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MICHAEL JACKSON wanted a change.
The superstar singer decided he no longer wanted to work with the agents his dad Joe had recruited to run the megamillion-earning Jackson Family concerts.
But what Michael did not know was that the “firm” he planned to dump was owned by one of New York’s most feared and violent Mafia families.
That is when the Mob’s biggest money maker since Al Capone got on a plane to California to make Jacko an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Now, at a hotel in Brighton, former Mafia mobster Michael Franzese tells The Sun: “Somebody very close to me represented a lot of talent — Marvin Gaye, Dionne Warwick, the Detroit Spinners and The Supremes.
“We had a deal with Michael Jackson’s father Joe to represent them on the 1984 Victory tour. Then, out of nowhere, Michael changes his mind and hires another agent because he got mad at his father.
“So Joe comes to us and says, ‘Look, Michael has given me a hard time’.”
At the time, Mafia prince Franzese was a trusted caporegime — or captain — in New York’s powerful Colombo crime family, which featured in the movie Goodfellas where Michael was played by Raging Bull star Joseph Bono.
When Franzese learned of Jacko’s plans to cut out the Mob, he flew by private jet from New York to Los Angeles to meet the star and his “new” agent.
He says: “I told them, ‘We will respect Michael and we will work out a deal. If you can’t do that, there won’t be a tour’.”
So what would have been the consequences if Jackson had continued the tour without the Mafia.
Staring across the English Channel, Franzese says: “The guy would have got scared and he would have told Michael, ‘I can’t do the tour and better go back to the other guy’. That’s how it would have worked.”
After Franzese’s visit, the Jacksons’ 55-show Victory tour of America and Canada went ahead as planned, earning millions for its backers.
But it wasn’t about the money for Mafia boss Michael, who was already earning $8million to $10million A WEEK for the Colombo family through a series of crooked deals.
Two years after the Jackson incident, Fortune magazine named the 50 richest mobsters in America.
Michael Franzese, the youngest on the list, was at No18. Today, 48 of those wealthy Cosa Nostra dons are dead — many of them were gunned down, the others died in jail.
Michael, now 71, is the only one left alive and free after becoming the first high-ranking mobster to walk away from the Mafia without police protection and survive — despite his own FATHER approving a contract to kill him.
The ex-gangster and dad of seven says: “In that life, if you die of old age and you die free you have really accomplished something.
“There’s a lot of respect sometimes but there is a lot of backstabbing and betrayal. Violence is part of life.
“My biggest regrets are the guys that were close to me who got themselves in trouble and I couldn’t save them. If you are messing around with somebody else’s wife or daughter you are dead, that’s it.
“You raise your hands to another ‘made guy’ and you are finished — you can’t do that.
“You betray the oath, you are in trouble. Guys get in trouble in that life all the time.”
‘Betrayal and violence is part of the life’
Franzese is in Britain on a tour to tell his remarkable story and reveal the secrets of the Mafia to audiences all over the country.
TV journalist Trevor McDonald was on hand to launch Michael’s talks, which continue in Leicester and Brighton later this week before taking in a further 11 towns and cities.
The two men first met when Sir Trevor made his 2015 two-part documentary on the Mafia.
Sir Trevor says: “Michael’s story of how he turned his life around from making millions for the Mafia is extraordinary. We think of the mob as an organised crime gang but it was a way of life.
“One Mafia member told me he had taken his seven-year-old son with him when he went to shoot a rival. When the boy, who had waited outside, asked, ‘What was that noise?’ his father simply said, ‘It was a firecracker’.
“Michael Franzese’s relationship with his own father was strange. I’ve never in my career come across a parent who raised no objection to a contract being taken out on his son.”
Michael’s dad, Sonny, was a close associate of mobster Joe Colombo, who ran one of the five most powerful crime families in New York.
Sonny, who lived to 103, was indicted and acquitted three times for murder. But he was eventually jailed for 50 years for masterminding a string of bank robberies, which he always denied.
Sonny Franzese was 100 when finally freed from prison.
Michael says: “I didn’t grow up wanting to be a mobster. My dad didn’t want that life for me. He wanted me to be a doctor.
“I was a pre-med student when he got his 50-year sentence.”
Desperate to earn enough money to hire lawyers to help fight his father’s case, Michael went to see Sonny in jail.
