An avid animal lover and activist, Gina takes us through a day in her life on Skid Row, where she lives with her rescue Pit Bull and foster animals. She tells us about the transformative nature of her relationship with her dog, Muneca, and why she thinks Pit Bulls are the most misunderstood breed.

It is the middle of summer, and for Florida, that means indiscriminate light showers. I am sitting at the circulation desk of the public library where I work when my phone starts ringing in my pocket. I fumble to turn my ringer off, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment as I mutter an apology to my coworker and the patron she is tending to. I don’t bother checking the caller ID. Nobody but my mother ever calls me. In my head, I am planning the angry text message I plan to send her for calling me during work hours. But then, my phone vibrates again. My mother is nothing if not insistent.

“Sheila,” she says quietly, deliberately choosing to let my disrespectful tone slide this one time. “Tony’s here.”

I blink, confused. “What Tony?”

“Tony Tony,” my mom says. “Caridad’s Tony. He’s in Texas. He crossed the border.”

Until now, Anna has only been known as Associate 1 – peppered throughout an 81-page federal complaint as an accomplice to a political mob family.

What she lived and what she witnessed has been written about from many other points of view – that of prosecutors, FBI agents, informants, and defendants. But through everything that’s happened, Anna’s perspective has been a mystery. She’s never shared, until now, what she saw and what she lived.

Her story straddles two very different worlds: the inside of what authorities call a “criminal enterprise” and then the quiet workings of a federal prosecution. This story is hers. It’s told how she saw it, how she reflects on everything that happened, and how it changed her life forever.

Forget dry reports and sanitized accounts. This is the unfiltered, unpredictable, and unapologetically honest diary of a witness.

Just outside the high desert ski haven of Taos, New Mexico, shortly after the adobe boutique stores give way to untamed, fenced lawns and the paved roads turn to dirt, a swarm of unusual structures begins to appear on the mesa. Glass-faced Earth homes with giant berm walls pop out from the ground, adorned in greenery. A circular Earthen fortress looks out over the horizon, resembling the turret of a castle. To its right, there’s a pyramid built with used beer bottles, wired and plastered together into packed walls. Inside, a ladder leads to a small altar, where a votive candle displays a recognizable figure:

A gray-maned man, holding up a peace sign, under an inscription reading…

I’ll never say die.