Rising From Deception: With Giovanni Rocco

This week, we sat down with our friend Giovanni Rocco, the undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the real-life DeCavalcante crime family—the same mob crew that inspired The Sopranos. But let us be clear: this episode is not just about mob takedowns and wiretaps. This is about what happens after the mission is over—when the badge comes off, the ring comes off, and the world you thought you were serving forgets your name.

From the moment Giovanni joined us, he pulled back the curtain—not just on the operation, but on the emotional wreckage that followed. He shared what it was like to live under five different identities, lie to the people he cared about most, and wake up years later unable to recognize the man he’d become. He talks about raising kids in hiding, being forced out of the home he loved, and watching the system he served treat him like a liability after his usefulness expired. If you’ve ever felt abandoned by the very thing you gave your life to—you’re going to feel this one deep in your chest.

Giovanni doesn’t just sit in the pain, though. He’s done with pity. Instead, he talks about what it means to invest in yourself—mentally, emotionally, and physically. He shares how he rebuilt himself using breathwork, reframing trauma, and staying connected to the people who could meet him where he was. He reminds us that the hardest switch isn’t going from undercover to civilian—it’s going from protector to partner, from armored up to emotionally available. And he tells us why, to this day, he still takes the ring off when he pulls into the driveway.

This is one of those conversations we’ll be thinking about for a long time. It’s gritty. It’s gut-wrenching. It’s funny in that dark, only-cops-and-clinicians-would-laugh kind of way. And most importantly—it’s real. Giovanni may have taken down the mob, but his real legacy is what he’s building now: honest connection, mental wellness, and the reminder that no one gets out of this job untouched—but no one has to heal alone either.Book

Title: Giovanni’s Ring: My Life Inside the Real Sopranos
Available at: giovannisring.com — Signed copies available

Podcast: Inside the Life
Website: insidethelife.org
Status: Season 2 currently in production

Social MediaGiovanni is available and responsive via Instagram and other social platforms (specific handles not listed but implied to be under his name).

DISCLAIMER:
After the Tones Drop has been presented and sponsored by Whole House Counseling. After the Tones Drop is for informational purposes only and does not constitute for medical or psychological advice. It is not a substitute for professional health care advice diagnosis or treatment. Please contact a local mental health professional in your area if you are in need of assistance. You can also visit our shows resources page for an abundance of helpful information.

ATTD Music Credits (Music from #Uppbeat):

• https://uppbeat.io/t/vens-adams/adventure-is-calling License code: ANJCYVHRMULSNKQR
• https://uppbeat.io/t/vens-adams/rise-of-the-hero License code: H4WTAGJZIXZCM8DM
• https://uppbeat.io/t/yeti-music/homewardLicense code: KO7FZAIJBAEAJLKE
• https://uppbeat.io/t/sonda/the-heart-grows License code: KAID0ITO96GJZAPS
• https://uppbeat.io/t/philip-anderson/achievement License code: XZ4PMCKHW94GUR74
• https://uppbeat.io/t/tobias-voigt/nexus
  License code: MVMDRGHKHTJRABVR
• https://uppbeat.io/t/paul-yudin/breakthrough
  License code: FYPM3OJF0NQ4OGTE

Transcript

EP104: Rising from Deception

00:00:00 Erin: You're listening to After the Tones Drop, the mental health podcast for first responders. 

00:00:07 Cinnamon: We're your hosts. I'm Cinnamon, a first responder trauma therapist. 

00:00:11 Erin: And I'm Erin, a first responder integration coach. 

00:00:15 Cinnamon: Our show brings you stories from real first responders, the tools they've learned, and the lives they now get to live.

00:00:29 Cinnamon: Welcome to After the Tones Drop. This week we're joined by Giovanni Rocco, our friend and the FBI undercover agent behind Operation Charlie Horse, which brought down the high-ranking members of the notorious DeCavalcante mafia family, AKA the real Sopranos. So in his book, Giovanni's Ring: My Life Inside the Real Sopranos, he dives into the emotional and psychological toll of living a double life and the personal cost of his work.

00:00:57 Cinnamon: After his sudden and unexpected retirement and the relocation of his family for their protection, Giovanni turned his focus to helping others. Drawing from his experiences and elite FBI training, he now leads mental health programs and resiliency workshops for law enforcement and military professionals worldwide. So now we bring you Giovanni's powerful story of survival sacrifice and how he's using his experiences to support the next generation of first responders.

00:01:29 Giovanni: Hello. 

00:01:32 Cinnamon: Hello. There he is. 

00:01:35 Erin: Hey, friend. 

00:01:36 Giovanni: How's it going?

00:00:57 Cinnamon: So good. 

00:01:38 Erin: I thought that I wasn't going to actually get to see your face. 

00:01:40 Giovanni: Well, you think I'm going to come in with a hood? I'll do the silhouette.

00:01:43 Cinnamon: No, because your camera was off. 

00:01:45 Giovanni: Oh, really? My camera is off yet.

00:01:46 Cinnamon: You took a second. 

00:01:47 Giovanni: Yeah, I didn't want to sit here. It's too vulnerable, Erin. I can't sit here vulnerable with the camera. 

00:01:53 Cinnamon: I am so excited. I'm so excited to see you. 

00:01:56 Giovanni: Good to see you, Cinnamon. It's great to meet you, Erin. So...

00:02:00 Erin: Nice to meet you. 

00:02:00 Cinnamon: Yeah. By the way, this is Erin, Erin, G taco. 

00:02:42 Giovanni: G-Taco, that's right. G-Taco.

00:02:07 Cinnamon: I mean, we're going to have to get you a shirt made. 

00:02:09 Giovanni: Yes. I can't take another name on though, Erin. I have too many names as it is. 

00:02:16 Erin: Well, in case the other way, you know, you can, you can...

00:02:21 Cinnamon: We can just add it to like one more alias. 

00:02:23 Giovanni: Yeah. As long as I don't have to go out and the ID and I have to go through TSA with another identity, I forget who I am from day to day. So...

00:02:30 Cinnamon: Oh, bet. I bet. I have to tell you, last night I was talking to my husband and I was like, yeah, so I was texting with my friend G and he said, you know, who is this? Because I talk about people and he doesn't always remember. And I explained and and so he said something and I'm like, no, this is the last guy that you would imagine when you're imagining what you're imagining. I tell Erin, I tell him, you are the sweetest, most humble. I just want to squeeze you. I have this block in my brain of how you could have fooled so many people for so long because to me you're just a care bearer. 

00:03:18 Giovanni: Oh, thank you. Well, I hope you didn't share all that with your husband because now if I ever have the chance to meet him, the guy's going to clock me in the jaw. You're saying. 

00:03:24 Cinnamon: No, no, no, he wouldn't do that regardless. He's a lover, not a fighter. 

00:03:30 Giovanni: No, what's funny, the guy I host my podcast with that, he's the guy who worked that I worked operational with. I don't know if you had a chance to see that. He's the guy with the big beard, the big biker. We recently just had a conversation in Vegas last week and he brought up the same things like, dude, it's so funny now that we're out in the public's eye.

00:03:46 Giovanni: He says, you raised my kids with me. They know Uncle G, Uncle Giovanni, but yet they've never seen me. So when the podcast came out and his kids are in their twenties now and we hadn't known it, we're thinking it's big fat greasy, like, know, Italian looking mobster guy with the hair hanging out of the t-shirt. And they were like, never in a million years did we picture what we saw when he came on the show.

00:04:10 Erin: Yeah, like the penguin?

00:04:12 Giovanni: The penguin, right? 

00:04:14 Cinnamon: Oh, my gosh.

00:04:15 Giovanni: You know, it's like, damn, like, you know, a lot of people say, well, what part of Italy you're from, they start peppering your questions and, you know, because they're expecting what they think is a traditional godfather character, you know, or Tony Soprano type person. So.

00:04:28 Cinnamon: Yeah, like the people on the picture on the posters in my base. 

00:04:34 Giovanni: Yeah, it is like we went to and I don't want to burn up too much time, but we went to shop for a car. My wife and I, she's looking for a new car. And the guy is from Philly, you know, and I'm there 10 minutes and he's talking to my wife. I'm off in the background. All I said was a couple of phrases and he's like, you know, I get this soprano-esque vibe from you. Like, you know, obviously you're from Jersey and I don't hear the accent, right? But he's--

00:04:58 Cinnamon: Of course---

00:04:58 Giovanni: And all of a sudden--

00:04:49 Erin: It's there, though. Trust and believe.

00:05:01 Giovanni: Yeah. He's like, Oh my God, I watched the sopranos. I watched the Godfather, I'm this, watched “mobathons” on TV and all this, and he's telling me all his favorite movies, mob movies. And my wife is just like, this guy has such an affinity for these mob things. If you were only really able to tell him what your name was and like, hey, you know, but I couldn't because again, I live in a different name. You know, I can't tell him Giovanni Rocco, but when I go to buy the car. And that's the life I'm still living. You live this life of deception even after the job like I don't know if that's something we should touch on because I've never talked about that before. 

00:05:37 Giovanni: Like you constantly lie, you know, I feel I'm not but because of the position I was put in, I always feel I meet two great people and I can't tell you, I can't tell you my kids names are my wife's name, you know, I can't bring my wife to functions that we go to, you know, it's a pretty shitty thing though, you know.

00:05:56 Erin: I just don't want it to be like popping... Yeah. I do want to say on what you just said, Giovanni, about the realness behind the scenes. I remember texting you as soon as I finished the book. First of all, I don't think I've ever gone through a book that quickly, or I sent you a message on Messenger or something. And I was just so enamored. And all I could think was, I just felt grief for you.

00:06:21 Giovanni: I get that a lot. 

00:06:23 Erin: I felt like despite the job you had to do, there was love there. There was a connection and then your whole life changed after that. And knowing the investment that comes with most of us in our careers. And then on top of that, we're talking like law enforcement where that's a real investment in a different capacity. I just wanted to come hug you. I'm like, hey, do you need somebody to talk to? And I know it's been years, but that was of course being a clinician and being just the fixer. That was my first thought was, my gosh, how that must be for you. 

00:07:01 Giovanni: Yeah. But I'm one of the millions, right? Like you guys are helping so many first responders across the country, and especially you being a clinician and doing what you're doing. This is just one facet of the mental anguish and toll that it takes on our job. You know, the job takes on us. Just because I did undercover work, yeah, mine was more complex. But for 25 years, you do a life of first responder service.

00:07:24 Giovanni: You do, lose your identity. I often talk about when I do my public speaking, like you lose the identity of the candidate you were when you applied for the job. Then 25 or 30 years later, you're expected to be that same person with all that callousness and all this doom and gloom. But we, we focus on the doom and gloom, right? At least I try not to, when I hear that, it makes me feel great. It warms my heart. I had a woman say the same thing to me in Vegas, Nevada, a couple of weeks ago, she was the head of the DEA and she read the book and she's like, first of all, I don't want to say anything. 

00:07:54 Giovanni: She literally embraced me. She was almost in tears. She says, I'm so sorry your family had to go through this. And I'm like, no, this is what I signed up for. And knowing it is, you know? 

00:08:04 Erin: I'm like, is it? Did you know? 

00:08:06 Giovanni: It is, buddy. And I guess we should talk about that too, Erin, because we forget what we signed up for. You told me and you trained me. You told me I was going to have the chance to deliver babies and have the brightest, most exciting moments in people's lives. You know, we can save people and that's what we do it for. But then you prepared me for the doom and gloom and you told me it was coming, but I signed up knowing what I was going to, knew I'd been put back together like Frankenstein. 

00:08:33 Giovanni: I've had my eyelid ripped off. I've been stabbed. had my shoulders done. I've had my knees replaced. I've been shot at, you know, I, I've multiple times throughout the job, but I just kept going back because I'm third generation. I'm that much dumber for it, but I was committed to it. So going into it, I think we don't prepare personally enough for it. So thank you to you guys for what you were doing, because you really are the backbone of the mental health and what we really need, what we've been missing for generations. 

00:09:00 Giovanni: And I'm witness to that. And we'll talk about that on the show, but I'm witness to that. My grandfather and my father, we never talked about their hurt and their sad feelings. First time I ever talked about what that my father is when he and I stood on a crime scene when a mom mutilated her kids and cut them up into pieces. That's and then he told me it was okay to cry. And he and I just stood there, never touched each other at the same crime scene, processed it, cried. And then that was it. Now when you go home, we don't talk about this ever again. And that was it, you know? So. 

00:09:32 Cinnamon: Which that's even impressive. That's even a stretch. 

00:09:36 Giovanni: But it's so broken, right? Cinnamon, you know, you know, now at least this environment is the message what you're driving and I'm driving now is. These feelings you're having are all natural. What do you do with it? Like, what do you do in the moments when somebody says, I just want to give you a hug? I don't want you to feel sad for me. You know, I want you to know that you can live a good life because I'm here to do, you know, I'm doing what I signed up for. This is what I don't know. It's hard, right? My kids didn't sign up for it. My wife and I are both in the life. You know, we both did undercover work and we both were in law enforcement, but I feel bad for my kids. 

00:10:10 Giovanni: My son, you know, he just recently. He was with me at Fox News Studios. I got him a private tour and we walked around and I'm meeting everybody and they're introducing me and I tell them my story as we go. And my 15 year old guy is like, that did this shit really happen? Is this why we live where we live? Is this why we had to move? Cause he was five years old, you know? And it was all like this wave of, you can only imagine, Erin, that in that moment in time, yeah, I wanted to just fall to my knees and just cry because I didn't want him to find out about this this way, you know, and that's 10 years later after retirement that this job still has that. 

00:10:47 Giovanni: But what do you do with it? I do this. I get it out. I dump it. I do everything my clinician friends tell me to do. And they taught me to do, you know, and I lean on the people who were there to tell me, lean on me. I'm here. You know, don't just lock myself. I do. I lock myself in my garage. I'm still guilty of that. I go out there and my wife says, what are you doing? You've been out here for four hours. What the hell are you doing? Oh, I'm building a wooden cross. How long does it take to build a wooden cross? You've been out here for four and a half hours. Dinner's been served and this is only two weeks ago, you know? So you always got to kick yourself in the ass to remind you. Your mental health and your psychological self. But it's what I learned along the way too, and we can talk about it. So, yeah, I feel like I just did the whole interview stuff. 

