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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  I liked that Eddie, Fran, and the rest of the Garafolas were across the street. We visited back and forth all the time. We had “our people” on the block now and had great times together. Initially, my father had been sad that his parents had to move just because of Eddie’s situation. But it all worked out in the end. My grandparents seemed happy there, and after all, my father was my grandmother’s baby, so being close to him was a bonus for her. When my grandfather died eight months later, my father was even more relieved that my grandmother had moved so much closer to us rather than being stuck in Ronkonkoma.

  My brother, Gerard, loved food, so having relatives nearby who loved to feed him was perfection. He’d go over and eat a meal at Grandma’s house, then he’d go to Aunt Fran’s and eat there, and then he’d come home and eat at our house. But he’d tell everyone he hadn’t eaten yet, so he’d get three meals out of the deal. Sometimes, from a farm behind the development, Gerard would steal a big squash or a tomato for my grandmother to put in her sauce. One time, the farmer was chasing Gerard down the block, telling him to bring back the stolen vegetables. Grandma was out there, too, screaming back at the farmer, “Don’t you touch my grandson!” “He was stealing my vegetables!” the guy yelled back. But my grandmother prevailed, and both the squash and the tomato ended up in her sauce. It was delicious!

  We all loved Grandma Kay. Having her across the street made it so easy to see her. She made the best sauce in the whole world. I was thirteen when she died. She hadn’t been herself since my grandfather had passed away. She was really sad, and she started to get sick. She was the one who had originated my nickname, K.G., and for my thirteenth birthday she gave me a necklace with my initials in diamonds. Everybody got their initials in diamonds when they turned sixteen, so it was odd that I was getting mine at thirteen. She also bought me all of my china and silverware engraved with my initials for when I got married. She must have thought she wasn’t going to make it three more years. The night before she died, we all went to the hospital to say good-bye. In the morning, she had passed away from a heart attack. Dad was sad, but he didn’t harp on it.

  * * *

  Toniann was my best friend on Leggett Place. She lived two houses away. She was two years older than me, but that didn’t bother either of us. We were in the same general age group, and we went to the same public school. Her parents both worked. Her father was a regular working guy, a nine-to-fiver, and her mother was a hairdresser. We used to sleep over at each other’s houses all the time. We lost touch in our teenage years. I became a “bad” kid, sneaking out and going to nightclubs when I was fourteen. She didn’t do stuff like that, so she hung out with the good kids while I regrouped with the ones who liked trouble.

  I remember the one time Toniann made me so upset I almost cried. All Italians are very serious about their food, and we Gravanos were no exception. Toniann asked me to say the word “ricotta,” so I complied and said the word exactly as she had said it, “ricotta.” She responded with a hurtful taunt, “So there, you’re not Italian! Italians say ‘ree-gut.’” I was in disbelief. I knew I was Italian, and I couldn’t even understand why she was challenging me. I pleaded my case. “You said to say ‘ricotta’ so I said ‘ricotta.’ If you had said, ‘how do you say ricotta?’ I would have said ‘ree-gut.’” I may not have known my father was in the Mafia, but I knew I was as Italian as Cristobol Colon, even if I hadn’t come over on the Santa Maria five hundred years earlier.

  On Sundays, the whole family would go to Brooklyn to my mother’s parents’ house on Fifteenth Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street for church and dinner. Dad didn’t go to church, but the rest of us would walk to St. Frances Cabrini on Eighty-sixth Street. After the service, Grandpa and I would walk to the Italian bakery and we’d get fresh bread and fresh mozzarella. Grandma would make us a huge Italian dinner of pasta and chicken and everything else. While she was cooking, Dad and I would go for our Sunday ritual of getting the car washed. He’d hand all the guys working there a nice tip after they’d polished it to look brand new.

  Other days, he’d take me with him to the construction office, or even the social club once in a while. We were a team to be reckoned with, and I loved having him to myself.

