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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  But the day Dad sent us to the farm early, things didn’t go according to the rule. First, he arrived unexpectedly. It was just before dinner when I heard the crunch of gravel on the driveway. Sprinting to the window, I saw Dad’s maroon Lincoln pulling up, and several other cars arriving behind his. My father had told us he wouldn’t be coming for several more days. And yet here he was. Not only that, he had “Stymie” with him in the car. Stymie was Joe D’Angelo, my father’s closest friend.

  Dad said he had met him on the “street.” The two men were so simpatico they even looked alike with their dark brown hair and short stocky builds, although at five feet eight inches tall Stymie had a good three inches on my father. They dressed the same, too, in similar sweat suits and sneakers. Stymie owned a bar in Brooklyn called Docks. Dad referred to him as his right-hand man.

  My father was in his white T-shirt and sweatpants when he stepped out of the car. Stymie was wearing a sweatshirt over his shirt. He didn’t have his wife with him, which was very unusual. When Dad’s friends came up, they always brought their families. Uncle Eddie and several other members of Dad’s work crew got out of the other vehicles. None of them had their wives and kids along.

  I ran around to the kitchen to say hello to my father. He was talking to my mother in a hushed voice. I saw her shaking her head.

  “Okay,” she whispered, before following my dad outside.

  That night, Mom served dinner out on the back porch, which was completely screened in. There was a low wall around the base of the porch supporting the screens. When I wanted to eavesdrop on my parents’ conversations I could hide behind it, out of view. I’d often use the spot to overhear discussions about requests of mine, like when I would ask my parents if we could go to Great Adventure Amusement Park. After I had asked, I’d disappear from the room and then sneak around back and listen from the outside to hear them weighing their decision.

  That evening, however, I sensed my father was not himself. His mood was scaring me. I could always tell when something was on his mind. He’d get quiet and stare off into space. I was sure something was wrong and was convinced it had to do with the gun and the murder outside his nightclub. I didn’t want to think that he might be involved.

  “Go help your mom clean up,” my father told me at the end of dinner. I cleared the table, and then asked my father if he wanted to watch me ride Snowflake.

  “No, I’ll come out later,” he said. “I’m just talking to the boys.”

  Mom was in the kitchen when I snuck around to the outside of the porch and crawled into my hiding spot. My back was against the wall and I was sitting, “Indian-style,” listening. I’d never done that before, listening in on one of my father’s conversations with his friends. But I wanted to know what was going on.

  “Paul’s hot over this,” I heard one of the guy’s say. I knew they were probably talking about Paul Castellano. He was Dad’s boss in the construction business, or so I thought.

  “Well I had to do what I had to do,” I heard my father say. “Fuck Paul. If we have to go to war, that’s what we have to do.”

  War? What was my father talking about?

  I heard Uncle Eddie interrupt. “I told you we shouldn’t have done this.”

  “All right, Eddie, stop with your whining,” Dad snapped.

  Something was definitely wrong. My father could be in trouble. I was sure it had to do with what had happened the night I’d seen him with the revolver. I was starting to put the pieces together. After I had seen him with the gun, I found out that the guy who was buying his nightclub had been murdered, and now my father was saying that he “did what he had to do.” I started thinking of all the things I’d seen and heard over the years that hadn’t made sense, like the time when I was six and found the gun under his mattress and him being out late and hanging out with people who looked different from my friends’ fathers. I wanted to stay and listen some more, but I was worried about being seen. I was also feeling guilty about hearing stuff that was clearly not meant for me to hear. I crawled away and went back into the house through the front door.

  At that moment, my father walked back into the kitchen.

  “I thought you were going riding,” he said.

  “I’m not in the mood.” I could feel my father staring at me like he knew I had been listening.

  “Are you okay?” He was looking at me weird.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Let’s cut up some fruit and we’ll bring it out to the guys,” he smiled.

