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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  A lot of people glamorize this lifestyle, and only choose to look at the glitz and the glory, but the cold reality of this world is murder, and that is not something people think about when they romanticize the Mafia. Looking back, families of the Mafia pay the consequences for actions that we had no part in.

  I met the news of my father’s defection and his nineteen murders with a mix of horror and fascination. At the time, the news media was playing it out that John Gotti was the good guy and my father was the cold-blooded killer. As odd as this might sound, after I acknowledged the horror of what Dad had done, I found morbid comfort in knowing that he was such a dangerous man, only because I was so scared of what could happen to Mom, Gerard, and me now that my father had switched sides. Even with him in jail, I hoped that people might think twice before they tried to hurt us. There was one thing I was certain about, that he would go to any length to protect me and my brother.

  Unlike Victoria Gotti, whose father was still revered despite the fact that he was a mob boss and had also been involved in murder, my family lost every shred of respect we’d ever earned in the Mafia underworld. That’s what happened when a person cooperated.

  Dad was the enemy because he had cooperated. He was instantly shunned by his community and was morphed and mutated from Sammy the “Bull” to Sammy the “Rat.” Experts on the Mafia described my father as the highest-ranking American mobster to break his silence and testify, and to this day, there hasn’t been an informant whose impact on organized crime has been so significant. Not even Joe Valachi, a low-ranking member of the Genovese crime family and the first mobster to break the Mafia’s code of silence when he testified before a Senate subcommittee in 1963, had had the impact that my father did.

  John Gotti was considered the most powerful crime figure since Al Capone, and my father was turning his back on him, on the whole mob, for that matter. In that moment, I lost all of the privileges I’d become accustomed to while growing up. But more important, I started questioning my father’s decision, something I never did before in my life. As a child, if my father told me something, I never second-guessed him. I was always content with his answer, but this time, I had a bunch of questions. I started wondering why he was betraying his boss when he had counseled me throughout my lifetime that you never rat out a friend. I was left with all sorts of doubts.

  In the hours after news of my father’s defection hit the newsstands, my three best friends, Jennifer Graziano and Roxanne and Ramona Rizzo, called me to say they were coming by. They were all daughters of men connected to my father’s lifestyle, and we had been lifelong friends. But I was second-guessing everything. I hung up the phone. Oh my God, I thought. Are these girls going to set me up? Deep in my heart, I knew they would never do that. But I still asked myself that question.

  The three pulled up in front of the house but didn’t get out of the car. I scoped out the street before stepping away from the front door, and ran out to talk to them.

  The girls were hysterical. “We’re not allowed to see you anymore,” they sobbed. I was completely devastated. What had I done? Why were people in my circle judging me because of who my father was?

  Although I felt confused, I was smart enough to know that this is what they had to do. We had all been brought up with the same beliefs. By cooperating, my father was going against everything we had been taught, and I am sure that their fathers had wanted them to distance themselves from me, so they didn’t have to be involved in the situation in any way. Still, it felt surreal. I never thought that I would be the one in this position.

  Our friendship almost mimicked that of our fathers’ brotherhood. We were like a sisterhood. We were like our own “crew.” Now, I was forbidden to enter their homes and our sisterhood was being put to the test. “Don’t worry, Karen, we’re going to figure this out,” they promised me. “We love you. We’re like sisters.” I was so relieved when I realized that they would not abandon me.

  Soon after they pulled away, my beeper started going off, and all my other friends were paging me. I couldn’t bring myself to call any of them back. These were friends I’d known my entire life, and I couldn’t bear talking with them. All I could think was, My life’s over. I’m only nineteen, and my life is done.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I, too, was in jail, only I was on the outside, not locked away. It felt like my father had torn me out of my world. At nineteen, I no longer had my father around, and I didn’t know what would happen from one moment to the next. Would my family and friends shun me permanently? I felt angry, abandoned, and alone. But I knew that my father still had people who respected him and would look out for us. Some of the men may have understood why my father cooperated, although they would never say it out loud. Still, they would watch out for me, Mom, and Gerard. Besides, there was that old rule that wives and children were “off-limits.”

  The flower shop my father had given me for my high school graduation present had been a hot spot of activity from the day it opened right up to the day his defection became front-page news. Overnight, customers stopped coming to the store, orders already placed for christenings and parties were canceled, and within weeks I had no choice but to close the doors of Exotic Touch.

  As the daughter of a mobster, I have lived the good and bad sides of the role. I have been indulged in the glitz and the glamour befitting a Mafia princess. But I have also experienced the downside, the fear that comes with living in a house of cards.

  Growing up, I was high on a pedestal. I enjoyed the attention and respect that came with being the daughter of a Mafia boss. But when I fell, it was a long way down. The in-between was just not there for me. When my father cooperated, I was still a kid trying to find my way, even if I was nineteen. I had always been coddled and protected. I was just emerging from my little cocoon and suddenly I had to survive on my own. Now I was trying to figure out who I really was and where in this new world I belonged.

