COPYRIGHT

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First published in the US by Simon & Schuster 1992

This edition published 2020

FIRST EDITION

© Teresa Carpenter 2020

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Source ISBN: 9780008398699

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008398705

Version 2020-07-15

DEDICATION

For Leslie

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The people and events in this story are real. Conversations have been taken from surveillance transcripts or reconstructed by eyewitnesses to the events. Only the following names have been changed: Cousin Solly, Paulie Messina, Walter Perlmutter, Matthew Burton, Nathan Pincus, Tilly Palladino, “Beatrice,” “Jilly,” “Yvette,” “Nino” and members of the families Silverstein, Lamattina and Paterno. The name of Tommy Luca has been changed at the request of Arlyne Brickman because of her stated concern for her safety.

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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008398699

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Note to Readers

Introduction

PART ONE

1. House of Mirrors

2. Mob Girl

3. An Honest Woman

4. Wiseguys

5. Tommy

PART TWO

6. Fort Lee

7. Atlantic Beach

8. Forest Hills

9. Sweetie Pie

10. Witness

Epilogue: Fade Away

Bibliography

List of Searchable Terms

Acknowledgments

Other Books by Teresa Carpenter

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

When I arrived at Arlyne Brickman’s apartment one early afternoon, her drapes were drawn against the bright tropical sun, leaving the living room in a kind of perpetual twilight. Everything was perfect, as spotless and orderly as a nun’s chambers. The only evidence of habitation was a glass bookshelf on which rested three volumes: Wiseguy, Donnie Brasco and Mob Star. The kitchen was similarly austere except for an arrangement of purple chrysanthemums. I touched one and remarked, “They are beautiful!”

“Teresa,” Arlyne replied. “Don’t you know that old whores always have fresh flowers? It makes them feel clean.”

She was grinning.

When my buxom, red-headed hostess describes herself as a “whore,” she means it quite literally. For a time she worked as a call girl under the tutelage of a Manhattan madame. But on the occasion of our first meeting—July of 1988—I discerned that she also defines that self-inflicted barb in a more universal sense, meaning that she has lived a life oblivious to the tyranny of reputation. In the best and worst sense of the term, Arlyne Brickman is an outlaw.

The notorious Mrs. Brickman came to my attention earlier that summer when I began hearing tales of her adventures in the New York underworld. Not only was she a “Mafia princess,” being the daughter of a well-connected Jewish racketeer from the Lower East Side. Not only was she “married to the mob” by virtue of her carnal association with a string of wiseguys. Arlyne was racketeer in her own right, insinuating herself into the implacably male underworld, first as a courier of messages and then as the proprietor of a thriving bookmaking operation. Later, for reasons of fear, revenge and power, she turned informant. For over a decade she wore wires for New York and New Jersey police as well as federal agencies, including the FBI. Her surveillance of the Colombo Family led to the 1986 conviction of one of Carmine Persico’s top lieutenants.

Two years later, at the age of fifty-four, Arlyne decided it was time to immortalize her exploits in a book. Happily, she was not wed to the idea of a first-person account rendered through a ghostwriter. What she had in mind was an independent author who would be given a free hand to write a book about her. Arlyne, it turned out, had surprisingly sophisticated instincts about publishing, and realized that such an account would be more credible.

She first approached my husband, an investigative reporter and author who, after talking with her by phone, concluded her story was fascinating. “But,” he added turning to me, “this really seems more up your alley.” What he meant was that during my ten years as a crime reporter for the Village Voice, I made a career of studying bad girls. Specifically the kind who come from “good” homes and with middle-class expectations and somehow get rerouted into crime, prostitution and perversity. I’m sure there is an element of “there-but-for-the-grace of-God” in my interest. But that is not the whole story. I found myself admiring my own disreputable subjects. For the most part, they are women of considerable energy and enterprise. For all her apparent docility, Dorothy Stratten, the Playboy Playmate of the Year whose short life and tragic death I chronicled for the Voice in 1980, seemed impelled to make something of her life. The same thing could be said of Robin Benedict, the antiheroine of my previous book, Missing Beauty. Benedict strayed into the orbit of a pimp who perceived not only her beauty but also her energetic drive and turned her into a successful call girl. (Her enterprise had deadly consequences; Benedict was murdered by one of her johns, an eminent research biologist.) For a woman, however, the underworld often offers opportunities that the straight world does not.

Nowhere was that more apparent than in the case of Arlyne Brickman.

From the time she was twelve, Arlyne was driven by an almost fanatic ambition to become a mob girl. Although it is difficult, perhaps, to imagine how a child deliberately sets her sights on becoming a moll, it becomes easier if one understands the time and place in which the young Arlyne Weiss passed her formative years. The Lower East Side during the early part of the century was a precinct of a little over one square mile that was home to thousands of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. For many young men from this teeming quarter, the pursuit of the American dream took the form of bookmaking, bootlegging and black-marketeering. The East Side, therefore, became a sanctuary for hoodlums and, ultimately, the birthplace of the mob—both Italian and Jewish. Arlyne’s father made his own fortune in the rackets during the thirties and forties, yet he craved respectability for his two daughters. The younger opted for the straight life. As the older, Arlyne had the opportunity to do the same, but she declined, preferring to follow the example of her maternal grandmother, the proprietress of an East Side funeral parlor. A woman of considerable charm and influence, the grandmother was also benefactress to a crew of racketeers who hung out in her cellar. She reveled openly in the “East Side Life,” tacitly encouraging her granddaughter to do the same.

Arlyne’s imagination was further piqued by the highly publicized exploits of Virginia Hill, the flamboyant red-headed girlfriend of Bugsy Siegel. During her heyday, Virginia refined and elevated the status of a gangster’s moll to that of national celebrity. One newspaper called her “the most successful woman in America.” It is small wonder that young Arlyne Weiss could imagine no calling more exalted than that of mob girl.

The job description was vague. A mob girl had to be good-looking, since a lot of her time was spent serving as a “showpiece” on a gangster’s arm. She had to be trustworthy, since she was often called upon to run errands and deliver messages. This was particularly important during an era when federal investigators were aggressively developing expertise at wiretaps and the phones were becoming unsafe. She served as lover and confidante, a mistress cum geisha, whose tough-minded company provided relief from the demands of a hoodlum’s often staunchly traditional homelife. In exchange for these services, she received gifts, status and—as far as young Arlyne Weiss could discern from the exploits of her grandmother and the gossip column accounts of her idol, Virginia Hill—respect.

From the time she was about fourteen, Arlyne was an active seductress of the underworld and by the time she was twenty, she had slept with upward of fifty hoods from the Lower East Side. Some of these were Jewish racketeers from her tribal circle. During most of her adult life, however, she showed a marked preference for Italian men, who were technically off-limits, hence infinitely more desirable. Forever status conscious, she amassed a slate of conquests that included the notorious Bonanno hit man Tony Mirra and, briefly, Joe Colombo. But as Arlyne would learn in her more than thirty years in the underworld, living the mob girl ideal was a considerably tawdrier proposition than imagining it.

Far from the romanticized characters of story and film, wiseguys—as revealed through the eyes of Arlyne Brickman—are callous, shallow, vain, often homicidal narcissists who would rather spend time with one another than with a woman. On several occasions, Arlyne vowed to give up her promiscuous ways. In 1957, at the age of twenty-three, she married a furrier named Brickman. That union, however, was done in by his philandering and ultimate conviction for grand larceny. Left with a baby daughter and a restless spirit, Arlyne resumed her destructive pursuit of glamour and influence only to be raped and beaten by wiseguys she thought were her friends.

The rape marked in Arlyne’s career the advent of a new ruthlessness, born simultaneously of a desire for revenge and the need for protection. She spent the next thirteen years of her life in a tortured and often violent relationship with a Genovese wiseguy named Tommy Luca. During this period she also became a “businesswoman,” engaging in bookmaking, then drug dealing, in an obsessive pursuit of money. It was this cynical worldview that allowed her to progress rather naturally into a career as an informant. The nominal reason for her defection was clear enough. A crew of loansharks were threatening to harm her daughter and she turned to the police for help. Once she had broken the taboo against ratting, however, she discovered that she enjoyed it.

It has been my feeling since first meeting Arlyne that turning informant (she bridles at this term, preferring to be called a “cooperating individual”) was her way of avenging herself for all the indignities and abuse suffered at the hands of the mob. This explanation, I’m sure, is too simple. Arlyne not only turned in her enemies when she went on the federal payroll but began supplying information about old friends as well. Informing gave her things that had been missing: power over Tommy Luca, power to protect herself and—not least—a sense of purpose. There is no evidence that she was ever won over to the side of justice. Arlyne always evinced a curiously amoral attitude toward working for the government. What she felt, rather, seems to have been a mercenary’s pride in her own prowess. She found deception and betrayal on both sides of the law and was exhilarated by it. Informing gave her a thrill that she likened to a chemical high. “Some people drink,” she once told me. “Some people take drugs. I work. It’s just something that satisfies.”

Having recognized in Arlyne this love of intrigue, I often found myself wary of her. For her, as for most informants, manipulation is a way of life. It became clear to me in our initial encounters that she was a keen observer of humans and had a tendency to tailor her responses to please the listener. After one glance at my 110-pound frame and Louise Brooks haircut, she concluded I was a “classy broad” who might be offended by the brash, and often obscene, tough-girl act she pulls on federal agents. As a result, she donned another of her masks, that of the doting Jewish mother. I did not resist this, since I recognized that this guise, as indeed all her others, represented a legitimate aspect of her personality. In time, she was to reveal them all—the tough broad, the yenta and even demure “little Arlyne.”

A more challenging problem during the course of my research was getting to the bottom of her elusive motives. If the first half of her life was unconventional, it at least unfolded according to the dictates of human emotion. When her husband cheats on her, she seeks revenge. When she is raped, she feels outrage. By contrast, the behavior of her mature years often seemed to defy analysis. She professes great affection for her “uncle” Paulie Messina, a hoodlum who seems to have shown her genuine kindness, yet she rats him out to drug agents without a qualm. She develops what appears to be a friendship with those same agents, yet deals drugs behind their backs with Tommy Luca. In fact, Arlyne seems to feel no loyalty to anyone, an observation that, at times, caused me to suspect she might be a sociopath, cruising through life like a shark, simulating human emotion whenever it suited her purposes. A closer look at her history, however, led me to conclude that Arlyne does feel loyalty, however fleeting, to whomever happens to be stroking her ego. When Luca is the source of affection and excitement, she is loyal to Luca; when the feds offer her money and attention, she is loyal to the feds. It is a primitive response, but one that makes perfect sense in light of her impulsive nature.

Over the many months I spent interviewing Arlyne Brickman—watching her spoonfeed her lapdog, Lucky, while spinning tales of intrigue—I also concluded that her apparent duplicity was made possible by an extraordinary ability to compartmentalize. It was literally possible for her to be fond of someone while, at the same time, conducting a surveillance on him. The fondness comes from a side of her nature that deals with “personal” things; the surveillance is business. She does not allow one to interfere with the other. This occasionally produces tragic results. During the years she was dealing drugs with Tommy Luca, her daughter, who had fallen in with fast company, was on her way to becoming a heroin addict. As much as she claimed to love her child, Arlyne would not quit the drug business. Throughout our many conversations, drugs remained the one subject Arlyne was not anxious to discuss. Beyond the fact that her involvement in the narcotics trade placed her own daughter in peril, Arlyne maintained a personal conviction that drugs were shameful. She had, therefore, devised an elaborate scheme of rationalizations to avoid taking blame: She did not actually do drugs. She was not actually a dealer, just someone who lent a hand and, in return, got “house money.” Although interviews with law enforcement officials and documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request indicate that Arlyne was involved with drugs without the government’s knowledge, her own position seemed to be that because she worked intermittently for the DEA and FBI, any contacts she made—for whatever reason—were with those agencies’ tacit approval. She steadfastly refuses to admit to double-dealing.

As for her general rendering of the facts, however, Arlyne Brickman was impressively scrupulous. As an informant, she took professional pride in delivering quality information, and she applied the same standard to this enterprise. Whenever I asked her something she couldn’t recall, her response was invariably, “I don’t remember … and I’m not going to make anything up.” (Only once did she deliberately mislead me, by suggesting that she was Meyer Lansky’s “niece.” This, in fact, was a myth she had spun and refined over the years to improve her standing among wiseguys. As such, I considered it a lie more of vanity than deceit.) Over a period of two years, we went over her stories many times and her telling of them was remarkably consistent. I took pains to corroborate her accounts with family members, police, attorneys and federal agents. In certain instances there were discrepancies, which I have noted herein. When these occur, a reporter has to decide whom she will believe. In most instances, I have found myself believing Arlyne. For all her masks and poses, she wanted this book to count for something. In telling her story she has spared herself nothing—revealing the ugly along with the flattering—so that it might stand as an accurate testament to her exploits: the life and times of a mob girl.

How do you describe a mob girl? There are all types of mob girls. There’s a mob girl who sleeps with one guy and she’s connected to a mob … there’s a mob girl who sleeps around with a lot of different guys, gets loads of presents and favors. There was Virginia Hill … a broad that really made it good.

And there was me. I considered myself a mob girl.

—ARLYNE BRICKMAN

PART ONE

ONE

HOUSE OF MIRRORS

Every Friday night as long as Arlyne could remember, the Weiss family had paid a visit to The Grandmother. It was a sacred obligation, which could not be breached under any circumstances. As a small child, Arlyne had looked forward to those outings with innocent enthusiasm, accepting and uncomprehending. Around the year 1944 when she was eleven—an age at which her curiosity was piqued by a growing awareness of the mysteries that lay beneath ordinary events—these visits assumed a new importance.

At three o’clock, when Arlyne and her younger sister, Barbara, arrived home from school, they would bathe and put on fresh dresses, which the maid had laid out on the bed. Then they presented themselves to their mother, seated—as was her custom at that hour—on a bench before her vanity dresser. Billie Weiss would appraise her daughters with a critical squint, then position the younger before her. As she braided the long honey-blond hair, the child’s head bobbed compliantly. This peaceful idyll ended, however, the moment her older daughter stepped to the mirror. As Billie jerked the strands tighter, the girl stiffened for combat. It was a domestic battle played out every Friday afternoon like clockwork; a battle that Arlyne Weiss fought valiantly and one that Billie Weiss invariably won.

At dusk, mother and daughters strolled out of the large iron gates of Knickerbocker Village, a twelve-story apartment complex, which sat near the East River just north of the Brooklyn Bridge. Knickerbocker was a model development erected ten years earlier on the site of what had been New York City’s most appalling slum. “Lung Block,” it had been called, because many of the three thousand tenants who had been crammed into tenements there suffered from tuberculosis. The razing of those rookeries had been part of a continuing effort to clean up the Lower East Side, an unruly quarter, teeming with prostitutes and pickpockets who gave it an unsavory reputation. It is no wonder then that for second-generation Jews like Arlyne’s parents it was the source of considerable pride to give a Knickerbocker Village address. It was a sign that one had risen above the rabble.

If one walked north from the Knickerbocker along the Bowery, one found oneself in the Italian quarter. This was something the Weisses rarely did, since decades of antagonism between Italians and Jews did not promise safe passage. Instead, they would head east on Monroe Street, stopping at the K&K Candy Store where Mrs. Weiss bought cigarettes. Billie prided herself on being a modern woman. Then, if The Grandmother had requested it, the little party would detour onto Hester Street to purchase pickles and peppers from peddlers whose enormous wooden tubs stood exposed to the open air. Arlyne could smell them a block away and she was perpetually horrified to see the vendors wiping vinegar on their aprons. For a child, she was unusually particular about cleanliness. And since the streets were crowded with milling, unwashed bodies, she was always quite anxious by the time the Weiss entourage arrived at 202 East Broadway. There, sitting like a blessed sanctuary, was the Blum and Oxman Funeral Parlor.

