Michael Franzese, a former captain in the Colombo crime family, had never done this before. But the retired mobster sat down to watch a video made by Johnny, a former associate-turned-made member of the Lucchese family, and decided to offer his own commentary on the rules of the Mafia. The two men came from different eras. Franzese was officially inducted in 1975, spending more than two decades in a life he left behind in the mid-1990s.
Johnny was made in 2013 and walked away about five years later, saying he had been falsely accused of being an informant, an accusation that carries deadly weight in that world. Franzese did not know Johnny personally, but he heard a man speaking well of a life they both left, and he found himself agreeing with some points and disagreeing with others. Franzese’s central distinction was between rules and policies. Rules were laws, binding on all five New York families.
Policies were different, flexible enough to suit one family but not another, as long as no rule was broken. Johnny opened his video by arguing that the biggest misconception about the Mafia today was that honor, loyalty, and respect had been replaced by selfishness and greed. Franzese pushed back. In his view, corruption was not a modern replacement for old values; it was a permanent feature of every institution, from government to business to the church itself.
He admitted that when he entered the life, he had an idealized vision of it as a world of honor and loyalty. But he learned that corruption existed there just as it did everywhere else. Not every man was greedy, and not every man was corrupt. He genuinely believed there were honorable people in that life, and he did not think those values had been replaced.
Corruption, in his telling, was simply part of the human story, and the Mafia was no exception. On the first hard rule, both men agreed completely. You never struck a made member. Franzese put it bluntly: if you raised your hand against a made man, you signed your own death warrant.
He could not recall a single instance in his former life where someone hit a made member and lived to talk about it. The rule stood during Johnny’s time and during his own. The second rule was equally straightforward. You never dated the wife or girlfriend of another made member.
Franzese extended the prohibition further, saying you did not mess with the wife, girlfriend, sister, mother, or daughter of a made man. In his era, people paid for that mistake, and the consequences were severe. Then came a point of divergence. Johnny insisted that a man had to be of pure Italian descent to be made.
Franzese disagreed based on his own experience. In his time, the requirement was that your father had to be Italian, proven through your ancestry and history. Your mother did not need to be Italian. He doubted that had changed, though he allowed that maybe the Lucchese family and Johnny’s experience had been different.
For Franzese’s family, if your father was Italian, you could be made. The next disagreement involved lawsuits. Johnny said it was forbidden to file lawsuits. Franzese had never heard that as a rule.
It certainly was not the preferred course of action. Disputes in business or money were usually settled differently, on the street. But if a man was in business and got sued, he was allowed to file a counterclaim. He had never been told he could not sue anyone.
It might have been a policy within the Lucchese family, he reasoned, but it was not a rule for the Colombos. Johnny also claimed that members were not permitted to trade in stocks and bonds. Franzese found that hard to believe. His own father owned stock.
Franzese traded bonds all the time and knew many other men who did the same. In fact, they ran pump-and-dump schemes on Wall Street, buying and selling stocks when they had inside information. It was a way to make money, so he did not know where Johnny had gotten that idea. Again, it may have been a Lucchese policy, but it certainly was not a Colombo policy.
Both men agreed that you did not kill family members of made men. Franzese clarified that this applied unless a family member was personally involved in criminal activity and crossed a line that brought that kind of trouble on themselves. You did not go after a man’s family because he became an informant or made a mistake. When Franzese left the life, people asked if he feared for his family.
He said no. He did not know of a situation where a family member was harmed as a result of a made man’s activities or his mistakes. Johnny said explosives were off limits. Franzese had never heard that, pointing to the fate of Frankie Deo, a Gambino underboss during the Gotti era who died in a car bombing.
That alone suggested explosives were not universally forbidden. Maybe it was a rule in Johnny’s era and within the Lucchese family, but Franzese had never heard it. On drugs, they were in full agreement. Dealing drugs was forbidden.
This was a family rule, and all five families had to follow it. Franzese recalled the night he was made, when he was told the same warning that had echoed through generations: do not deal drugs, and if you do, you will die. Men did deal drugs secretly, but they were small operators, not major traffickers. Franzese knew men who were killed for dealing drugs.
One of them, Tony the Big, blew his own head off in a phone booth because he feared being murdered for handling a small amount. When people tried to bring up the example of Vito Genovese, Franzese dismissed it, saying that was a different era. The rule was firmly established in his time. He also referenced the claim that Paul Castellano ordered the murder of John Gotti because Gotti’s crew was dealing drugs, something they were not supposed to do.
Johnny claimed that men in his era broke the rules of the gang on a daily basis. Franzese found that hard to accept. They had just reviewed eight or nine established rules, and he wondered how many rules a man could possibly break in a day. He said Johnny would have to clarify what he meant, because that did not match his experience.
