If they wanted to kill him, he knows how they’d do it.

He’ll see it at night sometimes, lying in bed, eyes shut, mind spooked, the scene he’s long feared unfolding in the darkness. A barrage of bullets startling him from sleep. His past crashing into his present. Icy revenge served.

Editor’s note IndyStar became aware of Mat Pazzarelli – formerly John Franzese Jr., a New York City mob figure – from freelance writer Elizabeth Flynn, whose first-person account is also being published by IndyStar as a companion piece. Flynn, IndyStar reporter Zak Keefer and photojournalist Mykal McEldowney reported this story while spending countless hours with Pazzarelli, who, despite any potential danger, voluntarily left the witness protection program. He told IndyStar he felt it was important his story be shared.

Some pieces of his old life never left him, so they just sit there, all these years later, crammed into his mind’s darkest corners. You wanna off a guy? He remembers how. You tail him. You study him. You wait. John Franzese Jr. knows how easy a mark he’d be.

“You look for patterns,” he says. “I’m not hard to look for.”

Not anymore. Same breakfast at the same Panera Bread, every morning for 11 years. Same route to Mass at St. Matthew, every Wednesday night for a decade. Same recovery meetings, week after week, year after year. These days, routine is everything. In the old days, routine got you killed.

They’d follow him, to the converted two-car garage on the northside of Indianapolis he calls home, the one tucked behind a halfway house where he helps a half-dozen men stay sober. They’d bust through the door and hurry through the kitchen, past the Bible verses tacked to the wall, past the handwritten notes from the high school students he speaks to and the addicts he counsels. They’d find him in the bedroom. It’d be over quickly. He wouldn’t have a chance.

“You know how easy a setup this is?” he shrugs. “I don’t keep guns here.”

He knows, he knows: It’s the fate that meets the man who made the choices he made. You don’t testify against the mob in federal court and live to tell about it.

Especially when your father’s the defendant.

“I know the statement my dad made. He said he’d kill me.”

Show caption Hide caption "That photo was taken in 2005 or 2006 at my mom and dad's new condo in Long Island," said John Franzese Jr. The photo... "That photo was taken in 2005 or 2006 at my mom and dad's new condo in Long Island," said John Franzese Jr. The photo was taken around the time he became an informant for the FBI against his father, John "Sonny" Franzese. Franzese Jr. changed his name after he asked to go into the witness protection program and is now known as Mat Pazzarelli. Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

But that was nine years ago. Truth is, he's been cheating death for 40, the gun-toting gangster who sank into a street-crawling crack addict who found God and himself, got clean, stayed clean and made a decision: tell the truth, walk away, hide. Maybe he’d spend 10 years in witness protection. Maybe he’d spend the rest of his life.

He always thought they’d come for him, and part of him still thinks they will. He wore a wire for nine months, logged over 400 hours of tape and became the U.S. government’s key witness in the case against aging mafia capo Sonny Franzese, a long-feared wiseguy who was once caught on tape bragging about his favorite way to dismember a corpse: chop up the body in a kiddie pool, dry out the bones in a microwave, then run them through a garbage disposal.

John Franzese called him dad.

And he never thought he’d see him again, not after singling out his 93-year-old father in a Brooklyn courtroom in 2010 and sending him back to prison. The son had broken the mafia’s code of silence. He’d testified against his father in open court, a first in the annals of organized crime. “RAT’S MY BOY,” screamed the headline of a New York tabloid.

Sonny Franzese, once a feared member of the Colombo crime family, earned a 50-year prison sentence in the late 1960s for organizing a slew of bank robberies. AP

By 2017 Sonny was freed, the 100-year-old gangster allowed to spend his final days outside of the prison walls he’d known half his life. That same year, some 700 miles west, his son signed out of witness protection in a parking lot in Indianapolis, tired, a friend said, “of living life in a cage.”

So late this winter, time melting away, John booked the rental car and headed for New York City, the 12-hour drive he always knew he needed to make. He kept his plans quiet, worried they’d still be looking for him. He wondered most, though, about the look on his father’s face. How would the old gangster react? Disbelief? Rage? Mercy?

His son – the rat – was coming to see him.

The next day, John rose early. He shaved, slipped on his favorite pair of pants, his favorite sweater, his best shoes. He drove the rental car to the retirement home. He signed his alias at the front desk, took the elevator up to the second floor and wandered anxiously down the hallway.