00:11:36 Cinnamon: And now we're at the question portion because I've got three right here. 

00:11:38 Giovanni: But what would you guys like to focus on? Tell me.

00:11:42 Cinnamon: You at least started to touch on it. You know, when we talk to folks about their career and then it ends, you know, we have this analogy that we've heard used about when your career stops, it's like an abrupt train stop and then it all piles on. Right. But yours is perhaps not completely unique, but let's just say it's different in the respect that it hasn't ended and it will not end until every last family member of yours, and well, let's say every last family member of theirs, and that usually doesn't come to an end, is gone. 

00:12:21 Cinnamon: So this isn't a retirement was the end of it, retirement was just the beginning of a different thing. I also, Erin and I both reacted to it. I'm going to set this up and I would like you to talk to us about this because Erin and I are from a different belief that you can know and they can tell you what you're signing up for. But this stuff that happens in here, when you deliver the baby or when you get shot at, there is no way in hell you know what that is going to feel like. Like you can say, yeah, I will wear a clown suit. Check that box.

00:13:02 Cinnamon: Put me in a clown suit and have me stand around town. It's going to bring up feelings that I may not have either anticipated or didn't know what it would be like to embody. And so I want to hear a little bit more about how you use that phrase of we know what we signed up for because we hear that as almost like counterculture, like the excuse of, well, I don't know why everybody's crying about all this mental health stuff. You knew what you were signing up for. And that's where Erin and I chime in and we're like, but did they? 

00:13:32 Giovanni: Right. And I agree. I totally agree with that. And we can chop it up with that. But I do follow up when I say, look, I got tired of the pity train, right? The pity train of watching speakers get up and go, you know, your feelings, all your feelings, you know, and I love the fact that we talk about feelings. But like you said, we did sign up for this, but here's the thing. I took the job because it paid well. I took it because it had great health benefits and it gave me a career that I could sustain for 25 years. Once I signed up to be a law enforcement or first responder, I'm locked in. My life is set. Right. 

00:14:04 Giovanni: Now you gave me all these tools. You gave me a gun, gave me a badge, gave me authority, you trained me on how to do, how to work with it, right? You never gave me any training, at least my generation, we still didn't have that. You gave me no training whatsoever on those feelings and the tidal wave of emotion I was going through. I would rather be shot at than have to deal with those and deal with those emotions on my own. I have been in those dark places where, listen, you know, my darkest moments, I picked my spot. I picked my spot where I was in my twenties and I saw doom and gloom and I rode off God and I was like, dude, you could not possibly allow this to happen to people. The things that I saw as a young kid being in my 20s. There's no way. 

00:14:42 Giovanni: So being a Catholic kid, I wrote them off, you know, and a lot of people do a lot of first responders. They lose that faith and I'm not wanting to take a pulpit and preach, but you know, listen, when you start to look at it, point being you gave me this great job. It pays great money. I could make overtime. I can make, I could actually work two jobs. I could work overtime and make just as much money. Who turns that down? You don't think we're going to burn out.

00:15:06 Giovanni: When I can work five days a week and then grab three days a week and extra shift. So I'm doing doubles because my family wants to go to Disney. I want to bode or I want to beach house, right? Or my wife likes having all these nice things. But what am I doing for myself? The key is I invest in my family. I invest in my finance. What am I investing in personally? How am I investing in myself? So that's where I say, you know, we signed up for this job and we're knowing what we're doing, but you got to give it your all. The investment has to be yours, you have to invest in yourself.

00:15:35 Giovanni: Like that's my, I love to have shirts that just say that. If you can't invest in yourself and your own personal wellbeing and your mental health and physical health, you could see the guy struggling on the job. You know, he came on a job, they struggled to get through the academy at 200 pounds. And then they're nine months into the job, a year into the job, and they don't even fit into the outfit that they had in the academy. Now yet they still keep squeezing into that shirt. They look like they're going to have a heart attack because you breathe on them too hard. You're not going to fall over.

00:16:02 Giovanni: It's just that stress. It's just, but what are you doing to invest in yourself? Like who are you talking to? What are you doing to process all this stuff? So I think... I don't come on too strong when I say, I knew it was coming, you know, assholes. So I don't sit here and complain like my father would say to me, know, but to say, yeah, listen, when you start to feel that tingling and you can't sleep at night, even having a baby, the emotions of a happy thing happening on this job is the adrenaline. And you guys know, I don't have to tell you about it clinically, you know.

00:16:33 Giovanni: The adrenaline dump, even after the happiest moment of when you save somebody, you know, when they're in, you know, you give them CPR and you bring them back or you deliver a baby in a backseat or car in a hospital or in a project and you come home and you lay in your bed and that adrenaline dump even then, because it's a good adrenaline dump, it still wears your body out. So what are you doing for you the next day? 

00:16:55 Giovanni: I just had that adrenaline. I just had everything sucked out of my body. Good, bad or indifferent. Am I going to get up and just wait to go to work the next night? Or I got to take a walk on the beach, go for a hike, go to the gym, go process it, dump it, and really get ready to do another tour and prepare yourself, invest in yourself. 

00:17:12 Cinnamon: Well, now add on to that, that happens to be that baby was born on the day that I had actually picked up overtime. And so I don't get to go home and go to bed. I get to work another 12 hours and who knows what I'm going to run into at that point. So there may not be an end in sight to even get through. Erin and I have talked ourselves about how grateful we are for this community of wellness advocates. And when you were talking about wanting people to lean on you, but having also those moments in your own garage, putting together your wooden cross. 

00:17:52 Cinnamon: So I'm going to the bank that you know a little bit about woodworking. I'm going to throw out the word sistering. Like what this community is about is sistering. And for those who don't know, maybe you can probably articulate it better, but it's a woodworking, about leaning into and on each other. So it's not just one, you, oh, you do it. 

00:18:18 Giovanni: Like a hard structure, like a 90 degree, it's not just balancing one piece on top of another. It's actually the two pieces hold like a 45 degree angle. If you were to put them together, they lean on each other. And that's what makes it. One piece of law is gonna fall this way. But together, their lives are straight. 

00:18:35 Cinnamon: They hold each other up. Yeah. And I think that we've had the experience to recognize that we all need each other. Like even the clinicians are not exempt. I made a phone call. I asked something from one of my clients and he goes, yeah, let me send that to you. I'm on my way to a search warrant. And I immediately was like, oh God, this could be the last time I'm talking to him. Will it be?

00:18:58 Cinnamon: Likely not. But it's that if you do this work, no one's exempt. And you have us, which is why Aaron says, I'll give you a hug and you can call me and you can reach out anytime. Because that's what we do. Right. And don't expect a phone call from us. 

00:19:19 Erin: Yeah. I think it's we follow. It's like when you get immersed into someone's story like that, you feel like you know them. You fall in love with them. I've joked in trainings before where I'm like, Cinnamon talks about some habits that we can create in our life to actually create new neuro pathways. And one of them is like going down a rabbit hole, like a productive one. And I say, I am the queen of finishing a movie and then going down this rabbit hole. Who else did this person act with? Who are their parents? 

00:19:55 Erin: And that's how I felt with your book. I was like, I don't want it to be over, but this is like your manuscript. So that part of it is over. And so, it's that love. And I think that's what makes it tricky about our side of the fence when we do this work is we can't not love you all. There is a unique nature and the relationships that we have with you all in terms of connection and rapport, because we got to meet you right in the middle. Like there's no you coming to us. 

00:20:28 Erin: And I think that that changes the level of trust and without a lack of a better word like intimacy, I don't have a better word because I don't want it to be misconstrued. Listeners. 

00:20:39 Cinnamon: They'll not getting it on. 

00:20:40 Erin: Right. 

00:20:42 Cinnamon: So there is that personal like, yeah, it's like this intense, deep trust. Like you just look at somebody in the eye and you get it. I got it. Okay, we're good.

00:20:52 Giovanni: And I love what you said, Aaron, about, you wanting to be there for us and you wanting to know how the story ends and wanting more of it. That's a first responder's life. When we show up at your car accident and we get there and we look at this mangled wreck of a car, we're preparing for the worst. Right. I don't even look inside the car and see the person inside the car yet. But you were sending them in and you're driving along. I come up to the car and thank God, now there's a breath of fresh air. But now it's to get you out, calm you down. You know, it's the reverse.

00:21:22 Giovanni: We want to make sure you're okay. We don't get that closure as first responders. We write the report. Maybe if we know you and there's a local cop or local fireman who processed the scene or something, maybe we know the aftermath of that. But if they are highway patrolmen or something, you know, we don't connect with those people. So those things too, you know, happy moments and sad moments. If it is a fatality and somebody, you know, lost their life in a car wreck, we never have closure for that. The 911 dispatchers don't have that. They're the worst.

00:21:50 Giovanni: You know, they suffer the worst because they can hear the person. Sometimes they're with them at their last moment, you know, mentally they're holding their hand and they're walking them through and they can hear them taking their final breaths. Where's their closure? Like they don't. So you're right in saying that it's a reverse though. We feel the same way about, because our love for our community and our love and our passion to want to keep people safe and keep them out of harm's way. We will truly lay our lives down for people we don't know, just like the military personnel. I don't need to know who you are. I don't care about the color of your skin.

00:22:20 Giovanni: I've proven that, you know, I took the job knowing that I might have to step in harm's way for somebody. And it doesn't matter who they are. Even a crackhead that I arrested 15 times throughout my career, I would still save him or her because that's the oath I took. And that's my DNA. It's my makeup. That's what makes me good at this job. But it comes with this roller coaster of emotions, you know, and to hear you say, I want to give you a hug. It's like, I just don't want to put this on Erin, you know, I don't want her to feel, you know, but that's what we think, right? 

00:22:53 Giovanni: You guys hear that so much. like, Oh no, Erin, I can't tell you my story. You think that's bad. And you get that a lot, right? If you think that's bad. If I told you to have, from what I experienced in 30 years, you'd be locked up in a mental institution wearing a straight jacket in a padded room. You'll lose your mind. Right? So I couldn't possibly want to destroy your life and dump my emotions and my trauma on you. It's bad enough that I have to carry it like a burden, but I won't see help because I don't want to do that to you. 

00:23:22 Giovanni: But it's truly knowing that the support system that's out there now and changing that ideology, changing that, knowing that after you went to that accident. Yeah, I'm good. It's just an accident. Yeah, I know. It was just another autopsy. I go to five autopsies a week. I work in Newark, New Jersey. You know how many murders there are, right? Like a homicide detective. They don't have an office. Their offices, they show up to grab the coffee and they go and they head to the ME's office to watch the first autopsy. They got several in a week.

00:23:49 Giovanni: So to say to them, you know, this is what I do for a living. No, you go to one, you need to go see somebody, even if there's like, you know, system, just like system, critical incident, just go and say, yeah, Aaron, you know, this one really messed me up. Just so you know, this one was a tough one. I got some stuff going on at home, but I might reach out to you during the week or you know what touch base with me later on, but right now I'm good. You know me and you can read me. We're great at reading each other, but it's one of those things you just check in, you know, and I think it's… there's the investing yourself comes up again. 

00:24:22 Giovanni: When I go to a homicide scene or I go to a triadic incident or a critical incident where I'm feeling stressed and burned out, I need to at least say something, you know, or at least check the box, check in, you know, and before you go to your locker, check in with somebody, say something. Yeah, I'm good. This one, this one really got me in a way, you know, don't wait six months, you know, don't go to the bar right afterwards because that's what we were taught to do. That's how we processed it. Yeah. Literally. Like I've been a bloody mess. And they were like, all right, are you done? Yeah. Yeah. All right. You cleared a scene. 

00:24:47 Giovanni: And you, Cinnamon, Erin, and G, I need you to get back in the street. Get back to your sectors. Yeah, but I got blood. Well, go to the station house, change your shirt, clean up real fast. And then, did you take a meal yet, Cinnamon? All right, take your 30 minute meal. Because, you know, legally, I have to give you a 30 minute meal. So go take your meal. After I just left this horrific scene, I got to take a meal. I have to go eat. Yeah. But 30 minutes, can get back to it.

00:25:17 Giovanni: So this is whole thing of emotions, but I'm going off the rails a little bit, but I think it's that having your services and having the ability to have so many professionals that want to support and understand. I hate this phrase clinically competent, right? This has been used and abused, but to have the right people, right? There's so many people that are drunk jumping on the gravy train now because now cops are loved and hugged again. You know, it's not defund. Everybody loves a fireman, right? But everybody hates cops like this abusive relationship.

00:25:49 Giovanni: But, you know, right now we're in a cycle where the political season now all of sudden all parties love us. Right. So now we're the cream. We're the cream that floats to the top because there's money in it for us. There's benefits. Everything that happens on the Hill, I've seen it. In government where if there's programming and money available, “Oh yeah. We love the first responders. Yeah. Let's, oh, we love our military veterans. Let's throw a ton of money at them.”

00:26:12 So now is that moment. So you see these people jumping on a bandwagon, but they're not clinically competent, right? They're not culturally competent when it comes to treating our people. So that's my biggest thing is just finding folks. And I'm very aware of your services and find those people that can relate. They're not trying to be one of us. They're just trying to understand and be a pillar of support for us, you know, to be that sister. You know what I mean? Yeah.

00:26:39 Cinnamon: I've hired people before to do this work with me and I can have them trained up and know the stuff that I know, but if they don't have the right personality for it, it's a deal breaker. And so it's, yes, you've got to find the right fit for you, but what you said I've heard before, it's bad enough that I know it. I don't need you to know it. It's also, I give the example of if I call you, cause my house is on fire, and then I tell you to stand down, because it's real dangerous in there, you're going to knock me out of the way and say, “Let me do my job.” Right? So it's kind of the same thing where I'm going to knock you down and say, “Let me do my job.” Like I am responsible for my own well-being, which I will take care of at the end of the 60 minutes. 

00:27:30 Cinnamon: And I also want to touch on what it looks like now for these new first responders coming in to come in after a critical incident, which is happening. And instead of like piling this up, you're getting rid of it one CI at a time. And so we're not doing the same thing. We won't be doing the same thing in 20 years because it won't be, you know, guys like you that were maybe allowed to shed a few tears on scene.