The two men disagreed on the history of the Commission. Johnny credited Meyer Lansky with creating the Five Families and the Commission. Franzese corrected him, insisting it was Lucky Luciano. Lansky may have been an advisor and a close associate, but he was not a man in the organization, being Jewish.
Franzese also pushed back on the idea that only five families were part of the Commission. According to what his father and his own boss, Carmine Persico, had told him, there were nine families represented. Chicago, Kansas City, Cleveland, and New Orleans were also part of the Commission from the beginning. Franzese never attended a Commission meeting himself, so he could not confirm it directly, but he trusted the words of his father and Persico.
Johnny said that before the five families and the Commission existed, the bosses were known as fathers. Franzese had never heard that term. Johnny also claimed that families were given geographical territories. Franzese did not believe that was true, at least not in his experience.
He had done things in Brooklyn, Long Island, and Florida. No one ever told him he could not go somewhere because it belonged to another family. The only instruction he ever received was that if he went to a city with a Mafia family, he had to inform the boss or someone from that family before doing anything there. When he went to Los Angeles, he was told to do whatever he wanted.
The same was true in Florida and across New York. They had their own territory in Brooklyn, around Carroll Street, which served as the Colombo headquarters when Persico was in charge. No one would open a business there without permission. But they were not organized geographically in his time.
The two men used different language for the same hierarchy. Johnny called associates civilians and made members friends. Franzese said that in his world, anyone who was not a made member was called a degenerate, even the President of the United States or the Pope. Associates were protected and could make money with the crew, but being an associate did not mean automatic promotion.
Many associates never became made members. Franzese told his own associates plainly that if they wanted to be made, they should join another crew, because he would never sponsor them. Once a man was made, he became his own boss, and Franzese would lose the loyalty and earning power he had built. He preferred to keep associates earning money with him.
In his telling, every made member, whether boss, underboss, consigliere, captain, or soldier, was an amico nostro, a friend of ours, not a friend of mine. Franzese disagreed with Johnny on the power of the boss and underboss. Johnny said they had the same power. Franzese insisted that was not true.
The boss was the boss, and he chose his own underboss. Politics played a role, as when Joe Colombo had to choose Franzese’s father because the man had too much standing on the street to be ignored. But the boss remained supreme, and the underboss did not share that power. No one could dictate to a boss what to do within his own family.
The Commission, Franzese said, was like the United Nations. It could make strong suggestions and try to push a leader, but it could not command him. A boss listened when it was wise, but he was still the boss of his family. The consigliere was a real official position, a counselor chosen by the boss himself.
One of the consigliere’s roles was to serve as a link between the soldiers, captains, and the boss, a mediator for grievances. But Franzese noted the flaw: since the consigliere was chosen by the boss, a soldier with a complaint against the boss would be a fool to bring it to the consigliere. Captains were chosen by the boss as well, and they were expected to be loyal. A captain, also known as a street boss, commanded soldiers who reported to him rather than directly to the boss.
The official positions in the family were boss, underboss, consigliere, captain, and soldier. Associates served them all. Franzese agreed with Johnny on political corruption, though he said it was nowhere near what it had been in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Frank Costello, known as the Prime Minister because of his political connections, had deep influence in his day.
During Franzese’s time, the families still supported politicians, held fundraisers, gave money, and received services in return. They also paid people in law enforcement for services. In his era, there were around 750 made men across the five families, and many had relatives in law enforcement or politics. But by his time, it was harder.
The government had become wiser, laws were stricter, and people were more afraid of getting involved with street guys. When Franzese tried to buy his father’s freedom, offering two million dollars to overturn a conviction he insisted was a sham charge for a bank robbery his father never committed, nothing could be done. In the old days, he said, two million dollars would have moved mountains. In the modern era, the corruption simply did not work that way.
On the future of the Mafia, Franzese agreed with Johnny’s prediction that in twenty years it might no longer exist. If the government kept up the pressure it had applied since the mid-1980s, the life would be in serious trouble. But he did not think it would disappear in his own lifetime. He also rejected the idea that modern men were weaker than the old-timers.
The old-timers never faced RICO statutes, surveillance technology, or the threat of a hundred-year sentence without bail. Many of the men who turned informant, like Greg Scarpa and Willie Boy Johnson, were not young kids. They were veteran men who broke under pressure that simply had not existed in the old days. Franzese closed by returning to history.
The Sicilians came to America and began extorting their neighborhoods, that much was true. But the real engine of Mafia power, he argued, was Prohibition. The government had unwittingly opened the door, and the money that flowed during those years was obscene. Al Capone and Luciano would have been billionaires by today’s standards.
Money, he said, was what built the organization, and no organization could grow and endure without it. In the end, Franzese concluded that he and Johnny agreed on most things and disagreed on a few, because their experiences had come from different eras. At times, their experiences were simply different.