Divorced from the Mob

Andrea Giovino breaks the Mafia’s code of silence and describes the life of a woman born and bred into the Family—and her inspirational escape. Her defiant struggle to break free of her family’s criminal legacy is by turns horrifying and heartbreaking. As a child in Brooklyn, Giovino watched her brother become a hit man and helped her mother host card games for local mafiosos. As a sexy, street-smart woman, she earned a seat at nightclub tables next to John Gotti and took an emotional and bloody ride through organized crime that no HBO series could match. At home in her quietly luxurious Staten Island neighborhood of doctors and lawyers, she fought to keep her children safe—keeping the guns out of reach, washing bloodstains out of her drug-runner husband’s clothes—and maintain the household’s front as a model of American domesticity. Murders, a DEA setup, and FBI wiretaps finally brought Giovino, her husband, and her brother to the brink of prison. Defiantly, she chose to retain her identity, facing down threats against her life and courageously separating herself and her children from the 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 exposé of organized crime told in a voice readers will never forget.