It was the Summer of Sam.
And Alan Kaiser, just 16, would soon learn that 1977 was also the Summer of Sammy Bull.
“I want Sammy Gravano’s daughter Karen — who was born in 1977, the same year my brother was killed, and who is now getting rich and famous on a classless TV reality show and from her ghoulish book about her father — to know that her father didn’t just murder other mobsters,” Alan’s sister says. “He also murdered a teenage boy. I want her to see my brother’s pictures. To know what he did and what he took from us. Her father is a monster. Not someone to idolize or profit from.”
Before Alan Kaiser left their two-bedroom apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, on that hot, clammy night of Aug. 5, 1977, wearing a spotless white safari suit he got for his 16th birthday on June 24, Alan Kaiser told his sister’s fiancé, Tom Faraci, 20, a city garbage man, to please make sure that Son of Sam did not hurt his beloved 19-year-old sibling, Joi.
“Alan worried about me so much he gave me his Boy Scout knife,” Joi Faraci says now, eyes watering, caressing the black-handled Forest Master knife 35 years later in the finished basement of the couple’s modest Staten Island home.
“My father and brother were cops, and I can tell you Alan was anything but mobbed up,” says Tom. “He was an innocent kid with a peach fuzz mustache trying to impress girls. . . .”
“Alan won a school art contest with a painting hung in the Brooklyn Museum,” says Joi, frowning in a forever sad way. “A New Utrecht High honor student. Mechanically inclined, like my father, who was a Korean War vet.”
Joi says Alan was walking along Kings Highway near West Eighth St. about 11:30 that night when two gunmen burst from a car. Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, with an ankle cast, waved a handgun. The second hood, Louie Milito, cocked a sawed-off shotgun.
Gravano’s ankle had been broken the week before by a couple of guys in an after-hours joint. One of them was Aldo Candido, 21, who now fled when he saw the two mooks firing in revenge. He escaped.
Just as Alan Kaiser happened along Kings Highway.
In Gravano’s federal confession, he says he called Milito and waved at Alan Kaiser, and Milito obediently shot the boy in his chest. Bam. Then fired a second, loud, point-blank round into Alan Kaiser’s teenage face.
At the funeral, a wailing Joi leapt on Alan’s body in the casket. “He was hard as stone and so, so cold,” she says. “Today, the mere smell of flowers makes me relive my brother’s death.”
So does mention of the name Gravano.
The Son of Sam was caught five days after Alan Kaiser was killed. Sammy Bull kept killing for another 20 years.
But for those two decades, Joi and her mother, Shirley, had no idea who killed Alan or why.
“Then in 1997, the FBI knocked on my mother’s door to say Sammy Gravano confessed to killing Alan Kaiser,” Joi says.
Faced with life without the possibility of provolone, Sammy Bull ate the cheese and became Sammy the Rat against John Gotti, a federal trophy bust.
In exchange, the feds stuffed all of Gravano’s 19 confessed murders into one huge body bag of a plea deal and gave him five pathetic years in prison.
Or less than four months per whack.
Including Alan Kaiser’s, to the feds’ everlasting shame. For that would never have been the case if it had been one of the feds’ kids.
“Those other 18 guys Gravano killed had all chosen to go into the Mafia gangster life,” says Joi. “They knew getting killed was part of that life they willingly chose. My brother never chose that life.
“That same year that Sammy Gravano killed my brother, he had a baby girl born named Karen.”
Gravano was such a man of honor that after he became a rat and went into witness protection, he enlisted Karen and his son in a drug-pushing operation in Phoenix. He and his son wound up doing time.
“Real classless,” says Joi.
Now 35 years after Alan Kaiser’s murder, Karen Gravano splashes in designer heels through her father’s blood-drenched legacy in a sleazy, debased reality show that should be called “Mob Slobs,” with a book I won’t even dignify by naming, about her “victimized” life as a mob daughter.
“The audacity of her saying she’s a victim sickens me,” says Joi. “How did she suffer? She had everything she ever wanted. How could she compare me losing an innocent brother to her being humiliated by having a mobster killer father who turned rat?
“I watched Sammy Gravano brag on that Diane Sawyer interview in 1997 when he promoted his book, and for the only time in my life, I wanted to climb through the TV screen and kill someone. Now the daughter has a book about how she was a victim. Sickening.”
She traces her finger along a baby photo of her little brother, who would be 50 now.
“I never watched this TV show,” Joi says. “But I read Karen Gravano says things like, ‘Check my bloodline, b----. I’m coming for you.’ That doesn’t sound like a victim to me. That sounds exactly like she’s proud of her cold-blooded father, who killed for fun and profit. Now she’s profiting off her father’s disgusting past. The Gravanos never go away. And I will never find closure as long as Karen Gravano makes money from this show and this book. My brother will never rest in peace. And neither will I.”
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