The Real Sopranos | FBI
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Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. I would have made a damn good criminal. I would have made a real good stand-up guy. I'm capable of doing the deed. I'm a capable guy. I just chose to be on the good guy's side. This is True Spies. Episode 77, The Real Sopranos. To be an effective undercover or effective operative, you have to have a certain level of addiction towards adrenaline. My thing was, I loved the challenge because I wanted the adrenaline.

I was attracted to it for the adrenaline. Meet Giovanni Rocco, or if you were moving in mafia circles in the 2010s, you might have known him as Giovanni Gatto. As an FBI agent, he spent years deep undercover, attempting to penetrate one of the oldest Cosa Nostra crime families in America. It was a journey that pushed his skills as an agent to the limit, and sometimes past it.

And put him and his family in the Mafia's crosshairs. You know, your true identity is ever revealed. It could jeopardize the investigation or it could place you in danger of being harmed or killed yourself. And in some Mafia circles, it doesn't take much to provoke deadly violence. I'll give you an instance I heard. You know, one guy, a Philly guy, he whacked out a guy in his crew because the guy kept sneezing at dinner. Oh, shit!

And he had allergies and this sociopath, this psychotic boss that was the crew chief, he said, I can't have it. The guy keeps sneezing like this. You know, I can't have this. This guy's got to go. You know, and that night the guy went. So what does it take to survive in deep cover? And what toll does it take on those left behind? For me, I'm third generation police. So I started training right out of the gate, right out of birth, I guess. I started training for the world ahead in law enforcement.

I grew up in a city called Bayonne, New Jersey, just outside of Manhattan. Both my grandfather and my father were law enforcement, so I was familiar with it. Back then, Bayonne was the kind of place where people knew each other and each other's business. The way I describe it to people and to give them the overview, it's very Brooklyn-esque. What the neighborhoods in Brooklyn used to be in the old ages is how I grew up in Bayonne. They say it takes a village, and Bayonne was that village to raise people.

In the neighborhood, both sides of the law were all around. Giovanni's father, as a police officer, emphasized the importance of doing things by the book. But on the street, the Cosa Nostra weren't shy about showing off their power and influence.

Even down to your local Italian restaurant.

I worked in Italian restaurants growing up where I learned how the bookmaking operations worked and a lot of the other rackets, like everything that fell off the back of the trucks, they would then flip it into the neighborhoods and folks from the neighborhood would get it. Call it a service to the community, but always with a catch. Maybe you didn't have enough money to buy a brand new TV. Maybe you bought one that fell off the back of a truck.

Maybe you didn't have enough money to go to the bank and take a loan, so some people were forced to go to the mafia and go to those bosses and take shy loans, which are loan shark loans. A lot of people did that.

You see where this is going. They would put so much interest on it, you could never pay it back. You know, you're so desperate for that loan, they controlled you. And Giovanni could see the lure of the other side. I saw a lot of different things growing up. I was hanging out with the wrong people. I was exposing myself to dangerous people purposely. I did that because I wanted to get a rise out of my father. I wanted to go against the grain. Pretty much just because it pissed my father off. For example...

I hung out with kids in my neighborhood, their dads were, or their uncles might have been a connected guy. You know, it was nothing for me to be playing in a capo in an organized crime capo's backyard. Capo, a mafia captain. And then when he came home, he'd kick us all out of the yard. I knew John DiGiglio was the boss running everything at that time, and I was exposed to him on a regular basis. So I had all that knowledge of this, and I identified with it very quickly.

For a future undercover agent, it would turn out to be invaluable training. The cultural knowledge to blend in convincingly.

to understand the rules instinctively. If I was playing stickball in the middle of the street and I had a soldier that I knew lived right around the corner from us. A soldier in the mafia, that is. And he came over and parked his Cadillac. The minute he pulled that car on the street, it was game over for us. We had to go find somewhere else to play. It wasn't said, but you did it out of respect. God forbid you hit that car. So you knew how to navigate. You knew when something was going to pop off. Giovanni made a key decision after he left school.

to follow the family tradition and join the police force. And he made a good street cop. But then his supervisor suggests that he might want to try helping out with some undercover investigations as well. He doesn't get any formal training. In his department, undercover is done the old-fashioned way, on instinct. Natural ability, plus some tips handed down between officers. But he does well, attracts the notice of the department chiefs,

And someone suggests that this could be a specialism for him, a calling. And that maybe he should apply for a very particular course that the FBI run. People call it "The School", the Bureau's elite training center for every aspect of undercover work. The place you go if you're heading undercover for months or years among the most dangerous people in the world.

