Read an Excerpt
Mafia Wife
My Story of Love, Murder, and Madness
Chapter One
Growing Up is Hard to Do
My mother, Sophie Dostis, was a Sephardic Jew born in Greece. She came to America with her parents when she was two months old. My father, Louie Lustig, was a Russian Jew born in this country. Sophie, who changed her name to Sally, had four sisters and a brother; my dad had three brothers. Grandpa Dostis died before I was born, leaving his wife, Dinah, to raise their six children. Both families, Dostises and Lustigs, worked mostly in the garment and textiles industries around New York City.
For a while it looked as though I wouldn't see my third birthday. Polio hit me in 1949, when I was about two years old. They said it came from the drinking water where we lived on West 27th Street in Coney Island. People say that two-year-olds don't remember anything, but they're wrong. What I remember when I was still in the hospital in Brooklyn is Grandma Dostis yelling at my mother to make sure I stayed awake to keep from dying.
I don't recall falling on the floor when a nurse forgot to put up the side of the crib, or my mother raising hell and threatening to sue the hospital, but that's what the family always told me. According to them, when the doctors heard the lawsuit word they asked if there was some way around this and my mother says, Sure, you can pay for my daughter to go to that special rehab hospital they have upstate in West Haverstraw. This is where the rich people sent their kids during the polio epidemic we had in those years.
Years later my uncle Nat told me that he had to carry me into the hospital because Dad was too scared to hold me in case I died in his arms, he was crying so hard he could hardly walk himself.
I wore steel leg braces and the shoes that go with them, I remember that, but what I remember most is the terrible, empty loneliness I felt when my family went back home from Haverstraw after the weekend visits. Lying in that crib in a ward with all the other sick kids wailing and screaming, I felt as if I would never get out and would die without ever seeing my family again. I probably didn't even realize I was sick and maybe at this point my mother didn't yet figure out she didn't like me, because she came when she could, so I guess she hadn't written me off as a disappointment -- the heartache in her life, as I later found out she thought of me. All I know is I didn't want to be in that place, I wanted to be home with people around me I knew, and because I wasn't, maybe it made me feel I wasn't wanted.
What I know is this: People need to make children feel special, even if it's just in small ways, like a smile or a hug for doing something right instead of messing up. Children want to feel that grown-ups appreciate them and are proud of them. I didn't get this from my mother, and I didn't get it from my two brothers. We were too far apart in years. By the time I started kindergarten, my brother Harvey was seventeen and Arthur was fifteen, so it's not like the three of us had much in common except that we lived under the same roof with the same parents.
Louie Lustig, my father, was what we called a knockaround Jew. He did a lot of things before I was born, including being a pool hustler who nobody ever beat, but when I was a kid, he was a peddler or a traveling salesman in the garment business. He picked up the overage, which is like the extras left over, from factories in the city, and drove around the Catskill hotels and bungalow colonies, selling clothes from the back of his old Rambler wagon. In the summers he worked as a ticket taker at the Monticello racetrack upstate, and for a couple of years in the fifties he had a full-time job at a Brooklyn sweatshop on 86th Street that made camel-hair and cashmere topcoats.
Before he got into the garment business, Dad did a one-man dance act, soft shoe and tap, at a club in the Catskills where he sometimes worked as a volunteer emcee. He was also a carney man on Coney Island with a Guess Your Weight booth and a Pig Slide, which is where you throw a ball at the target and a live pig falls down a chute into a tank of water.
I tell people this and they say it's a terrible thing to do to pigs, but in those days before television it was okay, and to my way of thinking it's a whole lot kinder than something like the Jerry Springer Show and the rest of that cruel stuff you see on TV.
Dad loved all living things, he was famous for being gentle. He couldn't hurt anything. If a fly or any kind of bug got in the house he'd catch it in a jar or something and take it outside and let it go. One of my uncles told me that after Dad closed down his Pig Slide he went all over New York State until he found a farmer who took the pigs from him on the condition they wouldn't allow them to be butchered.
Uncle Sam Dostis, my mother's brother, was the rich one in our two families. He made a fortune in textiles. As a kid, my brother Arthur started working at Uncle Sam's factory on Canal Street in New York, and later on Arthur also became a multimillionaire, thanks to Sam Dostis ...
Mafia Wife
My Story of Love, Murder, and Madness. Copyright © by Lynda Milito. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.