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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  “Walk with me,” he said.

  We went for a walk like I used to do all the time with my father, only this time I was talking about my father. At the time, I didn’t know that Uncle Eddie had decided not to go along with my father.

  “Where are we going to live?” I asked.

  “We’re staying put for the time being. You, your mother, and Gerard will stay in the house, and I will take care of the business and I will take care of you.”

  Then, he patted me on the head and said, “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  It was very confusing to me. I felt like I still had so many questions, but I didn’t want to ask.

  During the next week, business at the flower shop was normal. No one except Uncle Eddie seemed to know anything, and he appeared to be fine. We didn’t really talk about Dad’s decision at home. One night, Mom took me out to eat at the local diner. She told me that she would always protect Gerard and me. I told her that I would never go into the witness protection program, and she assured me that we would not have to do that. I could see that she was very hurt by my father, and that she was angry. But she didn’t bash him or speak badly of him. “We’re on our own,” she said.

  I think we both felt that we wanted no part of Dad’s cooperation, although neither one of us was ready to cut him out of our lives completely.

  I couldn’t understand why Dad was doing what he was doing. I asked my mother if she could explain it, but she didn’t really have any answers, either. All she said was that this was probably the hardest thing my father ever had to do in his life. And she knew that he loved us, no matter what.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “You’re not going to get shot in the head.”

  Right before news of Dad’s cooperation was made public that November, Dad called my mother. He signed his agreement to testify against John Gotti in exchange for up to twenty years in prison for all previous crimes. He put his own conditions into the agreement, saying he wasn’t going to testify against anyone on his own crew. He told my mother he wanted to see us one last time. He had already been moved from the MCC to the Marine base at the FBI’s headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, so we would have to travel there.

  Later that day, quite out of character, my mother announced she wanted to take my brother and me shopping at the Woodbridge Center Mall in New Jersey. As soon as we stepped out of our car, we were approached by FBI agents who instructed us to get into their black SUV. The agents were the same men I had seen on television taking my father, John, and Frankie into custody at the Ravenite.

  Dad really wanted to speak to us. He wanted to explain his side. And he wanted to make sure we were okay. He wanted to see us one last time.

  I couldn’t believe it was really happening. My father was going to betray the Godfather. In my heart, Dad had betrayed me, as well. He had broken his word. Here was my father, who’d given me a certain code of honor, albeit a twisted one. But it was all I knew, and he had violated that code. I was fit to be tied. In a few short hours, I would become known to the world as the rat’s daughter. At least he had bars to protect him. I was out there, a moving target in a hostile world.

  I looked at my mother and defiantly declared, “I am not going.”

  “Yes, you are,” she replied. “If you never want to see your father again after this, you don’t have to. Just go this one time, for me.”

  I don’t know why my mother agreed to the meeting. I know she still loved my father and wanted to hear what he had to say. She didn’t agree with what he was doing, but she was also confused, scared, and looking to him for answers. In her heart, she knew that my father loved his family more than anything and that no matter what decision he made, he would always guide us in the right way. Mom had never had to make decisions without him before. I wondered if part of her believed that by going to the prison, she could convince him to change his mind. Or maybe she hoped that he would direct her as to how to carry forward when the story hit the news.

  The next thing I knew, we were on our way to the airport to catch a chartered plane heading for Quantico.

  “You have to be kidding me,” I said in a sarcastic tone, as the agents led me onto the five-seater airplane. I was fuming mad and needed to let it out.

  “Karen, please don’t do this,” my mother pleaded.

  Gerard, as usual, remained passive, going along with everything. At fifteen, he didn’t understand how complex and earth-shattering everything that was about to happen really was. He just wanted to see our father.

  “I hope this plane crashes and we all die!” I said during the ninety-minute flight to our destination.

  Dad was waiting for us in a hotel room close to the FBI headquarters. He looked good. He was in shape and in strong spirits. I was surprised to see how confident he was.

  “How are you doing?” he asked when he saw us, as if nothing at all had changed.

  At that moment, I just wanted to be his little girl again. I wanted to throw myself into his arms where I would be safe and protected. I wanted to tell him something new I had learned that day. But I was far too angry for that feeling to last, and I threw myself down in a chair across the table from him. “I’m not going into witness protection!” I objected.

  That was my greatest fear, that not only would I be ripped out of my former life but I’d be sent to Nebraska to become a cow herder.

  “No one’s asking you to go into witness protection,” my father assured me.

  “I’d rather get shot in the head than go into witness protection,” I wailed.

  “You’re not going to get shot in the head,” said Dad, discounting that fear as well.

  “How do you know?” I demanded. I wanted my father to stop this new destiny immediately and was convinced I could persuade him to change his mind. Seeing me so upset would surely convince him. I was hoping that I could have my way if I applied the right amount of childish protest. At that moment, I just wanted my family back. I just wanted my father to come home. I was overcome by a strong feeling of abandonment, even though my father was standing right in front of me.

  Dad and I talked for a while. During our meeting, Mom made it clear that we would not join him in witness protection, but she would never do anything to hurt him. She didn’t cry that day, but I did.

