Sammy The Bull Gets Pinched

Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano was behind bars Thursday after Phoenix police busted him for his involvement with a local narcotics operation.

The former Mafia hitman, who relocated to Tempe under the federal witness protection program, faces drug charges as part of a Phoenix-area drug ring that allegedly controlled the illegal market for the designer drug Ecstasy.

Gravano was not selling narcotics but was a "mentor'' to the ring's leader, Michael Papa, the founding member of a white supremacist gang, said Phoenix police spokesman Jeff Halstead.

Thirty-five members of the ring were also arrested, police said.

The Arizona Republic reported the ring targeted "normal'' Phoenix area teen-agers and rave music clubs. The drug operation, which police allege was financed by Gravano, sold upward of 30,000 Ecstasy pills a week.

Ecstasy is an amphetamine popular in club and rave scenes.

Gravano, who has admitted to 19 murders, served just five years for racketeering under a deal with the federal government in exchange for testimony against New York mob leader John Gotti.

He helped convict Gotti and dozens of other gangland cronies. Authorities called him most important mob turncoat in U.S. history.

His bombshell testimony, along with conversations secretly taped by the FBI, finally put Gotti, the so-called "Teflon Don," behind bars for life in 1992 after three previous acquittals.

Gravano told all in a best selling book by Peter Maas, claiming that he turned federal witness after hearing FBI tapes which revealed that Gotti was trying to save himself by blaming crimes on "Sammy the Bull".

He then entered the federal witness protection program, ad moved to the Phoenix suburb under an assumed name. Gravano dropped out in December 1997, saying he wanted to live normally, not always looking over his shoulder for "some kid'' hoping to "make a name for himself by taking me out.''

By 1999, he was making a new life in a Phoenix suburb, living under an assumed name but telling a reporter for Republic he didn't think he was in any real danger.

"I'm not running from the (expletive) Mafia,'' Gravano told the Republic last year.