The Raid | From Deep Cover: The Family Man

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Hey listeners, Jake Halpern here. I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of the newest season of my podcast. Deep cover, The Family Man. I think you'll really enjoy it. Here's the gist of the story.

In 2007, Keith Giamonico was an ordinary father in the suburbs of St. Louis. But as the great recession loomed, he found himself, like so many others at the time, sinking into debt, bills piled up, his daughter's high school tuition went unpaid, and he struggled to find a way to make ends meet. So, he made a desperate choice and started living a double life.

Within a year, Giamonico had transformed himself from a struggling dad into a criminal, and what began as an attempt to stay afloat, soon spiraled into a series of consequences that would reshape his and his daughter's lives forever. I hope you enjoy it.

And if you do, find Deep Cover The Family Man wherever you listen to your podcasts. Pushkin+ subscribers can hear each episode ad-free. Sign up and save on the Deep Cover Show page on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm/plus. Use the code dc25 for 25% off annual subscriptions.

I remember it was late at night. It was like after we had gone to bed. For Marissa Giamonco, September 18th, 2008, 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 enter the door."”

She had heard voices outside, and then pounding on the front door. The Giamonco family lived in a cozy one-story shoebox 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 17 years old, seniors in high school.

And on this particular night, they were worried about their dad. He hadn't come home or called or left any kind of message. The girls tried texting him, but got no answer. It was weird. The family's dog lucky peered up 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, for the door, boy." And I'm like, "Hold on, I need to find some pants." And my sister's like, "Who is that?" I'm like, "I don't know, do you know who it is?" And because all we could see were flashlights.

It was a very bright light.

“That's what I remember. You could even see the flashlight coming underneath the wooden door before I even opened it.”

And you could just feel the pressure like, " Dude, they're going to open this door if we don't open this door." So, Marissa opens the door and sees a whole lot of guys with badges and flashlights. They asked to come in, and Marissa asks for a warrant, which I find kind of bold. Like, how did she even think to do that at 17 years old? I think it might have just been watching long order.

Like, honestly, I thought being dead ass, like, you got to tell me why you coming 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 it wasn't just the fluorescent 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. Marissa'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 at 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 much on brand Marissa lights a cigarette. And then, she just stands there, processing the chaos she just witnessed in her house. They are flipping over the couch cushions and looking in the vents and opening the closet. 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."

Because I had weed in the closet, so 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, "What's 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 in his dad mobile, a light blue mercury grand marquee.

And Keith Jiamanko was this guy. But he was also someone else. This is a story about a crime. Actually, a series of crimes carried out by a mysterious figure who managed to evade the authorities. And it's about justice about what punishment these crimes deserve.

But at its core, for me, it's a story about the secrets that can exist within a family.

“It's about the disguises that parents put on for their kids and for the world.”

So much of parenting is built on lies. Starting with the stories we tell our kids about Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. And then there are the lies of omission. We all withhold things in order to protect our children. We all harbor secrets.

It's just that some secrets are much bigger than others. I'm Jake Halpern, and this is Deep Cover, The Family Man. Episode 1, The Raid. Marisa Jiamanko is now 35 years old.

And I met her for the first time on the side of a lonely wind swept road in East Central Missouri.

Marisa had suggested this spot close to where she lives as our rendezvous point. She had this idea that we take a road trip together. There were places that she wanted to take me. Places that she thought I should see with my own eyes. Places that still simmered with questions.

Peering through my snow-and-crusted wind shield, I saw a woman in a winter parka and a puffy penguin hat. I slowed down the car and she hopped in. Hi. Hi. Hi.

I'm Marisa. In all my years of doing this, I don't have ever just done any of you. I got into the car with someone and went to a road trip with them. Yeah.

Yeah. I love that.

So where should we go first?

“I would say that let's start in fluorescent 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 St. Louis. An hour and a half later, we turned on to Aboshan Street. A quaint suburban road with rows of handsome Rick houses. Which houses it? It's this long over here on the corner.

Wow. The park is still red. This is the house for Marisa and her sister grew up into the age of 16. 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, Marisa 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 too. She had a bird bath right there.

But yeah, beautiful house. Back when Marisa 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 girl's

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 in that love into the food and then tasting the food.”

