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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  The Feds didn’t want to give Dad too much information because they didn’t want my father to retaliate as soon as he got released. John Gotti had not sanctioned the hit. No matter what his relationship was with my father, he always conducted himself like a man when it came to me, my mother, and Gerard. He never took it out on us that my father cooperated. If anything, he made sure we were protected to the best of his ability. He would never have wanted any of us to be hurt. He was not like that. He knew the rules and would never cross them when it came to women and children. Besides, the FBI would have been all over him if something had happened. I think in his heart, John could never accept what my father did, but he knew who Dad was, and he knew why he did what he did. I don’t know what the motive was behind the hit out on my brother, probably to send a message to Sammy. Or maybe just same jerk trying to make a name for himself who might hurt Gerard to gain respect.

  Agents told my father that the plan was for a good friend of Gerard’s to lure him to a nightclub. There, a hit team would be waiting to take Gerard out. An associate of Dad’s had been the one to stop it. Dad had once saved the man’s life, and he felt it was his obligation to make sure nothing ever happened to any of our family. We heard that the guy threatened to personally kill anyone who touched one hair on Gerard’s head. Even though Dad had cooperated, he still had a lot of loyal friends on the street. There were a lot of people he did not hurt, people he did not testify against, people he would simply not go against, period.

  Dad reached out to Mom to discuss the whole mess. They appreciated the protection, but feared Gerard would always be targeted. He would always live in the shadow of The Bull.

  My parents decided the best thing to do was to move us out of New York. Mom chose Arizona because she had visited there once before and had liked it. Gerard was eighteen and just out of high school, and Phoenix was a hopping college town, perfect for someone Gerard’s age. My aunt Diane was newly divorced, so relocating sounded good to her, too. Mom, Gerard, Gerard’s girlfriend Maria, Aunt Diane, and her two kids, Gina and Anthony, were ready to make the big move. Mom said she liked the warm climate and slower pace of life in the southwest.

  Mom bought a nice, spacious house outside of Phoenix, and Aunt Diane bought the one directly next door. They even opened up the backyards to join the properties. My mother had a friend who knew of someone who had a business for sale, a bagel store in Tempe, near Arizona State University. She thought she and Gerard could run it.

  Gerard was okay with the idea. He wasn’t sure what he would do in Arizona, but he wanted to be with our mother. I, on the other hand, refused to move with them. I was a tried-and-true New Yorker, I told them, and I had no intention of leaving town.

  Lee and I were going strong, I was having a great time, and once in a while I even forgot that my father was in prison. The house on Lamberts Lane was empty with Mom and Gerard gone. They had packed up and shipped a lot of the stuff to Arizona, leaving me with just the essentials and my stuff. I invited Lee to move in with me. At the time, he owned his own house on Staten Island, so he sold that and brought his belongings. He was a bank robber, so I didn’t really need to work. He was stealing enough money for both of us.

  Lee was committing crimes, and I was trying to figure out a career for myself. Mom had left me some money, and Lee took care of most of the bills. He was out robbing and stealing in the evenings, so we always had plenty of money. I knew what he was doing but I still followed our family’s code of not asking any questions. But Lee told me anyway.

  I was pretty well taken care of. When I wasn’t working, I’d be hanging with the girls, Ramona, Roxanne, and Jennifer. We’d go to the Palladium and the Limelight or any other place in New York City that was happening that night. Lee didn’t like me going out with my friends. He was kind of controlling that way. But he was going out with his friends, and I was not the controllable type. Most of our arguments had to do with what time I got in. I never gave him shit when he was gone for days at a time to do his crimes.

  One late July night, Lee and I were sleeping in my upstairs bedroom when bullets ripped through my window. This was no ordinary pane-glass window. It was something Dad had gone to great effort to have custom-made and installed. It was a forty-inch stained-glass circle with a huge letter G in the middle. The bullets flew right over the bed and lodged in the closet where we had once kept the safe with the money.

