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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  There was a thin veneer disguising all the things my father did. Dad was like Superman. At home he was a mild-mannered father, funny, charming, warm, the soft disciplinarian. When we went out, he had his “Superman” suit. He was elegant, he stood up straighter, and he had an air of authority. I thought he commanded a gentleman’s respect, but I found out people were truly afraid of him. He was scary and powerful. He controlled something, although I wasn’t sure exactly what. I never saw the other side of Sammy the Bull, the violent, cold executioner side.

  Mom had heard of a few men who had gone on the lam before. If they came home at all, they usually went to prison when they got back. There had also been cases of men who had left, changed their identity, and never returned. Others had turned up dead. Because of the risk to the family, when a man went on the lam, he would cut off all ties to his prior life for everybody’s safety. My mother was a true mob wife, she never asked questions and she did what she was told. I think she felt that if she ignored things, they would just go away.

  This time, I think she realized it was not going away. But she was still unsure how to deal with it. Her motherly instinct kicked in, and she needed to figure out how to protect Gerard and me from what was about to happen.

  The morning after the story about Dad possibly being dead appeared in the paper, I awoke to my mother calling to me from downstairs: “Karen, come down here.” I went down to the kitchen and Dad was standing there with a full beard and wearing a green shirt. I just started crying. “I thought I was never going to see you again,” I said.

  “I couldn’t stay away, even if coming back means I will have to spend the rest of my life in prison.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Prison?”

  He didn’t directly answer the question. We all sat down for breakfast, then Dad went to his bedroom to shave. I never knew where he had been. I wanted to know, but I realized it wasn’t the time to get into it. For the first time in my life, I felt like it wasn’t my business to ask. At that point, my prison question didn’t matter anymore. I was just so happy to have him home, even though my happiness was short-lived.

  I later found out that John had thought if my father left town, the Feds couldn’t bring the indictments against any of them. The plan was for him to make his way to Brazil and run the family from there. He had been in and around Atlantic City. He was getting passports made up, so he sized up other cities in South America that might make a good base of operation. My father had been under the eye of the FBI even since Paul’s death and our move to Lamberts Lane. The whole surveillance thing felt like a game. Dad and his crew would joke about the Feds. From the flower shop, I’d hear Big Louie’s big voice saying, “Guys, should we send them some pizza?”

  My father wasn’t home for long, less than twenty-four hours, when he was summoned by John Gotti to make an appearance at the Ravenite Social Club. Dad was irritated that John wanted to meet at such an obvious place. He would have preferred to meet in a secret location, considering he had a tip from a cop that he and Gotti were going to be arrested, which was why he had gone on the lam in the first place. The Feds had been looking for him day and night for the last month. The surveillance had become so heavy that agents had actually been following Mom and me, thinking we might be meeting him secretly. Although Dad knew that he was coming home to be arrested, he had wanted an extra few days to tie up some loose ends and spend time with his family.

  Because Dad was so loyal to John, he agreed to meet him on his terms. When my father left the house that day, he was dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, a black leather jacket, and socks and sneakers. Normally, when he went to meet John Gotti, he would wear a suit. But he was pretty sure he was going to be arrested that night and had dressed for the occasion.

  When he walked out the door that evening, I knew in my heart he wasn’t going to come home. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t. I looked over at Mom and wondered if she felt the same way I did. It was hard to tell, because she was being strong. It was like we were all going through the motions. It was part of the lifestyle and it came with the territory.

  Gerard was upstairs when Dad left. I didn’t bother to go in and check on him. But I was sure he was feeling the same way. He was younger than me, and it was almost like we looked at Dad’s life through two different sets of eyes. He was a lot like Mom, if he ignored it, maybe it didn’t happen. He also may not have been as intrigued by my father’s lifestyle as I was.

  Dad and I were very close. By nature, I was extremely curious and I liked to know what was going on, especially when it came to my father. I knew that night was different. Everybody assumed Dad was going to be arrested, but nobody was saying it, at least not to me.

  Sometimes when Dad would make jokes, I knew he was making light of a situation. However, he took his role at being a gangster very seriously, with all its pros and cons.

  Dad and some of the old-time gangsters didn’t like how John handled his business so publicly and predictably. Here they were with all this heat coming down and my father would have to go to the same place at the same time every night, Mulberry Street at six o’clock, to meet his boss. My father always felt that John was giving the Feds the entire Gambino family on a silver platter. The mob was supposed to be a secret society, and by holding their meetings so out in the open, the clandestine element was gone. The old-timers would tell my father to talk to John, to take it down a notch. But John’s motto was “Let’s put it in their face, let’s show them who we are.” I guess in his mind, he felt like he was untouchable. But his arrogance made surveillance easy. So the Feds watched and built their case.

  When Dad got to the Ravenite Social Club that night John was already there. The club was filled with the Gambino captains and lieutenants who had to report there on a nightly basis to turn in money and discuss the daily operations. My father joined John and Frankie at John’s table in the back. They were there only fifteen minutes when the Feds knocked on the steel door with a speakeasy peephole. Dad later told me that John was very calm when the agents came inside.

