Teresa Carpenter - Mob Girl: A Woman’s Life In the Underworld

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Also by Teresa Carpenter

MISSING BEAUTY

SIMON & SCHUSTER

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www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 1992 by Teresa Carpenter

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Designed by Laurie Jewell

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carpenter, Teresa.

Mob girl : a womans life in the underworld / Teresa Carpenter.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references

1. Brickman, Arlyne. 2. InformersNew York (N.Y.)Biography.

3. MafiaNew York (N.Y.) I. Title.

HV6248.B724C371992

364.106092dc20

[B]91-43256CIP

ISBN 978-1-4767-9571-3

ISBN 978-1-5011-6612-9 (ebook)

I would like to thank the following for their cooperation and encouragement: Nick Pileggi, Victor Kovner, Laura Handman, Emily Remes, Sterling Lord, Flip Brophy, David Kanter, Mervyn Keizer, George Diehl, Joe Spina, Mike Minto, Bill Vormittag, Philly Buckles, Greg Hendrickson, Jeff Dossett, Tom Roche, Diane Giacalone, Grady OMalley, Eddie Lindberg, Bill Noonan, Paul Scudiere, Aaron Marcu, Bruce Repetto, Jon Liebman, Rich Tofani, Mary Ellen Luthy, Joseph Smith, Steve Markardt and Loren Feldman. Special appreciation goes to Ken Brown and Oliver and Molly Halle as well as Esther Newberg, to whom I owe a continuing debt of gratitude. I would also like to thank my vigilant editor, Alice Mayhew, and my reassuring husband, Steven Levy.

F or Leslie

T he 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.

W hen I arrived at Arlyne Brickmans 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 nuns 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. Dont 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 meetingJuly of 1988I 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 Persicos 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. Im 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 mobboth Italian and Jewish. Arlynes 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.