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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  A couple of months after visiting my father in Boulder, Lee moved back to New York. True to his word, my father was leaving the witness protection program and moving to Phoenix, and Lee wanted to be gone before that happened. I stayed behind in Arizona for two months, and then joined Lee in Staten Island.

  Lee and I rented a two-bedroom apartment in an elevator building. It was on Wellington Court, near La Tourette Park and the Staten Island Mall. We went out and bought all new couches, a kitchen table, and other furniture, rather than waste the money to ship everything back. Dad respected my wishes that I wanted to return to New York. He felt that he had gotten his message through to Lee when he told him if he was going to be with his daughter, he was going to protect and love me the same way Dad protected and loved me.

  Dad later told me during the meeting in Boulder he had tested Lee to see if he had the ability to kill. He was reading him from every angle. If Lee was in Arizona to set him up, he wanted to know. Lee did not respect authority because of what had happened to his father, Dad said, and he was drawn to the criminal underworld, but he didn’t understand Cosa Nostra. My father didn’t view Lee as a threat to me, but he wanted better for me. He had a feeling that Lee was going to end up in prison.

  After Lee and I got back to New York, our relationship was never the same. I believe the conversation he had with my father that night in Boulder played a key role in our troubles.

  Lee basically told me he didn’t want me to have contact with my father. But he knew I would never go along with it. From that point on, he and I never talked about my father or my relationship with him. I was starting to understand my father and was ready to rebuild our relationship. He was my father, and I missed him.

  Back in New York, Lee and I were going through the motions of being together, but we really weren’t getting along. I think I just stayed with him because I felt comfortable and protected. I really had no contact with my family at that point, and Lee was the closest thing I had to family. However, he had a wicked temper, and he was very controlling.

  No matter what our problems were, however, I still protected Lee, because I felt like he protected me. I knew the fighting wasn’t right; and that true gangsters and true men didn’t lose their cool with women. But I felt that in New York I had no one else to answer to, and I knew that Lee would keep me in check. Being with him gave me a sense of security while I was there.

  After we got back to New York, the Feds updated my father a couple of times about Lee. They told him Lee was involved in bank robbery and was going to end up in serious trouble with the law some day. Dad was concerned about Lee’s behavior. He worried that if our apartment was ever raided with me in there, we were at higher risk because of who my dad was. I would be in deep shit even though I wasn’t doing anything, only because my last name was Gravano.

  Dad told me he had always wanted better for me. He said Lee was a street kid and was always going to be a street kid, robbing and stealing to get by. He was never going to have millions of dollars hidden in the walls. He was always making money here and there, but it wasn’t enough for a rainy day.

  A lot of what Dad said made sense. Lee was conflicted about the relationship, too. He wanted to be in my life, but there was this underlying tension that had to do with my father. Lee had as many misgivings about my father as my father had about him. We were not a happy, loving couple, despite the four years we had been together, though we were not ready to let go.

  * * *

  My relationship with Lee grew toxic. He cheated on me, I cheated on him; it was bad. After one particularly angry blowout, I packed up my suitcase and moved to my grandmother’s house on Fifteenth Avenue in Brooklyn. Grandma Scibetta wintered in Florida, so the place was vacant. I invited a new friend I’d made to move in with me, an Albanian girl named Drita Selmani.

  Drita was dating a guy named Albert, a kid Lee knew from the streets. I had been out with Roxanne Rizzo the night we met. Drita tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I knew this stripper girl. I said, “I know of her, but we’re not friends.” She said, “Good, because I am going to break her face.” Drita was pissed because she believed this girl was banging her boyfriend. I didn’t see what happened, but Drita later told me she beat the girl up right there inside the club. After that, we became fast friends.

  I’d met Drita before Lee and I had moved to Arizona, and we stayed friends while I was in Phoenix, constantly talking on the phone. When I got back, we started hanging out all the time. She used to come over to our apartment on Wellington Court. Sometimes, the four of us, Lee, Albert, Drita, and I, would go on double dates together.

