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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  Gerard’s friend Mike Papa was also arrested and charged as a member of the ring, which police were now calling the Sammy the Bull Organization.

  When the Gilbert police turned the case over to the Phoenix police, they had been investigating Mike Papa for years. They considered him the drug ring’s leader and called the ring the Mike Papa Organization. They knew that Gerard had only been a friend of Mike Papa for a short time. But once the investigation was in the hands of the police in Phoenix, suddenly my father was the main target, even though he hadn’t even been on the radar before that. Dad was considered a big fish, so cracking a case that involved Sammy Gravano, even if the charges were trumped up, could be career making. Once in the hands of the Phoenix police the name of the drug organization suddenly changed from the Mike Papa Organization to the Sammy the Bull Organization.

  Dave had been in on a couple of deals with Gerard and Mike Papa, so he was arrested, too. Because police had seen him entering the house and knew that he lived with Debra Gravano, they claimed that Dave was the runner and that he was storing the drugs in the house, which had now become the ring’s “headquarters.”

  This wasn’t the end of the story, as with all good Mafia stories, this one had a twist. Turned out that top members of the Gambino family were planning a hit on Dad. Dad’s interview in Vanity Fair magazine had put Peter Gotti in a position where he felt he needed to react on my father. In the article, Dad had said he wasn’t afraid of anybody in the Gambino crime family. Peter Gotti, acting capo, sanctioned a hit. He recruited my uncle Eddie to plan it and Huck and Fat Sal to come to Arizona to carry it out.

  They had been in Phoenix, casing out Dad’s construction office and apartment. Huck had taken on a disguise as a gruffy, bearded Hells Angel biker. The two men were considering a sniper attack or a car bomb. They opted for the bomb, because they felt it would be easier and they wouldn’t have to get too close to my father. Knowing Sammy, they feared that he might win. It was scary to think that Gerard, Nicholas, Mom, Karina, or I could have been in that car with my father when it exploded. The hit never went off because Dad was taken into custody.

  A short time after that, Fat Sal cooperated with the Feds and testified in a case where all three men, Peter, Huck, and Uncle Eddie, were charged with attempted murder and sentenced to prison.

  * * *

  Life in Phoenix was now hard for all of us. I was thankful I was only on probation, but soon Mom, Karina, and I were going to have no place to live, no place to work, and no money. The Feds had frozen all of our assets. They said everything we owned had been bought with drug money. Even though much of our property had been brought to Arizona from Staten Island long before any involvement with drug dealing, they confiscated it anyway. Our bank accounts and credit cards were frozen, so we had no access to cash or credit.

  I was distraught. “Oh my God,” I said to myself. “What am I going to do about my seven-month-old daughter? How am I going to be able to take care of this child? What is going to happen to Karina and Nicolas?”

  The Attorney General’s Office was forcing Mom to put the house on Secretariat Drive on the market and they were going to keep all the proceeds from that sale, as well. We had a couple of months to get packed and vacate, so there was a lot of chaos. Gerard was out on bail, awaiting sentencing. But Dad was stuck in jail until he was sentenced. I was really stressed.

  One crazy June day, I was the only one home with the two kids. There was a huge pool in the backyard. The property was surrounded by a six-foot fence, but there was no fence around the pool. However, every door in the house had locks very high up. Mom had a pit bull named Keisha and he had a way of opening the screen door if he needed to get out. I was playing a game with Nicholas, who wasn’t even two at the time. I’d hide a little toy and he would try to find it and bring it back to me.

  The phone rang and I took the call for just a couple of minutes. I assumed Nicholas was in pursuit of the toy. But he wasn’t coming back. I noticed the dog was outside, and realized that the screen door he pushed open to get there had not reclosed entirely. I ran outside and down to the pool. Nicholas was at the bottom of the pool, not moving. I jumped in and pulled his lifeless body out. He was blue and not breathing. I didn’t know how to do CPR. I dialed 911. I was hysterical and the 911 operator managed to calm me down to talk me through it.

  “You need to listen to me so I can help you,” he told me. I was freaking out. It was the worst experience of my life. After the 911 operator brought me into focus, it became a completely out of body experience. I did CPR just as he told me to. Mom pulled into the driveway from grocery shopping just as the paramedics arrived.

  The doorbell rang and I ran to answer it. It was the cop who had been coming by Gerard’s house to make sure he was obeying his curfew. “Oh my God, please tell me it’s not Nicholas,” he cried. The officer called Gerard at the restaurant and told him to come to his mother’s house. There had been an accident.

  When my brother got there, I couldn’t even look at him. “I almost killed your kid,” I cried. “I am so sorry, I almost killed your son.”

  Nicholas was put in an ambulance bound for Desert Samaritan Hospital. I was taken to a trauma shock unit at the same hospital. My father was in jail when the story of Nicholas’s near drowning ran on the news that evening. A correction’s officer came to find Dad in his cell.

  “Sammy, I think you need to call home,” he told him. “Something just happened at your house.”

