A LINCOLN Continental rolled up outside Andrea Giovino’s Staten Island home as dusk fell. Dinner simmered on the stove, her children played, and the $6k roses she’d planted out front swayed in the breeze.
But her husband wasn’t alone in the car that night – he had two dead bodies in the boot. For most, it’s straight out of a Scorsese script – but for Andrea, it was just another day as a real-life Carmela Soprano.
Andrea, now in her late 60s, told The Sun: “When you come from a background that I came from and you deal with knowing about a lot of murders, and your husband pulls up in front of the house and there’s two bodies in the back of the trunk…
“I mean, normal people don’t deal with this.
“Normal people don’t ever experience this. It took me almost 30 years to heal from that.”
Brooklyn-born and raised around mobsters, Andrea’s life was steeped in the “street code” from childhood.
She grew up watching men like Crazy Joe Gallo – an Italian American gangster and a capo (Mafia boss) of New York City’s notorious Colombo family – play cards in her mum’s basement.
As a young woman, she dated three major mob figures.
She married mob capo Frank Lino, 24 years her senior, when she was just 21.
After her split from Lino in 1980 she had a fling with mobster Mark Reiter, who locked eyes on her as she sat next to top Gambino family crime lord John Gotti at Club A in Manhattan.
Gotti once said Andrea had “more balls” than some of his captains – and she lived up to it.
Nicknamed “Rocky” after holding her own in a bar fight, she was never just someone’s girlfriend.
She was part of the world – a world of glittering dinners, $2,000 suits, Dom Perignon and pinky rings, where the women wore diamonds and kept their mouths shut.
In 1985 she met her second husband, Irish mob enforcer John Fogarty, who she married in 2010 and had two children with. Whilst living together, she had a home furnished with custom Italian furniture and drove a Mercedes 250 convertible.
But for all the glitz and notoriety, beneath the sparkle was blood.
Her brother, ‘Johnny Bubble Gum’, became a hitman at 17, and John Fogarty would come home with blood on his shoes.
Rather than reacting with shock, Giovino told him to take the shoes off before coming into the house – a detail she later cited as evidence of how deeply she had been conditioned by the criminal world around her, and how numb she had become to its brutality.
He was so shameless and brazen – she warned him that he thought he was “invincible” and could get away with anything.
She feared he would be caught if he was so careless.
In Andrea’s world, the identities of victims often remained unknown to those on the periphery.
She never revealed who the two bodies in Fogarty’s trunk were, and in the violent, secretive environment of the mafia, it’s likely she never knew – and perhaps didn’t even want to.
As a mob wife, knowing names or details of victims was unnecessary, even dangerous. What mattered was survival and maintaining appearances.
“I really don’t [pine for those days]. I’ve worked inwardly so hard to get to where I’m at now,” she said.
“It’s a very brutal life. You have to be really, really strong and have really thick skin. It’s not for the weak.”
Indeed, Andrea’s glamorous life came crashing down on September 9, 1992, when DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agents stormed her home at 6am as she prepared to take her children to school.
At 35, she was arrested and indicted on RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges – facing life in prison as part of a huge bust that netted 20 others.
They were screaming as agents flipped mattresses and read out murder and drug charges against her.
“When you’re hit with a RICO, you get life,” she said.
“I had to take care of my kids first and foremost, because my husband was incarcerated since the early 1990s.”
Fogarty served about six years in federal prison before entering the Witness Protection Program.
It was the moment Andrea decided to change.
She turned down witness protection but still escaped prison after her husband Fogarty and her brother cooperated with the feds.
She didn’t formally testify, but their deals cleared her.
In 1992, she moved with her four kids to a Pennsylvania suburb and started a fresh, safer life away from the chaos of her past.
She joined the PTA, signed up for church committees, and eventually wrote a bestselling memoir, Divorced from the Mob, released in 2004.
After serving about six years in federal prison, Fogarty entered the Witness Protection Program, leaving the mob life behind.
Years later, he left the program and attempted to rebuild his life, occasionally reconnecting with Andrea.
While they have had some contact since his release, their marriage had already ended by the time she relocated to Pennsylvania.
Today, she’s a grandmother, sharing her shocking story as the host for The Andrea Giovino Show on YouTube.
But speaking out has come at a cost.
‘They called me a liar’
Andrea was one of the few women featured in Netflix‘s hit 2023 docuseries Get Gotti.
