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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  CHAPTER SIX

  “If I do get killed, I want you to go on living every day like you do today.”

  In December of 1985, Paul Castellano was murdered along with his bodyguard at Sparks Steak House in New York City. The story was the featured splash on the evening news. I was in my bedroom, only half paying attention to the television I’d gotten for my birthday, when I heard one of the female newscasters detailing Castellano’s rubout live from the scene on East Forty-sixth Street between Second and Third Avenues.

  I remembered the first time I had ever seen Paul Castellano. I had been crouched in the window of my aunt Fran’s bedroom back on Leggett Place. Dad would always send us across the street to Aunt Fran’s house whenever he was hosting a meeting that he didn’t want us to be around for. That night, as my mother, brother, and aunt sat around the kitchen table, I had snuck upstairs to Aunt Fran’s room to spy on our house. I had watched in awe as big black cars pulled up in front and men in suits strode up our walkway. One man in particular had caught my attention. He was an older gentleman with combed gray hair, tall and impeccably dressed. I knew instantly that he was Dad’s boss, Paul Castellano.

  When I returned home the next morning, I found a platter of leftover cannolis on the table in a room that was off-limits to us even on holidays, the “museum dining room.” I knew something really important had taken place the night before. I imagined my father hosting a secret induction meeting, having someone “made.” I recently learned the real story when I visited him in prison. The meeting had been about the murder of Philadelphia crime boss Angelo Bruno. The Philadelphia people had wanted to have a meeting with Paul Castellano so they could gain favor with the Gambino family, and my father had hosted the gathering. I never had enough courage to ask my father any questions about secret stuff growing up. But I knew and respected the code, “mind your business and don’t ask.”

  * * *

  Now, as I was watching the newscast with the bullet-riddled bodies of Paul Castellano and his underboss covered by blankets in the background, I knew full well that Castellano was my father’s boss in the construction business. I flew down to the kitchen to see if Dad was anywhere around. I was calm almost in a weird way, like murder had been accepted in my life. It was becoming something easier for me to deal with, but I was nevertheless concerned for Dad’s safety. When I reached the kitchen, Mom was standing at the stove preparing dinner.

  “Do you think Daddy knows about Paul?” I blurted out in fear, thinking I already knew the answer.

  “I’m sure he does,” she said in a calm, reassuring voice. “It’s all over the news.”

  It was getting harder and harder for me to buy into my mother’s easy assurances. Paul was the second person close to my father to be gunned down in the last nine months. First Stymie, now Paul.

  My father didn’t come home after Castellano died. He was gone for more than two weeks. He was holed up in a safehouse with Frankie DeCicco, now the underboss, but I didn’t know it. I thought maybe he was on vacation in Florida. I had no idea who he was with. But I knew it was not with Uncle Eddie because he had been stopping in regularly to check on me, Mom, and Gerard. My mother gave me the usual reassuring brush-offs, but no information about where Dad had gone or when he was coming back.

  I was concerned that something might have happened to him. But I tried not to think about it. I had a way of blocking things out. Maybe it was because, when I was a kid, Dad had always made me feel everything would be okay, and I believed him. I felt that no matter what, he would always be okay. Even so, I couldn’t help but worry every now and then. I was too terrified to even think about the obvious, that Dad was off avenging Paul’s murder, or worse, that Dad was involved. From my bedroom I could hear the garage door when it opened. Every night I would lie awake, hoping to hear his car coming in.

  I couldn’t get the image of Paul Castellano lying in the street in a pool of blood out of my mind. I’d worry that that same thing had happened to my father. Uncle Nicky, my mother’s brother, had just “disappeared” when I was six. His body was never found, but I did overhear a family member say that his hand had been recovered. I was so devastated by my uncle’s death that I completely blocked it from my mind and refused to think that another tragedy would ever happen to my family again. But I took only small comfort in that. The entire Scibetta family was devastated at the loss of Uncle Nicky, especially my grandmother.

