On a break from shooting Paul Auster’s Lulu on the Bridge in lower Manhattan two months ago, Harvey Keitel showed up at his Franklin Street production offices to discuss his situation. Keitel has several rooms on the sixth floor of a postmodern building directly across the street from Robert De Niro’s massive former coffee factory, now a movie studio with a glass roof and eight stories of offices, not to mention the trendy Tribeca Grill. Keitel’s assistants tend to joke about the disparity in scale, but Harvey, a friendly rival of De Niro’s (it’s been 24 years since Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets launched them both), wasn’t in the mood for trivia. “I don’t wanna talk about that crap,” he said definitively, lumbering into his reception area in custom sweats, a black leather jacket, and gym shoes without socks.

A Brighton Beach “poolroom guy” and product of Abraham Lincoln High and Alexander Hamilton Vocational in Bed-Stuy, Keitel has labored “like a monk,” according to his business partner Peggy Gormley, to rise above the streets. As he struggled to express himself, the agony was palpable: “My only interest here, Lombardi, is my daughter’s welfare. I’m not gonna bad-mouth Lorraine, and I’m not looking for publicity. We have a tragedy here-a man Olmos who passes himself off as a member of unicef, of various children’s groups, a guy who goes to the White House and who addressed the Democratic National Convention, who paid money to silence a child from expressing her pain for an act she says he committed. . . .” He turned red and subsided, then pumped up again: “He took his finger and stuck it in this girl’s vagina.”

Keitel seemed most interested in demolishing Olmos’s “excuses”: “He claims he paid the money not because he did anything but to ‘protect’ his son Bodie, who he says had relations with the girl. But who accused Bodie? There are no charges against him! Olmos is hiding. . . .

“Then he told Lorraine and my daughter that he passed a lie-detector test in January 1993, with New York polygrapher Victor Kaufman. But he doesn’t mention another test with Nat Laurendi where he didn’t make out so well. . . .” (Laurendi confirms that Olmos was in his office in January 1993, that “he didn’t come for a haircut,” and that he, Laurendi, “recommended” Kaufman but says Keitel was “furious” with him for refusing to reveal the results of his polygraph: “He kept asking me, ‘What’s more important, the law or my daughter?’ I told him-the law. I can’t talk unless I’m subpoenaed.”)

“Then there was the $150,000 Olmos paid Lorraine between November 1992 and January 1994, while she says she was ‘investigating’ R.G.’s claims, when she was broke,” said Keitel. “How fucking ‘objective’ could she be? And then the hurry-up marriage on January 28, 1994, just as the custody trial began, and after Family Court ruled that Olmos and his sons couldn’t be alone in a room with Stella! Was that a coincidence, too? Am I just being a wild man, an irrational fellow, as Mr. and Mrs. Olmos try to paint me?”

Keitel was up and pacing. His staff had gathered around him. He looked as haggard as the righteous detective, Rocco Klein, that he’d played in Clockers.

He brushed at his burr haircut. “Do you think the ruling about keeping Olmos out of the room is even enforceable? Is this Disneyland? Or what?”

Harvey met Lorraine at a Paris café in 1983. She was winding up her Wilhelmina modeling career then, literally a Bay Ridge fishmonger’s daughter who’d gotten lucky, but was “never glamorous, more the girl-next-door type,” as she herself has said. When the affair with Harvey started, she quickly divorced and moved into his Hudson Street loft (bringing Margaux with her). In Tribeca, Lorraine threw herself into acting classes and the downtown art scene dominated unofficially by Keitel’s old buddies Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro: “She had a lot of help,” says character actor Victor Argo, a close friend of Keitel’s. “In this business, everything’s connections, even if you’re Laurence Olivier. Did Harvey push her? He’s a very generous guy.”

In 1986, Harvey and Lorraine appeared together off Broadway in David Rabe’s Goose and Tom-Tom, and shortly after that she auditioned for Ridley Scott, who’d directed Harvey in 1977 in The Duellists; she landed her first American movie role in Someone to Watch Over Me, with Tom Berenger and Mimi Rogers. It was a culture-clash part, with Lorraine fighting off a bid by the Fifth Avenue-bred Rogers for her Queens husband’s services; it helped establish Bracco as an “incipient feminist” blue-collar screen presence, as Tyne Daley or, earlier, Shelly Winters had been, but she denies that Harvey “got the role” for her: “Harvey and Ridley had known each other, but I still had to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger to get in the door,” Bracco said in 1993.

That film led to Scorsese’s casting her as Henry Hill’s frantic Jewish wife in GoodFellas, with De Niro and Joe Pesci. It was Lorraine’s finest performance, and in 1990 she was nominated for an Oscar. After that, she was tapped by Richard Donner for the role of the wife in Radio Flyer, a film about child abuse (it screened just as she was going through the R.G. nightmare with Olmos), and handpicked by Sean Connery to play a feisty doctor working with him in the Amazon in a kind of post-tech African Queen.

The movie was called Medicine Man, and it undid the wonderful notices of GoodFellas. Bracco was screechy; she seemed preternaturally energized, bouncing around the set, demanding things; she complained that she’d accepted the role based on a script that had been abandoned, and so the “Bogart-Katharine Hepburn chemistry” that Connery was expecting never materialized. After six weeks in the Mexican jungle, where the film was shot, the production crew nicknamed it Who’ll Stop Lorraine?