The Russian was not afraid of the Italian mob. This is the foundational fact of everything that followed the slap and of everything that preceded it. Franzese has said he found the Russians to be very intelligent, possessing remarkable business instincts that they would not hesitate to use for illegal gain. As a result of their experiences living in communist Russia, they have little respect for United States law and little fear of American prisons.
Read that slowly. Little respect for American law and little fear of American prisons. This is not a casual observation. This is the testimony of a man who had worked with Russian organized crime at the highest levels, who had built one of the most profitable criminal operations in American history in direct partnership with them, and who had spent enough time in proximity to their psychology to understand exactly what made them different from every other criminal organization he had encountered.
The Italian-American mob’s power rested on a specific foundation, the understanding shared by every operator in every criminal ecosystem that the mob touched, that the Colombo family and the Gambino family and the Lucchese family were backed by something real, by an organizational depth and an institutional history and a willingness to respond to violations that made every tribute payment and every territorial acknowledgement rational rather than merely coerced.
The Russian inmates who came through the federal prison system in the late 1980s and early 1990s had not grown up inside this understanding. They had grown up inside something else entirely. Inside a Soviet prison system that was its own world with its own codes and its own violence and its own institutional logic that had nothing to do with La Cosa Nostra or the commission or any of the specific architecture of American organized crime.
They came to American federal prison having already been through the worst the institutional world could produce. The fear that the American mob used to maintain its prison standing was a tool calibrated to American inmates. It didn’t work the same way on people who had been through the Gulag’s equivalent. The Colombo soldier learned this in the cafeteria.
Michael Franzese learned it at dinner. What happened between the two moments is the story. Michael Franzese was not supposed to exist. Not in the way he existed. Not as the specific combination of things that he was by the mid-1980s. The son of Sonny Franzese the Colombo family underboss who had earned a reputation for violence that made him one of the most feared figures in New York organized crime for four decades.
His father John Sonny Franzese was a legendary figure in the Colombo crime family who eventually rose to the rank of underboss. Michael had been enrolled in a pre-med program at Hofstra University. This is worth pausing on. A Colombo underboss’s son studying medicine. Building a life that pointed in a direction other than the one his father had taken.
The specific choice to take the academic path rather than the organizational one. He dropped out to make money for his family after his father was sentenced to 50 years in prison for bank robbery in 1967. 16 years old. Father gone to prison for what amounted to a life sentence. The family’s income and organizational standing both dependent on what Sonny had built and what his absence now threatened.
Michael looked at the situation and made the calculation that an intelligent 16-year-old from a Colombo family household makes when the circumstances eliminate most of the available alternatives. He came in. In 1980, Franzese had become a capo regime of a crew of 300 captain in the Colombo family running 300 men at 29 years old.
The speed of the rise was the product of his specific combination of intelligence and organizational savvy and the specific standing that his father’s name provided as a foundation. He had built on that foundation with a competence that his peers recognized and his bosses rewarded. And then Lawrence Iorizzo called.
The gasoline tax scheme was the most elegant criminal operation of its era. In 1981, Franzese was contacted by Lawrence Salvatore Iorizzo who had developed a scheme to defraud the federal government out of gasoline taxes. Iorizzo was being hassled by criminals in California and offered Franzese a percentage if he would defend and solve the issue.
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The pair set up 18 stock bearer companies based in Panama. Under law at the time in Panama, gasoline could be sold tax-free from one wholesale company to the next. The mechanism was a daisy chain of shell companies. Gasoline moved through them on paper. The taxes that were owed at each stage of the chain were never paid because the companies that owed them were, in legal substance, nothing but letterhead.
By the time the government tried to collect, the liability had been transferred to entities that existed only on paper and had no assets to seize. Franzese and his partners sold millions of gallons of gasoline tax-free, undercutting other sellers and skimming $60 million to $100 million in tax money, according to some experts.
$60 to $100 million a month. Not annually. Monthly. This was the operation that put Michael Franzese on Fortune magazine’s list of the 50 most powerful mob bosses in America at 35 years old. Fortune magazine listed him as number 18 on its list of the 50 most wealthy and powerful mafia bosses. Number 18. On a list that included men who had been running criminal organizations for 40 years.
