Mob Daughter: The Mafia, Sammy The Bull Gravano, and Me!

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to acknowledge my special friends and family who have been in my corner and believed in me through all my ups and downs.

  David, thanks for being a great father to our beautiful daughter Karina and for always being there when it counts.

  Karina and Nicholas: you are the loves of my life. I am so proud of both of you.

  Dad, Mom, and Gerard: you are my foundation and support team. Throughout everything we’ve been through in life we have always remained ONE. I am so proud to call each one of you family. I love you all.

  To everyone from the offices to the field that works so hard every day to create Mob Wives, thanks for putting up with us.

  To all the people that watch and support Mob Wives, you make the show worth doing. And to the people who have taken the time to reach out to me personally, trust me, your support is very much appreciated. And a special thanks to everyone who helped this book come to life. Lisa, our hard work is complete. xoxo

  CONTENTS

  Photograph of Karen and Gerard Gravano

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  “God don’t like that, Nick.”

  I could feel my stomach tightening as I steered the rental car toward the sprawling complex of dreary cement-block buildings. The prison where my father was being housed looked even more ominous than I imagined, isolated at the end of a narrow dirt road, sixty miles from the nearest town and surrounded by mountains and twelve-foot razor-wire fencing. My father had just been moved to this location after spending two years in solitary confinement at an undisclosed federal prison and five more at ADX outside Florence, Colorado. ADX, also known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, is an all-male “supermax” prison that houses some of the country’s most dangerous criminals, high-ranking mobsters, terrorists, and serial murderers.

  It had been years since I’d last seen my dad, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, in person. Our previous visit hadn’t gone well. We’d spent much of the time arguing. I was very strong-minded, just like my father, and we didn’t always see eye to eye. I was hoping this wasn’t going to be a repeat performance, especially since I had my mother, nine-year-old daughter, Karina, and ten-year-old nephew, Nicholas, along.

  When my father was incarcerated at ADX, it had been hard communicating with him by phone. He’d been in solitary confinement for seven long years and had been allowed to make only one fifteen-minute call a month. If I was not home to answer, he would have to wait another month to try again. On the rare occasions that we did connect, he was frustrated and angry. For five years, he’d been on twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown, and other than his monthly phone call to the family, had been permitted no contact with the outside world. He showered and ate all of his meals in his four-by-six-foot cell, located in a wing where the lights were kept on twenty-four hours a day. Every cell had a surveillance camera in it.

  The only person to have visited him at ADX Florence was my mother. She told me that he had been transported to the visiting area in a cage with wheels just like Hannibal Lecter in the movie The Silence of the Lambs. They’d been holding him in a special unit for high-profile inmates. There could be no physical contact, not even handholding. She had to talk to him through the bullet-proof poleax glass. They wouldn’t even remove his shackles during her visit.

  The years of lockdown and lack of socialization had taken their toll. Once while at ADX he called me and started telling me about the bugs that visited him in his cell in the evenings, which freaked me out. He joked that they were his “friends.” He’d even named them because he was so bored. I had nightmares for months. He didn’t want anyone to visit him and said to stay in touch by mail.

  My father had finally gotten out of solitary confinement, and was sounding a lot less angry and more like the man I remembered from my childhood. He had felt useless to his family in solitary, and that had been frustrating him. Talking to him on the phone had been bringing back memories of happier times and I’d started missing him. My father was not well, and I didn’t know how much longer he’d be around. He was diagnosed with Graves’ disease while in prison, a chronic thyroid condition affecting the immune system. I was concerned the illness was taking its toll. I was troubled by the poor medical attention he had been receiving and the fact that he had not been able to work out in a physical way as he once had done.

  Because of his “high-profile” status as a Mafia boss, he was being held at a maximum-security federal facility at an undisclosed location. We’d flown there from Arizona the previous night and stayed at a hotel near the airport because there were no accommodations closer to the facility.

  The sun was just coming up over the mountains when I roused the kids, got them ready, and hurried them into the car. Visiting hours started promptly at eight A.M., and I knew my father would be waiting. I was excited to see him but also worried about the kids. They didn’t see anything different about going to visit their grandfather in a penitentiary. They’d been to prisons before. My brother, Gerard, was in prison and so was my daughter’s father, so they were used to visiting people in jail and spending a day. But this visit would be different.

  The facility where my father was being held now was also a maximum-security prison with extremely stringent rules about contact with the outside world. The rules said that once Nicholas, Karina, my mother, and I entered, we had to stay inside for a full eight hours. A guard would sit within twenty feet of our table to monitor our conversations. And there wouldn’t be much for the kids to do. At the other prisons, they knew there would be TV, card games, and lots of other kids to hang out with. Visiting areas were typically large and could have up to forty inmates receiving visitors at the same time. We’d been told there’d be just one other inmate getting a visit that weekend.