  I watched him at the kitchen counter, carefully slicing the skin from the watermelon. Following him out to the porch, I continued to study him, observing how he was interacting with the guys. My father was at ease, talking and enjoying his dessert. He seemed back to his normal self. I was confused. Maybe I was just misreading him.

  Later that evening, Dad and I walked out to the barn to turn out the lights. Snowflake was kicking at her stall, happy to see us. “You guys are going to go back to Staten Island for a couple of days,” he said.

  “Why, I thought we were going to stay up here for the whole summer?”

  “You are,” he smiled. “But you’re just gonna go back to Staten Island for a couple of days.”

  I was back to thinking that something wasn’t right. What I’d just overheard, the gun, the man who just got shot outside Dad’s nightclub.

  “Daddy, if you ever die, would we live up here on the farm?” I was beginning to feel a little frightened.

  My father stood still. Turning to look at me, he asked, “Why would you ask that?”

  “I don’t know. I just want to know if we’d live in Staten Island or come up to the farm to live.”

  “Well, I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about that ’cause you’re stuck with me for a long time.”

  I didn’t know there was a hit out on his life.

  * * *

  The next morning, Gerard and I came downstairs. We went out to the chicken coop to look for eggs for our breakfast. The hens laid brown eggs, which had taken me a while to get used to, but I grew to love them. We found two eggs, but broke one in the fight over who was carrying them. Mom said we’d have to use one from the refrigerator, but she wasn’t going to tell us who was getting which. Gerard and I loved our eggs sunny-side up, which we called “dunky” eggs because of the nice puddle of yolk to dunk our toast in.

  By the time we got the egg issue straightened out, Dad was at the breakfast table acting normal. I was looking at him, not sure what to think. The night before something was definitely wrong, but he always just made everything seem like it was okay. I was too scared to ask any questions. My mom seemed a little preoccupied. When we left for Staten Island, she told my father, “I love you,” then hugged him in a way that was different. Because he was so calm, I wasn’t as nervous as I might have been otherwise. We went to the barn to feed my horse and say good-bye. I found Dad still in the kitchen and kissed him goodbye. “I’ll see you guys soon,” he said. Mom had a big, white percolator pot going on the stove, and Dad’s friends were outside on the back porch drinking coffee.

  When we got back to Staten Island, a bunch of our friends were playing outside. Gerard and I jumped out of the car to join them, forgetting all about the disturbing situation back at the farm. I was so excited to see my friends. It was like nothing ever happened. Dad came back from Cream Ridge a couple of days later. I was so happy to see him, and I hugged him for an extra long time. I looked at him like nothing could ever happen to us, not with him to protect us. He seemed like his normal self again. He even called Gerard and me “kiddo.” After dinner, he told me that I needed to rub his head. One of our favorite routines when I wanted to stay up late was to rub his head, face, and shoulders. Normally, he pretended he had to bribe me to rub his head, pay me. But this time I did it willingly, I was just so happy to see him. I was just so relieved.

  I didn’t think about Frank Fiala at all. I was too young to grasp that murder was part of Dad’s job descrip
tion. I didn’t even know that Fiala’s murder was against the rules of the Mafia because it hadn’t been authorized by the boss, Paul Castellano. In that world, before you could commit murder, you had to make a case to the family capo. An unsanctioned murder usually cost you your life. Dad was in deep shit, but I didn’t know it. There was so much more I had yet to learn.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “They are bad people, but they are our bad people.”

  My father was a gangster even before I was born. My parents lived in Bensonhurst when I made my appearance in the maternity ward of St. John’s Catholic Hospital on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn on May 8, 1972. My parents, Debra Scibetta and Salvatore “Sammy” Gravano, couldn’t have been more proud. My mother was eighteen and my father was twenty-six. They were still newlyweds, married for just over a year.