He was 35. The operation required scale. Scale required partners. And the partners Franzese found for the gasoline scheme were the ones who made the cafeteria incident both inevitable and interesting. Franzese partnered with the Russian Mafia in Brooklyn in the gas scheme. The Russians who became Franzese’s partners in the gasoline operation were a different kind of criminal.
As for his Russian partners, Franzese has said he found them to be very intelligent, possessing remarkable business instincts that they would not hesitate to use for illegal gain. As a result of their experiences living in communist Russia, they have little respect for United States law and little fear of American prisons.
This assessment, delivered by Franzese in congressional testimony in the mid-1990s, is the most informed possible source on the specific character of the Russian criminal organizations that were establishing themselves in Brooklyn during the 1980s. He had worked with them. He had built a billion-dollar operation with them.
He had sat across tables from them in the specific conditions of a criminal partnership where the stakes were high enough and the trust requirements were real enough that you learned exactly what your partner was. What he learned was that they operated from a fundamentally different set of premises than the Italian-American mob.
The mob’s authority rested on the specific history and institutional structure of La Cosa Nostra on the commission and the five families and the specific organizational framework that had been governing American organized crime since 1931. On the decades of relationships and tribute arrangements and territorial understandings that had made the framework real, the Russians who had come from the Soviet Union, from the Soviet prison system, from the specific institutional ecology of the Gulag, didn’t operate within this framework.
They operated within their own framework built on different principles, organized around different loyalties, backed by different kinds of violence. The vory v zakone, the thieves in law, the specific code of the Russian criminal underworld that had been developing inside Soviet prisons since Stalin’s era. It was not the same code.
It was not structured the same way. And crucially, it produced a psychology in the men who had been formed by it that was not susceptible to the same intimidation tools that the Italian mob used to maintain its standing in the American criminal world. You cannot frighten someone into deference to a code they don’t recognize.
The federal prison system in the late 1980s was a specific geography. The post-RICO prosecution wave had deposited an extraordinary concentration of organized crime figures into the federal system. Italian mob captains and soldiers, Russian criminal operators whose gasoline schemes and various other enterprises had attracted federal attention.
Drug trafficking figures from multiple ethnic organizations. The full range of American organized crime’s senior figures, all processed through the same federal court system. All entering the same federal facilities. This created an environment where the organizational rivalries and cultural clashes and territorial disputes of the criminal world outside the walls were reproduced in compressed form inside them.
The same men who had been competing on the street were now competing in the yard, in the cafeteria, in the specific institutional geography of the federal facility. The Italian mobs standing in the federal prison system was real. Built on the same factors that built it outside. Organizational depth. Numbers. The specific quality of institutional loyalty that made mob members reliable in the prison context even when their organizational infrastructure was located outside the walls.
But the Russian criminal figures who began appearing in the federal system in significant numbers in the late 1980s had not grown up respecting that standing. Had not been formed in a world where the Italian mob’s authority was ambient and understood. They came from their own world with their own standing and their own assessment of what the American mob was and wasn’t worth deferring to.
The soldier who received the slap in the cafeteria was the first data point in a collision that Michael Franzese, sitting in his own institution in Colorado, was about to receive information about. The cafeteria incident happened during one of the specific windows of institutional vulnerability that federal prison life creates.
Common areas, the cafeteria, the yard, the library, the spaces where inmates from different institutional backgrounds came into contact in conditions that were not fully controlled. Where the social hierarchy of the wing expressed itself through the daily logistics of who sat where and who moved for whom and what the physical geography of the shared space communicated about organizational standing.
The soldier had been in the facility long enough to have established a specific standing. Not extraordinary. The ordinary standing of a mob soldier in a federal institution. The organizational backing that came from membership in a family that other inmates understood even if they didn’t share its code as a serious organization.
