She Was the Mob’s Informant for 20 Years — The FBI Abandoned Her to Die ht

A woman walks into a federal courtroom in Manhattan, [clears throat] 1986. The most significant organized crime trial in the history of the Colombo crime family. Carmine Persico, the boss known as the snake, is seated at the defense table alongside his underboss, his capos, and seven co-defendants.

The prosecution has spent eight months building its case. The jury is anonymous. The courtroom is packed. The woman takes the witness stand. She is 52 years old, hair done, dressed well. The kind of woman who knows exactly what effect she has when she walks into a room. Defense counsel rises.

He wants to establish her character for the jury. He asks what she was doing in 1981. She looks at the courtroom. She looks at the jury. She says, “I was a housewife.” The courtroom erupts in laughter. Because everyone in that room, the judge, the jury, the defense attorneys, the eight mob bosses sitting at the table, knew exactly what Arline Brickman had actually been doing in 1981.

She had been wearing a wire inside her brassiere, recording Colombo family members in kitchens and social clubs and restaurant booths across Brooklyn and Staten Island. Building the case that was at this moment convicting the men sitting 15 ft in front of her. A housewife. That line is the story of Arline Brickman compressed into two words.

A woman who spent 25 years inside the American Mafia running drugs, dealing loans, moving numbers, sleeping with bosses and hitmen, who then spent another decade dismantling it from the inside, while the men she had trusted her entire adult life assumed she was just another mob girl who would never have the nerve to do what she did.

They were wrong about that. And the FBI, the organization she risked her life to serve for over a decade, paid her back by using her testimony to put away an entire crime family leadership, and then leaving her completely alone to deal with the consequences. This is the story of Arline Brickman, the most dangerous informant the American Mafia never saw coming, and the most instructive example in the history of organized crime of what the government actually does with the people who risk everything to help it. You have to go back to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1930s to understand who Arline Weiss was before any of this. The Lower East Side in that period was the most densely populated neighborhood in America. Tenement buildings stacked against each other. Pushcart markets on every block. And underneath the surface of ordinary

immigrant life, a criminal infrastructure that had been operating since the turn of the century. Jewish organized crime, the world of Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Louis Lepke, and their associates was woven into the daily fabric of the neighborhood in ways that made it nearly invisible to anyone who had not grown up inside it.

Arline grew up inside it. Her father, Irving Weiss, owned Chester Motors on 116th Street and Pleasant Avenue in Harlem. On the surface, it was a luxury car dealership, marble floors, mirrored walls, Cadillacs and Rolls-Royces on the showroom floor. The clientele included Meyer Lansky and a rotating cast of New York’s most connected mob figures.

Irving derived the name Chester from the Chesterfield cigarette that perpetually hung from the corner of his mouth. He was never without one. Beneath the showroom, Irving did what connected Jewish men of his era did. Bookmaking, loan sharking, the occasional labor union shakedown.

He was friends with Lansky. He knew Jimmy Plumeri and Johnny DioGuardi, who ran the garment center rackets after Murder Inc.’s leadership was dismantled. The mob was not something Irving Weiss tolerated around his family. It was the furniture of their life. Arline’s maternal grandmother, Ida Blum, ran the Blum Funeral Parlor at 202 East Broadway.

The bottom floor exterior was polished to a bright gloss. Brass railings, scrubbed front steps. Inside, dead bodies of all religions were laid out in the mortuary. And in a private room next to the mortuary, a man named Uncle Frankie Oxman, officially the parlor’s hearse driver, ran a bookmaking operation, taking bets on everything from horse racing to cockroaches racing up a wall. Dead bodies in the front.

Live money in the back. That is the world Arline Weiss was born into in 1934. She attended local public schools and had essentially no interest in any of it. She dropped out in her early teens. She did not need a classroom. She had Chester Motors. She had the funeral parlor.

She had a father who conducted his criminal business as an open and normalized presence in the family home. What she was learning how to read dangerous men, how to talk in a room where everything important goes unsaid, how to project confidence in the presence of people who could destroy you, she was learning it from the ground up in the most effective school available.

And at 14 years old in 1948, Arline Weiss watched a woman on television who gave her entire life a direction. Virginia Hill, the Kefauver hearings, the platinum mink stole, the atom bomb line. Arline later told her biographer, Teresa Carpenter, exactly what she felt watching Hill. Here was a broad that really made it good.