  We had no idea why someone was shooting up the house, but I assumed it must have had something to do with my father. There was no way I was going to call the cops, and no one else in the neighborhood did either. Maybe nobody heard anything, because the house was right on the service road to the freeway, but more likely nobody wanted to get involved in gangster business.

  The next morning, Lee and I went outside and saw that my gray Acura was shot up, too. The side panel had two bullet holes in it. I called my mother in Arizona and she called Uncle Eddie to look in on us. Uncle Eddie already knew about it, but he hadn’t come to check on me. I’m not sure why not. Big Louie Valario and Mikey Scars were two friends who were loyal to the family, and they started coming by the house to make sure I was okay after they heard about it. I still felt protected in this lifestyle, but I started to see this really wasn’t what I wanted.

  Lee took my car to a friend’s body shop. The mechanic took out the bullets and patched up the holes. I never bothered to have the stained-glass window repaired. I just had the repairman replace it with clear glass. I didn’t find out who did it until years later. It turned out it wasn’t a retaliatory attack against Dad like I had thought. A kid from Staten Island was actually sending a message to Lee, because he didn’t like him. This was a warning. Lee and I never talked about it, as weird as that might sound. We just brushed it off.

  The house was already on the market when it got shot up. Lee and I had decided to move to Phoenix and try and make a new start there. We had been to visit Mom and Gerard and we liked it. Lee had been arrested a couple of times for fighting and was on the radar of the police, and I was missing my family. I didn’t want to leave Lee, so we’d have to go together.

  When I told Mom we were coming, she was elated. I was the one to show the house to perspective buyers until it was sold. It was really hard to turn it over to someone else. Dad had invested so much of his time and heart in this house, and so much of it was personal. This was where some of my fondest memories of my rebellious teenage years took place. For most of our time in Bulls Head, Dad had been the respected gangster that everybody knew. Our parties were legendary. We really belonged here.

  Letting it go was heartbreaking. Mom came back for the closing. The house was in her name, so all the proceeds were hers, not my father’s. To get the money to relocate to Arizona, Mom also sold the office building on Stillwell Avenue, and other property that was also, conveniently, in her name. We packed up all the belongings still there that we wanted to keep, and gave the rest to family and neighbors. A lot of the furniture was Lee’s, so we put it on the moving truck for our new place. The only part of the whole move that gave me any comfort was knowing I’d be back with Mom and Gerard.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “I’m not a punk and I’m not a fool.”

  Lee and I found a rental apartment in a suburb of Phoenix in the East Valley, around the corner from Mom. It was a spacious two-bedroom unit on the second level of a two-story complex. It had a gorgeous swimming pool landscaped with palm trees and a state-of-the-art gym for all the renters. The rent was dirt cheap, nothing like in New York. The setting was unbelievable. The city of Phoenix was totally flat, but surrounded by desert and mountains. Camelback Mountain was right in the middle of town. I had never seen such vegetation: huge cacti, weird-looking yucca, and lots of sagebrush. It never seemed to rain out there. Every day was cloudless, blue skies, with no humidity. The sunsets were incredible, shades of pinks and blues and other colors that I never saw in a New York sunset.

  Lee had saved enough money for us to live on for a
while without worrying. The plan was to eventually buy a house and a business and stay in Arizona for good. For a short time, I worked at Manhattan Bagels, the bagel store Mom and Gerard were running in Tempe. Bagels were hard to come by in Arizona, and the town had lots of New York transplants, so Mom’s shop was doing pretty well. Working there gave me a chance to get a feel for the area and to decide what kind of business we’d like to run.

  My dream of a better life was beginning to come true. Lee and I were together in Arizona and we had plans to operate a real business. I didn’t want to be married to someone with the “lifestyle,” so I was hoping Arizona would be where I was going to live a normal life. But it didn’t work out that way.

