Nick Reding

by Methland: The Death;Life of an American Small Town

  Unlike Gustav Oelwein, though, who’d already contracted with the three separate arms of the Rock Island Railroad (the Burlington, the Illinois Central, and the Minnesota), Larry Murphy did not know for whom he was preparing the IP’s land, which is bookended on one side by the two baseball diamonds of the grandiosely named Oelwein Sports Complex, and on the other by the once-famed Sportsmen’s Lounge. The idea was that, to reference one of Murphy’s favorite movies, Field of Dreams, if Oelwein cleared the land, somebody would come. The fact was that Oelwein had nothing to lose. And nowhere was this sentiment more clear than in the decrepit presence of the Sportsmen’s, whose mixed history underscores both the hope and the danger of a down-and-out place literally dying to grow bigger and stronger. It’s said around town that the Mob fronted the Pirillo brothers the money to open the Sportsmen’s, thereby adding to an already long and storied connection between the Cosa Nostra and the town that, in the 1950s, became known as Little Chicago.

  Mafia history in Oelwein is taken today as a foregone conclusion. It’s a piece of the town’s cultural tapestry that’s at once as obvious as the cornfields and the railroad tracks and as illusory as the fading memories of the rail workers who once rubbed elbows with such American luminaries as Bugsy Malone and Jimmy Hoffa. Whether Little Chicago was really ever a cooling-out place for mobsters who needed a few days away from the heat in the Windy City is arguable, though the stories seem too well known, too oft-repeated, and too finely detailed to be false. These include how, for instance, the homes of three particular Italian families were not only immediately rebuilt but were rebuilt in grander style shortly after the tornado of 1968 nearly wiped Oelwein from the map. According to Clay and Nathan, those families—the Leos, the Pirillos, and the Vanattas—owned the bars and the clubs on Main Street beneath which the gaming dens were located, replete with revolving doors and hidden rooms dating back to Prohibition. The Sportsmen’s Lounge was founded by Dominic and Pete Pirillo shortly after they returned from World War II; they’d served only after an Oelwein judge gave them a choice between the army and jail. The Sportsmen’s was famed as much for the Pirillos’ twenty-four-hour slow-cooked prime rib as for the poker game that reportedly went on for five decades in the back room, which regularly had an audience of what were politely referred to as “dancing girls.” Mafiosi, people swear around Oelwein, would circulate between the Pirillos’ bar, the Leos’ Highway 150 South Club, and the Vanattas’ Pink Pussycat, all the while unafraid that any of Oelwein’s three cops (one of whom was part-time) would give them up to federal agents sent from Chicago.

  The only undeniable truth in all the stories is that the more sinister side of the “good old days” has either been forgotten completely or has come to be shrouded in the golden glow of longing. Today, the Sportsmen’s Lounge is little more than a hulking afterthought. In place of the prime rib—which Larry Murphy remembers as being so tender you could cut it with a fork—there is something called a Blooming Onion, which involves a Vidalia that’s been crosscut, battered, and deep-fried. And that’s only when the Sportsmen’s is open, which doesn’t seem to be that often. The meaning of the place is palpable, if not quite tangible, and is less about that particular structure than the era in Oelwein’s history it evokes. Clay Hallberg laments the loss of the raucous Saturday nights of yore at the Pink Pussycat strip club, after which he claims Mrs. Vanatta would make her girls sit in the front pew down the street at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Nathan Lein wishes that there was a strip club somewhere—anywhere—closer than Waterloo. Seventy-five-year-old Herman “Gus” Gaddow, a former rail-man turned farrier, thinks back fondly on the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, says Gus, people had good manners, and three cops were enough to keep crime non existent. The implication is that no one stepped out of line for fear of having to answer to the boys from Chicago. It’s in this way that the melding of Oelwein’s history and present circumstance provides a case study of the complexity of trying to regain a throne that was perhaps epically tarnished in its heyday.