  Finally, my father turned up in our kitchen early one morning. There was a newspaper folded under his arm, which he casually dropped on the table.

  “Sit down,” he said, opening up the New York Daily News. I saw a picture of my dad and I knew right away, he was showing me a story about the slaughter of Paul Castellano.

  “I want you to read it,” he said.

  My father stood over me while I skimmed the article, filled with gory details I wanted to know but had known not to ask about before.

  The story identified Sammy Gravano as a “rising star in the mafia,” calling him a hit man with the Gambino crime family, the most powerful of New York’s five organized crime families. The article said John Gotti was Sammy’s boss and that Sammy was considered to be one of the people moving up the ladder into a top position within the family. Now that Castellano had been killed, the family was under new leadership and there were a lot of power plays going on and people were shifting their roles. I had never heard John Gotti’s name before.

  “Do you believe everything you read?” my dad asked when I finally looked up.

  I shrugged my shoulders and said I didn’t know if I did or not.

  Leaning forward, he looked me in the eyes and said, “There is some truth in there.” He didn’t get into detail. “Don’t think you can’t ever come to me with a question. There are some things I can answer and some things I can’t because they’re my business.”

  At fourteen, these were the adolescent issues I had to digest, what kind of sinister underworld my family inhabited. While other girls were worrying about clothes, their bra size, their schoolwork, and boys, I was trying to wrap my head around “murder incorporated.”

  * * *

  In the next few months, I noticed my father was commanding an even higher level of respect. People were shaking his hand, his crew around him got tighter, he got a driver, and he dramatically upgraded his wardrobe. I saw the transformation right away with my father going shopping for shirts and ties at a store on Eighteenth Avenue in Brooklyn. He had to get dressed up to go and meet John Gotti. He had to start playing the role of consigliere, third in command. There were the flashy ties that he came home with. I remember thinking they were John Gotti ties because they were red and black and flamboyant. My father didn’t like to get dressed up, but he came home from the store with ten suits. He liked to stay fit and work out. He was into boxing, he ate right, and he didn’t put salt on his food. He wanted us all to be more health conscious, too.

  I liked his new look. I thought he looked good. I told him, “This is the way you should dress, Dad. I think you look good.” He just smiled. I think it made him feel good, but I don’t think he paid much attention to what I said. My father really didn’t care much about personal style, he was more concerned about his new role in the Gambino family.

  Now when my construction-company-owner father went out for meetings with the “boss,” he got dressed up in designer suits and silk ties. My father’s signature sweatsuits and sneakers apparently were not acceptable for someone in his new position. Dad wasn’t the only one being treated special. The whole family was getting the red carpet treatment. When we went out to dinner, way more often than we used to, we were picked up by a driver in a Lincoln Town Car. The maître d’ would greet us by name and bring us to a prized table.

  When we visited Aunt Fran and Uncle Eddie in Bulls Head, we were like celebrities. The kids would point and whisper, “That’s Sammy’s daughter.” They didn’t shy away from me, so I figured they were envious. I liked all the newfound attention, I felt s
pecial. Everyone in that neighborhood seemed to want to be a gangster. They were obsessed with the high-profile Castellano hit, so sensational it almost seemed out of Hollywood. There was talk that my father was responsible. But had he really killed someone at the heart of rush hour and gotten away with it?

  I knew my family was different, but we were still a family. We had a nice house in Todt Hill and spent summers at the farm in the country until the place was sold, playing checkers on family game night. Anyone from the outside who looked at our family without knowing our name assumed that we were the typical American household.

  My father went to work like any other father, even if being a mob lieutenant was a rather unusual career. The “company” was headed by John Gotti. I had never heard of him until Paul Castellano had been murdered. Now Dad was his chief confidant and protector. If you wanted to get face time with John Gotti, you had to go through my father. He gave the thumbs-up or the thumbs-down as to who would go through the door. My father ran the construction part of the enterprise, but John was the king who sat on the throne. Dad was really big in construction. He outshined the entire Gambino family in that venture. He was building all over the city.