  Like Lee and me, Drita and Albert were on a rocky road. If Lee and I had a fight, Drita was right there. She was my girl. I confided in her, hung out with her, and brought her around my other friends.

  Roxanne and Ramona didn’t like her that much. She wasn’t with us since childhood and they didn’t trust her. Her parents were Albanian immigrants, and she hadn’t grown up in our neighborhood. She was raised very differently from us, but I thought Drita was cool. I wasn’t the type to get caught up in petty girl gossip. I slowly integrated her into our circle.

  After a couple of months living at my grandmother’s, I moved back in with Lee. Drita moved back in with her parents on Staten Island. Lee was still covering all the bills, but I liked to stay independent, so I found a job answering phones for a Russian penny stock trader. I got Drita a job there, too.

  It didn’t take us long to figure out that the company wasn’t legit. Everyone who worked there had a thick Russian accent and went by the name “Richard Smith.” I was being paid eight hundred dollars a week in cash for my secretarial services. It was a good gig and they treated me well, but it was short-lived. I had only been there four months when I arrived for work one morning to find the place shuttered, cleaned out, and closed down. When my secretarial job with the Russians disappeared during the night, I started looking for something else to do.

  My fights with Lee were escalating, so to escape the yelling I started to spend more time at my childhood friend Jennifer Graziano’s apartment in Manhattan. Jenn was breaking up with her boyfriend, and I was at the end of my rope with Lee, so we found comfort in each other.

  Jennifer was a brainiac. She was taking classes at New York University’s Stern School of Business, working on credits toward a master’s degree. She lived in an apartment on Thirty-ninth Street in Manhattan while she was in school. I was there all the time, only going home once in a while to sleep at night.

  Jenn had lived the same kind of life I had lived until my father cooperated. She even had a mother a lot like mine, a very devoted mother, a typical Mafia wife, ask no questions, see no evil, just take care of your family. They kept our homes, cooked our meals, and raised and cared for us kids. They had no external ambitions for themselves, just to make sure their families were happy.

  Now I needed a way to support myself, and that’s where my friend, whom I will call Christina, came in handy. Like me, Christina’s father had mob associations. She also had a boyfriend who was running a marijuana delivery service, and she had been helping him out. But when she had found out he’d been cheating on her, she was so furious that she had stolen and copied his customer list and wanted to start her own business. Did I want to help?

  At that point, I thought it sounded perfect. I didn’t like taking money from Lee. I wanted to be independent.

  We set up our new enterprise with all the props of a legitimate business. We printed up business cards and called ourselves herbalists. We sent a mailing, alerting her boyfriend’s clients that his delivery service had changed its name to Aromatherapy, the name of our newly founded operation.

  “Let us lift your mind with our herbs, flowers and trees straight from the land of Buddha. Our herbalists will take you to higher levels and help you kick back and relax with our Aromatherapy,” the cards read, using innuendoes and street slang used by smokers.

  Christina’s boyfriend, now
her ex, went nuts. Our service hired all girls.

  Christina was the brains. She was able to organize the operation like a business. We had computers, codes, beepers, and coded mail-outs. I was the action, I did the running. I hit the streets and did the legwork. I did not fear getting robbed, knocking on doors, or making deliveries. I said to myself, “I’m bad, I can do this.” I had no fear.

  I was still living with Lee, but he had no idea what I was up to. I didn’t want him to find out because Christina and I were trying to keep a low profile so our fathers wouldn’t find out what we were doing. The one criminal activity the Mafia looked down on was drug dealing. Most people thought Cosa Nostra was big into narcotics dealing, but that was not the case. The Federal RICO Act had strict subjective sentencing guidelines for drug crimes, and had mandatory sentences of twenty or more years with no room for plea bargaining. It wasn’t worth it to lose a man for that kind of time.

