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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  “And you shouldn’t live with regrets from your past, you should just look toward your future.”

  I felt like we had moved closer to a reconciliation that night. My father seemed to be more honest with his answers than I had anticipated. A lot had happened to me these last seven years because of his choices. I always seemed to be reacting instead of initiating things and thinking them through. I had been vacillating between being bitter about my father and wanting to forgive him and move forward. But we still had a lot more work to do.

  Even though Dad had opted out of the witness protection program in Boulder, in Phoenix he was still living under the alias of Jimmy Moran. He was the highest-ranking gangster to ever break the blood oath of silence. He had gotten a lot of people sent to jail, and the ones who were still out were mad about that.

  The FBI gave him as much protection as it could. They were concerned about him living his life so openly, and would check in on him from time to time. But my father refused to live his life in fear. He was already hard at work, doing the best he could to move forward. Back in his “Gambino days,” a large part of his income was money he made skimming from the top and controlling the unions.

  Now, in Phoenix, he had started several legitimate ventures. He had a construction company called Marathon Development, the same name as his construction company in New York. The business made nice money in home building. My father also had the pool installation company, Creative Pools, which was where he employed me. He was excavating and installing in-ground pools for people all over the Phoenix area. He seemed very excited to welcome me on board.

  He had talked Mom and Gerard into selling the bagel business, which he didn’t think was earning enough, and he bought a high-end restaurant in Scottsdale, fifteen miles from downtown Phoenix. My mother managed it, and my brother was the chef. Gerard had gone to culinary school in Arizona and loved to cook, so Uncle Sal’s was the perfect place to show off his skills in the kitchen.

  Sammy Gravano, still known as Jimmy Moran to everybody who wasn’t family, was a regular. He was hardworking and well liked. It looked like everything was finally coming together for him in Phoenix. On some days, being with him brought me back to 1989, when I ran the Exotic Touch that was connected to his construction office in Brooklyn.

  As time went by, my father’s real name and true identity became known. In contrast to what many people in the New York community felt about my father and his decision to cooperate, people in Arizona were attracted to him, both as the real-thing New York mobster and as the country’s most famous gangster to turn state’s evidence. They thought it was cool to be close to us, the Gravanos.

  The amount of status and respect was totally welcomed by Gerard and me, too. For a while, it gave us back the sense of reverence that we had left behind in New York. People kind of worshipped us again. Of course, this was the kind of respect that attracted the wrong types of people, but I was not conscious of this at the time. I was thrilled to be popular instead of shunned.

  Dad was so proud to have me back.

  Three weeks after I had settled back into life in the southwest, my brother’s infant son, Nicholas, was diagnosed with spinal meningitis. Gerard and his longtime girlfriend had moved in together to raise the baby. Doctors didn’t think the child would survive. He made it, but his brush with death was a turning point for me. I decided I never wanted to be so far away from my family again.

  I was harboring a secret from them, however. The previous week, I had learned that I was pregnant, and Dave Seabrook was the father. I didn’t want to tell anyone, not even Dave at first. At the time, I knew I was in love with him, but I had made the decision to leave him behind when I left New York. I wasn’t sure myself what I was going to do about the pregnancy. I briefly thought about aborting, but I couldn’t go through with it. I was in Arizona to make a fresh start, but what I quickly learned was that you can’t leave the life behind.

  The hardest person to tell about my pregnancy was my father. I knew he wouldn’t approve. Dave had two things going against him. First, he was an ex-con. I was sure Dad would not like the fact that Dave had been in prison for robbery and attempted murder. Second, he was black and I was concerned that my father wouldn’t understand that. When Dad pictured his little girl getting married, he’d had a legitimate businessman, a doctor, a lawyer, or even a construction guy in mind. Dad had been relieved when I came out to Arizona and left Lee behind, and here I was with another street guy. I remember practicing for an hour how I was going to break the news to him. Basically, nothing I had rehearsed came out when I finally sat down on the couch next to him in Mom’s living room.

