The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight : When the East Coast Mob Came Knocking on Hollywood’s Door, the FBI Was Waiting With A Multimillion-Dollar Sting

As a child, Linda Carol fantasized about the people she saw on TV. Growing up south of Boston in a family in which screaming matches were dinner-time fare, she retreated time and again to the tube. “I thought I’d like to go inside there,” she says, “and get away from my own life.”

* At 14, she found a better escape--beauty pageants. She didn’t think she was that good-looking, but she always seemed to win: first the local “Miss Solar Energy” contest, then “Miss Teen Massachusetts” and “Miss Teen New England.” Then a national pageant earned her an audition in New York before director Franco Zeffirelli for a film about burning teen-age passions.

* She froze up at the tryout, totally froze. Zeffirelli stormed about the set, waving a cigarette and yelling at her, “Hello? Hello?” But all she could see were the monitors showing close-ups of a milk-skinned beauty, one who looked more woman than girl. “I couldn’t believe it was me,” she says.

* Brooke Shields got the lead in “Endless Love.” Linda Carol left home and became a waitress.

* She was 18 in 1982 when Dennis (Champagne) Lepore walked into Jason’s restaurant in Boston’s Back Bay and gave her $100 for hanging up his cashmere coat. She gave him back $90. Her boss told her to sit with the dapper customer. She said she couldn’t leave her station. “Do it,” her boss commanded.

* Lepore was drinking Taittinger, pink, a $200 bottle. He called her “Harlow” because of her blond hair and, well, she had a figure. She called him “Napoleon” because he was 5-foot-7 and had a classic Roman nose. And because “he had an edge about him,” like he had something to prove. He raised his glass and said, “Don’t ever lose that smile.”

* Her boss told her to take the night off.

THE FIRST TIME DENNIS LEPORE SAW “THE GODFAther,” he was bowled over by the Al Pacino character. Lepore hated movies that portrayed mob guys as “a bunch of f---ing pizza heads,” but Pacino’s Michael Corleone wasn’t like that. He was classy, cool, quiet. He kept everyone guessing what he was thinking. Then he whacked ‘em. Lepore would say, “Isn’t he the best?”

Lepore was a product of the streets, the narrow, bustling ones of Boston’s North End, the predominantly Italian district that had been a cradle of American freedom, home to Paul Revere’s Old North Church and now a bastion of the “legitimate guys.” The guys ran card games and coffee shops amid the brick tenements, took bets, loaned out money and offered “protection” to shopkeepers who didn’t want their windows broken. In each generation, the toughest of the lot were recruited into the Patriarca Family, the Mafia clan that ruled the rackets throughout New England from its headquarters in Providence, R.I.

Lepore was a Patriarca natural: cruel, cunning and violent. One old North End associate recalls how Lepore was “havin’ a beef” with a kid who “sent the dogs after Dennis . . . two big dogs.”

“Shoulda killed the dogs,” a buddy said.

“Well, he did.”

By the 1980s, according to the FBI, Lepore was a Patriarca “soldier” with “ambitions for higher office.”He also was working furiously to shed his street-tough image. He jogged daily, swam in icy ocean waters and got into natural food. While his pals worried about nosy cops and rival gunmen, he proselytized about the danger of radiation from microwaves. “I always have windows open,” he said. “It gets out . . . But imagine these people that never open their windows.”

Champagne was Lepore’s idea of perfection. It was the drink of class, of Michael Corleone. And it had “like 101 vitamins,” he told teen-age Linda Carol.

Over the next few months, Lepore taught her about long-stemmed roses and Swiss chocolates. He showed her which fork to use and dished out advice: “Don’t rely on anyone.” About his life, Lepore said little, only that he had many different things he was working on. He did tell her that if anyone hassled her, “I’ll take care of ‘em.” But she thought he was kidding. “You see, I was awed by the respect I got,” she says. “He never did anything to hurt me.”

When she mentioned her dream of becoming an actress, he bought her a ticket to Los Angeles. Eventually, he followed her here. A few of the guys came along for the ride.

