mob Daughter.

Copyright © 2012 by Karen Gravano with Lisa Pulitzer.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information,
address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Photo on pp. ii–iii courtesy of Sandra Scibetta.

www.stmartins.com

Design by Anna Gorovoy

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gravano, Karen.
Mob daughter : the Mafi a, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, and me! / Karen
Gravano with Lisa Pulitzer.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-00305-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-01520-4 (e-book)
1. Gravano, Karen. 2. Gravano, Salvatore, 1945—Family. 3. Mafi a—New
York (State)—New York. 4. Children of criminals—Family relationships—
United States. I. Pulitzer, Lisa. II. Title.
HV6248.G647G73 2012
364.1092—dc23
[B] 2011043170

First Edition: February 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 CHAPTER ONE
“If we have to go to war, that’s what we have to do.”

I was nine years old when I began to suspect that my father

was a gangster. It was Sunday and Dad had us all packed into
the car for an afternoon of house hunting. He loved driving
around different neighborhoods, pointing out houses he liked
and sharing his renovation ideas. On this par ticular Sunday,
we were cruising around Todt Hill, an upscale community on
the southern end of Staten Island, fi lled with homes owned by
doctors, lawyers, and “businessmen.”
Mom was in the front seat with Dad, and my younger brother,
Gerard, and I were buckled in the back. My father had just fi n-
ished the renovations on a three-bedroom house he’d bought
for us in Bulls Head, a predominantly blue-collar neighbor-
hood just over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and not far from
 KAREN GRAVANO

the two-bedroom apartment we had been renting in Benson-

hurst, Brooklyn.
My father was obsessed with construction and remodeling.
He’d ripped apart and remodeled every place we’d ever lived
in. He’d started tearing apart the new house the minute we
had taken ownership, knocking down walls and putting in im-
provements, like nice European tiles.
My brother and I attended the local public school, P.S. 60.
My mother would walk me to school every day. I had some good
friends there, but Dad’s friend Louie Milito was forever sug-
gesting that he transfer me to the private prep school on “The
Hill.” His own daughter, Dina, went there. And so did Dori
LaForte. Dori’s grandfather was a big player in the Gambino
crime family. “The Hill” had large manicured homes dotting
its steep streets and was about ten minutes from our three-
bedroom house on Leggett Place. Anybody who was anybody
lived on “The Hill.”
One par ticular house in this fancy neighborhood belonged
to Gambino family crime boss Paul Castellano. We were on
one of our Sunday expeditions when Dad pointed it out to us.
It was an enormous monster of a house, unlike any other in the
neighborhood. It was way fancier and more ornate. It looked
more like an Italian villa or a museum, with its iron gates and
a gigantic fountain spewing water in the middle of a large,
circular brick driveway filled with expensive cars and incredi-
bly manicured grounds. It must have cost a fortune. There was
an elaborate security system with surveillance cameras moni-
toring the perimeter, which seemed to span an entire block.
“Wow,” I said. “What does Paul do that he has such a big
house?”
“He’s in the construction business,” my father replied.

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 MOB DAUGHTER

I remembered thinking how glad I was that my father worked

in the same business as Paul, so that maybe one day we could
get a mansion like that. Dad didn’t say Paul was his boss in one
of New York’s biggest, most blood-letting, most feared crime
families, or that the construction business wasn’t building
somebody a little house, but more like construction racketeer-
ing, loan-sharking, and extortion. He didn’t mention being a
businessman like Paul was putting your life on the line. I’d have
to wait to learn this angle of the business.
By the fall, my father announced that I was going to be trans-
ferring to a new school. He wanted me to get a superior edu-
cation and had me enrolled at the prestigious Staten Island
Academy. I was furious about leaving my friends and worried
that I wouldn’t fit in with the kids at private school. I was there
just a few weeks when a classmate invited me over to her
house to play. She lived so close to school, we could see the
playground from her yard. It was a beautiful day, and we were
outside on her front lawn. Her mother had just gone inside to
make us some lemonade when my new friend made a startling
announcement.
“My mother and father say a big gangster lives in that house,”
she said, pointing across the street to the Castellano estate.
I knew that Paul was Dad’s friend. I put two and two to-
gether and decided if Paul Castellano was a gangster, my father
must be one, too. He just didn’t act like a gangster. My idea of
a gangster was Vito Corleone, the fictional mob boss in The
Godfather. The movie had even been filmed a few blocks from
my school.
Still, I’d been confronted with the possibility that my father
was “connected” before. When I was six, I found a gun in my
parents’ bedroom in our apartment on Sixty-fi rst Street in