  Lee couldn’t make any money out there, so he was flying back to New York to make a buck. He even brought some guys from New York out to Arizona and they started doing crime there. He was drawn to criminal activity. He wasn’t the working type; he liked the feeling of getting away with it.

  Lee knew how to make money illegally, but he didn’t know how to make it grow. He was nothing like my father. Even though Dad was the boss in every business he had, he didn’t have a problem working. He still went to the office every day. My father liked to follow a structure. That quality was missing with the street guys of today, they didn’t have structure.

  My father was still in prison in Arizona when we first got out there, but he was getting out soon. While he had been in prison, I had started longing for a relationship with him. I had been to visit him once, which had been awkward. I missed him, but I was still so angry with him, I couldn’t put it behind me.

  Lee and I were still struggling to make it happen in Phoenix when my father was released in early 1995. He was immediately put into a federal witness protection program in Boulder, Colorado, where he was supposed to create a whole new life for himself.

  Dad called me when he got out. My anger was beginning to subside and I was willing to begin to repair our relationship, but I didn’t want to let my guard down one hundred percent. I was now in my twenties, and I felt like I had to prove my independence to him. I took his cooperation with the government very personally, I felt as though he had abandoned me, and his decision had changed my life’s path. He was always hassling me to go to college and find a career for myself, but I didn’t want to hear it. I would find something when I was ready. I knew that he was only doing it because he wanted me to have a better life. But I was standoffish. It wasn’t my intention to hurt his feelings, but he had hurt mine. I was also still very upset with him for what I felt he had done to our family.

  Finally, Lee and I went to visit my father outside of Boulder, Colorado, for a few days. This was a big deal for me. Dad had met Lee one other time, but now he was my boyfriend, so Dad viewed him in a different light. I knew he had heard lots of rumors. He had been informed by the Feds about what Lee did for a living and that Lee and I were together. They had come to my father while he was still in prison to tell him “your daughter is dating a street guy,” and Dad understood what that meant.

  It was really nice to make the trip. When Dad picked us up at the airport, he was wearing jeans and a jean jacket, not the sweats I was so accustomed to. Dad didn’t do much to alter his appearance; he just had some minor plastic surgery to correct cartilage damage in his nose. He had started dressing differently in jeans and construction boots. The Feds had given him a completely new identity. They provided him with an alias, Jimmy Moran, and registered a construction company in his name. It struck me as funny, my dad Sammy the Bull, Italian in every hair and DNA fiber in his body, purporting to be an Irishman. But there was no way he could lose his Brooklyn accent, his Italian heritage, and his passion for Sicilian cuisine.

  Dad’s apartment had a small balcony that looked over Boulder Creek, which ran right beside the backyard of the complex. He liked to sit out on his deck chair, sipping coffee and watching the water race by. He had a little dog, a miniature Doberman named Petie, to keep him company. The apartment was really nice, although not in the taste I was used to from Dad. He was so contemporary, and this place had a more country-western style, with wood furniture, dark tiles, and plaid curtains.

  “How is it living here?” I asked him. I knew how he was always ready to remodel and redecorate, but this was a rental. “Is the apartment complex going to let you rip down walls?” I joked. I was talking about his eye for design and style.

  Dad said he didn’t care. He was adaptable and could live anywhere. All the reconstruction had always been for us, to make our lives more comfortable. “I always wanted the best for you,” he answered. “I wasn’t about blowing my money on broads and alcohol and flashy clothes, I wanted to give you guys a place where you could feel comfortable and people could come and hang out.”

  I finally got him to admit he was thinking a little about how he could remodel.

  Dad seemed to be doing well living in Colorado. He was relaxed and happy. His mannerisms and his confidence were the same. There was nothing different in that way about the underboss gangster from back in New York. But it was clear that he was on a different path.

  My father was very happy to see me, but I believed this visit was so he could talk to Lee, to find out what type of person he was, what his motives were, and how he was treating me. Although he didn’t show it, I am sure Lee was nervous for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which was that he knew who my father was and what he was capable of. Dad could be intimidating in a calm way. He liked to joke, but he was a very serious man and very serious about his family. He was concerned about what roles and positions people were going to play in his life, especially now.