And in my realm, in my wheelhouse, this was it. This was the major leagues. I didn't want to be on a small team. I wanted to be on the majors. And this is what I needed to do that. I just knew with this training, I could do so much more. But you need more than ambition to get in. You go through a battery of psychological tests. They do a background check on you. They do personal interviews with you to see if you have what it takes. And then they'll send you for it. And if you pass, then you make it into the class and off you go.

Once in, people warn him to be ready for a grueling experience. It's not going to be easy. It's not going to be easy at all. And it was not easy. We had other agencies and other establishments come and tell us, you guys are crazy for doing this kind of stuff.

The training starts by recreating the psychological and physical exhaustion of maintaining a false identity, even when your life depends on it. It took my previous training before I had the FBI school and injected steroids into it. The first thing they're going to do is strip you down. Some of the candidates, they don't even make it past the first few days. They'll deprive you of sleep and then they'll just strip you physically of everything you have in you. And then they'll begin to train you.

Because it mimics that extreme stress of having to negotiate under extreme pressure. You know, your body's pumping adrenaline. You're not negotiating in, you know, a corporate environment.

trades on Wall Street. You're in some crack den or sitting with some sicarios or some heavy hitters. So you have to learn how to do these things under extreme pressure. So they give you the proper training to prepare you conducting any kind of operation. You know, whether it's white collar, whether it's criminal, whether it's a murder for hire, they teach you all the things that you need to know. Skills such as identifying, ticks and tells, the subconscious signals we all transmit through our body language.

Signals about our true feelings of fear or weakness. Maybe I would have a pen and I would tap that pen on my hand or something. In my world, if I read you and I sit there and I'm watching you tap, it's just why are you tapping? You know, if I start talking numbers and I start talking prices for whatever I'm moving with you and the business we're doing, and that price is not the number I could tell by your tick and tell. Which could blow your cover. Heart rate variability is everything. Breathing is everything, you know.

And everybody's been in a situation where you have that jackrabbit heart, it's racing at a million miles a minute and you can't control it. And next thing you know, your voice gets elevated, your voice starts to crackle, you start to stutter. Well, if you just take a deep breath and you slow your speech, you can think clearer, regulate yourself, and then you can actually have a full conversation without saying something stupid that you should not say. At one point at the school, students are required to complete a role-playing.

enter a recreation of hostile terrain wearing recording equipment and avoid being discovered. Giovanni, as an under-trained officer, feels he has something to prove, so he starts the exercise.

I knocked on the door and you know first thing is what do you want nobody's here and I said well you know it's me I'm Giovanni and these two guys who were five feet wide and you know probably six feet tall they pulled me into the room they started searching me grabbing at me poking and prodding at me trying to find searching my this and searching that two guys searching you looking for a wire a wire that you are wearing give a matter of seconds before they find what they're looking for think fast

My street training kicked in and I kind of pushed back a little bit. And I said, okay, you guys want to get into it. What are you looking for? Well, we're making sure you're not wearing anything. You don't have anything. I ain't no weapons and no, you know, recorder. What are you talking about? You want to search me? What do you think? You know, I'm here for business. You want to get into it? Let's get into it. I don't care. I'll pull my pants down in front of you.

So here I am, I'm trying to take my pants off. And these two guys panicked. And they were like, no, no, no, no, just pick your pants up. What are you doing? No, you guys want to listen? I've been in county before. I've been locked up before. Let's take my pants off. So thank God, because I did that, they pushed back a little bit and I was able to survive it. And I got out of that situation. And then afterward, I guess they figured that I didn't have the device on me because they didn't find it.