My top 3 Mob movies
MICHAEL reveals his favourite Mafia blockbusters . . .
- GOTTI (1996) starring Anthony Quinn and Armand Assante: A brilliant film, and extremely accurate because they took a lot of the script from actual surveillance tapes. I knew all those guys, including John Gotti [boss of the Gambino crime family]. He always had to win an argument.
- GOODFELLAS (1990) with Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci: A great film. The media created a mystique about the Mob but this showed what it was like really back then. De Niro is good as Jimmy Conway and Joseph Bono isn’t bad as me. But Joe Pesci, who plays Tommy DeVito, is the best. There’s nobody who plays a gangster better than him. I knew a lot of Joe Pesci-type guys on the street. I tell you something – guys in that life are pretty funny.
- THE GODFATHER (1972) with Marlon Brando and Al Pacino: The Godfather I and II are amazing – but those films were pure fiction.
He recalls: “My father looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to ask you one question. If you ever had to kill anybody, could you do it?’
“I said, ‘Dad, if the circumstances were right I think I could do it’.
“He said, ‘That’s the right answer. Go home. I’m going to send word downtown and somebody will be in touch with you. You do whatever you are told’.
“That was it. That’s how he prepared me. I was a recruit for about two and a half years.
“On Halloween Night 1975 I took the oath and became a made member. I had a bullseye on my back from day one because of my dad.”
Michael soon proved to be one of the Mob’s biggest-ever earners.
He ran 350 petrol stations in New York and New Jersey as the Mafia defrauded the government of millions of dollars by neglecting to pay tax on millions of gallons of petrol a month.
He says: “We had a Bell helicopter which we used to pick up the cash at the gas stations because the FBI couldn’t follow us.”
The Mob made so much money that one day, returning from New Jersey with more than $400,000 on board, the pilot started flying around the Statue of Liberty and Michael decided to “share the wealth”.
He threw nearly $25,000 dollars in $10 and $20 bills out of the chopper, which rained down on to the crowds below.
Michael says: “There’s a myth out there that Mob guys sit in their social clubs and we create all these schemes and plan the next business we are going to attack.
“It’s not that way. Usually somebody from inside the company comes to us — they’ve got a plan to defraud their place.
Ordered a hit on the Mafia kingpin
“They want to make some extra money and they figure we’re not going to tell on them. We can finance them, we will protect them. It happened all the time.”
While the filling station scam was bringing in a fortune, Michael also produced movies to give the Mob a legitimate front.
He was making a musical film in Florida with singer Smokey Robinson when he fell instantly in love with a 20-year-old dancer on the set.
Michael “forgot” to tell his new love, Camille, that he was a Mafia boss and not a film producer.
But in December 1985, just five months after his wedding to Camille, Michael was jailed for ten years after admitting his part in the filling station fraud.
He spent 29 months and seven days in solitary confinement and during his first night in lock-up a guard pushed a Bible through the slot in his cell door.
Michael says: “The prison guard was a good man. The amazing thing is I never saw the guy again afterwards. Two guys came up to me and said they were the prison guard but I knew they weren’t.”
It was the moment that changed Michael’s life for ever.
He became a Christian and at the end of his jail term turned his back on the Mob.
It immediately ordered a hit on the Mafia kingpin who walked away.
Michael says: “I would have got killed in New York, so I moved out to California. When I finally met my dad again, he said, ‘If you’d listened to me you’d have been boss of the Colombo family’. I looked at him and said, ‘Dad, I’m done with that life. I serve a new master now’.
“Do I believe my dad would have put a gun to my head? No.”
The top 3 Mob queries
AND the questions most often asked on Michael’s tour . . .
- DID you ever kill anybody? It is a very violent life at times. If you are part of the life, you are part of the violence. There is no escape. You are told what to do and you got to do it.
- WHERE is the money? I had $33million in a numbered account in Austria. My partner had half the number, I had the other half. When I finally took a plea, I had a $15million restitution and $5million forfeiture and it cost me about $5million in legal fees because I had seven cases to fight. So I lost a lot of money.
- WHERE is Jimmy Hoffa buried? Hoffa was leader of the powerful Teamsters’ Union – representing truck drivers and labourers – who disappeared in 1975 and is believed to have been killed by the Mob. Michael says: “For some reason everybody is fascinated with that guy. He is not buried. He is in the water.”
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