  Dad was calling the house, but no one was answering. A guy from the restaurant ended up driving over to the jail to deliver a message. “Tell Sammy that everyone is okay.”

  I was horrified that my 911 call with the dispatcher had been played on the news that evening. I don’t ever want to listen to that phone call. To this day, I can still feel the overwhelming horror that overcame me when I realized that Nicholas had gotten out of my sight.

  In Arizona, drowning deaths are so common, and we owned a pool company. You think you can just turn away for two seconds. I thought Nicholas was in the house. The doctor at the hospital determined that he was only under water for two minutes when I found him. The dog must have run through the screen, and Nicholas probably went to throw the toy in the pool. He had a scratch on his chin that we believe he got when he fell in. Every day, I thank God that he is alive.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Don’t lie now, you are under oath.”

  On the day of the plea, June 29, 2001, Mom and I arrived at the Maricopa County Superior Court together. We didn’t know when Gerard and Dad were getting there. They were coming straight from the jail because my father hadn’t been able to make bail. We weren’t allowed to see them before the proceedings.

  That day in court was the first time I had laid eyes on the plea. It was a universal plea, so we all had to admit that we were part of a criminal organization run by my father, that Dad was the mastermind. Then we all had to plead guilty to the charges attributed to each of us or the deal was off and they were going to put it all on Gerard.

  I was pleading guilty “to illegal use of an electronic communication device.” I didn’t even know what that meant. My lawyer told me it meant that I had used a telephone to discuss a drug transaction. “I am not signing this plea,” I told him. I didn’t want to be a party to my father and brother going to prison. “What are my consequences if I go to trial?”

  “Pretty much probation,” the lawyer told me.

  “I am going to get probation anyway,” I said. “So take me to trial.”

  “Karen, we discussed this with your father, and you are going to sign it.”

  I had this sick-to-my-stomach feeling. I didn’t want to sign the plea. It was ridiculous to me. “Where is my father?” I demanded.

  I was informed that Dad and Gerard were in the back, in two different holding cells.

  “Can I see them?” I inquired. The answer was no.

  The courtroom was packed. I knew it was going to be based on the prior cou
rt hearings. Everybody, especially the media, wanted to see Sammy the Bull. My mother, sitting beside me, was a nervous wreck, too. Judge Steven Sheldon hadn’t taken the bench yet, but I had to sign the plea before the proceedings could begin anyway.

  I had a very nervous feeling. I didn’t want to do this. I knew that my father could get up to twenty years. I just wanted to stand up and say, “They are fucking lying. It didn’t happen this way. Let me get five years and let him get less time.”

  I knew my father didn’t start the organization, and he didn’t do what they were accusing him of. He lent the money trying to help out. He didn’t want us in this lifestyle.

  I’d lied to him. I hadn’t told tell him that Mike Papa was a drug dealer when I first met him. I got scared when Gerard said he was going to go back to New York. I always feared that he could get robbed or something could happen to him.

  I had been the one to tell my father and get him involved. The fact that Gerard had already had one serious threat against him already made everybody do things they wouldn’t have otherwise done. At that point, Dad was trying to rebuild a relationship with his kids. To warn us, “Don’t do this,” wasn’t going to work.

  Two months later, the entire Phoenix police force was kicking in our doors and putting it all on my father. Once the media got ahold of it, the headlines were out there, blaring our guilt.

  I felt bad, like what the fuck did I do? Here I fought this man, I tested him, I hid the truth from him, which normally I would never have done, but I’d lost respect for him. Now, here he was going to take twenty years in prison to protect his son, and nothing was going to happen to me. The pleas that we signed were worded very strategically.

  Dad’s last one had been a sweetheart deal. He’d killed nineteen people and he had only served five years. It felt as though the authorities were trying to rectify that deal.

  Gerard and I had given the authorities this path to get to my father and I felt really bad. At that point, I felt like it was all Gerard’s and my fault, and I wanted to get up in the courtroom and say my father didn’t do anything. It was like he was on trial for the nineteen murders, like it was payback. But now they could say Mr. Gravano sold drugs.

  I already didn’t like the government because I felt my father had joined forces with them and now they were turning on him. Look what you did for them, and here they are.

  I heard a lot of commotion when the side door of the courtroom opened. A couple of deputies were escorting my father in in shackles. He held his head high, and gave me a smile. He was always strong for all of us. This time was no exception. Gerard was brought in next, shackled like Dad. He took the seat on Dad’s far side.

  The first person called to step forward was me.

  “Can you state your name for the record,” Judge Sheldon asked me.

  I couldn’t even say it. I just stood there.

  My lawyer next to me urged me on. “Say it, Karen, just say it,” he said.

  “Miss, can you state your name?” the judge repeated.

  “Karen Gravano,” I said in a hushed tone.

  “Can you state your age?”

  I was so upset I couldn’t remember how old I was, and I looked back at my mother. She mouthed the number twenty-nine for me.

  Dad spoke out and said, “Don’t lie now, you are under oath.” Everyone in the courtroom laughed, even the judge.

