promised, a paper bag with sixty thousand dollars in it, in one-hundred-dollar bills. They hugged and kissed each other on the cheek and went their separate ways.
40
Sammy “the Bull” Gravano
Sammy Gravano was born and raised in the heart of Mafia country, Bensonhurst Brooklyn.
As a youth Gravano was a tough kid, a member of the notorious street gang called the Rambers. It was headed by Gerald Pappa, a vicious, extremely tough street fighter with jet-black hair and light blue eyes, one of the roughest guys in all of Brooklyn—no easy task. Gerald Pappa was known as Pappa Bear because of his unusual strength. He, like Gravano, would eventually be inducted into one of the five New York crime families, the Gigante clan, while Sammy would be made by the Gambinos. Sammy Gravano and Pappa were very close as teenagers. Gravano would eventually name his only son Gerald, in honor of Pappa.
Gravano had a bad habit of killing his friends and business partners; he murdered his own brother-in-law, Eddie Garofalo. He was known as a greedy, black-hearted backstabber. If Gravano called you up and invited you for dinner, a friendly drink, an espresso, it was a good idea to leave town in a hurry.
John Gotti would later take a shine to Gravano and promote him to underboss of the Gambino family—a fatal mistake—after the two of them successfully conspired to kill Paul Castellano on December 15, 1985, in front of Sparks Steak House. Now it was early March 1980. Richard Kuklinski knew Gravano; they had met at restaurants and Roy’s place over the years.
According to Richard, when Gravano had a “special piece of work to do”—the killing of a cop—he contacted DeMeo, and DeMeo referred him to Richard and strongly vouched for him. DeMeo wanted nothing to do with killing a cop, even a crooked cop. No matter how you looked at that, it spelled trouble, and DeMeo knew it. It was Peter Calabro.
DeMeo let Richard know Gravano would be calling, and a meeting was set up at a diner on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. They met in the parking lot, shook hands. Gravano came with a driver. As Richard and Gravano walked and talked, Gravano’s car slowly followed. Gravano wasted no time. “I’ve been hearing good things about you for a long time, Rich. I have a special piece of work I’d like you to do. It’s gotta be done pretty quickly.”
“I’m available,” Richard said.
“The guy lives in Jersey. I’ve got his address and photo for you, even the weapon—a shotgun. You okay with that?” Gravano said, not mentioning that the mark was a cop.
“Sure. They’re messy but they work.”
“Okay, there’s twenty-five large in it for you.”
“Sounds good.”
“Where’s your car?”
“Just down the ramp here.”
“I’ll give you everything right now, all right?”
“Sure.”
Richard led them to his parked car. Gravano had his driver open the trunk of his car. In it was a green canvas bag, like a small army duffel bag. Gravano opened it. Inside was the shotgun, a walkie-talkie, and a photo of the mark, a nice-looking dark haired man with an oval-shaped face. Gravano still said nothing about him being a detective out of the Brooklyn hot-car division. He had been working with the Gambino family for years now, providing a laundry list of services, some of which had caused people to be murdered. It was Calabro’s wife, Carmella, that DeMeo had murdered. Calabro had gotten himself in trouble, and both Gravano and DeMeo were concerned he would turn on them. He had to go. Richard took the canvas bag and put it in the trunk of his car.
“I’ll pay you when it’s done, okay?” Gravano asked.
“Sure. I know you, you know me, no problem,” Richard said, and it was done.
Peter Calabro lived with his young daughter, Melissa, and another detective, John Dougherty—also a widower—in a simple ranch-style house in Saddle River, New Jersey, a secluded wooded area. Richard checked out the house but decided not to do the murder there. He saw Calabro’s young daughter with some other young girls and opted to do the hit down the road from the house, a narrow, little-used road with few homes.
The plan was for Calabro to be followed from work, and Richard would be informed via the walkie-talkie when Calabro was approaching the house. Calabro knew he was marked—there had been threats against his life—and as he made his way from Brooklyn back home that evening he took a secondary route, traveled on back roads, not Route 17. But still he was followed, and Richard knew when and from which direction he was coming. It was March 14, 1980, a cold night, snowing heavily.
Richard parked his van on the snow-covered road, put on his emergency lights, grabbed the shotgun, crouched in front of the van, and waited for just the right moment. Richard was able to see the approaching car, its headlights reflecting off the snow as it came. He had parked his van so that Calabro was forced to go slowly; Richard raised the shotgun and, at just the right moment, when Calabro was abreast of Richard, cut loose with both barrels of the blue-black twelve-gauge, shooting Calabro in the side of the head with the double-ought buckshot rounds. Calabro was killed instantly. His brown Honda meandered for a ways, then careened down a thirty-foot embankment and crashed into a stand of trees.
Calmly, Richard got back into his van and left, still not knowing he had just killed a cop.
As Richard made his way back to Dumont he dumped the shotgun into a stream near his home and went into the house. It was a Friday night. His daughters Chris and Merrick were in the living room with some friends. Barbara was sleeping. Richard made himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and retired.
At 2:15 A.M. Saturday morning a snowplow crew clearing the road found Calabro’s car. In the morning Richard first learned that the man he had killed was a decorated NYPD detective. It didn’t make any difference to Richard that he had killed a cop, but it would have been nice, the right thing to do, if Gravano had told him. Be that as it may, Gravano called Richard a few days later and made arrangements to give Richard the twenty-five thousand.
It was over and done…for now.
In years to come, though, this murder would take on a life of its own and come back to haunt not only Sammy Gravano, but the United States Justice Department as well.
The accident occurred on March 18 of that same year. John Gotti’s youngest son, Frank, borrowed a friend’s motorized minibike, shot out onto the street where the Gottis lived, and was struck and killed by a car driven by one John Favara.
Surely, Favara should immediately have left town, but what he did do was to continue driving the car about the neighborhood, infuriating Mrs. Gotti and her husband, John. He also should certainly have gone to the Gotti home and told the family how genuinely sorry he was. He did neither. His days were numbered. It was by now well known that Richard did “special work,” and Gravano asked him that July if he’d be interested in applying his special talent to the man who had killed John Gotti’s son. Richard knew all about what had happened.
“Sure, be happy to,” he said.
On July 28, Richard met with a few other men, one of whom was Gene Gotti. They drove in a van to where Favara worked and grabbed him as he made his way to his car—the same car he’d run the young Frank Gotti over with. They drove to a junkyard in East New York. There, Gene Gotti and the others beat Favara to a bloody pulp, broke his bones, knocked out his teeth, knocked out an eye. Richard then went to work on him, bound him and tore off his clothes and used emergency flares to torture him, to burn off his genitals. He then stuffed the burning flare up Favara’s anus. They all stood about and watched what was left of him suffer terribly, though not die. Gene Gotti then used a pipe to mercilessly beat Favara and finally kill him. Favara was then stuffed into a fifty-five-gallon drum.
PART IV
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