After the exercise, there's a debrief. And his instructor is skeptical. She accused me of taking off my body and hiding it somewhere before I went in. She goes, "Can you produce it right now off of your body? Where is it right now?" I said, "Well, I can produce it right now. Just let me reach into my pants." And it was hidden in a very peculiar spot on my body and where these guys didn't want to go. And of course, I pulled it out of my pants later on and I produced it. She was very mad.

The ability to brazen things out would be useful later, but only with the control of body language and psychological awareness that training provided. A few years later, Giovanni is putting all these skills together on the biggest case of his career. He's back in New Jersey and about to go undercover to target one of the pillars of the Italian-American underworld, the De Cavacantes.

The Dicapacante crime family is long-standing American Mafia family, believe it or not. The Dicaps have been around the longest. They can trace their origins back to the 1920s, in fact. The era of Al Capone and Prohibition. Generations of violence, greed and murder since then, continuing as rival families rose and fell, and other Mafia dynasties have come to respect and rely on them.

When the Gambinos especially needed some work done, if they needed some murders done or some robberies or something, they would call in. They would farm out their work to the Decavocantes. Name not ringing a bell? You might be more familiar with the Decavs than you think. They're the family that inspired the Sopranos series.

So the New Jersey crime family, the Sopranos, mimicked the Di Cavacante crime family from New Jersey. Absolutely mimicked them. So what you saw in the Sopranos series, if you saw the pork store where Tony Soprano hung out with his guys, where you saw the strip club, that all really happened in real life. It's just they're not called those things. The neighborhood is the same, what you see on the Sopranos. Giovanni's case so far has been devoted to chasing some small-time drug dealers on the edges of the Di Cavacante world.

He's posing as a drug dealer and stolen goods merchant himself, going by the name Giovanni Gatto. But on this day, he is about to meet a man who will change his life. A newly minted capo in the Decaves, Charlie Stango, a man with the power of life and death in the family.

He was just getting released from a murder bid that he had did. He did a homicide years ago. He was known across the country. He was known overseas in Italy. He was known, he had a following in the New England area. He had strong ties to Chicago Outfit. So he was a well-respected guy. So the invite to meet Mr. Charlie is a big deal. A step up to the big time for Giovanni Gatto. A lot will hinge on how he carries himself. It's all due to take place on neutral ground.

A diner. You wanted to be hearing an old school movie song playing when you walked in because I met him in a diner and I was introduced to him. I could see that dark in his eyes. Time slowed down. Your heart's racing so fast or your adrenaline's pumped through your body. Time feels like it slows down to slow motion. The training takes over. So at this point when I met him, he told me to sit down, sit down right next to him. He wanted to be close to me and he kept repeating my first and last name over and over.

I played intimidated and then I relaxed. Implemented my breathing techniques and just slowed myself down and said, "Okay, this is going to happen." See, when you're a covert operative and you know how to control people, you can guide things, you can control the situation by doing certain things. He finds out later that Stango has had him under surveillance through his crew for some time, assessing whether he was who he seemed to be. And so far, his cover has held.

And he says, "Okay, all right, Mr. Giovanni, you do what you do. I'll allow it to happen and keep doing what you're doing. And maybe I'll call you, maybe I won't. Have a nice life." Stango leaves the diner. It's worked. From that day, Giovanni begins to be let in, not as a capo or even a soldier of the Decaves. That was an honor not given lightly, but part of their orbit, Charlie's orbit, an associate.

Pay attention if you think the office politics where you work are complicated. So traditionally in Cosa Nostra world, you could be a hang around and an associate, part of a soldier's crew. The lowest level. But if the associate does well, he might progress. And then eventually he gets proposed for membership of the family. He becomes a soldier. The next level.

Now as a soldier you start to put a crew together, you can have five, seven, ten guys under your crew and they all earn money. So now as a soldier you now work under a capo, a captain. A third level. Captain, now he's got to pressure the soldier to pressure his crew to make money. They just squeeze people, they squeeze businesses for money, however they get the money it's ultimately to make money for the administration and kick up.

And next you reach the senior management level. The underboss, the street boss, who makes sure everything is running right. He's the buffer between the captains and the boss of bosses, the head of the family. A long way from the street corner. If someone steps out of line too far, there are consequences within the hierarchy. So let's say a captain wants to whack out a soldier.

