'I was one of the top Mafia bosses - even my own dad wanted me dead'

On October 31, 1975, Michael Franzese was walked into a room with a top Mafia boss seated at the head of a horseshoe table, with underbosses to his left and right. Michael, then 24, walked towards them and held out his hand, where they cut his finger with a knife.

His blood spilled onto a card placed into the cup of his hands, depicting a saint, which was then set alight. “‘Michael Franzese, you are born again into a new life, Cosa Nostra.

“Violate what you know about this life, betray your brothers, and you will die and burn in hell like the saint is burning in your hands. Do you accept?’ And I said ‘yes I do,’” Michael, now 71, tells the Manchester Evening News.

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“It’s a night I’ll never forget. When you take the oath of Omertà, an oath of silence, you’re never even supposed to admit the existence of that life, and you can never betray the life.

“It’s not an oath that says ‘from tonight you’re going to murder and steal and kill,’ does that happen? Yes. Did I violate the oath? Yes, because I talk about it and I walked away from it.”

At the height of his mob life as a ‘caporegime’ (captain) of the revered Colombo crime family who ran the New York Mafia alongside five other families, Michael Franzese defrauded the US Federal Government of upwards of $350 million with a gasoline bootlegging scheme, making him one of the most powerful men in the city and a prime target for law enforcement.

In 1986, Vanity Fair named Michael one of the biggest money earners the mob had seen since Al Capone, with Fortune Magazine listing him at number 18 on the ‘Fifty Most Wealthy and Powerful Mafia Bosses’ list.

His life was like how you see it in