Like I still to this day had very, very, very, very found a meal that feels as loving as Miss Becky Becky, she munkers. When Marisa talks about her parents, it feels like a very 1950s arrangement. Each day Becky would pack Keith lunch with a few sandwiches and a Stanley thermos. Then Keith would go off to the printing press where he worked.

He'd come home tired, hands covered in ink. Marisa 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 breath until she fell asleep. Then he'd carry her off to bed.

During the holidays her parents decorated the whole house. Hung a wreath on the front door, wrote the word "noel" in cursive lights on the roof. Put a giant bow on the garage, like the house itself was a beautifully wrapped gift. And it kind of was right up into the moment it began to unravel. Hi, it's Kate Snow and BC News Anchor, host of the podcast The Drink.

This month I'm grabbing a matcha latte with comedian Taylor Tomlinson.

The drink is always about someone's journey to the top and Taylor's story is remarkable.

She tells us all about her unlikely path from performing in churches, all the way to headlining her own Netflix specials like her latest prodigal daughter. And she opens up about her religious upbringing. What drew her to stand up and how she feels when she gets on that stage. Hope you'll listen and follow the drink wherever you get your podcasts.

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They care about how I feel. It's the staff on the app. It's the connections you make. Without good mental and physical help. You have nothing.

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Rosa has a twin sister named Elise and like so many twins.

I early as 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 Elise played the part of the older sibling. She was taller, bigger, more talkative and very organized.

Elise, 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 and other things. I'm 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 remembered the police showing up.

It got to the point that Elise told me she actually wanted her parents to separate.

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 Elise says their mom got so fed up. She got to local bowling alley and come home drunk. So drunk that one time she missed her bed and landed on the floor instead.

Elise says that her mother changed from the perfect stay-at-home mom who volunteered with the PTA, morphing into someone else. Like one time, Elise 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 somebody 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 12, 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 classed like up against his head. And I remember him saying, "Your mom's not coming back here." And I just, I want to, I just want 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 her father and the silent presence of unanswered questions. With their mother gone, at least says that their dad, it is best to make their life as normal as possible. Keith embraced the role of a single dad,

making meals, driving them to school and his light blue mercury marquee, the dad mobile, taking them to practice, putting them in therapy with a family counselor, and just encouraging them. 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 Marissa 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,

looking to the pages and weeping. It was one of the only times she ever saw her dad cry. She knew he was grieving, but from a kid's perspective, none of it fully made sense. Her mother's behavior, her parents' separation, her father's explanation,

and despite her best efforts, Marissa just couldn't get through to him. I remember having to say his name. I would be like dad, dad, dad, Keith. 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 the window right there,

and I was literally like there is something wrong right now. Like, and obviously I was 12 years old, I couldn't put my finger on it, but it was anxiety, it was defeat, 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,

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 ask 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's something going on. It's 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? Yeah, dad was like, your mom's sick.

“That's how he kind of tried to explain it at the time, was she sick.”

She has a disease. There was no like 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 has always taken care of me.

Is she really that sick in the head? Are you sick in the head? Like, it just, there's a lot going on when somebody says that to you. The girls were left to think back on their mother, but all the strange things that she had done is they tried to make sense of it all.

Were there other things besides the handings that 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 their understanding of the world.

And this is kind of how life went for the twins. Their lives were like a novel, where all the transitions and explanations had been stripped out, leaving just a string of disorienting moments that would make any reader feel bewildered.

“Who gets to be a citizen of the United States at birth?”

When it comes to sports in school, who gets to compete with the girls? And how much power is the president actually have to hire and fire at independent agencies? These are some of the key questions before the U.S. Supreme Court this term.

And as any good lawyer knows,

the evidence and how you frame your arguments.

“But that's not the only thing that matters.”

I'm Laura Jarrett, senior legal correspondent at NBC News, and this month, in a new series for our here's the scoop podcast, I'm talking to legal experts and lawyers whose past legal victories are now the building blocks for the biggest cases still left to be decided. I want to know how they convinced the court they were right

when the stakes were high, what special sauce locked it in. And what could be different this time around? Join us for here's the scoop Supreme Court edition. New episodes every Saturday, you can find here's the scoop from NBC News on YouTube

and wherever you get your podcasts. What they did to your family, you're lucky to make it out alive. Streaming on peacock. These men are going to come after me. Taking them out, smite only chance.

