Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano

Everything on this page comes from the public record. Salvatore Gravano is alive, he has given sworn testimony in several federal trials, and this archive goes no further than what he said under oath and what courts have found.

He admitted to involvement in nineteen murders. He served four years for them. That exchange is the whole of his significance, and it is the reason the American Cosa Nostra of the 1990s looks nothing like the organisation of the 1970s.

The rise

Gravano started as an associate around the Colombo family in Brooklyn and moved to the Gambinos, where he was inducted in 1976. He was a capable earner in construction, which by then was the most reliable money in New York, and he was close enough to the killing of Paul Castellano to describe it in court fifteen years later.

Under Gotti he became consigliere and then underboss — the second man in the largest family in the country, and the one who understood exactly how much of the case against them rested on his own conduct.

Why he turned

The conventional account is that Gravano was bought with a sentence. The record is narrower than that.

He and Gotti were arrested together in December 1990 and held together. The prosecution's recordings from the Ravenite were disclosed to the defence, and they contained Gotti discussing Gravano to third parties in terms that read, to Gravano, as the construction of a defence in which he was the man responsible for everything.

After

He was sentenced in 1994 to five years, credited for time served, and entered witness protection. He left it, settled in Arizona under his own name, and in 2000 was charged with running an ecstasy distribution operation there. He pleaded guilty, was sentenced to twenty years, and was released in September 2017.

The rule the organisation had enforced for seventy years was that a made man does not testify. After Gravano, the argument for keeping it was harder to make than the argument for going first.