You know, you want to whack out one of your guys and you have to go to the administration for that. And then what happens is another captain turns around and says, no, I don't want to whack that guy out. Listen, he's making a lot of money on this thing for me. So the consul, yeah, we'll set up, he'll be the mediator and they might call a meeting and then you go to a meeting and they'll sit down and they'll hash it out and figure it out. And they'll say, okay, listen, we're not going to kill him. He's making money for all of us. So let's just leave the guy alive. And if he does it again, we'll whack him out. But for right now, no.

You'll get taxed. In order to save a guy's life, you might have to give up a piece of a trucking or a piece of a pizzeria that's making some money. And that's how it works. It's not exactly a system of checks and balances, but that's a lot more protection than the lowly associate can expect.

An associate, you can be clipped at any time. You can be taken out of the picture. It can cause some heartache for some other guys, and you don't want somebody to lose their money and their moneymakers, but you don't have to get approval to take somebody out. You want to take an associate out, you just go whack them out, and that's it.

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Giovanni is now an associate. He's in. And his FBI handlers have him focus all his energy on building trust with Charlie, generating hours and hours of secret recordings each week. If he can survive and his cover holds, he'll be able to build a unique picture of the inner workings of the modern Cosa Nostra. But mafia capos are understandably reluctant to speak openly about their activities, even to members of their own crew.

So Giovanni develops a new strategy with Charlie: play dumb about crime. I played stupid. I don't know how the mafia works. I don't know anything about you guys, you know. And he says, "Okay, that's why I need you to come out here. I need to talk to you and I need to explain to you how we operate. I want to break it down for you." And of course, when he does, Giovanni is wearing a wire. Don't ask where.

The intelligence improves even further when Giovanni gets a promotion. He gave me more slack and said, "Okay, that's it. From now on, from this point on, you're with me. You're going to fly our flag and you're going to represent this family for me." Be under their official protection. So the flag of the de Cavacantes. I'm not a soldier, I'm not a made guy, but no matter who you meet, no matter where you go, no matter what drug deals you do, no matter what trucking heist you do, first things first, they got to know you fly a flag.

Soon after this, Giovanni becomes Charlie's right-hand man, leading his crew. The two of them get closer. Almost a father and son relationship. The father, a convicted murderer, and the son, an undercover FBI agent, living a life of lies and deception. Again and again, Charlie emphasizes his complete trust in Giovanni. You just speak for me. You go to this thing, you do what you gotta do, even if you're wrong, Giovanni. Even if you're wrong, I'll make you right.

Which means even if you kill somebody by accident, I'll make you right. Don't worry about it. Even if you make the wrong decision, I'll stand up for you. But in the end, he always showed me something that reminded me of the criminal that he was. And he warned me. Listen, you know I'm crazy, right? You know I'm gone. You know I'm gone. I'm bots. I'm crazy. I do dumb shit. I kill people by accident, he said to me one time.

Maintaining this level of intimacy with a group like the Decava Countess involves constant risk, particularly as Giovanni is also leading a double life. Charlie and the crew believe he's unmarried, living in an apartment in New York with a live-in girlfriend. In fact, each evening, Giovanni is returning to his real life with his wife and young kids in the family home in New Jersey, close to where the Decavs are based. Too close, perhaps.

One weekend, Giovanni's daughter is competing in a statewide kids' soccer tournament. They decide to make a family day of it. One of those weekends where I said, "That's it. I'm not paying attention to my family enough." I was going to go to this thing and just unplug for the weekend. Just be me, right? Be Giovanni Rocco. The whole family come along, even Giovanni's parents. It's a beautiful day in the park.

And here I am living my true life with my wife and my kids. And as I'm sitting there in these little beach chairs, I look up and here comes Charlie's associate. And he's walking right towards me. He's with the Gambinos. And he's walking right at me. And he's a connected guy and he's got status. He's got Charlie's respect. He thinks the world of him. And here I am sitting with my family, my parents, my kids, my wife. And, you know, this guy knows me to have no such a life.

