ARIZONA
The Undercover Mobster
Is retiring like joining the witness protection program?
Uncle Sal’s is a curious place, a wood-paneled Italian restaurant once known as ‟the best kept secret in Scottsdale.” Its pulsing heart is a giant horseshoe bar almost as big as its dining room. The areas are still separated by the glass that delineated the smoking zone years ago when I first ate here. On this visit, early evening sun brightens the dim bar. The room smells of sanitized glassware.
Retirees like myself populate the barstools. Some are white-collar golfers in polo shirts; others are blue-collar pensioners in XXL tees. Both groups veer toward Oakley sunglasses and baseball caps. A few men have the long, stringy hair you sometimes see on aging parrotheads.
A few couples appear to be on OurTime dates. The well-tanned women — younger than the men they accompany — wear their dyed blond hair flat-ironed or banded into ponytails. They look like real estate agents or medical office administrators, not retirees.
The lighting is gentle, the drinks strong, and the dishes garlic-forward. The bartender, whose full head of dark brown hair suggests he’s in his forties, serves the crowd with the grace of an experienced professional. He boasts to a nearby patron that he’s worked here for 28 years.
‟Did you know Sammy Gravano?” I interject.
I stopped working in the traditional way a few years ago; call it retirement if you must. I have less resistance to that word than I did at the beginning.
Retirement is an unsettling multiyear process, even if you pursue it with great intentionality and verve. The experience inevitably raises questions about identity: What is innate? What is socially constructed? What really matters? Those questions made me think about the witness protection program. Like a cooperating criminal given a new identity, I’ve moved, adopted a different vocation, and found new friends.
In the witness protection program, your past is hidden like the dark side of the moon. You live under a fake name in an unfamiliar place. No one knows who you really are. Would that be freeing or frightening? How do you even go about constructing a new identity? The mystery of what life is like inside the cocoon of the witness protection program is what brought me to Uncle Sal’s.
Sammy ‟The Bull” Gravano, a Mafia killer who ratted out New York crime boss John Gotti, is perhaps the most famous protected witness. When arrested, Gravano had thick brown hair and was of medium height with a muscular chest and flaring nostrils that suggested anger or frustration. He was more athletic-looking than the typical corpulent mobster.
I remembered that Gravano eventually emerged from the witness protection cocoon — if not like a butterfly, then perhaps as a moth. I recalled press accounts mentioning that he’d been relocated to the Phoenix area.
My search results confirmed my vague recollections: Gravano testified against Gotti in 1992, putting the mob boss into solitary confinement for the rest of his life and sending 36 others to prison. Gravano spent five years in prison under a sentence reduced in exchange for his cooperation.
To protect him from retribution, the feds put Gravano inside what is officially called the Witness Security Program and abbreviated — in the bouncy syllabic acronym form sometimes favored by quasi-military bureaucracies — as WITSEC. That program is what interested me about Gravano, not his mob escapades or the 19 people he admitted killing.
I plunged into the deep water of WITSEC, studying the program’s history and troubled existence. The bottom line was that the program offers participants protection, a new identity, job training and placement help, and initial financial assistance. You could call it socialism for criminals.
Most participants leave the program after two years but maintain their new identities. The primary purpose of WITSEC is to protect high-value witnesses from retaliatory killings, so others will be willing to turn in the future. As the creator of the program said about Gravano, ‟If the mob murdered him, other mobsters would be scared to testify.”
What the books, articles, and congressional reports didn’t tell me was what life was like inside the program.
Arizona, I discovered, has always been a popular destination for WITSEC relocation. It’s far from mob bases in New York and Chicago; people consider it appealing; and the population is large enough to get lost in. Coincidentally, WITSEC’s unofficial symbol is a phoenix rising from ashes to start anew.
The feds placed Gravano in the Phoenix area after his release from prison in 1995. His new name was Jimmy Moran — a rather Irish name for a man obviously of Italian descent — and he ran a small pool construction company. He lived in an apartment in Tempe, a Phoenix suburb home to Arizona State University. Sammy’s wife, Debbie, and their two children, Karen, 23, and Gerard, 18, also moved to Tempe. For safety, they lived separately from Sammy.
I wanted to see the places in Gravano’s life and experience them firsthand, starting with where Sammy lived. Only minor detective skills were required; a few news articles and websites listed the address. The apartment complex is close to the university, so many students live there. Reviews from tenants at the time suggested problems with plumbing and roaches, typical issues for this kind of housing. The building’s current ads promise ‟a lifestyle free from worry,” though that was unlikely to be true for Gravano.
His one-bedroom unit sat on the ground floor. While offering a view of the street, it was somewhat protected by the pool fence and landscaping, which would have complicated a sniper’s shot. A back door provided a means of escape.
The complex was built in 1962 in the low-density garden-apartment style with a hundred units on two floors surrounding two pools. The midcentury architecture featured floating staircases and brightly colored fiberglass panels on the balconies. It was the kind of singles complex designed for flirty Saturday afternoon pool parties. Gravano staved off loneliness by caring for a small dog who growled when strangers approached.
To further feed his social appetite, Gravano sipped double espressos at a café in a Tempe strip mall. It’s still around, and when I visited, the eclectic decor and table games reminded me of the first wave of 1990s coffeehouses. Gravano didn’t hide his true persona there; in fact, he regaled the young crowd of software programmers and musicians with mob stories while playing chess.
