Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  Everyone thought Las Vegas was the kind of place you could hide in, that you could fuck up all you wanted. But the truth, David had learned, was that Las Vegas was a small, mostly conservative town and more isolated than a Hawaiian island. Five miles out of the city limits, going in any direction, sat the wild desert, hundreds of miles and several hours from the next big city, which meant you saw the same people everywhere . . . provided you didn’t go to the Strip, which David never did, and neither did any other local, unless they were going to their jobs, but even then, you saw your neighbor, one blackjack table over, everyone in everyone’s business, and all of it now getting captured on camera, the video processed and stored on a hard drive somewhere, waiting for a subpoena. Casinos used to be a place you could fuck off in, not worry about being an asshole, and maybe that was still true, but now, all the while, you were also being mined for your data, David reading about how all these big gaming companies were tracking your every move: how much you spent, how long you stayed in one place, your betting patterns, your body language, did you smile when the cocktail girl walked by, even how long you sat in the toilet, since they had a camera on you walking in and a camera on you walking out.

  Being home wasn’t much different.

  If someone strange showed up in your Summerlin or Henderson or Green Valley neighborhood, didn’t go to your church or your temple, didn’t wave hello in the morning, never got Nevada plates on their car, let their pit bull shit on your lawn, watered their own lawn with a hose instead of sprinklers, never finished their backyard, then you could bet the Mormons on the street would make a fuss, put in a call to the HOA. If you kept fucking up, the HOA would eventually call the cops, the cops would bring in the sheriff, sheriff would bring in the marshals, next thing, there would be a standoff, shots fired, and a body being wheeled out of your community draped with a white sheet, and it turns out you’ve got a grow house on the block, not Cartel level, but enough to fill Centennial High School and Bishop Gorman High School with narcotic-quality weed.

  Thus, David recognized the need to be prepared. He wasn’t going to be caught slipping again, like when that agent showed up. The national news had already rolled into Las Vegas just to talk shit in light of the Panthers debacle, and eventually some enterprising reporter would realize Panthers was only two blocks from the Wild Horse, whose owner, they’d learn, was Bennie Savone, also a reputed wiseguy, who was arrested on some RICO shit that didn’t stick . . . was currently doing time on the beating of a Nebraska-based dentist . . . and then that reporter and a cameraman would be knocking on the door of the temple to get some background color for their story . . . and, well, that would not do.

  Even on a night like tonight, behind the walls of the Vineyards, whose security was tight—Bennie couldn’t live in a place where anyone could walk up to him on the golf course and kill him—David had his butterfly knife in his pocket. If the FBI showed up with an assault team tonight, he recognized he couldn’t kill them all. But if it was just one or two guys, well, he could knife one guy, take his gun, and kill the other guy. He’d done that before. Average room filled with average people, there weren’t many who’d stick around after seeing someone bleed out through the neck or get a knife in the ear—which was a bad way to kill a person, since it was hard to get a knife out of someone’s head—or hear someone screaming when they got their eyes slit in two, which wasn’t fatal, but it was some horror movie shit, the kind of thing David was prepared to do if he needed to get out of a crowded room, fast.

  He kept a Glock cut into the passenger seat of his Range Rover, easy enough to get to when he was driving, since he never rode with anyone, and not easily found in a cursory flashlight search if he got pulled over, not that Rabbi David Cohen ever got pulled over in Summerlin, but he didn’t keep it on his person out in public. Couldn’t very well be golfing with a city councilman and have his Glock fall out of his bag. Even if everyone in Nevada pretended to have a gun, that whole Wild West ethos a thing in Nevada, David was of the opinion that rabbis couldn’t be Wyatt Earping motherfuckers on the street. Anyway, David knew that most people had no real idea how to use a gun—even cops were scared of killing somebody—unless they were on a shooting range, fitted with noise-suppressing headgear, protective goggles, and ceramic vests. It wasn’t like TV, where everyone was a trained assassin waiting for the right moment to show their disregard for human life.

