Former Colombo crime family capo Michael Franzese appeared yesterday on Fox & Friends with co-hosts Brian Kilmeade and Gretchen Carlson, and he compared the Democratic Party to a Mafia family:
Franzese earlier penned an op-ed piece contending that the feds were using mob-style tactics in taking over AIG.
Among those cited by Franzese during his Fox appearance was Rep. Barney Frank. The Massachusetts congressman, originally from Bayonne, NJ, was profiled last January in a piece by Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker, and among the more interesting revelations is that Frank's father, Sam, was a Genovese crime family associate:
"Because Bayonne was such a sleazy place, nobody knew whether Barney was going to wind up in Congress or in jail" [said lawyer Alan Dershowitz]. According to Frank, his father was involved with the Mafia. "[Alfonse Frank] Funzi Tieri, a big-time gangster with the Genovese family, came to my brother David's bar mitzvah, when I was twenty-three," he said. Sam Frank died at the age of fifty-three, while Barney was an undergraduate at Harvard, and Barney took a year off to help resolve the family's tangled financial affairs. "The Mafia guys were very helpful to me at the time," he said.
Sam Frank "operated Tooley’s Truck Terminal, near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City":
"My father ran a truck stop," Frank told me. "He sort of lived on the fringes. We're talking about Hudson County—Frank Hague was the boss—a totally corrupt place. In 1946, my father's brother Harry got the contract to sell cars to the city, and of course he had to give a kickback to the guys who ran the city. My father was a middleman or something." Sam was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury about the matter. He refused and was found in criminal contempt. "For a while, he was hiding out from the cops in New York," Frank recalled. "I was six years old, and once I went to see him in the city, and we saw 'Robin Hood,' with Errol Flynn. The next day, the cops came to my first-grade class to interview me, to see if I had been with my dad. My father's sister, Aunt Minnie, taught at the school. She heard about the cops coming and went straight to my classroom to break it up, so I didn't have to talk." Eventually, Sam returned to New Jersey, and was jailed for refusing to testify. "They treated him nice," Frank said. "They let my mother bring him food. He served for about a year."
Genovese front boss Funzi Tieri, whom Frank claims attended his brother's bar mitzvah, had the distinction of being the first individual convicted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act which specifically was enacted to target the Mafia.
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