  It was such a critical point in my development. I didn’t know how to move forward, it felt like having your wheels stuck in deep, thick mud. I knew that people were judging me because of who my father was. Although people never said it to my face, they said it behind my back. My girlfriends never made me feel that way. They always had my back. The kids I hung out with in the schoolyard had it, too, believe it or not. I really didn’t care at this point what everyone else thought, as long as I had my girlfriends and some loyal friends at the schoolyard. Dad’s friends backing away from us was starting to mean less and less to me. I had my own group of people that cared about me.

  My rebellion against my father and his entire way of life started now.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “The most significant witness in the history of organized crime in the United States.”

  Mom sent out a message to everyone she knew saying we were not a part of my father’s decision in the slightest and that we were not going into witness protection. We communicated with my father by phone, but we stopped all visits. From time to time, I would still see the agents who had arrested my father drive past the house. They would drive by slowly, making sure I saw them if I was outside. Now that my father was gone, I always wondered why they continued to watch us. It was like they were doing it to bother me. But Dad later told me that the agents who had had him under surveillance for years had grown fond of him. They were the same guys who had watched me sneak out of the house all those times, and with Dad in prison, they felt an obligation to protect us.

  When Dad and I did speak on the phone, our conversations were very superficial. I was sincere when I told him I missed him. I really and truly did. I didn’t want to hurt him, either. But I was very angry and confused and said a lot of hurtful things anyway.

  Now that my father’s secret life was being played out in the media, I just zoned out. I was in a state of total rebellion, I spent the next several months partying my ass off in New York City. I went to clubs, drank, danced, and smoked weed to excess. My mother tried talking to m
e, but I tuned her out. My friends weren’t concerned about what my father had done. They looked at me as me, and that felt good.

  Four months after my father cooperated, John Gotti’s trial got under way. I tried to block the whole thing out, hard as it was. John had asked Mom to come to court and sit in on the proceedings to distract my father when he was testifying. She said she couldn’t do it, and John understood. This wasn’t her lifestyle on trial, and she was staying away.

  My mother, Gerard, and I went to California for the duration of the proceedings. I didn’t want to be in New York, opening up the newspaper every day and seeing a picture of my father with a rat’s head on it. It really bothered me to see that picture. I knew in my heart that my father wasn’t cooperating because he was scared of going to jail for the rest of his life, yet that’s what people were saying about him. I understood that it was way deeper than what it looked like to the outside world, yet I did the right thing and said nothing.

  John had a reputation for tampering with the jury, so all the jurors were sequestered for the monthlong trial. The news was calling it the Trial of the Century. Prosecutors were calling my father “the most significant witness in the history of organized crime in the United States.”

  My father was on the witness stand for nine grueling days. Although my mother did not agree to sit in the courtroom to intimidate Dad, Joey D’Angelo, the son of Dad’s best friend Stymie, had agreed to be in the front row of the gallery the day my father took the stand. Dad was steamed at John Gotti for bringing the kid to the trial. My father had always been torn about bringing Joey into the life. This wasn’t the path that most of the men wanted for their children, but after Stymie died, Joey was stuck to my father like glue and looked up to Dad like a father figure. Dad worried that if he chased him away, Joey would find another way to get into the life, so he had taken him under his wing, Dad’s way of keeping him close.

  Dad knew that Gotti had asked Joey to come to court to stare him down. John was doing everything he could to break my father. At one point during Dad’s nine days on the stand, a woman came into the courtroom screaming that Sammy had killed her sons. Dad didn’t even know who she was; he’d never seen her before. All of a sudden court deputies were racing to tackle the woman.

  But Dad was unflappable, and remained stoic throughout the trial. Every time John tried to break him, it only made him stronger.

  On April 2, 1992, after fourteen hours of deliberations, the jury found John Gotti guilty on thirteen counts of murder and various other crimes. Frank Locascio was found guilty of conspiracy to murder and of money laundering, among other things. The judge who presided over the cases, Leo Glasser, called my father’s testimony “the bravest thing” he had ever seen. Both John and Frank were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Gotti was flown to the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, where he spent most of his sentence in solitary confinement until he died of throat cancer on June 10, 2002. Frankie went to a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, but was moved to the Federal Medical Center in Devens, Massachusetts, in April 2010.

  Dad’s testimony also helped send thirty-seven other members of organized crime to prison, among them Gambino crime family bosses and high-ranking members of the Genovese, Colombo, and DeCavalcante crime families.

  After the Gotti trial, Mom, Gerard, and I returned to Staten Island. Dad remained in protective custody in a federal facility and was later sent to Phoenix, Arizona. He was not formally sentenced until September 1994. By then, he had already served most of his five-year sentence, which was to be followed by three years of controlled release.

  I was a lot like my father, but it was impossible to wrap my head around what he had done. I also couldn’t ignore the hurtful things being whispered about my family. Even Aunt Fran and Uncle Eddie were distancing themselves from us.

