37 Facts About Sonny Franzese

Sonny Franzese served as underboss of the Colombo family from 1963 until 1967, when he was sentenced to 50 years in prison for orchestrating a number of bank robberies across the country.

Sonny Franzese was re-jailed at least six times on parole violations in the decades that followed.

Sonny Franzese was convicted of extortion in 2011, and sentenced to eight years in prison.

Sonny Franzese died in a New York City hospital on February 24,2020, at the age of 103.

Sonny Franzese was born in Naples, Italy, to Carmine Sonny Franzese and Maria Corvola on February 6,1917, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Sonny Franzese's parents had already immigrated to the United States at the time of his birth, and were back in Italy for a visit.

Sonny Franzese's mother gave him the nickname "Sonny" at a young age.

Sonny Franzese operated out of New York City and New Jersey and was involved in racketeering, fraud, and loansharking.

Sonny Franzese was a regular at the Copacabana and met such stars as Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

Sonny Franzese became a made man in 1950, and served in the crew of Sebastian "Buster" Aloi, father of former Colombo family acting boss Vincenzo Aloi.

Sonny Franzese is believed to have been elevated to caporegime or captain in the Colombo family in the mid 1950s by Profaci.

In 1967, Sonny Franzese gained a financial interest in a new recording company, Buddah Records.

Sonny Franzese used Buddah to launder illegal mob earnings and to bribe disc jockeys with payola.

Sonny Franzese infiltrated and began to make money through the owner of Calla Records, Nate McCalla, until the recording label ceased operations in 1977, and McCalla was murdered execution style in 1980.

Sonny Franzese was accused of murdering Genovese crime family hitman-turned-informant Ernest Rupolo in 1964 on the orders of Vito Genovese.

Sonny Franzese was arrested with nine other people on April 13,1966, and during his trial, the prosecution produced records that claimed that Franzese had killed between 30 and 50 people.

However, on March 3,1967, Sonny Franzese was convicted in Albany, New York of masterminding a series of four bank robberies across the country in 1965, and was finally sentenced to 50 years in prison at United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, by judge Jacob Mishler in 1970, after several denied appeals.

In 1978, Sonny Franzese was released on parole but returned to prison in 1982 for a parole violation.

In 2006, Sonny Franzese discussed techniques for mob murders with Gaetano "Guy" Fatato, a Colombo associate, not realizing that Fatato was a government informant and taping the conversation.

Sonny Franzese told Fatato that he put nail polish on his fingertips before a murder to avoid leaving fingerprints at the crime scene.

Sonny Franzese suggested wearing a hairnet during the murder so as to avoid leaving any hair strands at the crime scene that could be DNA analyzed.

Finally, Sonny Franzese stressed the importance of properly dealing with the corpse.

Sonny Franzese's procedure was to dismember the corpse in a kiddie pool, dry the severed body parts in a microwave oven, and then run the parts through a commercial-grade garbage disposal.

However, in May 2007, Sonny Franzese was again returned to prison for a parole violation.

In June 2008, Sonny Franzese, still incarcerated, was indicted on charges of participating in murders during the Colombo Wars of the early 1990s, stealing fur coats in New York City in the mid-1990s, and participating in home invasions by police impersonators in Los Angeles in 2006.

On June 4,2008, Sonny Franzese was indicted along with other Colombo mobsters on charges of racketeering, conspiracy, robbery, extortion, narcotics trafficking, and loansharking.

On December 24,2008, Sonny Franzese was released from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

Sonny Franzese is the first son of a New York mobster to turn state's evidence and testify against his father.

Prosecutors had asked for a sentence of 12 years, while Sonny Franzese's lawyer asked for leniency based on a variety of ailments, including partial blindness and deafness, gout, and heart and kidney problems.

Sonny Franzese was released from the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, on June 23,2017, at the age of 100; he was the oldest federal inmate in the United States and the only centenarian in federal custody at the time of his release.

Sonny Franzese is listed as an associate producer of the 2003 film This Thing of Ours, which starred James Caan.

Sonny Franzese was married to a woman with whom he had three children.

Sonny Franzese had four more children with Capobianco, who died in 2012.

Altogether, Sonny Franzese had eight children, 18 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Michael Sonny Franzese had entered a pre-med program at Hofstra University in 1969, as John Sonny Franzese originally did not want him to be involved in organized crime.

On June 23,2017, the elder Sonny Franzese was released and returned home at age 100.

Sonny Franzese died in a New York City hospital, on February 24,2020, aged 103.