The chapel’s dark stone façade was devoid of the grime that covered the surrounding buildings, the result of a weekly scrubbing. The brass railings that extended up the front steps were buffed to a high gloss by a rather simple Irish girl named Lily Higgins. She also swept the sidewalk and street for several yards around the stair. In this clearing, a gaggle of females consisting of blood relatives and honorary relations known as “Aunts” congregated, sitting on folding chairs or wooden boxes normally used for sitting shiva, the vigil for the dead. Billie promptly joined them, brushing off compliments on her Lartiga hat or little voile collar. Barbara went looking for the cousins, who all then scampered through the embalming room—blithely ignoring the marble slab upon which lay a corpse newly processed for burial on Sunday—into the tiny backyard to play at the duck pond. Arlyne, who only a year earlier had been content to join the others, now held back until she was sure she was alone, then engaged in a ritual of her own devising.

Ascending the white tile steps to the living compartment above the funeral parlor, she avoided the kitchen, from which emanated sporadic laughter and the clatter of cooking. Instead, she turned right into the deserted living room. There, illuminated by the glow of an enormous French fireplace, was a feast for the senses. Pink satin love seats. White brocaded sofas with feet carved like a lion’s paws. Oriental rugs and an upright piano. Arlyne would sit for a while, not on the sofa, for Grandmother was always fussy about soiling the upholstery, but on the floor, basking in the splendor. When she had had her fill, she moved on to the bedroom, which lay at the rear of the apartment overlooking the duck pond. It was small, less lavishly appointed than the other rooms, yet clearly the sanctum of a woman accustomed to luxury. The closet was filled with furs, meticulously arranged. The top of the dresser was covered with bottles of expensive foreign perfumes. More intriguing to Arlyne, however, was the top drawer, which held her grandmother’s jewelry. There was something about gazing upon that jumble of emerald bracelets and diamond brooches that excited her. Running her fingers over the facets of the gems, Arlyne was habitually tempted to slip one of the pieces into her pocket. But cowed by reverence for The Grandmother, she left them untouched.

In the center of the room stood a double bed with a headboard of dark wood carved as expansive, curving arms. Unlike the other beds in the house, it was never covered by a quilt, only a blanket. Arlyne found this strangely out of character with her grandmother’s taste. When she’d satisfied herself that there was no one outside the door, she would lift a corner of the mattress and from one of the coils withdraw a large white handkerchief knotted in the middle. Untying it, she released a small fortune in bills, between two thousand and five thousand dollars. Grandmother’s pin money.

For as long as she dared, Arlyne sat at the foot of the bed, fingering the bills, creasing them, rolling them, counting them, delirious. It was the beginning of her lifelong love affair with money, from which, she perceived at eleven, all things desirable flowed. Money bought the glow of an antique fireplace and emerald bracelets. Money bought cleanliness and safety. It bought power and position, assuring that one would never be mistaken for one of the poor Jews of Hester Street smelling of sweat and pickles. It was money that sustained the rich and highly unorthodox lifestyle of Grandmother Ida Blum.

From the kitchen came the seductive sound of laughter. Arlyne would put the bills back in their hiding place and join the revelers. Entering the open door she encountered a long table laden with a tureen of mushroom and barley soup and covered dishes of pot roast and carrots. Family wandered in and out filling their plates as they pleased. At the far end of the table, bent over the stove, Ida stood resplendent in a sheer blouse and tight skirt. Her platinum hair was twisted into an immaculate bun. On her left hand was a large diamond and ruby ring. On her right, an Eastern Star Ring. Her fingers were covered with matzoh meal.

Spotting her granddaughter, Ida wiped her hands, revealing a set of long and perfect vermilion nails. Then she raised them in a welcoming gesture. Arlyne ran to hug her grandmother around the waist. Ida would not return the hug. (She was not a cuddly bubba.) But the way she said “Dahhhhhling!” left her granddaughter limp with delight. It signified that at that moment she merited the great woman’s entire attention. As Ida turned back to her cooking, Arlyne watched with admiration. She was not a beautiful woman in the conventional sense. Her nose was too broad and her lips too narrow. Throughout most of her life she carried too much weight in her hips. But she transformed the initial impression of awkwardness by force of will. Her posture was always perfect, her diction flawless. Yet underlying that composure was a frank earthiness that men found appealing. The Grandmother, Arlyne observed, was always surrounded by men, most considerably younger than herself.

Among those tummlers who hung around Ida’s kitchen on a Friday night were the chauffeurs, Jimmy and Jake, who drove the hearses in the funeral processions. Both young men were clearly fond of their benefactress. Jake, a ladies’ man, would engage Ida in good-natured teasing and go on his way. The other, however, was more seriously smitten. Jimmy the Gentile, as he was called, was a timid soul who could never seem to find a girlfriend. Ida had taken pity on him and had offered to teach him to dance. Later, when her duties as cook were complete, she would take him by the hand and lead him to the living room where she would put a record on a phonograph. Then, to the delight of onlookers, she would initiate Jimmy into the erotic delights of the tango. Their bodies did not mesh perfectly; Ida overwhelmed her slender partner. But Jimmy was an avid pupil and Arlyne found it exciting to watch their silhouettes against the fire.

Jimmy waited on Ida in mute adoration. Every Saturday night, he drove her to the Roseland Ballroom where she competed in dance contests. Summers and holidays, he drove her to the Concord Hotel, a Jewish resort in the Catskills where she flirted with the dance instructors. He waited and waited. His vigil came to nothing. Ida already had a boyfriend who had staked a firmer claim upon her affections.

Uncle Frankie Oxman had been around as long as anyone could remember. He was a short, rotund man with a jovial disposition. On Friday nights Frankie circulated throughout the funeral parlor dispensing goodwill. The children were fond of him because he had a habit of handing out dollar bills, a princely sum in those days. He was indulgent, buying each of the cousins a duck for the pond. Frankie himself kept pigeons in the tiny backyard and he had an Irish setter upon whom he doted. Every afternoon he and Ida, she decked out in diamonds and an ermine stole, would strut down East Broadway walking the dog. They seemed improbable lovers and their affair was one that Billie and The Aunts were reluctant to acknowledge. Even years later when Frankie died one afternoon of a heart attack in Ida’s bed, The Aunts told themselves he had gone there for a “nap.” This delicacy was due in part to the fact that Ida’s husband, Jacob Blum, was still alive and living in exile somewhere in Brooklyn.

Arlyne remembered her grandfather as a sober, white-haired little man who always wore a black morning coat. Over the years she was to learn very little about his departure. Indeed, the facts of Jacob and Ida’s entire marital history were obscure and Arlyne could never discern whether this was a product of her family’s faulty collective memory or a deliberate amnesia in deference to Frankie Oxman’s position in the household.

Ida’s maiden name, Arlyne knew, was Lasker, and she had come to America as a child with her parents from a region in Poland then under the control of Austria. The family went into the grocery business and became moderately prosperous. Ida was betrothed at the age of sixteen to Jake Blum, who, it was assumed, had a good head for business and could take over the store. Jake, however, had ideas of his own and it was to the general consternation of the Laskers that he abandoned the family enterprise to become an undertaker. He reasoned, quite soundly, that the grocery business was subject to the vagaries of seasons and suppliers, while death produced an enduring clientele. No one was more distressed by Jake Blum’s defection than his young wife, who was revolted by the prospect of sharing a house with corpses. Ida loved life and funerals depressed her. Still, she tried to be a good helpmate. Even if she had no acquaintance with the deceased, she could be found weeping copiously at graveside. Her ostentatious displays of compassion won Jake the business of over a hundred of the funeral societies that had sprung up around the turn of the century to assure that immigrants would be buried, if not with pomp, then at least with a measure of dignity.

The Blums had three children. It was Ida’s destiny to bury two of them. Emmanuel died at the age of thirteen of a burst appendix. Harriet succumbed in early adulthood to pneumonia. Each time, Ida sank into depression. And, as having to endure her grief in the funeral home was intolerable to her, she would pack her bags and move to the Concord. After several months of dancing and merrymaking, she returned to East Broadway, her equilibrium restored.

On her remaining daughter, Ida lavished her undivided attention. Sylvia, a slender, dark girl with rather hawkish features, inherited her mother’s zest for living. Having taken dancing lessons from the time she was a toddler, she aimed for a career on the stage. At the age of fourteen, she secured a place in the chorus line of a troupe called the Manhattan Steppers, who were about to embark on a national tour. Jake Blum objected, his sense of propriety offended by the prospect of his daughter showing her ankles in dance halls around the country. Ida, however, overrode her husband’s objections, saying, “Let her have her fun.” Sylvia spent over six months traveling with the troupe under the stage name of “Billie Young.” She was known forever after as Billie.

In later years, Arlyne read her mother’s letters from the road—sweet, chaste letters that were no doubt intended to put Jake Blum’s worries to rest. She had them pegged as not-so-artful deception. She was sure that her mother had enjoyed what might then have been termed a “fling.” Even as a child, Arlyne was the skeptical sort who had limited tolerance for the little lies that families tell to save face. But, at the age of eleven, she found herself increasingly perturbed by the story of her grandfather’s disappearance.

If you listened to The Aunts—and Arlyne did a good deal of eavesdropping from various vantage points throughout the funeral parlor—Grandfather Blum had met another woman, also an undertaker, at a society meeting and had run off with her. Arlyne, who considered her grandmother the most desirable of all women, found this scenario wholly incredible. The truth, she suspected, was that The Grandfather had been cast out. Jacob Blum was a decent man with few enemies and it was difficult to imagine who might have engineered his downfall. Arlyne’s youthful suspicion, however, fell upon Frankie Oxman.

As good as Frankie was in many respects, Arlyne never fully trusted him. There was something too eager, too opportunistic in his effusive goodwill. He had originally come to work for the Blums as a chauffeur but had seized upon every opportunity to run errands for Ida, collecting corpses from the Kings’ County Mortuary and the “crazy house” out at Pilgrim State, thereby making himself indispensable to her.

Uncle Frankie was always into something shady, which enhanced his stature around the funeral home. No matter what it was you needed, Frankie could get it for you. Pots and pans, bolts of cloth, appliances. When the miraculous phenomenon of television was scarcely rumored in households on the Lower East Side, Frankie got his hands on one of the first models, an RCA with a tiny round screen in an enormous console. Ida was so thrilled with this acquisition that she invited a throng of family and friends into the living room, where she allowed her visitors the rare privilege of sitting on the brocade couches.

But Uncle Frankie’s talents did not end at procuring desirable and presumably purloined commodities. He was also a bookmaker. Long before Jacob Blum went into exile, the chauffeur was taking bets from the neighborhood boys. He kept his money, it was rumored, in one of the caskets. (Arlyne would have happily canvassed those crypts one by one looking for Frankie’s fabled stash, but the lids were heavy and resisted prying.)

After Grandfather Blum’s unexplained departure, Frankie abandoned discretion and brought his bookmaking operation out into the open, headquartering it in a small basement compartment next to the funeral parlor. Throughout most of the morning and early afternoon, a stream of men dressed in suits and fedoras entered and exited by a shallow cement stair from the street. The Clinton Street Boys, as they were known, were small-time racketeers who belonged to a social club a couple of doors down from Blums’. The Boys were a shiftless, fun-loving lot who spent the days playing pool, cards and baseball. Ida courted their goodwill by sponsoring the team, even providing uniforms. They were all avid gamblers and Frankie took their bets.

Sometimes, Arlyne visited her grandmother on Saturday afternoons, preferable to other days because there were no funerals in progress and she could play on the stairs. On those occasions, she would descend a back stairway that led to the basement compartment next door and pay a visit to Uncle Frankie and his friends. She would find them lounging on a pair of old sofas, reading the racing form and listening to an old floor-standing radio for race results. They didn’t seem to mind a child in their midst. Frankie or one of the others might slip her a quarter and pat her cheek. Indeed, for as long as she could remember these men had been “The Uncles.” There was Uncle Milty Tillinger, the shylock. Once when one of Milty’s relatives was on the run from the law, Ida had hidden him in the casket room until the heat was off, incurring the Tillinger family’s loyalty for life. There was Izzy Smith, proprietor of Zion Memorial down the block. Like Frankie a purveyor of hot merchandise, he customarily left his own establishment at midday to place a bet.

The Clinton Street Boys also counted among their number a substantial number of union officials. Now and then one of these men would take Frankie aside and whisper something in his ear. Giving a nod, Frankie would lead the petitioner up the stair to his private office, which was located next to the chapel behind a high brass door. High on the door was a tiny square window with a curtain hung from the inside. When that curtain was pulled, it meant that secret business was being discussed. Arlyne often climbed the stair and, under the guise of playing in the hallway, furtively studied the door. It was taller than any other she had seen. Except for a large, rounded copper knob, it was perfectly plain. The surface was polished daily by the industrious Lily Higgins and it shone like an amber mirror. Arlyne would stare at it, hoping to see through it. But all that came back was her own dark, frustrated face.

The imposing portal with its impenetrable curtain was an affront, since every other door in the funeral parlor was left open, a reflection of Ida Blum’s free, abundant nature. And Arlyne, whose talents for prying were already admirably developed, was galled by the existence of the one enclave to which she was denied access. She was always alert to those few seconds when the door was open admitting Frankie’s visitors. If she was quick, she could catch a peek at the interior of the forbidden compartment.

What she saw was a disappointingly ordinary pair of rooms. In front was a small office with desk and telephone. Behind it was an antechamber with several wooden file cabinets and a large cast-iron safe. One afternoon the opportunity arose to inspect these rooms more closely when Frankie hurried out of his office, inadvertently leaving the door ajar. Arlyne, who had been playing in the chapel, looked down the hall and could not believe her good fortune. Fearful that this lapse signified Frankie’s momentary return, she ambled idly down the hall until she arrived at the office door. Several minutes passed. Frankie was nowhere in sight. Emboldened, Arlyne pushed the door wider and slipped inside. From the front room, she could see that the safe had also been left open. As she moved closer to it she saw that it contained a stack of bound books. The temptation to touch them was irresistible. She knelt by the opening and picking up one of the volumes opened it to a page at random. It contained columns of figures whose significance she could not understand. She studied them fiercely but they remained as impenetrable as the polished surface of the brass door. Then she heard Frankie Oxman’s voice in the vestibule and his heavy tread on the stair. She snapped the book shut, careful to return it to the place she had found it, then scampered out the doorway into the safety of the chapel.

The mystery surrounding Uncle Frankie’s business dealings, and more particularly his presumed role in the departure of Jake Blum, was to nag Arlyne Weiss throughout her remaining childhood years. The answer to this riddle did not come in any sudden revelation, but rather with the slowly evolving awareness of who tugged the strings of the players at Blum’s chapel. From the time Arlyne was about eight, she had noticed among the visitors to Frankie’s office a very tall man with heavy bags under his eyes, his face in a perpetual scowl. “Uncle Red,” as she was instructed to call him, never stopped to joke with her or give her money like the other uncles. He would make a brief weekly visit to Frankie, pay his respects to Ida, then leave. Arlyne could tell from the way Frankie fluttered and fawned in Red’s presence that he was a dangerous man, the term “dangerous” connoting then, as it would for the remainder of her life, the ability to command respect, and more generally to get things done.

Red Levine, she learned as time went on, was a close friend of Meyer Lansky, a soft-spoken Polish immigrant who was already a legend on the Lower East Side. Shortly after his arrival in America in 1911, at the age of nine, he embarked upon a career as a street gambler, and in the years to come he succeeded in forging a criminal empire of gambling, rum running and protection. Castigated as a pariah by Orthodox religious leaders, he was, nonetheless, regarded with admiration, even awe, throughout the Jewish quarter, where he was considered a local-boy-made-good. “Meyer,” as he was called familiarly, enjoyed the status of statesman by virtue of having forged an alliance with the East Side Italian gangs, headed by Charles Lucania—later “Lucky” Luciano.

Luciano and Lansky were later joined by an irascible Jewish hood named Louis Buchalter, also know as “Lepke,” and they came to be referred to collectively as Lucky, Lansky and Lepke. While Luciano and Lepke mingled with showgirls and even socialites, Lansky—the reputed brains of the operation—remained in the background reading books on management. Throughout his fifty-year career he displayed an uncanny instinct for predicting which aspects of American life might be ripe for exploitation. During Prohibition, he brought his gang full-tilt into rum running. Even before the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933 restored the flow of legal booze, Lansky had his eye on the next field of opportunity: the unions.