  Dad took Lee and me out a lot over the four days we were there. We’d go out to eat or drive around seeing the local sights or the mountains, and even went out to a bar at night to drink. This was the first time I ordered an alcoholic beverage in front of him. The whole time, I knew my father was reading Lee. He was a master at reading people. Plus, he was very controlled. Those were skills he had been born with, but he had sharpened them in the Mafia. His were almost survival skills; he could acutely analyze people in a very controlled way.

  Dad’s apartment only had one bedroom, so he gave that room to Lee. He and I slept in the living room, him on the couch and me in a big chair. He already had a lot of insight into Lee’s lifestyle, because that’s the way he had started. He understood Lee was a street guy, but he also realized that he didn’t have a full understanding of organized crime. Lee was more of a cowboy, he was untamable and didn’t want to answer to anyone. But Dad wanted to know what Lee’s intentions were for the future, was he willing to give up his ties to New York to be with me? Dad told Lee he was planning on leaving the witness protection program. He stated that his family chose not to go into the program, so he was going to sign himself out. He was going to go to Arizona and be there in the background to make sure his kids were okay, keeping his identity a secret. Since the threat on Gerard, he promised himself he would guard the family, even if it meant putting himself at risk. Besides, my father didn’t like the constraints of the witness program. He wasn’t free to move around as he pleased. There were too many rules and regulations and he didn’t want to have to answer to it.

  He had money stashed away and was going to use it to help the family, setting us up in legitimate businesses. He was as good a businessman as he was a gangster. He was ready to get his life back in order and was willing to help Lee if he was going to be with me.

  He said, “If you are going to be with my daughter, I would like to interact with you. You can be successful. You can do it in business, and I can help you.”

  Lee agreed. Our final evening in Boulder was going better than I expected. Lee and my father seemed to be hitting it off and I was relieved. It had been a long day of touring, a very emotional four days, and I was tired. The men weren’t ready to turn in so I went off to the bedroom for a good night’s sleep, leaving Lee and my father in the living room talking.

  When I was asle
ep, Dad gave Lee the talk. “I’m not a punk and I’m not a fool,” he told Lee. “I was never scared to go to jail. I didn’t cooperate ’cause I was scared. I never do anything half-assed. I might have walked away from that lifestyle but I did not change who I am.”

  My father basically told Lee that he was planning to move to Arizona, and if anyone were ever to come to Arizona to hurt his family or anyone he loved, it would be a war. For my father to be able to accept Lee into his life, he would have to be certain whose side he was on. Dad was very serious about his family and protecting the ones he loved; he was also big on knowing people’s loyalties, and he was testing Lee’s now. Dad asked him a hypothetical question, if he would be willing to murder if my father asked him to. In this way, Dad determined that Lee was a street fighter and a criminal, but he was not a murderer.

  I didn’t know about any of this until four months later, but I didn’t believe that Lee had any intention of crossing my father or me. Still, I think Dad’s conversation made him uncomfortable. I think Lee realized that even though Dad had cooperated, he was still the same old Sammy and would stop at nothing to protect his family.

  The next morning, Lee and I flew back to Phoenix. Lee became kind of distant after that. I just thought it was because he wasn’t happy in Arizona. He was having trouble making a living when he wasn’t in New York. He was already flying back and forth between New York and Phoenix, but he often mentioned he was longing to go back to Staten Island permanently.

  I think Lee realized that if he were going to be around someone like Sammy the Bull, there was no room to mess up. After the conversation with Dad, he understood he would always be caught in the middle, and the middle wasn’t a good place to be. That conversation in Boulder played a big role in how he wanted to move forward. Since he was going to be in New York, he needed to show that he had no connection to Sammy the Bull, even though he was with his daughter.