How Did a Jailed Mobster Father a Child?
April 27 -- When guards at the Allenwood Federal Prison in Pennsylvania saw inmate Kevin Granato coddling his wife's newborn baby during a 1999 visit, they were puzzled.
"I'd have to say the guards were scratching their head a little bit," remembers his wife, Regina.
The thing was, little Gianna was only two weeks old, but Granato had been behind bars since his arrest in 1987, when he was an aspiring young mob associate for New York's Colombo crime family. He was later convicted of a string of mob-related crimes and sentenced to 23 years in prison. Federal prisons do not allow conjugal visits, making Gianna's paternity a mystery.
It was not until a Father's Day picnic the next year that prison authorities finally realized that Granato was Gianna's father, according to Regina. Suspecting Granato was involved in a criminal conspiracy to smuggle out his sperm, they launched an investigation.
Prison officials questioned Granato, then put him in solitary confinement. The Justice Department inspector general's office was convinced Granato had bribed a prison employee to get the sperm out and they wanted to know a name.
"They have asked him repeatedly: if you give us someone who's an official of the prison, this will all end," said Richard Rehbock, the Granatos' lawyer. Granato has now been in solitary for 18 months, locked up 23 1/2 hours a day, with one phone call a month and no visitors — not even his daughter, who is now 2 1/2 years old.
Sperm's Route Remains a Mystery
Regina Granato acknowledges making preparations to transport her husband's sperm. Knowing that sperm die if they are not preserved in a special kit, she says she obtained a kit from a hospital. To get the kit, she had to say her husband had a medical condition that prevented him from coming to the doctor's office. "I don't even remember the type of cancer I gave him for the day," she said.
But Regina declines to say how the sperm got past the prison's walls, saying only that vials of her husband's semen were in the doctor's office when she got there for the insemination procedure.
Popular Reads
ABC News Live