Blood Covenant

by Michael Franzese

  77

  Zimmerman also frequented Las Vegas, where he would run various scams on the big casino-hotels. If a scam was going particularly well, he'd call and ask me to catch a plane to join him.

  On one memorable occasion, Zimmerman conned the management of the Sands into believing that fat, dumpy Peter "Apollo" Frappolo, one of my underlings, was the don of the "powerful Franzese crime family in Long Island." He told the Sands that the family was moving its operation to Vegas and was going to dump millions into a hotel. The Sands responded by giving Frappolo and Zimmerman the hotel's best suite and surrounding them with all the trappings of luxury.

  When I arrived, I couldn't believe my eyes. Frappolo was perched in a thronelike chair and had two beautiful women attending him hand and foot. When I approached, Frappolo waved me off and picked up the telephone receiver. "Excuse me, Michael, I need to make a call."

  "Excuse me?" I said, burning a hole through my underling.

  Zimmerman swept me into a nearby room.

  "He believes it!" Zimmerman said, rolling on the bed laughing. "The guy really thinks he's Don Corleone."

  When we returned to the room, the two women were feeding Frappolo strawberries. Zimmerman and I had to duck back into the bedroom to hide our laughter.

  By the time we had composed ourselves enough to make a third pass at the "don," he was being feted by the hotel's manager.

  "Mr. Appolo, I want to remind you that you have an appointment for a haircut and manicure in fifteen minutes, if that's okay?" the manager asked. Frappolo indicated that it was.

  When I tried to talk to him a few moments later, Frappolo interrupted. "Michael, I have a haircut and manicure scheduled."

  I calmly asked the manager and the strawberry twins to leave the suite and give us some privacy.

  "Pete, snap out of it!" I ordered. "Get your rear end out of that chair. I've got to figure out how to bail you two out of this mess once they catch on."

  Zimmerman explained that they were being "comped" on everything and had a $70,000 line of credit at the casino, which they planned to cash in. I advised them not to play the scam out too long. We hung around a few more days, then left with the money.

  78

  Aside from his amusement value, Jerry Zimmerman performed another valuable function in my life. He was the one who introduced me to the movie business.

  During one of my Los Angeles visits in early 1980, I found my con-man friend especially upbeat.

  "Michael," he said, "I want to do a movie!"

  "What do you know about doing movies?" I asked.

  "It's easy. Listen...."

  And he laid it out. He had gotten his hands on a script for a horror movie called Mausoleum. He said the total budget would be a mere $250,000, and he already had two people willing to put up a third each. If I kicked in the final third, about $83,000, Zimmerman promised me a third of the action and the title of executive producer. It sounded good to me and, at that point, eighty-three grand was pocket change, so I agreed, and Zimmerman set the deal in motion.

  From the start, the project was beset with the woes of amateurs. What's worse, the two other financiers never materialized, leaving me with the entire $250,000 initial budget. That sum was swallowed up before we were half finished. About $1.2 million later-$900,000 of which was my money-we had two film cans full of a hodgepodge of a movie ready to distribute. Mausoleum promptly bombed. The only people the movie terrified were the financiers.

  During the filming, Zimmerman had his hooks into an older man from the Midwest named Jim Kimball, a legitimate businessman, who was interested in getting into the motion picture business. After being drained for a few hundred thousand, the guy shut off the tap. Kimball was in Zimmerman's office on Ventura Boulevard one afternoon checking out his investment when in walked Lenny Montana, the burly actor who played Corleone family enforcer Lucca Brazzi in The Godfather. (For those who have seen the movie, he was the guy who got the knife through his hand at the bar.) Zimmerman and Montana were about to put on a well-thought-out dramatization that would cause Kimball to cough up some more money.

  Montana, a real-life crook, screamed at Zimmerman, claiming he was owed a considerable sum of money. Zimmerman pleaded for time. Then the argument grew nasty. Suddenly, Montana pulled out a gun and shot Zimmerman in the upper body. Blood splattered everywhere as the big man dropped to the floor, gasping for breath.