Then he saw him.

There he was, the man in the gray sweatsuit, slumped in a wheelchair, watching TV. The father he once revered. The man who ordered his murder.

The son approached, heart racing, nerves bubbling, and began with a question.

“Do you know who this is?”

'The last time I saw my father, I was testifying against him in court' John Franzese Jr., son of John "Sonny" Franzese of the Colombo crime family, was relocated to Indianapolis after testifying against his father. Mykal McEldowney, IndyStar







HE STILL LOOKS THE PART, the olive skin and the oily hair, the yellowed teeth, the sweatshirts that are two sizes too big. Sounds it, too, with that tone straight from the shores of Long Island. But the gangster in John Franzese is dead, and has been for a long time.

These days, Sonny’s boy drives a cherry red Chevy Cruze, adds butterfly emojis to the end of his texts and lives off the $790 disability check that arrives the first of every month. He’s 58 years old, HIV-positive, a recovering crack addict who calls Indianapolis home. He loves the mussels at Mama Carolla’s, the iced tea at Panera Bread, Mass and meditations at St. Matthew Catholic Church. He landed here 11 years ago, under the veil of a new name, stained by a past that was supposed to stay buried.

His cover – he goes by Mat Pazzarelli these days – lasted nine years until someone recognized him at a recovery meeting and posted about it on Facebook. It was November 2017, just seven years after the trial. The FBI begged him to relocate. John refused.

“Leaving here was never an option,” he says. He signed his release papers in the parking lot next to Panera, forfeiting the government’s $694 monthly stipend and the protection that came with it. He was out of witness protection, caged no more. If the mob wanted to come and get him, fine. He was tired of running.

Show caption Hide caption Mat Pazzarelli says goodbye for the day to his cat, Indy, on Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Pazzarelli named his cat after the city of Indianapolis,... Mat Pazzarelli says goodbye for the day to his cat, Indy, on Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Pazzarelli named his cat after the city of Indianapolis, the second permanent city he lived in during his time in witness protection. "The witness protection program might have had a responsibility for my security, for financial concern and medical help," said Pazzarelli. "The minute I got here I knew." Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

It’s a quiet life in a quiet city, the sort of simplicity the ex-gangster never knew he wanted. In his younger days, he’d drive sparkling new sportscars straight off the lot. He’d wear silk suits and leather jackets, including one diamond-encrusted alligator skin coat that set him back $11,000. He’d tuck his gun into his belt and shake down anyone he wanted – nightclub and restaurant owners, massage parlor owners, record label executives – and force them to give his crew a cut of their profits.

“If they don’t give it to you,” he remembers his father telling him, “leave them on the floor.” John never killed anyone, he says, because he never needed to. “Being the son of Sonny Franzese had its benefits.”

Its pressures, too. John remembers being eight years old, running home in tears one afternoon, bullied by the boy next door. “Get a bat,” Sonny told him, “and don’t come back in this house until you hit him. Hit him as hard as you can.”

Problem was, he was too scared to hit anybody. When he went back outside, the bully was gone. He stayed out there anyway, waiting, waiting, long enough to convince his father he’d used that bat. When he returned home, he lied, too afraid to tell his father he was too afraid.

He idolized that man. He craved his approval. So John played the part, and slowly, the mobster’s boy became a mobster himself.

“Faked it my whole life,” he says now.

The clues were always there, scattered amid his childhood on Shrub Hollow Road. FBI surveillance manned the Long Island street so often the neighbors had a running joke: They lived on the safest block in America. John remembers one officer, sitting in his patrol car one night, calling him over to the window and pulling out his pistol. “This is for your dad,” he told the boy. He remembers a second-grade classmate doing a presentation about why the man down the street – the infamous Sonny Franzese – was always in the news. He remembers the arrest, the sentencing, the trips to see his dad in prison, gazing through the glass and into his father’s eyes and bursting into tears.

Sonny Franzese makes his way to a New York police station in 1966. “I killed a lot of guys,” he was once caught on tape admitting, “you’re not talking about four, five, six, 10.” Anthony Camerano/AP

When he wasn’t driving his sons to their Little League games, or to get ice cream afterward, John “Sonny” Franzese was mingling with Frank Sinatra at the Copacabana nightclub, running scams, shaking down joints, carrying out hits, financing box office smashes like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deep Throat, and rising to the rank of underboss – second in command – of the famed Colombo crime family. It was Scorsese’s Goodfellas, but it was real.

