Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  Peaches started to get out, but Lonzo said, “Hold up.”

  One of the cruisers double-parked down the block, on the corner of North Clarendon. Peaches looked over his shoulder, saw the other cruiser parked on the corner of Hazel, boxing the block in.

  “You always roll with cops?” Peaches asked.

  “Only on Family business,” he said. “Hard to get used to it at first, but fuck it. It is what it is.” Lonzo pointed at the house in front of them. “Go on in. Ronnie’s guys are a little much, but he’s cool. Like talking to a congressman. Friendly but about that business.”

  “You talk to a lot of congressmen?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Lonzo said. Peaches retrieved his briefcase from the backseat. It was filled with cash. The cost of doing business with Ronnie Cupertine was you had to pay for his time. Lonzo had already looked inside it, felt around, made sure Peaches wasn’t trying to smuggle in a hand grenade. Though he did have a little something extra for Ronnie Cupertine under all the cash. “Last thing,” Lonzo said. “You come out and I’m gone for some reason? That’s bad news. Those cops? They’re here to protect the boss. Not you.”

  “I get it,” Peaches said, knowing it wouldn’t always be like that.

  After he frisked him, a beefy guy calling himself Donte, wearing a Kevlar vest under his suit, guided Peaches downstairs into a finished basement, which connected to another finished basement through a long, narrow hallway. Okay, Peaches thought. I’m next door. But then they went through two more corridors, these ones crooked, Peaches’s sense of direction getting fucked up after about two minutes of winding around. Peaches thought he was across the street now, or maybe right back where he started. They ended up in another corridor that fed into yet another basement, and this one looked like a fairly decent rumpus room from the 1970s: shag carpet, wood paneling, a leather recliner, L-shaped sofa, dartboard, wet bar. Ronnie Cupertine shooting pool by himself.

  “You can leave us alone,” Ronnie said to Donte, though Peaches didn’t think they were alone, since he saw that there were cameras mounted on all four walls. This guy was more paranoid than Nixon. “You play?” Ronnie asked once his guy left.

  “No,” Peaches said.

  “No one does anymore,” he said. He lined up his shot—the six in the corner—and hit it, missed wide to the left, though he did manage to sink his cue ball. “Shit.” Ronnie stood up straight, cracked his neck. “Problem with no one wanting to play with me is it’s easier for me to cheat.” He walked to the other side of the table, dug out his cue ball, and rolled the six into a pocket, too. He set his stick across the table. “So, who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m here representing the Native Mob,” Peaches said, which Ronnie knew. Peaches figured he had to peacock a bit, put on his show, be about that business after he figured out a few things. Ronnie wasn’t the boss of bosses, but he ran Chicago, and for that alone, Peaches had admiration for him. He’d been at the tip of the spear since 1972, though one Cupertine or another ran the game since forever. Peaches had been hearing about Ronnie Cupertine his entire life. Plus the commercials for this car lots ran on every TV and radio.

  “I always wanted to ask,” Ronnie said, “do you call yourselves the Native Mob? Or someone else call you that?”

  “We chose it,” Peaches said, though he didn’t actually know if that was true.

  “The Family,” Ronnie said. “The Outfit. Not a lot of nuance there, but enough to hide behind on a tape. Anyone can be a family or working for an outfit. It’s just funny to me, how you guys start calling yourself the Mob, spray-painting it on billboards, screaming it before you shoot somebody. Seems a tad obvious, no?”

  “No more obvious than a man in a suit wearing Kevlar,” Peaches said.

  “Maybe so,” Ronnie said. He walked over to the bar, poured himself a scotch. “You drink?”

  “Not when I’m working,” Peaches said. He didn’t ever drink. He liked to take some pills. An Oxy every now and then. Made shit smoothed out. A little weed. Coke to fit in, if need be.

  “Who’s that guy keeps getting arrested?” Ronnie said. “In Michigan? Indian with an Irish name? Collins?”

