MOB DAUGHTER
This edition published in 2013 by Summersdale Publishers Ltd.
First published in the USA in 2012 by St Martin's Press
Copyright Karen Gravano with Lisa Pulitzer, 2012
Back cover images courtesy of Debra Gravano and Yvonne Hemsey via Getty Images
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CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I'd like to acknowledge my special friends and family who have been in my corner and believed in me through all my ups and downs.
David, thanks for being a great father to our beautiful daughter Karina and for always being there when it counts.
Karina and Nicholas: you are the loves of my life. I am so proud of both of you.
Dad, Mom, and Gerard: you are my foundation and support team. Throughout everything we've been through in life we have always remained ONE. I am so proud to call each one of you family. I love you all.
To everyone from the offices to the field that works so hard every day to create Mob Wives, thanks for putting up with us.
To all the people that watch and support Mob Wives, you make the show worth doing. And to the people who have taken the time to reach out to me personally, trust me, your support is very much appreciated. And a special thanks to everyone who helped this book come to life. Lisa, our hard work is complete. xoxo
PROLOGUE
'God don't like that, Nick.'
I could feel my stomach tightening as I steered the rental car toward the sprawling complex of dreary cement-block buildings. The prison where my father was being housed looked even more ominous than I imagined, isolated at the end of a narrow dirt road, sixty miles from the nearest town and surrounded by mountains and twelve-foot razor-wire fencing. My father had just been moved to this location after spending two years in solitary confinement at an undisclosed federal prison and five more at ADX outside Florence, Colorado. ADX, also known as the Alcatraz of the Rockies, is an all-male 'supermax' prison that houses some of the country's most dangerous criminals, high-ranking mobsters, terrorists, and serial murderers.
It had been years since I'd last seen my dad, Sammy 'the Bull' Gravano, in person. Our previous visit hadn't gone well.
We'd spent much of the time arguing. I was very strong-minded, just like my father, and we didn't always see eye to eye. I was hoping this wasn't going to be a repeat performance, especially since I had my mother, nine-year-old daughter, Karina, and ten-year-old nephew, Nicholas, along.
When my father was incarcerated at ADX, it had been hard communicating with him by phone. He'd been in solitary confinement for seven long years and had been allowed to make only one fifteen-minute call a month. If I was not home to answer, he would have to wait another month to try again. On the rare occasions that we did connect, he was frustrated and angry. For five years, he'd been on twenty-three-hour-a-day lockdown, and other than his monthly phone call to the family, had been permitted no contact with the outside world. He showered and ate all of his meals in his four-by-six-foot cell, located in a wing where the lights were kept on twenty-four hours a day. Every cell had a surveillance camera in it.
The only person to have visited him at ADX Florence was my mother. She told me that he had been transported to the visiting area in a cage with wheels just like Hannibal Lecter in the movie The Silence of the Lambs. They'd been holding him in a special unit for high-profile inmates. There could be no physical contact, not even handholding. She had to talk to him through the bullet-proof poleax glass. They wouldn't even remove his shackles during her visit.
The years of lockdown and lack of socialization had taken their toll. Once while at ADX he called me and started telling me about the bugs that visited him in his cell in the evenings, which freaked me out. He joked that they were his 'friends'. He'd even named them because he was so bored. I had nightmares for months. He didn't want anyone to visit him and said to stay in touch by mail.
My father had finally gotten out of solitary confinement, and was sounding a lot less angry and more like the man I remembered from my childhood. He had felt useless to his family in solitary, and that had been frustrating him. Talking to him on the phone had been bringing back memories of happier times and I'd started missing him. My father was not well, and I didn't know how much longer he'd be around. He was diagnosed with Graves' disease while in prison, a chronic thyroid condition affecting the immune system. I was concerned the illness was taking its toll. I was troubled by the poor medical attention he had been receiving and the fact that he had not been able to work out in a physical way as he once had done.
Because of his 'high-profile' status as a Mafia boss, he was being held at a maximum-security federal facility at an undisclosed location. We'd flown there from Arizona the previous night and stayed at a hotel near the airport because there was no accommodation closer to the facility.
The sun was just coming up over the mountains when I roused the kids, got them ready, and hurried them into the car. Visiting hours started promptly at eight a.m., and I knew my father would be waiting. I was excited to see him but also worried about the kids. They didn't see anything different about going to visit their grandfather in a penitentiary. They'd been to prisons before. My brother, Gerard, was in prison and so was my daughter's father, so they were used to visiting people in jail and spending a day. But this visit would be different.
The facility where my father was being held now was also a maximum-security prison with extremely stringent rules about contact with the outside world. The rules said that once Nicholas, Karina, my mother, and I entered, we had to stay inside for a full eight hours. A guard would sit within twenty feet of our table to monitor our conversations. And there wouldn't be much for the kids to do. At the other prisons, they knew there would be TV, card games, and lots of other kids to hang out with. Visiting areas were typically large and could have up to forty inmates receiving visitors at the same time. We'd been told there'd be just one other inmate getting a visit that weekend.
