Bringing Down The Bull
Feature Story Phoenix Magazine
May 2003

When Salvatore Gravano ratted-out his fellow mobsters and moved to Phoenix - courtesy of the Witness Protection Program - he was given a second chance. He didn't take it. Instead, he started one of the biggest drug rings in the country and got busted. Not by the FBI, which was clueless, but by the Phoenix Police Department. Good for them. Not so good for Sammy.

     By the time he got to Phoenix, Sammy "the Bull" Gravano had killed 19 people, spilled his guts on the witness stand about the Gambino crime family, served just a few years in prison to pay for his sins, and was given a new life under the federal Witness Protection Program.
     Few people get such a spectacular second chance, but it was probably apropos that the affable, charming Sammy - the highest-ranking Mafiosi to ever break the "blood oath of silence" - was one of the few.
     Within five years under the Arizona sun, it was all over. In that time, Gravano opened a construction company, became a popular cult figure among the students at Arizona State University, and, oh yes, went into business with his son running an Ecstasy drug ring. The FBI, which still counted on Sammy's testimony in prominent Mafia cases, knew about the first two. It didn't have a clue about the drugs.
     When Sammy was finally busted and sentenced to 20 years in prison, he said the reason he went back into crime was to get closer to his son - that his sin was a father's misguided love. The state of Arizona said he was running one of the biggest drug rings in the country and was plotting a new crime family called the Arizona Mafia.
     Those sides of the story have been well documented. This, however, is the inside story of how Sammy the Bull was brought down right under the noses of the FBI.

     The first time Phoenix undercover agent Jim Cope was told the drug ring he was trying to bust in 1999 was headed by Sammy the Bull, he thought it was just puffery.
     Having grown up in New Jersey, Cope knew the reputation of the Mafia underboss - the man who'd gotten famous by turning on John Gotti, eventually sending the "Teflon Don" up the river.
     But come on, this was Phoenix, Arizona. This was a drug ring that catered to the Rave and Scottsdale club scenes. Cope had no reason to believe Sammy was anywhere near the state, and he knew the Bull was too old to be clubbing it.
     "I thought, if I went back and told the guys that Sammy the Bull was involved, they'd laugh me out of the station house," Cope remembers. "They'd think I was nuts."
     So the police sergeant started asking around, quietly, cautiously. More names kept coming up and the questions kept mounting: Is Sammy in Arizona? Why is he here? What's he doing? Does he have a son named Gerard? Is that the Gerard Gravano who's making the club scene with a druggie named Mike Papa?
     Cope was well acquainted with Papa, from his days in the mid-1990s doing undercover work at Gilbert High School on the Devil Dogs and steroids. Papa's name was all over that scandal. And now his name kept popping up as Cope and his crew infiltrated Raves and spent freely to purchase the sexy little pill called Ecstasy - a drug that's proved itself capable of instant death as well as a high.
    They'd buy 25 or 50 pills at a time, at $20 a pop. Nothing suspicious, just glutinous. But when they asked about buying 500 pills, they got a warning: Watch out - New York guys are running this and if they find out you're dealing, they'll want a "tax" paid on each pill.
    Then one day a source put a name to the "New York guys," and the name was that of a man who'd made quite a reputation for himself. First on the streets of New York and then in bookstores with his bestseller: Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia, which was written by the late Peter Maas.
     Cope kept getting affirmative answers to his "could-this-be-true" questions, and finally confided in Detective Ron Sterrett.
     Sterrett was skeptical too, but it was time to find out. Normally, an officer would immediately go right to the National Crime Information Center. But these officers knew better than that with this case: The NCIC is linked to the FBI, "and we knew if we ran Sammy we'd get a visit from the FBI," Sterrett says. "We didn't want to go to them because we didn't know who we could trust and who we couldn't. And we didn't know if they'd leave him here once they knew we were investigating Sammy."
     So they moved prudently. It wasn't hard to find out that Sammy's ex-wife, Debra, was living in the Valley, or that she and a Gerard Gravano were listed on the lease of a construction company in Tempe called Marathon - a name that rang bells, since it was the same name Sammy had used for his construction business back in New York during his Mafia days.
     "We staked out Marathon and early one morning, this Lexus drives up and out pops Sammy, wearing a white T-shirt and leather jacket - just like he did in New York," Cope recalls.
     It was time to get some ducks in order. "We met with the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] and Customs and all together agreed that this was a top-secret investigation," Sterrett adds. "This was our case."
     So, the Phoenix PD never used Gravano's name in its teletypes. They kept the focus on Papa. ("If he leads us to Sammy, fine," Sterrett said.)
     From the very start, Sterrett was wary on every front. "I wanted to know if Sammy was involved. How easy is it for a 20-year-old kid to say, 'I'm backed by Sammy,' and Sammy not know a thing. I knew Mike Papa was dirty. I didn't know if Sammy was. But I sure didn't want someone from the FBI calling up Sammy and saying, 'Phoenix PD is investigating you.' If he was involved - and that's a big word - our investigation would go down the toilet."
     There was also a voice of experience speaking here. "I've worked organized crime and I knew defense attorneys would say we just went after Sammy because he was Sammy."
     Now he can admit what he felt certain from the start: "I thought we'd get Papa and Gerard and lots of little guys, but I never thought we'd get Sammy. Those guys were simpletons. I expected more from Sammy."
     It wasn't long after their discovery of a bull in their midst that all of Arizona learned that the guy who went by the name of John Moran was really the infamous Sammy the Bull.
     And that was thanks to The Arizona Republic's Dennis Wagner, who wrote in his 1999 front page exposé that he was met with a steely glare and these words when he showed up at Sammy's apartment: "So, you're going to write about Sammy the Bull living here?... Do you know how many people will get killed if you do that?"

