January 7th, 1986. West 9th Street, Benhurst, Brooklyn. Night. A car was moving through the neighborhood. Inside it, three men, Thomas Carbonaro, driving. Nicholas Mormando in the passenger seat, and in the back seat, a 63-year-old man named Joseph Peruta, known to everyone in Benenhurst simply as old man.
Mormando had been told there was a meeting at Tali’s bar and pizza, Sammy Graano’s restaurant on 18th Avenue. He had been told to pick up old man Peruta on the way. He had no reason to be suspicious. He had worked alongside these men for years. Peruta was practically a grandfather figure in the crew. Carbonaro was a fellow soldier.
This was just another ride to another meeting in a neighborhood where Morando had spent his entire life. As the car moved along West 9th Street near Bay Parkway, Joseph Peruta raised a pistol and shot Nicholas Morando twice in the back of the head. Trailing directly behind in a second car, watching the entire thing happen was Sammy Gravano.
Morando’s body was thrown out of the moving car into a vacant lot. It was found the next morning. He was 41 years old. He left behind 10 children. The youngest was a 6-week old baby daughter. The murder was never solved. Not by detective work, not by witnesses, not by forensic evidence. It was solved 6 years later when Sammy Graano sat down with federal prosecutors and confessed.
He admitted he had ordered it. He admitted he had watched it. He admitted he felt nothing. Now, before we go any further into this story, if you are watching this for the first time, hit subscribe right now and drop a comment telling us where in the world you are listening from. Mormando had been one of Graano’s most trusted men.
He had stood next to him through some of the most dangerous moments of the 1980s. When told that Paul Castellano himself might order their executions, Morando looked at Gravano and said, “Sammy, we’ll load up. We’re ready. Ready to go to war with the boss of the Gambino family for Graano.” 3 years later, Gravano had him thrown out of a moving car.
This is the story of Nikki Cowboy. what he did to earn that loyalty, what crack cocaine did to destroy it, and what Sammy Graano did when loyalty stopped being useful. You cannot understand Nicholas Mormando without understanding the neighborhood that produced him. Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. A workingclass Italian-American enclave in the southwestern corner of the burough, where every block had a social club.
Every social club had a backroom, and every backroom had men who had been doing the same things their fathers and uncles had done for 50 years. The mob was not something that existed in Benenhurst. It was the neighborhood’s central organizing institution. The men everyone knew, the men who settled disputes, the men whose cars were parked outside the same restaurants every morning, and whose presence was as much a part of the landscape as the church on the corner.
Sammy Graano was born into this world on March 12th, 1945. His parents, Jolando and Katarina, were Sicilian immigrants who had come to America with honest intentions and honest labor. His father, Jerry, was a working man who wanted nothing to do with organized crime. He passed that bar every day where the wise guys gathered and told his son to walk past it, keep his head down, make something legitimate of himself. Sammy could not do it.
The pull was too strong. By 13 years old, he was fighting in the streets, earning a nickname, the bull, after a brawl near his home, where he showed a ferocity that made older boys stop and take notice. By his late teens, he was drifting deeper into the world his father had tried to steer him away from. He joined the United States Army in the mid 1960s, served two years, received an honorable discharge, came back to Bensonhurst, and walked directly into organized crime.
His first mob association was with the Colbo crime family in 1968. His first murder was in 1970, a man named Joseph Kawuchcci, who had been plotting to kill another associate without authorization. Gravano described the moment afterward. He said it was exactly like the scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleó commits his first killing.
The slow motion, the detachment, the noise of the street receding. He could almost feel the bullet leaving the gun and entering Kawuchi’s skull. He moved to the Gambino family in the early 1970s and was formally inducted into Lacosa Nostra in 1976. He built construction businesses. He ran lone sharking and gambling operations.
He opened a disco and nightclub called the Plaza Suite in Bensonhurst in the early 1980s. One of the most popular clubs in Brooklyn with lines stretching around the block. He was climbing through the Gambino organization fast, operating under the protection and favor of boss Paul Castellano and building the crew that would become one of the most capable enforcement units in the entire family.