  But David was. That was a difference that mattered.

  “I saw that the weathergirl from Channel Thirteen made the show,” Bennie said now. “Jordan still sleeping with her?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “He doesn’t confess to me.”

  “Any other notables I gotta worry about?”

  “The guy from Channel Eight who believes in aliens was in the back, drinking White Russians.”

  “That Kenny Rogers–looking guy?”

  “Yeah,” David said.

  “Like there’s not enough bad shit in the real world? You gotta go searching for worse things in space? Makes no sense to me.”

  “It’s entertainment,” David said.

  “That’s what worries me.”

  David never worried about the local media surprising him, since they came out to the temple somewhat regularly for events—the Kugel Bake Off for Social Justice, the Jewish Book Festival, the annual Hanukkah Carnival and Menorah Lighting event—and besides, they never seemed to be sure whose side they were on when it came to organized crime, only that Mob business was good for everyone’s bottom line.

  One day, Harvey B. Curran, the Review-Journal’s Mob gossip columnist, would be insinuating that more trouble was about to come down on local wiseguys, that the feds were massed outside the gates of the Vineyards, had put recording devices into the neighborhood cats, were buying houses in the Scotch 80s, had moles in the gaming board, were running anthropologists around Lake Mead as the water receded, pulling out dead bodies, running DNA, capturing plates out front of Piero’s, strong-arming UPS drivers, bribing maids, everyone about a week away from a major indictment, the whole city about to be tossed up. Nothing anyone could confirm or deny.

  The next day, Curran would be going on about what assholes the corporate casino billionaires were, how life was better when the Mob ran the Strip, since at least you knew where you stood with those guys.

  The day after that, there’d be a half-page ad for happy hour at the Wild Horse, some nineteen-year-old blond jerking off a bottle of champagne. By Sunday, there’d be a color photo of Mayor Oscar Goodman in the same space, pimping at a fund-raiser for the Mob museum he wanted the city to build smack on the spot where Estes Kefauver held hearings on Cosa Nostra back in the day, David wondering if they’d be building museums for the Crips and Bloods and Mexican Mafia, too. Maybe toss one up for the Skinheads. Come with a prison tattoo, get a free tour. He thought maybe he’d write a letter to the editor, get on the record about how stupid this idea was, that the Jews didn’t support celebrating the Mob, any mob.

  But before he could put pen to paper, the Mercury, one of those shit-rag weekly papers, would do an investigative piece, send a girl into a strip club and have her report back on the dark shit she’d witnessed, the local Mob so fucking stupid that they didn’t even run background checks on their dancers. The Mercury would get photos of known felons counting stacks of cash in the break room, guns out, like they were waiting for someone to tell them to go to the fucking mattresses, and David would think: Build a museum and bury these dumb fucks in the foundation. Start fresh.

  It wasn’t, David understood, the right frame of mind to have in this situation.

  “You get a copy of the guest list?” Bennie asked.

  “I will,” David said.

  “Get the photos, too,” Bennie said, like this was David’s first gig.

  “I will,” David said. The temple had provided the wedding planner and the photographer, which made procuring these things
no problem. David was the middleman on everything these days, which meant paperwork and spreadsheets and calls on Saturday nights with questions about chevron vs. amphitheater seating arrangements for the ceremony and did he have a preference in terms of a wireless mic or a handheld? David was most comfortable not speaking at all, though you couldn’t be a rabbi and stay silent. He couldn’t avoid people taking his picture, but he could mitigate, when possible, how clear he looked. Lately he’d become one of those guys who could wear a hat. Initially he’d adopted the look so he wouldn’t have to worry about cameras catching his face, but now he sort of liked it, though you couldn’t exactly rock a fedora while officiating a wedding.