The early days of the labor movement were chaotic and violent, particularly in the “rag trade,” whose workers, largely poor immigrants, were crammed into sweatshops and forced to work under deplorable conditions on the Lower East Side. Even after the Garment District moved north into more hospitable accommodations on Seventh Avenue, dissatisfaction grew. Management threatened violence to workers disposed to organize: The unions threatened violence to those who were not. Both sides hired thugs, often professional hoodlums, to enforce their threats. In some cases, the hood was simply a hired gun who would work for whichever side paid most, sometimes working for both. (Others, like Dopey Benny Fein, felt the tug of principle and would break legs only under the union banner.) At first the racketeers merely demanded extortionary rates for their services, which included burning or bombing shops that refused to toe the union line. Soon, however, they moved into more sophisticated applications of terror, demanding and receiving leadership positions. Organizations like the ILGWU were so disrupted by strikes and infighting that “Little Augie” Orgen, a gunman originally hired to protect workers, simply walked in and took over, ushering in the era of the union racketeer.

Recognizing that the unions were fertile territory, Lansky went into business with his old friend Lepke who, as a former protégé of Little Augie, had managed to gain control of trucking in the Garment District. This he did with the help of a squad of thugs commanded by a muscleman named Jake “Gurrah” Shapiro. Lepke and Gurrah, who came to be known as “L&G” or simply “The Boys,” called the shots on Seventh Avenue, where literally no business could be conducted without their approval. Many a legitimate businessman was convinced to make “L&G” silent partners in exchange for assurances that his cargo would be delivered on time. Those who declined were threatened with sabotage and often death. Lansky and The Boys conducted their criminal enterprises virtually unmolested until 1933, when they found themselves drawn into a riptide of politics.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who emerged victorious from the 1932 Democratic National Convention with support from political bosses under Lansky’s control, promptly turned on his old allies, launching an all-out war on organized crime. That move proved so popular that local politicians all over the country took up the standard. The governor of New York, Herbert Lehman, appointed a young and politically ambitious special prosecutor named Thomas Dewey to bring the racketeers to justice. Dewey swung into action with fervor, targeting hoodlums across the spectrum of suspect industries. The brunt of his prosecutorial fury, however, fell upon Lepke and Gurrah, whom he called “the two greatest racketeers in the country.” Realizing the indictments were imminent, The Boys went into hiding for nearly a year, all the while the subjects of an intensive national manhunt. At length, hoping for clemency, they gave themselves up. For Gurrah, the gamble paid off. He was convicted of extortion and got a three-year prison term. Lepke was not so lucky. Federal and state prosecutors both went after him and when they were through he was sentenced to life at Leavenworth.

Lepke’s problems grew worse. In the months after he turned himself in, New York police arrested Abe Reles, a Lansky gunman whom they suspected of several murders. Threatened with the prospect of electrocution, Reles turned state’s evidence and reeled off a string of crimes committed by the Lansky crew over two decades. Among these was the murder of a trucker who had been cooperating with the Dewey investigation. Reles had killed the man, he said, at Lepke’s command. Reles’s confession set in motion a new round of prosecution, which eventually sent Lepke to the electric chair.

The damage of which Reles was capable did not stop there. Reles had knowledge that also threatened to convict Lansky’s lieutenant, Bugsy Siegel. Then, one night as he was being held in protective custody at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island, Abe Reles went flying out the window to his death. The question of exactly how a man might be murdered under the watchful eye of six New York City policemen gave rise to a number of theories. Perhaps he hadn’t been murdered at all. Perhaps Reles had repented of his confession, or more likely, realized his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel, and took an honorable leap. Perhaps someone paid the cops to turn a blind eye, giving safe passage to an assassin. The mystery lingered long after his death.

Arlyne had been only three years old when Abie, as he was known to the Clinton Street Boys, went sailing out the window. As her impression of death was rather imperfectly formed, she never imagined him spreadeagled on the pavement, but rather lying in a coffin, rouged and serene like the other corpses at the funeral home. She had only the most general notion of what his sin might have been. But even a child could see that telling tales on your friends could have dangerous consequences. For each rat, there was an avenging demon. And the identity of Abie Reles’s personal demon was widely debated among The Uncles in Ida Blum’s basement parlor. One candidate was Bugsy Siegel’s right-hand man, Frank Costello, who was rumored to have bribed the police. But those intimately acquainted with the players—and Clinton Street Boys prided themselves on those connections—insisted that the killer was none other than Red Levine.

Arlyne Weiss had no reason to doubt that what The Uncles said was true. The lowering figure who made weekly visits to Frankie Oxman struck her as a menacing presence. It was only after several years of eavesdropping from the stairwell that Arlyne understood what business had originally brought him to Blum’s. During the early forties, there had been a movement afoot on the Lower East Side to unionize the chauffeurs and hearse drivers at funeral parlors. Grandfather Jacob Blum had wanted no part of it, insisting he paid his drivers a fair wage. Jake didn’t want to go into the union out of respect for the old man and Jimmy would go along with whatever Jake did. In the face of this intransigence, the chauffeur’s union had dispatched Red Levine to the Blum funeral parlor hoping he could make Jacob Blum see reason. In short, Uncle Red had threatened to bomb the place, and Jacob Blum, who did not have the stomach for this kind of fight, had given in to the union. With that, all of the other funeral parlors on the Lower East Side followed suit.

The showdown with Red Levine broke Jake Blum’s spirit. After that, he did not manage his business or personal affairs with the rigor that he had used to. Into the vacuum stepped Frankie Oxman, the only one of the Blum chauffeurs who had welcomed the union. He became Red’s boy on the scene, taking over more of the day-to-day running of the business. Gradually he usurped more and more of Jacob Blum’s domain, including his wife. For years Frankie had courted Ida through obsequious errands but now that his star was on the rise, he became bolder. Just when her grandmother and Frankie Oxman became lovers, Arlyne never knew. It had to have occurred, she figured, when she was between the ages of eight (the year Red Levine appeared) and ten (the year Grandfather Blum disappeared). And it had to have occurred under the nose of her mother and the others as they appeared without fail for their Friday night get-togethers. Finally, Jake Blum had packed his bags and walked out the door. It was Arlyne’s conviction that Ida, weary of Jake Blum’s lugubrious presence, flattered by the attention of Frankie Oxman and the seductive prospect of becoming patroness to a crew of racketeers, had thrown her husband out. In time, Ida took Frankie in as a partner. She hauled down the old canopy and hoisted a new one, which read, “Blum and Oxman,” thus announcing to the world that she had decided to live the East Side Life.

Notably absent from these affairs was Arlyne’s father, Irving Weiss. The Aunts and more particularly The Uncles would make deferential inquiries about his health, knowing full well that Irving had forgone an evening at Blum and Oxman’s to play gin with his cronies. Curiously, that absence was not regarded as a cause for scandal. It was, rather, accepted as a fact of life. Irving Weiss harbored an ill-concealed contempt for Frankie Oxman, whom he considered a small-time operator. Frankie’s fawning irked Irving, who was generally acknowledged as a much classier sort of racketeer.

The Weiss brothers—Henry, Irving, Eddy, Joe and Natie—did not belong to the Clinton Street Boys but to a different crew whose territory extended from Houston Street through Attorney Street and as far east as the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Sons of Hungarian emigrants, the Weiss boys had grown up on Kosciuszko Street, where their parents owned a grocery store and milk route. That thriving enterprise was to have fallen to the sons, providing them with the means to make their fortune, their parents hoped, within the confines of traditional American values. But the Weiss boys had no taste for work. They were a handsome, indolent bunch who slept late and preened before a mirror until noon. They were fond of white suits, wingtips and shirts from an expensive haberdasher on Clinton and Grand. They liked fancy cars and good restaurants, and since honest work would not support their tastes, they fell quite naturally into racketeering.

Until the day he died, Arlyne was never quite sure what her father did. She knew that before she was born he and his brothers had left the grocery business and started a funeral parlor on Houston Street. The upright Jacob Blum was not taken in by this facade of respectability. To him, Irving was simply a racketeer. But if the Weiss brothers’ effrontery offended Jacob Blum, it intrigued his daughter.

Billie admired all of the Weisses. But it was Irving—dark, quiet and handsome as a movie star—who appealed to her most. From the moment she became aware of his presence on the Lower East Side, she would seize any excuse to walk down Houston Street. If she were lucky, she would find one or more of the boys lounging on the steps. They were always polite, mindful of her father’s place in the community, and would tip their hats and murmur “Miss Blum.” This formality, while at first gratifying, began to wear on Miss Blum’s patience. Constrained by convention, she could not initiate contact without a suitable pretext. Happily, one presented itself.

One of the funeral societies was holding a raffle and each of the East Side undertakers received a handful of tickets to sell. Ida Blum, who usually managed these matters, called her daughter to see if she might be interested in approaching the Weiss brothers. At her mother’s opportune suggestion, Billie marched to Houston Street with ten raffle tickets as a pretext. Irving was eager to buy all ten, but was stopped by Henry, who thought five were quite enough. That confirmed Billie’s assessment of Irving as the more generous—and the better catch. Billie had, in fact, left nothing to chance. Before coming, she had surreptitiously lifted the red seals on the tickets to make sure she sold the Weiss brothers a winner, thus assuring her of a future visit. When the drawing was held a week later, Irving had won a wool car blanket. Billie ran over to Houston Street to tell him, suggesting they might want to drive to Brooklyn together to pick it up. That excursion ended with dinner at an Italian restaurant, and six months later, Billie Blum was married to Irving Weiss, six years her senior.

Jacob Blum objected to the match on familiar grounds, that Irving was a hoodlum. This did not particularly bother Ida, who was more concerned that her daughter, like her, would be entombed for life in a funeral parlor. She made peace with her new son-in-law when, a few months after marriage, he and his brothers abandoned the funeral business and began running excursions by touring car to the Catskills. Their clientele were largely Jewish mobsters and their destination was an establishment called The Dodge Inn on Lake Louise Marie. The inn had an unsavory reputation as a gangster hangout and a haven for cheating lovers. (There was a standing joke that you had to “dodge in and dodge out.”) Ida approved of Irving’s new venture, finding it a much gayer occupation than undertaking. Often the entire family, with the exception of the taciturn Jacob Blum, would take to the country, Irving at the wheel, Billie by his side and Ida in the back seat flanked by young chauffeurs.

Ida’s delight increased a year after her daughter’s marriage with the arrival of her first grandchild, a baby girl. Arlyne—Billie found this unusual spelling elegant—was a roly-poly baby. She was not exactly beautiful but from the moment of her birth her tiny features were animated with vitality. Ida paraded the child proudly down Broadway, where she was known as “Little Arlyne” or “Princess Arlyne.” By the time she was four years old, the child had already been inculcated with the conviction that the most important thing in life was dressing well. Her grandmother never bought off the rack. Neither did her mother, whose wardrobe, right down to her bathrobes, was custom made. Following in that grand tradition, Little Arlyne was taken as a toddler to Madame Webber, a petite blond seamstress, who outfitted her with little velvet coats and muffs with matching pillbox hats. Arlyne also accompanied her mother to Madame Berger’s Beauty Salon, which lay at the top of several flights of stairs on Clinton Street. Madame Berger, a short woman with wavy reddish curls pressed close to her scalp, wielded a vigorous pair of shears and would chop and chop away, twirling the strands and securing them under a helmet of bobby pins. When she had finished, Arlyne’s mop was a tight, shiny mass of sculpted curls.

Twice a week, Billie visited Madame Berger to have her own hair hennaed and styled in a pompadour supported by large tortoiseshell combs. Those visits were not only a fashion ritual, but a reconnaissance mission to discover who was aligned, or more particularly sleeping, with whom on the Lower East Side. Madame Berger’s little shop catered to the wives and girlfriends of racketeers, most of whom showed up early on Friday afternoons to keep an eye on one another. A hair appointment at Madame Berger’s offered a most civilized way of spying on your enemies. According to the prescribed rules of warfare, most of the antagonists maintained a pretense of civility. Every now and again, one would overestimate the power of her position and make a tactical blunder. One such incident, which etched itself irradicably into the mythology of the Lower East Side, occurred when Gurrah Shapiro’s mistress, dripping with jewelry from her famous conquest, had the temerity to introduce herself to the wife. The latter drew herself up and announced with withering hauteur, “I am still Mrs. Shapiro.”

Billie Weiss, who was fairly wise in the ways of the world, maintained a studied naivete in regard to the criminal element. The term “racketeer” offended her. Gurrah Shapiro, Milty Tillinger and Red Levine were all “nice men.” And since it was possible to relate to them on an entirely social level, one did not need to acknowledge what they did for a living. Billie, for instance, had struck up a friendship with Red’s wife, May, who also had her hair done at Madame Berger’s. As a result, the Weisses were invited now and then to the Levines’ summer place, a rather shabby rented railroad flat in Atlantic Beach, Long Island. Those evenings, as Arlyne later recalled them, were unremarkable. She played with Red’s well-behaved children, Murray and Alice, while May, a thin, consumptive woman, cooked and chatted with the women in the kitchen. In the parlor at the very front of the house the men would usually be arguing loudly. The discussions would cease at dinner. Jewish racketeers never discussed business at the table. Then, after dessert, Red would fold his napkin and announce that he had to go to “work.” It occurred to Arlyne years later that it must have been during one of these nocturnal shifts that Red Levine shoved Abie Reles out of the window at the Half Moon Hotel.

If Red’s business was never discussed in Billie’s household, neither were the affairs of Irving Weiss. Over time, Irving had expanded his business from touring cars to locating and acquiring luxury cars for wealthy clients. Soon after, he and his brother Henry opened a car dealership on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (they called it Chester Motors after the ever-present Chesterfield King that hung from the corner of Irving’s mouth) where they dealt in Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces. Irving liked to say that if he sold one Rolls a month it was enough to keep his family fed. He was entirely too modest. The Weiss family lived extravagantly, indulging in their custom-made clothes and fine cars. Four years after the arrival of Arlyne, Billie gave birth to a second daughter, but Irving, who was ever solicitous of his wife, never allowed her to be burdened by domestic cares. The children were watched and the household run by a series of black maids while the Weisses made the rounds of fashionable nightclubs.

Irving Weiss’s already sizable fortune swelled during the war years, when he managed to obtain steaks, eggs, nylons and other luxuries in short supply among the general population. Arlyne heard her father tell her mother that she needn’t bother with rationing coupons. Looking back on those days, Arlyne was later to surmise that her father and his brothers, as well as a certain Uncle Sidney from the old Williamsburg neighborhood, were dealing on the black market.

During the war, the Weiss family spent their winters in Florida, taking a private plane, courtesy of one of Irving’s “friends.” For Arlyne those sojourns were infused with magic. There was the pleasure of stepping off the plane in Miami and feeling her skin caressed with the warm, moist air. She would fill her lungs, because in those days Miami smelled clean. Years later whenever she heard the strains of “Moon Over Miami” she would grow weepy with nostalgia.

The Weisses usually rented a small apartment in what is now the Art Deco District. Billie sunbathed while Irving looked after certain business interests. He owned a piece of a bar on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach. As the place was usually crowded with sailors, Irving would not let his older daughter come inside. Instead, she would meet him outside, under the awning, and walk him back to the apartment each day. Irving was also an investor in a night spot called The Paddock Club. This too was a rather sleazy establishment, which boasted for entertainment a foul-mouthed comedian named B. S. Pulley. It was a “dirty club.” Irving and Billie, who were accustomed to frequenting classier joints, were nonetheless required to put in an appearance there from time to time, largely because one of the other co-owners was one of Lucky Luciano’s friends, Giuseppe Antonio Doto, also known as Joe Adonis.

