The Real-Life Marty Supreme Taught Me How to Hustle (Amy Chozick, 12/24/25, NY Times)
I met Mr. Reisman when I read the manuscript for his memoir, which I unsuccessfully championed. He cut a distinctive figure, walking around the Lower East Side in vintage Panama hats, tinted aviators and custom-made pastel pants. He always had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
I hesitate to call him a mentor. After all, Mr. Reisman was, by his own account, friends with members of Meyer Lansky’s Murder Incorporated gang, a self-declared Ping-Pong hustler who, paddle in hand, had, he told me, taken money off everyone from Montgomery Clift to the president of the Philippines.
I remain useless at table tennis and lose bets to my 7-year-old, but Mr. Reisman taught me that if I wanted to make it, I’d need to cultivate my own kind of con. He showed me how to reinvent. To self-mythologize. To stop apologizing and start throwing elbows at the Barneys Warehouse Sale. To order an off-menu roast duck bowl at Mee Noodle Shop.
It’s easy to feel as if you’re going to get eaten alive when you first step out into the world, especially in a place like New York City. It’s a fake-it-till-you-make-it kind of place, where it seems as if most of the people you meet were born on third base. Anyone who’s ever tried to weasel inside or work her way above her station knows that a certain amount of hustle — even con — is required. It’s why we love Jay Gatsby and Don Draper and have welcomed the woman known as Anna Delvey back to Fashion Week.
Mr. Reisman did this in the most florid way. Known as the Needle because of his slim physique, he was born in New York in 1930 and grew up on the Lower East Side. He told me he picked up table tennis in Bellevue Hospital after he had a nervous breakdown at age 9. And damn, if Mr. Reisman didn’t cultivate his talent and the Reisman myth to travel the world and get into rooms he was never meant to be in. […]
Mr. Reisman used to tell me about the characters who frequented his splendid Gothic establishment, Riverside Table Tennis, on 96th and Broadway: Freddie the Fence, Herbie the Nuclear Physicist, Betty the Monkey Lady, Tony the Arm, Dustin Hoffman, David Mamet and a group of violinists from the Metropolitan Opera. “No one knows why,” he said.