We study invertibility of matrices of the form $D+R$ where $D$ is an arbitrary symmetric deterministic matrix, and $R$ is a symmetric random matrix whose independent entries have continuous distributions with bounded densities. We show that $|(D+R)^{-1}| = O(n^2)$ with high probability. The bound is completely independent of $D$. No moment assumptions are placed on $R$; in particular the entries of $R$ can be arbitrarily heavy-tailed.

Let $\mathbb{H}$ be the general, reduced Heisenberg group. Our main result establishes the inverse-closedness of a class of integral operators acting on $L^{p}(\mathbb{H})$, given by the off-diagonal decay of the kernel. As a consequence of this result, we show that if $\alpha_{1}I+S_{f}$, where $S_{f}$ is the operator given by convolution with $f$, $f\in L^{1}_{v}(\mathbb{H})$, is invertible in $\B(L^{p}(\mathbb{H}))$, then (\alpha_{1}I+S_{f})^{-1}=\alpha_{2}I+S_{g}$, and $g\in L^{1}_{v}(\mathbb{H})$. We prove analogous results for twisted convolution operators and apply the latter results to a class of Weyl pseudodifferential operators. We briefly discuss relevance to mobile communications.