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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  Even though my grandparents were not involved with the Mafia, a lot of Mafia members lived in their neighborhood. In Sicily, where Cosa Nostra started, the members protected their neighborhoods. When they came over from Italy, they also felt like they were protecting their communities and they were very respected. Grandpa Gravano was familiar with the Mafia culture and always treated the members with appropriate respect. They would be hanging around outside of the social clubs when my grandfather and my dad would pass on their way to the dress factory. They knew my grandfather’s name and would always shout hello across the street. My father was curious how my grandfather knew them. My grandfather explained that they weren’t hardworking, nice people. “They are bad people, but they are our bad people,” he would say.

  He told my father that they were the ones the Italian community would turn to when they had problems to resolve. There was a lot of anti-Italian sentiment back then, and Italians found it better to take care of business like they did in the Old Country. He made it clear that they should be respected but avoided.

  My father said he was the kind of kid who got into fights in the playground at school. He was a lousy student, which caused him to be humiliated and teased mercilessly. The only way he could be respected was to take it outside. There, the bullies would leave him alone. When my dad was in fourth grade, he was held back for a learning disability. He had a severe case of dyslexia, but at the time his teachers assessed him as being mentally retarded. He tried to laugh it off by being the class clown. But using his fists to take down troublemakers was easier and more satisfying, so anyone who dared to tease him was beat up after school.

  On Sammy’s tenth birthday, my grandparents bought him a new bike. Some kids stole it, but Sammy spotted it one week later across the street from the social club. When he went to claim it, he took on the two kids who refused to give it back. He put up a valiant fight, earning him the nickname “little bull” from a couple of wiseguys who watched the whole thing go down.

  * * *

  When my father was thirteen, he got a taste of the power of the men in the mob. One day, he was at the dress factory helping my grandfather with the payroll.

  A couple of Irish-looking thugs came into the office. They said they were from the union and threatened my grandfather, saying he would have to either start making payoffs or unionize the place or face getting his legs busted up. My father was very upset by the disrespect they showed him. His father told him that everything was under control, Zuvito would fix it.

  Sammy knew Zuvito was an old, frail guy from the neighborhood. He couldn’t fight two brawny, angry Irish thugs. His Rampers buddies gave him a gun and advised him to blow the two guys away. When Monday morning came around, the men arrived as scheduled. But this time they were completely friendly and apologetic. They said they didn’t know Zuvito was Gerry’s compadre, everything was good, and everybody shook hands.

  Sammy was stunned. His father again said there was nothing to worry about. Zuvito was a powerful person, a bad guy but “our bad guy.”

  When Sammy showed his father the gun, Gerry was livid. He glared at his son, took the gun, and said that the Gravanos were legitimate, honest people. He said if they had problems, they go to people like Zuvito for help. My grandfather didn’t hit him, but my father said this was probably the closest he had ever come.

  Eventually, Sammy learned the truth that Zuvito and the other guys who hung around in front of the social clubs were gangsters. He decided he wanted the lifestyle. The fights in the playground were escalating. He was a miserable failure academically. At sixteen, his parents were forced to sign him out of school and his formal education was over.

  My father preferred life with the Rampers, anyway. Gang life was exciting and reaped big payoffs for the brazen ones. Many Rampers aspired to be in the Mafia, and my father was “a good earner,” meaning he had the necessary makings to be a gangster. He was loyal, he was a moneymaker, he was a natural leader, and he had the ability to “whack” somebody.

  He soon caught the eye of Joe Colombo, the head of the Colombo crime family. Colombo remembered that my father had beat up his two sons at a movie theater a couple of years earlier. Colombo hadn’t held that against him. In fact, he liked the fact that my father had let them go before he totally broke their asses. Colombo made Sammy an “associate” in his organization, along with his Rampers’ buddy Tommy Spero. By being associates, both of them answered to “made” members of the Mafia. To become “made,” an associate had to be sponsored by a “made” man. At the time, the “books” of the crime families were closed and had been for eleven years. Both men were hopeful that they were going be brought in when the books reopened.

  My father was assigned to the crew of Thomas “Shorty” Spero, Tommy’s uncle. His first job was to rob a clothing store, and his second assignment was a bank. After both those holdups, he was arrested but managed to escape conviction after witnesses changed their minds about testifying.

  My father had been a Colombo family associate for two years when he was asked to whack somebody for the first time. He was just twenty-five years old the day he shot his victim, Joe Colucci, two times in the back of the head with a Beatles’ tune playing in the background. The word was that Colucci, a fellow Colombo associate, was going to whack Sammy, so Sammy was authorized by Colombo capo Carmine Persico to take him out first. At four in the morning, after a night of club hopping, Joe, Sammy, Tommy Spero, and another guy, Frankie, got into a car. Sammy was in the backseat, and Joe was in front of him in the passenger seat. Driving down the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn at a pretty good speed, Sammy placed two bullets in Joe’s head, told the driver to get off in a residential neighborhood, and dumped Joe facedown in the street. He fired three bullets into his body to be sure the hit was complete.

