MAN: Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville.
NIXON: America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.
NANCY: Just say no.
MAN: The Mafia is a major player in the international
drug underworld.
MAN 2: At the end of the day, it's all about the dollar.
It's all about the dollar.
REAGAN: American people want the Mob and its associates
brought to justice and their power broken.
HARRIS: There's now an understanding that the war on
drugs was an abject failure.
MAN: You have to stop and ask yourself,
"How did we get here?"
SHAUN: The first time I took ecstasy was in Manchester,
thinking, what is this?
This is pretty boring.
Then, all of a sudden, my knees just completely buckled,
and time just started to stand still.
RAVER: Woo!
SHAUN: The whole room is just throbbing,
and everybody is dancing and the music's
just pulsing into my head.
All these beeps and weird noises,
like signals from outer space that I didn't understand are
now completely making sense.
I never wanted the party to end after that night.
Raving became my religion.
I'm Shawn Attwood,
known as one of the biggest ecstasy traffickers
in the US rave scene.
My local nickname was English Shaun.
I was up against one of the Cosa Nostra's most notorious killers.
As a young person, I set a goal to be a millionaire by age 30.
"Greed is Good" was my mantra.
I flew out to Arizona because it had dazzled me as a teenager.
The plane comes in, and you're looking out the window,
and you're seeing all these swimming pools in people's backyards.
The sun's always shining.
It's almost 50 degrees in the summer and,
as soon as they hear the English accent,
they roll out the red carpet.
But the rave scene was barely starting.
They didn't even know what ecstasy was,
so there was this huge gap in the market.
(cheering).
When I threw my first rave,
looking down at all the ravers just going off,
with the strobe lights pulsing,
I knew that this was my calling in life.
RAVER: It's quarter to six in the morning.
SHAUN: As an experiment,
I decided to order 1,000 pills out of LA.
All this stuff goes in one weekend.
I've made thousands of dollars, just like that.
Partying my ass off.
And that was when I decided to go full time trafficking.
KAREN: One thing about my father, he is a businessman,
outside of being a gangster.
Some people call it a racketeer, whatever,
I say he was a businessman because he knew business.
He's gonna make money.
My name's Karen Gravano.
I'm the daughter of Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano.
He was the under boss of the Gambino organized crime family,
which was the most powerful organized crime family
in New York City.
MAN: Gravano was a mean, vicious, horrible person.
ANCHOR: Better known as "Sammy the Bull",
a man who pleaded guilty to 19 murders.
KAREN: My father was released from prison is 1995.
The FBI wanted him to go into witness protection,
so he agreed.
He went into the program.
GEORGE: Being a cooperator, and then,
the witness protection program,
and walking away from the Mafia life,
very few of them can succeed at it.
It is an enormously difficult task.
KAREN: There's so many restrictions.
He wasn't able to talk to us because we didn't go in the program,
so he signed himself out,
and he joined my mother and my brother in Arizona.
My father's main thing was construction.
He loved construction.
He started a company called Marathon Development,
which, in New York,
he actually had Marathon concrete.
He was in the office every day trying to build this company from the ground up,
legitimately creating a business.
He wasn't "Sammy the Bull" anymore.
He wasn't Salvatore Gravano, he was Jimmy Moran.
That was the identity the government gave him.
SHAUN: Ecstasy was going for $25 to $30 a pill.
I started to source them from Holland for $2 or $3 a pill.
SHAUN: My smugglers would bring them over and they went
from Holland to France to Mexico City to Hermosillo,
and over the border into Arizona.
The most anyone ever brought on one of those missions
was 40,000 pills.
SHAUN: By 1999 we were a multi‐million‐dollar
international ecstasy smuggling ring.
ANCHOR: Use of the designer drug, ecstasy,
is rising at an alarming rate.
ANCHOR 2: By 1999 seizures increased 300% to three million.
RICH: Ecstasy never carried that dirty social stigma that
methamphetamine did, or heroin did, or cocaine did.
