Sammy 'The Bull' Gravano: my dad, the mafia underboss Now into its third season in the US, the success of the reality TV show Mob Wives says as much about the current status of the mafia in New York as it does about the public's enthusiasm for scripted reality shows. Thirty years ago, when the mafia still owned much of the city's construction industry, crime rackets and police force, the idea of its women offering their lifestyles for public consumption would have been as unthinkable for the TV channels as it would the mob. Now, though, other gangs have moved in and the mafia have almost been sanitised into the mythology of New York's sepia-tinted heritage. With age has come a certain stylised, Tarantino glamour. "That's true," says Karen Gravano, one of the main characters in Mob Wives, on the phone from New York, "though my aim has always been to cut through that image. What I'm trying to do is give an insight into the lives of strong women whose husbands have been - or are - in prison. Strictly speaking, Gravano is not a mob wife; her ex-husband did time for his involvement in an Ecstasy drug ring and was never a member of the mafia. She is a Mob Daughter, the title of her book just published in the UK. Her father is Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, one of the mafia's most feared underbosses during the 70s and 80s, responsible for the deaths of at least 19 people, who became notorious when he gave evidence in court for the FBI against John Gotti, boss of the Gambino family. When the book came out in the US last year, Karen Gravano came under fire from the families of those her father had killed for trying to profit from their deaths. Curiously, she has a great deal more sympathy for the families than the victims. "I understand their concerns," she says, "but the book isn't about glorifying my father's crimes, it's about telling my story; what it was like to be Sammy Gravano's daughter. What you've also got to understand is that the mafia was a lifestyle to which everyone involved signed up. No one who has burned the picture of a saint in the initiation ceremony is wholly innocent. Murder and violence were an accepted part of the code, and the people my father killed were all part of this; many of them had also killed. I don't say this to condone his actions, but to put them in context. Karen is playing slightly free with history; at least one of her father's killings was a 16-year old boy, Alan Kaiser, who had no connections to the mob and is believed to have been a victim of mistaken identity. But even if everyone her father killed had been gangsters like him, her attitude to murder is still well outside the norm. "The only way I can explain it," she says, "is to compare what my father did to how a soldier acts in battle. The mafia was fighting a war and my father was acting under orders. It was never personal when he killed someone; he was just trying to protect the family. Only it wasn't a real war and none of the deaths were legally sanctioned. Her father knew full well he was operating outside of society's rules and was happy to accumulate the wealth, houses and respect that came with his reputation as a hitman. Karen pauses and when she speaks again her voice is less steely and more vulnerable. "It's difficult," she admits. He's my father. And I want to think the best of him. So most of the time I try not to think too hard about what he did; to remain in some kind of denial. It's easier to separate him into two different people. There was the man who did all those horrific things outside the home as part of his job. And there was the loving father inside the home who took care of me and tried to give me everything I wanted. Weren't there any clues that things were not all as they seemed at home? "The thing is that I was only 19 when my father was arrested [she is now 40] and became a government witness," she says. I was still really young. Yes, I'd seen things. My dad putting a gun in his belt. The safe with $2m inside. People turning up at unexpected hours. My dad getting mad at me, saying he could have shot me, when I was messing around on the roof. I was still young. At that age you want everything to be OK, so you go into denial. You compartmentalise things and normalise them. One thing that has never been totally normalised is that, in his evidence at Gotti's trial, her father confessed to killing her mother's brother, her uncle Eddy. Again Karen goes quiet. "This is still so, so hard," she says. My father has sort of explained to me that he was ordered to do it but, to be honest, it's a subject we all prefer to avoid. Doesn't it ever occur to her that her father must have come home from killing her uncle pretending to have had a normal day? Or that when the murder was discovered, he must have made a show of compassion for his wife and family and promised to get revenge on whoever had done it? "Of course," she says. But I try to blot these thoughts out. My mother is no longer with my father, but they are in contact. The bottom line is that she was a mafia wife and she knew the score. As for me? Well, he's still my dad and I can't help still loving him. It's easy to judge Karen for her selective sleights of memory and to point out the obvious flaws in her logic. It's rather harder to comprehend what it must be like to have been her. To have gone to all the best schools, to have had every material comfort and to have got the vicarious respect of an entire community while her father was active in the mafia. And then to lose it all practically overnight and in the process discover your father had killed so many people. We are all defined by our parents to some extent, but most of us, at some point, get the opportunity to escape and carve out a niche for ourselves. Karen knows she will never be able to do that. No matter what she does, she will for ever be Sammy Gravano's daughter. If Karen is a bit screwed up in relation to her father - who is due for release from prison in four years - then the same can be said for much of the rest of society. "When I heard my dad was giving evidence for the government," she says, "my first thought was not to be angry at him for being a hitman and deceiving me, it was to be mad at him for ratting." The code of honour counted for more than the body count? Really. I know it sounds strange, but that's how it was. My father had always brought me up to believe that the family came first, no matter what, and here he was collaborating with the FBI. It was also a scary time. Doors that had always previously been thrown wide open to me, because of who my father was, were suddenly closed. I didn't even know whether my father was going to be whacked or if my mother and I were also now marked people. Everything was completely topsy-turvy. All the newspapers ran stories saying Sammy the Bull had become Sammy the Rat. What kind of message was that sending? You'd have thought that a member of the mafia choosing to testify against other organised crime members would be a good thing for society. Most people saw it differently. My dad was the bad guy who deserved a kicking while John Gotti - a man who had done just as many bad things - was portrayed as some kind of good guy. It was crazy. In the years following her father's admission into the witness programme, Karen predictably struggled, lurching from one bad relationship to another, dealing drugs and winding up on probation after a police operation that also saw her father, brother and husband jailed. I was a mess. I guess I just thought that being bad was the only way to earn some respect," she says. Now, though, she is determined to enjoy herself. Even if many of her father's victims believe she should keep her head down and stay quiet. "It's weird to be something of a celebrity these days," she says. I hate that word, but what other word is there? I get recognised. It took me a while to come to terms with people looking at me. I would catch them staring and think, why are they looking at me? Are they going to whack me? Believe me, all I really want now is for my daughter and my nephew to grow up with a normal life. All my life, I've longed to be just average. Some chance. Mob Daughter by Karen Gravano is published by Summersdale, £8.99. To order a copy for £7.19, including free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846