  After that, Sammy found himself with a different kind of respect. He now had clout and prestige in certain circles. He was no longer waiting in line to get into discos and clubs, and the bosses loved him. He was well on his way to becoming a mobster.

  Sammy didn’t stay long with the Colombo family. Ralph and Shorty Spero were a little jealous about the attention he was getting and worried he would be “made” before Shorty’s nephew, young Tommy. With everybody’s blessing, my father was transferred to the Gambino family, where he fell under the mentoring of Uncle Toddo. Shortly after, he became a “made” man, someone with full membership in the Cosa Nostra brotherhood. During a secret induction ceremony, conducted in the basement of one of the bosses’ homes, he swore his loyalty to the Gambino organization. One of the men asked him which finger he used when he pulled the trigger of a gun, and when he presented his index finger, the man pricked it and smeared some blood on a picture of a saint. Sammy held the picture on his palms while it was set on fire, hearing the admonishment that if he broke his allegiance he would burn in hell just like the depiction of the saint. He also swore to honor Omertà, the code of silence. When the ceremony was over, he had all the privileges and protection of a “made” man. But the dues were he had to kill for the Brotherhood, too. He described his induction as being one of the proudest moments of his life, even though the burning of the saint left painful white blisters all over his palms.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “See? You learn something new every day.”

  Gerard and I were the other accomplishments dad was proud of. I still remember when Gerard was born. I was three years old, and I was completely grossed out that he was a boy. I wanted a sister, a little doll that I could dress up. I was jealous of him the moment he came home from the hospital. I had been the first and only child, and not only that, I was the very first grandchild on my mother’s side. Now Gerard was getting most of the attention. From the moment he was born, he was the apple of my mother’s eye. Gerard was her little man. It was probably fair, because the minute I had been born, I had been the apple of my father’s eye. Looking back, I can say that I am so much like our father, and Gerard is so much like our mother. Both Mom an
d Gerard are quiet, nonconfrontational, and kindhearted. Dad and I, on the other hand, are hotheaded, stubborn, loyal, and loving.

  My first introduction to my father’s not-so-normal life happened around the time Gerard arrived. I was in kindergarten and the kids in our class were asked to sell candy door-to-door to raise money for a class trip. There were incentive prizes for the good salespeople, and I had my eye on the popcorn maker. The machine was one of the bigger prizes, so I knew I had my work cut out for me. Once the teacher handed out our fund-raising packets, I wanted to get started right away, making the neighbors commit to buying from me before somebody else in the class got to them. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate, and it was raining too hard after school to get out.

  My father told me not to worry about it, that he would buy all the candy required for me to earn my popcorn maker. I didn’t think that was the way it was supposed to be done. As far as I knew, the rules were that I had to sell the stuff door-to-door, and I didn’t want to cheat and get in trouble.

  Dad made a deal with me. He said he would take the candy to the after-hours club he owned and sell it to all the guys who worked there. That way, I would still be selling my goods to a lot of different people, even though technically I wouldn’t be going to houses in the neighborhood. I liked the plan, and we closed the agreement with a handshake.

  The next morning when I woke up, my collection envelope was busting with cash. The sheet where I was supposed to register the names of my buyers was filled with odd names like Sally Dogs and Big Louie, and none of the names was followed by an address, as they were on my classmates’s sheets. But there was no question I had sold enough candy to get the popcorn maker. I was looking at stacks of money, hundreds of dollars.

  I proudly took the order form and the money to my teacher. She was not impressed with my success. She promptly called my mother to school to discuss the situation. She was sure I had made up the list and taken the money from somebody in the house to win the prize, despite my pleas that the list was honest. I knew my father would never have steered me wrong.

  When my mother arrived at school, she assured my teacher that all my customers were real people and that I had worked hard for the cause. I got my popcorn maker, with enough points left over to win a few more things. I settled for just the popcorn maker so I didn’t have to feel too greedy. That was the only prize I really wanted, anyway.

  * * *

  I really liked living in Brooklyn. We had so many relatives living nearby, and Gerard and I were always busy and indulged. We’d go to the playground in Gravesend Park for hours and hours to play on the swings or bounce on the big plastic animals on springs. On a good day, we’d get an Italian ice when the Good Humor man came around.

  I remember a particular Sunday trip to the duck pond. My father and mother took my older cousins and us to feed the ducks. We each had two slices of stale bread we could rip apart and toss at our leisure. My cousin Mary held on to her crust too long, and a duck bit her finger. My father chased it down the path and caught it before it could escape into the water. What happened next left us all traumatized; the duck was squawking, the kids were screaming, and the feathers were flying as Dad snapped the bird’s neck. It was a nightmare. But that was my father’s instinct, to protect the people he loved. He felt compelled to protect us, even if he sometimes went well beyond the accepted bounds.

  * * *

  My mother was very nurturing. If I had a question, she always had a way of answering me without answering me. They were never satisfactory answers, and I had to fill in the parts she didn’t tell me. I was probably wrong most of the time, but I couldn’t keep pestering her.

  She was very down to earth and simple. She preferred cooking a meal at home to going out to restaurants. She knew how to make dinner work with very small means and how to improvise.

