Divorced from the Mob

My Journey From Organized Crime to Independent Woman

By: Andrea Giovino, Gary Brozek

Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat

From mob wife with blood on her hands to straight-arrow breadwinner for her four kids, a tale of transformation and empowerment from a woman whose life in organized crime makes Carmella Soprano look like June Cleaver.

As a child in Brooklyn, New York, Andrea Giovino was pushed out of the house each morning to steal bread and milk from the local grocer, watched her brother become a hit man at age 17, and helped her mother host card games for the Brooklyn wise guys whom she was told would be her ticket to a better life. Divorced from the Mob breaks the mob code of silence and describes the life of a woman born and bred into the Mafia and her inspirational escape.

Sexy and street-smart, Giovino married a mob drug runner, earned a seat at '80s nightclub tables next to John Gotti, and took an emotional and bloody ride through organized crime that no mob movie or HBO series could match. Hers was also the task of keeping her children safe (keeping the guns out of reach, washing bloodstains out of her husband's clothes) and maintaining the household's front as a model of American domesticity in her quietly luxurious Staten Island neighborhood of doctors and lawyers, all the while helping manage a criminal enterprise that raked in the money. A murder, a DEA set-up, and FBI wiretaps finally brought Giovino, her husband, and her brother to the brink of prison. Defiantly, Giovino chose to retain her identity, facing down threats against her life and courageously divorcing herself and her children from the Gambino world of organized crime.

Now a model working parent, Giovino has penned Divorced from the Mob as an inspirational tale for all women, a perspective of mob life largely unexplored by film and literature, and a headline-grabbing expose of organized crime told in a voice readers will never forget.

©2004 Andrea Giovino with Gary Brozek (P)2004 Blackstone Audiobooks

A monument to the power of denial

The description of street life was fascinating, but the author spends the whole book preening about her street smarts on the one hand, and her perennial victimhood on the other. She pays lip service to recovery and taking responsibility, but never lets go of how she didn't know how this happened, and she just never imagined that that was going on under her nose, and explaining that if she hadn't made a wad of cash from some scheme or another, someone else would have done it -- all in all letting herself off very lightly as she draped herself with diamonds and fur given to her by those thugs she kept marrying. PLEASE. And then, to stay out of prison, she dumps them and all their friends out. It is pretty clear that had she not been faced with doing time, she would still be ensconced on Staten Island financing her drug operations and washing blood from her current man's clothes (in between shopping trips and pretending she had never had any other choices in life).

However, as so many of us do, I find books about the scum of society hard to put down, and this one is no exception. In large part, it's the performance of the narrator that held my attention. Her reading, with the Brooklyn accents, is terrific.

Leaves You Hanging

A great story if you like mob stories which I do. At the end, she just stops, like there was a pot boiling on the stove or something. Maybe there's a sequel in the works? I want to hear the rest dammit!

strong lady

love it. alot of women go through alot might not have mob ties to them but the Struggles are real and a passion for your children make you thrive.

A monument to the power of denial

The description of street life was fascinating, but the author spends the whole book preening about her street smarts on the one hand, and her perennial victimhood on the other. She pays lip service to recovery and taking responsibility, but never lets go of how she didn't know how this happened, and she just never imagined that that was going on under her nose, and explaining that if she hadn't made a wad of cash from some scheme or another, someone else would have done it -- all in all letting herself off very lightly as she draped herself with diamonds and fur given to her by those thugs she kept marrying. PLEASE. And then, to stay out of prison, she dumps them and all their friends out. It is pretty clear that had she not been faced with doing time, she would still be ensconced on Staten Island financing her drug operations and washing blood from her current man's clothes (in between shopping trips and pretending she had never had any other choices in life).

However, as so many of us do, I find books about the scum of society hard to put down, and this one is no exception. In large part, it's the performance of the narrator that held my attention. Her reading, with the Brooklyn accents, is terrific.

A smart, tough woman with a big mouth

She reads her book herself, and she comes across as a gabby Brooklyn housewife with a fascinating story to tell: her childhood growing up in a highly dysfunctional, very poor Italian family with many ties to crime.

You might think of this as another Grandfather story, told from an entirely different perspective. This is a story of an independent, gutsy woman knew how to be dependent when she needed to?and who knew when to get out and escape from her past. Not all of us can do this, no matter what our background.

Excellent

Great story. It’s not hard to see how one can get caught up in that life when that’s really all you know. The Adrenalin you get from living on the edge is an addiction. A mothers need to protect her children eventually leads Andrea to make the right choices. I really enjoyed listening to this book, finished it in a couple of days.

Drugs wars as literature

Criminals are people too. Maybe not the best of people, but they are definitely humans?humans with big egos. This is her painful past, and she had to write about it to help her get in control of it; and stop being a criminal herself. This is not just a reading, it is a performance by the narrator (who I suspect is the author herself), it could easily be made into a one-woman stage show.

She didn?t consider herself a criminal, only her family, her boy friends, and her husbands?and all their friends?were criminals. She was just living off the monster profits, like any sensible girl friend or wife. But the law saw it differently: she was part of a criminal conspiracy to sell drugs in the New York area, lots of them. She got busted too, mainly so she would make her husband and brother talk, which she did. Before she did that though, and came clean, she made so many damn mistakes, over and over again, you want to hit her up the side of her head. She now lives somewhere in rural Pennsylania.

Actually, this book could be used for a course in sociology and/or criminology. They do teach crime in college, I know that?or at least crime prevention. You learn how to be a criminal like she did: being part of the scene. She didn?t have a college course to teach her how the law operated. She learned that the hard way too.

You can?t imagine what this life is like?unless you have a tour guide. She provides a special perspective, being a woman. Myself, I discovered women do have a special vulnerability: powerful men. I don?t know why this surprised me, it?s certainly common knowledge, but I didn?t know how serious this addiction could be. Lots of women get killed this way?and lots of men too.

But the best part is the drama; these guys and gals have plenty of that, if they survive. And they get hooked on that. Here again, this is very human.

Brooklyn

I also grew up in Brooklyn, but a different part. I liked this book until the point where it just stops short. It does not explain what eventually happened to the characters it described, like at the end of a nonfiction movie. This _IS_ nonfiction, after all. For this reason I did not give it 5 stars.

Wonderful!!!

Just a few words:

Andrea, you are an outstanding woman. Your life was one that very few could have survived. Kudos to you, your family, and especially your children.

Self-serving and delusional

Amazing how she takes no accountability and states as if nothing of murder. She tends to try and sound educated while in the same breath tells about her 7th grade education.