'THE MAFIA WANTED ME DEAD'

After leaving the Colombo crime family, Michael Franzese transformed his life

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When Michael Franzese decided to walk away from his life as a mobster in the mid '80s, he knew it would put a target on his back.

“My boss was an old-time, old-school guy and you don't just walk in and say, ‘Hey guys, I’m leaving.’ That would never have worked,” Michael, 74, tells Woman’s Day. “I didn’t convince them to let me go — I never could have. My plan was to walk away quietly. Go to prison, move out to the west coast and get 5000km from New York.”

Michael, at that point a high-ranking “caporegime” in the Colombo crime family, was sentenced to a decade in prison in 1986 in relation to a gasoline bootlegging racket. Regularly earning millions a week, he was also ordered to pay $22.5 million in restitution.

But Michael's hope that he'd be able to leave discreetly wasn't to be.

“My father was very upset with me, the boss put a contract on my life and the FBI came into prison and told me I was a dead man,” he remembers.

It was a dramatic end to a life that had seen Michael become what he describes as “the best possible mob guy I could be”.