In his heyday, he was The Bull. In his next life as a turncoat, he was often called The Rat. After his sentencing hearing this week, the tabloids called him The Chicken.

These days, Salvatore Gravano, the pint-sized, onetime savvy, street-smart killer from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn who sweet-talked his way into a million dollar book deal and a new life in the Grand Canyon State, is a big jerk.

Let's start with the picture at the top. Here's a guy who got a slap on the wrist – five years for a life of crime that included 19 mob hits – signing a baseball bat, making like Barry Bonds after breaking Mark McGwire's home run record, with copies of "Underboss" as part of the backdrop. Only a lunatic or a fool would flaunt his old gangster exploits, autographing baseball bats AND allowing someone to take his picture while he's dealing huge amounts

of ecstasy with his immediate family in a new town with a government-financed new identity.

How about the shot at the right. Sammy signing a copy of the best selling book about his life for one of the young punks or established drug dealers who were thrilled to be working for one of the most feared gangsters in the country.

Michael Papa, a former high school football star and honors student from Long Island who moved to Arizona with his family and met Gravano through The Bull's son, Gerard, (whom we'll get to later) was an admitted groupie.

"I was kind of star struck," Papa said Monday from the witness stand, a place that Gravano owned for a couple of years when he first sat there and pointed a deadly finger at John Gotti on Mar. 2, 1992. (That's Gravano, John Gotti, former federal prosecutor John Gleeson and Brooklyn Federal Judge I. Leo Glasser in the drawing of the classic courtroom confrontation by sketch artist Ruth Pollack at left.)

"I couldn't believe I was in a pool with Sammy The Bull, actually having a conversation with him. We were going to use his name to monopolize the ecstasy market in Arizona. People (other drug dealers) feared Sammy The Bull's name, and they pretty much did what we wanted."

Gerard (Baby Bull) Gravano had his own unique way of using his father's name to strike fear in the hearts of Phoenix-area hoodlums, according to turncoats.

Gerard, now 25, and facing up to 14 years for his role in the operation,

would pull up his shirt, revealing a tattoo of a bull on his belly, (right) and say: "You know who I am? I'm Sammy The Bull's son." (Sentencing guidelines for The Bull are more complicated. At worst, he could get 15.5 years under the guidelines – the subject of the hearing. He still faces enhancement at a later hearing that could bring him to 20 years.)

Once, Papa testified, Sammy The Bull warned a drug dealer who threatened to resist: "I own Arizona. It's locked down. You can't sell pills here without going through me." 

And to show that Papa was not making up his claims, assistant U.S. attorneys Linda Lacewell and Noah Perlman did what prosecutors did 10 years ago to back up Gravano's testimony against Gotti and dozens more – they played tape recordings that were made before Papa began cooperating.

On Feb. 9, 2000, Papa explained to his buddy Andre Wegner why Gravano was getting a piece of all their drug deals in a discussion in which Wegner theorized that the guy "might bitch a little" but they really weren't in serious danger.

"No? Watch the movies," said Papa. "Watch the movies, you don't even know. You know (he killed) his wife's brother, like shit you don't even know. I said he's a fucking mess, you don't know what will happen with him, family

or not, it doesn't matter to him. You double cross him and you're fucked."

Or how about this inscription he wrote inside the copy of "Underboss" that he gave Philip Pascucci, a drug dealer who testified about the gangster do's and don't's that Gravano taught him as he groomed him to be a mob hitman:

• When you dress for a hit, wear different size shoes than you usually do.
• When the hit is done, the clothes are done: Get rid of them.
• Always use a revolver. It won't jam the way semiautomatics might.
• Don't tell the cops anything.
• Stay strong and don't cooperate.

Pascucci told Brooklyn Federal Judge Alynne Ross that Gravano regaled him and their cohorts with tales of past mob hits, explaining that sometimes victims were left on the street as a message and other times they were made to disappear to lessen the chance of arrest.

