Mafioso Reformed
David Biller
Issue date: 4/20/05 Section: features
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Versus Magazine Online [Image based format]
"Fifteen years ago, if I'da had a microphone on me, I'da been dead. Now I got two. Things change."
The first microphone is beaming sound to the NBC news team standing halfway up the right aisle, a television camera mounted on one of their shoulders. The second is connected to the speaker system of Vanderbilt's largest lecture hall, and doesn't seem to be working. Michael Franzese decides he can do without it and begins his speech.
Minutes earlier, the last of the Vanderbilt football team straggled in. Many of them were sporting matching gray sweats, though others were wearing their black Vanderbilt Football warm-up jackets. They dispersed throughout the empty hall after walking past their coach who, sitting front row with legs crossed and a sternly drawn face, required them all to be here. At the front of the room, a projection screen displayed the Bible verse Proverbs 16:7: "When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." Franzese stood to the side of the entranceway, speaking to a Dean in a low voice.
"When I found Christ," he started, but his quiet voice was lost amidst the roar of the players, laughing or giving each other hard, friendly slaps on the arms. Those with empty seats in front of them dangled their thick legs over the backrests.
He continued, gesticulating with his right hand. "That's what made me come over to Christianity. Jesus made me..." His voice faded out again.
"I don't think baseball's our national pastime. Gambling is," Franzese begins again, folding his muscular forearms over one another and displaying an expensive gold watch. Franzese had been a capo, or captain, in the Colombo Cosa Nostra -- one of the five families in New York, and one of nine in the country. Although he wears an olive, loose-fitting, button-down shirt, and wire-rim glasses, he certainly looks the part facially. He has short, jet-black hair, slicked back and shiny. He has a wide, hard jaw line and a thick Brooklyn accent. He pronounces Louisville with a strong 'e' like one might imagine him using when saying, "I'm gonna beat your fuckin' head in with a Louisville Slugga."