00:27:59 Cinnamon: But it's almost like going back to what you said at the beginning, all of this is deception because even after being bloodied, and eating your 30 minute dinner and going back out there, whoever you're encountering, they don't deserve to suffer the fallout of what you had before. So I do want to kind of circle back around to what we started to talk about with the deception. Because when you and I talked about preparing for this, I was like, there are so many podcasts out there who have really focused on the mafia undercover work. And it's very interesting. Those are rabbit holes that Erin and I have went down for sure.

00:28:44 Erin: And still do. I may or may not listen to the mob podcast of yours. Like peep peep!

00:28:50 Cinnamon: But we're there, right? And can you help me? Is it DeCavalcante? How do I say that?

00:28:56 Giovanni: Yes, you hit it. Yeah, I'll accept that. DeCavalcante, you hit it.

00:29:01 Cinnamon: Okay, so can you circle back around about there's so much deception, whether it's lying by omission to your family, not being able to break a certain level of a barrier, even with us as friends, because you're never going to be able to tell us your name. And that is gotta be a thing. It's gotta be a thing for you.

00:29:29 Giovanni: Yeah. I mean, my level with that. Most people don't get that deep into it. I mean, I had five different names, five different social security know, dates of birth, credit histories. I mean, that's severely complex. My level of deep cover operations was crazy, and that was… it was global. I mean, anything we did could be anywhere in the world. But again, it's the deception. So with me, it was fun. Early years of narcotics work for me was fun. 

00:29:58 Giovanni: I'll never forget my first undercover identity, right. My [A-FID], call it. It's a false license or false ID. I had to go to Times Square to buy it, and I paid $20 for it. You know from what was then, you have a Times Square back in the early ‘90s was just, you know, even worse than it is now. And I go into the basement of this place where it was all swag and knockoff stuff and counterfeit. And you know, there’s a middle Eastern guy down there, who we now know is probably ISIS or Al Qaeda back then, we just didn't know too much about them. And he gives me a photo album, I'd look through and I'd pick my state and I'd get my picture taken. That's how I got my first ID. So that was fun, right? Because now…

00:30:39 Erin: Me too!

00:30:43 Giovanni: You could go to the clubs. You just need to know a guy at the back door, you know? So, and here we are, right? And it's fun. And it's early, early undercover work and early deception. And then as I proceeded into my undercover work, it was a lot of fun buying dope and I never really had to pull out an ID.

00:31:00 Then once in a while to rent a car, I used it. But then when I started working DEA and FBI, it was more complex. Now I have to travel in a false ID. Now you really have to sell who you are. And a lot of people say you have to be a good liar, but it truly is the art of deception. You have to polish yourself with this. It's like being a magician. I mean, you know, when I get on a plane and I am now portraying myself to be a single guy with no kids, I don't like kids, you know, I hate kids. I wouldn't have kids.

00:31:28 Giovanni: Meanwhile, I really love kids and I love relationships, and I have to lie about this whole persona I am. That has to ooze out of you. Because you guys are clinical professionals. You could see through that just at your level of professional, right? Just being a licensed professional, you would scratch that surface. How far would you have to peel that onion back to see that I was full of crap, right? You know, so when you have this art of deception, is just so intense that so here I was, I'm trained now for the FBI to be this great operative and I get deployed and I have to go on an airplane. And I get the TSA and the girl at TSA, I was flying out of Newark airport and it was my first test and she grabs my license. She looks at me and she looks at the light. She says, Giovanni Gatto. Is that your real name?

00:32:18 Erin: Wow.

00:32:19 Giovanni: And you can only imagine it's like what? And she's like, is that your real name? It's like, yeah. So now I'm thinking, is my class, is my school still going? Am I still being trained? Are they testing me here? Cause it's government. And I said, yeah, that's my name. And I have a bunch of guys on the covers that have traveled with me, and she goes on and she says, Where are you from? And starts peppering me with questions. You know, I'm looking at the ID and I saw, I was from New Jersey. Says it on my license. She was like, Where are you from? What part of Italy?

00:32:50 I said, Do you know Italy? She's like, Where's your family from? And she went into this whole tirade, peppering me with maybe a series of like 5 to 10 questions. And the whole time, my heart starts racing. All this training they just gave me about controlling a heart rate variability just went right out the window. I haven't even started my operation. I can't get past TSA with this girl. And it turns out that this girl who I thought, you know, grew up like me in a projects, low-income housing.

00:33:16 Giovanni: She seemed familiar to me, and she goes, I just have a thing for Italian men. I've been to Italy five times. I travel there all the time, and it was just that she had a fascination with Italian men and Italian culture, and you would have never guessed it. So the point is I was so, I was so floored by the fact that my heart rate and my ears and my skin and my head felt like all the blood rushed to my head. I went to complete panic mode. This is, you know, 10 years of being operational undercover world. And now my lying and deception couldn't get me past TSA.

00:33:50 Cinnamon: Couldn't get you past getting hit on.

00:33:52 Giovanni: Right. Which is fine. Right. So, you know, girls from [inaudible] could be difficult. I had a lot of that growing up. So they don't take no easy.

00:34:01 Erin: Well, and this is a TSA. Right? So this is a government agency. The worst they can do is pull you into the back room and then maybe like certain people will have to know. When you're doing this undercover in an actual operation like a Charlie Horse, it's life or death.

00:34:21 Giovanni: Right. And that's the point. 

00:34:22 Erin: If they don't believe you.

00:34:23 Giovanni: With the deception part, all the training they gave me, that was the moment in time… And it's funny because I never discussed this on any other shows. And it's a moment of clarity. I talk about my pivotal moment. But when I really think about it, that was the moment where I realized the training that the government gave me is not enough. I need to do… I got to better myself. I have to do more. I almost passed out at the TSA line. What am I going to do when I get overseas? Go into this operation I'm going to, or, you know, other countries or wherever I'm going, I won't make it through.

00:34:54: Giovanni: So now my ADD kicked in. I went down rabbit holes. What can I do to help my breathing, my heart rate? And then that's when I really, you know, started looking at long before it was popular, breath work. And then when I started going down that road, I started realizing how to control myself.

00:35:10 Giovanni: A lot of people don't really talk about it, but neuro-switching is something that I was focused, like hyper-focused on. And understanding the neuroplasticity in your brain and how you can recover from it is insane. Like I'm a street kid, high school graduate at best, you know, had a great career. I'm not a doctor by any means, but I wanted to understand how can I control my entire nervous system? And then once I did, I became a different undercover, a different operative, a different person. And then that allowed me to open my brain. 

00:35:40 Giovanni: See, I had to go for checkups for the neck up every six to nine months in order to operate. And there was one guy, I always talked about him. He was a therapist, and you had to sit with the clinician every six to nine months. It wasn't for my services. It was for the government to check the box because I was an asset to them. They didn't want to have a broken tool in a toolbox. So they would give you these interviews, and this guy kept hounding me about all my trauma and my stress and everything that I had gone through.

00:36:05 Giovanni: And it wasn't until… he really opened my brain and helped me understand all the trauma that I was carrying. I'm third generation, and I was told just to push it down, and he taught me like, you know… and it was one specific incident. We don't have to get into it, but it was regards to a child dying in my arms. And, you know, he realized. He kept focusing on it, and beat me down every time I went. And then finally, he taught me how to reframe this trauma and stress.

00:36:31 Giovanni: That's a game changer. Like, because of that, Cinnamon, my deception, and people say my ability to lie was enhanced because of my ability to control my nervous system. Game changer. My inflection, my tone, who I was around. If you two are two stone cold killers and I was in a room with you, I need to convince you. I don't want you to think I'm a threat, but I need you. So I would slow my tone and my pace of my speech down to a snail's pace. Every single word that came out of my mouth. I just sit in there waiting for me to talk.

00:37:11 Giovanni: These gangsters and people all around and see, you know, so sicarios and cartels would sit there like… because I'd sit there and go see him. I know I'm speaking slow, but I need you guys to understand because we're in business of if something goes wrong, I can get hurt. You can get hurt. Things can go horribly wrong on both ends. So I want to be 1000% clear on how we're doing this. So let's just slow down.

00:37:34 Giovanni: And then I can gain the most intelligence. And then I made the best tapes ever because I'd say, okay, so Cinnamon, I'm just going to say it out loud because it's the three of us. We're dealing cocaine here. Right guys. What a great tape. What a freaking great tape. No jury in the world is going to say they set my client up. You just acknowledge. Yeah. “We're talking about cocaine. You're going to get… its kilos we're dealing. So you're to give them to Erin, and Erin’s going to bring it to me.” There's no better tape. There's no better deception or lie.

00:38:02 Giovanni: So when you say lying, I'm not deceiving you. I'm just deceiving you with a persona that I'm giving up. I'm not trying to entrap you and set you up, but it's because of my understanding of my mental abilities and my physical capabilities that I was able to do what I did.

00:38:16 Erin: Well, and it's acting. It's like you're putting on your actor's cap.

00:38:23 Giovanni: Yeah.

00:38:23 Erin: I guess we wouldn't say the same thing to some like Leonardo DiCaprio and all the different roles or Johnny Depp, look at all the roles he's played. We're not gonna be like, “How's it feel to be deceptive your entire life?” Because in a lot of ways, that's what you're doing is putting on your actor's hat and playing that part, believably so. 

00:38:49 Erin: And even still, there is still this whole life that you get to put on a new hat, or in your case, take off the ring and turn into this new version of yourself, and walk into your home and play husband. And we've used that whole line in your book with family trainings that we've done about going back to neuroplasticity, going back to telling your brain, we are now actively changing roles. And it's very helpful for people to hear something as simple as taking off the ring. But even still, I imagine that would be challenging to turn one off and turn another on when you're so used to playing one role. 

00:39:36 Giovanni: It's very challenging, Erin. Very challenging. Great point you make because it's the hardest thing. It's the hardest thing to leave a house. I'll talk about my experiences as an undercover and an operative, but let's talk about just as a detective and a first responder.

00:39:50 Giovanni: I leave the house, I have to put my uniform on. That's your identity. My kids don't see me as Officer So-and-So, firefighter so-and-so. They see me as dad. They see you as mom. Right? Now I am putting my persona on my uniform, my badge, my authority, and I'm going to work. Now I'm doing that for eight to God knows how many hours, 16 hours, if you do doubles or whatever. Now I'm that person for so many hours. Now I have to be hard to survive in the street, to process the stuff I have to see, to get through the emotional rollercoasters in a 12-hour shift is unbelievable.

00:40:25 Giovanni: Now you want me to now go home, take that costume off, right? Lose that identity, and I go back to being dad and go back to being mom, go back to being a spouse. That is so tasking, so tasking. And any actor will say to you, and I've had that a lot over the years, I worked in Hollywood. I trained actors to play parts, and I've done that. And they say, look, I get the chance to yell. When I yell cut, it's done. But for method actors, they immerse themselves in their character.

00:40:53 Giovanni: They show up on set for that day as the gangster, as the hard ass woman that she's playing. And they show up because that's what method acting is. So they don't break character. So sometimes to survive in this world, when one day to the next, I'm different identities. I can't break. I cannot break role. And sometimes when I go, all right, I'm going to take the weekend off. I'm just going to go back, you know, I'm going to take a trip with the kids. I'm going to go some place and spend some time with family.

00:41:20 Giovanni: Where I'm going to go spend time with my in-laws or my parents, you know, go spend time with cops. I'm going to go to a police barbecue. And then all of a sudden I'm at this barbecue and I feel… “Man, these guys are a bunch of clowns. Idiots running around getting drunk thinking they were [inaudible],” you know, and you really start to have these thoughts of betrayal. And because hyper masculinity kicks in and it's my survival technique. Right. And you think people are looking at me and then what is he looking at me for? What is he questioning? 

00:41:50 Giovanni: And then some people come at you and it'll be like, yeah, you and your gangster buddies. What are you talking about? Oh, you know, you and your gangster friends, know, the guys that you're hanging around with. Guys, I'm a law enforcement officer. You guys are my family. These people are people I'm investigating. Like, so you feel that level of betrayal and how do you immerse… how do you remove yourself from that? So you brought up the ring. That's just something I came up with on my own.

00:42:15 Giovanni: I mean, the rings are in culture, not just the Italian culture, many cultures. Irish culture has the Claddagh ring or whatever it is. And I use that analogy now, even with folks that do crimes against children. To me, I've had my cases with that and that is the worst of the worst. They are the worst people that walk the earth, right? People that commit crimes against children.

00:42:38 Giovanni: But to portray yourselves on somebody online, even though it's not face to face and it's not… the threat of harm isn't there, the damage that you're doing to yourself, it's tremendous. Looking at these images that nobody should ever see in life. I'm having to rinse and repeat, and go through it. And they're doing it. You know why? Because they're good at it. Like, I was good at covert operations. My friends were good at homicide. It's what you're good at. But how do you do that? And I came up with the idea of the ring. I wear a pinky ring. I grew up culturally with it, and I knew what it was, and I respected that.

00:43:10 Giovanni: And you know, it's a bit of a fear factor. You get a backhand from the, you know, the pinky ring and leaves a little bit of a mark, and it rings a bell, and you know, it might've been the way you grew up back then. Maybe we need a little bit more of that these days. But, that's what I grew up on. So I thought the government gave me my… even though I have my own nice jewelry that I could wear, I didn't never want to look down at my wrist or my fingers and think, Oh my God, my cousin, Cinnamon, gave me this ring or gave me this chain. When I'm in the middle of an operation, I never wanted to have my own personal life crossover into my undercover life.

00:43:45 Giovanni: So I went down to the government building, the Hoover building, and you're able to pick out jewelry. I picked out nice things. had a, you know, what reminded me of my uncle's ring growing up, my old Italian uncle. And I took this ring and I put it on. I said, Now I'm going to become this gangster when I wear this ring. And this is who I'm going to be. But I'm never going to allow that guy, Giovanni Gatto, to come into my home. My kids, my spouse, my family never meet this. This guy's a piece of garbage. They'll never be around this guy.