  “We have been expecting you,” he said. “We are just going to have our last cup of coffee before we go anywhere.” John, my father, and Frankie remained at the back table, sipping on espresso while the agents asked each man in the club to produce his ID and state his name. The men were excused one by one, until only Dad, John, and Frankie were left. The men finished their coffee, heard their Miranda rights, and waited to be handcuffed before they were taken to unmarked cars waiting on Mulberry Street. The three men were driven to the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in separate vehicles. Somehow the press knew about it, so throngs of reporters were waiting for them to get out of their cars in front of the jail on Centre Street. John was dressed up in his dark pinstriped suit; red, gold, and black necktie; and yellow silk scarf, always polished and ready for the cameras. Dad, meanwhile, answered a reporter who was pointing at him and asking, “Is he one of the guys?”

  “No, I got these two guys under arrest,” he joked, motioning to the Feds on either side of him. “Everything’s under control.”

  Once inside the MCC, the men were ordered to surrender their street clothes, everything but their socks. Back at the Ravenite before the arrest, John had commented about how Dad had not dressed for the “occasion,” meaning the arrest, which would turn into a photo op for John. But now that the men were in jail and stripped of everything but their socks, John didn’t seem to mind so much that my dad was wearing thick sweat socks. They were good inside the cold jail. John asked my father if he could borrow them. Dad, ever loyal, took them off and handed them over.

  I knew Dad was a gangster, but I thought the news and newspapers were exaggerating what a mobster was. But with my father’s arrest, I soon learned that I may have been underplaying what it meant to be a gangster. After Dad was arrested, I thought he would be released on bail and be back home with us. We certainly had enough cash to post bail. But that wasn’t the way it worked out. John, Frankie, and
my father were considered dangerous and a threat to society and were held without any bail.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “You’re the underboss of the most powerful crime family in the world.”

  I never got dressed up to visit Dad in jail. There wasn’t any reason to. I wasn’t there to impress anyone. There were only two rules: Don’t wear anything revealing, and don’t wear orange, the color of prison jumpsuits. I never showed much skin, and orange wasn’t a particularly good color for me, so that wasn’t a problem. All I’d do was blow-dry my hair straight and spike it up on top, the standard “Guidette” look of the day. Then I’d throw on some Cavaricci jeans and a baggy sweater. As long as my collarbone was covered, everything was okay.

  The Metropolitan Correctional Center, where Dad was being held, was located in lower Manhattan, right by City Hall, just south of Little Italy. It was kind of ironic to me. When I was a kid, I used to think the cops were the bad guys, not my father.

  The jail was a tall brick building with tiny, skinny windows, so tiny and skinny that I always wondered if the inmates could even see anything out of them. I liked to think they could, because that meant Dad could watch us when we walked back to the car after our visits. John, Frankie, and Dad had been sent there on December 11, 1990. All of them had been charged with multiple counts of murder and racketeering. John and Dad were bunked together in a special wing for high-profile inmates. Frankie was in the same area, but he was in a different cell. Visiting from Staten Island was fairly routine for Mom and me. We went at least once a week.

  My mother was always an obsessively punctual woman, so the days we went to see Dad, she’d insist we leave our house at least two hours before our scheduled visiting time. The visitors were brought in in groups, so if you were late, you might get shoved back two or three groups, which meant another thirty, sixty, or even ninety minutes of standing around the waiting area.

  After we filled out all the proper paperwork, a guard would walk us through a metal detector, then herd us over to a holding area that looked like a small auditorium. There were ten rows of chairs, six seats across. The walls were institutional white. The entire prison felt like a hospital, eerily quiet and antiseptic.

  Each group of visitors was allotted a half hour to visit their loved one or not-so-loved one. Even though Dad was thrilled when we showed up right at our appointed time, our punctuality caused him problems with John Gotti. John’s own visitors, usually his son John Jr. and his brother, Pete, often ran late. He’d complain to Sammy, “It makes me look like a jerkoff that your family’s here first, and my family’s not even here at all. You need to tell them not to get here so early.” I suspected it was less about John looking like an idiot, and more about him wanting to monitor what Dad was saying to us. John liked to be in charge, even in prison.

  My father didn’t want to hear John complain about the time thing, so one day he said to Mom, “Listen, Deb, I know you’re anxious to see me, but from now on, please wait for John Jr. and Pete to be ready, and you guys can all come up together.” Pete, too, was giving Mom shit. He’d say, “Debbie, please wait for us, because when we’re not there on time, John’ll yell, ‘Why’re you guys late? They’re on time. Why can’t you be on time?’”

  John was very meticulous about the way things were done. When someone walked into a room, that person was expected to shake hands with everybody in a certain order. John was first, Dad was second, and so on down the line of command. So in John’s eyes, it was very important for him to be pulled out of his cell at the same time as my father. I never figured out why, it was just the way he wanted it done.

