Funeral Hotdish (15 page)

Joya started the year 2000 knowing it was hopeless. Hell, it had been ridiculous to think she could date a cop in the first place. But Rob was different. She felt so safe with him. They’d had such fun in the beginning. He was helpful around the house. He had a great sense of humor—she could run that list in her mind all day and still come up with the same conclusion. They’d tried. They’d failed.

There was no final scene. No screaming and crying. No lies about how this isn’t your fault, it’s mine. No soft talk about how you deserved more. Someone special. I’m not the one. She came home one Tuesday and his clothes were no longer in the closet.

A note sat on the kitchen counter under the salt shaker. “I’ll always love you. Sorry it didn’t work out.” He didn’t even sign it.

She got her back up and refused to cry. “The only good thing to come out of this relationship was the Sammy story,” she said out loud, sounding every bit a bitch. She drank one scotch after another that night. The liquor finally broke down the locked door of her heart.

“Rob, oh Rob. We were so good together until this goddamned Sammy thing came up. Good men like you don’t come around every day. I loved you. Man, I loved you. Why wasn’t that enough? Why couldn’t that keep us on track? I tried. I really tried.”

She cried herself to sleep. In the morning, her eyes were swollen. She put ice packs on her face and laid down an extra half-hour before she dared go to police headquarters.

But the break-up gods were kind to Joya. The next day she heard about the twenty-five thousand pills the Arizona ring was buying out of California. She was so busy with this incredible news, she didn’t have time to mope.

The code was thick, but by now, Phoenix PD had it down pretty pat, so they knew the pills were coming and they were going to be dropped at University and Mill in Tempe, catty-corner from P.F. Chang’s restaurant.

Joya wanted to go along on the surveillance, but this is where the police chief put his foot down. She stayed back in the wiretap room, monitoring the progress of the drop from police radios.

Sergeant Cope and Rob were hiding on the top level of a two-story parking garage practically on top of the drop. Rob took pictures as one guy handed over money in a red backpack, while the other guy swapped a black sack with the Ex pills. Neither guy was Sammy. Nor were they any of the principals the cops were following. No Mike Papa. No Gerard Gravano.

“Where are they?” Joya almost screamed the question, thinking this was going to be
it.

“Those guys don’t get their hands dirty on deliveries,” the captain told her, more kindly than he would have when she first showed up. “Now we follow the money.”

“Great,” Joya thought to herself. “More delays. More stakeouts. More sitting around waiting for something to happen. God, this is never going to be over!”

She was never so happy to find herself wrong the next day. Joya was doodling in her notebook and wondering if she could get away for a haircut when she heard Mike Papa scream into a tapped phone, “My Godfather gave that money to me and he counted it himself. No fuckin’ way it’s ten thousand short.”

The captain didn’t have to snap his fingers for Joya to alert the others. Within minutes, the room was filled with officers listening as a drug courier insisted the money from the Tempe drop was ten big ones shy.

That wasn’t the only call. Another just like it came the next day. Papa was even more belligerent. “The Big Man” himself had made sure all the money was there, and that was the end of it.

And then another tap caught Sammy’s daughter, Karen, speculating about the missing money with her boyfriend, David Seabrook. David thought Papa had taken the ten-G, and Karen said he’d better tell her dad. When Seabrook showed up at Marathon Construction, to the delight of the cops staking it out, the blinds were open. They clearly saw Sammy waving his arms.

“You could tell he was really ticked,” Cope told Joya. She’d never seen such a big smile on his face before. Because now police had “probable cause” that Sammy was holding drug meetings in his office. They went to court and got an order to expand the wiretaps to Marathon Construction. And Cope assured her of something else that now was clear: This wasn’t an important drug case only because Sammy was involved; this was an important drug case because it was enormous. Thousands of pills were running through this ring every week.

“Is there any way those pills are being sent to the Midwest?” she asked the captain one day when they were alone in the wiretap room.

