The Raid

Pushkin. Jay Calpern. Here, before we get into this episode, I want to let you know that you can hear all episodes of deep Cover The Family Man ad free right now. By signing up for Pushkin Plus. You'll also get bonus episodes, full audiobooks, and true crime binges from your favorite Pushkin hosts and authors. Plus, your support helps independent shows like us continue making the content you crave. Sign up and save on the deep Cover Show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm Slash Plus.

I remember it was late at night, like after we had gone to bed.

For Marissa Giamanco, September eighteenth, two thousand and eight was the moment that everything changed, the last day of one life and the first day of another.

I was sleeping in a big sweater, like one of my dad's sweaters actually, and I remember being like, I need to put some pants on. Before I entered the door.

She had heard voices outside and then pounding on the front door. The Giamanco family lived in a cozy, one story shoe box of a house. There were only two bedrooms. Their dad, Keith, slept on a couch in the living room so that each of his daughters could have their own bedroom. Marissa and her twin sister were both seventeen years old seniors in high school, and on this particular night, they were worried about their dad. He hadn't come home

It was weird.

The family's dog, Lucky, peered out the window, and then late in the night came that pounding on the front door.

So I'm all like scrambling to find some pajama pants to put on. They're all like knocking really loud, like, oh, well, the door. You know. I'm like, hold on, I need to find some pants. And my sister's like, who is that? And I'm like, I don't know. Do you know who it is? Because all we could see were flash lights, Like it was a very bright light, like that's that's

So Marissa opens the door and sees a whole lot of eyes with badges and flashlights. They asked to come in, and Marissa asks for a warrant, which I find kind of bold, Like how did you even think to do that at seventeen years old?

I think it might have just been watching Law and Order, Like, honestly, if I'm being dead ass, like, you got to tell me why you come into my house, dude. So they handed us the warrant, which was a lot of language that I didn't understand at that time.

And then a whole parade of law enforcement officials starts coming into their house.

And it wasn't just the Floorsent police, it was the FBI, it was the county police. And I remember one of them saying, your dad is in a safe place. You don't have to worry about that. He's just in some trouble. Like that's literally what they said to me, Like nothing more than that some.

Trouble's like WTF, Like what could Dad have possibly done to warrant all of this? Meanwhile, Lucky, the family dog, he's on the offensive, lunging in all of these intruders. One of the cops asked Marissa to control her dog, so she takes Lucky to the backyard. It was a hot, sticky night, the last bits of summer lingered. Marissa prided herself as a moody, rebellious, aspiring writer and so very

They are flipping over the couch cushions and looking in the vents and opening the closets, and I'm standing there smoking a cigarette and I'm just thinking, I'm like, damn, I hope they don't find my weed in my room. I had weed in the closet, so I you know, I was like, Damn, I don't want to get in trouble too. And Dad's going to be mad at me if he finds, you know what.

I mean, Because at this point, Marissa is still assuming that her dad is coming home, that he's still going to be the one she has to answer to about school and walking the dog and the weed in her closet. But as this raid on her house continues, Marissa starts to scratch her head a bit.

I racked my brain for anything, and I was like, I really don't know what dad would be doing. I'm like, was he like involved in an accident, or like, did he see something he wasn't supposed to.

Marissa and her sister thought they knew who their father was. A mild mannered, kind of goofy, kind hearted midwestern guy, a single dad who loved hockey in sports trivia, a guy who showed up at their basketball games and orchestra concerts, a guy who drove them to school and his dad mobile, a light blue Mercury Grand Marquis and Keith Giamanco was

Hi.

Hi, I'm Jake.

Hi, I'm Marissa.

In all my years of doing this, I don't think I've ever just done an interview where I got into a car with someone and went on.

A road trip with them. Yeah. Oh that's cool. Yeah, I love that.

So where should we go first?

I would say that let's start in floorcent because that's kind of where the story started.

And just like that. We were off, driving through the snow, heading for the suburbs of Saint Louis. An hour and a half later we turned onto Abischon Street, a quaint suburban road with rows of handsome rick houses. Which houses it is.

This one over here on the corner. Wow, the porch is still red.

This is the house where Marissa and her sister grew up until the age of sixteen. So not the place where the police raided that night. This is where they lived before that. It's a spacious ranch house on a corner lot, a porch out front, a large front yard, tall trees. It's pretty in a quiet, unassuming way. For a while, Marissa just stared at her old home as if captured by its spell, ensnared by the invisible tendrils of memory.