But the moment the show aired, the backlash began.
“A lot of the men from that era are very chauvinistic,” she said.
“People in the streets that could be my children were calling me a liar.
“They have no idea what I had been through.”
Meanwhile, big names – like former mobsters Sammy Gravano and Michael Franzese – publicly dismissed her, with Franzese claiming she didn’t know him.
But Andrea retorted: “Mark Reiter [a major organised crime figure] once told me: ‘You were probably in his [Gotti’s] company more than he [Franzese] ever was’.”
In fact, Reither once called into a podcast from federal prison to verify Andrea’s story.
“Yes, Andrea knew John Gotti. Yes, Andrea was in the streets,” he said.
Former mobster George Martorano, who served 32 years and shared a cell with Gotti, also confirmed on her show that the mob boss spoke about her.
Still, the attacks kept coming.
“Then they were saying that I was just like an arm candy and I was a goomah [slang for mistress] and I was nobody,” Andrea said.
According to her, even Gotti’s own children allegedly threw shade, reportedly calling her a “groupie”.
Andrea bristled: “What kind of groupie? Are you people crazy?
“Just because I knew the father and he liked me? How do you know who your father knew?”
The money, the lifestyle, the jewellery… it looks very, very glamorous. It’s really not.
Andrea Giovino
Some of the backlash turned ugly.
“They were saying, ‘That b**** has to go,’” she claimed.
Yet Andrea insists she is telling the truth.
“I have nothing to lie about. I tell the truth,” she said.
“There’s nothing that you can’t ask me that’s gonna flip me up.”
What people don’t understand, she says, is that life married to the mafia isn’t glamorous.
Andrea explained: “The money, the lifestyle, the jewellery… it looks very, very glamorous. It’s really not.
“It’s really very, very sad for the women and the children.
“The kids get affected. A lot of them [get into] drugs, they follow through with the same pattern of crime that the fathers did.
“I’m not into all of the fame and fortune and worrying about being a celebrity here on Earth. That doesn’t matter to me.
“I’m worried about the guy upstairs when I go up there. I wanna be a celebrity for him.”
Andrea was determined to break the cycle.
“My kids are all doing very well and thriving, and I have a beautiful family, and I raised them with an iron fist,” she said.
“There is no way you’re gonna get yourself behind bars, not as long as I’m your mom.
“I’m very close to the Catholic Church. That whole community there is a second family to me. I have a beautiful life.”
Behind the mansions and money, Andrea says that mob wives live with fear, betrayal and abandonment.
“Maybe the mom is walking around and she’s got a big beautiful home and jewellery and no money problems, but that all comes falling down and she’s empty and she’s alone,” she said.
‘Never lived in fear’
Despite the danger around her, Andrea insists she never felt powerless.
“No, never, I have a very strong personality,” she said.
“I don’t listen to no man. I don’t care who you are. People always ask me, ‘Are you afraid?’ I’ve never been afraid.
“I’m a survivor. I will survive no matter what. I’m a fighter. I’m a tiger, you poke the tiger, she’s gonna come for you.”
Remembering “old Andy”, who would have “fought tooth and nail” with critics, Andrea said: “I handle everything in a much different manner, in a classy manner.”
And what would she tell her younger self?
“I’m hotheaded. Very hotheaded. I would tell her to stay calm, breathe, take it in, and then respond,” she revealed.
More than three decades after the night bodies turned up in her driveway, Andrea Giovino is still standing – blood on the shoes replaced by faith, fury swapped by grace, and the street code replaced by her own voice.
But the fire that once made her “Rocky” is still there.
The Rise and Fall of John Gotti
John Gotti, also known as “The Teflon Don” and “The Dapper Don,” rose to power in the Gambino crime family, one of the five families of the Italian-American Mafia in New York City.
Gotti became the boss of the Gambino family in 1985 after ordering the assassination of his predecessor, Paul Castellano.
Gotti’s flashy demeanor and high-profile lifestyle, along with his ability to evade conviction in multiple trials, earned him notoriety as the most powerful mob boss in America during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
But Gotti’s reign came to an end in 1992 when he was convicted of murder, racketeering, extortion, and other charges.
This conviction was largely due to the testimony of turncoat mobsters, including his former right-hand man, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.
Gotti was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and died in 2002 while incarcerated.
Despite his downfall, Gotti remains a legendary figure in the history of organised crime in the United States.