  The Native Mob wasn’t run like the Family, with one guy at the top. Instead, it had a council, decisions made democratically, things like drug profits getting split up evenly. When casinos and bingo rooms were involved, however, it got more complex; no one wanted to share anything. Richard Collins was part of the tribe opening casinos in Michigan, from Acme to Williamsburg. Doing it right. Spas and condos. High end. Problem was that he was also moving weight out of Canada. Landed a private plane filled with cocaine on reservation land. Now Michigan was dead, Native Mob telling everyone to stick to their places, don’t come up there, let shit cool down. Peaches had other plans.

  “He’s not involved in this,” Peaches said.

  “You guys need better lawyers,” Ronnie said. “Been getting fucked by the government for a long time now.”

  “I’ll mention that to my boss.”

  “Your boss know you’re here?”

  “Your boss know I’m here?” Peaches said. He pointed at the cameras. “Or is that the feds on the other side?”

  “That’s funny,” Ronnie said. Not that he laughed. “You come here to make jokes?”

  “I wasn’t making a joke,” Peaches said. “I just know you’ve been lucky with the government and so I wondered why. Then I saw those cameras and thought maybe I was in an interrogation room.”

  “You think I answer to anybody?” Ronnie swirled the ice around in his drink, took a drink. Sniffed. “You wearing perfume?”

  “I think you’re worried that you’ll have to,” Peaches said, ignoring the second question, “or else you wouldn’t put cameras in your own home.”

  “I don’t live here,” Ronnie said. “But your auntie? In Green Bay? I say the word, she’s living underneath floorboards here by the end of the day. Your cousin right next to her. But personally? I’m not worried about anything.” He took another sip. “You done measuring your dick in front of me, son?”

  All right.

  Everybody knows everybody.

  That was fast.

  “I’m not trying to insult you, Mr. Cupertine,” Peaches said. “You’re getting the wrong impression.” He walked over to the wet bar, looked up at the camera mounted above it. State of the art for about 1985. These fucking people. All their operations were antiquated. “If you’ve got someone on the other side of this camera? You answer to them. That’s just a fact, Mr. Cupertine. I’m just pointing out a logistical concern you should have. Problem happens? You’re down here, they’re up there. You’re dead already, yeah? What’s the big deal if they witness the crime but can’t stop it?”

  “Who’s to say you’d make it out alive?”

  “Nobody,” Peaches said. “I wouldn’t expect to. But also? I don’t give a fuck what you do to my auntie. I don’t give a fuck what you do to my cousin, either. Kill them both right now. You and me, we still have business.” He went over to the sofa, lifted up one of the cushions. There was a pull-out bed inside. Man. If it was up to Peaches, he’d fill this basement with cement, all the way to the roof. Science left these people behind. “I see things differently, Mr. Cupertine, and that can work to your advantage.”

  “Why don’t you open that briefcase,” Ronnie said.

  Peaches came back to the pool table, popped open the case, set it on the green felt. He had fifty thousand in used twenties, so it was going to take a minute to unpack. “Case in point, Mr. Cupertine? I know you’re not gonna go kill my auntie, because that’s not how the Family operates. You don’t kill families. So before you stand here and threaten me with it, you gotta do it sometimes to make it plausible. Not farm that shit out, either. Actually send a couple fucking Italians out there to kill an old lady.” He started to put the cash down, one stack at a time, fifty in
total. “This place you got here? Don’t get me wrong. It’s peaceful. But this carpet contains the DNA of every person who has stepped foot in here. Same with that sofa and that recliner. The grout in your wood paneling is rubber, which means any bit of hair or skin floating around in the dust is stuck in it. Blood, spit, snot, same deal. You could set fire to this place, cops could probably still dig hair and fiber out of the walls.” He ran a hand across the top of the pool table. “This felt is a problem, too. You may as well cover it with mugshots.” He put the last of the cash down and then took out two padded mailers that were on the bottom of the case.

  Ronnie took a sip from his drink. “Aren’t you a smart motherfucker,” he said after a while.

  “I’m trying to be,” Peaches said.

