My father’s punishment to me was that I had to wash and iron all of his clothes, and I had to do chores around the house for a week. The ratting lesson was you had to stand behind what you did. No matter what the consequences were, you were not going to rat.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“You cannot be crawling off my roof at night.”
I loved sneaking out of our house at night. When Dad remodeled the house on Lamberts Lane, he gave Gerard and me the bedrooms at the top of the stairs. When you walked in, the staircase was right there. At the top of the stairs, if you went to the left it was Gerard’s room and to the right was my room. I had my own bathroom and my own sitting area, so a lot of my friends wanted to be at my house. We were out of the way upstairs, and Dad made it like that to keep us close. He kept his bedroom downstairs.
The fact that his bedroom was at the bottom of the stairs didn’t help. We’d go in my bathroom, undo the window, and crawl out. Then, we’d walk along the roof of the first floor, which took us over the kitchen. Sometimes, Dad, Mom, or both of them would be in there, and we’d have to walk really quietly. That roof went a long ways, but eventually we’d be at the end. The jump-off point was near our glassed-in den, with big glass doors that looked out onto the backyard and the pool. Most of the time, all that glass didn’t matter, because at night my parents wouldn’t be in there. They’d be in their bedroom with the TV on. Plus, Dad had so carefully insulated every ceiling and rafter that it made the best escape route ever.
If my parents were awake, we’d jump down onto the fence and then into the neighbors’ yard. If they were already asleep, we’d just jump into our yard and sneak out the side door to the sidewalk. We’d go over to the P.S. 60 schoolyard, where a bunch of gangster thugs in the making would be hanging out.
There was always something going on there. Kids would be stealing cars, having fights. That was the place where all the Springville boys from Staten Island hung out. The Springville boys had the reputation of being the gangster wannabes of the Staten Island teenage population, and they honored their reputation admirably.
They were kind of like the Rampers, Dad’s first gang in Brooklyn, but there were more of them. They were from the Bulls Head and Springville neighborhoods on Staten Island.
They were trying to make their bones in the streets with the hopes of someday catching the eye of a made guy from some crime family. They really did not want to be part of that life. They wanted to be on their own, but they would quickly learn that if they wanted to be running the streets, they would have to follow the code. The difference between my father and them was that most of them really didn’t understand what the Mafia stood for. They looked at it more for the money and notoriety than the honor, loyalty, and brotherhood that the old-timers practiced. A lot of them ended up going to jail for petty crimes.
There was one guy at the schoolyard named Tommy who I thought was cute. The first time I actually talked to him was during my father’s annual Fourth of July party at our house. Dad always threw the biggest party in Bulls Head for the celebration, with garbage pails full of Dom Pérignon, alcohol, beer, lobster tails, crab legs, anything you could want. Hundreds of people from all over the neighborhood came to the event. People would bring their lawn chairs and set them up out in the yard. We just let people come in, anyone who wanted. It was a replica of the huge Fourth of July event that John Gotti always had in Queens.
By mid-afternoon, all the adults were drunk and wasted. Roxanne, Ramona, and I had left the party for a little walk when I saw Tommy in his car waiting for some friends. I had seen him around the neighborhood, and I liked him. When he told me he was going to a block party, I said, “That’s my family’s party.”
He walked back to the house with us and as we were walking into the backyard, I saw my cousin Bud running with my father’s friend, Sera, who was carrying a bloodied and beat-up teenager. Bud was yelling, “Get the fuck outta here and don’t come back!”
I was horrified when Bud next walked over to Tommy and asked if he knew the kid. Tommy said he had never seen him before. I was so embarrassed, I went to find my mother.
“Mom, what’s going on?” I asked her.
She was as drunk as everybody else. I had never seen her with a drink before, let alone drunk. “Don’t worry, Karen, just chill out,” she advised me. So I went to find my dad.
“Dad, what happened?” I asked him.