Adonis was aloof and to Arlyne, a mystery figure. She managed to catch a glimpse of him one night as he sat outside the apartment waiting for her father. Although she was not yet a teenager, the sight of Adonis’s indistinct profile visible through the Caddy’s smoky glass aroused in her stirrings of sexual interest. His thick sensual features seemed as exotic as they were forbidden. Although the subject had never been explicitly discussed, it was clear that any daughter of Irving Weiss was expected to steer clear of Italians, who were widely acknowledged to prey upon Jewish girls and broadcast the details of their conquests on street corners and clubhouses throughout the Lower East Side. On one hand, Adonis was attractive because he was so strange, the utter opposite of the pallid Jewish racketeers who hung out at Blum and Oxman’s. At the same time there was something familiar about him. Something that reminded Arlyne of her father. Not that they were physically similar. Beyond their dark features, the heavy, weary-eyed Adonis had little in common with the slender, sleekly coiffed Irving Weiss. It was more a similarity of attitude, a commanding, powerful presence, which made them, in Arlyne’s favorite expression, “dangerous.”

From the time she was small, Arlyne had observed that her father, while a man of few words, made his presence felt wherever he went. On Sundays when he took his family to dinner at the Grotta Azzurra on Mulberry Street, the valet would snap to attention when they pulled up in a Rolls and the staff would whisper audibly “The Weisses!” They never had to wait for a table, and the waiters always hovered solicitously, eyes lowered and necks crooked in an attitude of deference. It gave Arlyne a shiver of pleasure to be under the protection of a man who commanded respect.

The feeling she got on those occasions was intensified by the knowledge that she was her father’s favorite girl. While her mother was partial to Barbara, a sweet, dainty child to whom she routinely referred as “my Barbara,” Irving favored Arlyne. No matter how she misbehaved, he turned a blind eye and seemed even to enjoy the vitality from which those pranks sprang. From the time she was small he would draw her now and again into his confidence. Not that he shared private thoughts with her. Looking back on her life from middle age, Arlyne could not recall a single extended conversation with her father. Their intimacy, rather, grew out of his willingness to include her in excursions with his closest associates.

Once, when she was around eight, he took her on a day trip to Palm Island with Red Levine. Even at that young age, Arlyne was aware of how privileged she was to be taken along, since the object of that outing was an audience with Al Capone, recently released from prison and rumored to be insane. During Capone’s reign as crime boss of Chicago, Red Levine had enjoyed Al’s trust, serving as a courier of personal messages between him and Lucky Luciano. Now, in Capone’s retirement, Red served as a sort of legate-at-large, refreshing the fallen leader’s ties with the underworld. Her father’s meeting with Capone was uneventful from Arlyne’s perspective. As they entered the house, a dreary place with bars on the windows, Irving told her to sit on a bench in the foyer. Then a door opened. She could not see who was inside but Red ushered her father in, saying, “I want you to meet Irving. You know who Irving is.” The door closed. The little girl waited in the foyer until it got dark. When her father and Uncle Red reemerged, she craned her neck to see the third man, but the door closed before she could catch a glimpse.

Excluded as she was from the main arena of action, Arlyne, nonetheless, felt proud to be considered one of the boys. As time went on she became less eager to share her mother and sister’s bond, from which she was perpetually excluded, and was drawn more and more to the male camaraderie of her father and his associates. Irving obliged by taking her along to the Jamaica Racetrack on Saturday mornings. It would be her, Uncle Red Levine and sometimes Uncle Sidney. Irving would drive them all to Queens in a touring car, which they would park in the enormous lot. The men would leave her in the grandstand eating hot dogs as they conducted their business at the betting windows, and from a distance she would admire her father as he threaded his way elegantly through the crowd in his white suit. In those days nobody wore a white suit except Bugsy Siegel. Irving Weiss rarely won. He was not a lucky bettor, but his losses, though sometimes substantial, never seemed to put him in a bad mood.

As Arlyne entered her teen years, Friday night dinner at The Grandmother’s ceased to exert its irresistible pull on her and she would sometimes accompany her father and Red to the fights at Madison Square Garden. In those days people dressed to the teeth and Arlyne would show up on her father’s arm wearing something tight and strapless. She would secretly imagine that she was her father’s date, or if she was feeling particularly daring, his wife. Irving Weiss always got ringside seats because he had a connection. All the prestige that surrounded him enveloped her. In the company of the boys, she felt important.

Still, the intimacy that Irving Weiss offered his daughter always had limits, which frustrated her intolerably. And no place were these limits more strictly imposed than at the very seat of Irving’s business affairs. In a practical sense, the doors of Chester Motors were open to everyone. And on Saturday afternoons Billie, Barbara and Arlyne sometimes went up to 116th Street to pay the Weiss brothers a visit. On those occasions they put on their best dresses, because Irving never liked to see his family wearing casual clothes in public, particularly not at the showroom of Chester Motors, where the Weiss brothers strove for a certain elegance to showcase their selection of fine automobiles. The floors were tiled with faux marble and several fat columns were covered with mirrors. Arlyne came to call it the “House of Mirrors.”

Chester Motors’ pretensions to class were belied to some degree by its clientele, Italian hoods from 116th and Pleasant Avenue who were always in the market for big cars. After they finished browsing among the Cadillacs they often stopped by Irving’s office. Arlyne could see them through the high panels of glass arguing spiritedly with her father and Uncle Henny. She could not hear a word. The Weiss brothers had regular visitors who conducted their silent, energetic and unfathomable business. Among these were James Plumeri and his nephew, John Dioguardi, also known as Jimmy Doyle and Johnny Dio. These two hoodlums had been close associates of Lepke and Gurrah and had themselves done time on convictions for racketeering in the Garment District. Johnny and Jimmy seemed to have assumed the role of the Weiss brothers’ special protectors. Once when Chester Motors was robbed and thieves took Henny’s large diamond ring, Irving put in a call to Johnny Dio and the following evening the ring was returned under the door in an unmarked envelope. Another time, Irving’s brother Joey stole some money from the safe and left town. At Irving’s behest, Jimmy Doyle and Johnny Dio tracked him down to a resort in the Catskills where they found him holed up with a girlfriend. They dragged Joey back to face his punishment, but Irving, who had a soft spot for his younger brother, forgave everything.

Over the years Chester Motors served as a base of operation for racketeers from the teamsters and meat cutters unions. For a while it was even appropriated as an office by a corrupt narcotics cop who used it to collect graft payments. At all hours of the working day, men from the neighborhood would run in to make calls from a pay phone hanging on the wall. Often the phone would ring and ring. Arlyne’s father and uncles would hear it, but no one would answer. Irving Weiss had given his daughters strict instructions to leave that phone alone.

One spring afternoon when Arlyne was in her early teens she was hanging around the showroom when the phone began to ring. It continued to ring and with each ring the temptation grew stronger to lift the receiver. She tried to imagine the party on the other end. Jimmy Doyle or Johnny Dio? The narcotics cop? She was overwhelmed by the urge to hear the voice. As she reached for the phone, however, she heard the sharp report of her father’s voice calling “Arlyne!” She withdrew her hand. In one brief command he had excluded her firmly from the heart of his life. That was the way it always was with the Weiss family. Doors slammed shut. Mirrors stared back. And every ring of the phone concealed a secret.

TWO

MOB GIRL

If Irving Weiss appeared to draw his daughter into his circle of confidence only to push her away again, it was not because he intended to be cruel. He was, rather, ambivalent about his own life. Having done well for himself in the rackets, he nonetheless shared his wife’s pretensions to respectability, particularly in regard to his children, for whom he envisioned a quiet, affluent life in the mainstream. “Even the worst mobster,” Arlyne would later observe, “wants his child to be wonderful.”

Ironically, Irving Weiss’s two daughters mirrored the contradictory sides of his nature. Barbara, who had submitted herself dutifully to her mother’s tutelage, learned everything a little lady should learn. She took dancing lessons and horse-riding lessons and applied herself to her studies. Even in grade school she seemed well on her way to the country-club set. Arlyne, on the other hand, routinely cut classes to haunt the basement of Knickerbocker Village, which was catacombed with dark storerooms. There she and her chums would smoke cigarettes, which her mother, an unrepentant chain-smoker, had strictly forbidden. Billie once caught her daughter in the act and resolved to break her of the habit. She locked her in the bathroom with a cigar and didn’t let her out until she had smoked the whole thing. Arlyne found the experience sufficiently sickening that she never touched tobacco again. For the most part, however, the reform was superficial and she continued to cut classes.

Barbara also shone more brightly at play. Each summer the two girls would be shipped off to Camp Roosevelt for the Discriminating, a venerable Catskills outpost that catered to the offspring of rich Jews. There, Barbara Weiss became the youngest member ever inducted into the Blue Dragon Society, which honored the all-around best campers. Arlyne never made the cut. She was too busy sneaking to the milk bar at night for furtive necking with boys from Camp Winston across the lake.

By her early teens, Arlyne was already a striking girl, tall and thin with a precocious and ample bust. It was a figure that invited advances. She was only twelve when she lost her virginity. This occurred inauspiciously in her grandmother’s funeral parlor. One Friday evening, her cousin, Solly, only slightly older but infinitely more experienced, lured her into a tiny guest bedroom to play “doctor.” He guided her to the bed and, removing her panties, tried putting his fingers inside her. They wouldn’t go. Arlyne recalled experiencing no particular physical sensation. She was sufficiently intrigued, however, that the following week, when Solly once again beckoned her into the little bedroom, she followed willingly. This time he climbed on top of her and pushed his thing inside of her. She felt a sharp pain, then began to bleed. She ran to the bathroom crying.

Arlyne told no one about this and, thereafter, avoided Solly. She hoped to put the episode out of her mind, but curiously it kept resurfacing. She wasn’t sure why. The sex itself hadn’t brought her any pleasure. Quite the opposite. There was another component to the experience, however, that held an irresistible attraction. Arlyne recalled that during the time that Solly was luring her to bed, she had enjoyed his full attention. And that filled a deep and curious need. Arlyne was hungry for attention, perhaps because she was excluded from her mother’s affection and shut out of her father’s confidence. As long as she could remember Arlyne was crying to be noticed and admired. Now she discovered that sex, as unpleasant as it might be, made her feel important.

After the episode with Solly, Arlyne longed to find that sensation again. Her next encounter was with a short, thin fellow named Stamey, an automobile salesman who drove cars up from Georgia and other points south for her father. Stamey, with his southern accent and polite manners, was unlike any man she had met. Whenever he was in town, Arlyne hung around Chester Motors a little longer than usual, making sure she attracted his notice. With Stamey, she discovered the sport of man teasing. One afternoon, she asked him if he would drop her off by the subway. He agreed. En route to the station, she began to run her forefinger up and down his thigh. To her surprise, Stamey drove her to his hotel and asked, “Why don’t you come on up?” Arlyne had not anticipated he would call her bluff, but she agreed. After stopping into a liquor store next to the hotel, Stamey led her to an ugly room illuminated by the intermittent blink of a neon sign outside the window. The two of them got drunk on bourbon and crawled into bed. With a grown man, Arlyne had hoped sex would be more romantic. She had to undress herself and when she touched Stamey’s naked body, she was disappointed to find it bony. What mystique there was disappeared entirely the following morning when she awoke to the smell of stale liquor. Everything seemed dirty. The room, Stamey, her own body. Leaving her lover in a dead sleep, she dressed and took a cab home, where there was a terrible scene. Irving Weiss had done a little detective work and discovered that Arlyne had left Chester Motors with Stamey the night before. After calling his colleague and informing him he had just had sexual relations with a minor, he turned his wrath on Arlyne, warning her never to see the man again. Strangely exhilarated by the tongue-lashing, Arlyne ignored her father’s warnings. She and Stamey met two or three more times after that, not because Arlyne enjoyed the sex, but because she took pleasure in defying her father.

After Stamey, there was Sal, who owned a bakery shop on the corner. They would go up to his mother’s house in the middle of the afternoon to have sex. Then there was the son of a senator who lived at Knickerbocker Village and whom she met for quick, stand-up sex in the cellar. There were other boys from the Village. There were the boys at the milk bar at Camp Roosevelt. There were boys, boys, boys. By the time she was fourteen, Arlyne had what was politely termed “a reputation.”

On afternoons when they were supposed to be in school, Arlyne and her crew, a clique of Jewish girls named Teddy, Elaine and Hope, hung out on the corner by the K&K Candy Store. Hopie, whose father owned a prosperous bar on the Bowery, was older and drove a red Jaguar. As a result, the girls had the entire city at their disposal. They would go to Little Italy to have their fortunes told. Arlyne was fiercely superstitious and could never resist a palm reader. Then they would drive uptown, heads thrown out the window, hair streaming behind them, shouting taunts at men. In Times Square they would hang out at the hotels, flirting with the band members. Later they would follow the guys to after-hours joints in Harlem, arriving home at two or three in the morning.

Arlyne always had an explanation. She had been out with “the girls.” Irving Weiss tended to accept his daughter’s story because he refused to believe the worst of her. Billie was more skeptical, but with a little artful deception she, too, could be gulled. Before going out for the evening Arlyne would present herself to her mother wearing the most demure skirt and blouse in her closet. Once out the door, she and her chums would drive to a movie theater, and there buy tickets so they could use the restrooms to change into their cruising clothes.

Black satin skirts with high heels were their trademark. Arlyne wore her skirts so tight that she would have to wiggle out of them. Naturally, she could not risk a pantyline, so she dispensed with underwear. Over time her taste in clothing became even more flamboyant as she emulated the photos of showgirls and movie stars. Once she saw the starlet Marilyn Monroe in a pink linen halter dress with coat to match. She had her mother’s seamstress make her an identical outfit. Even on sweltering summer days she paraded down Monroe Street in off-the-shoulder furs, turning every few steps to see who was watching. In her own mind, she was “Stella Stunning,” a teenager’s incoherent ideal of glamour.

And then, Arlyne Weiss discovered Virginia Hill.

Arlyne was not much of a reader. She did, however, make it a point to scan the papers to see what the rich and beautiful were wearing. She happened one day across a photo of Virginia Hill, the fabled beauty who had been the girlfriend of the late Bugsy Siegel. She was wearing a tailored two-piece suit and a large picture-frame hat. Arlyne thought she had never seen a woman with so much class. She was not just a mob girl. She was America’s premier mob girl, and as such she seemed to enjoy the status of royalty. One publication went so far as to call her “the most successful woman in America.”

Miss Hill, it seemed, had clawed her way up from poverty in the finest American tradition. Born in a wretched Alabama steel town, she claimed to have neither worn nor owned a pair of shoes until the age of seventeen—the year she ran away to Chicago, where she found a job waitressing at the 1933 World’s Fair. There she happened to come to the attention of a big-time bookie and gambler who became her lover, financial advisor and ultimately her entree into the fast life of the Chicago Mob.

Virginia’s timing was fortunate. She arrived on the scene just as the Lansky-Lucania crew in New York was linking arms with Capone’s Chicago operation to form a national crime syndicate. That meant the bosses needed some reliable method of getting messages to one another. Talking on the phone was too risky as the wires were frequently tapped. Since most states had statutes making it an offense for two or more known criminals to consort with each other, the racketeers needed a courier who would not arouse suspicion. Who better than a bosomy redhead who was presumed to be some mobster’s brainless girlfriend? There were, after all, dozens who fit that description and law enforcement considered them harmless. In this innocuous guise, Virginia shuttled unmolested between Chicago and New York City.

But Virginia, as it turned out, was neither brainless nor harmless. As one contemporary commentator explained, she was “more than just another set of curves. She had … a good memory, a considerable flair for hole-in-the-corner diplomacy to allay the suspicions of trigger-happy killers and a dual personality, closelipped about essentials and able to chatter freely and apparently foolishly about inconsequentials.” Even the government eventually concluded that she was a “central clearinghouse” for intelligence on organized crime. As such, Virginia enjoyed an independent power base within the Syndicate.