  “What is it you’re interested in?”

  “You need partners,” Peaches said. “Your best guys are in prison, or they’re missing, or they’re dead. Gangster 2-6, they’re going to run out the door soon as the Cartels make them a decent offer, particularly now that they know you dumped one of theirs in a garbage pit trying to deke out the feds. I respect the game, but those Mexicans? They don’t give a fuck about you. They just want your product. The Cartels can get them all the weed and coke they want and they don’t need to go through you.”

  “They don’t have access to heroin,” Ronnie said. “Not like I do.”

  “Not yet,” Peaches said. “You get that good stuff, I agree. Afghanistan and shit. It’s nice. But people, they don’t need the good stuff. They just want the stuff. So they’ll take the dirt the Mexicans are making and the Cartels will sell double the amount while you’re cranking out that artisanal brand. You’re gonna price yourself out in two, three years, by my estimation.”

  “I don’t worry about the Cartels,” Ronnie said.

  “You should,” Peaches said, “because they don’t worry about you.”

  Ronnie put down his drink. “No?”

  “You got submarines and missile launchers? Because they do.”

  Ronnie thought for a moment. “Go on,” he said. There was the congressman.

  “Mexican gangs keep coming in and burning our crops, snitching us out, it’s getting tiresome, but I don’t have the capital to fight them. Or the relationships. So, before they turn on you, I was hoping you might assist us in getting ourselves a foothold.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  “I help you modernize a bit, keep you out of the newspapers, clean up some dirty dishes you still got sitting on the counter,” Peaches said. “And we’re opening a casino up north. We could use your expertise on a few things.”

  “The Family is out of the casino business.”

  “Not by choice, right? Everything being equal, you’d rather still own Las Vegas, right?”

  “No,” he said, after a while. He picked his drink back up, tossed it back. “I wouldn’t be happy paying workmen’s comp insurance for a thousand employees. I don’t need that.”

  “You wouldn’t be doing that with us,” Peaches said. “And Howard Hughes won’t be showing up to buy you out. We’re looking at a capital infusion and then you can name your involvement. Because Mr. Cupertine, I’m looking around? And I don’t see your next foray.”

  “I don’t need a next one,” he said.

  “And yet,” Peaches said, “you can’t stop your soldiers from knocking over liquor stores.”

  Ronnie smiled then. “I’m almost entirely legal now.”

  “Which only means you’re still a crook,” Peaches said. “War is coming. Isn’t gonna be guys in suits shooting each other on the streets. It’s gonna be some sixteen-year-old in a lowered Honda Civic shooting an AK out his window at you and your kids while you’re walking into Wrigley. You want to survive? You gotta move rural. That’s the next wave. That’s where the money’s going. And you want to beat the Cartels, you get out of that junk bullshit and get into pills. Oxy. Klonopin. Ambien. No one gets shot picking up a prescription from CVS. And tribes, we’ve got our clinics, our own doctors, our old folks’ homes, our own health insurance. There’s a lot of us, yeah? And we’ve got our own land and our own cops. What we don’t have is someone like you. The boss of bosses.”

  Ronnie said, “Why haven’t I met you before?”

  “I don’t get invited to social functions.”

  “I bet,” Ronnie said. “Where you from?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I want it on tape,” Ronnie said. Wasn’t he a smart motherfucker.

  “Wisconsin,” Peaches said. “Been down here a few years. Did a couple years in West Texas, living with some cousins. Did a spot in Joliet.”

  “How long?”

  “A year.”

  “On what?”

  “Assault with a deadly weapon.” He’d put a guy’s head through a television.

  “A year is fast.”

  “I know how to behave,” Peaches said. “Plus, it happened on reservation land.”

  Ronnie flipped through a stack of twenties. “How you know all this about fibers and DNA? You watch CSI or something?”

  “No,” Peaches said, “I read books. Take criminology classes at a couple community colleges. This stuff, it’s all out in the open. You just gotta know where to look.”

  “I pay people for that,” Ronnie said.