  Kimball, scared out of his wits, pleaded with Montana not to finish Zimmerman off. He promised to pay the $50,000 debt. Montana, apparently satisfied, put away the gun. Some of Zimmerman's associates dragged their bleeding boss to a car and rushed him to a hospital.

  Left alone in the office, the shaken investor called me.

  "Lenny shot Jerry!" he screamed. "Michael, Lenny shot Jerry!"

  I put my hand over the phone and laughed. It never even occurred to me that the shooting might have been for real. I composed myself and continued the conversation.

  "I'm going to pay!" Kimball reiterated. "I'm going to give him the money, okay? I'll make it good! You don't have to kill Jerry!"

  I said that would be satisfactory. When I hung up, I dialed Zimmerman's home. He answered.

  "I just received an interesting call," I said. "I understand you've been shot?"

  "You should have seen the guy's face!" Zimmerman howled. "You should have been there!"

  "You guys are insane," I told him.

  Kimball coughed up the $50,000, which Zimmerman and Montana pocketed. Kimball then pushed to visit Zimmerman in the hospital to make sure he was okay. They held him off as long as they could, then went to a local hospital and rented a room under the guise of needing it for a scene in the movie. They bandaged Zimmerman and laid him in the hospital bed. Kimball visited him for an entire half hour, and all that time, Zimmerman moaned and groaned and never once cracked a smile.

  The final coup came a few weeks later after Zimmerman had "recovered." I called Zimmerman, Montana, and Kimball into my office. I reamed out Zimmerman and Montana for the shooting and told them they'd better toe the line or they'd both be whacked. Kimball's hands trembled as he witnessed a real-life gangster laying down the law. After Kimball left, the three of us rolled with laughter.

  That was the highlight of Mausoleum. I never recovered a dime of my $900,000 investment. Not only that, but Zimmerman had raised some of the budget by banking on my name and reputation, promoting me as a rich New York mobster with a bottomless pit of cash. That resulted in a grand jury investigation headed by a California Organized Crime Strike Force attorney named Bruce Kelton. Kimball was called as a witness and made no mention of the shooting incident. Despite losing his money, he testified that everything had been on the up-and-up. The grand jury investigation came up as empty as the Mausoleum box office cash drawers.

  79

  Despite the financial horror of this experience and the close call with the feds, I was bitten by the movie bug. I quickly saw, however, that the money to be made in movies wasn't in production, but in the distribution end. I invested another half-million in a legitimate distribution firm headed by a man named John Chambliss. The company distributed Band C-grade movies regionally and made a solid profit. I leased a condominium in exclusive Marina Del Rey and looked forward to spending time in the California sun.

  As always, I registered my dealings with the Colombo family. They approved of my efforts, pleased to get a foothold in Hollywood. However, instead of extolling the wonders of Los Angeles, I made sure I always bad-mouthed the city and the surrounding area to them. I didn't want any of my mob associates moving in on my territory.

  "The place is horrible," I'd report to the bosses in Brooklyn after a long West Coast visit. "The pollution is so bad you can hardly breathe. The city is dirty, and it stinks. You guys are so lucky to be able to stay here in beautiful Brooklyn."

  It was absurd, but the old-time mob bosses were so infatuated with Brooklyn that they reveled in the comparisons. I played the same game with Florida, desc
ribing it as a steamy swamp infested with bloodsucking insects and assaulted by staggering heat and humidity.

  "Florida's not fit for human habitation," I warned.

  Meanwhile, I started shifting my operations to those two "dreaded" locations.

  In 1982, I took a stab at producing another film. This one was entitled Savage Streets. It boasted a semi-star, Linda Blair, from the horror blockbuster The Exorcist. Savage Streets was a vigilante movie in the Death Wish tradition. Blair was shown exacting her revenge on a gang of street criminals who had raped her sister. Smartening up on the ways of motion picture financing, I financed nearly all of the $2.3 million budget for the film through a loan from Michigan National Bank and a bond from Union Indemnity Insurance of New York. Although considerably better than Mausoleum, Savage Streets suffered from poor distribution, and it also bombed. Whatever money the film made went back to the Michigan bank. By then, the insurance company had far bigger problems: it never recovered from the staggering loss it suffered in November 1980 when one of its clients, the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, burned down.