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 KAREN GRAVANO

Bensonhurst. Mom was in the kitchen, and I was amusing my-

self by hiding some of my favorite books under their bed. That’s
when I came upon the pistol Dad had stuffed beneath the mat-
tress. I knew my father had served in the army during the
Vietnam War because I’d seen his dog tags. I wondered if this
was a souvenir from the war. Racing to the kitchen, I went to
ask my mother about my startling discovery.
“Mommy, does Daddy have a gun because he was in the
army?”
“Yeah” was all she could muster.
The next day, I bragged to my friends at school, telling
them my father had a gun under the bed because he was in the
army. My teacher overheard me and went directly to my mother.
When Dad found out, he wasn’t upset. He just told me not to
talk about it anymore.
My father had this “coolness” about him. He was hipper
than the other kids’ dads. He wore sweats and gold chains,
and he had tattoos, Jesus on one arm and a rose on the other.
He also had a small diamond in the middle of his chest. He
owned nightclubs and always stayed out late. Some of his
friends were bouncers. They spoke and dressed differently from
the dads of the other kids at school. They had wads of cash in
their pockets and always came bearing gifts, even if it was just
a box of pastries on Sunday.
On weekends, my father would sometimes take me with him
to “the club” in Bensonhurst. I didn’t know it then, but it was
a local mobster hangout, also known as a men’s “social club.”
Dad would fi rst get the car washed and then we’d stop in.
Guys would be playing cards and drinking coffee. The club
looked like a big kitchen, with tables and chairs set out around

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 MOB DAUGHTER

the room and a few pictures, mostly scenes of Italy, hanging

on the walls. There were no women around, ever. An older man
named “Toddo” was usually at one of the tables in the back. He
was always nicely dressed in slacks and a sweater, sporting a
big, fancy watch and a pinky ring.
“Hey Bo, what’s up?” my father would say. It’s how he ad-
dressed everyone, even me. I didn’t know why he addressed
people as Bo, not Bro.
“Go say hello to Uncle Toddo,” he’d instruct, pushing me in
the old man’s direction.
I’d have to go over and hug and kiss him. “How you doing,
kiddo?” he’d ask. The old man would pat me on the head and
then stick a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket.
I thought it was weird the way the men all kissed each other
on one cheek and then exchanged a fi rm handshake. No one
just walked into a room and said hello; it was always a hand-
shake, and there always seemed to be an order of whose hand
should be shaken fi rst. Obviously, I didn’t know that Toddo
was Salvatore “Toddo” Aurello, a capo in the Gambino crime
family, and my father’s boss and mentor in the mob. I just
thought Dad respected him more because he was older.
It wasn’t until I was twelve years old that I knew for certain
that my father was a gangster. Even then, I knew not to ask any
questions.

When I was in middle school, I overheard my parents talk-

ing about some guy who wanted to buy one of my father’s night-
clubs. It was late afternoon and we were all over at my aunt
Fran’s for Sunday dinner. Fran was one of my father’s older

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 KAREN GRAVANO

sisters. She and her husband, Eddie, lived across the street
from us in a two-family house. Dad’s mother also lived there,
in an apartment downstairs.
Aunt Fran was closer to my father than his sister Jean. Dad
and Fran were closer in age and seemed to have more in com-
mon. Fran was always warm and loving. She played the piano,
and she taught Gerard and me how to play. She’d sit us down
and tell us stories about my grandparents, and how they had
come over from Italy. My father’s mother, Kay, wrote chil-
dren’s stories that were published here in the United States.
Aunt Fran would read us those stories, and she’d add to them
with her own fanciful fabrications. One of Grandma Kay’s sto-
ries was about a little girl named Karen and a rabbit. Another
one was about my cousins and how they flew through the city
on the wings of an eagle. My Aunt Jean, or Jeannie, who was
Dad’s eldest sister, kept the books at her house, but they were
all lost in a fire after Grandma Gravano died. Jeannie was mar-
ried to my uncle Angelo. He wasn’t involved in “the life.” He
was an engineer.
Jeannie was much older than Dad. We would go over to their
house a lot. Uncle Angelo was into golf and tennis, and he had
a fish tank in his basement. We weren’t allowed to touch any
of his things. Dad loved Angelo. He was more like a father fig-
ure to Sammy. Uncle Angelo was a hard man, but he was very
generous. He had a lot of morals, and he stood behind his mor-
als. When two of his kids got in trouble for smoking marijuana,
he threw them out of the house. Dad couldn’t relate to that type
of discipline; no matter what I did, he would never disown me.
On the nights that Dad worked late in Brooklyn, we’d usu-
ally go over to Aunt Fran’s for dinner. Dad would meet us there
when he got home. He had this thing about eating together as

