Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “Fuck him,” David said.

  Rabbi Kales raised his eyebrows. “You’ve not met?”

  “No,” David said. “Not officially.” David’s name and Temple Beth Israel had appeared in Curran’s column a couple dozen times, however, all connected to Bennie Savone’s case. And Sal Cupertine showed up a few times, too, Curran’s thing being about drawing these lines of controversy between the families operating in Las Vegas and their parent companies in other cities. He thought it was pretty fucking funny that Sal Cupertine had last been seen inside of a truck filled with ground beef. Which wasn’t actually true. There was a shit ton of steaks and filets in there, too.

  Rabbi Kales pointed at David. “The reason you are so sharp, Rabbi Cohen, is that you grew up watching men’s backs,” he said. “Imagine how wise you would be if you’d spent that time watching their faces.”

  By the time David got outside, half of the newspapers were in the intersection and Curran’s Day Runner looked like a crime scene.

  “Let me assist you,” he said. He put a hand on Curran’s shoulder and the reporter twisted around to see who was there.

  “Oh, thanks,” Curran said. “I’m half an invalid right now. I tried to unlock my car and ended up spilling my work onto Buffalo and Westcliff.” David got down beside him and retrieved one of his notebooks and a stack of papers, set them on top of Curran’s car, and gathered up his pens, neither of which had caps. “Watch the ink,” Curran said. “You don’t want to get it on your suit.”

  “It sticks to you,” David said, “but it washes out. Eventually.”

  Harvey B. Curran chuckled. “I suppose that’s a good thing.”

  David retrieved the front-page section of The New York Times from beneath a Honda Accord. There was a page-one article about “The Summer of the Shark.” He handed it to Curran. “What is your take on this?” he asked.

  “Shark attacks?” Curran asked.

  “Yes,” David said. “They seem to be on the rise. There was the boy in Virginia Beach this weekend who was eaten. Those people in Florida earlier this summer.” He pointed at the newspaper. “Important enough that The New York Times is devoting their front page to the question.”

  “I think, technically, they’re just being bitten, not eaten.”

  “Does the shark not swallow?”

  Curran looked at David quizzically. “I don’t really know, actually. It’s not my area of expressed interest.”

  “Ah, I see,” David said. He walked over to the sidewalk, picked up three business cards that had flown away:

  Steven Dickensheets, Forensic Accountancy.

  Sheriff Geoff Sebelius.

  Scott Schumacher, Editor, The Public Record.

  Good people to know. He handed the cards to Curran. “Do you have an opinion as to why it happens?”

  “We’re still talking about the sharks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Well,” Curran said, “I guess it’s probably like being in the grocery store. Someone grabs the last bunch of bananas, or if you think they’re about to, I guess that might piss you off. Probably the same basic idea. People getting in the way of food.”

  “Interesting,” David said. “What should be done?”

  His hand went up to his eye patch, adjusted it. The skin directly around the patch was red and angry. “I’m sorry, I guess I’m confused as to why we’re talking about shark attacks.”

  “I can see why that would be the case,” David said. “Since we’re strangers who don’t know each other, don’t know what each is interested in, or what we might like to read about in the newspaper. Or anything else about each other, for that matter.”

  “Ohhh,” Curran said. “I see.”

  “Do you?” David pointed at the eye patch. “That seems to be affecting you.”

  “I developed some kind of infection,” he said. “My daughter came home with pinkeye or something; a week later, I’m like a horror film.”

  “That happens.”

  “You have children?”

  “No,” David said. “But I am surrounded by them at our school. You know. The one you frequently disparage in your column because of who happened to pour the concrete.”

  “It’s not about you, Rabbi, I hope you know that,” Curran said.

  “I do,” David said. “Which is why I have come over here to help. To show you that I am a man who understands what it’s like to have something dropped at your feet you cannot quite pick up.” He gathered up the rest of the papers and handed them to Curran, like a parting gift.

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Curran said, patiently, a speech he’d probably given a hundred times over the years. “I’m just doing my job. If I covered sports, I’d talk about how mediocre UNLV’s basketball team is this year, would probably throw in a shot about them being crap since Tark left just to keep on Tark’s good side. But I cover the Mafia.” He shrugged. “Confidentially? I’m sure you recognize that Bennie Savone is an unsavory fellow.” He waved two fingers at Rabbi Kales, who was watching the show from inside. Rabbi Kales raised a fork of lox back at him through the window. “Or at least your boss does.”

  “Former boss,” David said. “He’s retired.”

  “How do you retire from God?”

  “He is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the temple,” David said.

  “Is he well? I heard he wasn’t well.”

  “He’s a man in his seventies,” David said, “who doesn’t need to read conjecture concerning his own deterioration in the local paper.”

  “I just report,” he said.

  “Or speculate,” David said.

  “The Mafia doesn’t send out press releases.”

  “The temple does,” David said. “I saw you at our event not ten days ago.”

  “I’m the kind of guy who buys his daughter shitty pizza when she wants it, particularly if it’s on the one weeknight I get her. Just a coincidence that I was there that night.”

  “On the pizza, we agree,” David said.

