Eight years after his turncoat testimony helped bring down John J. Gotti, Salvatore Gravano, the Mafia killer whose ferocity earned him the nickname "Sammy the Bull," was arrested Thursday on charges that he helped control a multimillion-dollar drug ring in the Phoenix area with the help of members of a white supremacist youth gang.
Gravano, who was arrested in a series of raids before dawn along with his wife, his 24-year-old son, his 27-year-old daughter and 32 others, was accused of being involved in overseeing and financing an operation that the authorities said sold 20,000 to 25,000 tablets of the drug ecstasy each week to teenagers in the Phoenix area."Mr. Gravano's agreement to testify against the mob in New York doesn't give him a free pass to violate Arizona law and facilitate the sale of drugs to Arizona teenagers," said Janet Napolitano, the Arizona attorney general, whose office is prosecuting the case.
Federal, state and local authorities described Gravano as a mentor to Michael Papa, 24, who they said was the ring's chief of distribution and one of the founders of a white supremacist youth gang. He was also charged in the case.
Gravano was the underboss of the Gambino family when he defected in 1991 and became a government witness, testifying in 1992 against Gotti, the family's boss, who was convicted of racketeering and murder in federal court in Brooklyn and sentenced to life in prison. An admitted killer of 19 men, Gravano went on to testify at nine trials and has been credited with being the force behind the convictions of 39 organized crime figures and their associates, becoming perhaps the most significant witness ever against the Mafia.
The new charges against Gravano highlight what most prosecutors acknowledge is one of the most intractable problems in using criminal turncoats as witnesses in organized crime and drug cases: The witnesses often become criminal defendants again. But they are often the only people who have enough information to help convict high-level crime figures.
"It's the same in so many other cases," said one senior federal law-enforcement official who has dealt with scores of mob defectors who have been relocated from large cities to unfamiliar surroundings and revert to crime.