Michael Franzese was born on 27th May 1951 and is a former American caporegime and mobster belonging to the Colombo crime family in New York. He is also the son of a gang underboss named Sonny Franzese. He has studied a pre-med program at the University of Hofstra but then dropped out to sustain his family. He conducted a bank robbery job in 1967 but then was caught and sentenced to about fifty years in federal prison. He then decided to help create and implement a defrauding scheme out of gasoline taxes for the central government in the early days of the 1980s.

He has had his name in the fifty most wealthy and powerful mobsters in the eighteenth spot from fortune magazine in 1986. He has also claimed that he generated about eight million dollars per week during the best height of his career. He has had several cases against him, such as creating a conspiracy in 1986. Then he got arrested for a parole violation in 1991 and finally got released in 1994. Soon after this, he retired from work and currently works as a writer and motivational speaker.

Early Life

Franzese is originally from Brooklyn but grew up in the area of New York. He was born to Christina Capobianco and John Sonny Franzese. Michael would question his father and mother about who is his father. Michael suspected that he was born to Christina and Frank Grillo. Michael often went by the surname of Grillo until he was eighteen, but he later found out the truth about his father’s marriage. John was previously married and had three children, but she got a sixteen-year-old cigarette girl from Stork Club pregnant, Capobianco. They later married each other after John took divorce from his first wife and Frank Grillo disappeared.

Career Beginning

Lawrence Salvatore Lorizzo had developed a scheme in 1965 to defraud the government out of gasoline tax in the year 1965. Franzese got in touch with Lorizzo in 1981 after the Californian criminal started hassling him for a percentage if he solved the issue. The pair then managed to set up about eighteen companies doing stock bearer business in Panama. The law at that time dictated that a person and sell gasoline tax-free from one wholesale to the next. He also made a partnership deal with the Brooklyn Russian Mafia in the same scheme for gas. The gas was first sold and then shipped to another company with the help of a third company. The third company acted as a dummy company that did tax document forgery and sold gasoline for paper money.

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Personal Life

Franzese has gotten married twice, and his current wife is Camille Gracia. He resides with his wife in California, and he has seven children with her. Franzese was shooting Knights of the City when he met his current wife in 1984. She believes in Christianity and influenced him to leave the mob life and search for something. John Franzese testified against his father in a racketeering case after he won a wire during a conversation. John Franzese felt sick that his son betrayed him, and Michael considers his brother a nobody in the mob world.

Net Worth

The current average net worth of Michael Franzese is about 3 million dollars, which seems less considering he was generating about eight million a week in his peak. His life in the Colombo mob group was long-lasting, and he made the best of it.