CDSA

Speaking April 17, during the Community Keynote session “Driving Team Performance in Incident Response” at the 2023 edition of CDSA’s Content Protection Summit at NAB (CPS@NAB), author and lecturer Giovanni Rocco, an ex-Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent, told attendees he spent years inside an exclusive “old boys” network, where to be accepted and included in the community was literally a matter of life or death.

As an undercover law enforcement officer who spent much of his 26-year career as part of a federal task force targeting organized crime, the culminating role of his service was the successful infiltration of one of America’s most violent and long-standing Mafia families.

At the conclusion of that landmark investigation, Rocco retired from law enforcement and moved his family to a location that remains undisclosed. The insight and strategies he brought to the keynote presentation were acquired over decades of exemplary service with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.

“We’re going to take a wild ride,” he said at the start of the presentation. “I’m going to give you 30 years in 30 minutes.”

After working undercover as a cop, he joined the FBI, where he said, “I started working cases at a much higher level…. For a very long time, I worked international cases for human trafficking and narcotics cases” in places including Mexico and Columbia.

He also worked undercover to try and bring down members of the Black Panthers, including JoAnne Chesimard, who was found guilty of killing a New Jersey state trooper  but went into hiding in Cuba, where she has continued to evade capture. “Hopefully she will” be captured “before her life comes to an end,” he said, noting she’s “elderly now but I’d rather she die in jail than she died a free woman.”

He then went undercover to bring down mobsters, including associates of the DeCavalcante crime family, who he said the HBO TV show The Sopranos was based on.

Rocco went on to tell an abridged but still frightening tale of his time undercover in that family and then his efforts to go into hiding with his family. “I can dress like Ronald McDonald. I can’t get rid of this accent. It is who I am. You know, somebody’s going to know it’s me right away, especially in my backyard,” he said of his home neighborhood. “I was waiting on the funds to relocate,” he noted.

He went through a similar “sacrifice every man and woman in law enforcement, intelligence, and even the industry that you work in,” goes through, he told attendees, noting how “stressful” these professions can be.

“You can do a great job” but, at the end of the day, he advised the audience to not “forget to mitigate all that trauma and the stress because every job has trauma and stress, especially when you have the pressures of an industry” behind it, he said.

In jobs like these, “you have to produce and figure out how to keep ahead with guys, like these pieces of crap he went undercover to capture, that’s trying to sell counterfeit goods, he said.

After sitting “around for a long time” after leaving the FBI, “I started doing speaking engagements all around the world and helping intelligence agencies,” he told attendees, noting he now often deals with cybersecurity crimes and crypto.

He concluded by telling attendees he was impressed with the work they do, the presentations during CPS and the thought that’s gone into it.” He added: “You would not believe how smart [pirates and organized crime] can be.”

The 2023 Content Protection Summit was presented by Fortinet and sponsored by Convergent, Signiant, Verimatrix, Eluvio, NAGRA, PDG Consulting and EIDR. The event was produced by MESA, in association with NAB and the Content Delivery and Security Association (CDSA).