  “I’m pregnant with a black man’s baby,” I blurted out.

  Dad looked at me kind of in shock. “Okay, is this some random black man? Or do you know him?”

  “I know him.”

  Dad stood up, grabbed his car keys, and left the house.

  The next day I called him and asked if I could come over and talk. He said yes, so I brought Mom and Gerard with me for reinforcements. We sat down in his living room. The first words out of my mouth were, “Are you going to kill him?”

  “No, but I can tell you this much, if I was still in New York, I probably would have killed him, and not because of whether he is black or white but because of the way you told me and the lack of respect I feel you have for me.”

  My father never taught me to judge people by color or race. He had always taught me to judge a person on his character, and I let him know that I believed that Dave was a good person. And I also felt that he would be a good man to our child.

  My father was not happy that Dave was a street kid, because he wanted a better life for me. He wanted to know how he was planning to provide for me and his soon-to-be granddaughter. I told him that I was confused. That Dave would be leaving New York to come here, and that he would try to find work in Phoenix. I think Dad’s disappointment was that I just came home pregnant and that he hadn’t gotten a chance to know my boyfriend and the future father of my first child. But he gave me his word that he would allow Dave to come around him and welcome him into his life, if that was what I chose to do. Dad was a man of his word.

  Dave flew out to Arizona to meet Dad. I was freaking out a little bit. I was worried how things were going to go.

  I picked Dave up at the airport and we drove to Mom’s house. Dave came in the house and my mother welcomed him. That night, my father, mother, Dave, and I went out to dinner. I was nervous that my father was meeting him and I was already pregnant. Dave seemed calm.

  Dad and Dave joked about prison. Dad let Dave know that he didn’t want a street guy for his daughter. He wanted to know his reason for wanting to come to Arizona, and what his intentions were in terms of making a living and supporting me and the baby.

  I didn’t want anything to go wrong. I had decided I really wanted the baby and I didn’t want there to be any tension or bad feelings between my father and the man that I was with. The get-together went okay.

  Dave moved to Arizona, rented an apartment, and found a job as a plumber. Everything seemed to be going fine. Dave even went out and bought me a ring because he knew how important being married was to Italian families. Dave went to my father to ask for my hand, and Dad said, “If you can tame her, and you can live with her for the rest of your life, then good luck, I give you my blessing.”

  It seemed like everything in Arizona was coming together. I had a job, Dave had a job, I had a baby on the way, Gerard and Mom were running the restaurant, and Dad was in construction. Dave proposed to me, and I said yes. But we were going to take it day by day. We knew we were having a girl, and I wanted to wait to get married until after the baby was born.

  I was getting ready to move into the apartment with Dave when Dad suggested that he move in with my mother and me to save money.

  “You guys can help her with the bills. You can start looking for a place, you can put away some money, you can get your credit right, and some time in t
he future you can get a house,” he instructed. So Dave moved in with Mom and me.

  Not long after Dave got out there, my brother split up with his girlfriend again. They were on again and off again, and I worried that he didn’t have any friends outside of their relationship. Gerard was still the chef at Uncle Sal’s in Scottsdale. I was encouraging him to have some fun, make new friends and build a new life. But change is always hard.

  Around then, my cousin Gina started dating a guy named Michael. Michael was also a chef at Uncle Sal’s and a partner in the business. He was a party animal. Gina was in her late teens, but wasn’t into the party scene like Michael was. She and Michael were going out to the nightclubs. I stayed behind at home; I didn’t like partying pregnant. I was always tired and nauseous and just wanted to go to bed. I encouraged Dave to go out with Michael and make some friends. To help business at the restaurant, Michael started inviting lots of people he was meeting to patronize Uncle Sal’s.