So, the younger generation thought it was OK
to be taking it.
RAVER: And why not just go a club and, you know,
be messed up?
INTERVIEWER: How old are you?
RAVER: 16.
RICH: Next thing you know, little Johnny's not coming
home 'til the sun's coming up.
There were times when they'd start on a Friday night,
and they'd go through Sunday.
MAN: Do you know where your teenagers are?
This could be the night your child ventures into a
secretive and, potentially, dangerous world.
The world of the rave.
RICH: All of a sudden, we start fielding calls of
complaints from middle class families.
ANCHOR: There is reason to be concerned.
Even one pill of ecstasy can cause dehydration,
anxiety and exhaustion.
COPE: When my lieutenant asked for volunteers,
there wasn't one supervisor that wanted to volunteer for
that mission because it wasn't one of them
sexy things to do.
We're doing cocaine, heroin, meth, marijuana.
I'm Sergeant Jim Cope,
from the Phoenix Police Department.
I was the junior drug enforcement sergeant at the time,
so I got assigned the job.
I drafted Rich Lebel.
He was our lead undercover in the whole operation.
At the time, the spiked‐up hair with the bleached tips were in,
so we had him spike his hair.
We developed the strategy to go in the raves and
actually make undercover purchases at the raves.
RICH: You have to dress the part,
and it's certainly not stuff I would wear on a daily basis.
You walk inside and, right away,
the music makes your insides vibrate because it's so loud,
and it's thumping over and over and over,
with strobe lights and lights flashing.
It's all, sort of, hypnotic.
SHAUN: The vibe was peace, love, unity and respect.
There was no violence.
There was no Scarface level activity.
RICH: Once you were inside, they were super trusting.
Somebody would walk by you, and they'd ask you,
"Hey, do you need any E?"
And we would just be making buys.
SHAUN: All of a sudden, I received mass reports of
these guys that stood out selling ecstasy.
These were big, steroid head characters in shiny polyester shirts.
I'm wondering, who the hell are these guys?
They wanted to have a meeting with me.
So, I sit down between these two guys.
The friendlier one, he says,
"English Shaun, why don't you start moving some of our pills?"
And, I say, "Look, I've got a good reputation.
Why would we wanna be getting your stuff?"
Then the big guy just jumps up off the sofa and says,
"Who the (bleep) are you disrespecting our pills."
He throws out this name, Jimmy Moran,
and I'm not familiar with that name, and then,
he follows it up with,
"One call to "Sammy the Bull" and we can
have you taken out to the desert."
Now, that stopped me in my tracks,
because I've seen John Gotti
and Sammy "The Bull" Gravano on the news.
These guys are the Gambino crime family.
KAREN: I went to dinner with my father.
I wanted to sit down and know all the things
that I never asked before when I was kid.
I didn't want him to be my father and try to protect me.
I wanted him to tell me the truth and,
for the first time in my life, like,
my father started telling me about the Mob, and, you know,
about the things that he did.
You know, my father was accused of 19 murders.
I wanted to know, like, did you kill someone?
What was is like?
He looked me in the face and was, like,
"It was, honestly, a rush."
It was like an adrenalin rush, to be able to take another life.
Um, I didn't expect him to say that.
RICH: I was probably a little bit shocked that he got the five.
19 murders, five years.
How can anybody confess to that many murders and then do
five years in prison?
MAN: I think it's clear that "Sammy the Bull" is a marked man.
There are Mob members that would love to kill him.
There are wannabees that would love to kill him just
to add to their reputation.
GEORGE: He's, basically thrown all the rules out the window.
But the biggest one is being omertà, right?
He's destroyed the oath of secrecy.
"Sammy the Bull" is now "Sammy the Rat".
He's still working with us on cases and information.
It was in my best interest, as the government,
to make sure that this guy survived and played by the rules.
(cheering).
SHAUN: With this new breed of ecstasy dealers infiltrating my raves,
there was this change in the atmosphere at the party.