  My third foray into the movie business was picking up an Italian horror film, reediting it, changing its name to Gates of Hell, and sending it to the masses. The masses didn't like that one any better than the others, but the costs were so low the film actually turned a profit.

  A better investment once again came from the distribution end. I worked a $3 million, eight-picture deal with Vestron Video, an aggressive company that delved into all aspects of the movie business, including the new trade of supplying video cassettes to the rapidly expanding home VCR market. I made money by picking up various foreign and domestic films for about $70,000, reediting them and changing their titles if needed, then reselling the video, domestic, and foreign rights for $350,000. I was on my way in the movie industry.

  80

  As the action picked up in California, the agony continued in New York. In early May 1983, I returned from Los Angeles, tan and refreshed, only to be informed that Carmine Persico's son Alphonse and Anthony "Tony the Gawk" Augello had been indicted on a narcotics charge. That caught everyone's attention. Persico was young and from another generation, so the drug charge against him wasn't that surprising. The Gawk's role was mystifying. A big, bearish man with huge hands, he was an old-timer who had come up with my father and the elder Persico and was schooled in the traditional ways of the mob. For him to get involved in drugs was a direct breach of his oath.

  I knew the Gawk well. Like many of the Colombo soldiers, he had spent so much time at our house that he was like an uncle. Among my "uncles," I held a special feeling for the affable, smartly dressed Gawk. The big man had often attended my junior high and high school football games with my father, loudly cheering from the sidelines every time I ran the ball.

  Following his release on bail, the Gawk paid me a visit at Rumplik Chevrolet. He pulled up in his trademark bright green Eldorardo.

  "I've got a good shot at beating this," the Gawk said, as much to convince himself as me. "These charges are all phony. Man, I hope the guys don't think I'm involved in drugs."

  "If it ain't true, it ain't true," I said.

  Although the Gawk's words were confident, his body language was screaming something else. He was fidgeting and trembling as he talked. His hands were shaking so much that his diamond pinky ring sparkled like a mirrored disco ball in the sunlight. I had never seen the big man act like that before.

  "It'll be all right," I assured him. "No one blames you."

  "Yeah, yeah. How can anybody blame me? I mean, it's the boss's son, right? The boss's son. Right, Michael?"

  "I don't think you have anything to worry about."

  After the Gawk left, a chill washed over me. He wasn't handling this at all well.

  Two days later, I received a call from one of my men. "The Gawk just blew his brains out in a phone booth on Broadway. He called his wife, told her he loved her, then ate his gun. Can you believe that? Blew his teeth clean outta his head!"

  I shut the door of my office, turned off the light, and sat quietly in the dark for more than an hour. The trouble was, I could believe it. That was what was so unnerving. The Gawk had been one of the few real tough guys I had known. He would have confronted ten armed men and bravely fought to his death for the family. He would have walked fearlessly through a wall of cops. But the Gawk couldn't live with his own fear. He couldn't live with the wait, not knowing which one of his thirty-year blood brothers was going to take him for a ride and put a bullet in his head. He couldn't live waiting to be called into that final meeting where you never come out. The Gawk had done it to others, so he knew how it went.

  I thought of how the previous week must have gone for the man. The tension, no doubt, had been unbearable, tearing at his mind and body. Whom could he trust? Who would his killer be? When would the call come? Why don't they just get it over with?

  To relieve the paralyzing agony, the Gawk had become his own assassin, having determined that death was better than living with the torment he had created.

  The drug case against the younger Persico lingered, was transferred to another district, and then it was dropped.

  Sadly, the Gawk had hit himself for nothing.

  81

  May 1983 turned out to be, quite literally, a deadly month. First was the Gawk's suicide. Then my best friend Larry Carozza was found dead in his car along a Brooklyn highway, the circumstances of which weigh heavy on my heart even to this day. Later, on May 27, my thirty-second birthday, another tragedy occurred that set into motion a series of events that would change my life forever. Jerry Zimmerman's nineteen-year-old son Ira died of leukemia.