Nicholas Mormando was one of the men Graano built that crew around. Morando was born in Brooklyn on October 28th, 1944. the son of Italian-American immigrants from Morimondo in Milan, Italy. The surname changed when the family arrived in America. He grew up in Benenhurst, barely a block from the same social clubs and the same streets that shaped Gravano.
He was a close childhood friend of Michael Debbat, another Bensonhurst kid who was 2 years older and who would end up years later in Graano’s crew alongside him. He was known as Nikki Cowboy. The nickname was not a compliment. In mob terminology, a cowboy was a man who acted without authorization, who went off on his own, who did not ask permission before making moves.
Cowboys were useful when you needed someone willing to take a risk that a more cautious man would walk away from. Cowboys were dangerous when they stopped being controllable. The mob had deep institutional ambivalence about cowboys. It needed them and feared them in equal measure. Gravano considered Mormando one of his key men.
Alongside Joseph Sty D’Angelo, Liorio Lui Milito, Thomas Huck Carbonaro, and old man Peruta. Mormando was part of the inner circle of Graano’s Benenhurst crew. He handled enforcement. He handled collections. He was the kind of man who appeared when a situation required someone physically capable of following through on a threat.
In the language of the street, he was a worker, a shooter, a man who could be counted on. Graano built his crew like a general builds a unit. Every man had a role. Every man understood the hierarchy. Every man knew what was expected of him and what the consequences of falling short were. It was not a complicated system.
It was a brutally simple one. You performed. You kept your mouth shut. You kicked up your share of earnings to the cappo who kicked up to the boss. And you asked permission before you did anything that went outside your assigned lane. Nikki Cowboy was constitutionally incapable of that last part.
He operated on instinct and impulse. He moved fast and asked questions later, if he asked them at all. That quality made him dangerous in the best possible way when the situation called for it. It made him dangerous in a completely different way when it did not. The moment that captures both qualities simultaneously is June 25th, 1982.
Frank Fiala was a Czech immigrant and drug dealer who had agreed to purchase the Plaza suite from Graano for $1 million. He paid $650,000 and then before the transaction was complete moved his own people into the club and began acting as if he already owned everything inside it. Fiala was physically imposing, violent, and deeply stupid in the specific way that men with money and muscles sometimes are.
He installed a helicopter pad on the roof. He brought in his own security and told Gravano’s staff to take orders from them. He had a machine gun collection stored in the back rooms. And at one point, he showed Gravano an Uzi submachine gun and told him directly that he could have anyone killed, anyone, including Gravano.
Graano got permission from Paul Castellano to kill Fiala. But Castellano had a condition. It could not look like it came from Graano. The murder needed distance, which created a problem because Gravano was going to use his own men to do it anyway. The Plaza Sweet murder was technically unsanctioned in terms of the personnel involved.
Castellano had not approved Gravano, using his own crew members for a hit this close to Graano’s own operation. On June 25th, 1982, Frank Fiala walked out the front door of the plaza suite after signing the final sale documents. Gravano was waiting outside. He shot Fiala three times in the head. He then shot him through both eyes.
He made a point of the eyes of what it meant, of who Fiala had thought he was talking to. Nicholas Mormando was positioned around the corner with a shotgun. His assignment was simple. If any of Fiala’s men drew a weapon, Mormando was to start shooting and not stop. He sat there holding a loaded shotgun, ready to open fire on a group of men in a public street in broad daylight for Sammy Graano.
No hesitation, no complaint. Ready. Fiala’s people were in total shock. None of them moved. Morando never fired. The crew assembled afterward at a bar owned by Joseph D’Angelo called Docks. Graano walked in, looked at his men, and said it was a beautiful piece of work. Then came the problem.
Castellano was furious that Graano had used his own crew members in the murder. He had specifically told Graano to distance himself. Now, Morando and Debbat and several others were connected to a killing that the organization could not officially acknowledge. And because it was unsanctioned, the murder could not be used to qualify Morando for membership in the Gambino family.