How notorious were the Franzeses? John’s older brother, Michael, earned a shoutout in the mobster classic.

“Before there was John Gotti," John says, "there was my dad.”

John Franzese Jr. “Before there was John Gotti, there was my dad.” Quote icon

Sonny was both feared and respected, known as a brutal hit man who’d coat his fingertips in nail polish before a job, his way of never leaving a print behind. He was charged in the 1967 murder of a rival gangster whom police found washed up on the shores of a Long Island beach, stabbed and shot, his feet weighted down with cement blocks. No sweat. Sonny beat the case.

“I killed a lot of guys,” he was once caught on tape admitting, “you’re not talking about four, five, six, 10.”

According to a 1965 Newsday profile of the up-and-coming Colombo capo, the Franzese’s well-manicured lawn was the only one on Shrub Hollow Road without trees or bushes. “No one knows why,” journalist Bob Greene wrote, “but police have a theory. Bushes and shrubs prove a close-up hiding spot for would-be killers. Police figure that Franzese feels it’s a healthier climate with an unobstructed view of the grounds.”

The mobster was a family man, too, a doting father of seven who was home most nights for dinner. He’d met his second wife, Tina, at a Manhattan club, and they carved out a life in Roslyn, New York, on the north shore of Long Island, a half hour from the city.

“As a dad,” John remembers, “he was a really good dad.”

Then he was gone. John was nine when his father went away, 18 when he was first released, though Sonny would violate his parole five times over the next 25 years and be in and out of prison his entire adult life. The charge he couldn’t beat came in 1969, when Sonny earned a staggering 50-year sentence for organizing a slew of bank robberies, a crime to this day the family insists he didn’t commit. They believe he was framed, a pawn in FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s crusade against organized crime.

“In this case, I believe my father was telling the truth,” John says now. “But I also believe Sonny Franzese was Sonny Franzese, and if he didn’t commit that crime...”

John never put it all together until he was 16 and Michael sat him down at a Chinese restaurant in Long Island and told him everything. Bosses. Captains. Soldiers. The omerta – the mafia’s strict code of silence. It clicked. The clues were always there. Now they made sense.

Two years later, freed for the first time, Sonny put it this way to his youngest son: “If someone’s trying to hurt your family, don’t you have the right to protect your family, even if it’s a crime? We don’t just hurt anybody. We only hurt the people who are trying to hurt us.”

“Of course I bought in,” John remembers.

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He never had to get a real job, never had to earn an honest dollar. He liked the money and he loved the privilege, but as the years passed, the fraud wore on him. Slowly, the façade began to chip away. He wasn’t Sonny Franzese. Wasn’t even close.

After a while the only thing that made him forget was a fifth of Dewar’s or a line of cocaine. He spent the '80s as a gangster, the '90s as a junkie, plunging deeper into an addiction that would leave him wandering the streets of Manhattan, trash bags on his feet, puss oozing from his blisters, arms dotted with needle marks, HIV coursing through his bloodstream.

Booze became coke, and coke became crack, and pretty soon John’s life became all about the next hit. He stole the cross off his niece’s necklace, the keys to his dying grandfather’s Chevrolet, his older brother’s wedding ring. Pawned them all. Got high. Did it for 15 years.

“It completely took him over,” says a cousin, Richard Capobianco. “He’d sell his car for $5. Literally.”

And he would’ve kept doing it if not for October 9, 2001, the day John stumbled into a recovery meeting a few blocks from his brother’s home in Los Angeles, where he was staying for a few weeks, trying to distance himself from his demons in New York. It was there he met a man named Darrell Fusaro, an addict himself who heard his story and left John with the 12 words that saved his life.

“You can never take another dollar from your family, or you’ll die.”

Mat Pazzarelli exits after a weekly meditation session at an interfaith center called The Hermitage on Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2019. Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar







AFTER 20 YEARS IN THE MOB, he was tired of looking over his shoulder. “We lived our lives worrying about whether someone was gonna kill us,” John says, “or the FBI was gonna put us in jail.”