It almost feels surreal. Honestly, it feels surreal. Mom's flowers are gone, though, and there was a bird bath. She had a bird bath right there. But yeah, beautiful house.

Back when Marissa was a young girl living in this house, her mother, Becky was still very much in the picture. Becky was also the one the girls went to when something felt hard. She'd sit with you, talk it through Becky was involved at the PTA at the girls' school and was a leader at their church, and she was an amazing cook.

My favorite memory of my mom is in the kitchen, seeing her put her energy and that love into the food and then tasting the food like I still to this day have very rarely found a meal that feels as loving as Miss Becky Jumanco's.

When Marissa talks about her parents, it feels like a very nineteen fifties arrangement. Each day, Becky would pack Keith lunch with a few sandwiches and Stanley Thermis. Then Keith would go off to the printing press where he worked. He'd come home tired, hands covered in ink. Marissa remembers sitting with her dad at night on the couch. She'd lie down with her head on his belly, feeling the rise and fall of his breaths until she fell asleep. Then he'd carry her off to bed. During the holidays,

My earliest memory is us in our crib together and conspiring with each other through facial expressions on how we were going to get out of that crib. And she climbed up on my back and got out of the crib, and my mom had to run down the hallway and she was like, what are you doing? That is my earliest memory.

I love this story from Elise because even in toddlerhood, they're already conspiring, already working together, already figuring things out, and in a strange way, they're rehearsing the very skill they'll need most later in life, escaping. Elise is the older twin by one minute, and even though they're twins in many ways, Alise played the part of the older sibling. She was taller, bigger, more talkative, and very organized. Alise she always loved checklists.

I would be the.

One to ask questions to my parents for us, or like even when we were kids, I would order for her at a restaurant. I was kind of her mouthpiece a lot of the time.

Around the time the twins were ten years old, they remember their parents started to argue a lot. The girls floated through this turbulence, kind of the way kids do, listening and not listening, picking up bits and pieces like their parents bickering about food stamps, among other things. On one occasion, things got so heated that their mom shoved an ice cream cone into their dad's face. There was a lot of shouting. The girls remember the police showing up.

I saw how things were going with them. I'm like, yes, please get away from each other. That really was what I was thinking. I was like, please take time away.

Sometimes, Alise says, their mom got so fed up she'd go out to a local bowling alley and come home drunk, so drunk that one time she missed her bed and landed on the floor instead. Alise says that her mother changed from the perfect stay at home mom who volunteered with the PTA, morphing into someone else. Like one time Alise was playing in a middle school basketball game. She got called for a foul and then a moment later, a fire alarm went off.

I'm on the court and I'm like, what the fuck? And some may ran over and she was like, your mom pulled the fire alarm, And I was like, what she pulled the fire alarm because she disagreed with the call and emptied out the entire gym.

And it wasn't just erratic behavior. Elise says that her mother would vacillate from being an angel to a devil, no warning, no explanation. When the twins were twelve, it all came to a head. Here's how Marissa remembers it.

I remember being in the kitchen in this house, and I remember my dad sitting at the kitchen table. I was like kind of directly like standing behind him, about like two feet away, and he had his hands up on the table like together, like clasped like up against his head, and I remember him saying, your mom's not coming back here, and just want to I just wanted to scream. I might have even screamed out loud. I don't know.

This Apparently was their dad's decision. He asked her to leave, like he just finally had enough. Once Becky was gone, the girls were alone in the house with their father and the silent presence of unanswered questions with their mother gone. Ali says that their dad did his best to make

I think he tried to protect us. I think he was partially successful. And I say partially because I think many folks forget that children are smarter than we think they are, and they're so observant, and that was no exception for Merissa and I.

It was clear to the girls that Keith, despite everything that he was doing, was struggling grieving the loss of his wife. Once, when Marissa came home from school, she found him on the stairs down to the basement with his wedding album in hand, looking through the pages and weeping. It was one of the only times she ever saw her dad cry. She knew he was grieving, but from

I remember having to say his name. I would be like, Dad, Dad, Dad, Keith. You literally you'd have to go through like the list of names to get him to pay attention. I remember the first time I did that, standing in the kitchen. He was staring out that window right there, and I was literally like, there is something than wrong right now, like and obviously I was twelve years old. I couldn't put my finger on it. But it was it was anxiety, it was defeat, it was it was fear. She says.

