for leniency based on a variety of ailments, including partial blindness and deafness, gout, and heart and kidney problems. Franzese was denied compassionate release in July 2016. Franzese was released from the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, on June 23, 2017, at the age of 100; he was the oldest federal inmate in the United States and the only centenarian in federal custody at the time of his release. Movie business Franzese is listed as an associate producer of the 2003 film This Thing of Ours, which starred James Caan. He also helped to finance the $22,000 budget of the 1972 pornographic film Deep Throat, which generated $30–50 million, and the 1974 slasher film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which earned over $30 million from a $80,000–140,000 investment. Family and death Franzese was married to a woman with whom he had three children. While married, John had gotten Cristina Capobianco, a 16-year-old cigarette girl at the Stork Club in Manhattan, pregnant with his son Michael Franzese. To avoid having a scandal surrounding having a child out of wedlock, Capobianco married Frank Grillo. After the mob allowed John to divorce his first wife, Grillo disappeared, and he married Capobianco. Due to this, Michael had initially believed that he had been adopted by John after the disappearance of Grillo, who Michael thought to be his biological father. Franzese had four more children with Capobianco, who died in 2012. Altogether, Franzese had eight children, 18 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Michael Franzese had entered a pre-med program in 1969, as John Franzese originally did not want him to be involved in organized crime. However, in 1971, shortly after his father had been sentenced to 50 years in prison for bank robbery, he decided to drop out of college to help his family earn money. After he was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1986, Michael was ultimately released in 1994 and retired to California in 1995. His younger son, John Franzese Jr., was a Colombo family associate before becoming an FBI informant. On June 23, 2017, Franzese was released and returned home. In 2019, Franzese Jr. met with his father at the nursing home where he resided and reconciled with him; John Jr. had previously voluntarily left the Witness Protection Program. Franzese died in a New York City hospital, on February 24, 2020, aged 103. He was buried on February 28, at