IT WAS NEARLY A DECADE AGO THAT THE NEW ENGland Mafia took that unlikely first step in a glamorous, and ultimately disastrous, Hollywood adventure. Even as Linda Carol became a B-movie starlet, Lepore was making it to film, too, along with two other yuppie mobsters with ties to the upper reaches of the Patriarca clan, Thomas L. Hillary and Frank P. Salemme Jr. The footage of the trio is scheduled for screening this spring at their trial for conspiracy and labor bribery in U.S. District Court in Boston. It shows the “legitimate guys” walking right into one of the most elaborate stings ever concocted by the FBI--indeed, they’d be virtually the only trophies for the feds, who spent millions bankrolling “Dramex,” a film-production company seemingly ready to roll the cameras, if only the producers could get a little help from the Teamsters. . . .

In addition to the film, there’s a couple of miles of audiotape provided by an FBI mole, Robert (Ralph) Franchi, an old Boston flunky of Lepore. For three years, the Patriarca trio thought he was running their errands around Los Angeles. His main mission, though, was revenge, using the simplest weapon, a tiny recorder. His tapes, generating more than 7,000 pages of transcripts--all obtained by The Times--would be the basis for not only the Dramex prosecutions but also a series of criminal cases in California. They capture the obscenity-strewn banter among the Mafia’s blood-oath “made members,” associates and scores of wanna-bes around Los Angeles, Boston and Las Vegas.

But these mobsters are not the cool, efficient villains of “The Godfather.” Champagne Lepore is no Michael Corleone. The tapes show mob guys beset by laziness and phobias, bumbling to complete simple drug deals, still relying on small scams and crude strong-arm tactics for their best paydays and--despite well-founded paranoia that their every move is being watched--falling easy prey to authorities who continue to view them as a special prize.

Yet, like Linda Carol, the Patriarca boys got to live their dream in Hollywood. For a while.

They played pool with James Caan--Sonny Corleone himself!--smoked cigars with Robert Davi (“The Gangster Chronicles,” “License to Kill”) and shared plates of calamari with other big-screen tough guys at hangouts (since closed) such as Splash in Malibu and Ciro’s Pizza Pomodoro, across from the Beverly Center. They negotiated profit shares with producers at Cafe Roma in Beverly Hills and, when they believed they were crossed, plotted their own type of meeting--in an alley.

In the end, they were totally seduced by a community that continues to spin out glorified versions of their criminal society. While Franchi’s tapes might show their day-to-day lives to be a succession of parochial struggles, in Hollywood they partied with their celluloid counterparts, the very actors who portrayed their grizzled types in such films as “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas,” until the blurring of art and reality astounded them all, even cautious Tommy Hillary. After another wild night of elbow-rubbing, he declared, “This is f---ing crazy!”

Why, their foray west even had the perfect Hollywood subplot. The one that begins, “Boy meets girl.”

LINDA CAROL WAS DISTRACTED, AT FIRST, BY THE NOVELTIES OF the coast--the beach scene, the surfer boys, the would-be sugar daddies promising a new blonde a leg up. She loafed, went broke, tried working as a maid. And whenever she was in a jam, she called Lepore. He’d send money and advice: “Keep trying.” Finally, she realized how it was done--you waitress, room with other “aspirings” in low-rent dives, take acting classes and make the rounds of agents. Within a year, she had the lead in a movie.

“Reform School Girls” came out in the summer of 1986. The Times’ review described her character as a “virtuous, beautiful lass” who winds up in the can when her boyfriend drags her along on a heist. Her enemies inside are a 250-pound head matron who torches a girl’s stuffed rabbit and a biker babe who tries to brand the young pretties in the dorm. There’s a lingering shower scene.

Lepore was not impressed. He visited soon after the movie came out, meeting her at Gorky’s restaurant in downtown Los Angeles. Over borscht and caviar, “He said he would get me something that was worthy of me doing,” Carol recalls.

Lepore introduced her to a hulking actor, Jack O’Halloran, a former Boston-based heavyweight boxer who’d gone on to become a film heavy--he was one of the three Krypton bad guys who tried to kill “Superman.” O’Halloran, who says he knew Lepore as a guy who’d hung around the gym, thought him naive to tell “his little Kewpie doll . . . he could make things happen for her.” And even Linda, novice though she was, sensed that Lepore might be in over his head here. How could he believe some character actor had clout in this town?

Getting the part in “Reform School Girls” had made her bolder. She began asking Lepore about himself and where they stood. He hemmed and hawed. Then she was leafing through his latest nutrition book, and out fell a photo that showed two females who looked very much like a wife and daughter.

She walked out and changed her phone number. Boy loses girl.

Were it not for a chance encounter, there never would have been a record of Lepore’s attempts to find Linda Carol over the next two years. The FBI would not have discovered one of its most successful Mafia moles ever. And the Dramex sting would not have snared its showpiece trio.