There's not long to react. And I saw him first, thank God, and I jumped out of my chair and I had come around to his right side and he turned around quickly and sees me and here I am in shorts and flip-flops. And he's like, whoa, what are you doing? Even his clothes don't fit the look of a Decavacanti associate. And I went to give him a kiss out of respect and he pushed me back with his fingers in my chest and he got really, really standoffish with me. And he says, what are you doing here? Are you following me?

It's not just Giovanni's own safety that's under threat. Whatever happens, the associate must not get a chance to know what his wife and kids look like.

And I said, "What are you talking about? Come here, will you?" And he really pushed me again. "Don't, don't, don't. What are you doing here? You don't have kids. You don't live here. You don't live in New Jersey. What are you doing here?" And my wife and I, thank God, we had, we always made plans in case a perp ever saw her or saw me. And we always had an escape plan. And when she saw the kiss, she knew something was up. So she grabbed the kids and pulled them off to the side. He manages to keep the associate talking long enough for the rest of the family to make it get away.

But the man never does completely buy his explanation for why a childless, middle-aged man would be attending a school sports day in the wrong city. The seed of suspicion has been planted and family life can never return to normal. Giovanni's wife is understandably concerned. Then she started asking a lot of questions because before that she didn't know too much so I had to come clean with her. From that point on it was no more public appearances for us. We couldn't take that chance.

The threat level is growing in other ways. No one in the decafs can figure out why Giovanni isn't known to any other organized crime groups, why he doesn't have a recorded history. On another afternoon, Giovanni is hanging out with one of the most volatile members of the group, a guy known as Louie or Luigi. A second undercover officer is with them, and that officer makes a near fatal mistake.

He tries to send a text about the case to their FBI case handler. Instead, he accidentally sends the text directly to Louis. They manage to grab Louis' phone before he can read the text and delete the incoming message. Louis can't understand why they are trying to use his phone. An explanation is offered.

But again, Louis never fully buys the excuse. He kind of suspected a little bit. He had quite a lot of questions about us, but then once those questions went away, he was okay with it. Soon after, Giovanni is invited to make a visit to his capo, Charlie Stango's old neighborhood. There, driving around, looking at the places Charlie went to school, fell in love, committed his first violent crimes.

Gangster nostalgia. And Charlie turned around and he says, "I'm gonna show you who's who and I'm gonna point out some things to you." He pointed me down to Dead End Street and told me to turn around and park my Cadillac. He got out and he said, "I'll be right back." Next thing you know, here comes Louis. Louis is looking down the block and he calls me out. I got out of the car. Charlie was nowhere to be found. Louis suggests they discuss some things. Just the two of them. No one else around. Basically, the gist of that was he threatened to chop me up into pieces.

because he followed the FBI surveillance team back to the FBI building. The same day as the cell phone incident, there had been FBI handlers in a car waiting nearby. An even worse mistake. He said basically in a nutshell, we followed the car. Okay, so you followed a car. What are you telling me? He goes, guess where we followed the car to? I don't know. Where did you follow the car to? I don't know. Where? The FBI building. Now what do you say to that?

That's when I said, you know, I got to step it up. And then he accused me of being a rat. He didn't accuse me of being a cop, he accused me for being a rat, which is even worse in our world. You know, you're accused of being a cop, they might let you live and say, listen, I'm on a lawyer. But if they accuse you of being a rat, they're not going to bring it up to you, they're just going to put two in your head. So I knew that he was capable of doing the deeds and I knew that he had a background of some pretty strong associates. It's the most testing situation he's ever been through as an undercover operative.

What would you do? Reveal that you are FBI? Double down on your cover story, even with the evidence against you? See, here's the thing about being an undercover operative. Your intelligence team feeds you intelligence as you go along. And I knew the intelligence on this guy. I knew he had never been convicted of a crime. He had never been arrested. He was always protected by the neighborhood. And I knew he always carried a .38 revolver in his pocket.

So when he had his coat on, his overcoat, and he kept reaching in, I knew he was debating, you know, and at this point he had lost me. But Giovanni also knew Louis has an insecurity, a psychological weak point about his lack of a serious criminal record. He's sitting there rattling keys in one pocket and I knew he was hanging on to something in the other pocket. So I turned up the heat on him and I just put it all on the associate.