She called him by his first name because she needed to get his attention, but it went deeper than this, because in that moment, anyway, her father had seemed less like a dad and more like just a guy named Keith, well meaning kind, but removed in some way unknowable. Meanwhile, their mother did come back repeatedly, but in the strangest of ways.

She would knock on my bedroom window, so the back window of this house, in the middle of the night and asked me, can you grab the vacuum cleaner and hand it to me out the window? Can you hand me this piece of jewelry and hand it to me out the window and don't tell your dad that I was here. That's when I was like, there is something going on. Is when she started visiting my window in the middle of the night.

Naturally, Marissa asked her dad about this, like what was going on with mom?

Yep? Dad was like, your mom's sick. That's how he kind of tried to explain it at the time. Was she's sick, she has a disease. There was no further explanation. It was she's sick in the head.

I mean, how do you make sense of that? As a kid?

You don't. It sits with you and you're like, well, guess my mom's sick in the head? Am I sick in the head? I love my mom? My mom was always taken care of me. Is she really that sick? And then are you sick in then? Like there's a lot going on when somebody says that to you.

The girls were left to think back on their mother all the strange things that she had done as they tried to make sense of it all. Were there other things besides the handing stuff out the window where you started to see something was off with your.

Mom well, the erratic behaviors, the slurring of words, the nodding out, the not being able to stay conscious. And then there's the opposite, extremely energetic, talkative, not able to sit still, like I remember her howling like a dog at some point in the bathroom, like saying can I get more?

At some point it became clear to Marissa that can I get more meant can I get more drugs?

So it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, you know what's going on.

Keith may have had the best of intentions. He may have wanted what so many parents want, to protect their kids from pain, but his solution was a lie of omission. Ultimately, his daughters would make two realizations. The first was that their mother was struggling mightily with addiction, and the second was that Keith was an unreliable narrator of sorts, someone who could not be counted on to tell them about the harder truths, even the ones that were essential to

Like it was quick, like I'm saying my dad went in the garage and said, you can keep two bikes. Because I love bikes. I probably had like twelve bikes, so he was like, you have to set all of them out for free. We'll try to sell some of them. It was like, do you want to keep this? You can't keep that, Like we have to get out of here. That was like super freaky, like when you're a kid.

This is when they moved to that shoebox size house, the one where the police raid eventually occurred. Here, you might remember, the girls each had a small bedroom and Keith slept on the couch. During this time, Keith was out of the house a lot, and Marissa and her sister Elise used to guess about where their dad went and what he did.

We came up with different scenarios in our head. This was my joke. My joke was Dad bills build swing sets in his spared time. I was like, he must be going to build swing sets. That's what I used to say as a joke because I was like I can't. I can't literally can't can't figure it out. So I'm just gonna fucking fill it in with some joke.

At last remembers asking him where he was off to, and he would sometimes tell her, I don't have to tell you where I'm going, She says, with him, it was pure Scooby Doo mystery. Those are her words. When it became undeniable that things were wrong, like when they had to vacate their house, a lease offered to help.

I also had a job at the time at the Danna Republic, working at the mall, and I even was like, do you want help with the bills or whatever? And my dess said, you know, no, save your money. We're fine.

But clearly things were not fine. There were problems by that needed to be checked and weren't. And you can start to see why Elise loved checklists. In the small part of the world that she could control, she wanted order. Elise didn't really get much more clarity until the start of her senior year. They'd been living in the shoe box house for about nine months. It seemed like Keith was out a lot selling swing sets or whatever he did.

We're waiting for our dad to finally go home or come home and that never happened, and I'm thinking about calling hospitals. I'm thinking about calling the police because it's just not like my dad to not show up like that.

But it had been a long day. Elise had school and then a shift at work.

She was beat. I have to lay it down. At this point, changed into my nightgown. I get into bed, and I see a flashlight coming through my window, and then I hear dogs sniffing around and I get up out of my bed. I turn on the lights because I'm freaked out.

It's the police. She and her sister opened the door and a whole team of law enforcement officers enters the house.