     It is pretty hysterical when you think about it, but there was a time when Sammy would enter the old Gold Bar Coffeehouse in Tempe, and the guy who played the piano would pound out the first few bars of the theme song from The Godfather.
     Everyone there - from the owners to the strange assembly of punkers, ravers and coeds - knew exactly who this guy was. He told Mob stories and liked to play chess. In fact, Sammy regularly "held court" at the coffeehouse to an adoring crowd, some of whom brought in his book for an autograph, and all of whom had a sick fascination with anything Mafia. They'd ask lots of questions and sometimes their enthusiasm was funny, like the time one eager young lady tried to get his attention by yelling, "Mr. Bull, Mr. Bull."
     "The guy radiated bad medicine," remembers journalist David Holthouse, who witnessed those scenes. He was working for New Times then, and now writes for a paper in Denver.
     "I did some stories on computer hackers, and these guys said a famous gangster, who was maybe still in the Witness Protection Program, was hanging out at the Gold Bar," Holthouse says. "I hung out there every night until I met him. He never knew I was a reporter, but we played chess a few times. He wasn't as good as he thought he was, but I'm no dummy, so I let the wookie win. He was very arrogant and very full of himself, and he looked like a bad ass."
     Holthouse intended to get familiar with the mobster and then ask for an interview, but that never happened because Sammy stopped coming to the coffeehouse, and then the Republic outed him. He's sorry he missed the story on one hand, but not on the other: "In all honesty, I was afraid of how he'd react."

     The Phoenix Police investigation into the Ecstasy drug ring that kept bantering Sammy's name got off to a terrible start. By December 1999, they'd gotten court permission for wiretaps, and the day they "flipped the switch" on Mike Papa's phone, they sat listening to a Hispanic guy doing dope deals with Mexico.
     They called in a Spanish-speaking officer who listened a while and then told them, "We've got problems, bro." Unbeknownst to the police, Papa was in Florida for Christmas and a friend was staying at his apartment - a friend who was being investigated by the DEA. "We got crossways with a DEA wiretap," Sterrett remembers with chagrin. They had to go back to Judge Susan Bolton, who was not happy with the screw up. Everything was shut down, but the mistake was quickly corrected and the tapes went back on. Almost immediately, they made an interesting discovery.
     "Do you have the money for Shorty Whip Wop," they heard Mike Papa ask Dave Seabrook, who was the live-in boyfriend of Sammy's daughter Karen.
     It didn't take long to figure out that the weird nickname was code for Sammy Gravano, who they quickly learned was getting 50 cents for every pill the gang sold.
     Over a two-month period, police would monitor 17,000 conversations through their wiretaps. (Not all of the taps were proper, however. A review of the tapes shows that officers listened to several hours of personal calls - wiretap laws prohibit recording conversations that aren't related to criminal activity.)
     In mid-January 2000, the taps revealed that 25,000 pills were coming in from California.
     "They weren't too smart," Cope says with a laugh. "The drop was at University and Mill, cattycorner from P.F. Chang's. There's a two-story parking garage right there. I was on the second floor taking pictures of them. They handed over the money in a red backpack."
     A couple of days later, Papa got a phone call from the drug source complaining that the money was $10,000 short. "My Godfather gave it to me and he counted it himself," Papa shot back.
     The source kept calling, maintaining he'd been stiffed, while Papa always answered that "The Big Man" himself had counted the money, and it couldn't possibly be short.
     Another tap caught David Seabrook and his girlfriend Karen Gravano speculating on the missing money. Seabrook thought Papa took it and Karen told her boyfriend he had to go talk to her dad.
     When Seabrook showed up at Marathon Construction, to the delight of the cops, the blinds were open and they clearly saw Sammy flailing his arms. "You could tell he was really ticked," Cope remembers.
     The police now had probable cause that Sammy had drug meetings at his office. The bug went on his office phone. And that bug would catch Sammy red-handed - but in the most unexpected, ridiculous way.