  Our business took off immediately. We couldn’t even keep up with the demand. For the first time in a long time, I was having fun and felt as though I was on top of the world. I was dealing with prominent Puerto Rican gang members and other street kids, but I felt I could hold my head up again. I had become my own person, Gina, the marijuana dealer. It made me feel like I was gaining respect.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “There’s a rumor that Sammy’s daughter is running a weed service.”

  It had been my decision to be a drug dealer. I went from being Meadow Soprano in the HBO hit series The Sopranos to Nancy Botwin of Weeds. I became the consummate pusher, on call twenty-four hours a day. The money was rolling in, and Christina and I were spending it just as fast. We were going to clubs, getting tables right next to all the up-and-coming rap and hip-hop superstars like Puffy and Biggie, and drinking expensive top-shelf bottles of champagne. We became known as the “Mafia girls.” Everyone thought we had money because our fathers were gangsters. Little did they know, we were earning it all on our own. I was completely seduced by being in the limelight and got caught up in the celebrity of it all.

  I felt like I was the queen of the universe. I was living in New York and running a marijuana delivery service. As strange as it might seem to those who have only led a legitimate life, I felt I’d regained respect in the streets. My father never sold drugs; he was against them, as most people in the Mafia were. I felt like I was separating myself from his lifestyle and making my own place in a different kind of underworld.

  I took pride in being a drug dealer, making my own money and having people look up to me. I was starting to mimic the lifestyle of my father in his early years. I think that is what happens when you have a strong father figure who is really powerful, you mimic him. I have had guys tell me it is hard to deal with me because I am very strong-minded. I am not a submissive girl. I felt so much pressure after Dad cooperated that I wanted to be bad.

  Christina and I were more scared of getting caught by our fathers than by the cops. We had this secret, this sisterhood, and this loyalty to each other.

  One week, Christina was away on vacation, and I was running everything by myself. Christina and I opened at noon and we closed at midnight, so I was on a tight schedule, running around answering the phones, packaging the weed, and delivering it all by myself. Lee had become highly suspicious of my nights out, and he had decided to follow me. He watched me run up and down the stairs to five different drops in five different apartment buildings, staying at each for a good half hour to make sure the customer was satisfied with the weed and to get the money. I had just left the fifth building when, as I turned the corner, there came Lee. I had a pouch on my waist with cylinders filled with weed. Some were filled with fifty-dollar higher-grade stuff like Purple Haze and Kush. Others were thirty-dollar bags with mid-grade quality.

  “What are you doing?” he yelled.

  I didn’t want him to know I was working in the drug delivery business. He was a criminal, why did I care? But you don’t want your girl doing crime, too. I got all nervous and started stumbling. Lee went to grab my pouch and all the weed spilled out onto the sidewalk.

  “Are you sick?” he yelled at me, both amused and not amused at the same time. “I thought you were a prostitute. I was following you from building to building.”

  “I’m a weed dealer,” I replied.

  “What do you mean you’re a weed dealer?” he said. He went on to say if that was the case, maybe he could help me out with contacts.

  I stayed with Lee for about a year and a half after that, but our fights were becoming more and more volatile to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore. A couple of months after he caught me dealing, I picked up and flew to Arizona on a whim.

  I decided I wanted to go to skin school, so I stayed with my mother and enrolled in a beauty school to get an aesthetician’s license. I figured that way I could take care of myself and use my license anywhere. Christina knew I would be back.

  After four months in Phoenix, I had forgotten the bad stuff and the problems with Lee and couldn’t stay away. I moved back into Wellington Court, excited for a fresh start. It soon became clear that our relationship wasn’t going to work out, as we picked up right where we had left off. I tried to spend as much time away from the apartment as I could, but I realized that I needed to go. Once and for all, I officially moved out.

  Jennifer was now living in Bayside, Queens, and she invited me to move into her two-bedroom condominium. Jenn was still in school, and I picked up with Christina in our weed business right where I’d left off.

  As our business grew, Christina and I talked of expanding. We worked really well together; we were like a power team. Neither one of us had a big ego, so we didn’t step on each other’s toes.

