Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano On Podcasting, Regret, True Mafia, Gotti

PHOENIX, AZ — Every time Sammy "The Bull" Gravano speaks, there are some things you should probably keep in mind. Several appear to be at odds with each other.

He was the underboss of the Gambino Crime Family, the final step in a mafia career that saw him involved in three mob wars and play a role in 19 murders.

He was one of the most successful prosecution witnesses ever against the mob. After he started cooperating, Gravano helped convict more than 40 of his former colleagues.

He was the person who, after winning praise from the government for his help, was rewarded with a very slight prison term despite all the murders and other crimes.

And he was the person who turned his back on freedom and the Witness Protection Program and returned to the criminal life, earning himself 17 more years in prison.

Gravano is also one of the latest to enter the world of podcasting.

“At my age, I think I’m done with all this other s---,” he says.

Gravano is sitting by the pool in the back yard of his son’s home outside Phoenix, Arizona, enjoying the sun, smoking a cigar and talking about his recent career choice: recording his life story.

“I just got out of prison three, three and a half years ago, after doing 17 years, seven months, and I can't find a better thing to do than sit down and do this type of work,” he says.

But when you’re 76, a convicted felon, the choices can be limited.

“This seemed very appetizing to me,” he says.

Gravano isn't impressed with how the mafia has been portrayed in popular culture. "The Sopranos," he said, is about a “Jersey family” and it's maybe “10 or 15 percent truth."

“I would like my story to be 85 or 90 percent truth and Hollywood bull for the rest, because you can’t avoid it. What I'm doing is putting out a story that I've really never talked about,” he says.

“My life story. It's my life story. And it's the story of the true mafia, I’m trying to get that out so people really have a true understanding of the mafia. I’m becoming a historian of sorts.

“Mobsters love to talk. You can’t talk unless you flip. That’s the rule. I flipped. I like to talk.”

Not Ann Landers

Gravano says his goal with the "Our Thing Podcast" — which is available on Apple, YouTube, Amazon and Spotify — is to tell the story of the mob, to tell what he knows. Despite what he says is a history-driven focus, he says people are regularly reaching out with questions, looking for advice, guidance. People want to know if they should follow in his footsteps.

“As far as I’m concerned, I don’t give advice where people could go or should go,” Gravano says. “I'm not a f------ priest. I'm not a preacher. I'm not somebody who's coming out preaching saying I’m going to save the world.

“I have a story. You can look at my story. You want to follow that path? Go ahead. You're gonna do 22 f------ years in prisons. But that's your choice."

What he does want his podcast to create is a vision of what mob life is really like.

“Follow my story, you hear about more than 22 years in prison. Go ahead. Want to get shot in the back of the head by one of your best friends? Go ahead. You want to shoot your friend? Go ahead. It's your life, right? I’m not telling people what to do. I don't really get into all of that.”

Gets Me To The Store

As Gravano puffs on his cigar, he makes the point that it’s not a fancy, expensive one. It's a reflection of his values these days, he says.

“I could get a $200 Cuban cigar, but who needs it?” he says. “This one is cheap and it’s good, doesn’t burn. I’m 76 now. I’m interested in money like everybody else, but I don’t need to flash it around. I don’t need a $3,000 Brioni suit or a hand-painted tie. I drive a Kia. I could drive a Mercedes, but why? I like the way the Kia drives. It’s good enough for me, It gets me to the store.

“Things like flashy suits and expensive cars, that’s just showing off.”

In pointing that out, Gravano’s trying to draw a clear line between himself and John Gotti, the Gambino boss he helped put in prison, where he eventually died.

“John did more to destroy the mob than anyone,” Gravano says. “It’s supposed to be a secret society, yet everything he did was flashy, showing off, flamboyant. We had rules, and one of the main rules was to keep it confidential. No matter what. That’s the last thing he did. Everything he did put us on the front page.

“He did more damage to the mafia than 15 cooperators put together. History will show how much damage he actually did by what he did.”

Not An Ordinary Gangster

Gravano doesn’t see himself as a particularly complicated person. Yes, he readily concedes, he made his name by choosing a criminal life, by taking part in 19 murders, being involved in corruption, drugs. At the same time, he maintains that the life he led had a certain amount of honor about it.

“I’m a gangster all my f------ life,” he says. “I’m still a gangster right this minute. But I think it’s very honorable. Same time, I’m a little different than the ordinary gangster. Right? I have compassion.

"People will choke on that. But I do. I hold the door open when I'm going in the store. Right? I just do these things instinctively.”

Gravano attributes his compassion to his parents — particularly his dad, who he says instilled certain values in him.

“We lived in a house, one of three attached,” he says. “And our neighbors were Jewish. One year around Christmas, my dad puts up the lights, and he puts a menorah in the window. And my friends tease me, saying, 'You’re a Jew.' I tell them, 'I’m not a Jew, I’m Italian.' And they point to the menorah and say, 'Those are Jewish lights.'