  Everything was a blur after that. Mom, Dad, and Gerard each took their turns in front of the judge. It was probably one of the worst days of my life. For the first time, I was standing there and I was like what did I do? How did this happen? How did we get here?

  We each signed our plea and were instructed to return to the same courtroom on September 28, for sentencing. I had pled guilty to “use of wire or electronic communications” and “drug-related transactions.” I was sentenced to three years probation. Mom got five years probation for “illegally conducting an enterprise,” short for what the authorities considered her bankrolling of the whole operation. Gerard was sentenced to nine and half years in prison for “illegally conducting an enterprise” and “offering to sell and transport dangerous drugs.” His sentence was a half year longer than what Dad had agreed to in the plea deal.

  My father pled guilty to ten counts, including “conspiracy to sell dangerous drugs,” “participating in a criminal syndicate,” and “money laundering.” When he went up before the bench, Judge Sheldon sentenced him to nineteen years in prison, with no possibility of early release. Dad’s nineteen years meant he wouldn’t be out until he was seventy-four. The sentence was longer than Dad had agreed to.

  * * *

  My father always maintained that the charges against him had been jacked up. A couple of years after Dad was sentenced, a police officer who was involved in the case from the very beginning came forward with information that would have been crucial to my father’s defense but that we never learned about at the time.

  Specifically, the officer claimed that there were transcriptions of recordings from a bug that had been planted under my father’s desk. Those transcripts would have shown that my father had been trying to deter Gerard and Mike from getting into drugs and to push them more into legitimate businesses.

  If this officer is correct, then the prosecution testimony that the recordings could not be transcribed was, in fact, incorrect, whether or not the witnesses who testified were aware of that fact. We also heard that prosecutors from the Eastern District of New York had urged the police to tone down Mike Papa’s involvement in the drug organization so that he didn’t appear as the leader.

  Dad and Gerard were also brought to New York to face federal drug-related charges because of the alleged connection with the Israeli mob, claiming the ring was in fact an interstate organization. We believe that when Mike Papa took the stand in New York against my father, he played down his role in the drug ring and prosecutors, perhaps in their zeal to get Sammy the Bull, looked the other way. This testimony is what ultimately resulted in both Dad and Gerard getting longer sentences.

  My fiancé, Dave, was sentenced to nine and half years for selling drugs. Because he had violent prior convictions, he was eligible for the maximum allowable sentence under the law. He served his sentence in various prisons throughout the state of Arizona and was released in September 2010.

  Mike Papa cooperated with authorities, but the amount of jail time he received was never disclosed. He is now in the witness protection program.

  All of our assets were frozen and the families of Dad’s victims filed wrongful death lawsuits against my father. Now that my father had violated parole, all of the protections he had received under his original plea deal with the Feds were null and void. Everybody came after us with a vengeance.

  We weren’t allowed to touch any of our money. Things were really tough. Mom and I helped Gerard’s girlfriend to raise Nicholas, so it was like we had two babies to care for, mine and my brother’s. I was angry. I felt like I was a complete victim.

  I had to pay for the lawyers and take care of the family, so I kicked into gear and began hustling. My father was always a hustler, and if nothing else, he taught me to hustle. I had to take care of Karina the best I could. I was determined to make it work honestly. When I was in the jail cell with Mom that day, it had hit me hard that I had someone else beside myself to care for.

  I figured I’d try to do something in facials, and started going to the day spas in the area to see if anybody was hiring. Finally, three months after I had been arrested, I got an interview. I told the lady up-front about who I was.

  I said, “I’m Karen Gravano, and I am trying to get my life back. I am a licensed aesthetician and I need to provide for my family. But I’m not going to go through the interview if you are going to judge me.”

  The spa owner liked the way I was so honest with her, and she thought someone like me would be an asset to her. After she hired me, neither one of us told our clients who I was. We didn’t think it was anybody’s business. If
somebody asked, I didn’t lie, but it didn’t come up very often. In order to hustle up my business, I handed out flyers for free facials. I was trying to get my own clientele. I was starting from scratch. I didn’t have anybody. I was also building a relationship with the lady who owned the spa. After a while, I built up a big following. Word was out there that I was giving the best facials in Mesa.

  I worked at the spa in the daytime, and I also worked doing makeup at a strip club at night. I was in complete “do it” mode.

  My mother sold the house on Secretariat Drive, and the government took all the money. Mom, Karina, and I then moved to a smaller house not far from my aunt Diane in Tempe. My grandmother offered to give Mom a loan for the down payment.

  Nicholas’s mother, Mallory, was also working full-time, so she’d drop the baby at the house and either Mom or I would watch both children at the same time. The kids were fourteen months apart, and over time, they grew inseparable. While Mallory and I didn’t get along at first, she understood how family-oriented Mom and I were, and she allowed us to visit with Nicholas on a regular basis. In turn, she invited Karina along on weekends when she and Nicholas were going to be doing something fun.

  A year passed before I was able to take a good, deep look at myself. I needed to figure out who Karen Gravano was, besides Sammy the Bull’s daughter. I also needed to figure out what my role had been to get to this point.