Pills were cut with all kinds of toxic substances.
People were tripping.
People felt like they were on crystal meth.
All kinds of bad reports were coming in,
and violent episodes occurred.
When my top ecstasy salesperson got his teeth smashed out,
in the back of my mind then, I'm thinking
these guys wanna take me out to the desert.
Sammy the Bull.
You can't mess around with people who've got
that lethal reputation.
I got so scared I moved over 100 miles to Tucson, Arizona,
to live in a gated, guarded community.
COPE: When Rich Lebel was up to 250 to 500 pill buys,
the suspects we were dealing with said,
"Hey, if you guys are gonna be players in this market,
you'd better be careful because the New York guys are running everything,
and you're gonna have to pay tax on your pills to them."
Rich is from the East Coast,
and I'm from the East Coast, and we were both, like,
New York guys.
You know, we're in Arizona, whatever.
We didn't take it serious at all.
You gotta realize, at the time, The Sopranos was in.
They were all striving to be some young gangster, you know?
Some mobster.
These are just kids talking.
DENNIS: I got a tip that Sammy the Bull Gravano was
hanging out in Arizona under the assumed name of Jimmy Moran.
Um, I wasn't sure exactly how to go about this.
It's not like you got out and interview Mafia hit men
all the time.
I found that he had a construction company.
I drove around Marathon Development, like,
two or three times thinking, what am I gonna do here?
It was in a big warehouse district of Phoenix.
Kind of, a junkie area, and it had a little foyer,
and there was a little bell there,
and there was nobody upfront,
at the front desk so I rang the bell.
(ding)
And, out of the office walks Sammy the Bull Gravano,
and he walked straight up to me,
and he had these shark‐like eyes and he said,
"What the (bleep) do you want?"
And, I said, "Mr. Gravano,
I wanna interview you", and he kept saying,
"You don't know anything about me", and I said,
"Well, I know that you're responsible for something like 18 homicides",
and he says, "Get your (bleep) facts straight.
It's 19."
And that just blew me away.
He said, "If you do this story,
people are gonna get killed. It's not a good idea."
KAREN: My father just came home from prison.
My mother and brother bought a restaurant.
Everyone always thinks that we picked the name "Uncle Sal"
as the best kept secret in Scottsdale.
KAREN: When they bought the restaurant,
it was already called Uncle Sal's.
I mean, yes, we laughed about it, and it was, like,
Salvatore Gravano, Uncle Sal's.
It's ours. We're taking it.
We joke at home, but I think my mother's the real gangster here.
My mother's name's Debbie.
She came to Arizona with all the money.
So she financed things, whether it was the restaurant,
or whatever it was.
My brother, Gerard, he was a chef working in the restaurant.
I'd just had my daughter, and my brother had a son,
and we were doing good.
We were working hard, we were staying out of trouble,
and we were just really,
honestly building our family back up.
(splash)
GEORGE: Word came back to me that a reporter by the name of
Dennis Wagner was gonna write a story and we
wanted to stop it.
DENNIS: My publisher was on a cruise in the Caribbean
and a shore to ship call was made by the FBI trying to convince my
publisher not to run the story.
(phone ringing)
GEORGE: You print this story and expose this guy,
all you're gonna do is get him killed.
The story's not as important as you think it is.
This guy's life is.
(tone)
DENNIS: It was picked up by media all over the world.
It was, kind of, an explosion in that sense.
GEORGE: We knew the Gambino family were actively trying to
figure out where he was and how to set up on him, and now,
all of a sudden,
they were able to start tracking him down.
KAREN: Once that newspaper article came out,
it made everyone start looking at us.
That was actually the start of everything going bad for my
family in Arizona.
All the kids that were, you knew, Mob groupies,
or whatever you wanna call them,
infatuated with that lifestyle.
"Oh, Sammy the Bull's here."
"Oh, his family owns this restaurant."
And that's what drew the attention of the wrong people.
My brother was working in the restaurant.