  When I got back to New York, I reconnected with a guy named Dave Seabrook. I had met him in January 1997, right before I moved out to Arizona to go to skin school. I had been partying with my girlfriends at the China Club, our favorite hangout in Times Square, where there were always celebrities from music, sports, fashion, and Broadway in the mix. Dave was there in the company of Jam Master Jay from the hip-hop band Run DMC. I was out to promote my new weed service and handed him a sample bag of Chronic, a high-end weed, to test out.

  “You should try this,” I told him. “It’s Purple Haze. It’s good.”

  “You’re giving it to me?” Dave asked, puzzled.

  I gave him a business card. “My name is Gina and there’s more where that came from.”

  Dave called me the next day.

  “Do you want to buy anything?” I asked.

  “No, I just want to hang out,” he said.

  Dave was African American, handsome, and well dressed. I knew my father would greatly disapprove. Italians really preferred their kids to date their own kind. Dave wasn’t the most upstanding citizen, not even by my standards. He was an ex-street hustler who’d just gotten out of jail after serving six years for robbery and attempted murder.

  Dave had been born and raised in Hollis, Queens. It was a tough neighborhood, and a lot of the kids were into crime. He was sixteen when he and his cousin robbed a store. When they were running away, an off-duty cop tackled his cousin. According to Dave, the kid pulled a gun on the cop, but the officer was unable to pinpoint which of the two had done it. Dave went on the run for over a year, but was finally caught. He refused to implicate his cousin, so he was charged as an adult with attempted murder.

  He spent six and a half years in various prisons in the New York State prison system. It wasn’t his first time behind bars. He had already spent two years in a juvenile facility, so he was used to being locked up. Most of the kids in his neighborhood ended up in prison at one time or another.

  I didn’t care. I was doing everything that was as anti my father as possible. I was dealing drugs, partying, dating bad boys, and having a great time. Dave was different from the other guys I knew. He had a kind of swagger I had not seen before, and I was intrigued by him. He had grown up differently than I had, he�
�d been raised in a different culture and I was attracted to “different” at that time. We’d joke about what we called pasta, I said macaroni, Dave said noodles. The relationship was fresh. It fit into what I was doing.

  I was selling weed and now I had this boyfriend fresh home from the penitentiary. Dave was gangster in a different way. He was more street hood.

  Dave ran with his own crew. He never tried to take me on a date to Sparks Steak House, where all the gangster wannabes still hung out, despite the assassination of Paul Castellano outside of the restaurant more than a decade before. Dave wasn’t very demanding, my new gold standard in a relationship after how controlling Lee had been.

  Dave fit into my lifestyle. I didn’t want anything serious, and he was fine with that. He was friends with hip-hopper Jam Master Jay and had many contacts in the music industry, and he was really fun to be with. Likely, he knew a lot of people and could help us sell some weed, so that was good.

  Christina and I were buying the good stuff from Spanish Harlem and the medium-quality weed from Staten Island. I felt like I had a different kind of control over my life than I had ever had before. There was a consistency to my days, which were orchestrated by me alone. I didn’t feel like the Mafia princess I had been when I was a little girl. Then, people had looked at me like royalty. I’d go to restaurants and get silver spoon service because of who my father was.

  Now, I felt like a boss. Christina and I had jumped into a whole new kind of bad. We were dealing with gangsters, but they didn’t wear suits like John Gotti had. Christina and I were holding our own, getting respect from these people and I liked it.

  We’d been running the weed service for less than two years when I started to feel lonely. I had accepted that Lee and I were done. Although I had friends that were like sisters to me, I still missed my family. It just wasn’t the same. Ramona was rarely around. She was in a serious relationship with a Jordanian guy named Wally. Her family did not approve of the relationship for many reasons, and she was caught up in her own problems. Although I was always there to help her, she was traveling extensively with her new boyfriend, who had business outside of the country.