  And so it seemed only fitting that the key to Murphy’s economic stimulus plan was the Industrial Park, kitty-corner from the Sportsmen’s, where in March 2006 a gridded road system already cut the acreage into blocks. Among the weeds sprouting up now that the farmer who once leased those 250 acres was no longer spraying herbicide, a sign read “Oelwein Industrial Park—Come Grow with Us!” Murphy said the city had been courting a call center to lease the space, but it had two competitors: a similar-sized town in Nebraska and a town near Mumbai, India. If the call center prospect fell through, there were bound to be other options, said Murphy. It just wasn’t entirely clear what they might be, or when they’d make themselves available. Meanwhile, things in Oelwein were growing more desperate every month. On March 17, 2006, Tyson had closed the doors of what had, a long time ago, been the old Iowa Ham plant, costing the town another hundred jobs. Upon getting the news, Murphy chose to look at things with his characteristic optimism. Rock bottom, he observed, provides a firm foundation. From there, Oelwein could do nothing but push itself up.

  Larry Murphy is fifty-five years old. A compactly built five feet eight, he has the sun-bleached blond hair of a road worker; dry, ruddy cheeks; and an open, friendly face dominated by a wide nose and alert, mischievous blue eyes. He keeps his hair short and wears aviator-style Ray-Ban sunglasses. Murphy put himself through school—first at tiny Loras College, in Dubuque, Iowa, and then at Drake University, from which he graduated in 1975 with a degree in journalism—by working the graveyard shift on the kill-floor of a slaughterhouse in Davenport, Iowa. Before the night’s work began, he says, he’d head across the street to the bar with the axmen and the sledge-heads who’d worked at the plant for decades. They drank boilermakers—shots of whiskey dropped into pints of beer—to help deal with a job that was by turns brutally boring and just plain brutal.

  Murphy is a lifelong Democrat who makes his political home on a tightrope stretched between a staunch support of unions and a solid rejection of abortion. He works at home, in the den of his house, in order to save Oelwein the money it would cost for him to have a proper office. Political activism predicated on liberal fiscal beliefs seems less a calling for Murphy and more a part of his genetic coding. He was in his twenty-fourth straight year of elective office in Iowa, including stints as county supervisor, state senator, and now, mayor. One of his seven surviving siblings, Pat, had just become Speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives after seventeen years in office. Murphy’s father worked at the telephone company in Dubuque for thirty years and was a lifelong member of the Communications Workers of America. Murphy’s sister Margaret left a convent in order to organize migrant laborers in California and Arizona on behalf of César Chavez. His brother David is a former welder turned nurse, and his brother Bob is a negotiator for the United Food and Commercial Workers. Murphy himself organized his first labor union, at a grocery store in Dubuque, in 1959, when he was fourteen years old.

  Murphy said he had little trouble understanding why people with difficult, low-income jobs would do methamphetamine, and why, once they’d lost those jobs or had their wages slashed, they’d turn to making the drug themselves. Murphy knew well the utility of a little pick-me-up before beginning the graveyard shift at a slaughterhouse, even back in the day when you could make a decent wage, get health insurance, buy a car, and put yourself through college doing that kind of work. It angered Murphy that trends in the industries that had once buoyed towns like Oelwein now contributed to the numbers of people digging in the trash behind the Conocostation. To scenes like this, Murphy still reacted with disbelief. Every time he saw a destitute person in his town, it got his dander up. A proud, action-oriented Midwesterner, Murphy just couldn’t square what he saw now with the little town he’d moved to in 1977. The rundown homes and the trash piling up on the lawns broke his heart. What bothered him most were the kids who, abandoned by their parents and set adrift in the foster care system, flunked out of Oelwein High. At that point
, those same kids were summarily condemned to the Alternative School, which, for an astonishingly bleak 60 percent of the students, was nothing more than a stepping-stone to jail. It killed Murphy, he said, that there was no money to help the kids of addicts or their parents, beyond visits by underpaid and overworked DHS in-home caseworkers. That, or the Northeast Iowa Behavioral Health Clinic, which had but one addiction specialist to minister to the needs of a town of over six thousand people.