“I asked my father about it, and he says, 'Both our neighbors are Jews and they’re good people, and their holiday is around the same time so, out of respect, I put it up.' Those things stuck with me. Like when it snowed, I was shoveling outside our house, my dad said to me, 'Shovel the walk in front of Hymie’s house.' I’m supposed to shovel the whole block? He says, 'They’re hard-working people, they come home, they’re tired, just do it. It’s right.' And it stuck with me.”

Gravano says his father stressed it’s important to not live in the past, not judge individuals by what others may have done.

“If you look at people by what they did to me, in my era or before, my dad said to me, you’re going to hate people,” Gravano says. “You need to move forward, look through the front windshield, not the back.

“These words of wisdom have always stuck with me, when I was in the mafia, after.”

Gravano likes to tell stories that back up that point, that humanize him. He talks about helping the kids at a local school get money for football uniforms, about how when he was doing business out of a flower shop he’d set up for his daughter, it was located across from a school and he helped make sure the schoolyard was always clean.

“There had been kids, smoking and drinking, leaving garbage everywhere,” he says. “I had a talk with them, and it stopped. One day, the principal comes up to me on the street. She says, 'I know who are.' I just nod. She says, 'I know what you did to help clean the place up. I just wanted to say thank you.'

“I learned different things that stuck with me. I think that made me a different kind of guy and that's why I'm comfortable in my skin. I have memories that are good.”

Dyslexia To Running New York

Gravano says that while he isn't setting himself up as a role model, he sees parts of his life as something that can inspire people.

“I was never good in school. If I wasn’t dyslexic, I don’t know what I was,” he says. “And no one really did anything. People would ask me to read something and I couldn’t. I would get a blank piece of paper, scribble on it. People would be like, 'That’s just a bunch of scribbles.' I’d say, 'That’s how what you showed me looks.'

“I have a different way of learning, visual listening. I could learn so I wasn't stupid. I was dyslexic. And they never treated it.”

Gravano says that after eighth grade, he was done with school

“I went into gangs as a kid, stayed away from school, got drafted into the Vietnam War,” he says, a war he thinks that was a mistake. “It was all bullshit. They brainwashed us, telling us that the Vietnamese were coming here to attack our country, rape your mother, your sisters. I don’t even know any bad Vietnamese people. It was a waste.

“So, I get back, I got an eighth grade education, no high school, and I end up in the mob. And I worked my way up. Obviously, I wasn’t stupid. I could learn. At one point, I was running six businesses at once, I was running unions. I ran the city in New York for a while.”

Gravano hasn’t been back to New York since he last testified in a case there decades ago.

“I got a lot of good memories of New York,” he says. “I love New York, but I don't miss it. I went on with my life. Life has changes all the time. Every day life changes constantly. I change. I loved New York, the people there, but it’s changed a lot so I have the memories.”

Life In The Sun

Gravano says criminal life — which he continued in Arizona, resulting in a 17-year stint in prison for running what authorities say was the biggest ecstasy ring in the state — is also over.

“It’s a nice place,” he says, one with lots of mobsters but no mob. “There’s a lot of people I see who cooperated, who were in the program, but there’s not a lot for them to do even if they wanted. The state’s got no unions in the workplace. There’s no ocean for the piers and stuff. So, there’s no real mafia here.

“So it's comfortable. It's good to have nice people, good people. Get along good. I thought when I moved on the block, everybody's gonna be afraid of me. Just the opposite. People waved to me. I'm like an old f--- sweeping the sidewalk. And they blow the horn and wave.”

He says that he gets treated very well in the community, pointing out how one neighbor comes over from time to time with food.

“'Here take this,' she says and gives me a bowl of stew,” he says. “It's good here, comfortable, though I'm not too crazy about the heat in the summer. Right? But I like people, they seem to like me. With the pandemic now, I go into a bank wearing a mask, I joke with the tellers that last time I did this, I got 10 years in prison."

Regrets

“Everybody has regrets; of course, I have regrets,” Gravano says. “I did things, I broke rules that I knew could get me killed. I did things that meant I didn’t do other things. My regrets — you know, family and things like that. Go fishing with my father a lot more. I wish I would have spent more time with him, an extra drink, another cigar.

“I can't do that no more. So that's a regret. There's all different kinds of regrets. That's true.”

Gravano says that he's not ashamed of his time as a mobster. He says that he “never killed a legitimate man or a woman or a kid, people outside of the life”— an assertion that’s disputed. Listening to him talk, you get the sense that his feelings may be more complicated than he's admitting.

“Sometimes I even choke up thinking about it,” he says, referring to when he talks about his crimes during the podcast. “Because when I do this, it's not that easy. I relive these crimes. I relive these things, I could see these people's faces again, which I’m not too happy about.

“But that’s life, right?”