Mob Girl

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.