  If Oelwein could just kick-start itself, said Murphy—if it could just get some decent business into the IP—there’d be time to consider more sides of the equation. Maybe Murphy, given his extensive connections in state government, could create some momentum for Nathan Lein’s idea that meth addicts serve five-year probationary periods, during which they have to hold jobs and attend mandatory meetings with a counselor. Maybe, once there was more revenue in town, they could bring in an actual treatment facility, as Clay Hall-berg had begged him to do. Some real treatment alternatives might help Oelwein nip drug abuse in the bud, rather than simply treating its symptoms—even as those symptoms gained ineluctable momentum.

  For now, though, that was all a pipe dream. There was no excess revenue for anything, never mind treatment. Murphy’s task was to raise the town from the ashes. He had to build a foundation of decent economic growth, and he had to do it ASAP. Businesses like the call center could afford to be choosy—every hard-luck town in the United States was courting them. In fact, Murphy believed that most companies were looking for a certain modicum of poverty as a fail-safe against union organizing. If people were desperate, they’d concede this essential ground to the company. Murphy understood the game. As he once put it to me in an e-mail, he was “enough of a student of economic trends in the last two decades to understand [he had to] play on the edges for wage and benefit rates.” The trick was to look like something in between a union town and a town that was downright criminally dangerous. Oelwein had to appear complacently impoverished but nonetheless like a nice place to raise a family.

  That meant that social order needed to take precedence, even if it involved taking a few un-civil liberties, and Murphy’s sympathy regarding meth addicts was trumped by a certain mercilessness. No business was going to invest in a town with a bunch of tweakers riding around cooking dope on their bicycles, blowing up their own homes, and shaking inside their overcoats as they picked through the Dumpster behind the gas station. The trick, if Murphy could succeed in getting a handle on Oelwein’s meth problem, would be to lure businesses that wouldn’t automatically reinvigorate the meth industry by offering substandard jobs. Oelwein needed work, but it didn’t need the kind of work that had inundated Greenville, Illinois: half-time jobs with no benefits at Wal-Mart or Super 8, which injected little revenue into the local economy. Oelwein didn’t need any more meatpacking plants, either, which offered high worker-injury rates and minimal compensation. Bad jobs, Murphy knew, had gotten Oelwein in trouble in the first place. Being treated poorly by employers, he said, had sucked the hope out of people’s lives. It made meth seem like the only alternative. Nowadays, bad jobs came with the added burden of immigrant workers who couldn’t afford their hospital bills and whose children had to be taught English by the already overextended schools. And yet towns across the nation were clamoring for what ever jobs they could get. It was an almost impossible situation in which Murphy found himself. Compared with this, his past battles as a liberal pro-lifer had been a cakewalk.

  During 2004 and 2005, Murphy had done everything possible to run the small-lab meth business out of town as a means of preparing Oelwein to rebuild. This was not just to compete with the towns in India or Nebraska that might lure the likes of the call center. It was to compete with Oelwein’s more immediate neighbors. Nathan had told me, along with several other people, that DHS workers in nearby Buchanan County—home of pretty, prosperous little Independence—had for years been recommending that their worst cases move to Fayette County, and particularly to Oelwein, where taxes were low and the rental market was burgeoning. A kind of economic cannibalism had set in following the farm crisis, the ravages of population loss, and the onset of the meth epidemic. Towns, unsure of their own futures, hedged their bets, often to the detriment of their neighbors. According to a local real estate broker, In dependence had effectively made Oelwein its ghetto. “Low rent,” the broker went on, was synonymous with “meth lab.” It’s in this way that ridding Oelwein of its small labs became a kind of shoving match between two city-states, with the de facto goal of running the people from Buchanan County out of Fayette.