     If you've ever read Sammy's book, you probably came away realizing that there are people whose value systems are out of whack.
     Nobody dares to get too haughty here about how ruthless and revolting that subculture of crime is, after all, much of America wallows in The Sopranos.
     So it's not surprising the book sold well. It was promoted well: "Sammy the Bull Gravano is the highest ranking member of the Mafia in America ever to defect…. In breaking his blood oath of silence, Sammy the Bull brings us, as never before, into the uppermost inner sanctums of Costa Nostra as if we were there ourselves - a secret underworld of power, lust, greed, betrayal and deception, with the specter of violent death always waiting in the wings."
     Time magazine's review probably summed it up best: "Underboss is fascinating for its anthropologically detailed portrait of a subculture some of us can't get enough of."
     In the book, Sammy talks about killing 19 people without emotion - even supplying the detail that his first kill was to the radio playing a Beatles song. He talks about his indescribable joy at becoming a "made man." He talks about feeling justified in betraying Gotti because Gotti had betrayed him.
     But nowhere is he more animated than when he talks about how his family reacted to his decision to turn on their friends. To quote from the book:
     "I called them to come to see me [in prison], my wife and daughter, not my son, who was only 14. I told them I was going to cooperate.
     "Debbie says, 'No!' She's shocked, she's scared, she's everything. My daughter is hysterical. Completely and totally. Her idol, her father, is about to join forces with the enemy. And I'm thinking, 'Jesus, how did I fuck up my whole life so badly?' She's crying, 'No, Dad, please!' and she runs right out of the visiting room.
     "My wife's eyes are full of tears. She says, 'I have to tell you, Sammy, I'm not going into any witness protection program. I'm not going to be a part of this. I was never part of that part of your life, and I'm not going to be part of this. I'm not going to be part of anything.'
     "I said, 'Deb, I understand your position and I respect it. You're a mother, not a gangster. You do what you got to do as a mother and I'll understand it 100 percent.'
     "She gives me a hug, and she leaves.
     "My heart was breaking. I've never been through anything like this, never thought it could happen. But I know in my gut that for the first time in my life, I'm finally doing the right thing. I was going the route I chose. I wasn't turning back.
     "I was thinking of my son. I was worried about him. I had all kinds of thoughts about him. His father, the underboss, is going to jail. His father is a big hero in the neighborhood. And my son might try to follow in my footsteps, and I can't stop it because I'd be in jail. He's going to be running around, his father is this big underboss, and people are going to cater to him and he's going to wind up in the fucking life. He's a tough kid, but a good kid. He's not for the life. I had always sheltered him from it. And if he winds up in the life, he's sure to end up either being whacked or going to jail himself."
     Thirteen years after he first had those thoughts, Sammy saw his son sentenced to 9.3 years in prison for creating an Ecstasy ring that stretched from Arizona to New York.
     He saw his wife and daughter get probation for their parts in the drug ring.
     And he himself would get a 20 year-sentence for being the ringleader.

     There are thousands of pages of court documents that lay out the Ecstasy ring that hung around Sammy's neck, but police got him because of one simple reason: Sammy can't count.
     The first intercepted call that led to this startling summation began when Gerard called late at night, waking up his dad. The conversation went like this: "Mommy wants me to ask, can you lend Mike $70 for the gas receipts?" Sammy said yes, telling his son, "Have your mom bring the money to work tomorrow." Then he hung up and went back to bed.
     By now, police were savvy enough to understand the simple code that the ring was using to conduct its business. The call meant Debra Gravano wanted to take $70,000 from her home safe and loan it to Mike Papa to buy drugs.
     The next morning, Karen delivered the money from her mother to Sammy's office at the construction company. And then, there were three crucial calls between Sammy and Debra.
     In the first call, Sammy angrily accused Debra of shorting the delivery by $5,000. She insisted that she'd personally counted the money, and all $70,000 was there.
     In a second call, Sammy ranted about the shortage again, this time blustering that this was the second time a bundle was short and now he was thinking Debra was the one who ripped off the money the first time around.
     For police listening in on the wiretap, this was more than they'd ever expected. "That's it," they said - he's tied himself to the $10,000 drug deal out of California. "That's what got prosecutors to go for indictments," Sterrett notes.
     There are two things that make this story all the more astonishing:

1. This $70,000 was never used to buy any drugs because the deal fell through.
2. The third call that day had Sammy admitting to his wife that the bundle wasn't short at all - he'd just miscounted.

o  Count 1: conspiracy to commit the sale of dangerous drugs…
o  Count 2: participating in a criminal syndicate…
o  Count 3: illegal enterprise…
o  Count 48: offer to sell or transfer dangerous drugs…
o  Count 191: money laundering….