My dad was in trouble with the with the law in a serious way, because there wouldn't I recognize seriousness, because they wouldn't have sent an entire crime scene unit out to my house if it wasn't serious. They didn't send one or two dudes. They sent, you know, a whole van of people plus dogs. I realize this amount of labor is because my dad did something serious.

The police moved quickly through the bedrooms, the closets, up into the attic. They took the family computer boxes of clothing, other odds and ends. The family dog Lucky grew so agitated that Marissa had to take him outside. Alice stayed behind answering the police's questions.

I remember stepping in my room with a couple of the officers and then interviewing me. They asked how much money I'd ever seen my dad have on him. They asked me if I knew what he was doing earlier that day.

Her mind raced to make sense of what was happening, but none of it made sense.

I was in shock. I was in shock. Honestly, I felt like I was having an out of body experience, like I was disassociating as I was speaking to the cops.

The police told Elise that their dad wanted to call them himself and explain what he'd done. That was all they'd say. Then the police gathered the boxes of evidence and left. Maris remembers they stayed up as long as they could, waiting for their dad to call.

Me and my sister actually lay down in the bed together and we had the old corded phone with the green lights on it, and we had the phone next to our heads because we were like, we don't want to miss it. If he calls, but we were so tired because it was like three four in the morning that we were like, we have to lay down because we were still planning on going to school.

Finally, at some point the phone rings. The girls startled suddenly fully awake. They pick up and it's their dad.

He calls and he's like, I'm fine, I'm safe, I'm just in trouble. But there was no actual explanation on that first phone call. It was just hey, I'm safe, I love you, Everything's gonna be okay.

And that was it. That's all he says. Even in the moment of reckoning, this moment of truth, Keith is kind of deliberately vague, and so the whole situation remains shrouded in mystery. Elise also remembers this call vividly, including the way her dad's voice sounded on the phone.

He was very upset and crying and he said everything's going to be okay, I'll be home soon, and him saying that I had hope that he was telling the truth and that that would happen. But in my gud I had a gut feeling that I just knew that this was just it's going to be a long, long road.

At some point later that morning, they turn on the TV and there's a big story on the local news. They're replaying footage from the previous day. Marissa remembers seeing an aerial shot taken from a helicopter. She recalls the newscaster saying, they've.

Been looking for this guy. And then there was a picture of the car that he was driving, the light blue Grand Marquee.

A light blue Grand Marquee, which was the same type of car that their dad drove.

You could see the car and you could see into the car from this helicopter shot, and there was a cup. It was an Emo's cup.

Emo's Pizza was a family favorite. Keith had one of their branded cups. Marisa recalls his dad mug, the one he kept in his car.

It's like, you know, you're like, that's Dad's Emo's code. It was just too much of a coincidence to not be my dad's car. We're sitting here literally at this house, on the couch in the living room, watching the cable television, and we're just like, they have got to have the wrong person.

In this moment, the girls were overwhelmed with shock and confusion, but there was one thing that at last knew for certain.

This is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever. And I immediately started feeling like I was in survival mode and that I needed to figure out what was going to happen next, because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now I'm finding out untrue.

Before long, the TV camera crews started to arrive outside the little shoe box house where Elise and Marissa lived. Because this story about a suburban dad who secretly resorted to a life of crime, this would soon be national news. Reporters from around the country would be looking for answers, and so too would Elise and Marissa. They wanted to know what exactly had their dad done, was he guilty, and if so, how had they not seen this coming?

There was literally a feeling of relief when I knew that they didn't have a make on the vehicle, nor did they have a good picture of me that somebody that I knew would recognize me for the five thousand dollars reward or whatever it was at that particular time.

And he showed me the surveillance tape and he's like, do you recognize this person?

Is detalk to.

John Bradley DSM three point eight, one of the same Lost Counting Police Department bureau crimes against persons. That is not the look of an innocent man.

You can't put that many people in that much fear and not expect to pay a heavy price for it.

It was an all out onslaught of police cars, helicopters, cars in front of me, cars behind me.

It was a mess. It made me angry. I didn't trust anyone after that. What is actually reality is everyone lying to me about who they are.

Deep Cover. The Family Man is produced by Isaac Carter and Amy Gains McQuaid. Our show is edited by Karen Chakerjee. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Sound design by Jake Gorsky. Original scoring and our theme were composed by Luis Gara. Our show art was designed by Sean Carney, fact checking by Anica Robbins. Our story consultant was James Foreman Junior.