Papa, 25, said members of the drug gang often hung out with Gravano at Uncle Sal's, a Scottsdale restaurant operated by Gravano's wife Deborah, who was also part of the drug ring and was heard talking to her husband about drug money on another tape that was played by the prosecutors.

On Feb. 11, 2000, two weeks before the entire family was nabbed by Arizona authorities, Gravano called Deborah at the restaurant, complaining that a bag of cash she packed was $5000 short.

"I just counted it in front of your son...It's sixty-five, not seventy," said Gravano. "I'll have to double check when I go home," said Deborah.
"Double check, do whatever the fuck you want," said Gravano. "I know I

didn't take it. I mean, unless your daughter took it or dropped it. Fuck, I don't know where ..."

A few minutes later, after Gravano recounted and found 14 packets of $5000 instead of the 13 he had counted earlier, his daughter Karen called her mom (right) at Uncle Sal's to set the record straight.
"Ma," said a contrite Karen. "It was right. Alright?"
"Alright," said Deborah.

During the two-day hearing, prosecutors also played a tape recording made three months later, when Gravano was in the Maricopa County jail and called his construction company and spoke to Karen, and two women workers in his office, Jennifer Roche and Maria Martell, about Papa.

At the time, Papa's lawyer was trying to get his client to turn, and Gravano, who knew first hand how devastating the testimony of an insider could be to him, a 55-year-old recidivist facing 20 years, was desperate as he gave each of them important words of wisdom to impart to Papa.

"Tell him," he told Karen, "say watch that this lawyer don't have his own

agenda... so instead of talking about ratting, why don't you talk about severing the case ... and they can fight the case."

"You tell him," he told Martell, "when you do that you ruin your whole life. You'll never have a life again. You lose your family your friends, your girl, he'll lose everything."

"Tell him," he told Roche, who had worked for Gravano in Brooklyn, "Listen, you're going to lose your whole family and girlfriend, everything. Your whole life, everything is ended for you, you fucking bum."

After hours of devastating testimony and tape recordings, and his lawyer Lynne Stewart doing little if anything to rebut either, Gravano declined to take the witness stand. He let Stewart give a lame excuse that "once the Gravano name is invoked, things really are skewed out of proportion."

What a jerk. After pleading guilty because the feds had turncoats and tapes that were sure to sink him, he forced prosecutors to call the turncoats and play the tapes – sensational testimony that will be hard for Judge Ross to forget – in order to prove written, relatively dry allegations that he headed a drug ring and had used guns and obstruction of justice that she could have easily ignored.

And then, after that blunder, he sat on his hands like the loser he has become. What a jerk.

Before Generation X Gangster Chris Paciello bounced with Madonna in the South Beach section of Miami, he canoodled a bit with Jennifer Graziano in the South Beach section of Staten Island.

That's the daughter of Bonanno gangster Anthony (T.G.) Graziano sitting on sleepy-eyed Paciello's lap and nibbling on his ear at the right in the cutout photo of a 1989 Spring bash with a dozen young toughs you can read about in "Mob Over Miami," a hot new book by Daily News crime reporter Michele McPhee that's available at your local bookstore and at Amazon.com.

A page-turner about the wannabe wiseguys that prowl the mean streets of Brooklyn and Staten Island, "Mob Over Miami" details Paciello's rise and fall from street thug to South Beach club king to turncoat mob associate looking to talk his way out of prison.

Not Really For Idiots
Whether you're a Gang Land regular or an occasional visitor, you'll enjoy  "The Complete Idiot's Guide to The Mafia," a book I wrote for Alpha Books that was published in December. It's filled with real stuff about real wiseguys and insight about the ways that mobsters make their money. It's 343 pages of true stories of life and death, honor and betrayal. Get it at your local book store, or at Gang Land's favorite, Amazon.com, where the powers that be have knocked the price down to $13.27, so low I am concerned that the Godfather of online booksellers has forgotten about my end. If you haven't gotten one yet, and believe in long shots, our friends at The Smoking Gun have a handful they are raffling away.