  My father was the only one in our neighborhood, Bulls Head, who was in the mob when we arrived on Staten Island. Our neighbors on Leggett Place all knew Dad was a gangster, but they didn’t care. He had such people skills and was so normal and unpretentious that everybody liked him. He made everybody feel comfortable, just the opposite of the reaction you’d think they’d have. They knew his reputation as a tough guy, but that didn’t affect how he was as a neighbor. He’d help anybody in any way he could. He wasn’t exactly the handiest person, outside of specialty-carpentry, so if someone needed help with his car or mower, he’d tinker around a bit before calling someone else to help. He’d usually know the best person to call.

  It was on Staten Island that my dad got back into the construction business. When Eddie went broke, he begged my father to bring him into “the life.” My father understood that there was big money in construction, and he knew how to use his mob muscle to get the jobs, and he used his good work ethic to keep them coming. Uncle Eddie was the technical person, the nuts-and-bolts guy, who knew exactly how to get the construction done. He was good at making sure the crews were working and that they had all their necessary materials. Dad was good at being a gangster. I will admit, they made a good team. Dad got the jobs, and Uncle Eddie executed them.

  Now that my father was back in the construction business, he and Paul Castellano had a lot more in common. Paul had been in control of the building industry in New York for the mob for quite some time. In fact, Paul, the capo di tutticapi, the boss of all bosses, had a stranglehold on anything concrete. If a project in New York City involved the pouring of cement, the man had a hand in it. My father was doing jobs for Paul, so now he was at the mansion on Todt Hill a lot.

  Dad and Eddie’s new business specialized in plumbing, and Paul was one of their first clients. Paul’s house was so big that the water pressure fell off dramatically on the upper floors, so showering up there was very unpleasant. My father suggested installing a secondary station with an extra pump, and Paul was really happy with the result. Paul’s affection for my father was sealed, and it wasn’t long before he was throwing him and Eddie lots of work.

  One time, my father brought me and my brother along with him to the mansion. The two men, my father and Paul, were going to talk business and we were along for the ride.

  Paul’s wife, Nina, answered the massive front door. She wasn’t at all what I expected. I thought she’d be really dressed up, formal and fancy. Instead, she was unadorned and more like a grandmother, warm and welcoming. She stood barely five feet, her gray hair was neatly styled, and she wore a simple dress tailored below the knee. She brought Gerard and me into a kitchen bigger than our house. Dozens of shiny copper pots hung over a center island stove set in a pink marble countertop. A big ceiling fan circulated the aroma of freshly baking cookies, which she pulled from the oven. Gerard and I sat at the island eating cookies and drinking milk while our dad was otherwise disposed. We had never been inside a house like this, but living on Todt Hill was in our future.

  We were still at Leggett Place when Dad decided he needed to unload The Plaza Suite, his most successful discotheque in Gravesend. Even though he loved running it, he had become so busy with the construction business, it was almost like he had two jobs. During the day, he worked at the construction office on the ground floor, below the discotheque. At night, the construction crews needed him for jobs, or so I thought. He couldn’t be at the nightclub and out with the crew at the same time. He had two of his best guys, Mike DeBatt and Tommy “Huck” Carbonaro, overseeing the operation, hoping that would let him keep it. However, when the Czech guy, Frank Fiala, made him the offer of a million dollars for the nightclub and building, Dad couldn’t say no. It was five times the market value.

  It
wasn’t until many years later that I finally learned the truth about what had happened between my father and Frank Fiala. Frank had put a hole through the wall of the construction office to connect it to the discotheque when he hadn’t even anted up yet. My father was seething when he went to Brooklyn to confront him. When Dad got there, Fiala was sitting at my father’s desk, surrounded by a pack of Doberman pinschers. My father already didn’t like him, Fiala had a reputation as a showboater and a sleazy cocaine dealer. Dad demanded an explanation about the damage to the wall, and the guy pulled out an UZI and pointed it directly at my father’s chest. My father gathered a couple of buddies up for retaliation.

