Closing arguments expected Monday in Franzese case

In a 1965 article, "The Hood in the Neighborhood," Newsday chronicled the life and times of Roslyn's John "Sonny" Franzese - a suburban commuter with a well-manicured lawn whose gangland power extended from Manhattan's entertainment industry to an estimated half of all the rackets on Long Island.

Law enforcement and mob sources alike expressed a certain admiration for the Colombo family's emerging star, at 48 a "good family man" who handled himself like a rising young executive at IBM but whose tools of power were "greed, fear and, when necessary, the gun."

"He's a home man, a family man, which is very important with them," one underworld associate said, explaining Franzese's appeal to La Cosa Nostra's upper echelon.

Forty-five years later, Franzese - now 93 - is in the headlines again, on trial for the last three weeks in federal court in Brooklyn on racketeering, extortion and loan-sharking charges, with closing arguments expected Monday.

Different circumstances

But he's no longer a comer or feared enforcer. Instead, as the case has unfolded, this time around the headline seems to be, "The Hood Who Lived Too Long."

Nearly a half-century past his prime, Franzese clutches a cane, is regularly rolled out in a wheelchair for bathroom breaks, and occasionally nods off during testimony. On secretly recorded prosecution audiotapes, he is heard reliving old murders and obsessing over seedy strip joint extortions. When he's not around, small-time hoods call him the "Last of the Mohicans," and describe loan collections as Sonny's "Social Security."

As for taking care of his family, he may have done so, yet the key witness against him has been his son John Franzese Jr., who made many of the incriminating tapes while speaking to his father in 2005. On the stand, he said he loved his dad, called him a great father - and tried to bury him in jail.

Outside the courtroom, another son, Michael - a former Colombo capo - has defended his father. But Sonny Franzese's estranged wife, Cristina, 75, wandered the courthouse like a wraith during John Jr.'s testimony. She urged her husband to spare their son by pleading guilty and complaining that her whole family has paid dearly for Franzese's devotion to the mob.

"It was a horrific life," she told reporters.

Sonny Franzese, the patriarch of this complicated family, grew up the son of a baker in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He earned his early mob reputation as an enforcer. On one tape, not played at trial, Franzese brags that he "killed a lot of guys. . . . You're not talking about four, five, six, 10" but was "never caught," according to prosecutors.

According to book "Blood Covenant" that Michael Franzese wrote about his family, his father and mother - a telephone operator and part-time hatcheck girl at Manhattan's famed Stork Club - married in the 1950s. The merger of three families - Michael is Christina's son, Sonny had three children by a previous marriage, and the couple had John Jr. and two daughters together - was not without tension.

Long time since his heyday

The 1960s were Sonny Franzese's heyday. He had pieces of movies like "Deep Throat" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." He made friends with Frank Sinatra by helping to pack a Long Island nightclub for his son, Frank Jr. Both Michael and John still describe him as a great dad with a soft spot for his kids.

In 1967, however, Franzese got a 50-year sentence on a bank robbery conviction. Paroled after 10 years, he was repeatedly - five times - returned to jail for associating with mob cronies. He was true to the mob code, never squealing, and, the government alleged, still a Colombo underboss as of 2008.

But a lot happened to his other family during his long absences.

Michael, the adopted son, became a major Long Island mob figure in his own right in the 1970s, making millions in a gasoline tax scam before pleading guilty and serving time. Now married with kids and living in California, he's a Christian motivational speaker who says he quit the mob to serve God and his family.

He has denounced his brother's betrayal, but also had a warning for his father in his 2003 book: "The legend of Sonny Franzese will not survive into the next life."

Son turned informer

John, younger when their father went away, became a mob hanger-on and descended into cocaine addiction. After cleaning up, he became an FBI informant. He was declared "subhuman" by his father's lawyer, but said taking on Sonny's choice of the mob life was the right decision.

"This life is a bad life," he testified, "and if people did things like this [testifying] maybe it wouldn't be around like this."

Cristina Franzese says that one of their daughters died of a drug overdose in 1990, and another died of cancer recently, without treatments because there was no health insurance. She says she lost the Roslyn house because the money ran out, and had to leave a Northport rental for the same reason.

She said she banished Sonny because she was sick of parole officers in her living room, and sees her son John as seeking "redemption" from the life Sonny Franzese bequeathed. "I made the mistake by marrying him," she says.

Franzese was stoic during his son's testimony - although prosecutors say that in 2007 when he first learned that John Jr. was an informant he behaved more like a Family man than a family man, trying to arrange for his son's murder.

He hasn't been talking to the press during the trial. But a month ago, leaving a pretrial hearing, he didn't seem overly concerned about returning to jail at age 93.

"Who cares?" he told reporters. "I gotta die someplace."