SAMMY THE BULL SPILLS ALL
Gravano: I turned rat because don wanted ‘sacrificial lamb’
Infamous mob snitch Salvatore “Sammy the Bull’’ Gravano has resurfaced in a new videotaped interview — his first in more than two decades — to reveal explosive details about his life in the Mafia.
The hit-man canary’s main target in the wide-ranging YouTube chat was former pal and late Gambino crime-family boss John Gotti, whom Gravano ended up selling out to the Brooklyn feds in the early 1990s.
“People cheer about what he was doing. [But] he did more damage to Cosa Nostra being out there and putting it on Front Street than 10 cooperating witnesses put together,’’ the raging Bull claimed to Valuetainment interviewer Patrick Bet-David, apparently referring to the Dapper Don’s flamboyant style and inyour-face approach to the feds.
The chrome-domed rat, 74, insisted that he’s the real victim in the pair’s notorious saga.
Gravano said Gotti told him after the feds caught the duo on damning wiretaps that The Bull had to offer himself up as the crime family’s “sacrificial lamb’’ — to save its don.
“He said, ‘ Sammy, the tapes are horrible. They make you sound like a monster. What are we gonna do? So I’m controlling all the lawyers. You’re gonna take the weight, the lawyers are gonna bring it out in court that you’re a monster. You killed all these people, took over the unions, took over businesses.’ Which I never did,’’ Gravano said.
The ex-Gambino underboss, who has admitted to murdering 19 people, added, “During the trial, you hear John complaining on the tapes. ‘ Poor John Gotti, he lost control of this monster, Sammy the Bull. It’s him, not John. So I will go free, and you’ll do the time.’
“‘You’re the sacrificial lamb,’ ” Gravano said Gotti told him.
“I said, ‘OK, sure, that’s the way it is.’ And I got in touch with the FBI, I flipped, and I was gone.”
But he was still so angry about what he saw as Gotti’s betrayal of him that he plotted what would have been the ultimate mob hit — against his boss.
“I start thinking where we’re gonna kill him, who’s gonna drive him, where we’re gonna bury him, who do I have to kill: his brother, son, this one, that one, Genie Gotti. I happened to like Genie Gotti,’’ Gravano said, referring to Gotti’s brother Gene.
“At one point, there was 14, 15 people on a piece of paper,’’ Gravano said of his hit list. Then “I ripped it up and flushed it down the bowl.”
“Here’s my best f--king friend, my boss,’’ the turncoat said of John Gotti — whom he helped put behind bars for life in 1992 on murder, racketeering, extortion and tax-evasion raps.
John Gotti, who was known as the Teflon Don because criminal charges previously never stuck to him, died in prison of throat cancer in 2002.
“I did so many things for this guy. I rigged the trials, I threatened people, I f--king bribed people, and he turns on me,” The Bull said of Gotti in the videotaped interview, his first since a 1997 sitdown with ABC’s Diane Sawyer.
The turncoat revealed ordering a hit on Don King with Gotti because the boxing promoter wouldn’t work with them on throwing an unspecified fight.
Gravano, chuckling as he recalled the tale, said they sent an underling with these orders: “Go back, make another appointment, and kill him.
“Hit him with a proposal. If he says no, take a gun out and shoot him. Shoot him right in the head,” Gravano said the Mafia “associate’’ was told.
But Gravano said that in the end, the hit never went down because things were getting “insane.”
“What? We’d be hitting guys because he didn’t want to do a deal? We’d be hitting guys every other week,” he said.
King, 88, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post on Monday.
The Bull also recalled paying $60,000 to sway a juror in Gotti’s 1987 racketeering trial. The jury ended up finding Gotti innocent,
and the juror was later indicted on obstruction-of-justice charges.
“That’s true. That’s another thing I did for John,’’ Gravano said.
Yet “when the rubber meets the road, [Gotti is] throwing you to the wolves. It broke my heart, it broke me,” Gravano said in the interview, which was posted online Friday.
Gravano said that when he considered rubbing out Gotti, he thought, “F--k him, f--k the mob, I don’t give a f--k if I get killed.”
But in the end, “I just walked away.”
Gravano insisted that many of the mob’s made men see things his way.
“Bobby, he was the underboss in Boston. And he said, ‘Sammy, you wanna know the truth? I hear more crying and complaints about John than you, the position he put you in. And he betrayed you. When he betrayed you like that, that was a rat move,’ ” said the ex-Mafioso, seemingly referring to former Boston mob capo Robert “Bobby the Cigar” DeLuca, who was sentenced to 66 months behind bars in 2018.
The mob canary started singing against Gotti in exchange for a sweetheart deal and eventually a life, albeit short-lived, in the feds’ Witness Protection Program.
Gravano left the protection program in the mid-1990s, claiming it was too restrictive. He then ended up getting nabbed for running a massive ecstasy ring in 2001 and was charged in both Arizona and New York over it, landing 19-year and 20-year concurrent prison sentences.
While behind bars in Arizona, Gravano, a Catholic growing up, said he wanted to smoke so badly that he told prison officials he was changing his religion to “Native American’’ so he could partake of their tobacco pipe in prison.
He said he also became a Wiccan.
The Bull said he considered becoming Muslim in prison, too, but, “I couldn’t do that. I like pork.”
Gravano said he was behind bars when four or five guards came up to him “and say, ‘Sammy, get up.’ And they look all solemn.”
He said that’s when he learned Gotti had died — and he was crushed.
“Why should I be happy to watch somebody die like a f--king dog in prison?” Gravano said.
The Bull ended up being released 18 months early, in 2017.
It’s unclear where the former Mafioso lives now. Bet-David did not return a phone message from The Post.
During Gravano’s interview with the YouTube entrepreneur, he even weighed in on the conspiracy theories surrounding pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein’s jailhouse death.
“I was in 9 South,’’ Gravano said, referring to the wing at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan where he spent time holed up years before Epstein.
“It don’t take long to kill yourself, if he hung himself. I don’t believe anybody killed him. I think he knew it was over . . . and he took himself out,’’ the former mobster said of the 66-year-old accused sex-trafficker’s death in August.
Gravano added that he was disgusted that the rich and famous, including former President Bill
Clinton, chose to pal around with Epstein at various points.
“We also know he’s a f--king degenerate,’’ Gravano said of Clinton before adding, “Don’t take that personal, Clinton, wherever you are, that I’m calling you a degenerate.
“But you are what you are. I’m a man. I understand. But when you hit a certain point, you gotta keep your zipper closed. You can’t be nailing a 21-year-old. She’s old enough to know better, and I give you that. But still, you’re in a tremendous position of power. But you’re a douche, I don’t even want to talk about you,’’ he said, apparently referring to the married then-president’s Oval Office affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
A rep for Clinton did not return a request for comment.