But soon after Lepore returned to Boston, he stumbled upon a 60-ish woman shopping in the North End, the mother of Ralph Franchi, who’d fled the area in 1979, owing Lepore money. As Franchi later described the incident to a grand jury, Lepore told his mother, “I should go back and take care of what I owed.”

Franchi says he immediately phoned Lepore, furious, wanting “to get my mother out of the way.” But the tone of the conversation changed when Lepore learned where he was living now--near Los Angeles. Lepore was intrigued. “He said he had some friends down here,” Franchi relates, “and that he would be coming out. He said that this was a wide-open town and that with his connections, good things could happen.”

Good things? Did Lepore have any idea how much Franchi hated him?

To Franchi, Lepore was the symbol of the humiliation he endured growing up around the North End’s legitimate guys. Yearning to belong, Franchi by 16 was a gofer at Caffe Pompeii, a coffee shop-pool hall, bringing the men drinks and picking up bets. He also began wagering himself--and borrowing money from Lepore. The first time they met, Franchi says, Lepore threw a glass of cappuccino in his face, complaining it was cold, then later stuck a knife up his nose, for fun.

But Franchi saw the debt to Lepore as a sign that he “was being accepted” by the tough guys. He even began working for Lepore, rounding up Italian immigrants looking to borrow a few bucks or find a prostitute. When he couldn’t control his own gambling, however, his debt rose. Two collectors tracked him down. “I’m driving through east Boston--boom!--two shots right through the windshield,” he told a Boston mobster on one of the tapes.

The bullets missed. And that’s when Franchi headed west--and kept going until he reached ocean. He opened a restaurant in Hermosa Beach, sold pasta machines, started a family.

Now, eight years later, with a phone call, the memories came rushing back. Here was Champagne Lepore--”that narcissistic, egotistical maniac”--announcing that he, too, was looking west and assuming, amazingly, that Franchi would help him.

Franchi told him, “Sure.” Then he called the FBI. “It was either that,” he says, “or I was thinking of killing the guy.”

A shade under six feet, Franchi was pushing 250 pounds, with a 20-inch neck. With his curly black hair and full beard, he looked like a mountain man--or an enforcer. Still, the FBI didn’t know what to make of him. He wasn’t like prominent mob defectors, such as Sammy (the Bull) Gravano, top aide to John Gotti, New York’s reigning boss. Men like that made deals to get leniency from criminal charges or protection from rivals.

Franchi had only flitted around the fringes of the underworld. All he could promise was what he could dig up on the inside. But law enforcement officials in Los Angeles have long been alert to any hint of a Mafia incursion, priding themselves on keeping such characters out of town. Decades ago, the LAPD set up a special unit at the airport to greet mob figures as they arrived, then send them packing. Whereas New York and Chicago have hundreds of “made members,” not many more than a dozen are generally floating around Los Angeles, whose homebred hoods, meanwhile, are dubbed the “Mickey Mouse Mafia.”

Franchi started taping in 1988. He wasn’t “wired” but simply carried a small Panasonic in his pocket, hidden in a wad of bills. While waiting for Lepore to make his move, he flashed the roll at joints where L.A.’s mob guys met, lining up drug deals, proving himself to the feds. “I can get coke,” he announced at Ciro’s Pizza Pomodoro. “What else? I can get . . . credit cards, uh, antiques. . . . Can you move antiques? I might have some beautiful ivory statues. . . .”

The agents gave Franchi’s early tapes a close listen in their Wilshire Boulevard office tower, and soon they were paying him $5,000 a month, plus expenses, to keep going.

OCT. 5, 1988. THE GLENDALE GALLERIA.

Lepore: “Lemme explain this, Ralph. California and Las Vegas are known with the, the transients. Witness relocation people come here and Vegas more than anywhere.”

Franchi: “You mean informants . . . against the wiseguys?”

Lepore: “California’s so big, and they blend in. . . . It sucks, everyone’s a transient. That’s why people f--- each other here all the time.”

A person could get lost here, too. One of the first things Lepore asked Franchi to do was find Linda Carol. Franchi tried the Screen Actors Guild, but it wouldn’t release performers’ phone numbers, only names of their agents. Problem was, the star of “Reform School Girls” didn’t have one, a clerk said.