The associate, the FBI agent who messed up the text message. Codename? And I said, "Listen to me. Tommy is not like me and he's not like you, you understand? He's a hang around guy for me. He's a money guy. Look, he's never been to prison. He's never done nothing bad. He's never put work in. And when I say these things, I'm speaking another language. He's never put work in, which means he never shot or killed anybody. He's not like me and you. I'm delivering a message to him that I'm capable of doing the deed, okay?"

And in his mind, he knows he's never done the deed. But I know he's never done the deed either. Because I just said, I'm a capable guy. I just conveyed to you that I'm a shooter. And when he dropped his shoulders, I knew I had him on the ropes. A tick, a tell. And I turned it into money. And I said, listen, I don't know what your problem is. You just got to get back to making money. You and me, we're good together. Let's just make money together. And the minute you start talking money, people are going to let you live. It worked.

Louis never mentions his suspicions again. In fact, Louis is right to be watching his back. And not just because of Giovanni. The murderous internal dealings of the Cosa Nostra are beginning to catch up with him. Louis has offended senior figures in the organization by claiming to be a made guy, even though he hasn't completed the correct ceremonies. The equivalent of giving yourself a promotion. And the organization decides there can be only one outcome.

Giovanni is having dinner with Charlie Stanger when the subject comes up. The night that he told me to do the murder, we were in this like five-star restaurant in Vegas. And I took him out to dinner because I made a lot of money that time. He and I had a good score.

Charlie tells Giovanni everything that is required of him. He explained to me the thing would happen in November and he really pumped me up. And he said, "Now be careful, make sure you got an escape car, make sure you got this." We went down a list and he gave me a picture of the guy that I was supposed to clip. And the man Charlie has instructed Giovanni to kill is Louis, of course.

When he talked about the murder, he got excited. "Oh, I wish I could be there for you. I wish I could be there with you. Just do this, this and this. If anybody else is there, just shoot them. You know, just shoot them." And he would always say those things. "Just walk in. Shoot them. You know, boom, boom. Walk out. Walk the F out. Walk out." It's a clear instruction to commit murder. And it's all on tape. Giovanni's handlers decide they can't afford to let the undercover operation run any further. But first, they try to stall, to play for time.

Then it got to the point where he was like, listen, you're going to do this? You know, what's the holdup? You got to do this. And at that point, I realized if I don't move fast enough, he might think I don't have it in me. And you know what? He'll clip me just for that. Giovanni organizes what will be his final meeting with Charlie at Charlie's home. The father and son relationship is still there. Stronger than ever, in fact.

That was a hard goodbye for me. You know, he wanted me to know he's got my back the whole way. He explained to me it's going to all work out in the end. But at the same time, I felt bad. He said, be careful of mine. Call me when you get home. I knew right there I felt terrible at the moment when I was leaving his house. Yeah, you know, I had daydreams of going, man, you know, I wish I could just tell this guy to run. He's going back to the can forever. There's no way you're getting out of this, like the evidence that we had. So I knew this was, you know, he was going back to the can for a long time.

And then there was the rest of Charlie's family, his actual family. I knew that I destroyed Patty's life, his significant other. She waited for him forever to get out of jail and his kids and his grandkids had just had him back in their lives. So it wasn't so much Charlie's life, I was, you know, yeah, I would miss him for being with me, but I just felt like, you know, the people I was hurting in his family. In 2017,

Charles Stanger was sentenced to 10 years in prison for plotting the murder, and Giovanni's taped evidence played a major role in the conviction. And then eventually, as a good undercover, you have to say to yourself, I didn't cause this situation. I didn't put these words in his mouth. I didn't convince him to kill somebody. I didn't convince you to commit crimes. You could have taken a different path, just like I did. You did this to your family. As a mature undercover suspect,

That's what you start to process. But your emotions, it starts to take its toll on you. It always haunts you, but I figured out a way and I've been taught how to mitigate it. I don't know where my life would have been if I didn't become a cop. In jail or dead, like they told me I would be. So I'm extremely blessed. You can find out more about Giovanni Rocco's undercover work in his book, Giovanni's Ring, My Life Inside the Real Sopranos. I'm Vanessa Kirby.

Here's a taste of next week's encounter with True Spies.