  Harvey B. Curran stared at David for a few seconds, not speaking. David had seen Curran’s photo in the Review-Journal three times a week since he arrived in town, his “Street Sense” column always spread across the bottom of the Opinion page, the only column that put people’s names in bold type. He’d also seen him at the Bagel Café at least once a week for three years now, periodically saw him inside Smith’s buying groceries, had parked down the street from his house a few times, watching it, making sure he wasn’t putting shit in his column because someone was paying him to do it. Someone other than the newspaper. But Curran drove a 1994 Toyota Corolla, had a half-furnished home on a cul-de-sac that backed up to Cheyenne, a block off of the Rainbow intersection, and seemed to spend most of his free time writing books about corrupt casino owners, which kept him in and out of court fairly regularly. David would be surprised if Curran had more than five hundred dollars in his bank account.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you in some way,” Curran said. He patted his own chest with the tips of his fingers. “I feel like I have.”

  “You have,” David said. “Torah says, ‘Buy the truth and sell it not.’”

  “I’m not Jewish,” Curran said.

  “It’s also in the Bible,” David said.

  “I’m not much of a Christian,” Curran said. “Mr. Savone’s crimes are public record.”

  “Mine are not.”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Rabbi,” Curran said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “That’s all I can ask.” David extended his hand. “My name is David Cohen. I’m the rabbi at Temple Beth Israel. It’s a pleasure to meet you after all of this time I’ve spent in your column.”

  Curran took his hand, shook it. “I’m Harvey Curran,” he said. “I write for the Review-Journal.”

 
“Aren’t you missing the B?”

  “Honestly? It’s not really my middle initial.”

  “What is?”

  “A,” Harvey said. “When the paper hired me, they wanted me to use a middle initial, make me sound a little older. This was fifteen years ago and I was just out of journalism school, see? Once they realized people would have open license to call me ‘hack’ they decided B was a better choice. Now here I am, stuck with it.”

  “Have ye not seen a vain vision? A lying divination?” David said. “It’s not the worst I have heard.”

  “I suppose not,” Curran said. He took the papers and notebooks off the roof of his car and tossed them in his backseat. “Thanks for your help. I’d be running in traffic right now to save yesterday’s news and tomorrow’s column.”

  “Good luck with your eye,” David said. “Next time you’re in the neighborhood looking for Jimmy Hoffa’s body in the foundation of the Performing Arts Center, stop by my office, I keep wine for just such occasions.”

  “I’ll do that,” Curran said.

  David started back toward the restaurant, but before he got inside, Curran said, “What about the sharks? What would you do?”

  “My view is that the proper authorities should find the sharks and all of their close associates,” David said, “round them up, and kill them on the shore, for the public to see.”

  “So?” Rabbi Kales said, when David was back across from him. “What says his face? Golem or Gabriel?”

  Out the window, Curran sat in his running car, jotting something in his notepad, David thinking it was probably a bad idea he was driving himself around with only one working eye, then wondering if he even really had something wrong with his eye, if it all was some con. But then Harvey attempted to back his car out of a moderately tight space and ended up making the process into an eleven-point turn before he got his Corolla faced the right away.

  “He’s not going away,” David said, “is he?”

  “No,” Rabbi Kales said.

  6

  Rabbi David Cohen’s job at Temple Beth Israel most days simply entailed Lighting the Way, which wasn’t exactly his skill set, but he made do. Tried to fake a good example. Which meant he’d come to appreciate that he couldn’t fix every problem by getting rid of the part he found distasteful.

  Like this whole thing with Harvey B. Curran.

  It was after four and David was sitting at his desk, looking at the Review-Journal online, scrolling through Curran’s old columns, trying to figure out how he might just use him for good.

  Well, a kind of good.

  Talking to him today, David found himself feeling a sense of grudging respect, for the one guy he’d met in town entirely on the level. Curran did his job and he did not give a fuck who was angry about it. Yeah, he had his pat answer when David pressed him, but it also seemed like he understood his role in the world: bad shit happened, he brought it to light.

  In Las Vegas, Curran didn’t have to go searching for it, it was all right there, the Mafia such a shitty organization locally, they couldn’t even transcend cliché: They owned the strip clubs, they ran the girls, they broke legs for numbers guys, and they still tried to fuck with the unions, which was next to impossible now, so they ended up pressuring the culinary union rank and file and ended up getting cut to shit, literally, by a bunch of cooks and waiters who didn’t want some dumb guido in their kitchen unless it was a celebrity chef in from Florence. And it was all public record: Just last week, Rick Cazzetti, who owned a strip club called the Black Puma, was arrested for beating the shit out of a guy who owned a notary-and-mailbox joint in his same industrial park because the notary had taken him to small claims court over some beef with Black Puma patrons pissing on his door. Cazzetti got bailed out by a guy named Randy Hermano, who was a sitting city councilman.

  It baffled David.