00:44:13 Giovanni: So what I will do is every time I pull into the garage or I pull into the driveway, I will remove the pinky ring, like a switch, and I'll leave it in the cup holder. And then that's just me saying, all right, you're not Giovanni Gatto anymore. You're back to being Giovanni Rocco. Okay. The dad, the husband, the this, the cousin, whatever you do. So it works, you know? As I write in the book, I kind of fooled myself after a while, because when you live in that life for so long, it's only bound to catch up to you. Right.

00:44:42 Giovanni: But for me, I was so deep into it of years living the same persona, infiltrating the same crime family, and being around good people, not just criminals, that it took its toll on me after a while. But at least I did something to pull in my driveway, take that ring off, and say, “Okay, this is a reminder that I'm going back to being the person that I like to be. I'm the officer, I'm the investigator, I'm the good man that I was hired to be.” You know, same thing with law enforcement and first responders, environment as well.

00:45:11 Giovanni: When you come home, maybe don't walk in with your uniform on. Don't wear… everything doesn't have to be. We understand. Your persona and the way you march around and your hyper-masculinity, hyper-vigilance, that we know you're first responder. If you march around… like you have that way about it. Your back's to the wall. You never let your back face the door type of thing, we get that. But for you and your family, shed that.

00:45:39 Giovanni: Take the shirt off, take the badge off, take the gun off, put it in the locker, leave it someplace. And it's just a mental switch to say, all right, I'm going back to being Giovanni Rocco. I'm not Giovanni Gatto anymore. Officer Smith. I'm going back to being dad. I'm not Officer Smith. When I walk in my house, that's all I wanna be. Because our spouses always tell us, listen, I don't know what's going on with you, but you're not the same person. You know, they're giving you little crumbs, breadcrumbs, and they're telling you.

00:46:07 Giovanni: You’re not the same person who used to be. And then all of a sudden it's like, you turn on them, and then the whole wheel starts turning on the marriage, where relationships get destroyed because we don't want to hear we're broken. Don't tell me I'm broken. No, I don't want to hear that.

00:46:23 Cinnamon: And different gets interpreted as broken.

00:46:27 Giovanni: It does.

00:46:28 Cinnamon: That's wow. I don't think anyone's quite said it in that way, where going… maybe coming out of a spouse's mouth, it's different, right? And we know that change towards the negative of a worldview of yourself, people, and others is a PTS symptom, right? So to have somebody tell you, you're not who you were when I married you, you're not who you were when you started your career, it's going into your ears as you are broken and you are not who I want as my partner and as the co-parent, I need… that.

00:47:09 Cinnamon: And I'm thinking like the, what a willingness of being able like to take that off. But like you said, like there's still even that deceit in our relationship, knowing that we're sitting here talking about deceit. And it made me think about how you had to deceive these people in your work that you build relationships with that you saw as multi-dimensional and then to have them find out that they had been deceived.

00:47:33 Cinnamon: I think that would almost be maybe the most complicated deception. Like we can talk about how and why the logic of like, we respect your safety comes first before any kind of curiosity, right? It's easy to understand the emotions that are tied to family. But there was this whole other level of deception and complications of emotions that no one could have told you that you were signing up for that. 

00:48:08 Giovanni: Yeah. It's a tricky thing to balance, right? Because you want to do the job, you signed up for the job. So whatever it takes to do the job. And they warned me. You had touched on something earlier when I took the job and I was in a police academy, and I'm sitting in the Jersey City Police Academy, and they say to me, listen, this half of the class, raise your hands. Right.

00:48:30 Giovanni: You guys and girls, you'll all be divorced, probably remarried a couple of times. They're setting me up, right? You've now planted that seed in my brain. Now I'm going to destroy relationships. I'm going to ruin my family. I'm going to ruin my marriages. You know, I'm going to have shitty relationships. Sorry. I'm going to have garbage relationships with my kids, you know, because of this job. Now the other half, everybody put your hands down. The other half raise your hand. You guys, you guys and girls represent the 75% that probably died five years after retirement.

00:49:03 Giovanni: So now you put in my head that I'm only going to live but so long after I retire from this job. So my goal is never to retire from this job because I now know statistically, right, that there's a good chance 5 to 10 years after I retire, I'm just going to die. This job is just going to wear me out. It's going to suck the life out of me and I'm going to miss it so much, I'm just going to fade away. So that's what you planted in my head going in. 

00:49:29 Giovanni: So now you carry that along the way and I think, of course, every officer, every first responder, you aspire to be better and to get promoted. So you want to move up the chain. And, I think, so you'll accept it, whatever they ask you to do, you will do it. I'm not a fireman. Yeah. Three times I've run into burning buildings and almost killed myself, you know, to save other people. I think firemen have the worst job in the world. After you go into a burning building and you realize as soon as you're in there and you can't see, you can't hear.

00:49:58 Giovanni: I never realized that when I ran into a burning building, all sound is definite. Like you don't hear a pin drop. It's as if you're underwater when you're in a burning building. I didn't realize that. So, I just thought, "Well, here I am. And that's part of my job." What you described earlier, Cinnamon, right? It was like, get out of my way. And my supervisor warned me because what happened was they told me there was an older gentleman, a grandfather up on the third floor at an apartment. 

00:50:22 Giovanni: So I went and my boss said to me, "Stop, we're in a city, the fire department is going to be here in 30 seconds. But I didn't listen. I ran it, you know, because I had it in my brain that this is what I'm wired to do. So I run in and I was able to go upstairs, get the guy, this whole story of I woke him up in his bed and I didn't account for the fact that the fire was on me first going into the second floor. I ran up the stairwell. I get to the attic apartment. I find this little Portuguese guy sleeping in his bed. I wake him up. He's 87 years old. He's actually fighting me because he doesn't want to run out because he's losing. He can't find one of his slippers.

00:50:56 Giovanni: So he's on the edge of the bed. He doesn't speak English and I'm begging him to, “We gotta go.” So as we get to the stairway to go down, there's the fire, it blows out the window, comes across the stairway. And then, luckily we were able to get out and we got out of harm and just some smoke inhalation. But I walked outside and the fire lieutenant came right up to me and punched me right in the mouth. And that's where I grew up. That's the neighborhood I'm from. And he said, "Don't ever, ever do that again. You put my guys in danger." But again, you don't think of these things when you're doing this work because it's just, you know, it's what you're wired to do, you know? I might've went off track a little bit there when [inaudible].

00:51:38 Cinnamon: No, no. It made me think about one of the things that we wanted to know from you: what were some of the first signs of psychological strain of doing this job? Like, you know, you can think it's fun, but eventually it's like old hat and it's not fun anymore and you're looking at it differently. So, looking back, do you know were some of those early signs? Because we try to help educate folks. So if they're experiencing them, they see them for what they are.

00:52:17 Giovanni: I was trained, I guess I have to rewind and go back to when I was working in narcotics. I'm a street kid. I never should have lived past the age of 25. I was dead or in jail by 25 before I became a cop. I had no plan for life. I was black sheep in my family. I write about in the book, like Erin, you know, I truly was destined to be dead. I was on a track of just, well, I'm just going to live hard and fast. I was with a lot of bikers. I was running in that, Erin, before. And my uncle was connected and I ran with those guys and I became a cop. But it was when I became a narcotics detective that I realized my empathy. I had extreme empathy for people. I don't like being bled on. I don't like, you know, other people's saliva. I'm a germaphobe, big time germaphobe.

00:53:00 Giovanni: You know, so here I am, I take this job. One of the first calls I get, I get a kid who was stabbed and gutted and his intestines, I have to hold his intestines in. And I was a great patrolman. I did all these great things, but then I went into narcotics. And of course, narcotics is a different field because collars for dollars, we say where I come from, right? The more arrests you make, you get grand jury over time, you get court over time. So, you know, and again, you keep your detail by making arrests, good arrests.

00:53:26 Giovanni: My thing was when I arrested somebody, they'd be handcuffed to the bench and we'd be processing them. And they'd say to me, "G, Gio, Giovanni, I can't go to jail. I'm dope sick." And I see my family. I see my cousins. I see my friends that were—that had addiction problems. And I sat there and I have too much empathy. I like, "Oh, listen, you got to get clean.” “I can't find a bed. There's nowhere nobody will take me in. I can't find a bed in a rehab anywhere." So I would sit and I'd say, "Right, listen, if I get you a bed right now, would you go?" You know, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." 

00:53:56 Giovanni: And of course, the guys who trained me, my senior officers, they were guys that worked, you know, for—I knew them for years and I respect them, but some of them are hardened guys. One or two of them say, "What are you doing? It's not our job to help these people. Let's go, man. We gotta go back in the street. Go get another one. It's like fishing. Let's go, man. I'm not here. Put her in jail, put him in county and let's go." So I'd say, "You know what? Go ahead, hit the street. And, I'll catch up to you in a couple of minutes. I'm just going to make a phone call."

00:54:23 Giovanni: So I would call her. So now it's a detective calling. And of course they give me a little bit more attention. I get the bed. So I get the person to bed. I get the moral award, you know, cause I want them to live. I don't want to… I've seen my cousins. I've seen my family die in my own house on overdoses. So, I do that. Fast forward a couple of months. This person's out in the street again and then they call me because they feel indebted to me. They feel grateful to me that I got them clean even for a little bit. 

00:54:51 Giovanni: So now all of a sudden they become, they start feeding me information and they become confidential informants. And then all of sudden they're like, "So why is this Susie girl always calling you, G? She's always giving you information.” So “I don't know. She feels like, you know, I befriended her. I helped her, I don't know." So now all of sudden it changed the whole mindset of my squad. Even those old salty guys were like, "Ah, we got to get her a bed." You know, “The next one that comes in, we got to help her help her, you know, get her rehab." So it's infectious, right?

00:55:18 Giovanni: Problem with that sentiment is to question these people, the Susie, the heroin addict, she had nobody. I was showing up arresting her, repeat arrests constantly throughout the years. I remember going to her house one time with a warrant for her husband. I knock on the door, it was like a warrant sweep. We had to go out and just effect the active warrants that were there. I knock on the door, they were having a birthday party for her daughter. Dirt poor. When I tell you dirt poor, they had nothing there. Needles on the table. There's people shooting heroin on this little girl's birthday. The little girl was off in a bedroom listening to a radio, not even watching TV. 

00:55:56 Giovanni: I took the husband into custody and he said, "You know, ah, man, it's her birthday. I don't want to go to jail." I RORed him, which means I released him on his own recognizance. I got him off on the… and I drove him back to the house. And on the way back, I said, "You have to do something. You have to promise." I went, my partner and I, we picked up a cake. We picked up a little stick balloon that said, "Happy birthday" And a teddy bear from QuickCheck or 7/11. And I said, "This is from you. Go back in that house. If I find out you didn't celebrate this little girl's birthday."

00:56:27 Giovanni: All those years later, I watched that little girl grow up. Susie became bedridden. I became the executor to her. She put me down as her point of contact because her husband had passed away. The little girl suffered. She did… street [inaudible] up and got her. But all those years later, the Susie, she made me her, you know. So now I found out she was in a home and they had to pull the plug on her and she had me down as a point of contact to call, you know. So these things that you go through in life and you absorb this trauma. You absorb the stress of, you know, these people that you care about. That's just one example of where the first responder… I'm not some superhero that did this. There's a million people like me that are first responders. That's the extra mile we go and we don't get paid to do.

00:57:12 Giovanni: You know, that's the part that nobody sees that we do and the work that we do that we don't get paid for. And we don't tell our family about it either. I don't think I've ever shared that story outside right now, you know? So it's those things that you do and you absorb along the way. Of course, now when I'm deep cover and I'm lying to you and my objective is to put you in jail because you're the target. I didn't just throw a fishing line out and see if you grab the bait. There's this whole process that goes to our investigation.

00:57:40 Giovanni: We have to make sure that you're a good target. We have to make sure you're committing criminal activities before you meet somebody like me. Now I meet you. Now you introduced me to your sister, Erin, and Erin is this college graduate. She's young and she's a nice person and I'd befriend her. And now it turns out she's graduated from college and you happen to… you and I built a relationship over a year of investigation. Yes, you're still my target, but you care about me and I care about you. And then you say to me, 'Hey, Erin's graduating. We're going to have a party for her. You should come." Well, in real life, when I say no, there's no threat to me. So yeah, I go to that party and now I'm part of that. Now we're taking pictures at Erin’s graduation, you know, or her celebration at the party. You become immersed in their family. That's the part that's tough.

.

00:58:25 Giovanni: The gangsters are one thing and there's a lot of gangsters, cartels, Russian gangsters, your Asian, Chinese, Asian gangsters that have befriended me and many others like me that say to me, "You're my brother. You truly are my brother. I love you. Like, man, I'll die for you." Like, you know, because they feel that relationship. That's tough. That's a tough thing to process, you know, because you realize, "Hmm, I picked my team. They picked their team. You know, I'm on team America. They're on team criminal, you know?” So I always have to constantly remind myself what the objective is. I never swayed from my mission, but the relationships are tough. 

00:59:06 Giovanni: I've had CIs and I've had targets ask me to be their… the godfather to their kids. Their best man at their wedding. Will you stand in for me? I can't. Ethically, I can't. I can't be your best man. You're one of my sources. You're a confidential form to me. It wouldn't look right, "Yeah, but you're everything to me. You're everything to me. You're the only reason I'm still alive." That's tough. That's a tough thing to experience.

00:59:31 Cinnamon: I could also see you not wanting like... How do I want to phrase this? You would care enough about not being the person that they have to remember being part of their wedding party for the rest of their lives if they're sitting in prison, right? Like I could see you saying, "I don't want to do that because I don't want to sabotage later down the road when they figure out what's up..."

00:59:58 Giovanni: Yeah, yeah.

00:59:59 Cinnamon: "That I'm in their wedding photos and I've just ruined their memory of like..." to me, that sounds like something I would think that you would do that isn't necessarily one of the reasons that you wouldn't do it.

01:00:13 Giovanni: That's scary.

01:00:14 Cinnamon: Right? According to the books.

