Trafficante is also suspected to have been one of the key figures in an alleged mob plot to kill President John F Kennedy.
Jose Aleman, a Cuban exile leader, relayed to investigators that Trafficante had told him Kennedy was ‘going to be hit’.
He later shied away from that claim when called to give evidence by the House Assassination Committee.
The committee’s chief counsel and principal drafter of its final report, G Robert Blakey, asserted that ‘organised crime had a hand’ in the assassination.
It also said there was ample evidence the mob was at least thinking about removing Kennedy and named Trafficante and Carlos Marcello as the Mafia leaders most like to have conspired against him.
Going back to the Fortune Magazine list, Franzese says: ‘The guys on the list were meaningful, it was just the way they ranked them that was silly.
‘How do I get to be number 18? I don’t know. I mean, at one point I might have been bringing in $7million, $8million, $9million a week – I don’t know if anybody was doing that.’
He joked that ‘maybe I should have been on the top’ before getting serious again.
‘You know what’s not silly about that list and what’s kind of sad? It’s that 48 of those men are dead,’ he says.
‘Number 49 is in prison and he’s older than me. I’m the only one alive and free out of that list. So that’s pretty telling right there.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.