  Cazzetti was Genovese from way back, had done fifteen years of fed time in the ’70s on a variety of RICO charges, none of which stopped him from owning a strip club in Las Vegas, so as soon as this hit the blotter, his old mug shot and new one were in Curran’s column, and now Curran was digging into Hermano, too. Hermano was a local personal injury lawyer who’d been elected to the city council based largely on the fact that in his commercials he walked through the empty desert in slow motion while the voice-over announcer said four words: “Progress. Integrity. Family. Hermano.” Curran was now looking at Hermano’s voting record in relation to anything even tangentially related to Cazzetti and it wasn’t looking good for anybody, Curran now calling Hermano “Soon-to-be-Indicted City Councilman Randy Hermano” and putting his every move in bold type.

  Bennie Savone was the one guy doing something different, and Curran was so close to it, he couldn’t see it, because it was new. David could use that. He just wasn’t sure how.

  In the Torah, the Hebrew words for was, is, and will be were the words that made up God’s name, not because Jews thought God foresaw the future, but because He was the future, which was some Einstein shit. But not even Maimonides thought that meant everyone was destined to some predetermined fate. No, God wasn’t sitting around manipulating each living soul like a marionette. Maimonides believed people more often than not suffered from self-inflicted evils and then ascribed them to God’s master plan when they couldn’t reason with their shitty decisions.

  Everything happens for a reason?

  Fuck no. You brought shit onto yourself.

  So he’d brought Curran to himself today. He’d figure out how to use him.

  David clicked off the Review-Journal’s page and spent a few minutes watching the security camera feed. He had cameras surrounding the temple, the Barer Academy, the funeral home, and, farther up the street, the Performing Arts Center, so from here at his desk, David could watch thirty different angles of suburbia’s slow crawl. Most days, there was nothing to see, but that didn’t mean David didn’t keep looking, which is when Casey Berkowitz came screeching into the parking lot with his son, OG Sean B, a mere ninety minutes late for the continuation of Sean’s bar mitzvah class.

  “It’s this dumb shit’s fault,” Casey said when they eventually reached David’s office, one hand clasped on the back of Sean’s neck, like a Rottweiler without a leash, the other on a can of Red Bull. David had watched them arguing in the front of the temple for five solid minutes but didn’t bother to get up from behind his desk. He was going to Light the Way. He also had the first idea of a plan coming into play. “Tell him you’re sorry for being late, Sean.”

  OG Sean B wore the same basic outfit every day: baggy jeans belted at his groin, plaid boxers pulled up over his hips, a plain white T-shirt, and a Milwaukee Brewers baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes and cocked slightly to the right, not that he was from Milwaukee or knew anything about baseball, but because the logo, an M and a B and a baseball, spelled out MOB. He also rocked a Star of David the size of a lampshade around his neck. David had seen Gangster Disciples in Chicago wearing the exact same outfit, right down to the Star of David, since the six-pointed star was how they identified one another, difference being they were black and legit hard knocks, not twelve-year-old Jews caught up in a divorce.

  “Yo, dawg, I was faded this morning, so I just went home, got my grub on, and was out,” OG Sean B said, David reminded suddenly of Slim Joe, who he’d lived with for his first few months in Las Vegas, before he had to shoot him in the face. He’d liked Slim Joe, as much as that was possible. Or missed having someone to talk to, anyway.

  “Speak real English,” Casey said, and gave his son’s neck a shove. Sean’s head snapped forward, knocking his hat off.

  “I’m sorry, Rabbi Cohen,” OG Sean B said. “I got to my pops’s and forgot I was supposed to meet up with you. So I went to bed.” He probably was faded this morning, on his mother’s Klonopin or his father’s Xanax, or maybe Lexus had some Vicodin left over from her latest boo
b job. When David was twelve, he was already running errands for the Family, old-timers like Pete Divarco giving him nips of Jameson, but David didn’t try any drugs until he was a little older, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. He found he liked the way coke made him feel before he had to fuck somebody up, started to get a fondness for H in his twenties, which made him feel good for about fifteen minutes, and then made him want to pull strangers’ eyes from their skulls. He kept that shit from Jennifer, though, and then when William came around, that was it. He didn’t fuck with any drugs, just a taste here and there for business, like on the day in Chicago he lost it on those Donnie Brascos. Hardest thing he did now was scotch, even though most days his face felt like someone was driving an ice pick through it.

  “It happens,” David said, suddenly in a forgiving mood, because Casey’s face was pissing him off. His handlebar mustache was perfectly manicured, he was too tan, wore too much shitty cologne, and his pants were held up with a white belt that had the “Joy and Pain” masks for the buckle. He’d put on about fifteen pounds of muscle in the last few months, which made David think he was probably hitting some of his fighters’ HGH.

  The barbed-wire tattoo on his left biceps was new. This fucking guy.

  “That hurt?” David asked, pointing at the ink.

  Casey looked at his arm, then pulled his sleeve down. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said.

  “Good thing it’s permanent, then,” David said. He had a tattoo of an eight ball on his shoulder for about fifteen years until one of Bennie’s surgeons dug it out of his flesh, not even bothering with the laser treatment, David waking up with an oozing hole that took six months to heal. He had a gnarled scar there now that looked like he’d been bitten by a wolf. Not that he missed the tattoo. These days he had a deeper appreciation of his own flesh.