  Even when we were broke, it always seemed like we had plenty of food. She could make a meal out of macaroni and ricotta five different ways by adding peas, or cutting up pieces of chicken. Oven-hot garlic bread was the touch I loved the most.

  At our house, we had a family dinner routine. The table was set in a nook, and my dad always sat at the head. I sat to his right, Gerard sat on the bench across from me, and Mom sat at the other end. Every night, Dad had us go around the table sharing something new we had discovered in the last twenty-four hours. When we were done, he would say, “See? You learn something new every day.” He was proud that there was always something.

  My mother was a woman of very few words. If anything was wrong, especially with my father, she always made sure that my brother and I never learned about it. She shielded us with the same protective instinct as he did, but she just delivered it in a more understated style. She was the kind of mother who would create fake report cards so we didn’t get in trouble with my father.

  She was so quiet I always assumed she was weak and submissive, but not in a bad way, more like a dutiful way. Not asking questions was not a feeble shortcoming, it was respecting that family members didn’t gain anything by prying all the time. I never realized how much strength there was in her silence until I was much older.

  My father was the big jokester in the family. He was always playfully teasing my mother, and she was so amiable about being on the receiving end. You could tell that she loved him to death. It didn’t seem to bother her that Dad was out all night. If he was out late, I’d always sleep in his spot in the bed until he came home. He would pick me up and move me into my bedroom, whatever hour it was. Mom and he never seemed to have any fights about where he was, and she always appeared to be very understanding about his unconventional work schedule. I wouldn’t say they were over-the-top super affectionate. But when Dad came home and lay on the couch, he would put his head on Mom’s lap and she would stroke his hair.

  Lots of times I wanted to ask my mother questions about what Dad really did for a living, but I knew she wouldn’t answer them. She was the family ostrich. She’d just bury her head when things arose that she didn’t want to deal with. She routinely spent hours obsessively cleaning the house, going from room to room to room, and then starting again. If we were making footprints on a carpet, she would walk behind us, vacuum in hand, erasing any evidence that we had been there.

  Sometimes my dad would have a group of guys over to the house on a Sunday morning. They’d bring in bagels and shoot the shit. Without considering it intrusive, my mother would be right behind them with her vacuum, pushing it under their feet even as they talked. Why couldn’t she wait until they left the house before she started cleaning? Perhaps it was her way of vacuuming up his shifty friends and his tawdry life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “How do you say ‘ricotta’?”

  One day, we went to Staten Island to look at houses. I was only seven. One minute we went there to look at real estate, and the next thing I knew, we were saying good-bye to Bensonhurst and heading west across the Verrazano-Narrows to the rural farmlands deep in the boonies of Staten Island.

  I was very happy we were moving to the “burbs.” I had only one good friend in Brooklyn, so I was too young to feel overly attached to my old neighborhood. To me, the move meant that we had made it, we were in the money. Our new house was even going to have plush wall-to-wall carpet, so I knew my mother would be a pig in mud with her vacuum.

  We were leaving behind my aunt Diane, my mother’s twin sister, and her new husband, Sandy, who was different from my father, not a street guy at all. But they knew where to find us if they wanted. And they did. They moved into the house attached to ours on Leggett Place. Their daughter, my cousin Gina, was just a baby at the time. My other cousin, Anthony, hadn’t been born yet.

  Everything about the move was exciting. My father bought all new furniture, so there were always trucks and moving men bringing in things like an enormous, new living room set still wrapped in plastic or bureaus and beds for the bedrooms. My bedroom was yellow and white, and I had a canopy bed outfitted with all new bedding
in the style of a princess. My father built brick flower planters inside the house, trying to make the place fancy and special.

  This first house on Staten Island was on Leggett Place, about three miles west of the Verrazano Bridge. The development was made up of new homes or homes that hadn’t even been built yet. It was surrounded by farmland, but the best part was that there were a lot of younger families just starting out with kids around Gerard’s and my age. Everything was done very communally. Gerard and I would watch out the window to see who was outside, and then we’d join the tons of other kids playing games and riding their bikes in the streets. All the mothers would hang out talking about current events, child issues, or meals, the favorite topics. If someone went in to cook dinner, the other moms on the street would watch out for anyone left. At night, after dinner, we’d all go into one another’s basements and hang out until it was time for bed.

  Most of the people in the neighborhood were Italian. In fact, a lot of them moved from Brooklyn to Staten Island, just like us. About a year after our arrival, I was so excited when my aunt Fran and uncle Eddie and my cousins, Lillian, Bud, Jerry, and Rena, moved in directly across the street. Dad told us that he wanted his sister to move there so she would be closer to us. Even my grandparents were moving in with them, to a small, attached apartment on the ground floor. I didn’t know it then, but Uncle Eddie had lost his construction business. My father’s parents had sold their Ronkonkoma house, which was their retirement home, to help bail him out. It killed my father that they had to sell their house and move in to help Eddie. Fran was family, and my dad was going to do whatever he had to do to take care of his sister. He made a thirty-thousand-dollar score and helped them move, get furniture, and get them out of their financial jam. My dad had to stop doing our own construction project and, for a while, our new furniture purchases were over. Luckily, the new beds had been some of the first things to arrive.