  I had always thought of my father as the decision maker and my mother as the one who went along with him. But today, she was taking a stand for herself. I had never seen her like this before. There was no arguing or fighting, as we all shared our feelings. Mom surprised me when she told Dad how she felt and what she intended to do.

  Dad hadn’t called us there to persuade us to join his team. He explained why he was cooperating. We told him we understood his position, but we didn’t agree with it.

  Mom advised him that we would be staying on Staten Island. Dad asked that we keep an open line of communication. He wanted to be able to check in on his kids. We agreed to stay in touch. We had never been a part of his world and we weren’t going to start now.

  When I walked out of the hotel room that afternoon, I didn’t know if I would ever see my father again. Even though I was still angry, I was also ambivalent. But I realized that when people make a decision, it is their decision, and I can’t change it. I was heartsick. I just wanted to go home to Staten Island.

  By the time we arrived home from Virginia that evening, the story of Dad’s cooperation had already hit the airwaves. It was breaking news on the radio and on television. CNN was carrying the story nonstop. News reporters were even breaking into television programs, the story was so big. Reporters were already gathered outside of our house on Lamberts Lane when we pulled up that night. We had an electric garage door, so Mom drove the car straight into the garage, and shut the door behind us.

  Not long after we got inside, the doorbell rang. It was Uncle Eddie, “Big Louie,” Huck, and some other guys from Dad’s crew. Looking at their expressions, I guessed everybody felt the same way I felt, brokenhearted. They had been cl
ueless that Dad was going to turn and were all in shock—except for Uncle Eddie, who was only pretending to be in shock.

  One by one, they hugged Mom. Uncle Eddie asked my mother for whatever guns or silencers were in the house. She handed them over. She also gave him all of the books and ledgers of all the money that Dad was owed from people on the streets. We did have money stashed away, but no one asked for the money. I guess that wasn’t important to the men.

  The guys were in the house for a while. Mom made coffee for everyone. I could tell she was nervous. She assured the guys that she didn’t approve of Dad’s cooperation, and that she had no intention of leaving Staten Island to join him. Big Louie delivered a message from John. He told Mom that John realized that she was a woman and not a gangster, and that she had had nothing to do with my father’s decision. He sent his assurance that nothing would ever happen to her or her children.

  Uncle Eddie came into the kitchen, sat down at the table and said, “I can’t believe Sammy would do this. Debbie, when he calls, you have to talk him out of it! Tell him to take himself out, to do what he has to do.”

  While Uncle Eddie was making his rant, I got a drink out of the refrigerator. Big Louie had been watching me and asked if I was okay. I did everything I could to hold back tears. “Yes,” I stuttered.

  Uncle Eddie pointed at me and said, “How could he do this to you? You tell him he needs to do what he has to do if he calls. He can’t go through with this. He has to take himself out.”

  I was confused by the way Uncle Eddie was acting. I didn’t know the extent to which he had agreed to help my father, or if he had at all. But I knew he had been in that meeting with me and Dad at the jail when he first told us about his decision.

  Did he really want me to tell Dad to kill himself? “Okay,” I said, not sure how to feel. I was scared, angry, confused, hurt, and alone.

  Right then, Gerard was walking down the stairs. He took everything in for a few seconds, then turned right around and went back upstairs.

  That night, my father called the house collect. He was now back in protective custody at Quantico. He asked me how I was, and I responded in disbelief. “How am I? How do you think I am? It’s all over the news. They are calling you a rat. Why are you doing this to us? Please don’t do this, you can’t go through with it.” I was crying, and my crying got him choked up. It was the weakest I’d ever heard him sound, but I was really mean in spite of myself. I just couldn’t stop assailing him.

  He didn’t answer my brokenhearted questions, and he asked instead, “Who’s at the house right now?”

  I answered, “Uncle Eddie and Louie and everyone.” Then I passed on Eddie’s message.

  Dad knew exactly what “do what he has to do” meant. He said, “You’re right, I can’t go through with this, I can’t cooperate. This is not me.”

  I felt relieved to hear that he couldn’t cooperate. But then I realized what that meant. He had gone too far to turn back now. So by him saying I can’t go through with it, he meant he was going to kill himself.

  I started bawling. I could hear Dad trying to reassure me that it was going to be okay. But I couldn’t stop crying. “I don’t know who to trust,” I wailed. “I don’t know what to do.” I handed the phone to my mother.

  Later, Dad told me that our conversation that night had been one of the most horrible moments of his life. He said he really hit rock bottom. To hear his kid so confused and so hurt by his actions was devastating. He couldn’t imagine what I was going through, feeling so scared and unsure of who to trust. I didn’t know this then, but my father had told Eddie that if he couldn’t go through with his decision, that he wanted him to bring cyanide to the prison so that he could end his life.

  Uncle Eddie told us that he was going to give us something to bring to Dad. I didn’t ask any questions, but I assumed that it was something for him to use to kill himself. The whole scene was surreal. People he’d known all his life were asking me to help him commit suicide. I was beside myself and I couldn’t take it anymore. Bawling my eyes out, I ran up the stairs to my bedroom. I had to escape the kitchen to keep my sanity.