The Russian inmate had made his own assessment of this standing. Had arrived at a conclusion that the assessment of a man formed in the vory’s world would arrive at. That the soldier’s standing was a product of an institutional framework that didn’t apply to him. That the specific deference the cafeteria’s social geography expected him to show was not a deference his own institutional formation required him to produce.
He slapped the soldier. Not in a fight. Not as the culmination of an argument or a territorial dispute. A slap. The specific quality of a slap as opposed to a punch is its communicative function. A punch is combat. A slap is a statement. It says, “I don’t regard you as a serious enough threat to need to fight you.
I regard you as something that can be dismissed with a gesture.” The inmates who witnessed it processed it with the attentiveness that prison populations bring to incidents that have organizational implications. Not just a fight, a statement about the standing of the Italian mob in the facility delivered through the specific communicative grammar of a slap.
The news moved through the institutional channels that federal prison populations used to transmit information across the walls that separate them from other facilities. Through phone calls and letters and the informal networks that connected inmates across different federal institutions. It reached Michael Franzese at dinner.
Franzese’s specific position at the time of the incident was a complicated one. In 1992, while living under 24-hour a day lockdown at the Federal Correctional Institution in Englewood, Colorado, Franzese did the unthinkable. He was at FCI Englewood in Colorado. The soldier who had been slapped was in a different facility.
The incident had occurred in a different institutional context. And the information about it arrived at Franzese’s dinner table as the kind of intelligence that any captain in a criminal organization receives about events affecting his organizational world. The situation was complicated because Franzese was in the process of something unprecedented.
Prison gave Franzese something he hadn’t had in years, time to think. Behind bars, he began questioning the life he’d built. He saw clearly how the mob cycle worked. Loyalty was conditional. Friends became enemies overnight. And the only guaranteed outcomes were prison or death. During this period, Franzese became a born-again Christian.
A conversion that fundamentally altered his worldview. The man receiving the news about the Russian and the soldier was not the same man who had built the gasoline operation. He was in the process of becoming someone different, of processing the information that his specific circumstances, the imprisonment, the conversion, the distance from the operational world that had produced everything he had built, was providing.
And yet, the information arrived and required a response. Because the organizational logic that governed his world did not pause for personal transformation. A Colombo soldier had been slapped in a federal cafeteria by a Russian inmate. Whatever Michael Franzese was in the process of becoming, he was still the captain who had built the operation that had partnered with Russian organized crime at the highest level.
He was still the man whose organizational standing in both worlds, the Italian mob and the Russian criminal world, was unique. He was the specific person whose response to this incident mattered most. What Franzese understood about the incident that most other people in either organizational world didn’t was the specific texture of the Russian criminal psychology.
He had worked with them, had sat across from them in the conditions of a billion-dollar criminal partnership where the assessment of the other parties character was a survival necessity rather than an intellectual exercise. Had testified before Congress about what he had learned from that experience. As a result of their experiences living in communist Russia, they have little respect for United States law and little fear of American prisons.
The slap had not been impulsive. This is the element that the Italian mobs reading of the incident tended to miss. The Russian had not slapped the soldier in a moment of uncontrolled anger or failed social calculation. He had done it with the specific deliberateness of a man who had assessed the situation correctly and acted on his assessment.
The assessment was the soldier’s organizational backing was not present in the room in any form that required my deference. My own organizational standing rooted in the Vory’s world is not subordinate to his. The slap communicates this assessment in terms that the institution’s population will understand. The slap was a political act, not a violent one, a communicative one using the specific language of physical gesture to make an organizational statement.
Franzese’s response to this had to account for what it actually was, not simply a fight that needed to be responded to. A statement that needed a counter statement. One that was calibrated to the specific character of the Russian criminal psychology, rather than to the conventional mechanisms of Italian mob enforcement.
The response Francese organized operated through the specific channels his unique position provided. He had relationships in both worlds that nobody else in the federal system could claim. He knew the Russian criminal organizations from the gasoline partnership. He knew which figures from that world had ended up in the federal system after various prosecutions.
