Wedded to Crime

Sandowsky, raised in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, became the mistress of mobster Bernie Barton of the Meyer Lansky gang when she was a teenager, a man twice her age who suffered the disabling effects of childhood rheumatic fever. They married and had a son, born shortly before his father died. Despite her declared ambition to marry a second man who was not in the rackets, in 1969 Sandowsky wed her late husband's best friend, Chalky Lefkowitz, also in organized crime and determined to make her the typical mob wife: a passive and complaisant Hausfrau. In due course they divorced. The memoir, written with Gilmour, author of 15 books, is primarily about clothes, jewelry, meals at expensive restaurants, visits to trendy nightclubs and social contacts with mobsters. There's not much here to interest readers curious about the inner workings of organized crime. Ironically, Barton's son Jeffrey, we're told in an epilogue, graduated in 1989 from Manhattan's John Jay College of Criminal Justice and now works in law enforcement. (June)