The bosses found other uses for Miss Hill. She became the underworld’s personal emissary to café society. When Virginia arrived on the scene in New York in the late thirties, she contrived a new history for herself, one that would be sure to find its way into the gossip columns. The story circulated that she was a southern society girl who had gone through four rich husbands—all divorced or dead—and she had gotten $1 million from each. Authentic socialites saw through this ruse. Even so, it became fashionable to be seen slumming with her. Virginia made the circuit of Broadway clubs, picking up the check for an entourage of hangers-on and Latin gigolos. It was on one of these nightly swings that she supposedly contrived to meet Joe Adonis, the handsome hood who was later to become the business partner of Irving Weiss. She became Adonis’s girl. And in time, she became Bugsy Siegel’s girl. According to the popular lore of the underworld, it was Adonis himself who unwittingly brought Siegel and Hill together. Virginia carried a note of introduction from Joe to Bugsy, who was then eluding New York authorities in Los Angeles. The attraction was immediate and mutual. Although Virginia tried to placate both lovers by flying from coast to coast, she finally settled into Beverly Hills with Bugsy, whom she preferred to call “Ben.”

Virginia cut as flamboyant a figure in Hollywood as she had in New York. She and Siegel gave fabulous parties attended by celebrities like George Raft who were perversely flattered to be courted by a mobster and his moll. When Meyer Lansky ordered Siegel to open up Nevada for gambling, Virginia and Ben took their road show to Las Vegas to oversee the construction of the fabulous Flamingo Hotel. It was there that Virginia’s fairy tale career hit the skids. Bugsy was no businessman and he plowed the most expensive materials into the hotel without regard to cost. The overruns infuriated his Syndicate backers in New York and Cincinnati, particularly when rumors began circulating that he and Virginia were skimming construction dollars and socking them away in a Swiss bank account.

On June 16, 1947, Virginia Hill took an unannounced trip to Paris. Four days later, as Bugsy was sitting on the couch in Virginia’s Beverly Hills home, he was killed by the blast of a .30 caliber carbine fired through the living-room window. During the months thereafter, rumors concerning Virginia Hill’s role in the Siegel hit proliferated wildly. One school of thought held that Virginia knew Bugsy was in deep trouble and had flown to Europe to plead for his life, the reasoning being that she could place a call from Paris to Lucky Luciano, then in Italy, without worrying about her line being tapped. More cynical speculation held that she knew Bugsy’s days were numbered and simply wanted to be out of the line of fire.

After Siegel’s death Virginia made a series of highly publicized suicide attempts. These too admitted alternative interpretations. Sentimentalists concluded that she was undone by grief. Others professed that Virginia took just enough pills to make her attempts at suicide appear serious; that she kept a safe deposit box in which lay a packet addressed to the district attorney of L.A. County. That this packet contained evidence that could send ten Syndicate bosses to the chair for Siegel’s murder. That the document was supposedly to be delivered in the event of Virginia’s death. That after each suicide attempt she received a substantial payment from the Syndicate to assure her continued good health.

Four years later, the Kefauver Committee would call Virginia, whom it hoped might be sufficiently grieved by Bugsy’s death to divulge the names of his killers. They were mistaken. Virginia was unshakable. She claimed to know few of the men about whom the committee was inquiring. She knew nothing about the source of Bugsy’s money, had never heard of his being involved in any illegal activity, and seemed not to care one whit who had killed him. As far as she was concerned all of Bugsy’s friends were “perfect gentlemen.”

Virginia Hill made it clear to a nation of fascinated onlookers that a mob girl was no rat.

Arlyne was enthralled. Every day she combed the papers for some new shred of gossip about Virginia. “In my eyes,” she would later recall, “here was a broad that really made it good.” Here was a woman who had clothes, money and all the attention any human could hope for. Not only was she widely admired as a sex goddess but she seemed to enjoy respect as well. What impressed Arlyne most deeply was that Virginia Hill had been admitted into the bosses’ confidence. She had been accepted as one of the boys.

As a practical matter, Arlyne Weiss, the pampered racketeer’s brat, did not enjoy much in common with the young Virginia Hill, barefoot ’til the age of seventeen. Nonetheless, Arlyne felt a curious kinship with her. There were certain aspects of Virginia’s career that reminded her of Ida Blum, a sort of mob girl in her own right. Like Virginia, Arlyne’s adored grandmother enjoyed beautiful clothes and was always surrounded by men who admitted her to their private counsel. Not that Arlyne ever thought of her grandmother as a common mobster’s moll. She was a lady. But so in some strange way was Virginia. She was half tomboy, half whore, but always a lady. And that, Arlyne Weiss decided, was what she wanted to be. At the age of fourteen, she set out to become a mob girl.

The stylistic considerations were easiest to effect. Arlyne retired her Marilyn Monroe imitations and instructed the seamstress to make her a set of form-fitting two-piece suits, which she wore with a picture-frame hat. Although Virginia Hill’s hair was a bright red, Arlyne never saw anything but black-and-white photos, in which it looked dark. Acting on this misconception, she dyed her own hair jet black. When the physical transformation was complete, she set about cultivating the one thing that distinguished Virginia most. Fast company.

Arlyne had always been attracted to “dangerous” men. Men like Joe Adonis who emanated a seductive aura of menace and power. Curiously, she did not find that quality present among the Jewish racketeers in her father’s circle. It was certainly well known that individuals like Izzy Smith or Red Levine had the ability to pick up the phone and get someone killed. In the wisdom of her mature years, she would conclude that Jewish racketeers had more class than the Italian wiseguys. They certainly dressed better and they weren’t always trying to kill one another off. But there was a certain sterility in the way they wielded their power—like executives. It was the Italians with their pretty-boy looks and passionate vendettas who attracted Arlyne. When a wiseguy was dangerous, he was truly dangerous.

The streets around Knickerbocker Village abounded with wiseguys, some of them made men, and others just punks in their Danny Anfang shirts and Benedetti shoes aspiring to membership in a local neighborhood crew. Arlyne and her girlfriends had considerable experience flirting with the punks, as one stop of their nightly circuit was likely to be Sullivan Street, where Italian boys congregated on the street by a church. Hopie would slow the Jaguar to a crawl, giving the girls, who had shoved their upper bodies out the window, an ample opportunity to flaunt their bosoms. The Italians proved to be easily aroused, but when they ventured close to the car Hopie sped away.

Teasing punks was one thing, going out with them another. These were not the sort of hoodlums who would meet Virginia Hill’s high standards. And Arlyne had resolved to go after only those wiseguys who had made a name. At the top of her list of prospective conquests was Tony Mirra.

Arlyne was around fourteen when she first noticed Tony. He was much older, his jet-black hair already beginning to show the white streak that would become his distinguishing trait. Tony’s midriff was already beginning to expand, a fate that seemed universally to befall wiseguys once they reached the age of twenty-five. But Arlyne found him “gorgeous.” As with Joe Adonis, his dark good looks and commanding manner reminded her of her father.

Tony lived near Knickerbocker Village on Monroe Street with his old Italian mother, to whom he was passionately devoted. That filial solicitude stood out in sharp contrast to Tony’s widely held reputation as a sexual brute. It was not uncommon for Tony, while cruising through the neighborhood, to pick up an attractive woman, nail her in the back seat and then push her out of the car. Tony was, furthermole, reputed to be an enforcer for the Bonanno crime family. She heard he was a bodyguard for a very big boss, she didn’t know who. But he was definitely dangerous.

Tony’s path had crossed the Weisses’ at only one point, when he had come to Chester Motors with his uncle, Al Walker, looking for a car. They bought a black Cadillac with yellow doors. Irving had acquired it from the owner of a liquor store who had had signs hanging from the sides. Arlyne found the choice a little odd, but Tony and his uncle Al loved their two-tone Caddy. They drove it all around the Lower East Side. Wherever Arlyne saw it parked, she knew Tony could not be far away.

On most afternoons, Tony parked the Cadillac on Madison Street in front of one of his favorite watering holes, the Black Horse Saloon. He usually came there to conduct some unspecified business with two union officials. They would hang around on the street outside the bar’s blue door before going inside to eat. Having noted this routine, Arlyne embarked on a campaign to get Tony’s attention. Donning her Virginia Hill garb, she would strut majestically down Madison on the pretext of visiting Savarese’s corner drugstore. If her timing was good, she would catch Tony outside, in which case she would stop dead cold in front of him, turn slightly and give him a seductive glance from beneath the picture-frame hat.

For weeks, all she got for her trouble was indifference. Tony Mirra was simply not impressed by a fourteen-year-old dolled up like a high-class hooker. At length, Arlyne abandoned this tack in favor of a more direct approach. Enlisting Hopie’s company for moral support, she took her usual tour down Madison one afternoon, but instead of continuing to the corner, she stopped before the blue door and, grabbing the handle resolutely, opened it and marched inside. The Black Horse was dim, even with the late-afternoon light streaming through its street-front window. When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she scanned the length of the bar but failed to find Tony. Finally, she spotted him sitting at a table in the back with a union official having a plate of pasta.

“Come on over here, kid,” Tony called. “I wanna talk to ya.”

Thrilled at finally having attracted his attention, Arlyne steered Hopie toward Tony’s friend and took a place beside Mirra. But things did not unfold as she had hoped. She had envisioned herself impressing Tony with her tough talk, then maybe he’d take her out to dinner where she could be seen with him. Just being seen with Tony Mirra was an honor in those days. But Tony had other things on his mind. Without warning, he began playing with her, feeling around her waist, thighs and breasts. Caught off guard she complained, but in fact she found herself becoming excited. It was rush hour when Tony took her out for a ride. He drove for a while then pulled over next to the Journal-American building on South Street and started to unzip his pants. “Tony, I can’t do that,” Arlyne objected, keeping a nervous eye on the stream of people exiting from the Journal.

“C’mon. I wanna show you how to do something,” he said. And with that he grabbed her by her long dark hair and pushed her face toward his penis. When she resisted, he slapped her, growling, “You’re nuthin’ but a cockteaser.” It was then that Arlyne allowed herself to be instructed in the art of oral sex. Tony taught her how to hold it and how to rub it up and down. She found the whole process revolting, but at that moment, nothing in the world seemed so important as pleasing Tony Mirra.

Afterward, Tony dropped her back on Monroe Street as if nothing had happened, leaving her stung by his indifference. When the hurt passed, she became angry and her anger took the form of a renewed assault. Every day after that she showed up at the Black Horse wearing the tightest outfits she owned. If Tony wanted to feel her up, she offered no resistance. If he wanted to take a ride and park, she accepted docilely. It was not, she imagined, how Virginia Hill had done it—or maybe she had. But Arlyne felt this was all a necessary part of becoming a true-to-life mob girl. Tony, in turn, allowed her the privilege of being seen with him. She was allowed to come into the Black Horse when Tony wasn’t talking business. And if he was really feeling generous he would take her for a ride in the two-tone Caddy with his uncle Al Walker and cousin, Angelo. Tony, Arlyne would later recall, became her “protector.” If she ever needed money, she could get it from him. If she found herself in a situation she couldn’t handle at two in the morning, she called Tony and he’d send someone over to pick her up. In return, she ran errands for him. The nature and purpose of these errands were never explained. Tony would simply give her a sealed envelope, which she surmised contained cash—or sometimes a larger packet of undisclosed contents—and she would deliver it to one of his friends across town. Whenever duty called, she would dress to the hilt, always wearing a fox stole off the shoulder, Virginialike. She was thrilled that Tony trusted her with his business. It made her feel important.

Arlyne knew that her parents would definitely not approve of Tony, which, of course, was part of his charm. She enjoyed provoking her mother by arriving home at three in the morning. Even at that hour, there was no way Arlyne could make it to her bedroom unobserved, since Billie would be waiting on the couch in the foyer. She would never know for sure where Arlyne had been, but she was sure she had been up to no good. And as soon as she heard the door close, she began screaming, “You tramp! I’ve never had a good day with you. I’ve never had anything right with you.” Billie screamed until the muscles on her neck stood out. Arlyne would just smile and say, “Hit me.” After Billie landed a blow, Arlyne would turn and walk into her own room.

During these brawls, Irving Weiss would not leave his bedroom. And in the morning he would never let on that anything out of the ordinary had occurred. He was a man who saw only what he wanted to see. And for a long time, he turned a blind eye to Arlyne’s relationship with Tony Mirra. One evening, Arlyne told her father she was going out with a Jewish boy and instead went drinking with Tony at a Chinese restaurant called the House of Chan. When Tony dropped her off in front of her house at five in the morning, Irving was waiting. He had recognized the black-and-yellow Cadillac. That night Irving Weiss gave his daughter a beating. It was the first of only two times Arlyne could ever recall her father raising his hand to her.

The Weisses concluded that Arlyne’s wildness was attributable to the influence of the Lower East Side. Billie wanted find a “better environment,” someplace where her daughters could grow up to be ladies. For several years, other families—both proper citizens and racketeers with yearnings toward respectability—had been moving out of the old neighborhood. If they had any money at all they settled across the East River in the borough of Queens. This exodus further hastened the decline of the Jewish quarter. East Broadway began looking neglected. Grocers, milliners, haberdashers and family restaurants went out of business. Even Blum and Oxman suffered when the Clinton Street Boys found another hangout in Queens.

When Arlyne was sixteen, the Weisses joined the exodus, moving to a posh second-floor apartment in the relatively stylish residential neighborhood of Forest Hills. But a “better environment” did not have the desired effect upon Arlyne Weiss. Despite the fact that she was now cut off from Hopie, Elaine, Teddy, Tony and the entire Monroe Street crew, she had a gift for finding bad company. In Forest Hills, she found Sophie.

Sophie was a pretty little girl with bright red hair, which she wore in a flip like Hedy Lamarr. It was always so perfect it looked like a wig. Her father, an Eastern European Jew, owned a neighborhood grocery. But he was sufficiently prosperous that he could afford to indulge his only daughter. Sophie was spoiled and lazy. Arlyne found in her a highly congenial companion.

Like Arlyne, Sophie cut school routinely. Every day Sophie would sleep until noon. Then around two o’clock she would get into a cab, swing by to pick up Arlyne, and the two would set out to make mischief. Largely through Arlyne’s reconnoitering, they discovered the Carlton Terrace, a shady bar on Queens Boulevard, which served as the new hangout for the Clinton Street Boys. At any hour of the day you could walk into the Terrace’s dark interior and find the old crowd from Ida’s place and several other faces as well, including that of a union official named Moishe.

In the Blum and Oxman days, these had been The Uncles, who had given Arlyne quarters and affectionate tweaks. At the Carlton Terrace, however, they were usually in the company of women who were definitely not their wives. And when Arlyne and Sophie walked in like a couple of molls, they were greeted with lustful glances. During the ensuing seductions Arlyne managed to sleep with Moishe (whom she knew to be one of her father’s friends). Sophie slept with a handful of her own. The girls enjoyed picking these old men off for the sheer sport of it.

Some afternoons, they would not go out at all. Sophie came to Arlyne’s house. (Irving would be at work, Barbara at school and Billie off playing Mah-Jongg.) They turned on the television and if they saw a handsome celebrity, they would try to reach him by phone with the intent of seducing him. These overtures were usually unavailing. One day, however, while watching a rodeo, they saw a bronco buster named Casey Tibbs. Arlyne turned to Sophie and said, “I’ll bet we can get to this sonofabitch.” With that she dialed Madison Square Garden and told them it was an emergency and she needed to reach Mr. Tibbs. When she got Casey on the line, she proceeded without much prologue to describe the things she would do to him if he visited her in Forest Hills. The next morning he sent her a dozen red roses.

Casey went on the road, and over the next few months they talked a lot on the phone. When, finally, he returned to New York, Arlyne put on her silk sheath and went to meet him at his hotel. When he opened the door, she was crestfallen. However handsome Casey looked on a bucking bronc, in the flesh he was just a broken-down old cowboy. When he took her to a steak house, she was embarrassed by his cowboy clothes and the gaudy championship belt buckle that sagged around his thin waist. That night she and Casey had quick sex, and she fled to Forest Hills.

Other than this fleeting contact with celebrity, Arlyne wasn’t meeting the type of big-name big spenders with whom an aspiring mob girl could hope to make a reputation. What she lacked was some grand stage on which to play out her role. Then, almost by chance, Arlyne discovered an entree into the world of prizefighting.