Not a statement of admiration, a statement of intention. The 1950s in New York’s mob social world were a specific and very particular universe. Social clubs on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, restaurants in Bensonhurst, nightclubs in Midtown where wiseguys held court, and everybody knew who was who.

Arline Weiss moved through that universe with a combination of qualities that made her both dangerous and irresistible to the men she was chasing. She was beautiful. She was fearless. And she could talk, not the nervous chatter of a woman trying to impress, but the easy, controlled conversation of someone who had grown up at tables where dangerous men discussed serious things and had absorbed by osmosis every unspoken rule about what to say and what never to say.

She was also Jewish in a world that was almost exclusively Italian. That created a ceiling she could never get past and a freedom she did not fully appreciate at the time. Because the Sicilian code that governed the Italian mob, the absolute prohibition on discussing business with outsiders, the violent consequences for betrayal, the walls built around the organization, that code assumed the threat came from men.

It did not fully account for women. And it did not account at all for a Jewish woman who had been raised in the mob world since birth and knew its rhythms better than most of the soldiers operating inside it. She married Norman Brickman, a furrier, in the early 1950s. A quiet, ordinary man with no criminal connections who represented everything she did not want.

The marriage lasted long enough to produce one daughter, Leslie, and not much longer. She kept his name. She went back to the life. The men in her orbit during the 1950s and ’60s included Joe Colombo, the founder of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, boss of the Colombo crime family, a man who organized protests outside FBI headquarters in Manhattan and insisted the Italian Mafia did not exist.

He was shot in the head at his own rally in Columbus Circle in 1971. Shot by a black gunman, widely believed to have been connected to Joe Gallo, and died after years in a vegetative state in 1978. Arline had known him before any of that. She knew him as a man in a club, a boss who commanded a room, the exact kind of man she had been chasing since she was 14.

She also had a relationship with Tony Mirra, Bonanno family hitman, one of the most genuinely dangerous men in New York’s underworld at the time. Mirra is now most famous for a different reason. He was one of the mob figures who spent years cultivating the FBI’s undercover agent, Joseph Pistone, known as Donnie Brasco, not knowing the man was a federal agent.

When Pistone’s identity was revealed, Mirra was held responsible by the Bonanno family for sponsoring an FBI agent’s infiltration. He was shot to death in his car on February 18th, 1982. Shot once in the head, found in a parking garage on Mulberry Street. He was 47 years old. Arline had moved on from Mirra long before then, but the world she moved in was that world.

Men who ended up in parking garages, men who knew things nobody was supposed to know. Men who smiled at you across a restaurant table and were having a separate conversation in their heads about whether you were useful or dangerous. For over two decades, she operated inside that world without being either killed or arrested. She ran numbers.

She dealt drugs. She worked as a loan shark. She used the connections her father’s world had given her to position herself as someone people came to when they needed money or needed something moved. She was, in the language of the street, a mob girl. That is what the men around her called her.

That is what she had chosen to be. And then, everything that label was supposed to protect her from happened anyway. Around 1969, Arline Brickman was 35 years old. She had been in the mob world for over 20 years. She had relationships with bosses. She had earned money alongside soldiers. She had absorbed the code completely.

The silence, the loyalty, the understanding that you handled your own problems, and you did not go to the police under any circumstances. She was beaten and raped by a crew of men working for a gangster named Salvatore Granello, known as Sally Burns, a mid-level figure connected to the New York families.

She went to every mob figure she had cultivated a relationship with over two decades. Every man she had trusted. Every man who had accepted her company, her money, her favors, her loyalty, and the implicit understanding she had offered them that she was part of their world. Every single one of them told her the same thing, in different words with different degrees of regret or indifference.

They told her, “You are a woman. You are Jewish. You are not one of us. We cannot go to war over this.” 20 years of operating in their world, 20 years of knowing their rules and honoring their codes. And when it mattered, when a crew of men had violated her in the most fundamental way possible, the organization she had spent her entire adult life trying to belong to told her that she had never actually belonged to it.

She kept that information. She filed it. She did not act on it immediately, but she filed it. She kept operating. She connected with a small-time mob associate named Tommy Lucca, through whom she went deeper into drug dealing and numbers running. She was still doing what she had always done, still moving through the same world.