  All this happened around the time my family was getting ready to make the big move to Todt Hill. My father always seemed to have one foot in the door of a nicer house as soon as we settled anywhere. He loved construction and the challenge of upgrading a house. Paul Castellano living on the Hill didn’t hurt. He liked proving himself by being a man with a manor, even though everyone loved living on Leggett Place. My mother had been dabbling in real estate a bit to keep busy, so she had a couple of affordable houses in the well-heeled neighborhood in mind.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “The cops were the bad guys. Why were they doing this to us?”

  Todt Hill was the classiest neighborhood in Staten Island. Almost everybody who lived there was a blue blood, although there was some new money in the neighborhood, too. The lawyers, doctors, and bankers that kept New York City the capital of the world lived in Todt Hill.

  The English Tudor house where The Godfather was filmed was in the neighborhood, sprawling, yes, but by no means one of the biggest homes on the Hill. Paul Castellano’s estate was bigger, more extravagant, and more gorgeous by far. We moved to Dad’s own vision of a castle in the sky in 1982, when I was eleven. We knew the neighborhood was stuffy before we got to Todt Hill, but we figured we’d find a way to fit in.

  My father was going to be completely hands-on in restoring and expanding our new three-bedroom house on Buttonwood Road to a five-bedroom showcase. He had bought the beautiful Victorian with a dark old-country interior, red velvet walls, and gorgeous French doors from the original owner, a woman in her eighties who was motivated to sell, but very particular about who she would sell to. She was captivated by my father’s incomparable charm as he flattered her about her taste in interior design. He said he wasn’t going to change a thing. First, he sweet-talked her so far down in the asking price she knocked off $100,000; then, when she thought we smelled like cigarette smoke, she said she’d only to sell to nonsmokers. My dad said it was the realtor who smoked, pointing to my mother. He swore himself a reformed man who had given up the nasty habit long ago. After that, every time my mother and he lit up a cigarette, he’d look around for a bolt of lightning that he was certain would strike him dead. I thought the place was not our style. It was old-fashioned and dark. My father pointed out that it was on a beautiful piece of property, nestled down in a little vale with tall trees all around it, giving it lots of privacy. He also reminded me he could turn the old place into a palace. And so he did.

  The first thing he did after the closing was start sanding everything that could be sanded, the floors, moldings, and bannisters to lighten up the house. He hosted sanding parties where everybody we knew, including my mom, brother, and me, came to help sand. Dad’s best friend, Stymie, and his family were there more than anybody. Stymie had recently sold his own house in Brooklyn to move to Lighthouse Hill, not far from Todt Hill, at my father’s urging. Our two families were becoming really close. Stymie was like my own uncle and his kids were like my cousins. Stymie was also in the construction business and was almost as handy as my father. The two of them oversaw the installation of the state-of-the-art security system Dad desired. He was always conscious about security and personal safety. He had monitoring systems throughout the house and property.

  Even before we moved to Todt Hill, I had started attending the exclusive private school there, Staten Island Academy. Dad said I was going to be a lawyer someday, so I needed to upgrade my education. “Knowledge is power,” he would always tell me.

  My mother would drive me from Leggett Place, which was four miles away on the back roads. She’d be wearing bell-bottom jeans and a sweatshirt, and she had very permed dark brown hair cut no longer than her shoulders. She’d be behind the wheel of her Ford Bronco in a long line of Mercedes-Benzes. The other moms would be very stylish and coiffed, wearing fur coats even if it was only for the morning drop-off. I was a little embarrassed that my mother was so Italian-homey. I begged her to try being a bit more fashionable, to wear a fur like the other mothers so she could fit in better. She told me to deal with it, she was who she was, and she wasn’t going to change. She didn’t care what other people thought about her. She had the fancy trappings in her closet. My father adored giving her furs and expensive jewelry, but she was a jeans-and-sneakers kind of person, so she left the furs in the closet and baubles home in the safe.

  Unfortunately, I was not as self-confident back then. I had stopped hanging out with the old friends from Leggett Place to fit in with my new friends. The longer I lived on Todt Hill, the more desperately I wanted to be accepted by my classmates. They were all members of one country club or another. I begged my dad to join the Richmond Country Club in order to be with my newer, richer friends over the summer break.