     The list goes on and on. In all, Sammy pled guilty to 10 counts that could have sent him to prison forever.
     "As an active participant in the [drug] organization, my role did not involve actual hand to hand sales of Ecstasy, however, my primary role was to be financier for the wholesale purchases…."
      In the plea deal, Sammy admitted the following: "I loaned money to the organization from funds which I controlled… the organization purchased Ecstasy pills with money that I loaned to it and, in exchange… I was paid 50 cents on every pill sold plus repayment of the principal. In addition, I provided instructions to the members of the organization on how to avoid police detection."
      He owned up to intending to buy drugs with the $70,000 that he'd miscounted. He owned up to supplying $100,000 for an earlier drug deal. He told Wagner the return on that money was skimpy.
      And he insisted there was no multi-million-dollar drug ring, as police and prosecutors charged, noting that he only made about $25,000 on the drugs before he was busted. To him, that falls into the "what's the big deal?" category.
      As Wagner reported: "He said he was stunned to find out he was wiretapped because 'I wasn't really doing anything illegitimate.' Reminded that he was involved in an Ecstasy ring, Gravano shrugged: 'If I'm not killing somebody, I don't think I'm doing something illegitimate.'"
     He had the same kind of disconnect when it came to drugs, which he claimed he's "dead against… always was." But he gives Ecstasy a pass, claiming it's not like the hard drugs that he abhors. (Apparently, marijuana doesn't fit on the hard drug list either, for one of the counts in his plea agreement has him admitting to possessing "a useable quantity of marijuana" at his Tempe apartment.)
     "Gravano admitted blustering to a renegade Ecstasy dealer that he owned Arizona and was planning a Mafia-style operation, but said it was just tough talk designed to intimidate," Wagner reported.
      But the gangster insisted his role was overblown and that he was being severely punished because of his past sins, rather than the Ecstasy problem: "I made a mistake. But do I deserve 20 years?"
     He's actually serving concurrent 20-year sentences. One for the Arizona crimes, and another for charges brought against him in New York because he violated the plea agreement he got when he testified against Gotti, which specified he had to stay clean.
      Gravano still talked tough during the interview with Wagner, but the reporter noted that his hair has fallen out because of a progressive thyroid illness that will eventually attack his vital organs. Few think Gravano will survive the 20-year sentence, which he'll serve in the most secure federal prison, outside of Canon, Colorado.
     "Of course I feel remorse," he told Wagner. "My son is sitting in jail. I'm sick… I'm completely heartbroken with my wife and my daughter [convicted]… they made us out like animals… We all took pleas to save my son….
     "Would you give up your life for your kid? I did."
     Those aren't just self-serving words, but statements of truth, insist attorneys close to the case.
     Attorney Greg Parzych says when his friends ask him about his famous client, he tells them this: Mike Papa pulled Gerard Gravano into his drug ring - Gerard, the kid who'd lived so long under the sting of being the "rat's" kid; the kid who suffers from some learning disabilities and had never known the status he got being Papa's pal. And then Gravano pulled in his dad.
     "From Mr. Gravano's perspective, when he finds out what Gerard is involved in, he's thinking, 'I'm going to get more involved with my son, do some big deals and then get out.' Nobody's disputing it wasn't the right move, but he took the plea for his son," Parzych says.
      In fact, he notes, prosecutors wouldn't even consider pleas for other members of the Gravano family unless Sammy pled first.
     In all, 46 people were arrested for the drug ring. Most of them got probation or short prison terms (including Debra and Karen Gravano). In contrast, Sammy got 20 years while Gerard and Karen's boyfriend, Dave Seabrook, each got 9.3 years.
      "I don't think it's fair," Parzych says. "A lot of what happened is based on his past. A lot of people think he should have gotten a stiffer sentence in the past [for the 19 murders]. Clearly, with his prior felony record, some type of prison is appropriate, but 20 years is too much."
      Ironically, Michael Papa, the original ringleader, turned on Sammy the Bull much the same as Sammy once turned on John Gotti - Papa is going into the Witness Protection Program.