Put 'em bullet in your head.

From the co-creator of Ozark. Looks like a family was running drugs. Execution stop killing it, fresh the keys. I only eat something that they might have been right for. The cartel killed my family.

I'm going to kill them. Awesome. MIA, streaming now, only on peacock. Everyone, I'm Dylan Dreyer, co-host of the third hour of today, and mom to three wild boys.

I've learned a lot my years as a parent. Mostly that I don't have it all figured out yet. And I'm not the only one. This is my new podcast, The Parent Chat. Each week I sit down with someone new for on his conversation

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Keith had always told his daughters they needed to dream big,

and think about a life beyond fluorescent Missouri. When they turned 14, he enrolled them in a fancy all girls' private school, called Narengs Hall. The girls weren't exactly enthusiastic about this, but Keith insisted on it,

and claimed they could afford it. By then, he'd stopped working at the printing press, and told the girls that he was day trading, using his own money to buy and sell stocks. But money was always kind of weird with Keith.

At least recalled one time they went to an outback steak house, and when it came time to pay, Keith peeled off a crisp $100 bill, half of which was a tip. Super flashy. But then, she remembers his other time,

midway through high school, when she wasn't allowed to take her final exams because Dad hadn't paid their tuition. So, the family's finances, they felt shaky. And then, one day, when the girls were 16,

Marissa recalls her father telling them they had to move immediately. 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 12 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 move 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 slipped 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. And I heard this was my joke. My joke was Dad's Dad builds swing sets in a spare 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 figure it out. So I'm just going to fucking fill it in with some joke. Elise 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, the things were wrong. Like, when they had to vacate their house, Elise offered to help. I also had a job at the time at Bedana Republic working at the mall.

“And I even was like, do you want help with the bills or what?”

And my dad said, you know, no. Save your money, we're fine. But clearly things were not fine. There were problems, boxes that needed to be checked and weren't. And you can start to see why Elise loved checklists.

she wanted to order.

“Elise didn't really get much more clarity until the start of her senior year.”

They'd been living in the shoebox house for about nine months. It seemed like Keith was out a lot, selling swing sets or whatever he did. And then came that muggy night in 2008. The night of the raid.

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 had school and then a shift at work. She was beat. I have to lay down at this point. Changes to my night down. 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. Enter's the house.

My dad was in trouble with the law in a serious way. Because 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. Elise 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 raised 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. Marissa remembers they stayed up as long as they could, waiting for their dad to call.

Me and my sister actually lay down and the bed together. And we had the old courted 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.

And 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 going to 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 what happened. But in my God, I had a gut feeling that I just knew that this was just going to be a long, long road. At some point, later that morning, they turned on the TV.

They're replaying footage from the previous day.

Marisa 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 grandma key."

“A light blue grandma key, 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, it was his dad's mug, the one he kept in his car.

It's like, you're like, "That's dad's Emo's cup." 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 who's 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 least 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 shoebox house where Elise and Marisa lived. Because this story about a suburban dad who'd 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 Marisa. They wanted to know what exactly had their dad done. Was he guilty? And if so, how had they not seen this coming? What does that mean about them as a family?

Because as of now, the girls had no parents in the picture. No one to pay the bills. No one to answer to but themselves. And this was just the beginning. Soon there would be a very public reckoning, including a trial.

And a lot of lingering questions about their father. A man. They thought they knew. Coming up this season on Deep Cover, the family man. 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 $5,000 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? Since he talked to John Bradley, he has signed 3181.

“And the saying was, can't he please the part of your own crimes against persons?”

That is not the look of an innocent man. 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 Gaines McWade. Our show is edited by Karen Shakurji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Sound design by Jake Gorsky. Original scoring in our theme were composed by Louise Garra. Our show art was designed by Sean Carney. Fact checking by Anika Robbins. Our story consultant was James Foreman Jr.

Special thanks to Daphne Chen, Sonia Gerwit, Morgan Ratner, Kira Posey, Jake Flanagan, Karin Gillierd Fisher, Eric Sandler, Christina Sullivan, and Greta Cone. I'm Jake Halpern.

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