He was also consumed by his addiction. John snorted coke for the first time in the stairway of a club in 1985. By 1990 he’d lost control. He spent the next 11 years slumming the streets of New York City, trading his shoes for hits of crack, sleeping in subway tunnels, finding his way back to his parents’ house, begging for more money he’d end up burning on drugs anyway. He once grabbed a half-empty bottle of wine from a trash bin, only to notice it was filled with ants. He didn’t care. He chugged it anyway. He once took a birthday present from his mother, an $82,000 Jaguar convertible, and sold it for parts, trading four wheels worth $1,000 each for a $20 hit.

When a friend begged him to wait, John ignored him. "I don't care! I need a f--cking hit!" he shouted.

Somewhere along the way, he contracted the HIV virus from a dirty needle he jabbed into his arm. He’d wear big, baggy sweatshirts to cover the scars, even in the heat of summer.

“I was living like an animal,” he remembers.

He stumbled into that recovery meeting in Los Angeles on October 9, 2001, drunk and high and aimless. An hour later, he saw what he never had before.

Without his family to fall back on, John had no job, no money and nowhere to go. It terrified him. Darrell Fusaro looked at him and smiled. He told him he was the luckiest man in the room. He told him he had the chance to leave it all behind.

“What has that life done for you?” Darrell asked him. “You’ve been living on the streets for 10 years.”

And he’d been trying, and failing, to get clean for 15. John realized at that moment he didn't just have to leave the mob – he had to leave his family.

“Something happened in that one minute, something I can’t really explain,” he says 18 years later. “And my life’s never been the same since.”

Darrell was right. John had to try and make it on his own.

“He was living like a teenager,” Darrell remembers. “He was a 40-year-old teenager, dressed like he was on the set of a Run DMC music video. I asked him what he did for work. He said he wasn’t working. I asked him how he got money. He said, ‘Well, my parents send me money.’ He was such a knucklehead.”

After his morning reading, Mat Pazzarelli has a cigarette at his home in Indianapolis on Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

Driven by Darrell’s daily counsel, John got clean, and for the first time in his life, stayed clean. He was living in Mar Vista, California, working the front desk at a sober living home called Odessa House, trying to climb from his past. He met a woman there named Denyce. They married. He ignored pleas from the East Coast, begging him to return. He was done as a gangster.

“I was living on disability in Section 8 housing,” John says, “and I was happier than I ever was with them.”

Sonny, meanwhile, was ashamed.

“My father and his friends didn’t take my life seriously,” John remembers. “They didn’t think I could be happy without them. They wanted me to come back. I’m watching this life build and build, and I’m feeling like this is great, and they’re trying to rip it apart. I hated it. I couldn’t take it.”

Joel Freeman, a close friend of John Franzese Jr. “Because of who he is, the family was constantly roping him into things. He felt like there was no other way to get out.” Quote icon

So when the FBI called a few years later, John did what no gangster is ever supposed to do – he listened. Agent Robert Lowicky had been chasing Sonny Franzese for a decade, and he wanted John's help. He wanted him to become a rat.

John hated what he came to accept: It was his only way out.

He’d cooperate with the government, become a confidential informant, wear a wire, testify in open court, whatever it took. He’d leave Denyce behind. He’d break his omerta. He’d turn on his father. He'd betray the mob.

And he knew what it would mean: If he got caught, he was a dead man, right then and there, no questions asked, no matter who his father was. The family would shun him, the Colombos would hunt him, and there was a good chance Sonny would want him dead.

“Because of who he is, the family was constantly roping him into things,” says Joel Freeman, a close friend who met John at Odessa House. “He felt like there was no other way to get out.”

He hatched a plan with Lowicky: He’d creep back into gangster life, spend a year flying coast to coast, come up with phony scams and secretly meet with the FBI a few times a month. He lived in fear every minute of every day.

Show caption Hide caption "I was 202 with about four percent body fat," said Mat Pazzarelli, looking at a photo of himself with his sister's dogs that clings to... "I was 202 with about four percent body fat," said Mat Pazzarelli, looking at a photo of himself with his sister's dogs that clings to his refrigerator on Wednesday, Dec. 5, 2018. The photo was taken around the time Pazzarelli became an informant for the FBI against his father, John "Sonny" Franzese. Pazzarelli, formerly John Franzese Jr., changed his name after he asked to go into the witness protection program. Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

It was the wire that worried him most. During one sit-down, inside a room filled with gangsters, the recording device accidentally tumbled from John’s pocket, falling onto the floor, right there in the open. His heart sank.