  My father had written a book with journalist Peter Maas called Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano’s Story of Life in the Mafia. Maas had also written The Valachi Papers and Serpico. The book was a sensation. Dad had been interviewed by Diane Sawyer on Prime Time Live. The segment, which aired on April 16, 1997, was watched by millions of people across the country. As part of the conditions of the interview, they met in a mutually agreed-upon setting far from Phoenix. Sawyer protected Dad’s whereabouts. She put it like this: “We should point out we do not know where Gravano lives. We agreed to meet him at an inn in a remote valley in California.

  “But as you’ll see, amazingly, he’s not in disguise. He says he’s prudent, but he’s not the kind of guy who lives in fear.” So, Dad’s face was out there.

  The Prime Time interview caught the attention of a local reporter from the Arizona Republic, Dennis Wagner, who did a little digging and learned that Gerard Gravano had been arrested on drug charges in Phoenix the year before. The arrest had been when Gerard had tried to mail me the pound of marijuana.

  After a little more nosing around, Wagner found out that Sammy the Bull was also in Phoenix. With the national attention my father got from being on Diane Sawyer, and having a bestselling book, Wagner knew he had a hot scoop when he found Dad.

  The FBI tried to stop the newspaper from publishing Wagner’s story. Even though my father had signed himself out of witness protection, they tried to offer him the best protection they could. The agents most familiar with him even stopped by to hang out if they were in the Phoenix area. Dad wasn’t too happy when the reporter started showing up at the restaurant and at Dad’s construction office; he even started calling my mother’s house trying to speak to any one of us. Dad agreed that it was better to give Wagner the story and just meet with him so that he would go away.

  Against the objections of the FBI, the Arizona Republic printed the article with the headline “SAMMY THE BULL SURFACES IN THE VALLEY OF THE SUN.” My father was still good at being a cover story; that much was for sure.

  When the article was published and everyone in the Phoenix area learned who Jimmy Moran was, my father’s businesses suffered. At first, Dad’s customers at the pool business were nervous to patronize him, so things slowed down there. But nervousness came with a certain amount of intrigue and the restaurant became more popular. People fascinated by us starting coming into Uncle Sal’s to catch a glimpse of one of us. Unfortunately, some of them were the wrong kind of people, drug dealers, petty thugs, and those who looked up to that kind of lifestyle. The FBI was very concerned about that. My father was not supposed to hang out with the criminal element, and he stopped coming around.

  “I’m going to lay low for a while,” he told us. “I’m just going to do my construction, go to the gym, and go home at night.” However, he loved Gerard’s cooking. He couldn’t pass up a good meal. He would sneak into the restaurant, pick up takeout, and sneak back out. He was in the background stopping by on his way home, in and out to pick up his food.

  Meanwhile, Gerard and I were soaking up the attention. It felt good to be back on top. We were making all these new friends, mostly tough guys who frequented the nightclubs and were involved in dealing drugs. Arizona, like New York and every other place in the world, was an active market for illegal drugs. Ecstasy was the up-and-coming high, all the local nightclubs were flooded with it. It only made sense that local drug dealers would search out and befriend my brother, a real Gravano.

  One of the local dealers was a college kid, a former New Yorker by the name of Mike Papa. I met him for the first time on New Year’s Eve 1999. He came across as very studious. He was going to Arizona State University, and taking pre-med classes. He loved hanging around with Gerard, almost like a stalker. His brother had gotten in trouble and needed a lawyer, and so Gerard referred him to the attorney that Gerard had used for his marijuana case. The lawyer was having dinner with my father at Uncle Sal’s one night. Dad said he had a client for him, Gerard’s friend. Mike came to the restaurant to introduce himself and to thank my father for getting him the lawyer. He brought Dad a box of cigars.

  Mike was really intrigued with my father. He had even read his book, Underboss. Maybe Mike thought being around the family of a famous mobster made him important. I’d seen my share of these guys in New York. You could tell they were trying to get something.

  Dad was flattered that Mike had read his book and that he held him in such high regard. He was really happy that Mike had befriended Gerard. Mike was a university student and a fellow New Yorker, and Dad was impressed with both of these credentials. Dad didn’t know that Mike Papa was a drug dealer, and Gerard and I didn’t tell him.

