©2006 The Chestnut Hill Local

Ex-Secret Service agent from G’town authors an ‘easy read’
by AUDREY LEVINE

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Mike Maddaloni’s first fiction novel, Not On the Level, follows the life of Joe De Falco, a Philadelphia native who attends Catholic school, serves in the Marines, joins the Secret Service and later becomes vice president of security for VK Pharmaceuticals.

Through it all, De Falco realizes that government agencies and other companies are not exactly on the level. “You have to believe what you see and not what you hear,” Maddaloni, 59, said of the lesson De Falco learns in the book. “You have to learn how to be skeptical and more careful.”

This journey, however, is not just a product of fiction, but actually mirrors many of Maddaloni’s real-life experiences. “Some things (in the book) I actually experienced, and some are fiction,” he said. (For example, the grammar school mentioned in the book, St. Michael’s, was on the 5000 block of Germantown Avenue, and Mike was a student there.)

Maddaloni, who was born in Germantown and lived there until age 12, joined the Marines after graduating from high school. “They had a reputation of being the best and that drew me in,” he said. “It was a challenge.”

In his novel, which was published in April, Maddaloni included details about drill instructors cheating to ensure that all their men passed the tests in recruit training.

”The drill instructors cheated because they wanted to get high grades,” he said of a practice he actually witnessed during his time in the Marines. “But people who never learned to shoot were in Vietnam. I don’t think they do that now, but when I look back, it’s funny.”

After spending two years in the Marines, Maddaloni returned home and entered La Salle College, now La Salle University, where he studied management. In his last year of college, Maddaloni attended a job fair with different government agencies and learned more about the Secret Service. After landing a job with them, he began working in the Philadelphia office, handling forgery and counterfeiting cases.

In writing De Falco’s experiences in the novel, Maddaloni drew on many of the cases he worked on in the Secret Service. One such experience was a case in which he bought counterfeit money from an old friend in Germantown.”He didn’t know me because he hadn’t seen me since school,” Mike said.

One of Maddaloni’s scariest encounters is also documented in the book. He was trying to catch two counterfeiters and wore a wire so he could call in agents to make the arrest once the process was complete. Maddaloni said the men patted him down to check if he was wearing a wire, but found nothing. “One of the men was armed,” he said. “I was nervous, and my heart was racing a mile a minute.”

After several years in Philadelphia, Maddaloni moved to Washington, D.C., to work on the presidential detail, another aspect of his life also chronicled in the novel. For four years, he worked with Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

“When I was on the detail, I was in my early 30s,” he said. “At that age, it was a huge task. It was an enormous responsibility, realizing what could happen.”

Maddaloni was working on the detail when John Hinckley was stalking President Reagan. According to Maddaloni, in looking back at video recordings, he realized that, at one point, he was standing two feet from Hinckley.

“When you’re in a crowd, you know something could happen,” he said. “(But) you will look back later in life and realize it was one of the high points of your life.”

When he left the Secret Service, Maddaloni moved with his wife and three kids back to Philadelphia and began working at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals as the head of global security for 15 years; this was the basis for making De Falco head of security at VK Pharmaceuticals in the novel.

When Maddaloni’s third child finished college, he left the pharmaceutical company and began his own business, helping people to find corporate work. Through this work, he wrote his first book, Transitions, which sought to help those who had retired from military and government careers find jobs in the private sector.

Although he has cut back on some of the traveling he would normally do for the job to make speeches and hold seminars, he has continued the business in South Carolina, where he now resides. “(At that point), I thought I’d take a shot at fiction writing,” he said, and he began writing “Not On The Level,” based on both real and imaginary situations. “I put in the book whatever I thought would be a good read. But some things I’ve done were just like everyone else, so I had to spice it up.”

Maddaloni said one of the most important aspects of the book is the fact that a great deal of it takes place in Philadelphia. “Books do not usually take place there,” he said. “(People from Philadelphia) like things like this. And I have always felt there was a place in my heart for Germantown.”

Maddaloni said he has received many positive comments from readers who have taken the book to the beach or on plane rides and been able to finish it in that time span. “I wanted it to be entertaining and an easy read,” he said. “I am satisfied that people have read it.”

For more information, including comments from readers about the book, visit www.notonthelevel.com The book is published by Author House and distributed by Ingram. The best price is from the distributor web site, $11.70. It costs $14.49 retail (book stores, amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com etc.).