  Dad and John each had a cell in a wing on the south side of the ninth floor, aptly called 9-S. We never saw the cells; they were off limits. We always met the prisoners in the visiting room, a room that was about the size of an elementary school classroom. There were no tables, only chairs set flush against the walls. The inmates were brought in six at a time, and each prisoner was allowed a maximum of three visitors, so there could be as many as twenty-four people in that small room at a time.

  The front wall of the room was clear glass, and there was always a guard or two keeping a close eye on things, or at least on most things. From the moment my father and John arrived at 9-S, the guards were in awe of them, Oh my God, it’s Sammy the Bull and John Gotti! So, during our visits, they’d usually look the other way. The guards weren’t the only ones who were impressed. Other prisoners and their visitors wanted to meet the Bull and the Teflon Don, too. They were stars, especially in New York, where people loved hearing about the Mafia lifestyle. If you were a gangster, you were a celebrity, and Dad and John were on top. Other inmates’ visitors would give them snacks, chips, or a candy bar from the vending machine. More than once, I saw fellow inmates introduce their visitors to the two of them.

  It always amazed me to see the level of respect these men got. In my eyes, even though they were charged with horrible crimes, they still must have been good people because they were so respected by everybody, by men and women, older people, and kids. Although my father and John were being accused of murder, it was hard for me to see them in that light. I loved Dad, and John had always been nice and respectful to me. He seemed like a good family man. He was always sending flowers to friends and family, and people that he cared about.

  My father was more than just a father to me. He was my friend and my protector. It was hard for me to see the other side of him, especially with so many people treating Dad and John the way they did.

  During our visits at MCC, we weren’t allowed to move the chairs, so we’d have to stare at whatever family was seated directly across from us, and the visitors sitting nearby could undoubtedly hear almost everything we were saying. Naturally that meant we could also hear almost anything everybody else was saying, too, but I didn’t want to listen to their conversations. We only had a half hour, and I wanted to focus strictly on my dad, so I always ignored them. Everybody kind of made it a point to ignore other people’s business, anyway. There were different codes of conduct that applied here, and respecting other people’s privacy was an important one. I remember one time, seeing an inmate and his visitor slip into a bathroom together. My father must have noticed me watching, and leaned over and told me to mind my own business. Prison was a whole different world, and you learned very quickly to only pay attention to your own people, the relative or friend in front of you.

  Mom was always physically affectionate with my father during visits, more so than she usually was at home. While we were there, she’d often rub his leg or hold his hand. This hadn’t happened much when Dad was a free man. Mom liked to rub Dad’s head when they were laying on the sofa in the living room, but that was about as touchy-feely as she generally got. But when he was in prison, she missed him and just liked being close to him. When her affection became too noticeable, Dad would say, “Don’t do that in here.” It wasn’t that Dad minded the physical contact, it was that John didn’t like it. “Why are you having your wife rubbing your hand?” John asked my father one time. “You’re the underboss of the most powerful crime family in the world. It shows weakness.”

  Dad and John were only allowed three visitors at a time. There would be special days for family visits, and other days when just the men from Dad and John’s life would visit them. On family days, John’s wife, Victoria, his son Pete, or his daughters, Victoria and Angel, would take turns visiting him. Victoria was a few years older than me, and one time her dad told me that she wanted to be a fashion designer. She always looked well groomed and put together. But I thought she had a certain arrogance to her, just like her dad. She and I would exchange a cordial hello while we waited to see our fathers, but nothing more than that. Mom, Gerard, Aunt Diane, Dad’s sister Fran, and my cousin Rena all took turns visiting with Dad on family day.

  My father handled his prison situation well. A man who was locked up with him told me, “When your father and John came in, all the guys thought they would be these hard-ass b
ig shots. But here comes your father, boxing in the gym, working out.” My father was just like everyone else. He had a way of adapting to whatever environment he was in. That guy knew that my father was someone to be reckoned with, but he could also see that he was fair-minded. People knew how tough he was, so he didn’t need to flaunt it.

  “He never tried to play up that he was the underboss,” the inmate told me. I wasn’t surprised to hear that. He had never played it up outside jail, either.

  John seemed irritated by the ease with which Dad was able to interact with the other inmates. He was particularly bothered that my father enjoyed his time in the jail gym with the other guys. John once told Sammy, “How do you think this is going to look to the other families? What if you get punched in the face? What if somebody hurts you? It’s going to show weakness.” To John, there was nothing worse than showing weakness.

  Dad replied, “Well, that’s what happens when you box, you get hit in the face. You sometimes get banged up.”

  John wanted Dad to conduct himself more like a boss. He felt that he should be in his cell and be catered to as the Number Two man in the Gambino family. But Dad was never the type to have someone else do his laundry. He preferred to take care of his business for himself. Even out on the streets, Dad seemed to have no problem interacting with top men in other families. My father was a natural-born leader, but he also gained his respect and trust because of his long-standing reputation of being both fair and loyal. But instead of John looking at Dad’s social ease and undying loyalty to the people that he cared about as an asset, he viewed it as a threat and resented my father for the good reputation he had built for himself.