The documentary Sons of Ecstasy (now streaming on Max) can boast that it puts a bona-fide real-life gangster on the screen: Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, the former Gambino crime family underboss who famously flipped on John Gotti, sending the big guy up the river. Not that Sammy The Bull hasn’t turned up in such things before – he’s been in documentaries How to Become a Mob Boss and Truth and Lies: The Last Gangster, and even hosts his own YouTube podcast series, so it’s not like he’s new to spilling on the mob life. He’s also only part of the Sons of Ecstasy story, which zips past his Gotti infamy and details the second act of Sammy’s crime career, when he butted heads with a gent known as English Shaun, the two men running rival drug-dealing operations in Phoenix, Arizona in the late ’90s and early 2000s. So at least it’s not the same ol’ Noo Yawk gangster saga, eh?
SONS OF ECSTASY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Sammy The Bull looks right in the camera and proclaims, “I’m a f—ing gangster.” He’s in his late 70s. He did some time in the early ’90s, getting a reduced sentence for his involvement in 19 mob-related murders (!) after he talked to the feds and got Gotti and a whole bunch of other New York City mobsters in deep shit. After Sammy got out, he entered the witness protection program, and his son Gerard and daughter Karen dug up $3 million of their dad’s secret cash stash and moved to Phoenix. The kids were hoping to avoid any potential blowback after their dad became a rat – although Sammy debates that he broke gangster code, known as Cosa Nostra, claiming, somewhat unconvincingly, that Gotti turned on him first. He also talks about all those killings, saying it was “no different being a soldier” and that nobody who wasn’t involved in the mob ever died by his hand. Are we all comforted by that assertion? Sure. Absolutely. You bet.
Anyway, Sammy skipped out of witness protection to be near his kids in Arizona. He started legitimate businesses, including a construction company and a restaurant where Gerard worked as a chef. Notably, Gerard says he never had any interest in his dad’s business, and didn’t know anything about the killing and the stealing and all that until he was well into his teens. But the shadow of his father gave him enough notoriety to draw the interest of a Phoenix drug dealer known as Mike Papa, who asked Gerard to help him make big dough dealing ecstasy to teenagers in the massively popular all-night rave scene. Gerard took a look at his in-the-red credit card statements and, next thing you know, made a run to New York to get a batch of pills, which he and Papa turned around for a tidy $90k in a weekend. Not a bad gig if you don’t mind the significant moral compromises or the risk of being killed or going to prison, I guess.
This is when we meet Shaun Attwood, aka English Shaun, an upbeat fellow with a crazy-eyed smile. He was a wannabe stockbroker from a town outside Liverpool who moved to Phoenix and eventually amassed an ecstasy operation with 200 employees and $100k in weekly profits. Hisi partner was a guy named Schooly who smuggled pills from Los Angeles and the Netherlands under his gigantic JNCO pants, which were the style at the time. Yes, you may giggle. English Shaun had a monopoly on ecstasy for a while, but Gerard cut into his business thanks to the notoriety that being Sammy The Bull’s kid brings. There was a point when Gerard sought out English Shaun in an attempt to eliminate him from the gene pool, but is our boy from New York really a killer like his father? He says he’s prone to violent outbursts – he was a boxer for a while – but openly shares his doubts.
Not that Sammy The Bull was happy about this. He insists he never got involved in drugs, and never wanted to. Dirty business – too dirty. He says he gave Gerard a good talking-to when he caught wind of his son’s extralegal activities, but then agreed to help Gerard with a few investments for a few last lucrative scores, as long as the kid would get out of the biz afterwards. Of course, Sammy The Bull collected interest on those loans to his boy; he IS a mobster, after all. BUT. There’s always a BUT. We meet a few of the undercover cops who snooped around the ecstasy trade hoping to make a bust or three, only to discover that Sammy The Bull His Damn Self was involved. The same Sammy The Bull who was all over the papers for being a “mafia turncoat.” Not quite a spoiler: This doesn’t bode well for Sammy The Bull – or English Shaun, for that matter.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sammy The Bull was played by Nicholas Turturro in TV movie Witness to the Mob, and by William DeMeo in 2018’s famously awful Gotti. And I can’t help but see Johnny Depp playing Whitey Bulger in Black Mass every time I look into the real Sammy’s eyes. Weird.
Performance Worth Watching: I suspect there’s more “performance” than truth in Sammy The Bull’s participation, and Gerard seems sincere with a slightly phony fringe. That leaves Shaun as our most believable participant — outside the cops, of course.
Memorable Dialogue: Sammy plays up a bit for the camera when Gerard asks if he’s ever confessed his sins: “I went to confession. I told the priest, ‘You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.’”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Sons of Ecstasy is a perfectly fine take-their-word-for-it documentary that I guess is somewhat credible, considering everyone has done their time at this point, and will be OK if they stick to their stories and don’t further implicate themselves by letting anything slip that the cops don’t already know. The narrative almost-but-not-quite balances parallel stories, dedicating roughly 60 percent of its attention on the Gravanos, and the rest to Attwood’s story. One gets the impression that directors Elli Hakami and Julian P. Hobbs’ (who’ve collabed on House of Hammer, Queen of Meth and many other doc projects) interviews with Sammy the Bull and English Shaun came with the implicit agreement that they don’t look too evil or stupid in the film — although kudos to the interviewers for not being afraid to point out hypocrisies to their subjects, even if they don’t press too hard.
Sammy sticks to his tough-guy persona, possibly because a cursory web search tells us he has social media products about mobster life to sell, which compels smart viewers to take some of what he says with a grain of salt. (Nobody here is camera-shy — some of you may recognize Karen Gravano from Mob Wives.) Shaun comes off as a warm, fairly likable guy who you mostly believe when he says he’s a decent person who watched too many mob movies and got “gangsteritis” for a while – although a cursory web search tells us he too has podcasts and books to hock. Hooray for infamy and opportunism, I guess? The end of the film attempts to reframe them as decent people: We watch as Shaun, upset about the stress he inflicted upon his parents, gets choked up while apologizing to his father. Sammy expresses seemingly sincere regret for how his notoriety negatively affected Gerard. Most of us will be more convinced by the former than the latter, possibly because the latter doesn’t seem too terribly upset about the many lives he took.
Hakami and Hobbs keep the film to a tight 90 minutes that sticks to the saga at hand, doesn’t get bogged down in flashy flashbacks or flash-forwards and indulges the usual blend of talking heads, archival clips and cheesy reenactments (extra-cheesy, in this case). There are some rabbit holes you wish it’d stick its head further into, e.g., the fact that Shaun and Gerard ended up friends (!) after they went to the same prison (!!), which happened to be the notorious lockup run by ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio (!!!), which, thanks to the record number of prisoners who died there, became the subject of some of Shaun’s writings (!!!!). Sounds like a whole other documentary waiting to be made. But we’ll have to accept what we have for now, which is a reasonably entertaining, nothing-special, medium-deep slice of nonfiction that falls into the gap between sensationalism and journalism.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Sons of Ecstasy is a watchable-enough doc that just gets by, coasting on direct access to its subjects.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sons of Ecstasy’ on Max, a Documentary Digging Into an Ecstasy-Dealing Saga Involving Infamous Mobster Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano appeared first on Decider.