01:00:16 Giovanni: I've had my share of photos being out there, you know, at social engagements and parties and yeah, it's tough because you know, what are you going to say? You can't take my picture. I don't want my picture on social media. You know, guys will start looking at you sideways. So of course you're there for pictures. Yeah. So I look at… and sometimes I look online, it's out there. You know, I'm not going to say where they are, but I look at them and go. I wonder if these guys are really mad. That question often ponders in my brain. Like, I wonder when they look at this picture. I know some of them spit on the ground, curse me out, tear the picture up, burn the picture.

01:00:52 Giovanni: I can tell you this. I can tell you post arrest of the Charlie Horse and the DeCavalcante case, I know there were members of different families, different crime families, two of the major crime families had gotten together for the holidays shortly after the arrest.

Some of the guys had gone in, one of the wives had gone into her photos on her cameras and saying, "I can't believe Giovanni did this." You know, I'm going through, “Oh my God, look, here's us.” She's pulling up pictures of me with them, Cinnamon, and showing those exact things that you described.” And she's saying, "I can't believe it. I can't believe, look, I got these pictures." 

01:01:29 Giovanni: And one of the other guys had whispered because one of them was our informant, and that's how we found out about the conversation. And one of the guys leaned over and he says, "Listen, you need to tell your wife, she needs to delete those photos and stop bringing them out and showing them. Like that could cause us to like… I don't want the government coming around here. We don't want them to think that there's a threat perceived on him or anything like that. Like you got to tell your wife to delete the photos.”

01:01:51 Giovanni: But just the fact that these are people that I celebrated, I went to dinner with, I went to the houses, they made me breakfast. I have coffee with them. And now here I am removed from that party that I normally would have been at. And I'm still the topic of conversation, you know? And….

01:01:09 Cinnamon: Yeah. 

01:01:10 Giovanni: It's tough. It's tough.

01:02:13 Erin: The first thing I thought was, especially because more recently, the conversation of moral injury has been coming up. And that's the first thing I thought was you are clearly a beautiful human being who only wants the best for people. And I imagine even though you were playing a part that morally it must have hit you pretty hard. I think it would for me, so I don't want to put words in your mouth.

01:02:44 Giovanni: If it doesn't, Erin, we ourselves would be sociopathic predators, right? So for me, yeah, I mean, I would just be one of them. I'm no better than the criminals I'm investigating. If I didn't, what am I going to say? I could be a tough guy and I could sit here in this interview and say, “Nah, just part of my mission, part of what I signed up to do. That's what I do. I'm a military… you know, I did five tours overseas and I killed this many bad guys and it's what I do. It's what I do for my country.” That's not, you know, that's a broken person that says that to me. 

01:03:17 Giovanni: When somebody comes up to me and they say things like that, I know you're broken. Just listen, I'm no clinician, but I could pretty much tap you as you are a busted broken dude, you know, like to say things like that. To identify it, I think you're more of a professional. I think you're more of a better human being but it's hard, you know? I mean, growing up, but the way we grew up, I grew up in a lot, like I said, low income housing and projects. And I spent a lot of time there and my friends lived in apartments with broaches and barely nothing on the table, nothing in the refrigerator, you know, houses unkept.

01:03:52 Giovanni: So you can only imagine when I walk in to a place and I'm at a domestic and I'm backing up or somebody comes to back me up. They might not have… an officer might not have had the same growing up that I hadn't experienced. This might be the first time he's ever walked in before he got this job as an officer or first responder. First time he ever walked into some low income house where people have absolutely nothing to their name. You know, the only thing they have for dinner is water. That kind of poor. And then you walk in to back me up and then you start just making verbal comments of, "Oh, look at this shit hole. Who lives like this, this and that." And I'm going, "Well, you know what? I was one step away from living this way. I had friends that lived this way. So it becomes very offensive to me that you don't understand culture and you don't have any empathy for people.”

01:04:41 Giovanni: So that level of respect you have for somebody in the first responder world, that's what I'm talking about. To hold yourself accountable and live at a different… hold yourself to a different standard. When you walk in somewhere and you see somebody have a lot of empathy for people. Understand the culture and try to understand a culture. Don't just put this hard divide and I don't know what you… I don't even know the language you speak. You can shut up and sit down. You know, don't go over that attitude. You know, if that's the kind of person you are, go find another job some place. 

01:05:11 Giovanni: Well, maybe you're not cut out for this, but if you do and you constantly go into these places and you're seeing the way people live, you have to ingratiate yourself, right? But no, what can you do? What can you do to help them? Sit them down, talk to them, be a different kind of first responder. Listen, I get paid by the hour, right? So whether I finish this call and I go to another call, I know as soon as I clear and I clear and I go back to the street, I know they're going to put me in a role to grab another job.

01:05:41 Giovanni: So if I sit here and I listen to you for a few minutes and try to figure out why am I getting called to your house 10 times a week? You know, what's going on here? Instead of me bringing this deregulated attitude that I have and this crappy hard-nosed, you know, every time I come here, I got to lock you up. So let's go throw you in a jail block. Figure out why the system is broken in this home. I'm not a social worker, "Oh, you know what? Maybe, do you not want social workers coming to the job with you? Like a lot of these guys and girls say?” “Well, I don't want that with me.” “Then do your job. Hold yourself to a different standard, I think." But in doing so, prepare yourself about the things to come. Do your homework.

01:06:20 Giovanni: I often say, you have a license, right? I would imagine you have an office. Your license is probably hanging on a wall behind you someplace, or it's proudly displayed. Because I know when I go to the dentist and I go to the doctor or wherever I go to see a professional, a copy of the license is in the waiting room. A copy of the license is in the hall. And then a copy of the license is in the room where I got to go for my exam, my examination room. Everywhere I go, I'm reminded that this person is a licensed professional.

01:06:49 Giovanni: So if we want to consider ourselves to be professional and I don't want people sitting there like, you know, defund this and you know, looking down on me. Hold yourself to a different standard, you know? As if you're a licensed professional. You know, act as such, because you are. We're licensed professionals. I had a certificate given to me 37 years ago that was from the police academy that I was certified. You know where that went? Right where everybody else's went, in a cardboard box for 25 years. And then it's time for retirement go, "Hey, where did I put that thing? I wanna hang it on a wall." Now I want to hang all my certificates with confidence just on a wall. And now I'm looking for it. That's crazy. So what wait till that time to kick in.

01:07:31 Cinnamon: I'm thinking about how your retirement has been so different, and not that it's terminally unique, but it certainly is not what one expects it to look like when they go into law enforcement. So not only was it unexpected and sudden, it was not on your terms. And in reading the book, you realize there are some safety issues you were not well taken care of. And so in thinking about how that all went down, what did that do to your mental health? 

01:08:11 Cinnamon: Like the devotion that you gave to the job, the sacrifice. You know, I think that word sacrifice is so important. And most people who will thank you for your – don't even know what they're… what kind of sacrifice that looks like. But when you left and you had to, you know, have this new identity and not be able to have asked you about going back to Jersey and you're like, "No, not going to happen." But there's got to be some grief. And again, we go back to the moral injury of the betrayal trauma, as well as knowing that everybody that you are working with is finding out what was up. I can't even begin to imagine the entanglement of emotions.

01:08:53 Giovanni: Yeah, that was I don't know. That in itself was like being on a rocking rollercoaster, like this high speed just… I didn't know what was happening. What was happening, it was happening so fast. You know, I kind of anticipated it. I got to be honest, Cinnamon. There was part of me that said like during the case, I was like, "Man, how do I come out of this? This can't end well for me." But I was so far gone. See, I understand what addiction is. You know, I don't need to be an alcoholic or a substance abuse addict to understand my addiction is the job. I love my job. So when I was given these missions, I don't think there was a mission I said no to as part of my addictive personality, right? It's not because I thought I was the best for it. It's just presented to me and I took the job.

01:09:41 Giovanni: So when this was presented to me, it kind of fell in my lap and I never expected this case to be almost three years long. That particular one. There were other cases I was doing during the Charlie Horse case. That's not the only thing I did. I still did other cases along the way. So, but the Charlie Horse case, yeah, I got the feeling when I started getting too deep, when I started speaking for my boss, when I started taking high level meetings, when I started running my own crew and I started doing the work of a gangster. And then some of the scenarios I was walking into was like, I wasn't just a hang around. I was a guy where a boss of a family was introducing me to bosses of other families and I grew up knowing the mafia. 

01:10:27 Giovanni: I had a complete understanding of the structure of the mob and how it worked. And I was around gangsters my whole life. And I realized that's what helped me identify how far gone I was. Because again, I just had the chance to interview who is a legend in my life. I don't have legends that I look at, but there's an operative who did… he infiltrated the organized crime world, with the Genovese family and a Bonanno family, many years ago. And while he was infiltrating his family, I was playing in the backyards of the guys he was infiltrating.

01:11:03 Giovanni: So I had a really good understanding of how the mob work. You know, my friends, their fathers were hit men in the mafia. Our neighbors were part of the mob. So having that understanding, I realized during the case, like, "Oh, this isn't good." And of course, the story I write about in the book of the soccer game, that's when I knew when the gangster showed up at my daughter's soccer game because their kids were playing against my kids. That was like the defining moment of, “Oh, now this is not going to end well.”

01:11:34 Giovanni: So I crossed my fingers and prayed for the—I said my prayers to Padre Pio every night and just hoped for the best and maybe it'll end well. And I knew deep down it wasn't gonna, I think, pardon me. But I did my job. After it was over, they did a threat assessment and even after the job was over, I didn't think I'd get relocated. I didn't think. But what happened was one of my coworkers came to me and he says like, "This isn't going to end well. Like I'm an expert in this and this you're going to have to leave. Like these guys are going to come for you."

01:12:03 Giovanni: So the Hoover building decided they did a threat assessment and they came up to my house and spent a few days and I failed that threat assessment so bad. They were like, "Listen, we have a liability just leaving you here in the home another night. So we're suggesting that you guys leave tonight." I said, "You crazy. I'm not just going to drop everything here and leave my house. This is my forever home. You know, we have a life established here." So we decided to make the move. And after a while on the side of, "You know what, this is just the best thing. We need to relocate." 

01:12:32 Giovanni: Never thinking that I'd have to leave the job. I just thought, "Okay, maybe we'll go lay low for a little bit. They'll reassign me someplace and then things will be great." See, the problem is I'm a police officer. I'm a sworn law enforcement in the state of New Jersey, even though I’m undercover for the FBI. So for me to leave the state, my pension is affected by all this kind of crazy stuff. So yeah, when they put us into… they didn't put us into witness protection because there's no way I would take witness protection. It's an absolute joke. It's just a formality.

01:13:05 Giovanni: So my wife and I, both being armed, both being law enforcement, I know we could take care of ourselves more than… but I had a security team and then I had to start training my kids. My kids, I had to do ops plans for evac plans. I had to have a safe room in the house. They had to oversee it. They had to make sure I had all the equipment there that would keep me if somebody showed up. Because it wasn't just the Italian mafia. It was the trickle down effect of the other people I'd infiltrated. So you can only imagine, I'm old and there's an old movie, Warriors, and it's the street gang in New York and all these other street gangs that these guys didn't like. They chased them through the whole city in New York one night. So it wasn't like the mafia was just going to come and bomb my house like 1933.

01:13:46 Giovanni: I had to be careful of all the other cultures as I was outed on this, that who's going to come calling. So I had evac plans. My little guy and my smaller kids, we had to practice where they were going to hide at two o'clock in the morning at one o'clock in the morning. We had to let them pick their spot where they would hide for the FBI SWAT team to come. We had to pick a place to be air-vac-out, you know, to be air-vac-out in the middle of the night, where a helicopter… it's crazy. Now I realized, "Oh my God, what I did is… now I'm bringing my whole family in."

01:14:17 Giovanni: But now on top of that, I think, Cinnamon, it was, "Oh yeah, and by the way, yeah, you can't come to the office anymore." What? "It's just not safe for you. It's not safe. We have other cops. We have law enforcement here. We have support people here that we don't want to take the chance of anybody seeing you come into the field office. So we're just going to move you and we're going to keep you in safe house after safe house."

01:14:42 Cinnamon: So they said it's not safe for you here. But what they meant...

01:14:46 Giovanni: Not safe for us.

01:14:48 Cinnamon: ... was it's not safe for us for you to be here. So we're going to go put you on a little island and a house.

01:14:53 Giovanni: Yeah. The funniest part was when I was involved in an email threat and it was one field office to another and they had asked the field office to give me an office space. "Listen, he needs a place to do this. He's not doing any kind of enforcement. We just need a place for him to have a desk." And at least I could be around my people. I could be around, interact with some other people outside of my wife and kids. I love them dearly, but there's only so much time in the house...

01:15:17 Cinnamon: Kept you from isolating.

01:15:20 Giovanni: ...crazy life. So, there was an email sent to the other field office and this was a pretty aggressive field office in the country. And they said, "Yeah, we have this guy. He's got some active threats on him." The email back from that field office was, "Well, we don't think we want them here because that could be harmful and a threat to our personnel and our building. So we don't want them here. That's too much for us." So I basically was like a man on an island. So they told me to grow a beard. I hit a heavy bag for how many hours a day out of frustration, just worked out in the garage, never left. Couldn't leave my home.

01:15:55 Giovanni: Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. Rewind here. Am I a target? Cause all the guys I just put in jail are out on bail and they have a bracelet on them and they're at home. Now I'm at home. You start to get a lot of resentment. When you're alone, it's like isolation. You start to build a lot of resentment. And now that, that resentment turns into anger and that anger turns into what did I do wrong? Am I being punished? Are you turning on me? Is that... the hand, they're biting the hand that feeds me. What am I doing here?

01:16:26 Giovanni: So I had to go through that. Then on top of it being at home, it was like the Giovanni Gatto guy, that whole ring that I write about in the book. That guy started rearing his ugly head and before you know it, I wasn't pulling a driver anymore. And then this guy was living in my house. This stranger, this dangerous dude, this evil dude who hated kids and was just miserable. He had been living in my house for a while and it got ugly. It gets ugly real fast. 

01:16:55 Cinnamon: Can I just interject something? Because I think this is important. You are one of the miracles that you are still married to the woman that you rode this ride with.

01:17:11 Giovanni: Well, without a question. It's not easy for her.