He scooped it up.

He looked around.

No one had noticed. He’d live another day.

By the end, he'd recorded hundreds of hours of incriminating conversations, enough to put his father and several of his associates behind bars for shaking down a pair of Manhattan strip clubs and running a loan-shark operation.

John first entered witness protection in 2006 and spent two years in South Carolina before landing in Indianapolis in 2008. It wasn’t until June of 2010 the FBI called him to testify. He sat in a Brooklyn courtroom and singled out his father.

“He’s sitting there in the yellow shirt,” he told the jurors.

The family was stunned. The mob was furious. The press went crazy. “Godfather betrayed by namesake,” read one headline. “Turncoat son rats out father,” came another.

The defense tried to paint him as a money-hungry addict trying to score a movie deal. His older brother Michael, who himself had worked as an informant years earlier but never testified against the family, told reporters his father was crushed by John’s betrayal.

A 93-year-old Sonny Franzese, famed Colombo underboss, arrives for 2010 criminal trial in Brooklyn. Buried by his son's testimony, he'd serve a seven-year term for racketeering. Bebeto Matthews/AP

“I don’t agree with anything he’s doing,” Michael said. “The family is taking it very hard.”

Sonny fumed. The minute he learned his son was a snitch, he ordered his murder, according to court records. “He wanted to kill (his son),” the prosecution wrote, “because he knew (his son) could and would incriminate him.”

On the witness stand, John did what he never had before: He came clean. The defense grilled him across three grueling days. Why was he doing it? Why was he betraying father and family?

“I thought it was the right thing to do,” he told the courtroom. “I thought it was a chance to make up for what I had done with my life.”

The aging gangster, 93 years old, was found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison, where most assumed Sonny would spend his final days.

“He was devastated,” John’s cousin, Richard, remembers. “Here was his prized child, the child he loved the most, sending him away. He was ashamed. He was embarrassed. He would’ve bet his life that John wouldn’t be the one to do this to him.”

His son, meanwhile, did the only thing left to do: He disappeared.







THERE ARE LIVES ACROSS THE COUNTRY that have been shaped by the mobster’s son who told the truth and left the violence behind.

Rufus Gleeson is one of them. He was a drug mule, a cocaine addict who’d just been arrested for smuggling a kilo of coke out of Italy, when his fed-up father dropped him off at a sober living home in California in 2002. His bunkmate his first night at Odessa House was a former gangster, a cocaine addict himself, “a stupid f---ing goon from New York,” Rufus remembers thinking.

Almost 20 years later he calls John Franzese one of his best friends, and the biggest reason why he’s still sober.

“Big J changed my life,” Rufus says. “He’s my Eskimo. It’ll never be anything less than a miracle what he’s done for me.”

Norm Ferris is another. He lives in Columbia, S.C., and in 2006 he got a call from a man who’d just landed in town and was looking for a ride to a recovery meeting. That's when he met John Franzese for the first time.

More than a decade later, they still talk every week.

“As far as sobriety goes, we see things a lot alike,” Norm says now. “We have to be honest with ourselves and our lives, and I think that’s been the biggest thing with him. John carries a lot of his past with him.”

Show caption Hide caption Mat Pazzarelli speaks to students at Bishop Chatard on Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018. Pazzarelli built a relationship with Chatard teacher, Sister Kathleen Yeadon (middle), and... Mat Pazzarelli speaks to students at Bishop Chatard on Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2018. Pazzarelli built a relationship with Chatard teacher, Sister Kathleen Yeadon (middle), and has spoken to her senior social justice class for eight years. "What I hope they really get out of it is to make them ask questions to themselves," said Pazzarelli. "Are they living a life they truly want to live? Like, me living a life like my father wanted me to live rather than being that kid that loved life." Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

There’s Sister Kathleen Yeadon. She teaches Scripture at Bishop Chatard High School in Indianapolis, and a few years back, the man in the dingy old sweatshirts who sat in the same corner of her Panera Bread every morning, poring through books on religion, was driving her nuts.

Finally she walked up and asked him a question.

“Can you tell me what mission from God you’re on?”

John Franzese looked up, confused.

“What’s a mission?”