The opportunity arose during the summer of her fourteenth birthday. She and her family customarily spent the hottest days of July and August on Long Island in Atlantic Beach. There they rented a cabana, a little house with a bar and two shower stalls, at the Capri Beach Club, which was favored by racketeers, union officials and dress manufacturers from the Garment District during those years. Every day the Weisses would arrive from the city in a rented, air-conditioned limousine—Irving indulged in this luxury so that his beloved wire-haired terrier, Paula, would not risk heatstroke. While the chauffeur watched the dog, and Billie and Irving took their place at the cabana to play cards with old cronies, their daughters settled in by the pool. Arlyne, like her father, tanned quickly and, like him, she always wore a white or black suit to show off her color. By midafternoon, she would tire of the action poolside and ride her bike through the maze of residential streets that lay off the dunes.

On these outings, she passed by the brick beach home of Irving Cohen, best known as the manager of Rocky Graziano, who, that year, was about to make his bid for the middleweight title of the world. Cohen’s place was the subject of much interested speculation among the Capri crowd, since Graziano and his friends were frequent visitors. That beach house with its promise of celebrity exerted an irresistible pull on Arlyne Weiss. She took pains to pedal past it on her afternoon rounds, knowing full well that Cohen and the fighters would be sitting on the porch drinking.

In fact, Arlyne passed by several times during the course of an afternoon, always slowing down to show off her tanned, suited figure to best advantage. For days, she failed to elicit so much as a hoot from the porch until one afternoon someone finally called, “Hey. Come over here!” Cohen was beckoning her to join him on the porch where he was sitting with Rocky and another fighter, named Al Pennino. Sitting down, Arlyne did a quick study of the two fighters. Rocky was a well-built if not conspicuously handsome man. His nose had been flattened by punches, which made him look a little stupid. Al was slightly younger than Rocky. Thin, handsome, with thick, curly hair, he was a minor talent compared to Graziano, but nothing to be sniffed at since he himself was a contender for the featherweight title. As Arlyne sat on the porch that day trying to catch Rocky’s attention with her tough-girl talk, she became aware that it was Al who was making eyes at her. A few weeks later, Arlyne ran into Al by chance. Entering a lingerie shop on Second Avenue, she saw him standing with Rocky outside a fighters’ bar called Foxie’s. She got to talking to Al, who invited her to visit him where he worked out at Stillman’s Gym.

Arlyne did not need a second invitation. With Sophie in tow, she made daily trips to Stillman’s to watch Al train. The two vamps would get off the subway near Madison Square Garden and walk up a stairway to the gym to a big room where the men worked out. No matter how good a fighter’s concentration was, he turned around and stared when a couple of pretty girls walked into the room. On those occasions Arlyne and Sophie wore the tightest skirts and sweaters they owned. Al or one of his several brothers would come over and offer them chairs, but they usually declined since their skirts were too tight to allow them to sit comfortably.

Arlyne and Al would rendezvous near the gym at a place called the Hotel America. Afterward, they would sometimes take a subway to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn to visit his mother. While Arlyne was flattered that Al thought enough of her to take her home, she was always uncomfortable. The Penninos’ walkup was a “real wop house,” the air redolent of simmering sauces and full of chatter. Mama Pennino glowered in the background, clearly displeased that her son had brought home a Jewish girl, but silent in deference to his wishes.

After an uncomfortable dinner, which Arlyne and Al usually ate alone, they would go out to sit on his stoop in the twilight. There he would take his guitar and sing lyrics he had composed for her. “Oh, honey baby, say you’ll be mine. Don’t tease me, baby. Say you’ll be mine.” It was a silly song, but Arlyne found it so touching that for a while she was convinced she was in love with Al.

Their affair continued through October as Al prepared for his fight with Sandy Saddler. Although conventional wisdom held that a boxer should refrain from amorous pursuits during the critical weeks before a fight, Al was so smitten that he tossed caution to the wind. Arlyne, for her part, was so intoxicated by the attention Al was receiving that she demanded every free moment of his time. She monopolized him up to the very eve of the Saddler fight when she took the initiative of checking them into the Hotel America. Unfortunately, Arlyne had made the mistake of confiding her plans to Sophie, who, perhaps jealous that her friend had bagged a minor celebrity, squealed to the Weisses. That night’s interlude was interrupted by a knock on the door. When Al opened it, he found himself face to face with Irving and two of his brothers, who dragged Arlyne, protesting, into a waiting Cadillac. That incident apparently took a toll on Al’s concentration. Saddler knocked him out in the fourth round.

The Saddler fight had been Al’s best shot, and now Arlyne was worried that she might have done him irreparable damage. Although she did not ordinarily suffer over the pain she inflicted upon others, she was now wracked by guilt. For a time she undertook to “support” Al and his whole family by pilfering money from her father’s wallet. She would take the subway to Brooklyn on missions of penance, and, arriving at the house in Red Hook, would hand Al several hundred-dollar bills. These gestures, however, did not make things right between them. The old sweetness was gone, as Al came to regard these reparations as his due. In time, Arlyne began to feel that they were laughing at her, Al, his brothers, Old Lady Pennino. Arlyne had to admit to herself that Al was considerably less attractive now that he was a nobody. He really was—and always had been—just a punk kid. It was time to move on to more ambitious conquests.

Each of the next four summers, the Weisses returned to the Capri Beach Club. During the early weeks of the 1951 season Arlyne waged a campaign for the affection of a young man about five years older than herself. Larry was a rich boy, his father a big bookmaker in New York, and Arlyne had him pegged as a very good catch. Larry’s mother had other ideas. She wanted her son to marry a “sweet girl,” and Arlyne Weiss, in her estimation, was “too goddamned wild.” At his mother’s request, Larry backed away.

Arlyne did not wallow long in self-pity before she was distracted by yet another potential conquest, one which promised to be the affair of the summer. Nathaniel Nelson was a friend of her father and Uncle Henry. Though nearly forty-eight, Natie was a Jewish pretty boy. His features were dark and sensual like Bugsy Siegel’s. He also reminded her a lot of her father. Natie’s thick wavy hair was combed back so that it formed a plateau. Everybody called him Flattop, after a bad guy in the comic strip Dick Tracy. He wore a large cat’s eye diamond ring, a gold watch and a belt buckle with the insignia “NN” set in diamonds. He was clearly loaded.

Arlyne knew from overhearing conversations between Irving and his brothers that Natie Nelson was a clothing manufacturer from the Garment District and owned a company called Advance Jr. Dress. He was “secret partners” with Jimmy Doyle, who handled his shipping through a company called Elgee Trucking. (Elgee was presumably a coy derivative of Lepke and Gurrah’s old logo, “L&G.”) Their partnership was formed when Jimmy came to him threatening sabotage if he didn’t ship through Elgee. But Natie didn’t seem to bear any ill will. There were considerable benefits to that alliance. Besides the fact that his shop was safe, he was in a position to do certain favors for The Boys, and for this he was paid a lot of money. He also enjoyed the privilege of being seen with Jimmy Doyle and by virtue of that association was considered a heavyweight.

Natie was a frequent guest at the Weisses’ oceanfront cabana. He never joined Irving Weiss and the other men at cards, however, preferring to drink at the bar accompanied by his sidekick, Heshie. Arlyne kept a lookout for him and would then strut past the bar in her swimsuit hoping he’d notice. He didn’t. Once within earshot, she would try her tough-girl talk, thinking he’d be impressed. He wasn’t. Some racketeers, she knew, did not like their women hard. It didn’t look good, for instance, for a woman to be holding a cigarette or a glass of booze, nor was it good for them to be mouthy or forward. Figuring Natie might fall into this category, Arlyne took to standing at the bar demurely sipping soda, waiting for him to make the first move. He didn’t. One rainy afternoon as Natie was preparing to leave the beach club, Arlyne followed him back to the cabana, and when he stepped inside to change clothes, she slipped in after him. Natie turned and smiled as if noticing her for the first time. Without much conversation, they made love on a chaise longue.

Irving Weiss noticed the attraction between his middle-aged friend and his seventeen-year-old daughter and he warned Arlyne to stay away from Natie. Arlyne gave her earnest promises that she would behave. Then she would promptly sneak away from the club to give Natie a blow job in his car. Or she’d pretend to be cycling and spend the afternoon with him in a motel. It was very romantic. That summer she heard Tony Bennett sing “Because of You.” Because of you, there’s a song in my heart. Arlyne couldn’t get it out of her head. It seemed to speak directly of her and Nat Nelson.

As the weeks went by, however, Arlyne became a little worried about him. He began demanding more and more of her time and smothering her with effusive professions of love. He was also talking marriage, which Arlyne found a little odd. Natie had been a bachelor for forty-seven years. If he had resisted marriage that long, why would he now lose his head over a girl almost thirty years his junior? Arlyne found it very pleasant fooling around with him on hot summer days. She enjoyed getting gifts from him—he was extremely generous with money and jewelry. But she was not sure she wanted to get married. Finally, she told him that they had better not see each other for a while.

Arlyne intended to make the decision stick, but this was more difficult than she had imagined. Natie did not pester her to reconcile as she rather thought he would. Instead, he took up with a short redhead at the club. It was a very uncomfortable situation. Arlyne was becoming jealous. Eager to get away, she arranged to spend her eighteenth birthday at the Concord with her grandmother.

When she stepped out of the limo onto the big front lawn, Ida greeted her with arms and tapered nails outstretched. “Dahhhling,” she crooned. “Tell Gam all about it.” Over dinner, Arlyne poured her heart out to the one person who listened to her uncritically. Ida did not scold Arlyne because Natie was so old or because she had continued to see him behind her father’s back. No, Ida Blum was very open-minded in those matters. Instead, she recommended an evening of dancing, which was her remedy for any heartache.

As she was dressing in her grandmother’s suite, there was a knock on the door. Arlyne answered it and was shocked to see Natie standing before her. He handed her a gift box containing a diamond bracelet. She spent the next three weeks in the rooms Natie had taken at the hotel. Her grandmother turned a blind eye. Ida had taken an immediate liking to Natie, who also gave her small gifts and included her when he and Arlyne went out to dinner. When Natie confided in Ida that he loved her granddaughter, Ida got Arlyne alone and said, “Marry him!” If she married Natie, Ida argued, she would have everything she wanted, and she wouldn’t have to run around wild anymore.

This idyll came to an end during the last week in August when Irving Weiss arrived at the Concord to take his daughter home. Natie had slipped off to New York with Heshie. Neither Arlyne nor her grandmother let Irving know he had been there. Although Natie’s earlier promise of marriage technically stood, he had stopped mentioning it. Arlyne suspected that this was because he was getting everything he wanted without the vows. She agreed, nonetheless, to continue seeing him which was easy to do since she had dropped out of school and now had a job as a model at a company called Letty Doyle Dress.

Every morning she took a subway to the Garment District carrying a big hatbox. For most of the day she sat in a smock at the back of the showroom waiting for buyers to come in so that she could model the dresses. The work was not as glamorous as she had hoped, and she was eager for quitting time when she could take a cab to Natie’s apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street. Arlyne loved that place. The living room was done in beige and brown with enormous couches and pillars like “something out of the movies.” She always felt safe there. If her father were to come looking for her, he would have to buzz up from downstairs. She could always see who was in front of the building through Natie’s large picture window. That would have given her time to compose a plausible explanation.

No one came looking. When she arrived home, however, Billie was waiting as usual and mother and daughter would have their customary screaming match. This went on for about five months. During that time, Arlyne became more brazen about appearing in public with Natie. They would sometimes go out to eat with Jimmy Doyle at Patrissy’s or Patsy’s or the Weiss family’s old haunt, the Grotta Azzurra. On Friday nights they would go to La Fontaine, a nightspot favored by Jimmy and Johnny Dio. There Natie would have the opportunity to play the big shot and impress her with his connections.

As time went on, Arlyne couldn’t help noticing that Natie was getting too big for his britches. He had always been something of a showoff, but he had had the good sense to keep his mouth shut in front of Jimmy, Johnny and their friends. Now he was bragging openly about favors he was doing “The Boys.” He talked about people in the trucking business. About deals that were being made. The particulars went over Arlyne’s head, but she could see the effect that Natie’s behavior was having on the crowd at La Fontaine. Whenever he approached, Jimmy would turn his back.

One Saturday morning in January, Arlyne and her grandmother had set out in a taxicab for a day of shopping when Arlyne realized that Natie had forgotten to give her any money. She directed the cab to the apartment on Fifty-fifth Street, intending to hit him up for a couple of hundred dollars. Leaving Ida in the cab by the curb, Arlyne took the elevator to the fifth floor. When the door opened, she was taken aback to see Jimmy Doyle standing before her. Their eyes met. Jimmy’s betrayed a flash of alarm, but he recovered quickly and slipped into the elevator as Arlyne walked out.

She stood in the hall for a moment trying to make sense of this peculiar encounter. No matter how mad Jimmy was at Natie, he would normally have said “hello” to her. Her sense of uneasiness grew as she looked down the hall and saw that Natie’s door was ajar. She walked slowly toward it and called his name. There was no reply. She pushed the door open a little further and recoiled in shock. There was Natie lying lengthwise in the foyer. He was wearing a casual shirt and pants and all his jewelry. Arlyne’s eyes rested for a while on his belt insignia, fearful of continuing further. Finally, she looked at his face. There was a bullet hole between his eyes.

For a moment she didn’t know whether to cry or scream. All she knew was that she had to get out of there. She raced to the elevator and began pressing the buttons madly. Her grandmother was still downstairs, and as Ida was an eminently recognizable figure, Arlyne, in her panic, imagined that Jimmy might spot her and do to her what he had done to Natie. She was overwhelmed with relief to see Ida waiting in the cab. “C’mon,” Arlyne whispered to her grandmother, “we’re getting the hell outta here! I’m taking you home!”

After dropping Ida off at the funeral parlor, Arlyne hurried home, locked her bedroom door behind her and turned on the radio. All afternoon she listened for news of Natie’s death. The whole event had such a nightmarish quality that she thought it was possible that she had dreamed or imagined it. Even after she heard Billie and Irving arrive, she did not leave the room. She remained in solitary, her ear to the radio, until she heard the news. A prominent Garment District dress manufacturer had been gunned down in his apartment. In some ways it was comforting to hear the worst confirmed. But that temporary relief was quickly replaced by dread. Jimmy Doyle had seen her. He had looked right into her eyes. And now he would be coming for her.

Arlyne did not tell her parents about her predicament. Ida, who had doubtless put two and two together, had good enough instincts not to inquire further about it. The only person in whom Arlyne confided was the black maid, Sadie, who helped her keep a vigil. Three days passed and there was no word. Arlyne, who had not left the apartment since Natie’s death, was going crazy with the suspense. Finally, on the fourth day, Sadie took a call from Jimmy Doyle. She passed Arlyne the receiver.

“Why d’ya want to see me?” she asked.

“You know what I want to see you about,” Jimmy replied.

He told her to meet him at the Hotel Forrest in the Theater District and Arlyne agreed. After she hung up she gave the conversation a moment’s thought, then made up her mind what she must do. Arlyne went to her closet and took out a pea green satin skirt and a strapless top. As a final touch she added her platina fox stole, her “drop dead” fur, as she called it. As she stood in front of the mirror studying the effect, she said to herself, “Well, if I’m going, I’m going like this.” She told Sadie that she was going out and that if the maid didn’t hear from her by nightfall she was to call the police.

The taxi got caught in traffic and Arlyne arrived late. She rushed into the lobby to find a scowling Jimmy Doyle. “When you meet me, you be on time,” he said. Jimmy then took a key from the desk clerk and she followed him upstairs to a plain little room. Minutes passed. Jimmy said nothing. Arlyne could not read the expression on his face. Made uncomfortable by the silence, she took the initiative and asked point blank, “Jimmy, are you going to kill me?”

Jimmy smiled.

“What for?” he replied. “You’re not going to say nuthin’ to nobody.”

“That’s right,” she affirmed. “I’m not going to say nuthin’ …”

“You know,” Jimmy continued, “I always liked you. And now, you’re going to do me a favor.”

