Copyright 1992 CanWest Interactive, a division of
CanWest Global Communications Corp.
All Rights Reserved  
Calgary Herald (Alberta, Canada)
March 9, 1992, Monday, FINAL EDITION
Correction Appended
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. B4

LENGTH: 769 words

HEADLINE: Gotti informer loved rich life

BYLINE: GENE MUSTAIN AND JERRY CAPECI, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

BODY:
He's called "Sammy Bull" because he's built like a concrete-filled drum.

But Salvatore Gravano's nickname became apt for another reason. For him, the 1980s were one long bull market.

By 1989, when the former Grade 8 dropout had clawed his way to the seat next to the throne of the Gambino crime family, he was among the top one per cent of the wealthiest people in this country.

And that's just according to what he and his wife owned up to on their income-tax returns - $ 774,000 that year, most of it from a construction company he formed after a former partner was wiped out, permanently.

The returns made no mention of the $ 1.2 million he says he gave John Gotti. Or the interest income on his loansharking "book" - worth $ 1.5 million when he became a government witness against Gotti in November 1991.

They also showed no income from Tali's, the bar he has admitted to owning, or the East Side restaurant he's a one-third partner in - or any of the undisclosed cash he has admitted taking from contractors to "solve" union problems.

They did, however, include some money the government's computers would know about - $ 19,000 in state lottery winnings.

"I'm living well," Gravano allowed on the witness stand last week, after Gotti lawyer Albert Krieger began badgering him about the "material benefits" of the "lifestyle" he once led.

Gravano, who was born in 1945, is the mob's version of the baby boomers who went ga- ga on Wall Street during the go-go 1980s. But, as with many boomers, the good times are gone.

Once he agreed to testify, his former mob pals took over ownership of his loanshark book. His grip on the concrete construction industry was lost. And even his $ 800,000 house on Staten Island now stands empty, not that he can ever return to it anyway.

Still, what a rags-to-riches, robbery-to-murder, mobster-to- informer ride it was. As he testified, he grew up humbly in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, the baby (and only boy) of three children.

"When I was a kid," he recalled on the witness stand, "I ran with gangs. It was the environment, it didn't seem wrong."

After dropping out of school in 1961 at age 16, he turned to armed robbery and burglary to support himself. He was in the Army from 1964 to 1966, then came back to Brooklyn and began working his way up in the mob.

In 1968, he joined a Colombo family crew and began establishing friendships with mobsters with connections to construction companies and to unions.

Still, until 1970, he was small potatoes - even though that year he did begin establishing his fearsome reputation by committing his first murder.

Then in 1972, after a dispute with the brother of his crew leader, he was "released" to a Gambino crew, where, over the next four years, as he testified, he began to really "move" with unions.

In 1976, the newly installed boss of the Gambino family, Paul Castellano, gave Gravano his "button" - formally inducted him into the mob - because he had developed a reputation as both a tough guy and an "earner."

In the early 1980s, he went into the dry-wall construction and plumbing business with two partners - but not to pound nails or fix pipe.

His role, he said, was "to go out and solicit business and take care of the union problems."

Gravano also said unions such as Teamsters Local 282 and Mason Tenders 23 would solicit jobs from contractors for Gambino family-owned companies, such as Marathon, a concrete construction company he opened after Castellano was murdered in 1985.

That murder - which Gravano has admitted a role in - and others over the next few years caused his income to soar. Money that had been going to Castellano and others began flowing to him.

A lot also poured in from a secret partnership in a steel erection company, Gem Atlas Steel - once again a situation in which another secret partner was eventually and permanently wiped out.

In his testimony, Gravano has blamed the murders of such former partners on the victims - one was a "swindler," another became unreliable after developing a drug problem - and said they were always approved by his boss, Gotti.

Gravano said he gained complete control of the concrete part of the empire after yet another former partner was murdered - Gravano says it's because Gotti ordered it.

Gravano learned Gotti's version after he and Gotti were arrested early in 1991. He learned it by listening to Gotti talk on an excerpt from the government's tapes.

The tapes - which are devastating - caused him to run to the government, and the collapse of heavily leveraged Salvatore Gravano, Inc.