  * * *

  Frankie DeCicco was the next casualty from Dad’s group of friends. Frankie was not in my father’s crew. He had his own crew and was very powerful in the Gambino family. When my father agreed to take out Paul, he wanted Frankie to be the boss, because he felt that Frankie would be a better boss than John. My father and Frankie were very close. Both men were good earners, very dangerous, and very respected not only within the Gambino family, but by other crime families as well. Frankie thought that John’s ego was too big and that it would be better for him to be the underboss for the time being. If John was not doing a good job, he would reconsider taking his place, when the time was right. But that time never came. Frankie had told my father that because the hit on Paul was not sanctioned, the other crime families would more than likely try to retaliate against them.

  Only the Mafia Commission could authorize the assassination of a boss. True to the Mafia code, a hit was put out on the men believed to be responsible for killing Paul. Genovese family crime boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, who was also the head of the Mafia Commission, ordered a hit on Frankie and John Gotti and others they felt were responsible. Someone had to pay for the violation of the code when Castellano was killed.

  This time, I was with Mom at Aunt Diane’s house when I heard the news that Frankie, who was identified as the Gambino family underboss, was blown up in a car outside of a club in Brooklyn, and another man was injured. I knew that Frankie and my Dad had been riding together to Brooklyn to meet John. But it wasn’t until I heard it on the news that I learned that they had gone to the Veterans & Friends Social Club in Dyker Heights. I feared the person who had been injured when DeCicco was killed in the car explosion had to be my father. I ran upstairs to find my mother, who was in the master bedroom talking to her sister.

  “Mom, is Daddy okay?” I begged.

  “Yes, he’s fine,” she said, crying. I’d seen her cry when Stymie died. “He’s on his way home. He’s just very, very upset about Frankie.” She said she couldn’t believe it. She had known the DeCicco family from Bensonhurst since she was a kid.

  Holy crap, I started thinking. What is this life? I looked at it and at everything the people looked up to. I didn’t know if I wanted to grow up wondering every day if something was going to happen to my father. Was this life really worth it?

  Mom and I were home by the time Dad got there. I started crying when I saw him. I hugged him, and he kissed me on the forehead and hugged me back. He went into the bedroom to take a shower and clean up a little.

  I heard that he had been there for the explosion. The bomb had been intended for John, but the assassin had detonated it prematurely, mistaking another guy who was there for Gotti. My father had tried to pull Frankie’s lifeless body away from the burning car. The whole body felt like all the fluid had drained out of it. My father grabbed ahold of what he thought was Frankie, but ended up with only two detached body parts, a leg and an arm.

  When Dad got out of the shower, I asked him, “Is there any way that you could possibly die or get killed?”

  He answered me, “Yes. If I do get killed, I want you to go on living every day like you do today. I want you to be strong for your mother. I want you to help guide your brother, and I want you to understand that this is the life I chose. And this is why it’s so important to me for you and your brother to go to school and make a different life for yourselves.

  “I love you, and I don’t want you to worry every day about me. I’ll be okay.”

  He was clearly upset. He had been very close to Frankie, but it was part of business. When I was a kid he was able to pat my head and shrug it off. He didn’t have to answer me, but he did have enough respect for me to tell me what he could. He was aware that I had known these men since the time I was a little girl. They were like family to me. He also knew that no matter how much he tried to shield me from his world, I was a part of it. He knew I worried about him. Mom and Dad went to Frankie’s funeral, but I didn’t go.

  After Frankie’s death, Dad was promoted to Number Two, the underboss.

  * * *

  Dad’s notoriety had an enormous downside. Apparently, the people on the Hill and our friends in Bulls Head differed in their opinion of my father’s Mafia status. The Bulls Headers thought Dad was a celebrity and cool; the Todt Hillers thought he was a pariah and objectionable. What they thought of him spilled over onto what they thought of everyone in our family. Gerard was the first one to experience the rejection.