“Apparently some kid mouthed off and he got a beating,” he told me. It turned out he was some kid from the schoolyard. He had gotten drunk at the party and grabbed someone’s ass. Someone else at the party saw it and said, “Buddy, we don’t do that here.” The kid mouthed off back, and wound up getting roughed up for being disrespectful.
Tommy was still following me around, so I introduced him to my father. “Dad, this is Tommy,” I said. Dad must have thought I was dating him the way he sized him up.
“Tommy, I’m gonna tell you right now,” my father said. “If you start a problem, you’re gonna leave the same way.” Dad probably said it to test Tommy and see what kind of kid he was.
* * *
I started dating Tommy that summer. We’d go to the P.S. 60 schoolyard to hang out. Roxanne and Ramona Rizzo and I were the regulars. Jennifer Graziano was joining us, too. She was a girl I had just started hanging out with. She was the daughter of Anthony “The Little Guy” Graziano, an alleged big shot in the Bonanno crime family. She had an older sister, Renee, but Renee ran with a different crowd.
Renee was different from Jenn. She was the true definition of a Mafia princess. She dressed the part with her fur coats and fancy jewelry. I remember sneaking into nightclubs and Renee would be there, hanging out with wiseguys, drinking and having fun. She was the total opposite of Jenn, Ramona, Roxanne, and me. If we went to a club and ran into some of our of fathers’ friends, we would run and hide, partly because we were still too young to be out but mostly because we didn’t flaunt our dads like Renee did.
Jennifer would sneak out of her house, too, because she was dating a guy named Danny. She lived in another neighborhood off Hylan Boulevard. If we weren’t walking to the schoolyard, we had other people picking us up. The problem was that when I was dating Tommy, his ex-girlfriend, a girl from my neighborhood, would be hanging around. She was now dating someone else, and her sister and her sister’s friends were also dating some of the guys who hung out at the schoolyard of P.S. 60. Tommy’s ex hated me because she still had feelings for Tommy. She would call my friends and me names like Mafia princesses or daddies’ girls. She was Puerto Rican and knew nothing about the mob. It seemed to me she and her sister didn’t get who our fathers were. Whenever this group of girls saw us, they threatened that they were going to kick our asses. One of the guys in the schoolyard warned us that the girls were crazy, the types who would split your face open with a beer bottle or jump you when you were alone. I am not going to lie, I was scared. I knew if I went to my father, he would handle the situation, but going to Dad was not the way I handled my business.
My girls and I started meeting at Roxanne and Romana’s parents’ house where we practiced fighting each other so we would be ready, just in case they confronted us. Finally, it happened. We wiped their asses and got the respect we deserved. We never used our fathers’ names to get the respect. If someone tried to kick my ass, all I really would have had to have done was to say, “My dad is Sammy.” But Dad taught me how to stick up and fight for myself. The first fight we were in was at a nightclub on Staten Island. Back then, you had to be eighteen to get into the club, but we had fake ID and would sneak in. I was sixteen. Everybody was on the dance floor. We were battling the girls, bumping each other hard until it turned into an all-out catfight. Even though the place was dark and the music was loud, we had an audience. Luckily, we won.
The one time I got caught sneaking out of the house, I was getting ready to go to a big party. Roxanne, Ramona, and Jennifer were all at my house. They were going to sleep over. Gerard knew I snuck o
ut and he used to help me. He’d go downstairs and turn on the radio and make noise. That night, Gerard decided that he was going to sneak out for the first time. He didn’t even need to sneak out. He wanted to see if his minibike, which was in the driveway, had a flat tire, so he could have gone out the front door. My parents were in the kitchen. Gerard didn’t have the good sense to walk stealthily. My Dad said to my mother, “Did you hear something?” Mom said no.
Later that night, the four of us used the roof to get out without Dad hearing. We knew how to walk quietly and our escape was successful. But because he’d heard Gerard earlier, he was on high alert. He didn’t know we’d snuck out. He never went up to check on us, assuming we were home. So when we were coming back across the roof, making a little noise, he heard something but had no idea it was us.