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a family every night, and made it a point to be home at five

sharp.
I remember sitting around the long white table in Aunt Fran’s
dining room when Dad started telling everybody about this
Czechoslovak ian guy named Frank Fiala. He said the guy was
“nuts.” I wasn’t sure what this guy was doing that made Dad
think he was out of his mind, but whatever it was, it was begin-
ning to piss off my father. I knew that Frank Fiala wanted to
buy The Plaza Suite on Sixty-eighth Street in Gravesend,
Brooklyn. It was my father’s most successful nightclub. Dad
owned the entire building and operated The Plaza Suite out of
the second floor. His construction company headquarters and
a showroom for his carpet and wood flooring company were
on the ground floor. The discotheque was enormous. It spanned
the entire five thousand square feet of the building and had a
bar, a dance floor, and a private VIP lounge. People lined up
outside for hours hoping to get in. For a time, Dad was there
practically every night, but with his construction business de-
manding more of his time, he was looking to unload the place.
Frank offered my father a million dollars for the club. Dad
had accepted his offer, but I think he was starting to have sec-
ond thoughts. A few days after we fi rst heard about Frank
Fiala, my father didn’t show up for dinner. I’d been waiting for
him to get home so I could ask him if my best friend, Toniann,
could sleep over. Mom said I needed Dad’s permission. He al-
most always said yes.
Six o’clock rolled around and he still wasn’t home.
“Where’s Daddy?” I asked my mother.
She looked up from her pot of tomato sauce. “Your father is
busy. He won’t be joining us for dinner.”
“Well, can Toniann sleep over?”

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 KAREN GRAVANO

“Let’s wait until your father gets home and see what he says.”
“But you just said he’s not coming home for dinner. When
will he be back?”
“I don’t know. And honestly, I don’t know if this is a good
night for Toniann to be here anyhow. Maybe she should go home
now.” She packed up the sauce in plastic containers. “We’re go-
ing across the street to eat with your grandmother, Aunt Fran,
and the kids. Get your brother, put on some clean clothes, and
let’s get going.”
There was a strange vibe in Aunt Fran’s house that evening.
Uncle Eddie wasn’t around, which was also odd. None of the
adults said anything while they set out the food, a sure sign some-
thing was wrong because my family members were big talkers.
Even though I wanted to, I didn’t ask Mom any more questions.
After dinner, I asked her if I could go across the street to
Toniann’s to play until my father came home. “You can play,
but only for half an hour.”
“What about the sleepover?” I pressed.
She sighed. “Ask your father when he gets home. If he doesn’t
come home, it’ll have to be another night.”
We were out playing in Toniann’s front yard when Uncle
Eddie’s car roared around the corner and screeched into our
driveway. Dad jumped out and ran into our house, and I ran
in after him. He wasn’t in the living room or the kitchen, so I
wandered upstairs. The door to the bedroom was shut. The
moment I cracked it opened, Dad turned and looked at me with
a serious face.
“Don’t you knock?” He quickly turned his back to me, but
not before I saw him jam a revolver into the waistband of his
jeans. I tried to figure out if something was wrong, but his
body language revealed nothing. He was calm and together. I

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stared at him and struggled to convince myself that I hadn’t

seen the gun. After a long pause, I fi nally said, “I was just go-
ing to ask if I could have a sleepover with . . .”
He interrupted, “No, you can’t!” He untucked his T-shirt and
turned around to face me.
“Why not?” I whined. “What’s the big deal?”
“Not tonight. You can have one over the weekend. And I
can’t talk about this right now. I gotta go.” His eyes were
cold; I felt as if he was looking through me. He spoke really
quickly, his mind clearly somewhere else. He grabbed a pair
of black leather gloves off the top of his dresser and brushed
by me.
I followed him into the hallway, watched him stomp down
the stairs, and called after him, “Why do you need the gloves?
It’s the middle of the summer.” I knew in my heart that some-
thing bad was about to happen, and I was terrified.
He stopped, stared, and said, “Why do you ask so many
questions?”
“I don’t know. I was just asking.”
“One day, you’re gonna make a good lawyer.” He slowly
came back up the stairs, bent down, and kissed me on the fore-
head. “I promise you can have a sleepover before we leave for
the farm next week.” The farm was Dad’s pride and joy, a
thirty-acre working horse farm he’d purchased and renovated
in rural New Jersey. We’d spent every summer there since Dad
bought the place.
“Trust me, tonight’s not a good night,” my father told me.
“Now I want you to be a good girl. You’re the oldest. You’re in
charge and you have to take care of your brother. And don’t
drive your mother nuts.” He kissed me again, stood up, and
headed out the door.

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