Two years ago, Salvatore “Sammy Bull” Gravano rejected a plea deal from state prosecutors in New Jersey for the 1980 murder of a NYPD detective. The deal was even sweeter than the one the pint-sized killer got from the feds for 19 mob slayings, Gang Land has learned.

For the mob slayings, Gravano had to do five years – he’d already done most of it by the time he was sentenced – and agree to testify against his boss, John Gotti. The deal Sammy Bull was offered for the murder of Detective Peter Calabro was a total free pass – no jail time at all – if he agreed to plead guilty, according to a prosecution memo obtained by Gang Land.

The plea offer tendered by the Bergen County prosecutor, John Molinelli, did not require Sammy Bull to testify against anyone, according to a memo by Detective Robert Anzilotti. The nine-page memo details rambling discussions that Gravano had with Mr. Anzilotti and another detective on February 21-22, 2003.

The discussions took place while Gravano was housed at the Maricopa County Jail in Phoenix, awaiting transfer to federal prison to serve a 20-year rap for drug dealing. The offer on the table called for him to do no extra time and just accept a 20-year sentence that would be served concurrently with his stretch for drugs. It was an “everybody’s happy” deal: Mr. Molinelli gets a conviction; Sammy never does an extra day.

The proposed deal did have one requirement, but it certainly wasn’t a heavy lift. In exchange for the free ride, Gravano would “have to provide a full confession to include all others involved in the murder,” according to the memo.

The session between Sammy Bull and the detectives went down this way, according to the memo: After reading Gravano his rights, Mr. Anzilotti engaged Gravano in small talk about Roy DeMeo, a Gambino soldier who was killed three years after Calabro, until Sammy Bull pressed him with: “I know you didn’t come all the way here to talk about Roy. Why don’t you just get to the point, and if I can help you, I will.”

Mr. Anzilotti obliged, telling him that convicted killer Richard “Iceman” Kuklinski, who claims to have been a DeMeo associate and once boasted that he had killed DeMeo, had fingered him for the Calabro hit. The detective also showed him a copy of an affidavit by the Iceman that implicated Gravano in the murder.

Throughout the first 85 minutes of the interview – before Mr. Anzilotti presented Gravano with a written document outlining an agreement for him to plead guilty – Sammy Bull’s remarks were filled with wisecracks and sarcasm.

“Believe it or not,” a source familiar with Gravano’s mind-set at the time said, “Sammy thought the whole exercise was some kind of a weird, bizarre joke. They brought him coffee and doughnuts, and wanted to talk, so he talked to them.”

After reading Kuklinski’s affidavit, Gravano “volunteered” that “if” he had wanted to kill Calabro, he would have “whacked him myself,” Mr. Anzilotti wrote, quoting Sammy Bull as adding: “What do I need this Polack for? I hate to say it, but we were good at it.”

At another point, after Mr. Anzilotti had shown him 1980 crime scene photos that obviously did not connect Gravano to the murder, Sammy Bull looked at the detective and stated: “Maybe I should just cop to it and move on.”

Immediately after that crack, however, the lightbulb in Gravano’s brain finally went on when Mr. Anzilotti showed him a prepared cooperation agreement that he had brought along.

He immediately asked to see his Arizona lawyer, Greg Parzych. The attorney listened to the detectives summarize their talk with Gravano, read the documents they provided, and conferred with his client, apparently convincing him that while the investigation and accusation made little sense, it was no laughing matter. The next morning, Mr. Parzych told the detectives that Sammy Bull would not answer any more questions.

“Gravano then spoke,” Mr. Anzilotti wrote, “and in a noticeably different attitude from the previous day stated that he would not cooperate with us, nor was he interested in taking the deal being offered.”

To cap off the sessions – the actual conversations with Gravano took about 90 minutes – Sammy Bull said “he had no involvement in the Calabro murder,” Mr. Anzilotti wrote.

Two days after Sammy Bull turned down the deal, Mr. Molinelli called a press conference to announce the filing of murder charges. If convicted, Gravano, 60, faces life, added to the 12 years he still owes for trafficking Ecstasy in New York and Arizona.

***

Sammy Bull’s main partner in the drug business, his son Gerard, recently recalled wonderful things about his father’s old Mafia boss to cell mate Shaun Attwood at the state prison in Buckeye, Ariz., where the Junior Bull is serving a nine-year, three-month stretch.

“John Gotti was a good guy. I considered him an uncle,” Gerard said, according to a long-running blog by Attwood, a former British stockbroker serving seven years for money laundering.

“There was an aura about him,” Gerard said. “I was at Communion service once; there was about 150 people. There was a bunch of made guys there, and Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons. But there was a bigger line to shake John Gotti’s hand than Frankie Valli’s. … He had presence, an aura. Everyone wanted to meet John.”

But when it came to acting like a wiseguy, Gerard believes his old man had it all over the late Dapper Don, at least before Sammy Bull defected and violated the vow of omerta.

“My dad was a mobster’s mobster. People aren’t supposed to know who you are. Mobsters are supposed to be on the DL,” said Gerard, who, according to Attwood, gave his permission to be “blogged.” (DL stands for “down low,” of course. Where’ve you been?)

On the other hand, the Junior Bull declared: “John was the downfall of the Mafia. He brought the entire Mafia down because of his big mouth.”

***

In January, a week after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the 20-year-old sentencing guidelines were unconstitutional, lawyer Murray Richman moved quickly on behalf of Venero “Benny Eggs” Mangano, the jailed, ailing 83-year-old Genovese underboss.

Mangano, who is going blind and suffers myriad other ailments – he has survived two heart attacks and has undergone three heart-related operations since he was incarcerated in 1993 – was an obvious candidate to have his 15-year, eight-month sentence reduced.

His 1991 extortion conviction should have meant 27 to 33 months, but Benny Eggs was hit with a prison term six times longer, based on mandatory enhancements. The Supreme Court says those enhancements are now merely guidelines that can be ignored. Mr. Richman moved to vacate the sentence, seeking bail for Mangano while the matter was pending.

“We thought maybe Benny and his wife will get a chance to see each other again while they’re both alive,” a longtime Mangano friend said, noting that the mobster’s wife of more than 50 years is also ailing and hasn’t been able to visit him in several years.

In March, Brooklyn Judge Raymond Dearie, who sentenced Mangano in 1993, said he was “enormously sympathetic” to the mobster’s current plight, but that Mr. Richman would have to find the legal jurisdiction under which Judge Dearie could consider any relief for Benny Eggs.

The next month, Mr. Richman filed papers citing what he thought was the appropriate legal mechanism, but prosecutor Peter Norling found a way to shift the matter to another judge, Frederic Block, who had made a prior ruling in the case, in 1999.

Today, as Judge Block ponders the merits, Benny Eggs bides his time in a low-security prison adjacent to a prison hospital in North Carolina. His homebound wife, Louise, 79, waits for him in Greenwich Village. As it stands now, if Benny Eggs doesn’t drop dead, he’ll be home in 17 months, on November 2, 2006.

This column and other news of organized crime will appear later today at www.ganglandnews.com.