And then, the world came for her daughter. Leslie Brickman was 18 years old in the mid-1970s, Arline’s only child. A young woman who had grown up largely apart from her mother, raised by others while Arline chased the mob life she had chosen at 14. Their relationship was strained in the way that the relationship between a daughter and a mother who was never fully present can only be strained, not with hatred, but with the specific damage of sustained absence.

A loan shark connected to a Colombo family associate named Anthony Scarpa “The Scappi” came to Arline with a debt. She owed money. The message was simple. “Pay up, or the debt gets collected from Leslie.” Her daughter, 18 years old, who had nothing to do with any of it. Arline Brickman called the FBI. This is the moment that the title of this story is actually about, not the informing itself, the reason for it.

She had been beaten and raped, and the mob had told her she was not protected. She had absorbed that lesson and kept going, but threatening her daughter was a different category of violation. The mob had spent 25 years telling her she was not really one of them. She had spent 25 years trying to prove otherwise.

And now a crew of men connected to the Colombo family were using her daughter as collateral for a debt. She was done. She contacted the FBI. She told them she was willing to wear a wire. She told them she could get inside conversations that no male informant could ever access because she could be in rooms with these men in a way that their own rules prevented them from fully guarding against.

She was not an outsider trying to get in. She was already in. Had been for 25 years. The FBI made her a deal. They paid her debts. They gave her a plea bargain on her own criminal exposure. And they put her to work. Here is how Arline Brickman operated as an informant. And this is the part of the story that the book covers, but that almost nobody who knows her name has actually absorbed.

She hid the microphone in her brassiere, sometimes in her purse. She sat across tables from men who had known her for years, men who trusted her with the comfortable familiarity of long acquaintance, and she recorded them. She had conversations about loan sharking and extortion and the mechanics of Colombo family operations while the wire captured everything.

She did not seem nervous. She could not seem nervous. A nervous woman in those rooms would have been noticed immediately, and the consequences would have been immediate. Teresa Carpenter, who wrote the biography Mob Girl based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Arline, described what the undercover work felt like from the inside.

There was a tension that would build before a surveillance, culminating in a tremendous climax of relief and self-esteem, made all the sweeter by the camaraderie she enjoyed with the agents afterward. For Brickman, her 10 years of undercover work provided the same high as drugs, alcohol, or sex.

She was not doing it only because she had to. She was doing it because she was extraordinarily good at it. Because the skills she had spent 25 years developing in the mob world, reading people, controlling conversations, knowing what to say and what to leave unsaid, turned out to be exactly the skills that made a great undercover informant.

The mob had trained her for this without knowing it. She targeted Anthony Scarpa “The Scappi” specifically. She recorded him discussing loan sharking operations. She recorded conversations about the mechanics of Colombo family extortion. She produced recordings that FBI agents later described as among the clearest and most incriminating audio evidence gathered against the Colombo organization.

For approximately a decade, she operated this way. Officially designated as an FBI informant from 1980, producing recordings, testifying before grand juries, building cases that were taking shape inside the federal system. She was also, during this entire period, still operating in the mob world, still moving through the same social circles, still maintaining the relationships that made her useful.

The cognitive dissonance of that position, being trusted by people you are simultaneously recording, requires a specific kind of detachment. Arline Brickman had been developing that detachment since she was 14 years old, watching Virginia Hill tell the Senate she did not know anything about anybody.

October 15th, 1985, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the trial of Carmine Persico and seven co-defendants, the entire leadership structure of the Colombo crime family began. Carmine Persico, 52 years old, boss of the Colombo family since “The Snake”, born in Brooklyn, recruited into the Profaci family in the early 1950s at age 17, arrested over 12 times in his first decade in the organization, and spent almost no time in prison.

By 1985, he had been running the Colombo family for over a decade, conducting much of his leadership from prison via telephone, a management method that was itself charged as a racketeering act in the indictment. Gennaro Langella, underboss, nickname “Jerry Lang”, Anthony Scarpa “The Scappi”, nickname “Scappi”, the man whose crew had threatened Leslie, the man Arline had spent years recording.

