Divorced from the Mob

My Journey From Organized Crime to Independent Woman

De: Andrea Giovino, Gary Brozek

Narrado por: 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.