  Uncle Eddie followed up the stairs right behind me. He looked me in the eyes, and he said, “I’m your father now, don’t ask no questions, and you don’t talk about nothing.”

  “I’m your father now,” he repeated. “Your father left you, so I am going to be the one to take care of you and you need to respect me.”

  “But Uncle Ed…” I started without getting very far. I wanted to ask him what was going to happen next.

  “But Uncle Ed nothing,” he interrupted. “I’m your father now. What I say goes.”

  About a half hour later when the house was finally empty, I asked my mother why she didn’t say anything when everyone was in the kitchen. “Trust me. Your father’s not going to take himself out. Don’t trust anyone. We’re on our own now.”

  I realized that night that even though my father was really close to these men, they were no longer his family. They had been so loyal to him that he had once considered them brothers. But Dad had switched sides, so those days were over. I was so blown away. I was nineteen and I wasn’t a gangster. I didn’t understand a gangster’s life, even though I was a gangster’s daughter. I certainly didn’t know what the hell I was going to do next.

  That night, for the first time in my life, I understood what Cosa Nostra was really about. It was about choosing the family over our family, an ancient loyalty to the greater cause.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “R.I.P.”

  That night, I went to bed with nightmares about cyanide. I felt like some of the people who had been friends of the family were now our enemies, but I didn’t know which ones were which. I had never had to trust Mom to be the one to keep us safe, and here she was, at the helm for the first time and in god-awful conditions, in the middle of a terrible tempest.

  The next morning, I got the shock of my life when I saw the headline in the New York Post—R.I.P.—with the names of Dad’s nineteen murder victims on tombstones. Sammy the Bull, my father, had killed nineteen people. It was there on the paper’s front page that I discovered what my father had really been doing all those years. I had been given little hints throughout my childhood that something was not aboveboard in the Gravano home, and I had spent a good deal of my childhood trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Maybe I should have figured it out the first time Dad made the Post headlines, but I was only a kid back then.

  For hours, I stared at the Post’s front page. The article said that the murders had started before I was born. The most recent was only two years earlier. The tombstones all had names on them, some of whom I recognized as onetime family friends, like Louie Milito and Mikey DeBatt.

  Louie’s daughter, Dina, was a friend of mine. I even remembered when her dad went missing. Dina had come to our house tearfully asking my father to help find him. Dad and Louie had been lifelong friends. Mikey DeBatt was Dad’s bouncer at The Plaza Suite, and had been in on the hit on Fiala. My father had always talked highly of Mikey. But his addiction to crack cocaine had made him a liability. The details of Paul Castellano’s and Frank Fiala’s murders were also in there. Dad hadn’t actually pulled the trigger on Fiala, but he had orchestrated the hit and spat on his corpse.

  From the article in the Post, I learned that Paul Castellano’s assassination was a total mob execution arranged by John Gotti, who had feared that Paul was going to kill him because John’s crew had been selling drugs behind Paul’s back. A four-man hit team, wearing tan trench coats and black Russian hats, had carried out the hit. Castellano was in his car on his way to a dinner meeting at Sparks Steak House. Dad and John Gotti were parked across the street from the restaurant in John’s Lincoln, watching out for Paul’s arrival. A second hit team was down the sidewalk in case the first four marksmen missed. My dad was another backup shooter, but the execution went down without a hitch, everybody escaped, and John became the boss.

&nbs
p; I kept looking at the names on the nineteen tombstones. To my abject horror, one of them carried the name of my mother’s brother, Uncle Nicky Scibetta.

  For years, I’d thought that my uncle had simply vanished, that he had run away. I later heard that his hand was found, and we all assumed he was dead. Uncle Nicky’s death had been the first loss I had ever had to deal with. It still affects me to this day. I had been very close to him. He and I used to go together to the park, and he would take me to Nellie Bly Amusement Park near my grandparents’ house in Brooklyn, where we would go on the carousel.

  I tried not to think about what could have happened to him. Even after my family held a memorial service for him, I continued to imagine that he would come home to us one day. His death was something that I had always blocked out as too painful to deal with. As a family, we never really talked about Uncle Nicky’s passing. Now it was in the newspaper that my father had had a hand in it, and I didn’t know how to feel.

  At first, I was extremely angry and lashed out at him when he called on the phone. I didn’t want to bring it up to my mother. I could see it was something that hurt her deeply also, and she told me she didn’t want to talk about it with me, ever. To this day, we have never discussed it. I can’t speak for her, but for me, it took a long time. Like my mother, my grandparents also chose not speak about Uncle Nicky. The one thing my grandmother did say was, “The day I learned your father was involved was the day I lost two sons.”

  I’d never really thought about the murder part before, not even when it came to Uncle Nicky. I did a good job of blocking it out. I may have suspected that murder was a part of my father’s life, but I’d never really thought about the men who lost their lives. The way it was portrayed, it seemed like all of the casualties had been involved in this life in one way or another. They knew what they were getting into and that murder was a part of it. Those who were not made men but chose to be around these men, and dared to rob, steal, or violate them, also knew the consequences. These were men who had chosen this life and were fully aware that murder was a part of it. And, in fact, many had committed murder themselves.