  “Let Rachel pick out the nice ones to give to Naomi,” Bennie said. “She’s got an eye for that sort of thing.” David didn’t particularly like spending time with Rachel Savone. Not that he disliked her, merely that she knew he wasn’t what he seemed, had figured out he’d had plastic surgery, had even confided in him that she was thinking of leaving her husband. But that hadn’t worked out. Not yet, anyway. “I don’t want Rosen getting any of this shit before we go over it, got it? He’ll have you on a fucking poster in his car wash if we’re not careful.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about Rosen,” David said. “Not for a little while, anyway. He’s not looking for trouble. Not if he’s inviting his mistress to his daughter’s wedding.”

  “Rosen is always about thirty minutes from going balls up.” He pointed at the wedding reception going on across the way. “I paid for more of that than he did. Two months I’ve been waiting for some word on this project we’ve got cooking up on Craig Road. Supposed to be getting funding from the Japs or something.” He shook his head. “Fucking money pit, is what it is. Best thing that could happen is if the city decided the ground was polluted and could only be zoned for a nuclear dump. Get a government contract, write our own ticket.” He paused, thinking. “You ever drive out that way?”

  “No.”

  “See what I’m saying? I should have just made the motherfucker pay me.”

  “He would have called the cops,” David said.

  “You’d think so,” Bennie said. “But they don’t. This town? People would rather be in business with me than risk embarrassment. Isn’t that something?”

  A helicopter swept up in the air from the Vineyards’ helipad a block away, behind the clubhouse, climbed a few hundred feet, then flew up and over the wedding party and spun back toward downtown. That was one thing the Mob didn’t have: air support.

  “Who’s that asshole?”

  “Probably the mayor,” David said. “He showed up to the reception.”

  “How’s he looking?”

  “Had on a nice tie,” David said.

  “How much you think Spilotro and Scarfo paid him over the years?”

  Tony Spilotro, a Chicago Outfit guy—the Family’s rivals—and Nicky Scarfo, the boss of Philadelphia, were two of Goodman’s clients, back when he was a lawyer, but then so were all the Vegas hoods. “Not enough,” David said. Spilotro was dead and Scarfo was doing fed time in Atlanta, scheduled to get out when he was 133 years old, no chance of parole. That RICO shit was no joke. “If he was any good, they wouldn’t have needed his services so often.”

  When the helicopter disappeared, Bennie turned his attention back to his daughter Sophie. There were four houses surrounding the lake, each with its own private dock where they kept electric boats, dinghies, and more bright yellow pedal boats like the one Sophie was tooling around in. Sophie was seven and a little chubby now, unfortunately growing into a body that more closely resembled her father’s than her mother’s. “Goodman still going to Beth Shalom?”

  “That’s the word.”

  “You talk to him?”

  “No. He just shook some hands. Couple minutes, in and out. Guess Manic Al gave him some cash on his election campaign.”

  “That’s my fucking money,” Bennie said.

  “Maybe you’ll get your own exhibit in the museum.”

  “Worst secret organization on the planet,” Bennie said. “I find myself wondering why anyone is surprised when someone snitches. But you know, I figure running a city is worse than being in the game. Mayor can’t kill anyone and he has to work with those Waste Management fucks. I’ve got it easy.”

  David considered that. In Chicago, the Family had run the garbage business since the turn of the twentieth century. Back then people didn’t want to pay, they had to dig a pit and burn their garbage. Now it was just taken out of their property taxes. Government got their bite, the Family got theirs, everyone happy. Fact was, when the mayor was in a room, David left it. If there was one person in the city who could smell a gangster, it was probably that guy.

  “I’ll have Rabbi Kales give him a call around Hanukkah, maybe he’ll be in a generous mood,” David said, “give us a donation for the birthright trips.”

  Bennie shook his head. “Rabbi Kales should be in a nursing home.” He paused. “Or whatever comes next.”

  “He’s fine for now.”