      The police officers who brought Sammy Gravano down aren't buying the daddy-dearest excuse. "Sammy had enough influence over his son that if he had said stop, he would have," Sergeant Cope says. "This was a kid who had a baby bull tattooed on his stomach."
      Sterrett agrees. "Sammy could have stopped it, but he didn't."
      He says the evidence they were gathering about other drug deals in Texas - deals that had nothing to do with Mike Papa or Gerard - show that Sammy was creating his own drug network. And then there were the calls they overheard that sounded a lot like possible "hits" on folks who'd ticked off Sammy for one reason or another. And then there was Sammy's posturing: "I own Arizona; it's locked down."
     So there aren't any alligator tears being shed by the Phoenix police officers who broke the case. And you have to forgive them if they work hard to suppress a smirk when you ask about this case happening right under the noses of the FBI.
     "Our understanding is that the FBI went nuts," Sterrett says. "Some specific people, that is, because some agents were ecstatic this happened."
     Cope says that even in retrospect, it wasn't a hard decision to keep the FBI in the dark. While it thinks of itself as the nation's top cops, the FBI (sometimes derided as "F-ing Bumbling Idiots") has a reputation of never sharing with other law enforcement. Or as the rap goes, "We're the FBI - we'll give you the sleeves off our vests."
     "It was best for our case to not include them," Cope says.
     He doesn't want to comment on what kind of a "dumping ground" Arizona has become for the fed's Witness Protection Program, and how much they monitor the criminals they send to live among the good people of this state. Some say the feds hum By the Time I Get to Phoenix every time they mention their Witness Protection Program. There even was a national ad in the last few years that made fun of Scottsdale as the favorite site for starting life all over again under an assumed name.
     But those are issues somebody else has to debate and decide, the Phoenix officers say. Cope just wants to be sure everyone who deserves the credit for this bust gets it: the Department of Public Safety, which assigned an entire undercover squad to the case; the Drug Enforcement Administration, which loaned four people to the investigation; and the U.S. Customs Service, which helped immeasurably.

     This isn't the way Hollywood would have ended this story, and by all rights, it isn't the way it should have ended.
     Given his second chance, given his ability to make a good living in construction, given a fresh chance with his family in a new state, you'd have thought Sammy the Bull would have thanked his lucky stars.
      But even he has admitted that it's hard for a leopard to change its spots. Which makes what he did on the witness stand a decade ago all the more remarkable. Whatever else happened, you can't take away the incredible courage it took for Salvatore Gravano - a kid from the streets who became somebody only because he was a soldier in the Gambino crime family - to turn on his friends.
     These were guys who had whored around together, had gone to each other's weddings and their kid's christenings, had buried their folks together and pretended to cry at funerals when they knew they'd been responsible for the corpse.
     So when Gravano got on the stand in a New York courtroom a decade ago and told the world the inside secrets of the mob, it was something to behold.
     Nobody of his rank had ever done it or done it so well. He was - and still is - the most significant witness in the history of organized crime in the United States.
     Dozens of guys are sitting in prison because of him - John Gotti spent his last years locked up before dying in 2002. Crime families were shattered because of Gravano's testimony. He was treated like a hero in law enforcement circles because he did something heroic.
     But that doesn't erase the 19 murders - "whacks," he calls them, as though they were a game you play with a bat. And it doesn't suggest that the five years he spent in prison for his sins was sufficient.
     Of course, there are those who don't see him as any kind of hero at all. "Sammy the Bull deserves what he Gotti," read a headline on a column in USA Today shortly after his arrest.
     DeWayne Wickman wrote: "Gravano is a murderous thug. He's a career criminal who ought to be locked away for the rest of his life. Instead, he was coddled by a justice system that placed a greater value on putting a mob boss behind bars than jailing a guy who killed 19 people."
     So they put him away for the Ecstasy ring instead.
     Like Gotti, Salvatore Gravano will probably die in lock-up. He already is destitute. While his drug case was pending, the Attorney General's office went after the $380,000 he made off the book Underboss. The Appeals Court has stripped him of the money, noting that it "resulted from criminal activity that violates Arizona's racketeering laws." The money is to go to the families of his 19 victims, including the family of Sammy's wife - among Sammy's many victims was Debra's brother.
     So that's how it ends for what the Attorney General's office calls "Arizona's largest-ever Ecstasy drug case."
     Then-Attorney General Janet Napolitano, now Arizona's governor, was rightly proud when she hailed this as one of the "largest and most successful drug prosecutions in Arizona history."
     And, appropriately, she singled out the Phoenix Police Department "for their extraordinary efforts in the case."