This guy came in, and he threw $1,000 on the table,
and he told Gerard, "Here, put this in your pocket.
Come out with us tonight.
We're gonna go to the clubs.
Everything is on me, and, by the way,
I love your father."
So, that's how Mike Papa comes into the whole picture.
That's how this whole ecstasy thing started.
Mike Papa was a sharp kid.
He dressed nice.
He was a good‐looking kid. He knew how to talk.
He had the New York hustle,
because he was originally from New York.
So, Gerard, building his friendship with Mike Papa,
started going to clubs with him.
Gerard started seeing that this guy's, you know,
he's selling pills, he's selling ecstasy.
Mike Papa was a big, big person in that rave scene.
COPE: As our investigation was progressing,
we kept hearing the rumors about the New York guys.
I was at the gym working out, an acquaintance of mine said,
"Hey, do you know anything about some kind of crazy club drug or...",
he called it a "sex drug".
He goes, "All these young kids are, at the gym,
bragging about how much money they're making off these pills",
and he named Mike Papa, and he goes,
"You're not gonna believe it, they say they're being backed
by Sammy the Bull Gravano."
RICH: When I first started hearing about the
Gravano name being involved in the ecstasy scene,
you know, I said to myself,
Sammy would be crazy to get involved in any of this stuff.
COPE: I think we have something here.
But I've already had to convince everybody, hey,
there's something to this with this drug ecstasy,
you know, and now,
I'm gonna say, "I think Sammy the Bull Gravano,
a legendary Mafia hit man is also involved."
People would think I was crazy.
KAREN: Mike Papa started to come into the restaurant and
my father finally met him.
My father was, you know, "Who is this guy?"
He wasn't introduced to my father as,
"Oh, this is our drug dealing friend, Mike Papa,
who sells ecstasy at raves."
It's, like, "This is our friend Mike.
He goes to ASU. He's a college student.
He's from New York."
My father was anti‐drug,
and so adamant about Gerard and I having the straight and narrow path,
building a life that is unbreakable.
But, unfortunately, we (bleep) up.
(sirens)
OFFICER: We see ecstasy coming from Canada.
Unfortunately, the ecstasy and Molly,
it's actually caused death, here in Detroit.
OFFICER: Any time where there's drugs involved,
you know, you're dealing with a lot of money.
People tend to use guns.
MAN: The DJs are selling the dope and it's coming
out of the bathroom too.
OFFICER: The door, the door.
Search warrant, gotta go, gotta go.
Move by the door, the door.
OFFICER 2: Face down. Face down.
Straighten your legs out. Straighten your legs out.
Face down. Look at the floor.
Don't be looking around. This ain't entertainment.
Keep your hands where I can see them.
Wanna get cuffed up?
Look at the floor.
OFFICER: You have any guns on you?
MAN: No.
OFFICER: Got a gun right here.
It was loaded. I just cleared it.
Put your hands on the floor.
Crawl out now.
Crawl backwards. Crawl backwards.
Now, move.
What do you have?
Coke in there.
Tried dumping the coke.
Toilet doesn't flush. It didn't work.
Looks like a pretty good size piece of crystal meth.
Ecstasy. Heroin. Crack cocaine.
Good job, guys.
COPE: As we were progressing and learning that, you know,
there's a possibility that Sammy the Bull Gravano
was involved,
I knew we were gonna have to take it to another level,
and I said, "You know, I'm gonna sit down with Ron."
STERRETT: My name's Ron Sterrett,
and I was the lead detective for the Phoenix Police Department
in the Gravano ecstasy trafficking investigation.
I didn't believe that Sammy would be associating with
college kids selling drugs, quite honestly.
I thought that was beneath his level.
But, when we obtained Mike Papa's phone number,
it was subscribed to Marathon Development.
COPE: It, right away, hit me a business that Sammy
ran back in New York was Marathon.
STERRETT: So, the link was created.
Mike Papa, who was involved in ecstasy trafficking worked for
Sammy at Marathon Development.