There were no preliminaries. The sex was rough and quick. Afterward, Jimmy paced around the room smoking a cigarette. After Arlyne had dressed, he muttered, “Get the fuck outta here. I’ll call ya.”

After that Arlyne was on call whenever Jimmy wanted to get laid. At first they met only at night because Jimmy didn’t want to risk being seen with her, but as the weeks passed, he became cocky and started taking her out in public to La Fontaine and other haunts she had visited with Natie. Jimmy never once mentioned the murdered man.

The sessions with Jimmy were as instructive as they were disorienting. For Arlyne, sex had always seemed a means of getting control over a man. The control might be only momentary but she found it exhilarating nonetheless. “Control,” Arlyne would later say, “is the most important thing in a person’s life.” The two women she admired most—Ida Blum and Virginia Hill—controlled everything in their orbit. Particularly their men. And in playing Little Miss Sexpot, Arlyne imagined that she, too, was in the catbird seat. Now, it was quite clear that she was a servant and sex was part of her servitude. Her degradation deepened when Jimmy began passing her around to Johnny Dio and Johnny’s brother, Frankie.

Arlyne did not tell her parents what she was being forced to endure. She still felt she could manage the situation. That Jimmy would tire of her and release her with no one being the wiser. But Jimmy did not tire. And gradually, the strain took its toll. Arlyne was consumed by the idea she was being punished for all the bad things she had done. She was constantly frightened. She lost her appetite, became listless and had spells of weeping. When her mother asked what was wrong, Arlyne would whimper, “I can’t tell you.”

Billie conferred with Ida, who offered the opinion that Arlyne’s sickness had something to do with Nate Nelson’s death. It was decided that she should see a psychiatrist. Over Arlyne’s objections, her mother and grandmother made an appointment for her to see Dr. Max Helfand. On the day of their first visit, the three took a cab into Manhattan, and stopping at the address on Central Park West, walked through a pair of swinging gates to Dr. Helfand’s apartment, which also served as his office. A uniformed maid admitted them to a living room overfurnished with antiques. Arlyne and her guardians took seats on the brocade couches to wait for him. After a few moments, the doctor appeared.

Max Helfand was a short, balding man who wore spectacles and an expensive suit. He was energetic, charming and quite apparently a bon vivant. It took only a few moments for him to reveal that he was an enthusiastic dancer, which endeared him to Ida. The two carried on a subtle flirtation throughout the course of Arlyne’s treatment. Arlyne, herself, did not care for Dr. Helfand. She did not like the way he probed to get at her secrets. It seemed to her that he was as intent as Jimmy Doyle upon robbing her of her control. And so she threw up barriers to him every step of the way. Before each session, she would concoct phony stories to throw him off track.

But Dr. Helfand with his unshakable goodwill began to wear her down. Little by little certain details of her life, which she had resolved to keep from him at all cost, slipped out. She told him about Cousin Solly and Tony Mirra. About Stamey and Sal and all the others. Confessing, however, did not make her feel better. The more honest she became with Dr. Helfand, the more exposed and powerless she felt. There were times that she longed for death and was tempted to jump from her bedroom window. At other times she was terrified of death and was afraid to cross the Queensboro Bridge—the route to Helfand’s office—for fear it would collapse.

The one secret Dr. Helfand had failed to extract from her was the truth about Natie Nelson’s death. And Arlyne clung to that like a life preserver. At length, Helfand, seeing that he and his patient had reached an impasse, conferred with Billie and sought her permission to give Arlyne an injection of strong sedative. It was necessary, he argued, to get to the root of the patient’s trauma.

On the next visit, Dr. Helfand administered the injection and Arlyne let go of her final secret. As she slept off the drug in a little antechamber, Helfand urgently recounted to Billie Arlyne’s story of the death of Natie Nelson and her involvement with Jimmy Doyle. That evening Billie conferred with her husband. In the days thereafter, Irving went to see Jimmy and struck a bargain. Arlyne would never tell what she saw. The Weiss family would never go to the police. In exchange Jimmy would leave her alone.

Arlyne was kept in the dark about the details of her father’s intervention. All she was told was that she was safe and must now try to get better. Dr. Helfand recommended that Billie take her out of town, to Florida perhaps. There she could sit by the ocean. Salt water, he felt, soothed the nerves. Billie agreed and within the week, she and her daughter set off for Miami.

As Dr. Helfand predicted, the trip had a tonic effect upon Arlyne. She responded not only to the tropical sun, but to the care her mother lavished upon her. It was the first time in her life she could recall having Billie’s undivided attention. And the weeks they spent together during Arlyne’s convalescence were among the most tranquil they would ever enjoy. At the end of a month, Arlyne returned to New York, tanned, healthy and resolved to turn over a new leaf.

THREE

AN HONEST WOMAN

Arlyne had not worked out all the details of her reform. The centerpiece of the plan, however, involved giving up men. For a good month or so after the return from Miami, she was virtuous. The memory of her humiliation at the hands of Jimmy Doyle was still fresh in her mind and she gave her old haunts a wide berth. She stayed home nights, deferring to her parents. Gradually, however, virtue began to wear on her nerves. She thrived on the excitement generated by discord. She would rather receive a cuff on the ears than a pat on the head. She missed the rush.

Arlyne renewed her old acquaintances at the Carlton Terrace, partying there until 3:00 A.M. Billie resumed her vigils in the foyer but became more resigned with the knowledge that Arlyne, now eighteen, was slipping beyond her control. The daughter grew wilder, until a trick of fate temporarily clipped her wings in a way her mother never could.

Arlyne had been having a bed affair—she coined the term “bed affair” to indicate a more serious involvement than a roll in the back seat of a Cadillac—with Moishe, the racketeer who was a regular at the Terrace. Arlyne was not serious about Moishe. She found his thin, angular body and pale skin revolting. Moishe, furthermore, was a serious cheater. At the time they met, he had not only a wife but a girlfriend. Arlyne could see cheating on a wife, but a man who double-crossed his girlfriend was beneath contempt. Moishe, however, was high up in the unions and he got her around to places where she wanted to be seen. The arrangement was tolerable until Arlyne missed her period.

For several days she lay around in a kind of stupor. How could it have happened? she wondered. This was no real mystery, since she had never in her six preceding years of sexual activity used birth control. But just the fact of having gone so long without a mishap had left her feeling she led a charmed life. Now she was caught. Mustering her resolve she called Moishe and arranged to meet him at the Terrace. She laid out the problem calmly.

“Moishe,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

Moishe did not blink and he replied without emotion, “Do what you gotta do.”

He did not believe the child was his and he clearly did not intend to help her.

Arlyne walked out of the Carlton Terrace in disbelief. Taking a cab home, she was relieved to find that Sadie had not yet left for Harlem. She burst into a tearful confession. Arlyne had found that she could count on Sadie at times like these. A little wild in her own right, the housekeeper proved a willing partner in crime and together they decided that they should try to take care of matters without telling Billie, who was vacationing in Florida. Sadie had a few time-tested remedies up her sleeve. First she made a trip to the druggist and came home with a bottle of enormous black tablets that she called “elephant pills.” Arlyne didn’t ask what they contained. She just swallowed a couple of them with water. She did the same thing the following day and the day after. A week passed and still her period did not materialize.

So Sadie came up with another plan. Taking out a tin of turpentine with a long nozzle, she squeezed three drops into a spoonful of sugar and told Arlyne to swallow it. If she did that for nine days, Sadie promised, the blood would return. Before the treatment was complete, however, Arlyne was seized with violent stomach cramps and fever. Sadie became frightened and allowed as it was time to get help. It was decided that the wisest course was to tell Ida and have her relay the news to Billie, since Billie would not dare yell at her mother. The plan worked admirably. The unflappable Ida issued her usual comforting assurances. “Dahhlling, don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything.” She summoned Billie from Florida and the two arranged for a discreet visit to a reputable doctor located through a family friend.

Thanks to her abundant natural vitality, Arlyne recovered from both the turpentine poisoning and the abortion in a matter of days. Her father, whom everyone agreed should be spared the facts, was none the wiser.

The episode frightened Arlyne. But having come through it without any apparent consequences curiously increased her sense of invulnerability. She resumed her promiscuous habits, disdaining birth control, convinced against all reason that the odds were with her. But she was ever the unlucky gambler. Over the next four or five years, she was to become pregnant eight more times, each time, she was convinced, with a Jewish racketeer (a pattern that increased her preference for Italians). Each time she came home crying that she had gotten caught, Ida and Billie would mobilize their forces. They found her a doctor in Philadelphia. They found her a doctor in Manhattan. They found her a Cuban doctor who had dirty instruments. Each time, Arlyne limped home to spend several days in bed sipping soup and meditating upon her crimes. During the fever and pain that followed each of those furtive operations, she would vow to be good. But as soon as she felt better, she was back on the circuit.

The last of these illegitimate pregnancies occurred when she was twenty-three. She had been sleeping with one of her father’s friends, a car dealer from Manhattan, when she discovered that she was once again “caught.” The father, like all the others, denied responsibility. And once again, Arlyne appealed to her mother for help. This time Billie, who by now knew her way around the medical underworld, turned up a physician known as Dr. Sunshine. He performed only abortions and made a fortune at it. Billie made the necessary arrangements and one gloomy winter morning she accompanied her daughter to Dr. Sunshine’s office located in a hotel next to the Roxy Theater.

The doctor’s waiting room was rather small and soon after arriving Arlyne noticed a man sitting across from her. He was in his late thirties, with wavy hair turning a premature gray. While short, he was a stylish dresser. He was with a woman who appeared to be more than ten years his junior. Out of habit, Arlyne threw him a seductive glance. Soon, he was engaged in animated conversation with her mother.

His name was Norman Brickman. He and his father, he said, owned a fur business in Midtown. As Norman and Billie found they knew people in common, they exchanged phone numbers. Then Arlyne heard her name called by the receptionist, and she put the furrier out of her mind.

A few days later as she was convalescing, Arlyne received a call from Brickman, who asked her if she would like to go out. She found this a little odd in light of the circumstances of their meeting. Norman, she assumed, was involved with the young woman in the waiting room. (Arlyne had to admit that the sight of a man standing by a woman he had knocked up was endearing and certainly without precedent in her own experience.) The woman, Norman explained, was just a “friend.” Over dinner he elaborated on his personal life. He was married but unhappily. He and his wife were legally separated. After dinner he took her home early and asked if he could see her again.

Arlyne liked Norman Brickman. He was courteous, attractive and impressively generous. Shortly after they started to date he began giving her furs. A white fox stole. A platina fox coat. Then a mink jacket. What’s more, he reminded her in some inexplicable way of her father. There were no physical similarities except for the fact that Norman was approaching middle age. But the presence of an older man was enough to evoke in Arlyne Weiss the yearnings of her youth.

In early January, less than two months after they had met, Brickman proposed marriage. At the time Arlyne did not stop to ask herself why he might be moving so fast. She was preoccupied by her own agenda. Her sister, Barbara, had just announced her engagement to a very good-looking boy from a straight family. This impending union was, of course, everything that Billie and Irving had wanted for their daughters—both of them—and there was a great stir in the Weiss household in anticipation of an August wedding. The prospect of Barbara monopolizing the family’s attention for an entire summer galled Arlyne. She reasoned that she might steal her sister’s thunder by marrying first. With this invidious intent, she accepted Norman Brickman’s proposal.

On hearing the news, Billie was alarmed. Norman, she felt, was inappropriate on several counts. First was the obvious age difference. Beyond that was his complicated personal situation, which included, as far as she could see, both an estranged wife and a once-pregnant girlfriend. Arlyne assured her mother that Norman’s divorce was due to become final soon, but that did not put Billie’s mind at rest. At the bottom of her uneasiness, however, lay a suspicion that she could not verify: that Norman was hoping to get his hands on Irving’s money.

Billie pleaded with her daughter to reconsider, but Arlyne was adamant. In the face of Arlyne’s resolve, the family set a date during the first week of April. It was nothing special, just a “hit-and-run” wedding in Greenwich, Connecticut, where there were marriage statutes favorable to the recently divorced. Arlyne wore a beige Chanton suit with mink stole. Bride and groom trudged through a snowstorm to a justice of the peace. After the ceremony, the wedding party gathered at an inn for a champagne breakfast. Everyone got drunk, less out of high spirits than to take the edge off the discomfort. Billie wept continuously. The only one who seemed happy was Ida, whose years as a funeral director had steeled her to rise to any emotion that convention demanded.

Although Irving was dubious of his new son-in-law, he put the best face on things, unveiling his wedding gift to the newlyweds—a pink Cadillac. Amid the farewells of well-wishers, Arlyne and Norman climbed into their new auto and drove off into the blizzard.

They honeymooned at the Concord, Ida’s old haunt and a spot that Arlyne had always associated with gaiety. But the mood was sour. Norman drank and sulked. She had never seen him that way. Arlyne attributed it to the uncivil treatment he had received at the hands of her family and redoubled her efforts to raise his spirits. She was determined to be a good wife, although her motives were not altogether pure. On one hand, she had seen enough of the two-timers at the Carlton Terrace to realize that a good marriage was something worth having. Her own parents had a relationship to envy. They were loving and fiercely loyal to each other. Like any other couple, they had gone through some rough times. When Arlyne was in her early teens, she had learned that Irving was having an affair. The phone had rung one evening and a woman asked for Irving. Billie came on the line and delivered the coup de grace. “I am still Mrs. Irving Weiss.” After that, Billie never let on that anything had happened. At the time Arlyne marveled at the coldblooded cruelty of a mistress who called a man at home. But she never thought less of her father. It was only, she figured, a momentary lapse in an otherwise exemplary marriage.

But there was a more pressing reason why Arlyne could not fail. If she gave any impression that her marriage was in trouble so soon after the wedding, Barbara’s August nuptials would appear all the more glorious. With this in mind, Arlyne threw herself into being Mrs. Norman Brickman. Upon their return from the Catskills, she found an apartment on Manhattan’s fashionable Upper East Side. She prevailed upon her mother to loan her Sadie for a couple of days a week, but it was Arlyne herself who oversaw the management of the household. All of her slovenly habits disappeared. Where she used to toss her custom-made clothes in careless piles behind the door, she would not now suffer anything to be out of place. She became a fanatic about cleanliness, getting down on her hands and knees to scrub. Every day she ordered fresh flowers from the neighborhood florists and filled the rooms with huge, aromatic bouquets. Flowers always suggested innocence.

Though Arlyne waited on her husband like a servant, he was not an easy man to please. He was particular about his shirts, which had to be hand-washed and hand-ironed. It took both Sadie and Arlyne working full-time to keep Norman’s wardrobe in the condition he demanded. He was equally fussy about his meals. Sadie did most of the cooking but every so often Arlyne, who was no mean cook herself, would make him his favorite dinner of veal cutlets and mashed potatoes. Then she would sit and wait for praise, which never came. Instead, if she tried to make conversation, Norman would raise his hand as if to strike her.

Arlyne could have taken her husband’s cruelties in stride had it not been for one peculiarity that threatened to drive her insane. On Friday nights she would normally send Sadie home early and prepare what she hoped would be an intimate dinner for two. Only a few weeks into the marriage, however, Norman started leaving in the middle of dinner. He would rise from the table, his meal half-eaten, to announce that he was going out for a pack of cigarettes. Arlyne would sit alone listening to the clock strike nine, ten, eleven. Midnight. Norman would not return that night nor, indeed, the next day. It was not until Sunday that he would wander back, cigarettes in hand. Without a word of explanation he would walk to the phonograph and put on his favorite song, “Let there be you. Let there be me. Let there be oysters under the sea.” Then he would ask for the rest of his dinner.

Arlyne was mesmerized. Either Norman was crazy or he was engaging in this charade to drive her over the edge. Whatever the case she felt she needed independent verification of his bizarre behavior. One Friday afternoon, she asked Sadie if she could stay the weekend. “You’re going to see he’s going to come back Sunday night like nothing happened. He’s trying to do a Gaslight on me.” Sadie thought it sounded queer, but she stayed in the shadows and bore witness as Norman walked out on Friday night and returned two days later.