  Ira's passing threw Jerry into a deep depression. He had always experienced huge mood swings, but this time it looked like he was down for the count.

  I wasn't in great shape myself. I was haunted by the specter of the still-undisclosed joint task force and was emotionally rocked by the Gawk's suicide and the murder of my good friend (mob business as usual). To deal with all of this, I focused my energy on trying to cheer up Zimmerman. When nothing worked, I decided to make another movie-just to snap him out of his depression.

  Although Jerry had introduced me to the movie business, albeit with the terrible Mausoleum, he wasn't able to mesh with John Chambliss, so he had withdrawn from subsequent movies. I called Zimmerman now from my home in Delray Beach and told him I needed to see him in Florida immediately. I didn't say why.

  When Zimmerman arrived the next day, he was still depressed.

  "What's up?" he asked.

  "I want to make a movie here in Florida," I told him, "and I want you to produce it with me."

  His face lit up as his depression lifted.

  "What kind of movie?" he asked.

  "I don't know," I said. "I like music. Why don't we do a musical this time."

  "Sounds great!" Zimmerman gushed.

  We had no cast, crew, director, or even a script, just a vague idea and my desire to help a friend shake the blues. I solved these problems with a few phone calls. The first was to a Hollywood agent named David Wilder. I instructed Wilder to put out an order around town for a musical script. Wilder responded a few months later with a screenplay entitled Never Say Die, written by Leon Isaac Kennedy, a suavely handsome black actor known for the Penitential y boxing films and the Chuck Norris hit Lone Wolf McQuade. He was also known as the former husband of Jayne Kennedy, the onetime NFL football announcer. Leon Kennedy had woven an energetic, interracial love story around a street gang, a rock band, and the fad of break dancing.

  The project presented an intriguing casting dilemma. Instead of searching Beverly Hills for Hollywood's A-list, we'd have to cull the cast of such a movie from the squalid black ghettos of Miami and the gang-infested Latin barrios of Southern California. This could be interesting!

  82

  Through this film, another influence came into my life in the person of a beautiful nineteen-year-old Mexican-American woman. I f
irst caught sight of her as she was lifting herself from the Marina Bay Club's pool in Fort Lauderdale. Her long, coffeecolored hair was wet and slicked back, accentuating her face and huge brown eyes. Her firm dancer's body impressed me. Her wet skin seemed to shimmer in the sunlight. In that moment, I felt a strange sensation in my chest that made me gulp for air. This woman had literally taken my breath away. And for good reason. She was, without a doubt, the most beautiful and exotic woman I had ever seen.

  "Will you look at that!" Frankie Cestaro said, as struck by the dancer as I was.

  "I noticed," I said. "That girl's young, innocent, and awesome. She could be a lot of trouble for me. I'm going to stay away from her."

  "I think I'll give it a shot," Cestaro said.

  "Be my guest," I told him. "I don't even want to get near her."

  I had too much on my mind to be distracted by real romance. My whim to film a movie in South Florida had quickly grown into a master plan for building a major independent motion picture company there. I wanted to produce a series of big-budget, Hollywood-quality movies in Florida, and I had arranged with First American Bank in Fort Lauderdale to kick in $10 million to help with the initial financing.

  Not that money was a problem for me. With the capital coming in from the gasoline business, I was capable of being my own financier. In the end, it happened just that way. The $2 million budget for Leon Kennedy's movie, renamed Cry of the City during the shooting and Knights of the City when it was released, came from my own pocket.

  The movie, along with my grandiose plans, had made me, for the moment, the darling of the local media and of Florida's state, city, and county politicians-none of whom had apparently bothered to check out my background. The Florida Film Commission bent over backward, granting me permits to film at various locations. Miami Beach Mayor Malcolm Fromberg awarded me the key to the city and promised that the tourist town would donate prime land and help finance the building of an immense motion picture sound stage. Fort Lauderdale Mayor Bob Dressler tried to present me with a plaque but was unable to pin me down for the presentation. The Broward County Sheriff's Department even made me an honorary police commissioner.