He ran to get his gun, thinking, “oh my God, here they come, up my kids’ window.” Footsteps in the night, especially on a roof, meant something else to my father.
He came flying up the stairs, gun in hand. He heard the commotion going on in the bathroom as we tumbled in. Just as he pushed opened the door, I came walking out of the bathroom. We walked right into each other. He had the gun pointed at my head, and I threw my hands up in the air.
“Dad!” I screamed. “We just went to Miggy’s to get a sandwich.”
“Karen, do you see this?” he puffed, waving the gun.
“Yeah,” I said.
He yelled out, “Do you know how close you just came to getting killed?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Get to bed!” he directed and slammed the door.
In the morning, my mother came into my room to collect the laundry. Every day, she’d do all the laundry, and everything was ironed and pressed.
“Where’s Daddy?” I asked.
“Oh, you’re dead,” she answered. “When the girls leave, you need to go downstairs and talk to him.”
I knew that meant to get the girls out. I was so scared of what he was going to say. I went downstairs and he was sitting at the head of the table, where he always sat. He’d do his books there, always jotting down numbers and crossing them out. This morning, he was stewing, drinking a cup of coffee.
“Do you want to talk to me?” I asked.
“Sit down,” he ordered.
Usually, I sat to his right, but I was afraid to be right next to him, so I sat one chair down. He pushed the chair between us out of the way and directed, “Move your chair closer.” He continued in a rage, leaning into me. “Do you know how close you came to getting whacked last night?”
“Uh huh.”
“Do you know how fucking upset I am right now?”
“Uh huh, I won’t do it again.”
“I’m not upset that you snuck out of the house. I’m upset that I almost blew your head off your shoulders!”
“I’m sorry.”
“You cannot be crawling off my roof at night.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. “I’ll never do it again.”
“Do you know how serious it can be if I think somebody is sneaking into my house? Do not crawl off my fucking roof again!”
“I’m sorry,” I said for the third time, and started to cry.
“Give me a kiss and give me a hug,” he said, accepting my apology. “Karen, I swear to God, do you know how sick to my stomach I would be if, God forbid, I would have pulled that trigger?”
“Yes,” I replied, promising not to do it again. He made my curfew earlier, which I accepted without protest. That weekend, I snuck out again. Dad was so upset that he had almost killed me, that he never checked up on me again. My father was a man of honor and if he gave you his word, he stuck to it. He expected everyone around him to do the same. Although he knew I was a kid and would probably sneak out again, if he said he was going to trust me, he was not going to run up and check on me every night. If I fucked up and he caught me again, then it would be a big problem. But my father was exceedingly fair and when he accepted my apology, he also gave me back his trust.
* * *
Most of the time when I snuck out, I went to find Tommy. Tommy was a decent guy. He got into petty fights and stayed out late, like everybody else I knew. But those weren’t crimes. Dad always told me I needed to respect myself as a woman. He wanted me to be with someone who respected me, and he told me he had to meet and approve any guy I dated. I thought I should bring Tommy home, but I was afraid for him. I was daddy’s little girl and one thing I knew for sure was if I brought a guy home, he had to be just right. In my experience with him, my father would never hurt somebody, but he was very protective of his family, especially his children.
The grilling started the moment I brought Tommy into the house. Dad started with, “Tommy, you think you can handle going out with my daughter?”
I knew Tommy was already a little intimidated. He was aware my father was the underboss of the Gambino family. I didn’t know it, but all the kids in the neighborhood looked up to the gangster life and admired my father, including Tommy.
“You better treat my daughter good,” Dad warned.
Tommy and I dated for three years. Eventually, Dad got him a job in construction. If I was gonna be with somebody, he wanted the guy to have a good job and a decent career.
