When she was a little girl growing up in Brooklyn, Andrea Giovino’s mother ran an illegal gambling operation and crap game from the basement of her home for “Crazy” Joe Gallo.

Two of her brothers carried out contract murder for rival crime families. Brother Frankie Silvestri was a member of the Colombo crime family.

Johnny “Bubble Gum” Silvestri, a free- lancing “button man” for the Luccheses and other groups, is presently incarcerated in a federal prison on a murder rap.

By the time she was 21-years-old, Andrea was the live-in girlfriend of Frank Lino, a captain in the Bonanno crime family whose boss, “Sonny Red” Indelicato, was portrayed in the recent Hollywood movie “Donnie Brasco.”

In September 1992, she was the only woman among 21 East Coast “wise guys” arrested in the early morning hours for federal narcotics violations by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) who swooped down on four Staten Island locations identified by the feds as the hub of a large-scale, mob-run drug network.

John Fogarty, a Mafia hitman, drug mover, and the father of Andrea’s two youngest children, agreed to cooperate with the federal government against the mob figures she had intimately known her entire life, following his November 1991 arrest in Franklin, Tennessee, for the purchase of 100 pounds of marijuana from an undercover officer.

The conspiracy charges against Andrea were eventually dropped and she was relocated to another state by federal authorities. In the intervening years, this former mob lady who was indoctrinated into the “life” by her mother has managed to turn things around.

Divorced from a world that she found both alluring and nightmarish, Andrea has managed to put the pieces of her life back together.

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