The aged and infirm underboss of the Colombo crime family was sentenced today to eight years in prison for shaking down the Hustler and Penthouse strip clubs in Manhattan.
John “Sonny” Franzese 93, devoted “a lifetime to organized crime” and is now unlikely to survive the prison term, given his deteriorating medical condition which includes chronic kidney disease and heart problems, Judge Brian Cogan said in Brooklyn federal court.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Christina Posa had urged the judge to give Franzese even more time behind bars for his racketeering and extortion convictions, arguing that the mobster “has literally gotten away with murder for decades.”
“He has never held an honest job one day of his life,” Posa told the judge. “He’s essentially lived as a parasite off the hard work of others by shaking them down.”
The judge’s sentence could represent the final chapter in Franzese’s storied and controversial life as a violent New York mobster who government officials suspect may be responsible for some 50-100 murders.
His criminal career began in the later years of the Great Depression and continued on for generations into the 21st Century, when he discussed having his own adult son murdered after learning that he had become an FBI informant and was wearing a “wire.”
Franzese troubled path dated back to an arrest for violent assault at age 19 in 1938, prosecutors say, and included his 1942 discharge from the Army at the height of World War II because he displayed “homicidal tendencies.”
In 1945, Franzese’s first wife divorced him, alleging that he “habitually threatened to disfigure her with a knife,” prosecutors say. Then in 1947, he raped a waitress in a garage. In 1966, Franzese was arrested for murdering a bookmaking rival and dumping his body in Jamaica Bay with cement blocks chained to his feet.
In recent weeks, Franzese’s family members have written numerous letters to the judge to emphasize a different side to a man they insist has fundamentally changed in later life.
His 21-year-old granddaughter, Kristen Franzese, described Franzese as “kind, considerate, warm, and funny.”
“When he is around family he just loves to tell jokes, watch baseball on television, nap, and tell stories about the past,” she wrote.
Another granddaughter, Maria Vanessa Scorsone had written to tell the judge about how Franzese warmed to his year-old great granddaughter.
Until two years ago, Scorsone wrote, Grandpa “was not really a part of our lives” and “he never had anything to do with children. Mostly he was in jail.”
Then he came to stay for a visit and met the baby, Scorsone wrote, “He seemingly melted in front of her,” Scorsone wrote. “I had never seen him happy before, but he was happy when he was with [our daughter]. This was not the man I had known.”
Before pronouncing sentence, the judge said that he believed the relatives’ stories and that Franzese – in poor health and reaching the final stages of his life – had become “a changed person.”
Franzese’s defense attorney, Richard Lind, had asked the judge for a sharp reduction in the sentence, saying that the mobster “was not a risk to the public at this point.”
Lind said that despite coming across as gruff and menacing in the FBI’s secretly recorded tapes, Franzese was actually “extremely insecure and vulnerable to people who want to prey on him.”
When Franzese was asked by the judge if he wanted to address the court, he mumbled to his attorney and appeared to ask whether he should point out the his perceived unfair treatment at the hands of the government.
But his defense attorney abruptly cut him off.
“He has nothing to say, judge.”
mmaddux@nypost.com