Former mobster speaks out
With the rising popularity of poker and other gambling games on college campuses, university administrations are bringing in the big guns to combat the trend – a former mob boss.
Michael Franzese, formerly known as the Long Island Don and the Prince of the Mafia, spoke in the TSC ballroom Tuesday to a group of about 50 students and faculty. “If you’d said 10 years ago I’d be addressing a bunch of students, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Franzese told the audience. “I want to show you that you can start one place in life and end up 180 degrees in the other direction and not know it.”
Franzese was an underboss in New York City’s Colombo crime family for 17 years. After escaping several charges and trials without prison sentences, Franzese served seven years of a 10-year sentence for racketeering, tax evasion and parole violations.
While in prison, Franzese publicly announced his decision to leave his former life in the mafia, known as la cosa nostra in America, behind. Eleven years after making that decision, Franzese lives in southern California with his wife and children. There are certain places he still cannot go and people he can’t meet with, he said, matter-of-factly discussing the possibility of his death. The fact he is still alive is somewhat of a miracle, considering he survived a mob death sentence without government protection after being released from jail.
“It was never on my radar screen to walk away from that life. It’s something you just don’t do,” he said. “They put a contract on my life.”
Since then, Franzese has travelled to 250 universities and several high schools, as well as rookie training camps with professional sports organizations to spread his message about staying away from gambling.
While Franzese worked in organized crime it was said he made more money for la cosa nostra than anyone since Al Capone. He dabbled in all kinds of business while making $6-8 million a week–car dealerships, union kickbacks, a gasoline tax scheme and money-lending. But he said the biggest business for la cosa nostra was gambling.
“Everyone on the street is involved in gambling. It’s the mob’s main business,” he said. “It’s what we do and nobody’s better at it than we are.”
The mob targets college and professional athletes especially, Franzese said, which is why he was recruited by the FBI at the end of his prison sentence to speak to teams about the dangers of gambling. Franzese’s manager, Rob Michaels, said 18 million Americans are addicted to gambling, half of which are college-age.
The danger of gambling, Franzese said, is it’s addictive and it escalates. He said three years ago a University of Wisconsin student killed three people in connection to a gambling debt. When he was captured, he told police he never gambled a day in his life until he got to college and started playing penny poker with his roommates. Soon he wanted to play for higher stakes, so he moved on to online gambling, racking up $70,000 in debts.
“I can’t even stand here and tell you how many tragedies I have seen that started with penny poker,” Franzese told the audience.
The message Franzese tries to put across in his talks is that gambling is not an innocent pastime. Crime is inextricably connected to gambling, he said.
“In every casino community, within three years of a casino going up the crime rate not only goes up, it skyrockets,” he said. “If you’ve got a friend who’s gambling, hide your stuff, get a safe.”
Franzese said not to think you can be involved in gambling and avoid the violent aspects that can be connected with it. He said college athletes who became indebted to people running gambling circuits. Sometimes those who owe money can get hurt or forced to do illegal things to make up for their debts, he said.
“Remember it’s a business,” he said.