01:17:16 Cinnamon: Right. And so, and without going down a whole different topic that deserves its own episode, your wife's father was one of the people who died in 9-11. So she's bearing her own resentment. You've got that vicariously, but there was still like, "But it wasn't happening to me until it was."

01:17:37 Giovanni: Yeah.

01:17:38 Cinnamon: And she's watching you go, "Oh, yeah."

01:17:41 Giovanni: Yeah. No [inaudible] America. And she saw it out. And she's not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but she would say to me, "Look, what are you doing? This is not going to end well." She saw. She had the foresight. I didn't. And she was like, "This is not going to end well for us." You know why? I just told you. I knew, but I didn't want to see it. I knew my world was collapsing. Not a mafia story. That's a first responder story.

01:18:06 Giovanni: My world is collapsing around me. So while your listeners are listening to my story today, their story, mine just happens to encompass the mafia and undercover work. But the life of a first responder is the world starts crumbling and cracking around you and you don't want to see it. And you refuse to see it. So now you're the problem, the spouse. You're pointing out my shortcomings. You're telling me I'm not a good parent when I give everything. I give everything up. And these things are not just my story.

01:18:35 Giovanni: This is every first responder story that happens like this if we allow it to. So she realized that, "Look, this is not going to end well. You got to stop doing this. I don't know why you just keep doing you. You're good at so many other things." She constantly remind me. I was a homicide investigator. I was a regular investigator. Anything I did in law enforcement, I was very good at. And she was like, "You could do anything else." I said, "But now you don't understand. This is my passion. If I was a traffic cop giving out tickets and doing radar. That's what I'd be passionate about. This is my passion. This is what I love to do."

01:19:07 Giovanni: She had that feeling of knowing what we know now after 9-11 and knowing the knowledge that she had about... she was very angry at the government. She was angry at the fact that her dad perished with the other victims that day. And she still hadn't healed from it. None of us did. She and I were there that day. I mean, it was... so we didn't just have the memory of losing. We were there.

01:19:31 Giovanni: I would say, that day, later that day, it wasn't even late afternoon before we were there that day. And so she had been carrying all that stuff and now she's warning me and I'm like, "No, no, no, this is Team America, man. I played for the right team. This is going to be fine. Don't worry about it." Cause I didn't want to hear it. I blocked it right out. And then again, now you can only imagine the conversations in our house.

01:19:58 Giovanni: Now I got to pick up my kids. I got to leave. I got to split my families up. I got to do this. I got... it's terrible. I got to go through this and it took a huge toll on us. Huge toll on our relationship and to this day, it still does a little bit. Because I just said earlier, I had my forever home. I had my New Jersey home. It was my forever home. I didn't need anything else. And we had a plan and my kids loved their home. Imagine having to just pick your kids up and just... they took a duffel bag.

01:20:28 Giovanni: They left all their toys behind and we're very OCD. So it looks like a model home. You walk in my house, you don't even believe that people live in our home. It's that clean. So it wasn't even like it was just... when we left, it was like, we were gone. And then my kids kept asking, "When are we going home? Like, this is fun. And I love living..." different safe houses we're on. I can say now. We were in South Carolina and Iowa, Palms for a month or so. And it's great because you feel like you're on vacation.

01:20:58 Giovanni: And it's great because they're trying to take care of me and give me what I need, right? To get my family ahold again, because that was it. "G, worry about you, worry about your family. You've done enough for us. You're a patriot. We appreciate this is all about you now putting your life back together." It's all bullshit in the end.

01:21:13 Erin: It's like, how do you expect me to do that?

01:21:15 Giovanni: And then it was like, "So what's your plan?" "I don't know. What is my plan?" "Well, you got to retire." "Wait, I gotta what? I'm in my 40s. What do you mean I got to retire? Well, I signed up for this job. Like I told you, you told me my life expectancy. I committed to this job to 65 because I want to live a long life. So I got to stay on this job mentally." And they're like, "Yeah, you have to consider retiring and you're eligible for it. Obviously what we have to do for you."

01:21:49 Giovanni: And then it was like, okay, well... so you can only imagine my chief of police says, "Well, listen, he's been tasked force out, I think, for 20 something years. He's not even a cop in my department. I pay him, but the guy doesn't... they don't even know him here." So, he said, "Well, why don't you guys just take him?" And the bureau was like, "No, he'd have to go into the applicant pool and he'll be," I have to go through a hiring process. So you can only imagine that me sharing that is… that feeling of being abandoned. And it's awful.

01:22:19 Giovanni: My feeling is the same feeling. Again, your listeners are listening to this. You get injured on the job and you bump your knee or you twist your finger and now you're out on workman's comp or something happens and the job tells you you can't come back. That feeling of abandonment, man, there's nothing worse. You talk about an angry elf, like you get angry real quick. And if you don't have those resources we talked about earlier and even having those resources, leaving me having the idea with the switch and the pinky ring and all that. It doesn't matter what you throw at it.

01:22:52 Giovanni: Even Superman has kryptonite, right? He has his weaknesses. And it will put chinks in your armor and life will just come at you at every angle and just keep hitting you and hitting you and hitting you until the armor starts to crack and then your emotional armor starts to crack. Your mental armor starts to crack and you will fall apart if you allow yourself to. But unless you're connected to the right people.

01:23:17 Giovanni: See when I was abandoned by retirement, now I was angry. But you took me while I was still active. You unplugged me and I sat home all day long. I didn't go any... I couldn't leave my house. So I sat there, watched TV, something I wasn't used to doing thousand channels around, but there's nothing I can watch because I don't even know what's flashing on the screen in front of me. I'm just in another place mentally. And I'm just flipping through channels, sitting there, waiting for another leaf to fall in my pool. There's no trees in my yard. I'm just looking for something to do.

01:23:51 Giovanni: So at that point it was like nobody's even calling me. You know what I'll do? I still have all my undercover phones. Because I had a bag of phones. I had burner phones and drop phones and I had a phone for you, one for Erin, one for this guy, one for that guy. And they were all labeled. So I literally took about maybe 12 or 15 phones and turned them on in front of me. I put them on a coffee table and just let them and I sat there. And I just sat and sat waiting for one to ring. Nobody's calling me.

01:24:19 Giovanni: My personal phone's not ringing. Nobody from the bureau is checking on me. Nobody from my PD is checking on me. Maybe two people because I was a mentor to them and they worry about me. And then maybe three at the most. And then finally the phone rang and it was one of my dirty phones. And I was like, "Here it is, here it is." So I get that feeling of the bubble and the heart starts racing. I feel like I'm operational again and I sit up and I couldn't be more happy. I had this big smile on my face and I finally feel fulfilled because I'm back in it.

01:24:49 Giovanni: And now I got it. Please, please don't let this be like one of those advertisement calls. I pick up the phone. I give them my best gangster hello. "Hey." "G." "Yeah, it's me." "Who's this?" Real aggressive and I can't wait. And he goes, "It's me. Nicky." That's the guy who worked undercover with me in the beginning of the case. He's an FBI agent. It's just Nicky. And he was probably into the field of undercover work, probably five years earlier than me.

01:25:18 Giovanni: And he goes, "What are you doing?" "Nothing." "What are you calling me on this phone for?" He goes, "Why do you have this phone and why is it on?" He goes, "They're not calling you, G. Nobody's going to call you. They're all gone. Nobody's calling you. Nobody's going to ring you. Nobody's going to threaten you. Take the phones, put them in a bag, bring them to your case agent, bring them to the field office, get rid of them." He says, "I'm here if you need me," and this and that. And he let me know. And that was tough. That was tough.

01:25:47 Giovanni: And because Nick did that, I think he was the catalyst for others. And here it is, Erin, right? Like I'm going through my own shit. You guys care about me, but after a while, it's like, "Man, I can't have... he's going through some bad stuff and I just can't get back to work. And I don't know what's happened to him," but people forget you. It's not that they forget you. It's just that they put you on a back burner.

01:26:10 Giovanni: And because of what Nick did, Nick reached out and said, "Hey, I just called G. This is what's going on. You need to call him, Cinnamon. And you need to call him, Vinny. And you need to call him, Erin. Reach out to him." And it was because of what Nick did. And then my team, they didn't realize I was suffering in silence. And then they started coming out of the woodwork. See, because we don't have that type of program. We just had a training program to tell us how to this job. The mental component wasn't there and the physical and emotional component was not.

01:26:41 Giovanni: So then they started coming out of the woodwork. And then they started checking on me. And one guy, he happened to be in the area where I was living at the time. And he said, "Let's get together for a drink." And he was a mentor and a senior guy. And he, I guess, as soon as you saw me, like I described earlier, you can't fool us. Right? He looked at me and he knew I was a broken human being. And he sat there and had a couple of drinks with me. I had to... small talk, regular conversations, and then it was time to go.

01:27:14 Giovanni: He parted his ways with everybody and said his goodbyes and said, "I'm going to walk G to his car." I parked in the same garage he parked at. So we're walking to the garage and he says to me, "You're not good." Say, "I'm not. I'm not good at all." So I had my moment of breakdown and he said to me, goes, "Look, did you call? Did you call our service department," which is the place where they did the mental health checks every six, nine months. I said, "No, no, I have an appointment, but nobody's calling me back." He says, "Well, you got to call him up. You gotta get down and go see him. You gotta go talk to some people."

01:27:45 Giovanni: I said, "Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna call him." "Make sure you call him." So I said, "I will, I will." So I call the next day and I call this place and I said, "Hey, it's G. I need to make an appointment to come in. I'm not doing really good." And I throw myself on a sword and I said, "I'm not doing well. I'm not feeling good. I got some shit going on at home." Okay. So I made an appointment. I drive to this secure location, which is outside of DC. And I get there and I walk in and nobody's there. It's on a Friday afternoon.

01:28:12 Giovanni: They squeeze me in and this young girl who's eight months pregnant, she's the only psychologist there and she's new. Right? So she's really not culturally competent. She just got this job and she's just getting broken in and eight months pregnant and squeezes me in, sees me real quick. We had this conversation and she says, "It's a regular conversation like we're having." She's like, "Oh, I'm eight months pregnant." Now I got four kids. I'm like, "Listen, this is what your body's going through. Is it your first one?" She's like, "Yeah, yeah, this is. It's so much I didn't expect this."

01:28:43 Giovanni: I talk her off a ledge, right? The whole time I'm there for an hour, hour and a half, she's like, "Oh," literally rubs her belly. And she says, "I am so, so glad you came here today. I feel so much better. And I'm grateful. I'm blessed." That's good. I'm glad you're good. I barely talked about my stuff and I jump in the car and I say my goodbyes to her and I said, "Oh my God, I forgot. I got to get my follow up appointment."

01:29:08 Giovanni: So I go back inside and receptionist says... I said, "Hey, I'm going to make my follow up appointment." She says, "Oh, no. You're not operational anymore. We don't see you guys unless... this was like a special thing for you." Wait, what? "Yeah. You're not operational anymore. So we don't provide services to you. You'll just have to go find your own therapist or go find whatever service. We don't do that unless you're operating. It's the rules. It's the government's rules. You have to be operational." So you can only imagine. I was like, "Okay. All right, thanks." So I had a six hour drive back. And just angry as anything like, "Oh, okay."

01:29:40 Erin: Thank you for your service.

01:29:41 Giovanni: Thank you for your service.

01:29:42 Erin: We're done.

01:29:43 Giovanni: Which a lot of... and I tell you that story because a lot of guys and girls feel that way. A lot of veterans feel that way. Thank you for your service. But when you get... now you tell me to call the VA. Call your local VA. If you need anything or anything, we're here for you. That's what our job is. We're here for you and how do you deal with that? So, again, don't get mad at the system. Invest in yourself. Have a plan. Have a plan of action. Have a plan for yourself.

01:30:10 Giovanni: If they screw me over, I got my Erins. I got my Cinnamons to the world. I got my Tom Coggins in the world. Who am I going to call? Okay. And I'm not going to call and say "Boo-hoo. This is what just happened, Erin. Can I get a-" Sometimes it's just, "Hey, Erin. How's everything in life? What's going on with you?" And it's just a 20 minute conversation. If I have a friend like that... if you have to go see somebody, you see somebody. I check on you and you check on me. That works for me.

01:30:36 Giovanni: I have dear friends that are clinicians and a lot of times I find we can relate to each other. And sometimes they'll just call the dump on me and it's reversed. I'm not billing them though. I probably should bill some of them, but I don't because you know what? That's what we do for each other. And it truly is having each other's back. I say it all the time angrily when I speak, "Don't wear these t-shirts that say I got your six if you don't mean it." And that's me. I can say that because I'm third generation.

01:31:03 Giovanni: I could say that because I lived this life and I've seen guys and girls betray each other on this job. But if you're going to have that mindset, and I know 95% of these people, if I was laying there and I needed life saving services, they would be there for me. I know. And that's the reason why I did the work I did. Cause I knew my backup team when I had them, if I was in a bad situation and I was going to... I'm in a life threatening, I know I had an army to come through that door and I'd be rescued. That's the people I want.

01:31:30 Giovanni: But in the times of darkness, we also have to be there for each other. Don't be afraid to get involved in the dirty marriages and pick a side and all this stuff. Don't wait for the world to crumble around somebody. Don't wait for the world to just... and your armor just to fall off of you completely before you have to help. Because it's too late. I rambled there. I'm sorry.

01:31:51 Cinnamon: No, you were just... I am mesmerized. I'm just listening.

01:31:58 Erin: I just was curious then. So you go from a place of feeling abandoned and alone... and part of me was thinking, I wonder if it's not so much that they forgot about you as much as their life continued to go on. Kind of like when someone passes away. I don't think we intentionally... Well, some people are just assholes, but I don't think we intentionally are trying, right?

01:32:24 Erin: As much as... like I still gotta get up and go to work and do my family stuff and do all that. But what is the nature of your relationships now? And I don't know the question and how you got into the conversation when you began speaking, but do you feel like you have a good support system now? Do you have fun? Do you feel connected? Do you feel supported? All of those things in a different capacity that maybe something that feels more authentic than maybe you've ever experienced before because of stepping into this new, another persona.