  The mood in the car was light. My mother was in the passenger seat, and the kids were playing cards in the back. It was a warm summer day, and for much of the ride I was enjoying the scenery out the driver’s side window. One of the things I missed since living in southern Arizona was the greenery and the foliage. When I was a kid growing up in New York, I used to love to play hide-and-seek among the trees in our backyard in Staten Island. It had been almost ten years since I’d left the East Coast, and still I missed it.

  We’d been driving for nearly an hour when the piñon pines began to thin, and so did the road, which changed from four lanes to two and from asphalt to dirt. The rocky mixture beneath my tires aggravated my already nervous stomach. I could sense that my daughter’s temperament was changing. As the car got closer to the first of the fences surrounding the facility, she suddenly grew quiet and seemed to tense up.

  “Mom, is this a bad place for really bad people?” she asked, looking nervously out at the cement watchtowers manned by heavily armed guards. “Worse than the place where my dad and Uncle Gerard are? Because there’s a man with a gun up there.”

&nb
sp; “Why is Papa Bull in a bigger prison than my father?” Nicholas questioned. “Why is it a bigger deal to visit him?”

  “Your grandfather is considered a higher profile and more dangerous criminal because he was a gangster, and he was famous,” I told them.

  The kids fell silent and my mother didn’t say a word.

  The uniformed guard in the booth directed me to a parking area and told me to wait in the car until somebody came to get us. That’s when I started to get real excited. I hadn’t seen my father in a long time. I held such good memories of him from my childhood. He’d been such an important person in shaping me and who I am. We’d had our differences over the years, but at thirty-seven, I’d finally arrived at a place where I could move past the anger and accept and love him for who he was. I wanted the kids to know him and I wanted my dad to see how they’d grown up.

  We waited only a few minutes before one of the prison guards came out to the car to take us inside. We filled out some paperwork and had to go through a metal detector and be searched for contraband.

  “Your father’s really excited about the visit,” one of the guards told me. “You know your father’s a good guy.”

  “He’s crazy,” I said, smiling.

  “Oh, he’s definitely crazy, but he’s a good guy.”

  I glanced toward the kids and noticed that they seemed to lighten up a bit after hearing what the guard had to say about their grandfather. Squinting against the bright sunlight outside, I hurried them out of the visitor center and through a second gate that led deeper into the prison facility. All the buildings were low-slung and looked like army barracks. There were no windows on any of the structures.

  The building we entered was smaller than the rest. It had drab cement-block walls and looked like the inside of a cell. I could see my father standing at the end of the hallway with a guard at his side. He was dressed in the standard prison garb, brown pants, a black belt, black shoes, and a tan long-sleeve button-down shirt. He almost looked like he was in the army, but in a tan uniform instead of a green one.

  Even at a distance, he looked frighteningly sick. Because of his Graves’ disease he’d lost all of his body hair. Even his eyelashes had fallen off. He was completely bald. His skin was gray and because of the lengthy confinement, he wound up with vitamin deficiencies from lack of sunlight.

  My dad was only sixty-five years old, but he looked eighty. His skin was sallow and his cheeks were sunken. As we got closer, I realized he didn’t have any teeth. He’d gotten veneers, a thin layer of enamel put on the fronts of his teeth to make his smile whiter, back in the day when he was running with John Gotti. He was in the process of changing them out when he went to prison. While in prison, his teeth had given him nothing but trouble and he eventually ended up directing the jailhouse dentist to remove most of them. I knew he didn’t have them, but I thought he’d be wearing his dentures. He hated the false teeth and used to joke that he felt like he had a piano stuck in his mouth when he had them in.

  I felt like crying but I didn’t want to freak out the kids, so I ran over and hugged him. “It’s good to see you, Daddy,” I whispered, as tears fell from my eyes. Stepping back, I saw that both kids were staring at him. I realized they had no idea what to expect. They hadn’t seen their grandfather in seven years. And all I had to show them were old family photos. Because Nicholas idolized his grandfather, he’d downloaded an old picture of him from the Internet onto his cell phone. But the gaunt, bald, toothless man now standing before him looked nothing like that photo.

  Trying to break the tension, my father joked, “Your grandfather looks like Elmer Fudd.”

  The kids didn’t know who Elmer Fudd was, but I laughed.

  Nicholas seemed okay with his grandfather, but Karina looked frightened. Technically, the inmates are only allowed a brief kiss or hug. But the guard kept looking away, and my father snuck in a couple of extra kisses and playfully tugged at my daughter’s hair. Soon, he had her smiling.

  The guard led us to a small windowless room. There was a television and two vending machines that dispensed snacks and soft drinks because we weren’t allowed to bring in any food. “I got you guys something,” my father said excitedly. He’d saved all his commissary money to buy the kids chips and sodas from the machines.