* * *
Dad and I became closer during my junior and senior years. We’d work out together at the gym. If I had a couple of pimples, he was the one to run me to a dermatologist. I looked up to him and respected him, not just as a father, but as a friend. I didn’t mind being around him. I admired and learned a lot from him, mostly about life. I knew that everything he did was because he loved us. I was the one person in his life who could talk back to him. He’d debate an issue until everyone else gave in, but I would just continue until he gave in. We had a very cool relationship. He loved the fact I never backed down. He liked that I was strong-minded and opinionated. That’s why I think he let me get away with winning some of our disagreements. He wanted to see how I handled myself and he liked the fact I was not a pushover. In fact, he encourged me to stand my ground.
He could talk to me about teenage stuff. He warned about drinking and driving. He told me if I was going to a party, and there was going to be alcohol, I should call him if the driver was going to be drinking.
I told him I probably wouldn’t call, because I didn’t want to get punished for drinking myself. Dad promised me, he’d waive any punishment or reprimand if I called. He knew I was the kind of kid who would still drink but never call if he was going to be angry.
One time, when I was more than a little tipsy, I took his advice and called Mom to come and pick up my friend Valerie and me from a party. Dad thought it was so amusing when he took a look at us coming into the house. “Are they drunk?” he asked my mother. I overheard the question and told him no, we weren’t.
“Okay then, let’s play craps,” he said with a wry smile. He wanted to test me and see if I could handle the dice. I rolled away, but this time I couldn’t add up the numbers. Once again, Dad had caught me red-handed. Even though he was a father and would make me answer for what I did wrong, he knew the reality of life and let me be a kid, as long as I didn’t get out of hand. He trusted me enough to know that I might not always be perfect, but I was no fool and I knew right from wrong.
When I was seventeen, I returned home from school one afternoon to find my parents in my bedroom. The closet door was open, revealing a typical teenager’s disarray. I was about to apologize for the mess when my father suddenly handed me a screwdriver.
“Pop open the third plank,” he instructed. There, along the back wall of my closet, was a combination safe. It contained two gold watches and two million dollars in cash.
“It’s for an emergency, in case something happens to me or your mother,” he said.
That’s a lot of money, I thought, staring at the stacks of bills. I was imagining all the things I could buy at the mall when my father’s voice snapped me back to reality.
“And don’t let me find out you’re going to the mall with this!” he admonished.
Dad always said these real serious things and then lightened them up with a joke.
That year, Gerard broke his leg. He was fourteen, and we had brought his minibike back from my grandmother’s house in Pennsylvania. He had been riding it after dark when a car had run into him. The hospital called my dad to tell him there had been an accident, but had no more information. Dad was at Angelo Ruggiero’s wake in Howard Beach, Queens. Angelo was a close associate of John Gotti and the nephew of the late Aniello Dellacroce, a Gambino underboss, until he had died of cancer. Just the men went to the funerals. The FBI was always watching the events, so the wives stayed away. My father went to John Gotti and said, “I’ve got to go. My son was hit on a dirt bike.”
John did the sign of the cross and said, “Oh my God, go!” Ruggiero’s wake was at the same funeral home where John’s son had been laid out. His youngest son, Frank, had darted into the street on his minibike and was hit and killed by a neighbor nine years earlier, when he was only twelve years old. My father’s story about Gerard hit John hard.
The guy who had collided with Gerard waited for the ambulance to come. My mother wasn’t home. She was at a comedy club in Brooklyn with Huck and his wife, Kathy, and some other friends. Somebody called her there. “Is he gonna die?” she asked. She was told his injuries were not life threatening, but he might have broken his back. My uncle Eddie came over and rode with Gerard to the hospital, and I followed in my own car. I was so scared because I didn’t know the extent of the injuries.
Dad found me outside the emergency room at Staten Island Hospital, waiting there for him to come. He jumped out of the car when he saw me, and a cop stopped him on the sidewalk. I thought the cop was going to tell him what happened. He asked my father, “Is this your bike?” When my father saw the minibike, he thought Gerard must be dead. Instead, the cop said, “We’ll have to give you a couple of tickets. The bike’s not registered.”
Mob Daughter: The Mafia, Sammy The Bull Gravano, and Me! Page 8