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

by Karen Gravano; Lisa Pulitzer

  Once again, I found myself caught between two worlds. Even though I was dating Dave, whom I cared a lot about, and had my girlfriends around me, I still very much needed my family. It was ironic that though I was leading the street life, the life I thought I wanted so badly, I still missed my family. I was living in a kind of dreadful limbo; I had no comfort zone.

  I felt like I was on the outside again, this time not with my father’s organized crime family, but with my own family. They weren’t calling me anymore. I wasn’t sure if that was their plan, to kind of cut me off and make me feel lonely. I had never asked them to stop calling, but I was missing them more.

  While I was angry with my father, I realized that in many ways I was just like him. I found myself running my own criminal enterprise and I took pride in it. I was gaining respect on my own outside the lifestyle he had chosen. I’d lived in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Manhattan and liked the fast pace, the nightlife, and the hustle and bustle of New York City. Besides, I had built a lucrative business for myself, even if it was illegal. Although I knew I always wanted more than that, I was caught in the moment and couldn’t bring myself to shut it down.

  * * *

  Dad had done everything he told us he was going to do back when I had visited him in Boulder. He had remained in Colorado for only six months before leaving the witness protection program to join my mother and brother in Arizona.

  Once my father relocated to Phoenix, he was no longer officially under the wing of the U.S. Marshals Service. He also had a long list of parole conditions he had to abide by. My dad didn’t want my mother to be in any kind of danger on account of him, so he took his own apartment a short distance away in case somebody with a gun and a grudge came looking for him. My parents never lived together again after our house on Lamberts Lane. They had actually gotten a divorce, but it was more for legal reasons than because of a bad marriage. Dad still called my mother his wife. They adored each other.

  My parents had been through a lot in their marriage, but my mother was a very loyal person and no matter what my father’s life had been and no matter what he had put her through as a wife, he had always been a good husband and a good father. My mother knew that it was never my father’s intention to ever hurt her or their kids. She understood that he loved us and would protect us until the day he died. He had always been a good provider and made sure my mother was always well taken care of. She knew that no matter what decisions he had made in his world, he had always been good to us in our world.

  Whenever I would call my family in Arizona, Mom would tell me that she, Dad, and my brother were going out for dinner or to a movie. They sounded like they were doing just fine without me. Dad even sounded like he had found a replacement for me. He had taken a real liking to a young college girl about my age named Jen. He had even hired her to work for him as his assistant at the construction business he was now running. Dad would never sink so low as to out-and-out compare me to her, but he’d say things like “she’s a brainiac” or “she’s going places,” things that definitely made me feel judged or resentful. “I really want you to meet her,” he would say, as if I wanted to make the acquaintance of somebody he thought more highly of than me.

  I hadn’t been out to Arizona for a while, so I decided to go back for a visit. While I was there, I met Dad’s assistant, Jen. She was definitely from the west. She didn’t have that city edge. Nothing she owned had a designer label, but I felt very intimidated by her. She wasn’t chic, but she had an aggressive smartness. Dad was right. She was going to be somebody some day.

  College didn’t mean anything to me. I was now making three thousand dollars a week, without a college degree. Nevertheless, I felt I wasn’t in Jen’s league. She made me jealous.

  Growing up, Dad had always looked at me and told me I was going to be somebody, a doctor or a lawyer or some other distinguished career. Now, on my trip to Arizona, he wasn’t looking at me with that “I believe in you, you’re going to make me proud” look. I think he’d given up on me. And for the first time, he wasn’t insisting that I visit. It didn’t seem to matter to him one way or another.

  My parents had done everything they could for me and saw my life in a way that I couldn’t. I was too entrenched in thinking that making money was all that mattered. I didn’t care how I made it, as long as it was flowing in.

  Once the visit was over and I was back in New York, I started to feel depressed and inadequate. A lot of our customers were professionals, the doctors and lawyers who my father once had dreamed I would be, except for their pot-smoking habits. When I visited their apartments, I found myself wondering what it would be like to have what they had: prestige, a nice place to live, and a respectable career.

  To top it off, the kids from my old neighborhood were really running around trying to be gangsters now, no more hubcaps and petty stuff. It was because of the gangster life that my family was broken, that my father had gone to prison, that mother was living in another state across the country, and that my brother had avoided a hit on his life only because Dad’s friend had been in the right place at the right time. I was homesick for my family.

  Not only that, I had terrible guilt about something that had happened to Gerard. I had asked my brother to overnight me a pound of weed from Arizona and he got arrested for sending it. He dropped it at a mailing station, all wrapped up in newspaper, under brown paper and secured with packing tape, and addressed to New York. The female clerk thought he looked suspicious, so after he paid and left, she opened the package and found the weed. She didn’t know how to locate him and there was no return address on the package. The next day, when I called him to say the package hadn’t arrived, he called there to see when it had been sent. The same clerk star-sixty-nined him to get his phone number. Then, she called the police.