Franchi vowed to keep trying, but with Lepore visiting, there was other business to attend to. They had gone to the mall so Champagne could show him how to dilute cocaine with various white powders--from a natural-foods store. But drug deals were small potatoes; everyone knew the real scores out here were in deals “with producers and everything,” as Lepore’s buddy Tommy Hillary put it when he, too, came to visit.

Hillary, who is half Italian, occupied a unique position in the New England mob. After his father died, he’d been taken in by Raymond L. S. Patriarca, a bookie who rose to form one of the most powerful crime families in America. Mob informer Vinnie Teresa claimed that when the CIA sought organized crime help in a plot to kill Fidel Castro in 1960, Patriarca negotiated the contract. Colleagues said Hillary became a second son to him, like the Robert Duvall character to Marlon Brando in “The Godfather.” Even after Patriarca died in 1984, Hillary remained close to the don’s real son, Raymond J. (Junior) Patriarca, who had taken over the family’s interests in New England.

Now Hillary was scouting new turf. He stopped first in Palm Springs to play golf, then cruised over to L.A., where Franchi volunteered to squire him about, hitting the hot spots. Hillary loved the scene, showing off his clothes (“Looked like Johnny Gotti!” he complimented himself) and--best of all--stargazing.

Any facsimile of celebrity excited him. Jay Leno’s head shot on a restaurant wall. Or a glimpse of the actor who played “Huggy Bear” on the old “Starsky & Hutch” TV series--so what if the guy was a stool pigeon on the show? Hillary approached actor Antonio Fargas at a Monday amateur night at Ciro’s and, learning that “Huggy” had a home in Rhode Island, suggested they get together back there, maybe “meet Junior.”

“I guess they had an air of who they are,” Fargas recalls. “They didn’t come out and say, ‘I’m the Mafia,’ but you have to be a little naive not to know.” As an actor, he notes, “these things are of research quality to me.”

Research wasn’t on the mind of another actor, anxiously awaiting his pay from “Godfather III.” Franchi told Hillary how the actor asked, “Do you know where I can borrow $3,000?” One of the local mob boys came up with some cash, Franchi added, and was “gonna charge him big every week.”

Hillary was in ecstasy. “If I make some money, I’m buying this joint,” he told Franchi at Ciro’s. “Would this be a good office or what?”

But making money was no piece of cake for the Patriarca boys. Like many mob guys, Hillary hatched more plots than profits. He did his laundry in coin machines while staying at a Glendale hotel. “Another robbery,” he snapped. “For a regular cycle, it’s a dollar. You gotta go three cycles.”

Hillary was confident, however, that the cash-flashing Franchi could help turn their fortunes. What clinched it was how Franchi met all these movie people, even James Caan, the hot-tempered Corleone son in “The Godfather.”

Caan was the latest in a long line of actors--from George Raft on down--who mixed screen roles with a real-life fascination with mob figures. It was research at first, Caan’s lawyer once said, but two decades after “The Godfather,” the actor claimed as his best friend (“I love ‘im”) one of Franchi’s main targets in Los Angeles, restaurateur Ronald A. Lorenzo.

Caan said they met in New York in the mid-’70s, on a set. Lorenzo knew the caterer. In 1982, Lorenzo moved to California and later opened Splash at the foot of Malibu’s Point Dume. Bald on top, his hair on the sides neatly trimmed, he resembled an accountant as he greeted diners. But the chase began in 1987, when Los Angeles authorities decided he was--as a prosecutor once put it in court--a “made member of . . . one of the five traditional Mafia families in New York.”

Franchi worked for two years to gain Lorenzo’s trust, getting him a case of “hot” Dom Perignon, cheap, and commiserating about the unmarked police cars outside Splash. “You know what it is out here?” Franchi said. “They got nobody to pick on.” Finally, with the restaurant about to close, Lorenzo agreed to do drug deals with him.

Lorenzo also took Franchi by Caan’s Bel-Air home for a game of pool. In a dizzying blur of art and reality, Caan teased them, “I wish you guys did play for money.” Franchi remembered seeing Caan in “The Gambler,” playing a man so in debt to bookies he bet all he had left--his life. The film came out in 1974, when Franchi was getting in hock to Lepore.

Franchi: “Took my girl to see you.”

Lorenzo: “Yeah, Jimmy stretched for that role.”

Franchi: “She left me.”

Caan: “Haaa.”