  Mike started hanging around my father. He was an extremely well-educated guy, and Dad thought he could be an asset to his pool company. Dad was going to let him become the head sales guy. Mike was good-looking and charming. Pools were getting sold when he came on board and business was improving.

  Unbeknownst to anyone, Mike was telling people that he was rolling with Sammy the Bull, and he was partners with him and his son. At the time, my father had no idea that Mike was going around using his name, nor did he know that he was under surveillance by the police for being a suspected drug dealer.

  In the nightclubs, we knew Mike as a celebrity kid. Everybody seemed to want to be around him. We didn’t know how much trouble he was in until much later. Gerard and I both knew that Mike dabbled in drug dealing, but we had no idea how long he’d been doing it or what the extent of his involvement was. Members of the Gilbert Police Department had him under surveillance even before he met Gerard. The code name for the investigation was the “Papa Organization.”

  Gerard and I also had no idea that he was a member of a gang in Gilbert, Arizona. We knew that his brother Kevin belonged to a white supremacist group called the Devil Dogs, so named because members barked as they assaulted victims. Kevin had been arrested and the story was all over the news. That’s why Mike had needed the name of a lawyer. But he insisted that he was nothing like his brother and painted a picture of himself as a dedicated pre-med student. Normally, when somebody first met my father, they tried to impress him with their street credentials, but Mike did the opposite. He tried to make Dad believe that his ambition was to become a doctor.

  Dad had no idea that Mike had asked Gerard if he knew where he could get Ecstasy. Mike thought my brother could hook up a deal. Gerard knew people in New York, and Mike threw my brother money for hooking him up. I started to worry that something bad was going to happen to Gerard.

  All his life, Mom and Dad had tried to protect Gerard. When kids snubbed him on Todt Hill, we moved. If he wasn’t doing well in school, Dad hired tutors. When he was diagnosed with dyslexia, Dad took him to every specialist in New York he could find. When Mom left Staten Island, she brought Gerard with her. And now here was this punk Mike Papa using my brother for leverage in drug dealing.

  My father always wanted my brother to be a legitimate kid. He never felt Gerard was cut out for the street
life. Even in Phoenix, Dad’s biggest fear was that someone from New York who wanted to make a name for himself would try to kill my brother, now that he wasn’t a kid anymore. But as a parent, he only had so much control over his kids’ actions and choices.

  The whole thing was like a perfect storm. Gerard was spending more and more time with his new buddies at the restaurant. He knew what they were up to, and got involved in dealing willingly, nobody made him do it. He was only working with Mike, though. He never went out and pedaled pills. It was Mike doing the dealing, and Gerard just lent him some money. These guys were seeing that they were getting more respect hanging around with my brother. That Mike was intrigued by the Gravanos struck me as weird, but I went with it. I didn’t try and stop it.

  But when they started talking about going to New York, I got nervous. My brother had been doing some pretty irresponsible things before his new friends came on the scene. He was living beyond his means, buying things he couldn’t afford, and getting himself into debt. He decided he could participate in a couple of drug transactions to get himself in the clear. I tried to tell Gerard not to go to New York with money, but he wouldn’t listen. He was planning to hook up with some of his old contacts and make a deal big enough to erase his outstanding debt.

  There had already been a hit out on his life once, two years after Dad had cooperated. There was no one left in New York to protect us. Lee had done it until he found out I was with Dave. Whether it was because I was with a new guy or because Dave was black, Lee didn’t like that I was with Dave, and he was no longer going to protect either me or Gerard.

  I was in a mess. My brother and I were trained to never tattle on each other. We’d get punished by my father if we did. But I was scared for Gerard’s life. I was compelled to go to my father and tell him what was going on.

  Dad flipped when I told him Gerard’s plan. “Get in the car,” he demanded to me. He drove straight to my brother’s house, kicked in the front door, and put a gun to Gerard’s head. “I’ll help you kill yourself!” he screamed. “Here’s the gun!”