  He never really liked living in Todt Hill. When he was nine or ten, he and some of his friends were playing with firecrackers in an area of Todt Hill where a couple of new homes were being built. Some leaves caught fire, and Gerard was blamed.

  A couple of years later, when my father’s picture was frequently in the paper for the wrong reasons, my brother had been hanging around the house looking bored. Mom suggested he go outside and play with one of the kids on the road, a boy about Gerard’s age, just a few houses down, named David.

  “David said he’s not allowed to play with me ’cause Daddy’s a gangster,” Gerard told her.

  My mother was so insulted. When she confronted David’s mother, the woman repeated the sentiment. “We don’t raise our kids like that,” she told Mom. By the way she was acting, my mother could tell that she didn’t want her kids to play with Gerard. She was one of those people who thought she was better than everyone else, a socialite. I am sure in her eyes a gangster’s kid did not make a good playmate for her son.

  After that, Mom told my father she wanted to move back to Bulls Head. “You know, Sammy, I don’t think we should live here anymore,” I overheard her telling Dad. “I don’t feel like we fit in here, with all these people driving around in fancy cars wearing furs. That’s not me.”

  Dad wanted to make her feel better, so he agreed. He accepted the fact that he was a gangster, so he wanted us to go around with our heads held high. I think he was just as ready to leave as Mom was. Todt Hill wasn’t our thing. My father loved the house, but he sympathized with her and felt we didn’t fit in there.

  There was also another reason we needed to move. With Paul Castellano and Frankie dead, the chances of my father taking a bullet had risen dramatically. Our house was very accessible to anybody; it had too many windows, was surrounded by trees, and was on a very narrow street. Anyone who wanted to get to my father could do it easily and get out without being seen. He accepted that he might die, but he wanted to be sure my mother was living in the neighborhood she loved before anything happened to him. He was very cautious. He was a hit man before becoming the underboss, so he understood every aspect of this life. He was always on alert. And always drove slowly down Buttonwood to Willow Pond, making a left on Todt Hill Road, and coming back along Circle Road a couple of times before coming back to
the house.

  I was defiant about leaving Todt Hill. I did not want to relocate again. “I don’t want to move!” I bellowed. “Why do we have to?” The next thing I knew, we were about to close on a property on Lamberts Lane, only a few blocks from our old house on Leggett Place. When Dad took me to see the house, I nearly cried. It was a puke green Cape right on the service road of the Staten Island Expressway. The place was so small and square it looked like a Monopoly piece taken from the board and plunked straight down on Mediterranean Avenue or Baltic Avenue, the cheapest properties of the game.

  “Are you crazy?” I protested. “I don’t want to live in that house.” Dad smiled, and then ordered me out of the car. The interior of the place was even worse. It had not been updated in a century and had two small bedrooms with sloped ceilings, clearly carved out of a space that had once been the attic.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not gonna look like this when I’m done with it.” He basically blew out all but one wall, and remodeled the tiny ranch from three bedrooms into a gorgeous three-level house, complete with a gorgeous in-ground pool, that became the talk of the neighborhood. The house had only three bedrooms, but the rooms were huge and all of them had their own bathrooms. I had my very own sitting room, so when all of my friends came over we would be comfortable. My father wanted the house to be perfect, and he wanted to make it a place where Gerard and I wanted to hang out and bring our friends. If our accommodations were comfortable, Gerard and I would spend more time at home and out of trouble.

  It was so funny. Dad was always talking about fitting in and keeping a low profile, but then he would turn an ordinary house into an eyepopper, defeating the whole purpose. Ours was the nicest house in Bulls Head, with great details and extra touches, and everyone was whispering, “Sammy the Bull just moved in.” Because the neighborhood was predominantly Italian, being a gangster was a good thing.