"Franzese noted that he had committed numerous murders in connection with his membership in the Colombo crime family," prosecutors Elizabeth Geddes, James Gatta and Rachel Nash say in court filings.

At the time he was speaking, Franzese thought he was talking to an up and coming mob recruit who was going to be "made." Actually, Gaetano (Guy) Fatato, whose status as a mob turncoat was disclosed by Gang Land in 2007, was working for the feds and wired for sound.

One reason he never got caught, Franzese told Fatato, was "that he used to wear nail polish on his fingertips during murders to avoid leaving fingerprints," the prosecutors say in the papers filed in Brooklyn Federal Court.

On October 13, 2006, while discussing the then-pending case against acting boss Alphonse Persico for the 1999 murder of William (Wild Bill) Cutolo, whose body had not yet been recovered, Franzese stressed the importance of disposing of murder victims.

"Today, you can't have a body no more... It's better to take that half-an-hour, an hour, to get rid of the body than it is to leave the body on the street," he said, according to the prosecutors.

A few months later, on December 4, 2006, the prosecutors wrote, Franzese told Fatato that he had done "a lot of work" back in the 1950s and 1960s for the Colombo family: "I killed a lot of guys ... you're not talking about four, five, six, ten."

If Fatato were called on to take part in a hit, Sonny said "he should wear a hairnet to avoid leaving DNA evidence," the prosecutors wrote. He also offered grisly cooking lessons. Disposal of a body, Franzese advised Fatato, could be accomplished "by dismembering the corpse in a kiddie pool and drying the severed body parts in a microwave before stuffing the parts in a commercial-grade garbage disposal," wrote Geddes, Gatta and Nash.