A well-dressed man who had power over everyone he met thought he was heading out to an

expensive dinner. But when poor Castellano stepped out of his car outside Spark Steakhouse,

what he didn't know was that he was walking straight into a planned murder.

This is Redram, stories about the true victims of crime.

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Paul Castellano was considered one of the most powerful men in New York City.

He was an American crime boss who headed the Gambino family. If you don't know

much about the mafia and mobs, which I don't, very basically put, the Gambino family was one of

five families, groups, mobs that really had taken over New York City in the sort of 1950s onwards.

So this case isn't actually about Paul, the man who was murdered. This is about the man who was accused of killing him and at least

18 other people. Today we're talking about a member of the Gambino family, Salvatore Gravano,

also known as Sammy to his family and friends,

or Sammy the Bull. Sammy was born and raised in Brooklyn. Now, Brooklyn at this time was controlled

by organised crime groups and the Gambino family was one of them and these are crime groups that

would operate sort of day to day through

intimidation and also doing illegal things like dealing drugs or sex work or operating in

various different criminal activities now growing up sammy was completely enamored by these groups he

saw them he saw the power they had over

people and he wanted a slice of that. And so growing up, his lifelong ambition was to be in one of

these groups and he got to know people in the Gambino family. Now, at first, Sammy was just kind of a normal kid. He grew up, he went to

school, he didn't end up graduating, he actually ended up going into the army, but he wasn't there

for very long and when he came back home, he got himself into the Gambino family pretty quickly.

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