They became close friends. He told her his story. He’s been speaking to her classes ever since.

“When he’s with the students, he’s raw,” Kathleen says. “And they really take to that.”

Jim Mingay has lived in the halfway house John oversees for almost three years. He’s a recovering addict – “heroin, crack, everything really,” he says – trying, at the age of 60, to piece what’s left of his life back together. He’s bolted twice, only to return, lured back to sobriety by John’s incessant encouragement.

“I kept trying to do it my way, by myself, choking on that pride, choking on everything else, and he kept offering me this comment or that comment,” Jim says. “He has a knack for knowing when somebody is screwing up, and a knack for knowing when somebody is trying to bullshit him. You can’t bullshit him. I’ve learned that.”

The guidelines are laid out for each tenant, and they must be met: Get and keep a sponsor, attend recovery meetings each week, adhere to the Alcoholic Anonymous’ 12-step program.

Ed Correll (left), a resident who lives in the halfway house in front of Pazzarelli's home, smokes a cigarette during an afternoon meeting in Indianapolis on Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019. Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

John collects their rent checks, makes sure they’re making their meetings and offers a daily example of what a life in recovery can look like. “It takes a special man to do what he’s done the past 18 years,” Jim says.

John’s life in recovery is one of routine, the sort of routine that used to be dangerous for a man like him. He rises each morning and sings his prayers. He drives to Panera Bread, buys his iced tea, and keeps an empty chair across from him, his way of welcoming the world. “My past has become an asset,” he says. He’s used it to speak at high schools and homeless shelters, at recovery meetings and AIDS Awareness Day at Ivy Tech.

It will never be lost on him how far he’s come, the gun-toting gangster who sank into a street-crawling addict who got clean, stayed clean and now sees life through a completely different lens.

“Places like Panera are like the places I used to go at 5 or 6 in the morning to beg for money,” he says. “Like, when you see me with an iced tea? It’s the idea that for 17 years, I get to buy my drink in the morning, where I used to beg, filthy, dirty, all kinds of bodily fluids in my pants, stand around delis in Manhattan, or diners, and beg people for money – not to get food, but to buy a beer. And when you see that iced tea, and why I drink that iced tea, I never forget. Every single sip I take, I enjoy it like it’s everything.”

Show caption Hide caption With all of his beloved mementos hanging on his wall, Mat Pazzareli speaks with his friend, Lisa Gilbreath, on Thursday, Dec. 6, 2018. The two... With all of his beloved mementos hanging on his wall, Mat Pazzareli speaks with his friend, Lisa Gilbreath, on Thursday, Dec. 6, 2018. The two meet to talk about their lives and their journeys through sobriety. Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

Yet for all the miles John has covered in his rehabilitation, and for all the good he’s done, in California and South Carolina and Indianapolis, there was still a hole in his life, something eating at him. There was still something he felt he had to do.

He had to go see his father.

His mother was gone, stolen by cancer a few years back. John never made it to the funeral, and the regret still burns inside of him. So earlier this year, he reached out to his older sister, who very cautiously told him about the retirement home Sonny was staying at in New Jersey.

John weighed making the drive. He worried about the risk. And every Wednesday night, at the meditation service he attends at St. Matthew, he scribbled on a sheet of paper his private prayer for the week. Each was the same. He wanted to make peace with his dad.

Sonny turned 102 in February. John’s closest friend in Indianapolis, a woman he met in recovery named Lisa Gilbreath, kept nudging him. “Time is running out,” she’d tell him. "Time is running out."

So late this winter, he booked the rental car and headed for home, the 12-hour trip John Franzese always knew he needed to take. Lisa rode shotgun.

“I was trying to think of ways not to go,” he says, “and I really think I would’ve chickened out if it wasn’t for her.”

He kept his plans quiet, worried there might be someone out there still looking for him. He played the scene out in his mind as the miles passed and the car made its way east. How would Sonny react? Disbelief? Rage? Mercy?

His son – the rat – was coming to see him.

John rose early the next morning, the day before Valentine’s Day. While Lisa stayed back at the hotel, a nervous wreck, John drove to the retirement home, signed Mat Pazzarelli at the front desk and took the elevator up to the second floor. He wandered down the hallway.

Then he saw him.

“Do you know who this is?” he asked the man in the gray sweatsuit.