“Like where?”

“To Minneapolis?

“Why?”

“Captain, there was a girl in my hometown in North Dakota who died from Ex. Is there any way that could have been Sammy’s Ex?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. Minneapolis is a big drug hub. It’s the biggest west of Chicago until you get to Denver and Phoenix. But what’s a nice girl in North Dakota doing taking Ex?”

“It was a senior prank, they say. The whole class took it. I know. Stupid. Her boyfriend was in a coma. They were the only ones hurt. Why would that be?”

“You can never tell with Ex. A thousand kids can take pills and nothing happens. Then a kid dies. Another goes into a coma. It’s the luck of the draw. Sorry about that girl.”

“Thanks. It’s tearing my town apart. I didn’t even know they had Ex back there until this. Don’t think the adults in town did, either. Will you keep your eyes open, in case there’s a connection? Please? I’d sure like to know.”

“Sure.” The captain sounded sincerely sorry.

Unbeknownst to her, he took it upon himself to do some digging—he hadn’t wanted a reporter around, but if it had to be, he was glad it turned out to be Joya. He called the Ransom County Sheriff’s Office, but surmised quickly they were clueless. He called the Fargo Police Department to find they hadn’t been called into a case in Northville, North Dakota. But their drug enforcement unit dropped a bombshell.

“We think the Ex coming into Minneapolis originates in Phoenix,” he was told. “You guys working anything?”

The captain lied and said they didn’t have anything right now, but what did Fargo know?

“We’re picking up a lot of chatter. A big buy is coming up. Thousands of pills. We’ve never seen this much at one time. We’re thinking somebody big is involved.”

The captain promised to keep his ears open. He hated lying to another officer, but he couldn’t reveal the Sammy connection and expect that would stay secret. He made a note to call Fargo as soon as Sammy was in custody.

He shared the news with Joya.

“Oh, God,” she cried. “This drug stuff really is like a virus, isn’t it? Here’s this Mafia killer in Phoenix dealing drugs that probably killed a nice girl in North Dakota—doesn’t seem possible, does it?”

“Yeah, Joya. It’s not only possible. It happens all the time. Drugs are destroying this country. You’re only getting a little taste of it.”

She’d come to admire the captain, even like him. He took his job seriously and she was touched that he went the extra mile to find the Midwest connection.

***

After three months of tedium—one revelation here, another there, a wall growing brick by brick—it was all over within hours.

If Joya hadn’t been monitoring the wiretaps that day, she wouldn’t have believed the end would be so ridiculous.

It started when Gerard called his dad the night of January 4, 2000. Sammy must have been snoozing in his five-hundred-ninety-dollar-a-month, one bedroom Tempe apartment. He sounded sleepy. “Mommy wants me to ask you to lend Mike seventy dollars for gas receipts,” the boy said.

A drowsy Sammy told him, “Have your mom bring the money to work tomorrow.”

Around the room, officers were slapping each other on the backs and dancing around like fools and laughing and calling out. “We’re gonna get him. We’re gonna get the son of a bitch.”

They knew the code meant that Debra Gravano wanted to take seventy thousand dollars from her home safe to loan to Mike Papa to buy drugs. And the money was on its way in the morning to Sammy’s office at Marathon Construction. Now police just had to follow the money to the drug buy and they’d tie it all up in a pretty package.

Joya was right there, laughing and congratulating with the rest of them. Rob even gave her a hug, although it had none of the sexual tension his hugs used to have. She was ready to celebrate.

“So, who buys when you break a case like this?” She was laughing when she asked it.

All of a sudden, the room got quiet. Everyone looked to Rob to deliver the news.

“Um, Joya, it’s a tradition. Boys only. Sorry.”

He watched her face fall, and tried to soften the blow. “We don’t even ask Mary Kay or Sandy. Just the boys. You understand.”