  “Not enough,” Peaches said. “FBI could be on those cameras in five minutes. Take a sixteen-year-old probably half that time.”

  “No one knows I’m down here,” Ronnie said. Peaches handed Ronnie one of the mailers. He opened it up, looked inside. It was filled with papers. “What’s this?”

  “Every piece of property you own and every piece of property you’ve hidden in the last three decades. Including that one that burned down the other day.”

  “The fuck you talking about?”

  “In Florida.”

  “Donte,” Ronnie said, though he kept his eyes on Peaches.

  The door opened up and there was that big motherfucker with the Kevlar, gun in his hand, and then behind him two other guys now. So here it was.

  “Tell the boys upstairs to give me three minutes off camera,” Ronnie said.

  “Okay,” Donte said. He looked at Peaches, then back at Ronnie. “You all right alone?”

  Ronnie stared at Peaches for a few seconds. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m fine.” When Donte left, Ronnie put a finger up. “Don’t speak,” he said. He looked up at the cameras. When the red light went off on all of them, he said, “All right. You’ve got three minutes. I don’t like what I hear, you’re leaving in a bag.”

  “I had a problem solved for you,” Peaches said. “An impediment to us having any kind of fruitful association.”

  “For me? An entire fucking block of residential properties burned down,” Ronnie said. Peaches hadn’t seen that. Mike really had a sheet now.

  “That wasn’t the intention.”

  “I got cops picking bones out of the ashes down there. It’s gonna cost me all the insurance money just to keep people quiet. So tell me, what fucking problem did you solve?”

  “A transportation problem,” Peaches said. He tore open the second mailer, dumped out Frank Fishmann’s eyes, ears, tongue, and the skin that once covered his face. “Let’s have a conversation about Sal Cupertine.”

  1

  August 2001

  That Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t Jewish had ceased, over time, to be a problem. He hardly thought of it anymore. Not when he was at the Bagel Café grabbing a nosh with Phyllis Rosencrantz to go over the Teen Fashion Show for the Homeless, not when he was shaking Abe Seigel down for a donation to the Tikvah scholarship over a bucket of balls at the TPC driving range, nor even when he was doing Shabbat services on a Saturday morning at Temple Beth Israel.

  It didn’t cross his mind when he was burying some motherfucker shipped in from L
os Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle, like the low-level Chinese Triad gangsters they’d been getting lately. The last one—David thought he was maybe nineteen—went into eternity under the gravestone of Howard Katz, loving husband of Jill. Or at least some of him went into eternity. Katz didn’t have much of a face left and David had his long bones extracted for transplant, then disposed of his organs, so basically he performed a service over metacarpals and phalanges in a bag of skin. Same day, David also put Morris Brinkman down, and that was fine, too. Eighty-seven years old, always crinkling butterscotch wrappers during minyan, the kind of man who still called black guys schvartzes? His time was up. Long up.

  Hell, not even brises really got to David. That was all the mohel’s show, anyway, and a RICO-level scam in its own right. Schlomo Meir did the cuttings at every synagogue in town, a fucking monopoly on the foreskin business, but David didn’t see any way to move in on that. There were training courses and accreditations involved, most Reform mohels these days were nurses or EMTs, no one really wanting some shaky-hand from the Old Country wielding the knife on their son. Since David was about the only person in the room who wasn’t queasy around a blade and a little blood, it was actually a fairly pleasant affair. He could zone out for a few minutes, not worry about a tactical team kicking down the door.

  No, the only time the Jewish thing crept up on David was on a day like today, the last Sunday of August, presiding over the quickie wedding of Michael Solomon to Naomi Rosen. They were too young, in David’s opinion, Naomi only twenty-two, Michael a few months younger, both just out of UNLV with degrees in golf resort management, which was a thing, apparently. The rub was that Naomi was three months pregnant and that wasn’t going to fly, at least not with her father. Jordan Rosen came to David a few weeks earlier to get a spiritual opinion on the matter, wanting to know where abortion fell among the irredeemable sins.