The murder that should have been Nikki Cowboys ticket to becoming a maid man was the murder the organization had to pretend he had not committed. Gravano had the crew go to his farm in New Jersey and stay there while the situation settled. Word came back that Castellano was furious enough that he might order executions.
When Gravano gave Morando the option to leave, to take his crew and go somewhere else and let the heat die down, Morando did not flinch. He said, “Sammy, we’ll load up. We’re ready.” Think about what that means. Castellano was the boss of the Gambino crime family, the most powerful mob boss in New York, a man whose organization controlled construction, garbage, the waterfront, labor unions across the city.
And Nikki Cowboy, a mob associate with no formal rank, was telling Graano he was ready to go to war with Castellano for him. That was the measure of his loyalty. That was who Nikki Cowboy was in the summer of 1982. Gravano talked him down. The situation resolved. The heat faded. The crew came back from New Jersey and resumed operations.
Four years later, Graano had him shot twice in the back of the head. Here is what four years can do to a man inside an organization built on discipline. Crack cocaine arrived in New York City in the mid 1980s with a force that the city’s institutions, its police, its social services, its hospitals, its neighborhoods, and yes, its criminal organizations were completely unprepared for.
It was cheaper than powder cocaine by a factor of 10. It was more addictive than anything that had come before it. It hit faster and harder and left its users craving the next hit within minutes of the last one. It devastated Harlem. It devastated the South Bronx. It devastated Bedstey and East New York and neighborhoods across the five burers.
And it devastated Sammy Graano’s crew. Nicholas Mormando developed a severe crack addiction. By 1984 and into 1985, the reliable enforcer, the man who had sat with a shotgun waiting to protect Gravano’s operation, was becoming unreliable, erratic, difficult to manage. He was beginning to ignore crew protocols.
He was beginning to make moves without authorization. The cowboy behavior that had always been his defining characteristic, now stripped of any professional discipline and driven purely by addiction and paranoia. He was also, according to Graano’s account, the man who introduced crack cocaine to his childhood friend Michael Debat.
Debbat, who had been Gravano’s trusted associate since he was a teenager, began developing his own addiction. Two key men in the same crew, compromised by the same substance at the same time, becoming simultaneously unreliable. In an organization that operated on the premise of absolute discretion, a crack addict in a leadership position was not a personnel problem.
It was an existential threat. A man who was high or desperate for a high would talk, would make deals he was not authorized to make, would trade information for money, would do things that careful, sober men would never do. The mob had always understood that drug addiction and organizational security were incompatible.
That is why many mob bosses had rules, formal rules, against drug use by their members. Addiction made men unpredictable. Unpredictable men got people killed or arrested. Then Morando made an announcement. He told Gravano he was done with the crew. He was leaving. He was going to form his own operation. You do not leave the mob.
This is not a metaphor or a dramatic oversimplification. You do not leave. You do not take your knowledge of the organization’s operations, its personnel, its methods, its secrets, and walk out the door with it. You do not announce that you are forming a rival gang using the skills and connections the organization provided you. That is not a resignation.
That is a declaration of war. Gravano in his own account said he could not take a chance. Morando knew too much. He had been inside the crew during sensitive operations. He knew faces, names, methods. A man in the grip of a crack addiction who had already demonstrated he was willing to operate outside the organization’s rules.
Was not a man who could be trusted with the knowledge he carried. Graano went to John Goty. Paul Castellano was dead. Goti had orchestrated his murder outside Spark Steakhouse on December 16th, 1985. The most audacious mob hit in the history of New York organized crime carried out on a Midtown Manhattan street corner during the Christmas shopping season.
Goty was now the boss of the Gambino family. Gravano was rising alongside him. The first piece of business Gravano brought to his new boss was the problem of Nikki Cowboy. Goty gave permission. The execution of Nicholas Mormando was a masterpiece of operational deception. Not because it was complicated, because it was so simple.