  My mother’s twin sister, Diane, had introduced the two. Diane knew my father from the neighborhood. In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn’s Little Italy, everybody knew everybody. There were blocks and blocks of identical, detached two-story houses with little fenced yards and street parking. In the pizzerias and bakeries along Eighteenth Avenue, everybody spoke Italian and knew the names of all the babies in the carriages. Sundays were for church, big meals, and family.

  My aunt Diane was more outspoken than my mother and hung out with more people in the neighborhood. My mother was reserved and very shy and didn’t go out that often. She was a pretty brunette. She had a great figure and a radiance of innocence, and my father was smitten. She wasn’t into clothing and fashion, although she always looked nice in an understated way. What he liked about her best was that she was not like the girls who frequented his after-hours club in Fort Hamilton, who wore lots of makeup and acted slutty. My father was instantly attracted to my mother. He said he knew she was the one for him. He could tell right away that she would be a devoted wife and mother. They dated for less than a year before they were married.

  When my father first asked my grandparents, Sandra and John Scibetta, for my mother’s hand, they were not too thrilled. Sammy had a reputation as a thug. He’d had a couple of run-ins with the law and had been in lots of fights. My mother’s parents knew my father’s parents, aunts, and uncles and knew them to be good people. Still, at the time Sammy was a member of the Rampers, a prominent Brooklyn street gang. The Rampers were involved in armed robberies, burglaries, car thefts, and extortion, rising hoods heading for a life of crime. They’d started off with “trunking,” robbing people’s trunks for spare tires. Unbeknownst to his future in-laws, my father was also a recently inducted “associate” of the Colombo crime family under Joseph Colombo.

  But Sammy had been very respectful and charming with their daughter, so they begrudgingly gave him their blessing, saying they would have to wait until Debra turned eighteen. They didn’t think Sammy would be able to marry their daughter anytime soon, anyway, because catering halls for the reception were booked a year in advance. They were certain the romance would fizzle out by then.

  Sammy had a connection at the Colonial Mansion, a splashy catering hall on Bath Avenue and Twenty-second Street with marble floors and crystal chandeliers and was able to get the hall in less than one month. The wedding itself took place at St. Bernadette’s Church on Friday, April 16, 1971, one month shy of Debbie’s eighteenth birthday. More than three hundred people, mostly from the neighborhood and including a few wiseguys, were there to witness the union and join in the celebration afterward at the Colonial Mansion.

  Everybody was hoping that once Sammy settled down and had children, he would abandon his criminal ways. They weren’t too far off the mark, because after I was born, our family moved out of Brooklyn to my father’s parents’ house in Ronkonkoma, a town on Long Island, about an hour east of Bensonhurst. My father had spent his childhood summers in the tiny house that eventually became my grandparents’ permanent home. When our family moved out there, my grandparents happily converted the attic into living quarters for us. My father was determined to go straight and to find honest work. His epiphany came at a moment of desperation, when he and my mother had to bust open my piggy bank to be able to buy enough food for dinner.

  His brother-in-law, Eddie Garafola, his sister Fran’s husband, offered him work. Eddie was a partner in a small construction business in Ronkonkoma that specialized in plumbing, and had plenty for him to do. My father started working long hours, but was still earning less than one hundred dollars a week. When he asked Eddie for a raise, my uncle and his partner told him that ten cents more an hour was all they could spare. Peeved, Sammy went to work for another construction company that was run by a friend of my mother’s uncle. There, he started at $175 a week, but within ten months, was making $250. He was beginning to feel optimistic about being able to provide for his family legitimately in the construction business.

  The family was out on Long Island for less than one year when my father and another guy, Alley Boy Cuomo, were indicted for the murders of two brothers, Arthur and Joseph Dunn from Coney Island. The two had operated a local auto body shop, but had not made good on a loan when they were gunned down in 1969. Based on information from a thug already in jail on something else, my father and Alley Boy were arrested. The thug wanted to get his sentence shortened and offered up my father and Alley Boy for shaking him down a couple of years earlier. My father knew he was being framed, he had never heard of the Dunn brothers. But that didn’t help with his arrest.