  For a time, I continued to live at home in Staten Island. I was still a teenager and cared deeply about my image and what other people thought about me. I was confused about the choice my father had made. The more articles that came out about him, the more rebellious I became, and the more I felt I had something to prove. Mom was also feeling the rejection. Her friends had been distancing themselves from her, and she, in turn, started withdrawing. People were afraid of what others might think if they were seen hanging around with us. People who owed my father money just walked away. It wasn’t right.

  Oddly, my brother, Gerard, wasn’t shunned. He was younger than me and his friends in the neighborhood didn’t seem to care about Dad’s cooperation one way or the other. He continued to hang out with his friends and went about his normal routine. His friends weren’t old enough to be wannabes yet. And a lot of his friends’ parents weren’t connected. But I was still struggling with that ridiculous question that wouldn’t leave me alone: which person was I, the upstanding one or the sinister one? I had a choice to make. I could divorce myself from “the life” and start a new one for myself.

  I felt more comfortable being bad. That was my father’s world, and even though it was an ominous one, it gave me some sense of safety and protection. I was comfortable in its familiarity. With a false sense of invincibility, I began to channel my father as I wound my way through the New York City street life.

  In my heart, I had wanted to divorce myself from the decision my father had made to cooperate. The criminal life came so easily to me. I didn’t realize it, but I was carrying on my father’s legacy. I didn’t know any other way. My sole purpose was to try to regain for myself the respect my father had squandered. I was convinced that being bad was the only way. I put on this tough girl persona. It was my way of blocking out what was going on inside me. The truth was I was mad at my father, but I was still missing him. I felt angry and confused.

  I didn’t mind when the flower shop closed. I didn’t think I was cut out to be a florist anyway. I went to St. John’s University in Staten Island for a semester, but I dropped out. Tommy and I had broken up after three years and I had a new boyfriend, Lee D’Avanzo, the leader of our neighborhood crew. He had a reputation as a real bad boy. I felt that if I was with him, nobody was going to say shit about me.

  Lee was tall, with a very dark complexion and big, olive-shaped brown eyes. He was handsome, and he had this certain toughness that I was attracted to, he had a leadership quality in him. He was three years older than me, and he lived a couple of blocks away from the schoolyard where we hung out.

  I’d known Lee for years. My father had actually saved his life when he was younger. Back when I was dating Tommy, Dad had come home from the gym one day and asked me to get him something out of his gym bag. Inside the bag, he had a list with three names. One of them was Lee’s.

  “Why do you have these names?” I asked him.

  My dad said, “Do you know these kids?”

  I answered, “I do.”

  We started talking specifically about Lee.

  My dad inquired, “Is he a good kid?”

  I had heard things he had done, like stealing hubcaps and other stuff from cars. I knew he was a tough kid. He had been raised by his mother, after his car-thief father was killed by the Feds outside a chop shop. He found out about it when he was a kid, just coming in from trick-or-treating one Halloween.

  Everybody in the house was crying. He asked his mother what time his father would be back, and she said never, and not to mention his name again. Eventually, Lee found out about the shootout and hated the Feds and the government for what they had done to his family. He became the breadwinner at a very young age, and his mother looked the other way as long as money was coming in.

  Dad didn’t know any of this history, but if I knew Lee, that was good enough for him. He said, “Do me a favor, can you get this kid to come and see me tomorrow? Tell him not to leave his house until he comes to see me.”

  I called Tommy and asked him if he could reach out to Lee, and have him come to my house. Lee and Tommy knew each other from the schoolyard. They ran in a
mutual crowd. Lee got the message, and showed the next day. Lee had been in a fight a couple of days earlier and had beaten up a wiseguy’s nephew. This wiseguy had put a hit out on Lee. He wanted to send a message to the Springville boys, to let them know that if they were going to be on the streets running around, they needed to know there was a code. My father explained that Lee and his friends had to be careful about who they beat up. They also had to answer to someone in organized crime, since the families ran the streets. Lee agreed, thanking my father for saving his life. After that, Lee seemed to watch out for me. He may have felt some sort of loyalty to Dad. A couple of years later we started dating.

  Lee wasn’t much for the city, so we hung out at clubs on Staten Island or in Brooklyn. On weekends, we’d go to Hunter Mountain or the Hamptons. At this time the only thing that really mattered to me was my social life. Once in a while, I’d talk to Dad on the phone, but I was pretty much living it up to get him out of my mind. My mother was worried about my reckless behavior, but I shrugged off her concern.

  By this point, Lee and I were pretty serious. We had been dating for nearly two years. Dad was serving his sentence in Arizona. My mother spoke to Dad regularly to keep him updated on the family. I didn’t visit him, but I spoke to him on the phone from time to time. Not long after one of their conversations, Mom announced that we were moving to Arizona. The FBI had visited Dad in prison and told him they had credible information that there was a possible hit on Gerard’s life, so she wanted to get us out of New York.