He knew the specific organizational standing of the Russian inmate who had delivered the slap and who his connections were and what the counter statement needed to look like to be legible within the Russian criminal world’s specific framework, rather than just within the Italian mob’s framework. The counter statement needed to be delivered in terms that the Russian would recognize as serious, not in the terms of Italian mob organizational authority, which he had already demonstrated he didn’t recognize.
In terms that his own formation told him to take seriously. This required a different kind of organizational resource than the conventional mob enforcement response would have required. Not a message delivered through the Italian hierarchy that the Russian had already implicitly dismissed. A message delivered through channels that the Russian’s own world took seriously.
Francese had those channels. From the gasoline partnership, from the specific relationships that building a billion-dollar operation with Russian organized crime required. From the years of sitting across tables from men whose framework he had taken the time to actually understand, the message moved through those channels.
The Russian inmate received it in the form that his own institutional formation was calibrated to understand. Not a threat made in Italian mob language, a communication made in the Vory’s language through figures whose standing within that world the Russian recognized as real. The counter-statement was understood.
The deeper story here is about what Franzese’s gasoline partnership revealed about the intersection of the Italian mob and Russian organized crime. He had built something extraordinary with the Russians. Franzese and his partners sold millions of gallons of gasoline tax-free, under-cutting other sellers and skimming $60 million to $100 to $100 a month in tax money.
That operation required him to understand the Russians with a precision that nobody else in the Italian mob had developed. He had to know how they thought, what they valued, what motivated them, what made them reliable, and what made them dangerous, and where the specific lines were that couldn’t be crossed without producing consequences.
However, I am reasonably certain that the hit was authorized by the Colombo family and could possibly have been carried out by other Russians. An attempt was also made on the life of Lev Persitz. Although he survived the attempt, he is permanently disabled and confined to a wheelchair today. The violence within the gasoline partnership’s world was real.
The Russian partners were not men whose criminal activities existed within the organizational boundaries that the Italian mob maintained around its own activities. They were men who had come from an environment where the specific restraints that La Cosa Nostra had developed over decades didn’t apply. The cafeteria incident was a miniature version of the larger dynamic.
A Russian criminal formed in a world that didn’t recognize the Italian mob’s authority acting on that formation in a context where the Italian mob’s authority was supposed to be established fact. Franzese’s ability to respond effectively was the product of the years he had spent understanding both worlds. He was the bridge.
The specific person whose formation gave him access to the organizational language of both. The resolution of the cafeteria incident did not appear in any official record. This is consistent with how these things resolve in the federal prison system. The slap appeared in the incident report. The institutional response the administrative classification of the incident as a disciplinary matter was documented in the facility’s official records.
What happened through the organizational channels that ran alongside the official ones was not documented. It was resolved through the informal mechanisms of the prison world’s own governance structure. Through the specific communication between organizational figures that the federal system’s official framework neither acknowledged nor controlled.
The soldier had been slapped. The statement had been delivered. The counter statement had been made through channels that the Russian recognized as serious. The organizational landscape of the facility adjusted accordingly. Not dramatically. Prison adjustments rarely are. Through the specific, gradual, practical reorientation of daily institutional life around the demonstrated reality of what had occurred and what the response to it had demonstrated.
Franzese had managed the incident from Colorado through the organizational relationships that his unique position provided. The captain who was in the process of becoming something different from what he had been had nevertheless exercised the organizational capability that his 30 years in the life had built.
When he was released from prison, he made a decision that shocked the underworld. He walked away from the Colombo family. He didn’t enter witness protection. He didn’t cooperate with the FBI to take down his former associates. He walked away. Eventually. After the gasoline operation and the federal conviction and the years of processing what the life had actually been and what it was going to produce if he stayed in it.
But in the specific moment of the cafeteria incident he was still the person who could navigate both worlds simultaneously. Who had built a billion-dollar operation with the Russians and who knew how to make a statement in their language when the Italian mob’s language wasn’t sufficient. The slap had been delivered in the cafeteria.
The counter statement was delivered through channels that the Russian understood. Michael Franzese had found out at dinner. By morning, the organizational understanding was established.