  My father spent the morning catching up with the kids and the details of their lives. One of the guards found us a game of Uno, and we sat around on plastic chairs talking and playing the game. It felt almost like when I was a kid and we were back at the farm in New Jersey where we had spent our summers. We’d sit around the dining room table eating chips and playing checkers and cards. My father is very competitive, and he’d let us stay up late as long as we played cards with him. He was like a different person. It was the one place where he could relax and be himself.

  At the farm, there was never a sense of mob activity. It was laid-back and fun. He’d laugh and joke. I never felt the stress that I could feel when we were back in Staten Island. There, my father was always busy and rarely had time to play. Some nights, I’d find him sitting alone in the kitchen with all the lights turned off. I wouldn’t ask him what was wrong. I would come in and make a joke. As soon I started to talk, he’d act normal, like nothing was bothering him. But I could always tell. He’d get real quiet and stare off distractedly.

  Knowing now what he was going through, I can almost go back in my mind and pinpoint certain events, like the time his best friend Joe “Stymie” D’Angelo was shot dead in a bar/restaurant that Stymie and my father had bought together. That night, I found him in the kitchen, thinking.

  “Do you miss Stymie?” I asked.

  “I will always miss Stymie,” he said, choking up. It was the only time I ever saw him this upset.

  My father is a very dangerous man. He has the ability to kill someone at the drop of a dime. He doesn’t belittle people. But if he feels he is being taken advantage of or someone is backing him into a corner, watch out. I didn’t know it then, but he was up plotting a murder that night. He was thirsty for revenge and trying to figure out how he was going to execute Stymie’s killer, a member of the Colombo crime family who had harassed the female bartender at the restaurant. Looking back, I can recall a number of nights finding my father in the kitchen after midnight.

  * * *

  Thank you guys for being so good,” I told the kids during the ride back to the hotel that night. Before dinner, we all went for a swim in the pool. “How do you guys feel about the visit?” I asked, as they splashed around in the deep end.

  “Aunt Karen, can I ask you a question?” Nicholas said. “Did Grandpa ever kill anyone?”

  Oh my God. We still had another day to go, and I didn’t want the kids to be scared of their grandfather. But I didn’t want to lie to them.

  “Yes, he did,” I said matter-of-factly. “It’s part of being in the Mafia.”

  Nicholas persisted. “What’s the Mafia?”

  I tried to explain as best I could. “What I knew as a kid growing up was that it was a group of Italian men who came to America. It was hard for them to get jobs and stuff, so they came together and formed a secret organization to take care of each other, like a family did. It may have involved stealing and robbing.”

  “Why did they kill people, then?”

  I didn’t know how to respond. “Why don’t you ask Papa Bull when we see him tomorrow?”

  “I don’t want him to be mad at me.”

  That night, I thought about Nicholas and his questions. He reminded me of myself at his age. He was intrigued for different reasons than my daughter. He was trying to make the connections, as I once had.

  “Well, what did the kids say?” my father whispered when I hugged him hello the following morning.

  “They had a good visit,” I smiled.

  Glancing over at my nephew, my father said, “So you think your papa’s crazy?”

  “No, you’re good,” Nicholas said, shaking my father’s hand.

  “Da
d, Nick has some questions he wants to ask you.”

  Nicholas crossed his arms in front of him. “No,” he murmured.

  “What? What is it, Nick?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Dad, he wants to know what a gangster is. And about the Mafia.” I watched my father’s face for a reaction but saw none. Taking my nephew by the arm, he led him to one of the plastic chairs along the wall.

  “Nick,” my father began. “There are certain things that I might not answer, but I’m going to try and guide you.”

  I couldn’t believe it. That’s just what he’d said to me some twenty-seven years earlier in the kitchen of our Staten Island home. My father laid out what the Mafia was all about, in terms expressly chosen for his grandchildren. “The Mafia started back in Italy. It was a group of men that got together and formed a brotherhood. They protected their villages and their families. These men built their new brotherhood on trust and loyalty. They would do what was needed to take care of one another and their families. They called this brotherhood Cosa Nostra, Italian for ‘our thing.’

  “When the Italians started to come to America, a lot of the old-time men worked hard, but they were immigrants and it was hard for them to get jobs, so they started to steal and rob and do whatever they needed to take care of their families.

  “As these men started to make money, they earned respect and a lot of the younger men wanted to be a part of the organization, which was now called the Mafia. I wanted to be a part of it, Nick,” my father explained.

  “I looked up to this brotherhood so much that I wanted to be just like them, even if it meant not always doing the right thing. I liked that it had rules, structure, and organization. To me, it was like being in the army and Cosa Nostra became my government.”

  My daughter didn’t say a word, she just listened.

  “Did you ever murder someone?” Nicholas asked in a soft voice.

  “I did, but God don’t like that, Nick. That’s why I’m in here. Looking back now, I realize I took the easy road. Everything that I ever did in life was because I wanted to give my family a better life. And because I made mistakes, I wound up here in prison. I live with what I did every day of my life. So make it all worth it for me. Make sure you never wind up here.”