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

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Id 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 weve 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

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

God dont 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 countrys most dangerous criminals, high-ranking mobsters, terrorists, and serial murderers.

It had been years since Id last seen my dad, Sammy the Bull Gravano, in person. Our previous visit hadnt gone well. Wed spent much of the time arguing. I was very strong-minded, just like my father, and we didnt always see eye to eye. I was hoping this wasnt 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. Hed 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, hed 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. Theyd 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 wouldnt 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. Hed even named them because he was so bored. I had nightmares for months. He didnt 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 Id started missing him. My father was not well, and I didnt know how much longer hed 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. Wed flown there from Arizona the previous night and stayed at a hotel near the airport because there were no accommodations 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 didnt see anything different about going to visit their grandfather in a penitentiary. Theyd been to prisons before. My brother, Gerard, was in prison and so was my daughters 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 wouldnt 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. Wed been told thered be just one other inmate getting a visit that weekend.

The mood in the car was light. My mother was in the passenger seat, and the kids were playing cards in the back. It was a warm summer day, and for much of the ride I was enjoying the scenery out the drivers side window. One of the things I missed since living in southern Arizona was the greenery and the foliage. When I was a kid growing up in New York, I used to love to play hide-and-seek among the trees in our backyard in Staten Island. It had been almost ten years since Id left the East Coast, and still I missed it.

Wed been driving for nearly an hour when the pion pines began to thin, and so did the road, which changed from four lanes to two and from asphalt to dirt. The rocky mixture beneath my tires aggravated my already nervous stomach. I could sense that my daughters temperament was changing. As the car got closer to the first of the fences surrounding the facility, she suddenly grew quiet and seemed to tense up.

Mom, is this a bad place for really bad people? she asked, looking nervously out at the cement watchtowers manned by heavily armed guards. Worse than the place where my dad and Uncle Gerard are? Because theres a man with a gun up there.

Why is Papa Bull in a bigger prison than my father? Nicholas questioned. Why is it a bigger deal to visit him?

Your grandfather is considered a higher profile and more dangerous criminal because he was a gangster, and he was famous, I told them.

The kids fell silent and my mother didnt say a word.

The uniformed guard in the booth directed me to a parking area and told me to wait in the car until somebody came to get us. Thats when I started to get real excited. I hadnt seen my father in a long time. I held such good memories of him from my childhood. Hed been such an important person in shaping me and who I am. Wed had our differences over the years, but at thirty-seven, Id finally arrived at a place where I could move past the anger and accept and love him for who he was. I wanted the kids to know him and I wanted my dad to see how theyd grown up.