Franchi: “She said, ‘You are going to end up like him.’ ”

As he heard of Franchi’s escapades, Hillary was envious. Of course, he was starting to meet show-biz folk himself, Huggy and all. “I’m moving pretty good,” he told Franchi.

“For a virgin in town,” Franchi responded.

CHANGES IN THE PATRIARCA CLAN BROUGHT THE LAST OF THE mob trio into the picture. With a racketeering investigation looming over the New England leadership, including Junior Patriarca, control passed to “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, who’d been safely distanced from that case: He’d been in prison for bombing a lawyer’s car--with the lawyer in it.

Salemme relished the idea of his son getting away from a brewing gang war in New England. Why not Hollywood? Though both Salemmes thought Lepore a loose cannon, they, too, accepted an offer from his friend Franchi to show them around.

Salemme Jr. took the fascination with film to new levels. A bit cocky--casting agents would call him a tall Bruce Willis type--he tromped about town and soon talked about enrolling in film school, inspired by a list of acquaintances that by now included another “Godfather” actor, a featured player from “Goodfellas” and a James Bond villain.

The last, Robert Davi, was worried that he was being repeatedly cast as gangsters, terrorists and drug lords. Davi was anxious to establish himself as a romantic leading man through a script about a loan shark’s quirky love affair, “The Shark.” The Hemdale Film Corp. (“Platoon,” “Hoosiers”) was going to make it until the firm fell into financial problems.

Davi, a regular at Cafe Roma, said he met Salemme Jr. there and thought him “a working-class guy . . . who wanted to better himself” and who claimed to know investors. Davi put him in touch with the film’s producer, Vera Anderson.

Salemme Jr. loved “The Shark.” He was going to raise $2.5 million through “people who worked with his father,” Anderson recalls, and was to get credit as executive producer. Through the negotiations, Salemme Jr. was a perfect gentleman, Anderson says, anxious “to learn the process.”

But alone with his buddies, Salemme Jr. soon was seething. According to the tapes, he believed that Davi had falsely claimed to have a commitment from Danny Aiello to act in the film. Salemme Jr. made a series of calls to set up a showdown near Cafe Roma, even consulting local mob guy Lorenzo for advice in dealing with the movie people.

“I don’t wanna get into that f---ing pissing contest, who’s the toughest guy on the block,” he told Franchi. “But if he’s guilty, I’m gonna have a beef.”

The plan? “We all wait in, in that back alley there. . . . I’ll f--- him. . . . You know?”

After he was read Salemme Jr.’s comments recently, Davi called them “amazing.” Davi says he never promised to deliver Oscar-nominee Aiello--and that the back-alley showdown never materialized. Davi had no idea what Salemme Jr. was planning behind his back. “He didn’t seem like a tough guy at all,” the actor says.

But on the tapes, the mob boss’ son was ranting about how he was going to confront Davi: “I’m gonna say to him, ‘Who the f--- do you think you are? You know, 007?’ ”

THE DRAMEX STING HAD ITS roots back in 1985, when one of L.A.’s Mickey Mouse mobsters was overheard boasting that he could save films money by getting local Teamsters to waive requirements that they use expensive union workers. FBI agent Garland Schweickhardt posed as an investment counselor for wealthy clients looking to make a movie with non-union labor and bribed the mob guy and a Teamsters friend. But after they were arrested, an investigation found their Teamsters local didn’t actually work on films--its members trucked fruits and vegetables. It was all a con.

Richard A. Stavin, a former federal prosecutor on the case, recalls thinking they should have “pulled the plug” on the sting right then. He believed real film union bosses would be far too sophisticated to fall for such a crude bribery scheme. But the FBI wasn’t convinced. Schweickhardt was enrolled in UCLA Extension film courses. The goal, Stavin says, was to do the ruse better--much better--”if the opportunity arose again.”

The bait was dangled on March 27, 1989. Franchi called Hillary and said he’d met some producers who wanted to film in New England, of all places. They asked if he knew “people up there.”

Hillary: “. . . They wanna be connected . . . They don’t want no problems with the Teamsters and all that shit.”

Franchi: “Yeah.”

Hillary: “. . . I’ll come in with the good suits, don’t worry about that.”

Franchi’s “producer” friend used the name David Rudder. He was 6-foot-4 and balding. The mob guys called him “Goofy” behind his back.

Lepore and Hillary met Rudder on June 20, 1989, in Boston. They took him yachting in the harbor, everyone getting drunk on champagne. “What a score!” Lepore said.

But then, panic. On June 23, they met again, at the Marriott in Cambridge, this time to negotiate the bribes required to get New England’s largest Teamsters local to allow Rudder to film without union workers. That’s when Hillary noticed Rudder peering across a courtyard--at a parked van. Hillary was still ballistic the next day, when he called Franchi to recount the disaster:

Hillary: “A white van . . . I’ve had these f---ing things on me for years. . . .”

Franchi: “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Hillary: “. . .It had the long black window in the side. . . . You understand?”

Franchi: “But I wonder. . . . “

Hillary: “No, let me finish. . . . I look at the van again, (see) the guy in there. . . . I see like a reflection of a metal thing . . . like the sun hit it.”

Franchi: “Jesus!”

Hillary: “. . . I look and see the guy clicking as I’m walking. . . . He’s got the camera in his hand to his f---ing eye, and he’s clicking.”

Franchi: “ Jesus !”

Hillary: “. . . I grabbed (Rudder). I said, ‘You wired, you motherf---er?’ And I start shaking him. . . .”

Franchi: “. . . I f---ing schooled this guy. . . .”

Hillary: “They were clicking like . . . like I was f---ing Johnny Gotti.”

It was the pivotal moment of the sting. If the Patriarca boys backed out right then, there would have been no case. They hadn’t taken a penny yet.

But they decided to go on. Franchi helped with a little bluster, pledging to “fry” Rudder if he was a setup. It wasn’t necessary, though. The guys simply decided that the surveillance was the usual hassle they faced--and that Rudder was legit.

The FBI had spent a great deal making sure he looked legit. Dramex investigators paid $25,000 for a script, “Love at Second Bite,” hired a production consultant from New York, set up a field office in Providence and opened a David Rudder Productions headquarters in Santa Monica. The place was so convincing that unwitting actors and writers sent in resumes. The walls were covered with film posters and a head shot of George Hamilton, the tanned, amiable vampire in “Love at First Bite.” The conference room had space for a dozen movie moguls, and Rudder’s private office was littered with scripts. The camera was hidden in the ceiling.

It captured Lepore getting the first $5,000 on Aug. 23, 1989, Franchi at his side. It caught Salemme Jr. taking another $5,000, boasting that his father’s influence was essential, “so we never have a problem again.”

The Patriarca trio raked in the bribes through June, 1990, $65,000 in all. Unlike the earlier Dramex targets, they apparently produced for their money, getting Rudder the concessions he wanted from two officials of Charlestown, Mass.-based Teamsters Local 25--which was responsible for movie projects around the area.

“Love at Second Bite” didn’t get made. “We were actually prepared to produce a movie, a low-budget film, if necessary,” supervising agent Patrick Marshall says. But it wasn’t necessary. The evidence was in the can.

Lepore, Salemme and Hillary were told that Rudder’s investors had backed out. They accepted the explanation, deciding Rudder was pulling a con all along, separating his clients from their money. They didn’t seem to mind. Hillary had his cash. Salemme was working on his own film project. And Lepore--well, Rudder did produce for him.

FRANCHI HAD NEVER BEEN ABLE TO locate Linda Carol. When he called the Screen Actors Guild, she’d been in Italy, filming. She didn’t have an agent because she was seeking a new one, hoping to step up from B movies. Waitressing was getting old; so were auditions where guys mostly wanted to see her bod. Her last film was “Carnal Crimes”--playing a killer’s girlfriend who doesn’t know he’s a killer.

After Lepore appealed to Rudder for help, the FBI had no trouble finding Linda Carol--just another way to demonstrate the “producer’s” clout. The feds have a name for innocents brought in to investigations: “props.”

“Somebody called me. I don’t know who,” she recalls. “They said they were a friend of Dennis, and ‘He was looking for you.’ Dennis was having dinner with a producer.”

She met them at L’Ermitage, one of the poshest French restaurants in town. She was wearing a slinky Italian cocktail dress. Seated across from her was the bear-like Franchi, playing the big-spending mobster. To her left sat Rudder, the FBI agent playing a producer. To her right sat Lepore, playing a classy Pacino.

Before she arrived, she told herself she was going for her career, that an actress should never turn down a meeting with a producer. Once she was there, though, she realized she’d come because of Lepore. She’d never really known him, sure. But some part of her hoped they could be alone. That, just once more, he’d tell her she was special. And that just once more, he’d raise a glass in what had become his favorite toast, “Cheers to my lady.”