“Oh, sure.” She went home with a bruised ego and poured herself a stiff vodka. For good measure, she knocked back a shot of tequila.

The next morning everyone was there early, even though they knew this wasn’t a family that roused much before ten a.m. First thing after she finally got up in mid-morning, Karen Gravano delivered the money to her dad.

Both eyes and ears were on Sammy—Rob was hiding nearby with a telephoto lens to shoot whatever he could see, and the wiretap room was as quiet as a church to catch every word.

Sammy picked up the phone and called his ex. “Hey, you short me five thousand?”

“What you talkin’ about? I packed that money myself and all seventy thousand is there.”

“No it ain’t. I just counted it and it’s five short!”

“Can’t be, Sammy. I was careful. Count it again.” Debra hung up, obviously perturbed.

Rob could see Sammy through his lens and the man was painstakingly stacking up the bills into thousand-dollar piles and he was shaking his head in anger.

Sammy called Debra again.

“I counted it again. It’s five shy. You know, Deb, this is the second time a bundle is short. Now I’m thinking it was you that ripped off the money the first time around.”

Joya heard grown men suck in their breath like they’d just gotten an electric shock. Sammy the Bull had just tied himself to the drug deal out of California that was ten thousand dollars short. And was well documented by the cameras and eye witnesses of the Phoenix Police Department.

“That’s it,” one of the officers declared. “We got him cold.”

The captain picked up the phone to county prosecutors, who were waiting to fill in the blanks of the indictment of Sammy and his entire family. Chief Tomayer rushed up to dole out arrest honors to cops who’d been on the case from the start. They weren’t even out the door when Sammy called Debra again.

“Hey, hon, forget it. I miscounted. It’s all here.”

Everyone froze. And then started laughing. Some so hard, they wet their pants.

Joya issued her trademark, “Holy shit.”

She couldn’t have wished for a more juicy detail to end this story.

***

Joya was standing in the booking room of the Maricopa County Jail when Sammy “The Bull” Gravano arrived in handcuffs at 4:47 p.m. on Wednesday, January 5, 2000.

“Sammy, what do you have to say for yourself?” she yelled at him.

He looked at her and snarled, “I was stupid. You can say, ‘Sammy, you were a fucking retard.’”

She pushed forward and Phoenix cops knew better than try to stop her—this was her payback for holding the story all these months.

“Why did you do it, Sammy, why? You had a whole new life. Why?”

He looked at the ground, but turned so she could hear every word. “You ever have a son that’s going wrong and you’re trying to help him? I know you won’t believe this, but it was my love for my son—Gerard was in deep before I knew anything about it. Instead of squashing it, I decided to help him. I wanted to stay close to my son. I wanted to be sure he didn’t get hurt.”

Joya heard officers laughing at Sammy’s words, but the way he spoke—the simple, clean way he said those words—made her believe him. It wasn’t an excuse that would keep him out of prison, but it was a reasoning that made sense.

She rushed back to
Phoenix Rising
,
to bang out the last chapter of her all-time best scoop, while the production staff tore apart the paper they thought they were publishing on Friday to replace it with a story that shocked the city and made the daily newspapers look like amateurs.

While the Thursday morning
Arizona Republic
was breathlessly reporting the first words revealing Sammy was even in town—to say nothing of what he’d been doing—her upstart weekly newspaper came out twenty-four hours later with the complete inside story. It was a journalist’s dream come true.

“Bringing Down the Bull” covered the entire front cover, printed over a picture of Sammy. “The EXCLUSIVE, inside story of how the Phoenix Police Department broke the biggest Ecstasy Ring in the Southwest—and nabbed the Mafia boss under the noses of the FBI.” Joya’s byline was an inch tall.

By the time he got to Phoenix, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano had killed nineteen 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, 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.

This is the inside story of how Sammy the Bull was brought down, right under the noses of the FBI.

It had ended in such a ridiculous way. Joya’s story dripped with delicious irony: