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How I Stole $8 Million A Week As A Mafia Boss

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The mafia never produced an earner like Michael Franzese — and he’s the only boss from Fortune’s 1986 mob power list still alive to explain how he did it.

BuzzFeedVideo’s “How I Stole $8 Million A Week As A Mafia Boss” sits down with Michael Franzese, a former capo in New York’s Colombo crime family whose income once outpaced the rest of organized crime’s old guard. He didn’t get rich running numbers or shaking down store owners — he got rich exploiting a hole in gasoline tax law that made him, by his own account, one of the biggest earners the mob had produced since Al Capone.

• Fortune magazine ranked Franzese No. 18 on its 1986 list of the “Fifty Most Wealthy and Powerful Mafia Bosses,” just five spots behind John Gotti — and he was only 35 years old at the time.
• At the height of his operation, Franzese says his schemes generated $5 million to $8 million in cash per week, most of it from a gasoline bootlegging and tax fraud racket rather than traditional street rackets.
• In 1986 he pleaded guilty to federal racketeering and conspiracy charges, receiving a 10-year sentence and a $14 million restitution order, then later walked away from the mob entirely without entering the witness protection program.

The Yuppie Don’s Rise Inside the Colombo Family

Franzese climbed to caporegime — a captain running his own crew — inside the Colombo family at a time when the traditional mob was still leaning on loansharking, gambling, and extortion for its cash flow. He earned two nicknames that stuck: the “Yuppie Don,” for the buttoned-up, business-suit image he projected instead of the stereotypical wiseguy look, and the “Prince of the Mafia,” a nod to how far his earning power set him apart from his peers.

Instead of grinding out street-level rackets, Franzese built out a network of legitimate-looking fronts — auto dealerships, nightclubs, movie production companies, and sports and entertainment management ventures — that gave his organization cover and additional revenue streams on top of the criminal core of the operation.

The Gasoline Racket That Outearned the Street

The real engine behind Franzese’s fortune was a multi-billion-dollar gasoline bootlegging and tax fraud scheme. By exploiting loopholes in wholesale fuel licensing, his operation collected excise taxes on gasoline sales and then simply never remitted the money to the government, pocketing the difference at a scale street rackets couldn’t touch.

$5 million to $8 million a week, in cash — that was the take at the peak of Michael Franzese’s gasoline operation.

The scheme’s structure — layering legitimate-seeming wholesale transactions to disguise where the money actually came from — put Franzese’s crew in the same category as some of the more sophisticated modern criminal enterprises, the kind detailed in How Mexican Drug Cartels Make Billions, where volume and logistics matter as much as muscle.

Fortune’s List and the Vanity Fair Comparison

The 1986 Fortune ranking wasn’t a tabloid stunt — it was a serious attempt to size up organized crime’s financial hierarchy, and Franzese’s spot at No. 18, five places behind John Gotti, reflected just how much cash his gasoline operation was moving relative to bosses running far larger crews through conventional means. Vanity Fair went further, citing him as one of the mob’s biggest earners since Al Capone.

That kind of money required real laundering infrastructure, funneling illicit gasoline-tax proceeds through the auto dealerships, nightclubs, and film ventures that gave the operation its aboveboard face — the same laundering challenge examined from a modern angle in Money-Laundering FBI Expert Rates 8 Money-Laundering Scams In Movies and TV.

Pleading Guilty and Walking Away

The run ended in 1986, when Franzese pleaded guilty to federal racketeering and conspiracy charges. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $14 million in restitution. He served his time, survived multiple subsequent indictments, and then did something almost no capo had done before him: he publicly walked away from the mob without going into witness protection, surviving a mob contract placed on his life in the process.

What followed was a religious conversion — Franzese became a born-again Christian, motivational speaker, and anti-crime educator, writing books including “Quitting the Mob” and “Blood Covenant” about the life he left behind.

Franzese’s story stands apart from most mob accounts precisely because there was no wire, no cooperation deal, no new identity — just a capo who outearned bosses above him on the org chart and then chose to disappear from the life on his own terms.