Gravano used the one thing Morando could not defend against. Trust. He had Morando told there was a meeting at Tali’s bar and pizza, Graano’s own restaurant. He had Morando told to pick up old man Peruta on the way. Thomas Huck Carbonaro was sent to collect him. Old man Peruta. Joseph Peruta, 63 years old, known throughout the crew as the most reliable of Gravano’s killers.
A grandfather-aged man who had been in the Bensonhurst world longer than most of the younger crew members had been alive. He was the last person in the world who seemed threatening. He was a familiar face, a presence so embedded in the crew’s daily operations that riding in a car with him was as unremarkable as breathing. Mando got into the car.
They drove through Bensonhurst, the neighborhood he had known his entire life. West 9th Street near Bay Parkway, streets he had walked a thousand times. Peruta raised the gun and shot him twice in the back of the head. Sammy Graano was in the car directly behind them. He watched it happen. The entire operation was completed within seconds.
The car containing Morando’s body continued moving down West 9th Street. The body was thrown out into a vacant lot. Graano and GOP drove past it. The body was found the next morning. The police had a dead mob associate in a vacant lot with two bullets in the back of his head and no witnesses willing to say anything useful. The case went cold.
Nikki Cowboy had said, “We’ll load up. We’re ready.” When the threat was Castellano, he never saw the threat that actually killed him. Because it did not come from an enemy. It came from the man he had been ready to go to war for. 6 years passed. In 1991, Sammy Graano was arrested alongside John Goti in a sweeping FBI operation targeting the Gambino family leadership.
The FBI had been methodically building their case for years. Wiretaps in the apartment above Goty’s Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy had captured hundreds of hours of incriminating conversation. Graano heard the tapes. He heard Goty complaining about him on some of them. He processed what he was facing. He did the calculation.
On November 8th, 1991, Gravano agreed to cooperate with the federal government. He became a government witness against his boss, against members of his own crew, against the organization he had served for over two decades. He was at the time of his cooperation the highest ranking member of any of the five families to break Omera and testify against his own organization.
As part of his cooperation, he confessed to involvement in 19 murders. Nicholas Morando was among them. Graano described the murder in detail. The setup, the car, old man Peruta in the back seat, the body thrown into the vacant lot on West 9th Street. The murder that had been officially unsolved for 6 years was solved in a federal prosecutor’s office in Manhattan by the man who ordered it.
Gravano received a reduced sentence of 5 years for his cooperation despite confessing to 19 murders. He was released in 1994 and entered the witness security program. He relocated to Arizona and then because Sammy Gravano was constitutionally incapable of leaving the life entirely, he got involved in an ecstasy trafficking operation in Phoenix that resulted in his rearrest in 2000.
He was convicted of drug charges and sentenced to 20 years. He was released on parole on September 18th, 2017. He is now, at the time of this video, a social media personality. He runs a YouTube channel and podcast called Our Thing. He does interviews. He tells his stories in an unhurrieded Bensonhurst accent to audiences who find him fascinating.
He is by some accounting enjoying a kind of celebrity second act that the 19 men whose deaths he admitted to will never have. In November of 1998, the family of Nicholas Mormando filed a wrongful death suit against Graano in New York State Supreme Court. They were joined by the families of Michael Dbat and Joseph Kawuchcci.
The suit, also named Peter Mars, the author of Graano’s autobiography Underboss, his literary agency ICM, the publisher Harper Collins, and 20th Century Fox, which was allegedly preparing a film adaptation. The plaintiffs alleged that the book had profited from the glorification of murders committed against their family members without any recognition or compensation.
Michael Debbat, Mormando’s childhood friend, was murdered in 1987 on Graano’s orders. He was shot multiple times while tending bar at Tal’s, the same restaurant Morando had been told he was driving to the night he was killed. Debbat had developed his own crack addiction, the addiction Gravano blamed on Morando.
When DBAT’s wife went to Graano and begged for help for her husband, Gravano reportedly told her he would look into it. He looked into it by ordering DBAT killed. He later said the Dat murder tore his insides out. He expressed no comparable sentiment about Morando.