01:32:56 Giovanni: Yeah, after I retired, Erin, I sat around for a while trying to figure out what was going to do. And I thought, "Okay, now what? Where do I go from here?" I can't reach out. One of my daughter's godfathers is my partner for 10 years. He doesn't know where I live. That's how disconnected I am. My brother had been promoted. I had to sneak into the back of the room and watch my brother be promoted after I was relocated. And I broke all the rules to watch him be... because my father said to me, "I want you there. I don't care about this threat. I don't care."

01:33:32 Giovanni: And that's what my father is. A lot of times people hear me say if Al Pacino and Robert De Niro had a baby together, my dad. Looks like Robert De Niro screams and yells like Al Pacino. And he says, "Your brother's being promoted. I don't want to hear this bullshit about you and you hiding and all this. I want pictures of my sons. I want pictures of all of us there. And this is the thing where your uncle's there, your grandfather's gonna be there, you're all cops and you gotta be there." That's the best I could do is I'll hide in the back of the room and I'll just... so you can only imagine.

01:34:00 Giovanni: And I see my friends. It's like being behind plexiglass and not being able to interact with somebody, right? And I see this world of happiness happening in front of my eyes and something I should normally be a part of and I gotta get out. I get... the minute, the bagpipes start playing. I don't like bagpipes because of 9-11. So I got that wave of emotion. I want to leave. And the minute that the ceremony's over, I'm out the door. So I hid for a long, long time.

01:34:30 Giovanni: So my wife... I'll tell you a funny story. My wife said, "Look, we're in this new area. You got to get out and meet people." She said, "Yeah, but I meet a girl at the cinema and she says, my husband works for a power company. And if you're looking for work, yeah, give me a resume." I can't give you my resume. I'm not allowed to tell you anything about me. When you go to look me up, the guy doesn't exist. So there was a lot of that.

01:34:55 Giovanni: So my wife came over the [inaudible]. She's like, "You got to get out of the house and network. Why don't you drive? Like be an Uber driver? Just get out of the house, do something." So I did. And it's like a scene in a movie. They probably will make it into a series. But here I am. I said, "Yeah, you know what? I got to get out of the house anyway. So I'll do it." I get this Uber. I signed up to be an Uber driver.

01:35:15 Giovanni: And I got this huge SUV. So imagine Tony Soprano picking you up as an Uber driver. I got this big Escalade, like an SUV type thing. And I got this like... I got all the bells and whistles. You get in the car. This guy's got all this hardware on. I got pinky rings. I got jewelry. I got Frank Sinatra playing. "Forget the water. I got sparkling water for you in the cooler in the back. What do want? Hey, does your wife like coach bags? I got some coach bags in the back of the truck before you get out. I'll give you a couple of coach bags."

01:35:42 Giovanni: So I do this. And I go out and the first one was I pick up a guy from the Northeast. Couldn't have worse luck. Gets in the car. He's like... he's not even in the car. He opens the back door and he's very affluent, right? Affluent area. And he's like, "This really an Uber? Am I being punked here?" I drive this guy three miles. I dropped him off to another spa and he goes, "I'm picking my wife up at a day spa. We're here on vacation. This and that." I drop them off.

01:36:13 Giovanni: And he's like, "Man, it's a real pleasure meeting you. This is awesome." So I go and drop the guy off. 15 minutes later, I get another Uber and I go back to the spa. Him and his wife had to go to the airport and I dropped him off again. He said, "Oh my God, Giovanni, I can't believe I got you again." And she gets in a car like Northeast, Carmela Soprano. She's like, "Oh my God, this car is beautiful. This is, Oh my God. This is like..." I dropped them off at the airport. I pick up another girl. I drive her. She's in college. I'm giving her safety tips on how to keep herself safe the whole drive.

01:36:43 Giovanni: So two and a half hours later, I pulled into my house and my wife goes, "What are you doing home? I thought you were going to do this for a whole day." It's [inaudible]. I did the math. I said, "I'm not going to hurt anybody, but I did the math real quick. I realized the gas and tolls alone, I'm not making any money. And the people getting in my car, I make more money if I pull over to the side of the road and rob them at gunpoint. There's no money in this for me." And she's like, "You're looking at it the wrong way." So I gave that up.

01:37:11 Giovanni: What happened was, a friend of mine was in the mental health area and he was doing addiction and recovery. And he was asked to be part of a program as a clinical director. And he asked me... he didn't believe that these people were who they were because there was so much money changing hands in that world. The industries, they saw millions and millions of dollars. Right. And again, he's a cop. He's a retired cop. So he thought, "I don't know, these guys like fugazi. They're all like... they're fake. They're lying. They're corrupt. There must be something going on."

01:37:40 Giovanni: So I came out to vet them. And they seemed like good and honest guys. They were out in the end. But man plans, God laughs. It was a God thing. And God was looking out for me. He just put me where I needed to be at that very moment with my friend. And then it was... I got into the world and they were like, "So what do you do now?" And I have an understanding of mental health and having everything we talked about here on the show. I used it and I applied. They have great programs, but how can I enhance treatment? And I got into doing that. And then before you know it, there lies my new legacy.

01:38:13 Giovanni: For the last eight... well, six years, seven years, I've been developing first responder veteran programs and working in a field of treatment and recovery. And it's been rewarding for me because selfishly, yes, I make my living, but it's good for me. I tried other things. After the Uber thing, I went overseas and I worked with some of my friends from other countries and we were working for private corporations, stealing girls back from human trafficking. And it was very, very exciting. I could tell you.

01:38:42 Giovanni: But it was that life again. I dipped my toes in the water again and realized this is not going to work out for me because the addiction, right? You're tapping your arm and I do it all the time. It's a fix. And I quickly realized I was good at it, but I was doing some crazy stuff. I mean, we were going to other countries and third world countries and stealing these girls back and it was crazy stuff. I couldn't put my family through that again.

01:39:06 Giovanni: And the field of mental health is good for me. As you guys know, it's... or girls know, helping others is a way for us to process our stuff too. And gee, they have a word for that, isn't it? Like peer support, right? 

01:39:24 Erin: The whole program is a [inaudible]. 

01:39:26 Cinnamon: I tell people all the time, like I didn't start doing this work because I had this idyllic life and I was just curious how the other half lived. There's some relatability and oftentimes we're just a few steps ahead. And it's kind of like, I can teach second grade math as long as I know up to fourth grade math. So, we're all in this together and that's why... 

01:39:54 Giovanni: And we're all in it for our personal reasons, I think, Cinnamon, right? There's something that other than a paycheck that drives us. You pick this area for yourselves and your licensed clinician and you pick this area for a reason because that's your calling. It's what you understand. You don't need to be a first responder to treat them. But you need to have an understanding. Don't let them get away with too much either. I've seen that in the world of recovery.

01:40:16 Giovanni: Everybody thinks... and again, people disagree, but I joined up with a first responder only program and I saw the way that they were running it. It's not that the concept is wrong. It's just the way they were running it. First responders are very, very controlling and manipulative people. That's who we are. I can go into a session with you in a private room, and you can... you know?

01:40:39 Giovanni: At the end of it, I am just trying to manipulate you and I don't want you to see who I really am. We go down a whole rabbit hole about that, but they're hard to treat. So when you give them their own space and tell them, "Listen, we treat other patients here and other addicts, but you're a special kind of addict. We give you your own programming and your own place to sleep where it's safe." Now I agree with that. And I agree that I would never put a first responder, especially law enforcement in a room with somebody that might be Antifa or have some crazy ideology.

01:41:12 Giovanni: And again, I would never want to put them in a position where they're in a room with an addict who has a career history being arrested by police and can harm each other. But there's something to be said, going back to what the professionals program. And recently I had the pleasure and the honor of a developer program for a facility that already had a working professionals component to it. And they were doctors, licensed clinicians, airline pilots, NFL players, all this great stuff that they had. And these were people of professions.

01:41:44 Giovanni: So they all had a common goal to get better and get back to work. You didn't have you... there's plenty of other places to treat the civilians that are going through mental health crisis and addiction from the street. But there's something to be said with veterans and first responders where they need that safe space and that empathy that we talked about, I witnessed it. One of the first cases I ever brought into treatment. 

01:42:05 Giovanni: I had this salty military style. He was a veteran. He was a retired veteran, but a law enforcement officer and he was just, you know, hated gang bangers. He had some racial barriers. He was a white guy. And he bumped in with a truck driver from the South, black gentleman. And by the end of their treatment program, he was a former gang banger. A much older gentleman now with a lot of regret in life and they shared a lot by the end of it. 

01:42:35 Giovanni: They were sharing each other's phone numbers and you would think that they were long lost brothers at the end of it. And that was the light bulb. Yep. That was the light bulb that went on for me. And I was like, see, this is what our first responders need. They need to hear that what you're going through is just as bad as… addiction is addiction. Trauma is trauma, right? You might've had one bad car accident or lost a loved one and that was enough to trigger you to go into substance use for decades, and you're seeking help now. And versus that responder, and he's the same thing who was rinse and repeat.

01:43:09 Giovanni: Problem is he saw more horrific things. So we developed a program that yes, they do group together, they do their individual. But now we do a first responder group and a veterans group where the stuff, the ugly stuff that we talk about, and the ugly stuff that we've seen and witnessed, and the most gruesome things, we can at least share with each other and not have to expose other people that have never ever, ever, even seen anything like that on TV, or smelled those things or been triggered by those things.

01:43:36 Giovanni: So there was, you know, they had their own programming… but that's where I found my passion. I'm to the point now where it drives me so much that I say people, they hold me on this pedestal for doing the work I did as a police officer and an undercover. But I truly believe the work I do now is my legacy. This is my true legacy. This is what I want to be known for. But my path just brought me to where I am now. So I can't question it.

01:44:02 Cinnamon: You had to go through what you went through to get to where you needed to be to find your purpose. You couldn't do the work the way you do the work had you had that idyllic life leading up to it. Like people with curiosity, they don't do what you do, right? So that's me and that's the way we make sense of this. And I love how it's… an addict is an addict. And I think a lot of times some of the programming downfalls is that we… it's not even a pedestal. It's like, “Oh, you're in law enforcement, you're military, you're a first responder. You are above doing what an addict would do. So we're gonna treat you differently.” Whereas, like no, you guys are probably even smarter about doing the shady shit to get around whatever. Because you have the insider information.

01:45:08 Giovanni: You're giving them a pass to be an addict, right? In a way, if I'm following you, you're a victim of addiction.

01:45:17 Erin: You're terminally unique.

01:45:18 Giovanni: You're terminally unique, right?

01:45:20 Cinnamon: Yeah. You're a good guy. Those are the bad guys over there in that other wing where like you said, you just need that space to talk about the exposure.

01:45:34 Giovanni: And it's up to us. It's up to us now to provide those platforms, to provide those channels, the resources. It's all about resources. You have to give these guys and girls the resources along their path. And while they're traveling down this path and they're going through life, professional and personal, and they have these obstacles, what are you doing to get around it? We help people everyday. It drives me crazy. We show up to domestic dispute, we show up to scenes, and we give people great advice, right? And we just tell them, and we're great. We're great at, oh my God, you know, tara ra ra ra ra ra, they're screaming at you, right?

01:46:06 Giovanni: And then the first responders say, "Hey, woah! Slow down. Take a deep breath." We're great at giving advice. But we suck at taking our own advice. Sometimes, it’s just take a pause. Just take a nice deep breath, and let's think about how we're going to do this. Whether that's your marriage, whether that's work, whether it's dealing with a coworker you don't want to be partners with or somebody on your squad, whether it's a supervisor you hate, whether it's a sucky job, a detail that you have and you don't want to have it, get yourself out of it. Come up with the plan. Have a plan of action. Find the resources you need. Be resourceful, be vigilant, and be resilient.

01:46:43 Giovanni: They give us resilience training, but half the time we don't listen to it. You know why? Because it's a check the box training. That's all it is. I encourage everybody to go down rabbit holes, find out a little bit more of what you can do for yourself. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not broken. It's the job. This job takes its toll on you. You're not going to be the candidate you were. You can be pretty damn close after 30 years. It's like working out in gym, right? When you haven't done a damn thing and Christmas comes and you go, right, January is it. I'm going to go back to the gym. I'm going to start working out. I'm investing in myself.

01:47:17 Giovanni: And then you go to the gym and you got blisters on your hands. You're like, "Oh, that's my excuse not to go to the gym anymore. These blisters hurt. I don't want to deal with these blisters." Well, they're blisters of life, right? You need to keep working at. And then looking at even weightlifters hands, look at everybody that goes to the gym like a gym rat. Their hands are calloused because it's constant. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. They're investing in themselves. They're doing what… they're putting into work for themselves, for their best. And along the way, don't question it. I realized it took me a long time, you know.

01:47:48 Giovanni: My brother unfortunately took his life. And, you know, I can question it. I could get mad. I could be sad. I could, but you know what? I just look up and okay, I don't know why this happened. I don't know why, but again, being third generation first responder, that's a whole story in itself too, for another show where I realized a lot of stuff was hidden from us.

01:48:09 Giovanni: I mean, could you imagine here I'm working in the area of addiction and recovery and mental health. And then, you know, I have, again, Sunday Gravy with my brother. And days later, I'm getting a phone call that my father's telling me, he's out of town, he's gone at a young 30 something year old man. 3-month old child, you know, never… and my last conversation with him was things are great.

01:48:32 Giovanni: Gee, does that sound familiar to you listeners? When you're talking to your partner or you're talking to some coworker and they're going, you know… we always go to the funeral and say, "Oh, such a shame. I knew something was up. Saw it coming." Did you really? So you didn't want to say anything. You really had my six though, right? And we all sit down, we'll mourn you, and we'll do the flag ceremony, and we'll do all this happy send off. But really, really? Did you see it? And you just didn't say anything. I'm not putting that on them, but you knew something was broken, right?

01:49:02 Cinnamon: They've trained you to have each other's six in a very particular way. And your training is so extensive. So now, no. They're not equipped to have your six in this other way. I would say it's not even a desire issue. It's more of a like, what the hell do we do? Right? Like I've seen lists that say, you know, call them, check on them, let them know what resources are. And I'm like, you call, you check, you give them the resources. You still can end up at their funeral.

