His parents wanted him to be a doctor, so he dutifully enrolled at a local college on Long Island and majored in biology. Michael Franzese was expected to do well. The only time his father ever hit him was upon being told—falsely—that the boy’s A average in Catholic school had slipped. But he dropped out of college midway through his studies, and soon after that, Franzese paid a call on his father to announce that he was being drawn into the old man’s profession.

Their meeting place, the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, was a stark reminder of where that profession could lead. John “Sonny” Franzese, a caporegime in the Colombo crime family, had gotten fifty years in a bank-robbery case. Sonny was a shark-eyed, bull-necked hoodlum who looked like John Garfield in Body and Soul; a legendary enforcer given credit for dozens of murders; a man who had been tossed out of the U.S. Army as a “psychoneurotic with pronounced homicidal tendencies.”

Sonny was not surprised at the news. Though Michael was an adopted child, he had raised the boy from infancy, and, he told his son, “I seen that spirit in you.” As long as Michael was going to be “on the street,” Sonny wanted to give him “a proper introduction” to certain of his friends. But first there was an important matter to clear up.

“Let me ask you a question,” Sonny said. “If you had to kill somebody, do you think you could do it?”

Michael thought for a moment. “If the circumstance were right,” he said. “For the right reasons, I’d do it. Yeah.”

Sonny arranged for Colombo soldier “Joe-Joe” Vitacco to reach out for his son, and Michael Franzese began his formal schooling in “the life.” In 1975, at age twenty-four, he was deemed ready for induction into the Mob. Tom DiBello, acting head of the Colombo family, presided over the solemn ceremony in the back room of a catering hall in Brooklyn. The Colombos laid out a symbolic gun and knife, murmured in Sicilian, and drew blood from Franzese’s shooting finger. He was now a “made” man.

Within a decade, Franzese had become a caporegime like his father, one of the biggest earners the Mob had seen since Capone, and the youngest individual in Fortune magazine’s survey of “The 50 Biggest Mafia Bosses.” His far-flung ensemble of businesses included high-rise construction, car dealerships, a security guards’ union, and the production of B-movies. But his biggest scam involved selling millions of gallons of bootleg gasoline in several states and robbing federal and state governments of the excise taxes. Franzese’s personal take: an estimated $1 million to $2 million a week.

Before too long, however, the law caught up with him. By 1985, Franzese was under indictment in New York and Florida, and although he had beaten five cases in the past, this time it looked bad. A federal judge locked him up without bail after hearing evidence of his violent tendencies, including claims—which he still denies—that he ordered a competitor’s head bashed in with a ball-peen hammer.

Defeated, Franzese copped a plea to racketeering and conspiracy. He would do ten years at Terminal Island and pay nearly $15 million in fines and restitution. It appeared he had come full circle, ending up like his father.

Today, Michael Franzese, thirty-nine, is a free man, having served about a third of his sentence. He has not paid a nickel of his restitution. He lives in a $2.7 million home in a swank Los Angeles neighborhood with his second wife, twenty-seven-year-old Cammy Garcia, a former aerobics instructor who danced in one of his movies. They drive a Mercedes and a Porsche. Franzese gives his occupation as movie producer. He is represented by ICM, a leading talent agency, which recently sold CBS the rights to a four-hour mini-series about his life. John Travolta and Tony Danza were both mentioned as possible leads. The series is now on hold—Franzese didn’t like the script. But later this year, Harper-Collins will publish his memoirs, written with best-selling author Dary Matera.