Mob Daughter Endorses Trump: ‘Maybe He’ll Pardon My Dad’
This Mob Wife wants Trump to make America great again — for her jailbird dad.
Karen Gravano — whose father Sammy “Sammy the Bull” Gravano escaped 19 murder charges by helping the FBI take down numerous local gangsters including Gambino crime boss John Gotti — said she hopes her father’s buddy, presidential candidate Donald Trump, will win the 2016 election.
The New York Daily News reports:
Karen Gravano, talking about the GOP front-runner’s alleged ties to organized crime, said Tuesday her father would be happy to see Trump call 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. home.
“All I can say is maybe he can give his old friend Sammy a f—in’ pardon,” the VH1 “Mob Wives” star told the Daily News.
Despite his cooperation with authorities, the former Gambino under boss, now 70, is serving out a 20-year sentence for running an ecstasy smuggling ring while in the government’s Witness Protection Program.
The outlet cites Wayne Barrett’s “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall” for evidence of Trump’s dealings with the Brooklyn mafia, which effectively controlled the construction business in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s.
In a statement to the Daily News, the Republican presidential candidate denied having met the Bensonhurst mobster, and accused Barrett of having a personal vendetta against him.
“I don’t know Sammy Gravano and to my knowledge I have never met him,” Trump said.
Karen maintains that it was impossible to work in construction in New York without interacting regularly with folks like her father.
“Listen, at the end of the day, he was in construction in New York and the mob ran construction,” Gravano responded, according the outlet. “I’m sure at a certain point and time he had to have some sort of interactions with people who were in that lifestyle.”
Trump’s adversaries, including GOP candidate Ted Cruz, are already jumping on Trump’s alleged mafia connection.
“There have been multiple media reports about Donald’s business dealings with the mob,” Cruz said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month. “Maybe his taxes show those business dealings are a lot more extensive than has been reported.”
Karen ruffled feathers in 2012 when she published a book called “Mob Daughter” about her father’s life as a hitman for Gotti, and nine families of Gravano’s victims cried foul, saying she should not profit from her father’s crimes.
Despite her appearance on VH1’s Mob Wives, Karen’s status as a “baby rat” — or offspring of a mob informant — allegedly got her banned from co-star Angela “Big Ang” Raiola’s Dyker Heights funeral last month.
Karen’s father can be seen hinting at a relationship with Trump in this Diane Sawyer interview (skip to 26:25):
“I literally controlled Manhattan. When I see it at night — those lights and everything about it — I think of Donald Trump and Tishman and everybody else who couldn’t build a building if I didn’t want them to build it. That got me off. Plus, I made a lot of money with it,” he told Sawyer.
Pardoned or not, Sammy is expected to be released from prison in 2019.
