She Was Only a Daughter

MOB GIRL
A Woman's Life in the Underworld..
By Teresa Carpenter.
Illustrated.. 288 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $21
By Amy Pagnozzi
Y
OU may have noticed, reading the front pages
of the tabloids, that reJII>rters who cover the
Mafia have highly sensitive, exquisitely at-
tuned quiver thresholds. GODFATHER
TALKS!!! "It's mind over matter- if you don' t mind,
it doesn' t matter," says John Gotti. EXCLUSIVE! !!
Victoria Gotti tells "what Johnny is really like. He is a
wonderful father. The children adore him."
So maybe the mobster and his missus said nothing
of substance. So what? They said it to us. Even the
merest "Hey, guy," called out by Mr. Gotti, can trans-
form courthouse scribe into Made Reporter - at least
in the pressroom.
In .this atmosphere, you can see how thrilled Teresa
Carpenter must have been to snare Arlyne Brickman
as the subject of "Mob Girl: A Woman's Life in the
Underworld." There are virtually no books on women
mobsters, apart from novels. Richard Condon gave us
Irene Walker, freelance hit woman, in "Prizzi's Honor,"
but she was fiction, whereas Ms. Brickman is real, a
Jewish racketeer's daughter raised on the Lower East
Side in the days of Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel and
Louis (Lepke) Buchalter.
On the face of it, Ms. Brickman is quite the charac-
ter, cruising around in a pink Cadillac scoping out
"dangerous" men like Jimmy Doyle and Joe Colombo in
her quest to be the next Virginia Hill. "In my eyes," says
Ms. Brickman, "here was a broad that really made it
good." From her girlhood she kept a scrapbook cele-
brating the cafe society adventures of Hill a nd her
boyfriend Bugsy Siegel; she eve.n copied Hill's clothes
Amy Pagnoul is a columnist for The New York
Post.
I
riiOMwoeGR.
Arlyne Brickman, at 15, in Miami in the late 1940's.
Arlyne Bn.ckman's is the
story not so much of a mob
girl as of a mob groupie.
I
and dyed her hair jet black. Actually, Hill's hair was
red, but in the news papers it looked black to Ms.
Brickman.
Which is about as good a metaphor as any for what
is wrong with this book. Ms. Brickman is street-smart
and perceptive, for s ure - but not to the degree
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
require<! to pull off the tra ns forma tion. Upon losing he r II
virgmity at the age of 12, s he s aw that sex, despite he r
mdifference to it, equals leverage, that women can have
power over the me n who would bed the m. But s he was
too impuls ive by far to exploit that power.
It mus t have been a s hock for the a uthor to realize
- somewhere between contract and completed manu-
script - that while Ms. Brickman was intimate with
doze ns of mobsters, she was c lose to none of them. Oral
sex was her c alling card, the act that gave her entree, at
age 14, to Tony Mirra, a reputed enforcer for the
Bonanno c rime family, whom she seduced des pite
. knowing hls reputation for throwing girls frorri his two-
tone Cadillac a fter he had finished with them. From
then on, so much of Ms. Brickman's contact with
gangsters occurred in cars that s he coined the term
"bed affair" to connote otherwise. "It was not, s he
imagined, how Virginia Hill had done it -or maybe s tie
had," Ms. Carpenter writes. "But Arlyne felt this was
all a necessary part of becoming a true-to-life mob
girl."
Throw a round names like Gotti and Genovese,
Gambino and Galante and Persico a ll you will - but if
you a re only servicing their underlings, it gets numb-
ingly repetitious. Reading the book, I could almost hear
the discussions that must have gone on between author
and subject. Carpenter: "That's interesting, Arlyne, but
wha t happened after you had sex with Johnny Dio?"
' Brickman: " I did his brother Frankie." The biggest
notch on Ms. Brickman's garter belt by far was J oe
Colombo. At least with him, we get some trivia: he dad
not re move l')is socks; his boxer shorts were un-
hemme<l.
But this is the s tory not so muc h of a mob girl a s of
a mob g roupie, who like a ny other groupie performed
for flunky after flunky to get near the star s. Had she
worke<l a different arena, this might have he ld some
interest; Pamela Des Barres didn't do badly with her
book, "I'm With i.he Band." But even the testosterone-
charged world of rock-and-roll is a feminist utopia
compared to the Mafia.
Ms. Brickma n's idols were Old World mama's boys
who defined women as wives, mis tresses or whores -
Continued on next page
A Racketeer's Daughter
Cont mued {rom preceding page
not , as s he had hoped, partners m crime. You think
Victona Gotti 1s bemg coy when s he c laims s he doesn' t
know about John' s business? And if they don' t te ll the
w1fe, do you think they are going to tell the mistress or
the whore?
It is a mazing that Ms. Brickman got even s o far as
to run a nickel-and-di me numbers game and to dabble
in narcotics. but that was not far eno_ugh When she
. could not be a player in the mob, s he turned s tate's
e vidence, double-crossing even friends a nd relatives,
jus t for the rush. You might feel s orry for Arlyne
Brickman - battered and abandoned by he r hus ba nd.
gang- raped by gangster s, a deluded, muumuued ma-
t ron who even bungles he r lines on the witness s tand.
But you cannot . She's got the ins tinct s of a hyena -
toting her mfa nt da ughter, Les lie, on e rrands because a
woma n with a baby is less like ly to be hurt, later
keeping the child home from school for company, ultl
mately a llowmg he r own hood boyfr iend to sell her
grown daughter he roin a nd cocaine that would lead to
her addiction and death from AIDS.
Ms Carpente r , who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for
he r reportage in The Village Voice, renders this trage-
dy with supreme skill, but you sense that even the loss
or a daughter galls Ms. Brickman less than being out of
the limelight. Leslie, after all, was just a prop in the life
of this mob girl who never was - ballast to be cast orr
like t he rest of those c lose to Ms. Brickman. It is fitting
that he r s tory ends before Les lie's death, which Ms.
Carpente r saves for the epilogue. But Arlyne Brick-
ma n' s story never really began.
Ms Ca rpenter has orev10uslv memoria lized s m a l l ~
town girls who made bad but at least made It: the
Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten and the high-class
hooker Robin Benedict, both murder victims. Far from
belll2 a olaver. Arlyne Brickman barely got beyond the
back seat , never mind the be<lroom. Now, maybe this
gi ves her a story to tell, but it's no Mafia s tory. and she's
no mob girl - a ny more than the- guy who tends John
Gotti's s uits is a mob dry c leaner. 0