Satisfied that she had the forces of reason on her side, Arlyne seized the initiative. She hired a detective to follow her husband. The private eye tracked Norman to a Brooklyn apartment right around the corner from where Arlyne went to the beauty parlor. The apartment belonged to a woman named Chickie. Arlyne studied the photos of her purported rival. Chickie was a real Brooklyn broad with long silvery-white hair. Nothing special to look at except that she was conspicuously pregnant. Arlyne decided it was time to sit her husband down for a little talk.

Norman Brickman professed outrage that his wife had hired a private eye to spy on him. Arlyne, however, was not to be diverted so easily and did not let conversation stray from the subject of his pregnant girlfriend. After much arguing, Norman promised to give the other woman up. But the situation proved not entirely within his control. When she didn’t hear from Norman for a few days, Chickie showed up in front of the Brickmans’ apartment, in broad daylight, brazenly flaunting her stomach. When she did not get an answer to the doorbell, she stood under the window shouting, “Norrrrman!” Arlyne watched from behind the curtain, fascinated and appalled. Norman sat in his armchair reading, as if nothing was happening.

Finally, Arlyne opened the window and shouted “go away,” but Chickie ignored her. She was determined to get at Norman and she would not be deterred by his wife’s opinion of her. In short, Chickie had no shame and showed up several times in weeks thereafter, standing under the window, calling Norman’s name. When Arlyne asked her husband what he intended to do about this situation, he insisted that he had already ended the affair. Arlyne earnestly wanted to believe this and in her heart she hoped that Chickie’s determination would simply burn itself out. She never asked Norman if the baby was his. If he said “yes,” he would be acknowledging an obligation that he might feel compelled to honor. Arlyne worried that her husband might be a man of scruples. However, those fears were soon dispelled by the appearance of a new caller.

There had been a temporary pause in Chickie’s siege. Still, every ring of the doorbell gave Arlyne a start. One afternoon it rang and she peeked out from behind the curtains. Standing in the doorway was a tall, very attractive blond. Not a cheap blond like Chickie, but a broad with some class. Arlyne opened the door and found herself staring into the forlorn face of another very pregnant woman.

Arlyne invited her in for a cold drink and learned that her name was Frances. She was an Irish girl from the Bronx. She had met Norman two years earlier in the fur district where she was working as a model. Now, she was pregnant and Norman wouldn’t return her calls. She wouldn’t have imposed, she explained, but she was about to deliver and had no money. Arlyne was moved. Unlike Chickie, who had stormed the gates like a Hun, Frances was simply trying to find some justice. Rather than a rival, she seemed more like a fellow sufferer.

Without telling Norman about this visit, Arlyne gave Frances some money to tide her over and sent her back to the Bronx, calling every few days to inquire about her condition. When Frances went into labor, Arlyne took her to the hospital and, seeing that the girl did not have a decent nightgown, went out and bought her one. On the Feast of St. Jude, the saint of impossible causes, Frances had a son. Arlyne held the baby briefly. Then, giving Frances another substantial sum of money, she walked out of the hospital never to see her again.

Arlyne could not bring herself to discuss Norman’s mistresses with her parents. That would be an admission of failure. Instead, she invited her parents to dinner on Friday night with the intent of presenting a tableau of domestic bliss. Throughout the meal she was in a state of nerves, wondering if her husband might not wander out for cigarettes. But in the presence of Irving Weiss, whose wealth and influence he admired, Norman behaved like a model husband. Although the Weisses earnestly wanted to believe in their daughter’s marriage, in the hopes that it would settle her down, they were not so easily fooled. Rumors of Norman’s wrongdoing had filtered back by way of Sadie. Arlyne, however, refused to discuss her troubles, until events forced her hand.

Soon after their marriage, Arlyne had realized that Norman’s business was in trouble. He and his father had fought about something, she wasn’t sure what, and for days at a time Norman stayed away from the shop. One afternoon in mid-June the doorbell rang. Norman was lounging around the apartment relaxing in his favorite blue boxer shorts, so Arlyne answered the door. She met two New York City detectives with a warrant for her husband’s arrest.

Norman did not seem surprised. He calmly pulled on his pants, gave her instructions for arranging bail and left with the detectives. That night after she had managed to retrieve him, he explained his difficulties. He had taken a bundle of furs on consignment, sold them and pocketed the money. In the process he had ruined his father and now he himself stood to go to prison.

Norman related all this dispassionately. Still, the prospect of her husband behind bars was so disturbing to Arlyne that she threw herself on her father’s mercy, begging him to intervene. Accordingly, Irving prevailed upon one of his own friends, a congressman, to take on his son-in-law’s case.

Convinced that her husband at last needed her, Arlyne felt closer to him than at any time since their marriage. When he came out on bail, his behavior was exemplary. He was thoughtful, kind, attentive. In early July, she discovered she was pregnant. For once she was happy about it. It was not a sentiment shared by Billie Weiss, who, sensing impending disaster, begged her daughter to get another abortion. But Arlyne would hear none of it. Although she had regarded her previous pregnancies with fear and revulsion, she now felt maternal yearnings. She wanted something of her own. As usual, Arlyne’s motives were not unalloyed. Having a baby, Ida Blum’s first grandchild no less, would assure her of a position of esteem within the family, one that Barbara could not preempt.

When Arlyne told Norman about the baby he seemed delighted and, concerned for her delicate condition, suggested she should remove herself from his legal troubles as far as possible by spending a few weeks with her grandmother at the Concord. Arlyne agreed, but once there she was restless and worried about her husband. His next hearing was approaching and she felt guilty that he would be facing it alone. It would be a nice surprise, she thought, if she showed up to meet him after he got out of court.

When Arlyne’s rented limo pulled up next to their apartment on the Upper East Side, the lights were out. She turned her key in the lock and called Norman’s name. There was no reply. The place looked much the same as when she had left it. Norman, unlike many men, was no clutterer. The instant she passed from the living room to the bedroom, however, she could tell something was wrong. Her favorite nightgown, a turquoise peignoir, was thrown across the bed. She would never have tossed it so casually, nor would Sadie, who knew her mistress required her lingerie to be laundered after each wearing, have treated it with such disregard. It had been worn by another woman.

She was enraged with Norman, who, it was now clear, had tricked her into leaving town so he could play house with Chickie. Repenting any sympathy, she waited in the darkened house until she heard him walk in the door. He was alone. When he turned on the light, he saw her and froze. Arlyne had no intention of giving him the opportunity to explain himself. Brandishing the incriminating nightgown, she launched into a tirade against his lechery. Norman struck her. Then he stormed out the door.

All that night, Arlyne nursed her wounds and seethed. By morning, she had decided upon a course of action. She called the assistant district attorney in charge of prosecuting Norman’s case and told him she had information to offer concerning her husband’s misconduct in the fur business. The prosecutor ushered her into his office, where she recited a litany of Norman’s “crimes.”

Arlyne had not reckoned with the consequences of her own revenge. Years later as she tried to reconstruct the tumultuous aftermath of her trip to the prosecutor’s office, she would recall that Norman was taken back to the city jail. She had ratted out her own husband. She was mortified. She would set things right, she decided. She would recant her statement. But first she would bail her husband out. That, she learned, would be impossible until the next day. All night long she sat outside the Tombs in her pink Cadillac waiting to do penance. In the morning when she finally got in to visit Norman, he told her he never wanted to see her again.

In the days to follow, Norman and the state struck a bargain. He pleaded guilty to charges of grand larceny second degree and was sentenced to a brief term at the state maximum security prison in Ossining.

In every practical sense, Arlyne’s marriage was over. She moved from the Upper East Side back to her parents’ apartment in Forest Hills. The retreat was humiliating, particularly since it came only two weeks or so before Barbara’s wedding, a fairy-tale extravaganza in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. At that point, news of Norman’s conviction was not common knowledge and the Weiss family hoped the news would not leak out to spoil Barbara’s big day. It would be best, they decided, if Arlyne and Norman would show up together, smiles on their faces, putting rumors of their domestic problems to rest. This was difficult to arrange since Norman, out on bail, was living with Chickie.

Getting him to that wedding was a feat that required the skills of a trained diplomat. Arlyne rose to the occasion. She called him in Brooklyn and explained that in his precarious legal position he had as much to gain as anyone by appearing to be embraced by his influential in-laws. Their continued goodwill, in fact, might prove useful to him come time for parole. Enticed by this appeal to his self-interest, Norman attended the wedding, where he was a shadow, if a necessary shadow. He appeared in only one photo, an obscure figure seated in the background.

Arlyne did not see her husband again before he left for Sing Sing.

The full weight of her misery did not settle upon Mrs. Brickman until after the wedding, when the contrast between her circumstances and those of her sister became all too clear. While Barbara and her new husband honeymooned in Europe, Arlyne was back at home with no husband and a baby on the way. Pregnancy, furthermore, was not the glamorous interlude she had imagined. She suffered from morning sickness. She suffered from nerves. Despite the former and to assuage the latter, she ate ravenously, gaining fifty-five pounds. As her depression deepened, her mother thought it might be a good idea for her to go to work for a few hours a day at Chester Motors to keep her mind off her troubles. Irving Weiss had recently lost his secretary and could use the help. This arrangement, however, caused Arlyne still more discomfort. She knew her father despised people who let themselves go. There was never an excess pound on his frame. Billie, too, was always reed-thin. Now, waddling around under his critical gaze, Arlyne felt she was repulsive to him. She wished for two things only: that the hateful pregnancy would end, and that she could regain her freedom from Norman Brickman.

Given their stormy history, she had believed that Norman was as eager to be out of the marriage as she was. When a decent interval had passed, she wrote him at Sing Sing asking for a divorce. She received a reply that said, in essence, “As long as I’m rotting, you’re going to rot.” Arlyne’s already precarious emotions now swung wildly between depression and hysteria. Weeping, she went to see her father’s old friend, the congressman, to ask if he would handle her divorce. He informed her this wouldn’t be proper since he already represented Norman in a criminal matter. Noting her distracted behavior, he warned, “Arlyne. You keep acting this way and you’re going to have a very nervous child.”

Arlyne’s disposition did not improve. Her delivery date came and went without a sign of a contraction. The days dragged by. One week. Two weeks. Still no baby. The Weiss family kept a vigil. For hours on end, Arlyne played gin with her sister and new brother-in-law. Occasionally, someone would break the silence with a polite query into her condition. Arlyne felt she might scream.

Seventeen days late, Arlyne went into labor, a painful, arduous labor that lasted more than twenty-four hours. Late in the evening she gave birth to a daughter. When the nurses tried to bring her the baby, Arlyne did not want to see it. For several days after delivery, she suffered from postpartum blues. All of her parents’ friends sent bouquets. But Arlyne, who had always loved flowers, was now terrified by the sight of them. They reminded her of the wreaths at her grandmother’s funeral parlor. In her troubled state, she reasoned that she had died.

When the black mood passed, she sent for her daughter. Little Leslie Rebecca Brickman was an undeniably beautiful child. Arlyne studied her white skin and plump limbs with pride. Before Leslie’s birth, Arlyne had worried that Irving might not accept the baby. Her fears were soon laid to rest. From the moment he saw her, Irving Weiss fell in love with his little granddaughter. He carried her home from the hospital and ensconced her in a nursery where she was tended round the clock by a nurse. The baby was denied nothing. Whenever she cried, her grandfather demanded she be given a bottle. As a result, she grew fat. When she was old enough to sit up, Irving bought her a custom-made baby carriage with a window in the back. It looked like a Cadillac. He took her shopping at Little Royalty, one of the finest baby shops on Queens Boulevard. By her first birthday, Leslie had a closetful of little velvet dresses with pantaloons.

Leslie returned her grandfather’s affection. When she took her first step, it was to him. After that, she toddled after her “Poppy” wherever he went. He would take her with him to Chester Motors, where she played on the leather seats of his vintage Rolls-Royces. When she was older, he would take her to ride ponies in Oyster Bay. As time went on, Irving Weiss began to think of himself as Leslie’s father. The thought of her real father returning at some point to claim her was more than he could bear. He offered Arlyne a deal. If she would get a divorce from Brickman, he would take care of Leslie for the rest of her life.

Arlyne called Sing Sing and asked to be put on the list to see Norman Brickman.

“Who are you?” the guard asked.

“I’m his wife,” she replied. “Mrs. Brickman.”

“What kind of game are you playing, lady,” the guard replied. “You’ve been coming up here to see your husband every week.”

Organizing a war party that included both Billie and Ida, Arlyne—dressed in her most provocative ankle-strapped shoes and her furs—set out for Ossining to pay a visit to the warden, who, as it happened, had once bought a car from Irving Weiss. The warden received the delegation politely.

“Now tell me,” he asked, “are you Mrs. Arlyne Brickman?”

Arlyne showed him her birth certificate and marriage license.

“Well, wait a minute,” the warden replied. He called a guard. “Is this the woman who sees Norman Brickman every week?” he asked. “No,” replied the guard. “That’s a blond.”

Arlyne knew she had Norman dead to rights. The false Mrs. Brickman had to be Chickie. It was time, Arlyne felt, that Norman be made to realize the power she had over him. She informed the warden that her husband had been sneaking in a mistress with false identification. The arrow struck its mark. Norman was punished with a transfer to an even less congenial maximum security prison in Auburn. But if he was chastened by his wife’s guerrilla tactics, he didn’t show it. When she asked, once again, for a divorce, his reply remained: As I rot, you shall rot.

Arlyne had no choice but to wait for her next opportunity. It arose approximately one year later when she went for her weekly appointment at the beauty parlor in Brooklyn. While she was having her hair teased, she heard a woman next to her telling the beautician about her “son-in-law,” Norman. Arlyne shot a glance at the speaker. She was a haggard bleached blond. Arlyne did not need to be told that this was Chickie’s mother. Norman was apparently out on parole and living in Brooklyn with his old paramour.

When Arlyne relayed the news to her father, Irving Weiss was decisive. They must somehow catch Norman in the act of infidelity. That would provide the evidence Arlyne needed to start divorce proceedings against him. Wasting no time, Irving hired a pair of private eyes who set about planning a “raid” on Chickie’s apartment. They would need a family member or a close friend to accompany them for the purpose of establishing that the woman with whom Norman was living was not his wife. This gave the Weisses pause. Irving and Billie were not willing to compromise their dignity by participating in this sordid outing. Arlyne was the logical person to go but to pit her in the same arena with Chickie was asking for a nasty scene. The family decided to send Sadie.

Late one evening Sadie and the detectives left for Brooklyn. When they knocked on the door, one of the private eyes instructed her, she was to look for an opening to slip inside and head for the bedroom. Norman answered the door in his favorite blue boxer shorts. Sadie, seizing her chance, slipped past him to the foyer where she nearly collided with Chickie, who was wearing a short nightgown and dangling a baby over her arm. Sadie fixed Chickie in her gaze. Chickie shouted, “Get out of here!” Having the proof they came for, the party retreated.

The raid put Norman in the mood to negotiate. In the days thereafter, he and Irving met to discuss the matter like gentlemen. The upshot of this summit was a solution satisfactory to both. Norman would grant his wife an uncontested divorce and give up all claim to the baby; in return, Irving Weiss would assume all responsibility for their support. When Arlyne went to court to formalize the dissolution of her marriage, the judge asked her if she didn’t want at least one dollar, as this would leave the door open for future support payments. “No,” she replied adamantly. “I want to be rid of him.”

Norman Brickman made only one more appearance in Arlyne’s life. Several weeks after the divorce became final, she was strolling the baby, by now over two years old, down the sidewalk in Forest Hills. She looked up and saw Norman crossing the street in her direction. Her first instinct was panic. She was very happy with the promise her father had made to support Leslie and she was afraid that if he saw her talking to Norman, he would be so angry he would renege.

“What do you want?” she hissed.

“I want to see what my daughter looks like,” he replied. He glanced at the child in her stroller, then turned his attention back to Arlyne. He was leaving, he said, for California and she would never see him again. And with that he walked down the block and out of her life. That night, Arlyne went through her photo albums destroying images of Norman. The Weiss family held council and decided it was best to tell Leslie that her father was dead.

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