  Dad balked at first, but eventually was agreeable to the idea. He grabbed one of his buddies, and we drove to the club in the Lincoln Town Car to find out about a membership. I spotted one of my girlfriends as soon as we entered the clubhouse and I hung out with her while Dad went into the office to talk about joining. I thought he looked a little out of place in his sweatsuit and pinky ring, but on the other hand, that was his style.

  I was in the clubroom only about fifteen minutes when I heard the door to the office fly open and saw my father emerging, red-faced.

  “Baby, let’s get the fuck out of here!” he directed, waving his hand in the air for me to follow.

  Embarrassed, I said a quick good-bye to my friend and rushed out after him. Climbing into the passenger seat of his big Lincoln, I waited for him to say something first.

  “Karen, we’re not joining. They’re not our kind of people.”

  “But Daddy, everybody goes there. What am I going to do in the summer?”

  “What’s wrong with the country house?”

  “I don’t have any friends there, and it’s so far away,” I said.

  “It’s not that far, and I’ll take you on a vacation, anywhere in the world you want to go.”

  I was disappointed, but I couldn’t blame my father. During the ride home, he laughed about how the guy had asked for copies of his financials, proof of income. I assumed that meant we didn’t make enough money to get into such a fancy place, and that wasn’t his fault. It was only later that I realized our family had been denied membership because the club was prejudiced against gangsters.

  * * *

  In 1985, Dad was arrested. We were over at Aunt Fran’s when we heard the news. The Feds had come to his office in Gravesend, and they’d taken both him and Uncle Eddie into custody. The police had been looking at Dad for three years, ever since Fiala’s murder. But they couldn’t get him on that charge. Even though the police were pretty sure Dad was involved, the detectives could not gather enough information, so the investigation went nowhere. Everyone in the neighborhood knew what had happened, but no one ever told on my father.

  The cops couldn’t get him, but the Feds did. They indicted him and my uncle on money laundering and tax evasion charges related to the sale of The Plaza Suite. As part of the investigation, the Feds even raided our farm in New Jersey, which was like our heaven.

  Up until that point, our neighbors in Cream Ridge really didn’t know who Dad was. Sure, they thought he was different, shady perhaps, but they didn’t really know he was this ambitious gangster, Sammy the Bull. They just knew him as “Sammy.”
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br />   I suspected my father had likely played a role in Fiala’s demise. Still, I found myself feeling bad for him. He was under tremendous stress because of all the heat coming down on him. Years later we would have to sell the farm at Cream Ridge to pay the three-hundred-thousand-dollar tax bill Dad owed the IRS. Even though it sounds crazy, seeing my father so upset made me feel like the cops were the bad guys. Why were they doing this to us?

  The day before Dad learned he beat the rap on the tax evasion charges, his best friend Stymie was gunned down at Tali’s, a bar that my father and Stymie owned together. What should have been a time of celebration was now marred by the loss of his closest friend. The Colombo associate who killed him was drunk and high, and out celebrating the fact he was about to be “made.” Stymie died honorably, protecting the female bartender who was being harassed by the bastard. Everybody in our family was devastated. Stymie was family to us. He and Dad had redone our Todt Hill house together.

  I went to the funeral. It was weird how many people were specifically giving my father their respects and condolences. They were saying, “Sammy, I’m sorry.” Why were they paying him respect? That’s not his brother, I thought. Why was everyone going over to my dad before offering condolences to Stymie’s wife? That’s when I started looking at it and saying my dad must be the boss here. He was definitely the boss of everything here. When my father had been “made,” he got his own crew. The crew was like our family. We went on vacations together. Stymie had been closest to Dad, but the whole crew was in mourning when he died. There were Louis Milito, “Old Man” Paruda, and Thomas “Huck” Carbonaro, all in a state despair. This was the only time I ever saw my father cry. I saw him in the kitchen when he came downstairs after the funeral. I saw a single tear. That was it.