Sonny Franzese was born in Naples in Southern Italy and arrived in the United States with his parents and siblings as an infant where he grew up in Brooklyn’s gritty Greenpoint section.
By the early 1940s, Sonny started what would eventually become one of the most notorious criminal careers within New York’s underworld.
Legend has it that young Franzese first cut his teeth as a strong-arm enforcer and top hitman who had reportedly “made his bones” on numerous occasions at the behest of mob higher-ups.
As a reward for his loyalty, by the early 1950s, Sonny had become a fully inducted soldier in the Brooklyn-based Family of boss Giuseppe (Joe) Profaci. Within a few years’ time, by the mid-1950s, Franzese had been elevated to “capo di decina” within the Profaci Family.
Now simply referred to on the streets and in the newspapers as “Sonny,” from that point forward, there seemingly was no stopping his meteoric rise within the Mafia.
Over the next seventy years, Sonny Franzese would become a legendary, almost mythical figure among his Cosa Nostra contemporaries, those in law enforcement, and within the annals of organized crime in the United States.
This is his story!