STERRETT: When it comes to the wire tap,
we were going to go up, initially, on Mike Papa.
STERRETT: He was horribly undisciplined on the phone and
would talk at length about their drug trafficking activities.
If the rumors were true that Sammy Gravano's involved,
Mike Papa and Mike Papa's phone would walk us directly
into that evidence.
STERRETT: But, actually, the link was created
to Gerard Gravano.
KAREN: When Gerard got involved in the ecstasy business,
all of a sudden, it went from the Mike Papa
investigation to the Gravano investigation,
because they realized that this is Sammy the Bull's son.
COPE: During our wiretap I kept seeing this light‐colored
Mercury Marquis out on surveillance.
I would always come into the wire room and I'd say,
"Hey, I think there's some other dudes out there following this guy",
and, because of the shape of the car, I'm, like,
"Maybe it's another cop?"
KAREN: My father started feeling like people were
following him, and he said,
"Listen, I don't know if it's the cops,
if it's people from New York,
but I feel like something is going on."
COPE: Everybody told me I was crazy.
There's nobody else, and I'm, like, "I keep seeing this car.
Something's up with this car."
GEORGE: The whole time Sammy was out in Arizona
we knew Gotti had given the contract on Sammy.
'He screwed us. You gotta go get him.'
STERRETT: During the wiretap the kids made constant
reference to "The Big Guy".
STERRETT: Every now and again somebody would slip and call him Sammy.
COPE: They openly referred to Gravano, you know,
when they were trying to feel important or show off to their friends.
KAREN: Mike Papa is talking about "'The Big Man' takes 50 cents",
so he can't drop the price.
That's Mike saying,
"I'm not gonna drop my price",
and using my father as leverage.
"If you got a problem, go talk to Sammy the Bull."
STERRETT: We really believed Sammy's name was being thrown out by
these younger kids as a point of intimidation.
COPE: So, the speculation was always,
are we gonna get to Sammy the Bull Gravano?
(tone)
(dialing)
COPE: In January of 2000,
Ron Sterrett and the investigative team
start intercepting calls between a supplier in
California and Mike Papa.
(ringing)
COPE: As those calls progressed,
we realized a large shipment of 25,000 pills were
gonna be coming in from LA.
STERRETT: We knew exactly where the exchange of money
and pills was gonna take place.
STERRETT: They met at a hamburger place real close to
Arizona State University.
We saw the bag of ecstasy coming into possession
of Mike Papa.
We followed Mike Papa directly back to Marathon Development,
and saw Mike Papa carry the bag in.
(camera shutter)
COPE: It was just amazing how fast those pills were gone.
They were distributed in the Phoenix metropolitan area,
and I don't think they lasted a week.
(busy signal)
It got frustrating because we weren't getting the
confirmation that Sammy was involved with this
ecstasy thing that the kids were doing.
All of the ecstasy purchases were being done by Mike Papa.
Gerard was right there.
He was a distributor that was giving it to the other parties
that were going out and selling the pills.
(ringing)
GEORGE: The whole time I'm dealing with Sammy,
there were no indications he was doing anything other than
running his business,
helping the family with the Italian restaurant,
and trying to be legitimate.
I had no doubt that that's what was going on with him.
(dialing)
(ringing)
STERRETT: That call came in somewhere between 11:00
in the evening to 1:00 in the morning.
A normal business doesn't pay somebody at 11:00 in the
evening for a gas receipt.
$70 for gas receipts,
we knew that that was code for $70,000
for the ecstasy.
STERRETT: Gerard and Mike Papa needed to ask Sammy
to front the $70,000 for the next shipment.
That brought him right into the middle of the financing of
the ecstasy organization.
I can't believe Gravano was so stupid to be
caught doing these types of things with these kids.
The prosecutor came down to the wire room and
listened to the phone call.
SAMMY: Can she do it right away?
STERRETT: And said, "We've got the evidence that I'm looking
for to charge Sammy."
COPE: Yeah, we got him.
