Ex-Mobster Sammy Gravano Says Cuomo 'Killed More People Than the Mafia' With COVID Policies
Ex-Gambino crime family underboss Salvatore "Sammy The Bull" Gravano on Saturday slammed New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's "disgusting" alleged sexual misconduct and urged Italian Americans in the state to "get rid" of the embattled politician.
Gravano, a former New York mobster-turned-podcast host, responded to state Attorney General Letitia James' Tuesday release of a 165-page report which outlined 11 women's sexual misconduct allegations against Cuomo.
Gravano told Newsweek by phone Saturday that New Yorkers of all political affiliation should also be infuriated by Cuomo's attempted cover-up of of tens of thousands of COVID-19 nursing home deaths last year. Gravano said Cuomo "killed more people than the mafia did in this country" with his controversial order to send thousands of recovering COVID-19 patients into nursing homes at the height of the pandemic.
"This guy is literally the worst of the worst," Gravano said of Cuomo in a YouTube video released Friday, which highlighted allegations of both government corruption and sexual misconduct against the New York governor.
"He used public funds to write a book so he could make $5 million. He put people who have the coronavirus in old-age homes, 13-or-15,000 senior citizens died. This is more than the mafia killed in the entire time they were in this country," Gravano added.
The Brooklyn-born ex-gangster said he's bothered that the governor and his brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, are of Italian-American heritage. He condemned Chris Cuomo for notoriously comparing the term "Fredo" from The Godfather to use of the "n-word" toward Black people. Gravano argued that both Cuomo brothers have tarnished the legacy of their late father, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who died in 2015.
"I'm a New Yorker, I don't know how people look at 12-to-15,000 people dead... he can blame Trump or whoever he wants, but I know if you gave me an order to put those people in the nursing home with all those old people, if you put a gun to my head I wouldn't do it. Don't blame somebody else, you were in power," Gravano told Newsweek Saturday.
Gravano was second-in-command to Gambino crime family boss John Gotti during the late 1980s and early 1990s before he became a government witness and confessed to his involvement in 19 murders in 1991.
He told Newsweek Saturday the Cuomo administration should be hit with federal charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for his 2020 nursing home order.
But despite James' dual state-level investigations into the Cuomo administration, a relatively obscure "executive law" prevented her from filing criminal charges against the governor this week. However, several county prosecutors have said they are pursuing criminal charges against Cuomo tied to the numerous abuse of power and sexual harassment allegations in the A.G. report.
Tens of thousands of elderly nursing home patients were exposed to the deadly virus as a result and the state attorney general later issued a report which found the administration had attempted to obscure the real number of deaths.
Gravano's remarks Saturday reveal how far the governor has fallen since the early months of the pandemic in which his daily coronavirus press conferences were widely praised by media outlets and anti-Trump critics. Bipartisan lawmakers have since turned their backs on Cuomo.
RICO laws are the method through which prosecutors ultimately dismantled much of the New York mafia, including the Gambino crime family during Gravano and Gotti's reign.
Speaking to his nearly 360,000 YouTube subscribers Friday, Gravano mocked a 2019 video which showed Chris Cuomo confronting a man who called him "Fredo." Gravano criticized the CNN host's comparison between that phrase and other ethnic slurs, saying The Godfather-based term simply refers to "the stupid brother who got passed over."
"That's not offensive to all Italian people," Gravano told Newsweek, noting that he gets angry when people call him a "rat" in public but has the composure not to get caught in a viral video incident like Cuomo did in 2019. "Not everybody has a stupid brother."
"There's no comparison whatsoever, Fredo has nothing to do with Italian people, he's just the stupid son, the son who got passed over by the father because he knew he was f**ing stupid," he said. "Now the comparison with Chris is the stupid brother who turns around and tells his brother, Governor Cuomo, how to evade the charges of women's complaints and abuse. It's a disgrace to every Black person in the country to compare that word to the N-word."
