In 1976, when he was sixteen, he went to Albany and testified before a legislative commission in the state senate against nuclear power, felt completely ignored and concluded that the tactic of lobbying the government was futile. He was arrested for what would be the first of twenty-seven times on May 1st, 1977. When he was twenty and living in a cabin in Rowe, Massachusetts, running the Rowe Nuclear Conversion Campaign, which ended in the first-ever shutdown of an operating nuclear power plant in America, he met Abbie Hoffman, who called him "the best political organizer of his generation." The two worked together until Hoffman's death in 1989, opposing U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and fighting to save the Delaware and St. Lawrence rivers. Giordano was for a time a prominent media figure in Western Massachusetts. He sometimes worked on political campaigns, notably for senator John Kerry and for the legalization of marijuana. Al Giordano is a musician who has performed with numerous bands()