NO, SONNY FRANZESE, SLUMPED IN A WHEELCHAIR, didn’t know the man standing in front of him, at least not at first. It’d been nine years since the courtroom in Brooklyn, his son singling him out, making headlines, then disappearing. They weren’t supposed to see each other after that.

But here he was.

“It’s John," his son said.

“John?”

“Dad...”

Sonny’s eyes lit up. His arms opened.

“John!”

The father beamed. The son exhaled.

At first, Sonny was stunned. His son, the snitch, had come to see him. He was worried about his boy. “Are you OK?” Sonny asked. “Did you sign in? God forbid anybody found you here.”

A gangster, even at 102.

“It’s still in him,” his son says.

But more than that, he was a father. He’d missed him. They talked for almost two hours. Sonny wanted to know every piece of his son's life. John told him about his mornings at Panera, his sobriety, the men in the halfway house, his life in Indianapolis.

“Indianapolis!” Sonny blurted. “That’s close to Chicago. You can’t let people know where you live!”

They talked about John’s mother, about Sonny’s long days in the retirement home, about the wrinkles on John’s face.

Finally, they talked about the trial.

“You know, son,” Sonny said, “that wasn’t a very nice letter you wrote to the judge.”

“I know, dad.”

There was no letter, of course. But Sonny Franzese, famed Colombo capo, wasn’t about to openly admit that his own son had worn a wire and ratted him out, not in a Brooklyn courtroom in 2010 and not in a New Jersey retirement home in 2019. It went against everything the man believed. The words would never come out of his mouth.

Then he asked the question he’s waited nine years to ask.

“Why’d you do it?”

Sonny had his theories. “Did they offer you a half-million dollars? Was it your mother? Was it that FBI agent? Did he talk you into it?”

No, no, no, John told him.

“Dad, I love you,” he said. “I never did it to hurt you.”

Silence.

More silence.

John wasn’t sure how to tell his father – that life, his life, was never in him. He faked it for years, playing the part, but he was never gonna be the next Sonny Franzese. By the time he realized it, he’d run out of options.

Finally, the silence was broken.

“You’re my son, and I love you,” John remembers his father muttering. “But you’ve always been f---ing crazy. I got a son who’s crazy. But he’s my son!”

It was enough.

The father forgave. The son healed.

Show caption Hide caption After a quick dinner at Joella's Broad Ripple, Mat Pazzarelli goes through a personal prayer ritual at St. Matthew The Apostle on Wednesday, Feb. 27,... After a quick dinner at Joella's Broad Ripple, Mat Pazzarelli goes through a personal prayer ritual at St. Matthew The Apostle on Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019. The prayers take Pazzarelli 15 minutes to sing. After, he attends a church service. Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar

“This is the best way I can explain it,” John says a few weeks later, wearing the relief on his wrinkled face. “My father showed up, not Sonny Franzese.”

They talked and laughed and hugged. Sonny asked him to visit again. John pledged that he would. He and Lisa drove home the next morning, 12 hours back to Indianapolis, the anguish that had once filled his mind finally eased. The hole had been filled. He’d made peace with the father he’d turned on and the life he left behind. Testifying was his only way out. He knew it then, and he knows it more now.

Maybe his father, the infamous Sonny Franzese, finally understands.

“I did it because it was the right thing to do, the right thing to do,” John says, echoing the very thing he said on the witness stand nine years ago.

“I got away with so much in my life.”

It’s been six weeks since they returned, and as the days pass and life carries on, the fear in him has begun to fade. He doesn’t see that scene in the darkness much anymore, the one where he’s lying in bed, eyes shut, mind spooked, and those mobsters come crashing through his door, unloading their icy revenge all these years later.

That part of his life’s been buried. He’s moved on. He hopes they have, too.

But he’ll never really know for sure.

Mobster in our Midst exclusive IndyStar.com video extras Exclusive video extras from interviews with John Franzese Jr., son of John "Sonny" Franzese, as part of IndyStar's Mobster in our Midst. Click to Play 'If you're surveilled to a meeting you get killed' Click to Play 'You'd be at a table with movie stars or athletes and they'd cater to him' Click to Play Why a former mobster doesn't sugarcoat life for Bishop Chatard students

With reporting from freelance writer Elizabeth Flynn.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.

Follow Star photographer Mykal McEldowney on Twitter and Instagram.