  My father’s boss in the Gambino family, Toddo Aurello, loaned him ten thousand dollars to make bail, on the condition that he pay him back, with interest. Because he also needed money to pay his legal bills and support the family, we had to go back to Bensonhurst. We moved into my mom’s parents’ five-room apartment on Fifteenth Avenue. My aunt Diane was still living at home and we all shared her small bedroom, while she slept on a couch in the living room.

  Back in the same old neighborhood, my father was doing the same bad things every night, robbing and stealing to get enough money to pay for the lawyers for his defense. He said he didn’t do the murders, it was a made-up case, but he still had to mount a defense. He didn’t have any other way to make the kind of money he needed to pay the legal fees. To make matters worse, he was arrested three times while he was out on bail, so his legal bills were mounting.

  Two weeks before the double murder case was scheduled to go to trial, it was dismissed because there were so many inconsistencies in the guy’s story. In one of them, the thug had claimed my father was driving a white ’72 Lincoln, but Sammy didn’t own that car until years after the murders. Even though my dad was cleared, there was no turning back from his life of crime. His attorney’s fees had left him in debt. He realized that if he was going to be in the business of crime, he was going to do it one hundred percent. That was my father’s motto, whatever he did, he did it one hundred percent, whether he was a criminal, a father, or someone cooperating with the authorities, whatever choices he made, he was going to follow through with no turning back.

  Soon, he started pulling in enough money to rent his own apartment and moved us out of my grandparents’ home and into an apartment on Sixty-first Street.

  My mother was one of those very loyal wives who would stand by her man through thick and thin and ask no questions. She never really questioned my father because she believed in her heart that he meant well. I know she wished they had never left Long Island and her dream for a simple life. As the mother of his children, she supported whatever decisions he made. I’m sure at times she wished that it could have been different, but she understood that when the breadwinners came home from a long day, they didn’t tell the wives what they did, and the women didn’t ask questions. So, she surrounded herself with her kids, her sister, her parents, and some of the wives of the men in my father’s crew who understood this lifestyle.

  Neither of my sets of grandparents was involved in the mob. My maternal grandmother and grandfather both worked to provide for their family. My grandfather worked nights for the W
estern Electric Telephone Company, putting together circuit boards, and my grandmother had a job at a dry cleaners. They had been able to save enough money to buy a summer home in Pennsylvania, where they could escape from the city.

  My father’s parents came to America from Italy. The family was very poor. All the men in the family had come first, then sent for the women and children. My grandfather, “Giorlando” in Italy but “Gerry” here, was the youngest boy and was the last to come. He was in his mid-teens when he traveled alone by freighter from Sicily to Canada. When the boat reached Canada, he jumped ship, and he had to find his way to New York with only a telephone number. Because he slipped into the United States illegally, he was never able to get his U.S. citizenship. He was very Italian, abided by his strict Italian traditions, and spoke either Italian or very broken English in a strong Italian accent.

  My father’s mother was Caterina, but everyone called her Kay. She had been born in the United States, and raised her three children to speak English, knowing they would need it to be successful here. As a kid, I remember thinking how strange it was that my grandmother, aunts, and father spoke English well, but my grandfather did not.

  When Grandpa Gravano first got to New York, he found work as a house painter. I don’t know how he met my grandmother, but she was a seamstress when they got married. Grandpa’s exposure to so much paint gave him lead poisoning, so my grandmother, always an ambitious and hardworking woman, supported them. My grandmother’s boss helped her open a dress factory in Bensonhurst, and my grandfather helped her run it. I remember my grandmother always wearing nice dresses. She walked a lot, which helped her keep her nice shape.

  My grandparents had their children later in life, delayed by a couple of miscarriages. Finally, they produced three children, first two daughters, Jeannie and Fran, and then a son, Salvatore. Dad’s parents called him “Sammy” because he had such a resemblance to his uncle Sammy. The name stuck. He was my grandmother’s “baby.”