01:49:41 Giovanni: Right. And I saw that with my own brother. He knew there were resources for him. And talking to my parents later on, there were clear markers there. You know, very clear. Not to me, because I didn't know it was that imminent. But yeah, and then to find out that there was abuse and there was substance use there, and all these things. And there was a moment where I got angry and went, "But you know I work in this industry now."

01:50:08 Giovanni: But again, Cinnamon, I can't get mad, right? You know, I'm more than… you said something earlier like, yeah, we have the funeral. I have to get past it. I'm still here on earth, but he's gone. He's always going to be with me and I'll always have him with me. But to have my children see that, to have my young son walk up to the casket and put his hand on my father's back, and to watch my father break down and have my little guy walk up to him like a strong little kid and just pat him on the back. And then I have to explain this to my kid.

01:50:43 Giovanni: I’m trying not be graphic, but it's obviously visible. You can't hide… all the makeup in the world can't hide a hole in the head. You can't hide it when you're laying in a casket. So these little kids have to process it. So I realized a lot about what I preach now, and that goes to why I do the work I do. Open communication. It's what I promote. And I make it aware, but let me just say this, I promote this stuff and I talk about how to bring awareness. I am in no means fixed myself, right? We're all the work…

01:51:14 Erin: Neither are we.

01:51:15 Giovanni: We’re all a work in progress. So for your listeners, I don't want everybody to think, well, how do I get to where these people are? I'm not there. How do we get there? No, we're never there. But would you put a band-aid on a gunshot wound? No. So you just need to do what you have to do to carry on, to recognize it, preventative measures, maintenance, just like everything else.

01:51:38 Giovanni: When your car is not running right, you get it to the shop and you get the oil fixed, you get the brakes checked. You have to do the same for yourself. It's just basic value. I've experienced this job in every way, shape, facet there is. I mean, you know, to ruining relationships to suffering with substance abuse to watching my friends suffer to losing my friends to substance abuse, literally drink themselves to death, showing up to so many different things, losing my brother. I can get mad all day long and I can woe-is me or I can use it and pay it forward and pass it on. You know, and I think that's what I'm trying to do now.

01:52:14 Cinnamon: You know, I've taken a couple of different things that I've heard and put together this whenever I face any kind of adversity or I watch something happen that I don't feel is just, I go back to what I call my original conversation. If I'm having a conversation with God who's like, hey, if you want to go down and ride this ride, I got a place for you. And I'm like, oh, sign me up. But while I'm down there, can I learn this lesson? Sure, I got you. And so it always comes back to what was the lesson I asked for, right?

01:52:59 Cinnamon: Like, how do I connect this to something bigger than my pain or somebody else's pain, or this one event? How is this tying together? And everything that you have talked about today, the overarching theme that I've heard is this dispelling the myth of the terminally unique. You talked about being on a scene and telling somebody to take a deep breath when they're starting to panic because you know that works. And yet we can have folks who are like, "So you want me to breathe? Because how's breathing going to make my situation better?"

01:53:42 Giovanni: Can I answer that real quick?

01:53:43 Cinnamon: And yes.

01:53:45 Giovanni: What I share with everybody is the worst call you can ever get is an officer needs assistance call, right? Because they're literally fighting for their life somewhere in the city. And the first time I ever received one, and everybody laughs because they relate to this. The first time I received an officer needs assistance, I was up at the city line. You know, arterial runs through the city Broadway and I'm up on the 50s. I'm in maybe a higher 50s, 60s street. And a call came in and as you know, you work with our first responders, that call comes in, it's garbled, it's screaming.

01:54:15 Giovanni: You know, the minute it comes over the air, that person is in distress and fighting for their life, right? It's garbled, they're screaming and then the dispatcher is trying to clear the air. So you can only imagine every responder in the city wants to get there as fast as you can. So you hear first on Broadway. I throw my lights on, right? And I start racing, lights and sirens as fast as I can. I would run a busload of nuns off the road if I had to. I’d run kittens over if I had to, just to get to that officer needs help. And I come in and I get the first in Broadway, right? From 60th to 1st takes me what I feel is seconds. 

01:54:54 Giovanni: And I come in, my tires, SkiHut, best sliding skid. I jump out. And I'm the first one on the scene and I start screaming, you know, first one scene, where is he? Where is he? You know, and all this commotion's on the radio, license sirens over the air, total chaos. And the dispatcher says, where are you? I said, I'm here, first in Broadway. I don't see anybody. There's nobody here. Where is it? Find out the location. What building is he in? No, it was 51st, and bro, I told you I was at 60th.

01:55:26 Giovanni: I could have been there in split second, let alone minutes. And because I was so deregulated, I didn't take a breath. If all I did was… when I heard that officer needs assistance, and take a deep breath, everything would have been like fresh cold water coming in. I would have received everything. I would have heard it differently. But because I put that death grip on the steering wheel, white knuckled it all the way down through on all these intersections, almost killing myself and other people and I put… I never breathe. I never took one breath probably to get down to that scene.

01:56:03 Giovanni: That's why you take a deep breath. That's why people go, how you… tell me take a deep breath? Yeah. Next time you have an argument with your spouse, before you respond, take a nice deep breath and then respond. See how that goes. See if it's a different conversation. 

01:56:17 Erin: Reset your nervous system. 

01:56:20 Giovanni: I constantly have to remind myself to do that because you will just jump and lunge and just attack as opposed to nice clean breath. Clears your air, clears your thoughts, resets our system.

01:56:37 Cinnamon: If we're designed to eat and then excrete it, we got to appreciate that we are brilliantly designed. Why would we not have our own internal regulatory system? And then why would we be so arrogant to think that as humans we don't need to use the tools that we were born with? We're going to go find this outside external thing. No, I got it right in here.

01:57:10 Erin: Well, Giovanni, first of all, I loved you before I met you. I knew that you had a huge heart when Cinnamon met you in Ocean City, I believe it was. I just felt like I was there too, even though I wasn't, which was very disappointing. And I know that you are up to big things. And so obviously I want to definitely plug Giovanni's Ring, which now that you are officially here, you might already be on our website. There's so much depth in that story. And I think that it's important that people get to see it too and get to see that side, the details of it. Obviously you have the podcast. Was that like a one season kind of thing? Is that still going?

01:58:00 Giovanni: No, we just started season two of Inside the Life. Yeah, Inside the Life. We just started filming season two. We actually won right out of the gate. Top 5% of all podcasts. We won Gold Awards last year. Believe me, I was floored myself. So yeah, insidethelife.org.

01:58:16 Erin: Well, I’m not. 

01:58:20 Cinnamon: I can totally understand why. I am sure that you… yeah. We could go for another four hours if time was enough.

01:58:29 Giovanni: And I'm glad to hear you say that. I appreciate your kind words, Erin. And I wanted the book… I didn't write it to say, look at this cool stuff I did. I want it to be a teaching thing. Bob Delaney wrote a book called Covert. He was on the cover operative. And I don't read police books and I don’t watch cop shows. You know, I lived a life as a criminal, so I didn't want to be tainted by that.

01:58:47 Giovanni: But Bobby, Bobby's book, he was raw and he inspired me to kind of… the way I wrote the book. Then of course, I wanted it to be a teaching component. I didn't want to write my story. But any good publicist will say to you, “Listen, it's a mafia story. You have to tell the mob story. You want to write a teaching book, go be a teacher.” You know, that's kind of response I got. So I'm glad to hear you say that. Because my intention was to have that depth. So you might have to scratch the surface a little bit to see what I'm trying to get out when you do read the book. I did write it to be a fast read.

01:59:16 Giovanni: I never thought I'd write a book. I figured at best a coloring book. But I appreciate the accolades and the support. And I truly, I appreciate everything you're doing and the two of you are something special. The mission that you're on and the mission we're on together is just encouraging everybody to come out, do these conferences, come to these places where just get out, you know, just be in the ear. Just come and listen, right. You say that in the room sometimes, just come and sit and and listen, you know, you don't have to tell your story.

01:59:46 Giovanni: Nobody wants to know. You don't have to get up. Nobody's going to make you a speaker at these conferences. Bring your wife, bring your husband, bring your spouse along. There's so many good programs going on now that we're evolving this family component. And you'll see, when you listen to somebody else's story, like ours, like we sat here and we were raw. And you'll realize everything that we're experiencing, you are too. You're not suffering in silence.

02:00:10 Giovanni: This is what partners job is. And again, you just have to prepare for it and find the right network and right resources. This peer thing that we're doing is amazing. And I think we're on a trajectory where it's going to get even bigger. I think we're getting the money behind it now and the programming behind it now where, you know… and we just have to be careful because we can't let it get too tainted, right? You can’t poison a well. So there's a lot of bad actors, a lot of wolves in sheep clothing out there. So you just have to avoid them as well.

02:00:41 Cinnamon: Our friend has a saying that we've kind of hijacked. And it's, “There are too many of us to ever feel alone.”

02:00:48 Giovanni: That's great. Great saying, a great thought.

02:00:52 Erin: So is there any place else that our listeners should know about to follow you, to find you, to support you?

02:01:00 Giovanni: Social media. Social media is out there. I'm always… you can contact me. Social media is… I have Instagram. I do all that stuff. I know I suck at it. I'm terrible at it. I'm not one of these guys where, “Look what I'm doing today,” but I'm out there. If you are struggling and I will steer you in the right direction, I truly will. I'll go out of my way to find somebody help if they need it. I'm rebranding and reprogramming and looking for new places to work with to develop a new program for first responders and veterans.

02:01:31 Giovanni: So I'm always looking to collaborate with somebody and just keep the message out there. So I have a website, giovannisring.com. The book is available there if they want one signed. And social media, I'm very open to social media and people can reach out to me. And, like I said, it's family too. It's not just us. So when you're considering the things that we talk about, please consider our family. The ones who love us the most, they're waiting for us at the end of our journey here. You know, brothers and sisters on the job, they'll always be there. You leave the job with a handful of friends, close friends, you know, sad to say that. I've made more friends since I retired.

02:02:05 Giovanni: Since I've been doing this work. Because the different… it's a mindset, this different mindset that I live in now. I love my first responder community. I love them to death. I grew up in it. I literally was born into this, and it's all I know. And that was my biggest fear was to lose contact with the police departments and first responders – I'm sorry. Can you still hear me?

02:02:25 Cinnamon: Sure can.

02:02:26 Giovanni: I know I lost my camera. Well, do you need my camera on?

02:02:30 Cinnamon: We can live without it. And maybe this is exactly how we wrap up the idea that you've made more friends since retiring. That made me think of is when we started this conversation, we were talking about deception and how there's even in our relationships and other people that you meet since retirement, we don't get to know your name. But a name is something that you got from your parents and the government had it for a while. They gave you a number to go along with it.

02:03:09 Cinnamon: But at the end of the day, I would say that there's probably an opportunity for you to be known more authentically, more intimately, and more realistically since retirement. And so I'm cool with not knowing the name on your birth certificate because I feel like I get to know your heart in a way that we wouldn't have had we met before you retired.

02:03:39 Giovanni: Yeah, there might have been a chance we never met.

02:03:43 Cinnamon: Yeah. You could have been dead.

02:03:47 Erin: I don't think I would have met any of the people because I never imagined my life would be where it is today.

02:03:51 Giovanni: Right. If you ask me, not in a million years, like I said, I used have the mentality, dead or in jail by 25. So your words carry so much weight, Cinnamon. And I appreciate that because where I'm at today is, you know… and don't question it, you know? Man plan – I can't say it enough, “Man plans. God laughs.” You know, we think we have it all figured out. Sometimes you just gotta surrender. And it's tough. Our people don't like surrender. We don't like that word surrender, it's a dirty word. But when it comes to our personal wellbeing and our family's wellbeing, we step in and we take a bullet for anybody, but we also have to surrender when the time is right.

02:04:04 Cinnamon: Yes, and to me, surrender is often my theme of the year. It has been for a decade. And for me, it's not so much about relinquishing control as much as it is being in flow. Like being part of being in the flow of what's happening. And that just creates ease in my life. I've always...

02:04:51 Erin: Be the water, not the rock.

02:04:53 Erin: Right. I'm always encouraging people to surrender in the most beautiful ways. Well, Giovanni, thank you so much. Oh, there he is. I can't wait to meet you in real life. If you're not a hugger, tell me now because I will hug you.

02:05:09 Giovanni: I'm a hugger.

02:05:11 Cinnamon: Just mentally prepare for the ambush. We will wash our hands prior.

02:05:17 Giovanni: Yeah. We'll see each other in the coming days. I look forward to it. I really appreciate the opportunity. I love the platform. I love what you're doing. Please don't stop what you're doing. It's fantastic and it's well needed and well deserved. So thank you very much.

02:05:33 Erin: We won't stop.

02:03:34 Cinnamon: You're very welcome.

02:05:35 Erin: We love it. Thank you.

02:00:18 Cinnamon: I look forward to many, many more conversations. In fact, I've already written down a few things that I need to call you about.

02:05:44 Giovanni: Call me. Text me. Call me. I don't sleep. So you know, anytime.

02:05:49 Cinnamon: Yeah, I usually text you. So making the actual phone call, typically I feel like I need people's permission to actually ring the phone. So, yeah.

02:05:59 Giovanni: No, this phone is on. So like I said, reach out at any time.

02:06:03 Cinnamon: All right.

02:06:04 Giovanni: All right, ladies. 

02:06:05 Erin: All right.

02:06:06 Cinnamon: Thank you so much. This has been amazing.

02:06:08 Giovanni: Thanks so much.

02:06:12 Erin: Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of After the Tones Drop. We've been bringing you some real mental health insights and we'd love to hear what you think. If you're enjoying this show, take a minute and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. And don't forget, share this podcast with someone who might benefit from it. A big thank you to Whole House Counseling, and Novus Home Mortgage for sponsoring today's episode. And a special shout out to Rob Maccabee for writing and producing our show's music.

02:06:42 Erin: Just a quick reminder, After The Tones Drop is here for informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for medical or psychological advice. If you're in need of help, please reach out to a mental health professional in your area. For more resources, head over to afterthetonesdrop.com and check out our resources tab. We really appreciate you being a part of this community. Thanks for listening and sharing.