John DeRoss, Alphonse Persico, Carmine’s son, Andrew Russo, Dominick Cataldo. Eight defendants, the entire hierarchy of one of New York’s five families in a single courtroom. The trial lasted eight months. Arline Brickman testified. She described what she had witnessed and recorded.

She was cross-examined by defense attorneys who did everything possible to discredit her, her criminal history, her drug use, her relationships, her long career as a mob associate and criminal participant herself. The courtroom had actors in the audience. James Caan, who had played Sonny Corleone in The Godfather, was there as a friend of one of the defendants.

And when defense counsel asked her what she had been doing in 1981, she said, “I was a housewife.” The jury returned guilty verdicts against all eight defendants on the RICO conspiracy count on June 14th, 1986. Carmine Persico received 39 years. He was then separately tried and convicted in the Commission trial and sentenced to 100 additional years to run consecutively with his 39-year sentence.

The sentencing judge, John Keenan, looked at Persico and said, “You are one of the most intelligent people I have ever seen in my life.” Then he gave him a sentence that meant he would die in prison. Langella convicted, Scarpati convicted, the entire leadership table wiped out in a single prosecution.

Arline Brickman had done that with a wire in her brassiere and 25 years of access to a world that had never fully accepted her, but had never fully recognized how dangerous she was. After the trial, the FBI offered her the Witness Security Program. She refused. Her words were precise and deliberate.

“That’s the quickest way to get killed.” She was making a calculation. WITSEC meant a new identity in a new city with no network, no connections, no history. It meant starting over as a person who did not exist in a world where everything she knew how to do was useless.

And it meant trusting that the same government apparatus that had used her for a decade would successfully manage her protection indefinitely. She did not trust that. Given what came next, she was probably right not to. Because after she refused WITSEC, the FBI’s relationship with Arline Brickman essentially ended.

There was no ongoing protection, no relocation, no financial arrangement, no security detail, no regular check-in from the agents she had worked alongside for 10 years. She had produced some of the most valuable informant recordings in Colombo family history. She had helped put eight mob bosses away for the rest of their natural lives, and now she was on her own.

The men she had put away were in federal prison. The men connected to them were not. The information she had provided during her decade of cooperation was in the court record. Anyone connected to the Colombo family who wanted to know what she had done could read it in the trial transcripts. She had no protection.

She had no new identity. She had a reputation in every neighborhood that mattered as the woman who had wired up against the Colombo family. And she was told to figure out the rest herself. That is what the second half of the title means. The FBI abandoned her. Not dramatically, not with a single definitive act of betrayal, just by stepping back.

By treating a human being who had risked her life for over a decade as a resource that had been used and was no longer needed. The years after the trial were not easy ones. Her daughter, Leslie, the person whose safety had triggered the entire decade of undercover work, died in 1990. She was 32 years old.

She had battled drug addiction throughout her adult life. She died of AIDS. Arline had tried to reconcile with her in those final years. She had been present during the decline. She had tried to give her daughter in death the presence she had not always been able to give her in life. Leslie died 3 years after the men her mother had helped convict received their sentences.

In 1992, Teresa Carpenter’s biography, Mob Girl, was published by Simon and Schuster. It told Arline’s story in detail, the childhood, the mob associations, the rape, the wire, the trial, the aftermath. Arline cooperated extensively with Carpenter during the writing process and then had a complete falling out with her after publication, telling people that much of her family’s story had been fabricated and taken out of context, that her father had never been a racketeer, that he was a true gentleman highly respected by all who knew him. She and Carpenter never spoke again. The book made her briefly famous. She appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live. She was called the female Henry Hill. The Los Angeles Times described the book as an insider’s view of mob life that is by turns comic and chilling.

Madonna picked up the film option. The two women became friends. And then in 1994, Madonna asked Arline to do what Arline had apparently never fully stopped doing. She asked her to check out a man. Her New York party promoter boyfriend, Peter Shue, whom Madonna suspected of drug dealing, Arline investigated.

Shue was indeed a cocaine dealer. Arline reported him to the DEA. They set up a sting with her assistance in 1995. Shue was convicted of drug conspiracy in 1996. Arline Brickman, in her early 60s, was still informing. She appeared in an episode of the A&E series Mobsters in 2008. She was living in Bal Harbour, Florida by then.

A woman in her mid-70s in a beachfront community in South Florida with a story that most of her neighbors could not have imagined and would not have believed.