  “He pissed on my sofa the other night. The leather one? You know, in the den? Just sat there and pissed himself. Good thing Sophie was asleep and Jean was off doing whatever the fuck fifteen-year-old girls do.” Across the way, Naomi and Michael and their wedding party gathered along the Rosens’ dock for a photo, everyone looking sharp in their rented clothes. “Omerta has shit on the secret lives of teenage girls.”

  “Maybe ask more questions,” David said, “before it’s too late.”

  “You assume I want the answers.” He pointed at Sophie. “That one still tells me everything, snitches on her sister every ten minutes. Benedict Arnold thinks she’s hard to trust.”

  David tried to imagine what his own son, William, looked like these days. He and Sophie were about the same age. William’s seventh birthday was only a few weeks away.

  David could remember being seven.

  Walking to school with Fat Monte, that poor dead fucker, sneaking into Cubs games, Monte lifting pocketbooks from ladies’ purses, the two of them getting loaded on Carnation Frozen Malt cups in the bleachers, snapping those wooden spoons into shanks, playing at being tough guys. Which got David wondering: Who was William playing with? Did he have any friends? If Jennifer was smart, she was keeping him far away from his cousins, away from any of the kids of the old crew. David hoped William wasn’t playing video games with one of Sugar Lopiparno’s dumb-fuck sons, like the one who had to get his stomach pumped after he ate a handful of pennies.

  Did William remember his father at all? Because it was getting harder and harder for David to accurately recall his son. He could remember experiences—his first birthday, chocolate frosting and yellow cake all over everything; Christmas, ripping up wrapping paper and throwing it everywhere, not giving a shit about the presents; Jennifer giving him haircuts by putting a bowl on his head—but they’d known each other for only a few years. Hard to make any kind of permanent memories. In a year, maybe less, William could walk by him on the street unnoticed.

  Sophie pedaled out into the middle of the lake, right in the line of the photo shoot, so Bennie cupped a hand around his mouth, shouted, “That’s too far, Soph,” then waved her in with two fingers. He dug some shells from between his bottom lip and teeth, crouched down on one knee, wiped his fingers on the grass, motioned David down, too. “Everything going okay with the Chinamen?”

  “No problems,” David said.

  “Ruben said they’ve been coming in pretty steady.”

  Ruben Topaz was Bennie’s guy at the Kales Mortuary and Home of Peace, the temple’s funeral home, and the only other person on the planet Bennie trusted to handle his business while he was away. Ruben didn’t know the truth about David, though he probably had some suspicions.

  “Yeah,” David said. “Some kind of hostile takeover going on. Can’t last much longer.�
� They’d put ten guys down in the last few months. Unless they were importing new guys from China, David couldn’t conceive of a way for them to keep pace and keep ahead of the law, too. You disappear one guy, maybe their families and friends keep quiet, because that’s the life, but you start getting toward a dozen missing gangsters, someone is going to say something, and either the cops pick up a lead on a wire or someone walks into a station and starts telling stories.

  “It can always last longer.” Bennie shrugged. They weren’t his men. “How’s the back end?”

  “Slow,” David said. He’d been moving body parts to Jerry Ford, who ran a tissue and organ donation shop called LifeCore for a few years now. It was a good partnership. The funeral home provided him with product, Jerry provided the funeral home with money, and in between there weren’t a lot of questions. Still, even Jerry Ford had some simple standards. “Their lungs are shit and there’s too many livers Jerry says he can’t use, so, mostly, he’s taking some bones, skin, a few corneas. But these Triad fuckers have a real thing about hot pokers into the eyes.”

  “Language, Rabbi,” Bennie said.

  He was pretty good about controlling his vernacular until he got around Bennie, then all the old ways would come right back to the surface. Bennie Savone was the kind of guy Sal Cupertine had known his whole life. It was easy to drift. “My point is,” David said, “our return hasn’t been what it could be. Least not on these. Unavoidable, I suppose.”