  The cops called my brother and told him he had to turn himself in. Gerard reached out to Dad, and my father found him an attorney in Phoenix. Gerard ultimately beat the rap because the woman had opened the package without a warrant, so it was an illegal search and seizure. However, my father was furious with Gerard. My brother had a house, a restaurant, and a son, so Dad viewed his marijuana bust as reckless and irresponsible.

  Gerard never told my father that the package had been for me. He abided by the family code of no tattling, work it out between you. My father knew Gerard and I dabbled in little things, but he wasn’t aware of my drug business. Even though I hadn’t gotten in trouble, being a party to my brother’s arrest was a low point for me.

  But the final straw came the day I went to a magazine, where a few of my clients were employed, to make a delivery. There were already rumors out there that Sammy the Bull’s daughter was running a weed service. One of our clients, an editor at the magazine who knew me as “Gina,” saw me when I came in. We had become friends, and we would talk for a bit whenever I came by.

  But when I was leaving that day, he startled me when he didn’t call me by my alias. “All right, Miss Gravano,” he said. “See you next time.”

  “All right, bye,” I said, starting for the door before turning back to him in total surprise. “Wait, what did you say?”

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

  “I’m not her,” I insisted.

  “All right, Karen. Can I call you Karen?” The situation was making me uncomfortable. “Look, I don’t know why you are doing this,” he said. “You can be so much more.” It turned out he was being protective. He told me to be careful. He thought I could be doing something better with my life. “If they catch you, they will lock you up and throw away the key simply because of your last name,” he warned.

  I thought I’d been doing such a good job of making sure nobody knew my family’s history, but the combination of the fame and stigma associated with being a Gravano would follow me wherever I went. It had never occurred to me that I could have a conventional life. But my friend’s comments got me thinking.

  Besides, the dr
ug business wasn’t a career without its risks. Running the weed service had become increasingly dangerous. First of all, there were other services competing with ours. Everyone had been calling us because we were an all-girl service. But now customers were calling two services at a time and buying from whichever runner arrived first. Some of our runners were getting robbed. People started robbing each other. One night, Christina was held up at knifepoint as I stood by. Thankfully, we were just robbed and nobody got hurt. It scared the shit out of us.

  We thought the best idea was to bring some muscle on board. Dave and some of his friends started watching our backs. Dave wasn’t like my other boyfriends, who had been obsessed with the Mafia and the lifestyle. It didn’t seem to matter to him. I liked that. It made the relationship about me, not Dad.

  Getting the guys into the mix only led to more drama and confrontation and made the fights worse. When we were an all-girl service, no one would mess with us, but now all bets were off.

  One night, we were at a nightclub and an altercation broke out. The cops ended up wanting to talk to Christina. They had heard the altercation was over our weed service. Although Christina was brought down to the station for questioning, she refused to talk to the officers. She wasn’t being charged with anything, so they had to let her go.

  Our biggest fear wasn’t the cops; it was our fathers. We did not want our fathers to find out what we were doing. We knew how disappointed they would be.

  The last of the fun was over, though. We were having too many close calls with one thing or another. I was beginning to realize that as much as I wanted to blame my father for everything that ever went wrong in my life, the time had come for me to accept responsibility for the results of my actions. It was time for me to grow up.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Do you have any remorse now?”

  One morning I woke up and decided I was just done with New York. I was twenty-seven, missing my family, and confused about what I wanted. Christina had a college degree, so she had lots of options besides the weed business. I knew I couldn’t go on this way forever. Eventually, I was going to get caught, so in October 1998, I joined my family in Phoenix. This was to become my new world and a fresh start for all of us, now that Dad was living there too. As a family, the Gravanos had been through so much heartache, pain, and betrayal. I was looking forward to some healing.

  It was crazy to think back how at one point I had been asked to suggest to my father that he should kill himself, and even more crazy to not have even questioned that directive, total insanity. But conversations like that had been normal back then. Now I was in search of a different kind of normal.

  Jennifer thought I was just going to Phoenix for a visit and would be coming back soon to her apartment in Bayside, being the consummate New Yorker that I was. When I first got out to Arizona, even I was convinced it was only temporary. My options were wide open. I had every intention of returning to New York, or maybe going to live in Los Angeles.

  My mother picked me up at the airport. Dad greeted me at the curb when we pulled up in front of Mom’s gorgeous new house that first day. After Dad had arrived from Boulder, he had bought my mother a new house and remodeled it to be 4,500 square feet, complete with an in-ground pool, so she would be comfortable. He had his own apartment somewhere nearby and had come around just for my return.

  “Welcome home, kiddo,” he beamed. “We have your room all ready for you. Do you want to see it?”

  “I’m not staying forever,” I responded. “This isn’t my home.”

  He looked at me like he wanted to rip me a new asshole right then, but he said nothing. Gerard and his new baby were waiting for me, too. His girlfriend Mallory had given birth to their son, Nicholas, that past May, and I was so excited to get to know him. I hadn’t seen him since I had flown out to Phoenix for his birth five months earlier. My brother had been keeping me up-to-date about all of the baby’s milestones.