  To this end, Murphy had given wide authority to police chief Jeremy Logan. Logan in turn had instilled a culture of aggressiveness in his men. He’d built a new canine unit around a twelve-thousand-dollar drug-sniffing German shepherd. And he’d put himself in charge of enforcing new ordinances, passed by the city council, ordering the cleanup or destruction of run-down properties—just the kind of grimy, falling-apart rentals, said the real estate agent, that the castoffs from Buchanan County favored.

  Every morning, Jeremy Logan leaves his house and drives five blocks to work in a blue Ford Expedition emblazoned with the words Oelwein Police in the town’s green and yellow colors. Logan is of middle height and weight. His short brown hair is in a crew cut, which, along with the sharp features of his face and the acne scars along his cheeks and jawbones, gives him a decidedly military air. It takes only minutes, though, for Logan to reveal a deeply ingrained streak of friendly sarcasm and a sharp appreciation for the irony that surrounds him. According to Clay Hallberg, for decades, if not since the police department’s founding, the men saddled with protecting the citizens of Oelwein have been a violent bunch, and disdainful of the rights of the citizens in this notoriously tough railroad town. (When asked to confirm this, Nathan Lein smiled and said, “I wouldn’t want to be arrested, put it that way.”) Of the ten-man force, Logan is the only one with a college degree. Many of his officers are built more like offensive linemen; almost all of them shave their heads. Knowing this and taking into account once again Logan’s physical characteristics—the army crew; the soft middle signaling a distaste for the gym—is to understand that Logan is a reflection of his job, which exists in the delicate middle ground between the brute strength of the department and the slick, erudite bonhomie of Larry Murphy. Sarcasm, says Logan, is more than a coping mechanism. It’s like a second language.

  Being the chief of police is perhaps the only job in town more visible than being mayor. Murphy, when he’s not running Oelwein, has a political consulting business that sends him regularly to Des Moines, a three-hour drive south. Murphy’s kids are grown, and he works from home, meaning that he can choose to hole up for a couple of days should things get tough—as they did when he lobbied to make riding a bike on Main Street illegal. Logan cannot. He is constantly on display, whether picking up his three young children from school or heading to the scene of an accident in his truck. When he does things that people don’t like—agreeing to arrest students at Oelwein High, for instance—it’s not just he who hears about it. It’s his wife, too, who has to smile and nod while she waits for her latte at the Morning Perk. Still, says Logan, this is a walk in the park compared with the year before Murphy made him chief of police. That year nearly drove Logan out of the town where he’d lived his whole life.

  Details vary, but the consensus around town is that the former police chief, under whom Logan had achieved the rank of sergeant, ran a loose ship. All Logan will say on the record is that there was a certain “laxness around the department,” and that he thought it appropriate to one day approach the chief and tell him how unhappy he was with the situation. The chief, according to Logan, thanked him for his input and said he’d think about what to do. Two days later, according to Logan, his wife called him at work to say he was being accused of peeping in the bedroom of a local teenage girl. Further, said Logan’s wife, the rumor around town was that the chief was suspending Logan indefinitely withou
t pay. Criminal charges were expected shortly, followed by the high likelihood of a civil suit. This was the first Logan, who was on duty when his wife called, had heard of the charges.

  According to the story that Logan tells, the charges filed against him accused Logan of routinely setting up surveillance near the girl’s house, only to use binoculars to ogle her in her bedroom. Several times, it was alleged, he sneaked up to the girl’s window at night as she undressed and masturbated in the bushes. Logan denies the charges vehemently, and maintains that they were payback for questioning the former chief’s authority. It wasn’t long before Logan’s home life was a shambles. His wife threatened to leave him. Unable to find another job, Logan was going broke. The legal bills alone were ruining him, he says. So he violated the unwritten code that is often referred to as the Blue Wall, by which police officers refuse to publicly discuss departmental conflict. Logan told Larry Murphy everything he knew about the department and its officers, and how he was being set up. Thus began the first few months of Larry Murphy’s first term as mayor, in 2002. By the end of that year, Logan—so recently fearful of jail time—had been made chief of police.