Netflix’s true crime docuseries Get Gotti chronicles the Gambino family’s rise to power under New York kingpin John Gotti in the ’80s. While most of the main players in this mob story were men, one woman managed to score plenty of screentime across the show’s three episodes for her role in helping Gotti conquer the city’s criminal underground.
Andrea Giovino became a trusted advisor to Gotti once he became head of the Gambino syndicate. In 1984, a then-21-year-old Giovino caught Gotti’s eye at a nightclub frequented by mobsters called Club A. She was invited to Gotti’s VIP area where she met the freshly installed mafia don and his henchman, Mark Reiter. Reiter was instrumental in Gotti’s heroin enterprise and he hit it off with Giovino, with the two quickly moving in together after meeting each other. According to the doc, Giovino attracted wealthy and powerful individuals thanks to her street smarts and brash personality, and she knew a lot about the mob business. Once her relationship with Gotti ended, Giovino continued to advise Gotti, becoming one of his closest confidantes despite the two rarely seeing each other in person.
Giovino’s involvement in Gotti’s dealings put a target on her back, with his enemies, and with the feds. After her arrest in 1992, and the later arrests of both her husband and her brother, Giovino decided to distance herself from the mob, breaking ties and moving to a quiet suburb in Pennsylvania as the Gambino empire began to crumble. She eventually wrote a book about her experiences with Gotti and Reiter called Divorced from the Mob: My Journey from Organized Crime to Independent Woman, and became a public speaker, hoping to help others avoid a life of crime — making her story one of the few that ends happily in the Netflix series.
(Via ScreenRant)