  As much as I wanted to be happy, I couldn’t allow myself to feel good. I didn’t know how to let go of my anger and just fit back in. I was nasty, sarcastic, and confrontational.

  We had dinner. I felt completely at home, but I didn’t want to tell my parents that.

  After dinner, Dad said, “Come on, let’s go for a walk.” He had planted a rose garden in the backyard with a little bench in it. “You ever seen The Godfather,” he asked me, “when Michael Corleone is in the rose garden?”

  Why was he asking me this? I wondered.

  “I know how hard it is to move here. I miss New York, too. But please trust me. I want to move on, and give you and your brother a chance in your life. If I can do that, if I can provide a new path, it will make me happy.”

  I didn’t want to hear that. I just wanted him to be Sammy the Bull, the gangster.

  “I know you think I’ve changed, but to be honest with you, I will always be Sammy,” Dad continued. “I don’t think you understand who Sammy is. I don’t have to be in New York with people driving me around and on some pedestal to be who I am. I am trying to make a new path.”

  Dad took out a gun to show me. “I’m always going to be Sammy,” he said. “I haven’t changed. I’m still who I am.”

  I think he was trying to say that even though he was living outside the Mafia world, he hadn’t changed. If his enemies were going to come after him, and this was his destiny, he was ready for it. But this was not his focus. His focus was getting everybody back on track and helping us to rebuild our lives.

  “I am not a coward, I am not going to run,” he said. “I am going to be right here banging it out ’cause this is who I am.

  “I understand from the way you grew up that you think there’s no other way,” Dad said. He was trying to show me that there were opportunities for me outside New York. But I couldn’t see it yet. I was still standoffish and not as open-minded about starting a new life. My answers to him were still a little snippy.

  He should have checked me right there. My father had never allowed me to talk to him like that but I think he sat back as a parent and let me play out my anger. Only part of me had wanted to come to Phoenix, another part wasn’t ready.

  Dad wanted to keep me busy and not thinking about New York. The following morning, he showed up at Mom’s house and took me shopping for a full aesthetician’s setup. He got me a bed, steamer, table, and everything I would need to do facials in Mom’s house in the room where Gerard had stayed. My brother had moved out and was living with his girlfriend and their new baby a couple of houses away from us. A couple of days later, I found a job at a local day spa, doing facials and body treatments.

  Dad’s small one-bedroom apartment was in a neighboring town. He lived there with his new dog, Petie Boy, who he had picked up after his first dog Petie fell off the balcony to his death in Boulder. Neither my mother nor my father ever moved on romantically, but they never really got back together again as a couple. Still, they remained friends. They were both living in Phoenix, but in separate households. My father felt it was important to be around us, but he also felt the need to keep his distance.

  I was in Phoenix a little over a week when Dad and I hashed it out over dinner. We went out to his favorite Italian restaurant, just the two of us. The place was cute, and kind of hidden in an old house in Tempe, not far from the college. I had told Mom and Gerard I wanted to have dinner with Dad alone. I had so many questions, some I had wanted to ask him since I was very young. He was the one to break the code of silence first, so now I felt I could ask him anything I wanted, including those things my mother had so respectfully kept private.

  “I don’t want you to talk to me like you are Sammy the Bull or Jimmy Moran. I want you to talk to me like you’re my father,” I told him unapologetically.

  I asked him what it was like to kill someone. His response absolutely floored me.

  “Surprisingly, the first time, it was a rush,” he said. “It was just the craziest feeling because I didn’t have remorse. I just felt empowered.”r />
  “Do you have remorse now?” I asked.

  “I don’t regret who I am. Although there are things I didn’t like that I had to do in my life, I know why I did them and I have to live with them, so to answer your question I don’t live with remorse, I live with reality and how to move past it. I chose that life. And if I needed to, I can kill someone tomorrow. I am trying to follow a new path. But I will always be Sammy the Bull.”

  Dad told me about life in the Mafia and the codes they were supposed to live by. “If there’s a hundred codes, we broke ninety-nine of them,” he said.

  I told him about my marijuana business. He found a little humor in it and then said he was glad I was out of it. I finally confessed to him that I had been the one to get Gerard arrested for mailing the pound of weed to New York. He reprimanded me, but he understood.

  Although we did talk about a lot things, the hardest thing for him to talk about was my uncle Nicky, and we didn’t address the issue.

  Dad told me he felt like he put his family second to his other life. But now he was ready to put his blood family before his Cosa Nostra family. I felt like I really started to understand my father’s character. I realized that he was a man of honor and loyalty and that he would never double-cross someone unless he was double-crossed first. I started to feel a lot less angry after talking to him that night.

  When I asked him if he regretted cooperating, he said he sometimes regretted not killing John Gotti, as he had originally wanted to do while they were in jail. But he said, “I’m not living my life with regrets because I will never be able to move forward.