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crack cocaine and his wife went to Sammy to plead for help. Sammy did the only thing he could; he had DeBatt murdered.
    In 1988, he was involved in three murders. Louis Milito, his boyhood friend was first, after he had complained about someone else being promoted. A few months later, Francesco Oliverri was the second killing of the year. He had killed a member of the Family in a fight. Gravano sat in a stolen getaway car while the man to whom he gave the hit, Robert Bisaccia, shot Oliverri in the head in his car outside his house. The third was Wilfred ‘Willie Boy’ Johnson, an FBI informant.
    In 1989 he took out Thomas Spinelli, who had recently testified before a Grand Jury. Gravano arranged his murder in a Brooklyn factory.
    In August, 1990, he had a demolition contractor called Eddie Garafola – not his brother-in-law of the same name – gunned down in front of his home in Brooklyn and in October that year, he oversaw the death of his former business partner, Louis DeBono. He was found dead in his car in the World Trade Center car park.
    The authorities began to close in on John Gotti and Gotti worried that Gravano would also be reeled in. He made Sammy official underboss of the Family and ordered him to go on the run. He went to Florida and then Alantic City, while the government officially declared him a fugitive. But Gotti insisted on a meeting with him back at his club which, Gravano reminded him, was under constant police surveillance. Nevertheless, Gotti insisted and Sammy returned to New York.
    Inevitably, the police raided the club and Gravano, Gotti and Frank Locascio were arrested. Thomas Gambino was picked up elsewhere. When they got to court, the police played taped evidence and Gravano heard himself being described by his associates as an out-of-control killer. His relationship with Gotti deteriorated so badly that Gravano contacted the FBI and told them he wanted to cooperate.
    When the news broke, Gotti’s men peppered the neighbourhoods with posters of Sammy’s head on the body of a rat. Meanwhile, he was at the United States Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, singing his heart out. He signed a witness deal and prepared his testimony. At the trial, he was in the dock for nine days and he achieved his objective – the destruction of John Gotti who received multiple terms of life imprisonment.
    Gravano’s dismantling of the Family continued. He helped send seven Gambino capos to jail, as well as a number of high-ranking members of the Colombo, Genovese and DeCavalcante Families.
    Sammy himself got five years, plus three years of supervised release. Not bad for a man responsible for the deaths of nineteen people.
    He was released into the Witness Protection Programme, but left it early and moved to Arizona where he started up his own construction business. But, just to prove that you can’t keep a bad man down, in 2002, he was convicted of being the leader of an ecstasy trafficking organisation.
    He is currently serving nineteen years in the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado.

Joey ‘Big Joey’ Massino
     
     
     
     
    When Joey Massino was convicted in New York, in 2004, his charge sheet was a roll-call of Mafia crimes of the past 100 years – murder, racketeering, arson, extortion, loan-sharking, illegal gambling, conspiracy and money laundering. This head of the Bonanno Crime Family had certainly come a long way.
    Although Joey later became a restaurateur, his catering career had humble beginnings – a mobile food-wagon in the Queens area of New York, selling coffee and pastries to workers in the docks. He began his Mafia career as a protégé of Philip ‘Rusty’ Rastelli and his brothers, in the 1960s. Rastelli was a nasty, violent individual who, a few years later, would rise to the top of the heap in the Bonanno Family. With the Rastellis, he got into running numbers, hijacking trucks and fencing stolen goods.
    In 1975, Paul Castellano,