We got enough. We got enough for everybody.
This whole group is done.
KAREN: We come to find out Gotti had sent a hit team down
to Arizona.
STERRETT: There was a plan to kill Sammy where Sammy parked his car.
The individual was set up in a position across the street
with a high‐powered rifle.
KAREN: My father would have never laid down lightly.
It's no secret that, at that particular time,
he had guns.
If some gun battle was going off,
he's coming out shooting.
Everybody was ready for whatever was gonna happen.
♪ ♪
COPE: There was probably 200 tactical officers at
that meeting from different agencies.
So, I have a lot of guys there.
They're not real happy about being up so early.
But the attention level on the room definitely heightened
when we told them who was involved,
and what the case was about.
(siren)
STERRETT: We wanted to use the cover of darkness to minimize
any potential risk to the officers or Sammy getting
involved in a shooting.
STERRETT: When they made entry,
Sammy was crawling on the floor toward getting a gun.
I think he thought it was the Mob coming after him.
He surrendered, was handcuffed,
and brought to the facility where I was waiting for him.
COPE: He was a really sharp guy.
I could tell he was scanning every document he could to try
to figure out how bad it is and what's going on.
STERRETT: I told him 'you're being arrested for conspiracy
to distribute dangerous drugs,
and he just kinda leaned his head back and closed his eyes and signed,
like, jeez, I can't believe I got caught for this.
But, quite honestly, we feel we saved Sammy's life by
arresting him a few days before he was
gonna get killed.
REPORTER: He insisted he was a hard‐working businessman,
who had settled into his new law‐abiding life.
But a tiger doesn't change his stripes.
REPORTER 2: And authorities say it was a family affair.
KAREN: I made mistakes.
Did I know that there was ecstasy being sold?
Yes.
Was I involved in, maybe, some of the talks?
Yes.
Me and my brother, we (bleep) up.
ANCHOR: The crime ring, allegedly,
distributed up to 30,000 pills a week of the drug ecstasy.
GEORGE: He beyond stabbed us in the back,
it was betrayal.
I mean, it was the stupidest thing he could do.
It was the worst thing he could do.
Nobody was gonna save him this time.
REPORTER: The turncoat who sent so many mobsters to jail
could soon be joining them.
RICH: I was over at Mike Papa's residence
when we arrested Mike.
I thought Mike would be one of the ones who cooperated.
REPORTER: He might just be the most famous snitch of all time,
but now Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano
has had the tables turned.
GEORGE: That's the nature of drug dealing.
People are always gonna be ratting people out and
pointing fingers at one another.
KAREN: Once Mike Papa started cooperating with the government,
they threw everything at us.
They threw charges at my mother. They threw charges at me.
They threw charges at my brother.
My father's now boxed in.
(sighs).
You know, I don't think people understand.
My father didn't get involved in the drug business because
he wanted to sell drugs.
My father stepped in because he wanted to save my brother.
His biggest fear was Gerard was gonna get killed on a
drug deal gone bad, and someone was gonna make a
name for themselves for killing Sammy the Bull's son.
Family's everything to my father.
He would never let us jump in quicksand without jumping in with us.
And that's why Sammy the Bull got involved in drug dealing.
STERRETT: There was a belief, when Sammy ultimately took
responsibility for what he did,
that he was doing it on behalf of his family and, certainly,
that plea agreement did mitigate Gerard's exposure.
It certainly helped Karen out.
SAMMY: I believe you and this court have been very fair with me and my family,
and I appreciate it very much.
STERRETT: In my view, a lot of the Mafia members,
despite this Godfather script of we don't get
involved in drugs, they get involved in drugs.
They get involved in anything that makes money,
and drugs is an extremely fast way to make a lot of money.
GEORGE: I mean, the fact is,
he was a murderer, but we still talk,
and I look forward to conversations with the guy.
You know, if he was sitting here today,
he would tell you, straight faced,
"I wasn't a drug dealer."
You got convicted of it.
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.