Wedded to crime

Alternately rough and tender, hard-boiled and hilarious, Wedded to Crime is a fascinating look into the final years of the traditional mob--and the heart of a woman who lived through them. Sandy Sadowsky was only nineteen when she met nightclub owner Bernie Barton, twenty years her senior and a lifetime member of the Meyer Lansky mob. A sharp dresser with a heart of gold and a pinky ring to match, Bernie wooed Sandy with dogged nonchalance, and soon this working-class girl from Brooklyn was residing off Park Avenue, dressing in furs and living The Life. In the course of her tenure as a mob wife, Sandy traveled to Rome to watch her husband launder money through the Vatican; assisted in opening a storefront ministry in Harlem, recruiting a charismatic teenage preacher and reaping the benefits of the collection plate; and dined at the Lansky home, where Meyer entertained in his bedroom slippers. "You do good, kid," Bernie told her. "The guys say you're a real standup broad."

Eight years later, Sandy suddenly found herself a widow with a month-old son. When one of Bernie's colleagues stepped forward to fill his shoes, she was relieved. But when kingpins from Maine to Miami showed up at the wedding, she realized her groom was even more connected than her beloved Bernie. Sandy Sadowsky's moving and engaging story offers a wife's view of life in the underworld, with all its fierce loyalties, farcical blunders, ephemeral pleasures, and ultimate brutality.