But with three men at the table, the talk was mostly business. The movie business. “I had a very fine dinner,” she says. “I hadn’t had a dinner like that in many years--and I haven’t had one since.”

Rudder picked up the tab. It included $500 for a bottle of champagne.

This was a little rich even for the FBI’s Dramex budget. The next time Rudder took Lepore to dinner, it was at Bob’s Big Boy.

DENNIS LEPORE PROMISED TO keep in touch after the dinner. But all Linda Carol got was a frantic call, saying he believed the feds were on his tail. Then she heard no more.

The FBI let Franchi mix with mob guys through 1991. Then he, too, vanished, to brace himself for a lifetime on the run--the only way to survive, he knew, once his deception was revealed. He realized the rest of his life would be “doing time on the outside.”

The indictments started coming down last spring. In Los Angeles, there were at least nine for drug trafficking--with 21 defendants--and another charging five men with a series of holdups and kidnapings. Before Lorenzo was convicted on a drug count in October, Caan offered his home as collateral for the restaurateur’s $2-million bail. “He is my best friend,” the actor told The Times.

But the 11-count Dramex indictment, filed in federal court in Boston, was the showpiece of Franchi’s extraordinary stint as a Mafia mole. Payments to him alone--with expenses--reached $500,000. The cost of the sting stretched into the millions.

Was it worth it? The answer may depend on Hillary. When the FBI finally tracked him down, he was in Florida--another good golfing spot. He reportedly told agents to pass a message to Franchi: “You did a good job.” Then he agreed to be a witness for the prosecution--and to provide information that may yet produce cases against the heads of the Patriarca clan. But, as of now, the sting snared just the three yuppie hoods--described in the indictment as “members and associates of La Cosa Nostra”--and two Teamsters.

Salemme Jr., free pending trial, never got to make “The Shark.” His attorney plans to argue entrapment: “There is not enough crime in the U.S., so they’re creating it to bust people,” he says.

Lepore is in custody awaiting the trial. Last April, he was sentenced to 14 years in a separate case, for trying to extort $500,000 from a 92-year-old Boston bookie. He was taped in that one, too. Lepore told the judge that he should get a reward for pleading guilty. Perhaps a “fine Burgundy.”

Linda Carol didn’t know what had happened to him until she was contacted by a reporter, who got her name from the tape transcripts. Reluctant at first to reopen her past, she plunged in over a period of weeks. She says she had no idea Lepore was Mafia. “When you say Mafia, what do you mean?” she asks. “He wasn’t like Don Corleone?”

In December, she wrote him in prison to say she was thinking of him. When he got the letter, he phoned. “He said it was the greatest Christmas present he ever had,” she says.

They speak regularly now. She says he still dishes out advice--about her career, health, etc.--but is more open, talking about his daughter, for instance. And, oh, he’s divorced.

Boy gets girl?

Well, she isn’t going that far yet. But she’s decided to be a good friend, at least, while Dennis endures all those years without Taittinger pink. She does have one other thought about the story that was ending pretty close to how Hollywood would have devised it.

“Maybe they’ll make a movie about it,” she says, “and give me a part.”

The Stars:

* The Actress: Linda Carol met Dennis Lepore in Boston; he bought her a ticket to Los Angeles so she could be a movie star.

* The Gangster: Dennis (Champagne) Lepore, a “soldier” in the New England Mafia, pursued crime, and Linda Carol, in L.A.

* The Mole: Robert (Ralph) Franchi hated Lepore; he volunteered his services to the FBI when Champagne headed West.

Supporting Players:

* Thomas L. Hillary. Like a second son to the head of the New England mob, Hillary came to L.A. to scout new turf. He loved the scene.

* Frank P. Salemme Jr. Son of a Boston don, he was a bit cocky--sort of a tall Bruce Willis. He talked about enrolling in film school.

* Ronald A. Lorenzo: A mob-connected restaurateur, he introduced Franchi to James Caan--Sonny Corleone himself!

Cameo Appearances:

* James Caan. Lorenzo’s pal, the latest in a long line of actors who mixed screen roles with a real-life infatuation with mob figures.

* Robert Davi. Salemme Jr. was to bankroll a film that could change his image--but later threatened to confront him in a dark alley.

* Jack O’Halloran. A Boston heavyweight boxer who’d become a film heavy, he was asked by Lepore to help Linda Carol’s career.