I then took a spin by Debbie’s house, 15 minutes away. Someday this will seem quaint, but right now, driving in the Phoenix metro area, it’s unsettling to frequently encounter self-driving Waymo cars in adjacent lanes, with their roof-mounted radar spinning like flying saucers, their driver’s seats empty.
Debbie’s sprawling home was in horse country, with an acre-and-a-half of land, four stalls, and a small riding area. Sammy, Debbie, and Karen all rode frequently. The surrounding streets exuded that calm, pastoral air unique to equestrian neighborhoods.
Debbie did not look like the stereotype of a mob wife. She wore oversized blazers, her blond-highlighted hair in an asymmetric bob. Neighbors said Sammy visited often in his white Lexus, though the couple was officially divorced. I then swung by the Tempe shopping center where Debbie bought a bagel store for her and her son Gerard to run. Now it’s a weight-loss clinic.
I also cruised by the building that housed Sammy’s business. It was a nondescript structure in a rough industrial area where Phoenix and Tempe abutted, near the airport. The windows provided sight lines to the surrounding land of chain-link fences and construction trailers. The air smelled of broken concrete and truck exhaust.
Eventually, Gravano left WITSEC because it limited his contact with his ex-wife and children, but the FBI still monitored him, and he continued to live as Jimmy Moran. His family used their real names. His daughter’s boyfriend came with her from New York and kept his links to the mob. How hard would it have been for one of John Gotti’s henchmen to track down Gravano and kill him? Why didn’t they?
In July 1999, an Arizona Republic reporter heard that Sammy the Bull was living in the Phoenix area. He found Gravano at his office and told him he was planning an article on Gravano’s new life.
‟Do you know how many people will get killed if you do that?” asked Gravano, then 54. He agreed to talk if the reporter masked his current name, where he lived and worked, and details about his family.
Gravano told the reporter that he ‟could go to Montana and live 20 years in a cabin and be scared to death. Or I can live here, where I’m happy, five years. I choose to live here.” He paused, and a slight smile came to his face. ‟When it happens, it happens. If they start shooting, then I’ll be a little scared,” he admitted.
He told the reporter that many people in Arizona knew his real identity; sometimes he even told people his real name. Giving up the Gravano name, he acknowledged, stole him of his identity.
The next day, the New York tabloids reprinted the story. Though Gotti was in prison, he continued to issue orders through his son and brother. After the articles, there was little doubt that Gotti’s henchmen could locate Gravano. And a few months later, they did.
In December 1999, at the direction of John Gotti’s brother, Peter, two hitmen drove cross-country in a Mercury Grand Marquis. Salvatore ‟Fat Sal” Mangiavillano and Thomas ‟Huck” Carbonaro surveilled Gravano with a camera hidden in their car’s grille. They decided that the fencing near Gravano’s office could make a bullet ricochet, and his apartment complex was too exposed. So, they staked out Debbie’s home, waiting for Gravano’s Lexus. The horse trails offered some cover. They debated whether to plant an explosive or use a hunting rifle, wanting to keep their distance from Gravano, who they knew would be armed.
The two hitmen changed hotels frequently. At the reception desk of one, they learned no rooms were available. The desk clerk apologized, saying they were full up with that FBI convention in town. The men hightailed it out of Phoenix until the conference was over.
Before they could return, a new obstacle prevented them from killing Gravano. In February 2000, Phoenix police arrested Gravano, his wife and two children, and 33 others for running a drug ring that sold Ecstasy in partnership with a local white supremacist youth gang. One federal law enforcement official doubted that the charges against Gravano would stick. ‟I’m sure when the actual facts come out, it’ll show he’s not stupid enough to have gotten involved in this. He had his life turned around and was doing well in Arizona.”
Well, he was that stupid, and the Ecstasy scheme was funding his success and happiness. Gravano later said he participated only to protect his son, who was already dealing Ecstasy and taking advantage of his father’s identity. The entire family pleaded guilty. Sammy was sentenced to 20 years, his son got 9, and Debbie and Karen received probation. The state seized all the family’s property, including the horse ranch, the restaurant, and the construction business.
In 2017, after serving almost 18 years, Sammy Gravano began a lifetime of parole. He returned to Phoenix, where, once again, he had to reassemble his identity.
I was surprised to discover I’d already visited one of the locations in the Gravano’s hidden lives many times. In the mid-1990s, Sammy convinced Debbie and Gerard to sell the bagel shop and buy an Italian restaurant. Gerard went to culinary school and became the chef.
Uncle Sal’s was within walking distance of our condo in Scottsdale, and I’d been there many times. Now I realized it was named after Sammy, whose birth name was Salvatore. I walk there from our condo, crossing the Indian Bend Wash greenbelt, an 11-mile stripe of trails, parks, and sports fields that bisects Scottsdale like the layer of icing in a cake.
Little has changed here over the last 20 years, though they no longer use Debbie’s slogan, ‟the best kept secret in Scottsdale.”
When I ask the bartender if he knew Sammy Gravano, he responds, ‟I did. They were great people. Him and Debbie. Worked for them for two years.” It seems like he doesn’t want to say more. He turns back to the Cardinals football game on the TV. They’re losing.
Upon his release from prison, Gravano adjusted to life in the 2020s by starting — what else — a podcast and a YouTube channel. Now 78, he suffers from Graves’ Disease. He is occasionally seen at Uncle Sal’s.
Today, Sammy ‟The Bull” Gravano is a storyteller on social media who misses the social interaction his work once provided. He’s not really that different from me.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
