Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  Which meant they were probably here for the group upstairs. The Native Mob was running their operation, as planned. There’d been no issues. Last night, Matthew went up to the ninth floor around 10 p.m., before he clocked out and went back to his apartment, just to make sure nothing untoward was happening. Hallways were empty. Clean. Down by the Presidential Suite, there was a guy standing by the double doors wearing a suit, cell phone in his hand, didn’t look strapped. When Matthew approached, name tag still on, the guy stepped from the door and met him a few feet away. “Everything cool, sir?” the guy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Matthew said. “Everything cool with you?”

  “Badgers lost to Fresno State. So everyone’s a little pissed off.”

  “They cover the spread?” Matthew asked.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said.

  Matthew didn’t know who was staying in the Presidential Suite. Didn’t really care. Because the truth was simple: Matthew’s job was to protect the property. Not the people. He didn’t give a fuck about the people. Next job he took, maybe he’d be doing some kind of paramilitary security in the Middle East, the kind of job guys who’d washed out of Quantico ended up taking all the time. Be expected to stand between an armed insurgent and some asshole from Exxon, be willing to take a bullet so he wouldn’t have to pay more than three bucks a gallon for unleaded.

  “Let management know they’re here,” Matthew told Purvis now.

  Purvis nodded. “Should I make an anonymous call to the ninth floor, in case any of them are up there?”

  Matthew clicked on the ninth-floor feed. The hallways were empty, save for a maid pushing a cart filled with dirty dishes back toward the service elevator.

  “No,” Matthew said. If the FBI wanted into one of the rooms, they’d need a warrant or a guy already inside, which was possible. Probably likely. But in that case, they’d have marshals with them, a tactical team, a couple guys with door rams. The Native Mob would be armed, but Matthew didn’t see them or the FBI engaging in some Waco siege. “They want to go up there, they’re going to have to show papers. And if they have paper, they’re on our phones already. That’s not a problem you want to have, Purvis.”

  “On our phones? How? Wouldn’t we know?”

  In his mind, Matthew ran through a million different entirely legal tapping scenarios. Thought about how easy it would be to have CIs working in every part of the hotel and casino. Considered it was highly plausible that the feds had bugged this place during construction, that every feed Matthew had, the feds had, too, that the whole casino and hotel and surrounding property was marked as probable cause for investigation from the moment it broke ground. The Chuyalla had been involved in bingo rooms since the 1980s, and during that time, there’d been half a dozen murders related to people adjacent to the tribe, including an unsolved case where the vice president of the bingo operation ended up buried upside down outside of Iron River.

  It was, Matthew realized, probably why he’d been hired in the first place. To think about these things.

  He captured a photo of the agent beside Poremba, sent it through the recognition system, but only statewide. Nothing showed up.

  “No,” Matthew said, “you’d never know.”

  Ten minutes later, Matthew’s gun and sap locked up in a file cabinet, Senior Special Agent Lee Poremba and his partner were standing in his office; the weekend day manager of the hotel, a fifty-year-old Chuyalla dupe named Del, shifted nervously in front of them. “This man,” Del pointed at Poremba, “is from the FBI office in Chicago. He has some questions for you. Our lawyers are on their way and they’ve advised us to wait for them.”

  “Okay,” Matthew said. He made eye contact with Poremba, who, as ever, seemed entirely impassive. His partner seemed cut from slightly different cloth. He’d taken his windbreaker off already and had it folded over his arm, rings of sweat visible under both of his arms.

  “Okay you want to wait, or okay you’ll talk to them?” Del asked.

  “Am I personally being charged with anything?” Matthew asked. Poremba shook his head once. “You can go, Del,” Matthew said.

  When Del was gone, Poremba pointed at the man beside him. “This is Special Agent Zane Wilmore,” he said. “He runs the Gang Task Force up here. You mind if we sit?”

  “Be my guest,” Matthew said. He’d never met anyone from the Gang Task Force in Wisconsin, not when he was on the job, and not since he’d taken this new one, though now that he was looking at Special Agent Wilmore up close, he seemed familiar. Poremba and Wilmore sat down across from him and took in the surroundings. Matthew had five TVs mounted on the wall, which at the moment were all tuned to the casino floor and its surrounding bars and restaurants, and he had two computer monitors on his desk, a wall of bookcases filled with binders. His window overlooked the employee parking lot and the row of Dumpsters he’d banged Killer’s face against.

  “When Matthew was an agent, he worked with Jeff Hopper,” Poremba said to Wilmore. He didn’t say anything about the months that followed, which made Matthew think this introduction was intentional and not just the sort of territorial pissing everyone did in the Bureau, where you let everyone know how they were connected, so that you might get something accomplished based on who you knew or where you’d been.

  “For a couple days,” Matthew said. “Before I got fired.”

  “He was a good agent,” Wilmore said.

  “You ever tell him that?”

  Wilmore looked at him curiously. “I worked with him a million years ago. Rochester. Then again when all three of us were in Kansas City for a little while. You were probably in middle school.”

  “Rochester. Who bothered to organize in Rochester?” Matthew asked. This was the kind of conversation he used to overhear in the office, senior agents bullshitting on confidential information like they were talking about the Cubs and White Sox. No one had these conversations with Matthew back then. He was just “kid this” and “kid that.” Until you had war stories, you weren’t shit. Matthew had stories now. He just didn’t have anyone to tell them to. He’d never mentioned Sal Cupertine to anyone.

  “You familiar with the area?”

  “I used to play club lacrosse out there. When the fields weren’t frozen.”

  “Last ten, fifteen years, the Bonanno Family muscled in, but there wasn’t anything to take. Rochester was always independent and it’s so damn cold, no one wanted to be involved up there, anyway. Crap place to be an agent, crap place to be in the game, honestly.”

  “Wisconsin is better?”

  Wilmore cocked his head, like he hadn’t heard him right, then like he was sizing Matthew up. “It’s changing,” he said after a while.

  “Have we met?” Matthew asked.

  “Yes and no,” Wilmore said. “I came through here last month. You showed up on the tour for a few minutes, told us about how you could keep our conventioneers safe.”

  “What was your convention?”

  “Model trains,” Wilmore said, and Matthew suddenly remembered him. It had been a day when the Native Mob was having their council meeting downstairs. Which is probably why the FBI was back today. Everything was starting to come into view.

  “That’s a good one,” Matthew said. All that gear. All the machinery. Nothing but men in overalls. They could have bugged the whole place. And probably did.

  “I thought so. You didn’t background check us?”

  “No,” Matthew said.

  “That’s too bad,” Wilmore said. “All that groundwork for nothing.”

  “You like your job here?” Poremba asked.

  “I like the salary.”

  Poremba got up from his seat, looked at one of the TVs. “You catch a lot of card cheats?”

  “No,” Matthew said. “I wouldn’t even know what I was looking for. We’ve got people who do that. My main job is th
rowing people out by their hair.”

  “That must be nice,” Wilmore said.

  “I haven’t heard any complaints.”

  Poremba leaned close to the TV screen, his face just an inch or two away, then tapped it with his two middle fingers. “I need glasses,” he said. “I can hardly make out anything on this.” He slid his hands between the TV and the wall, up along the top of the TV, down each side, under the front, didn’t say a word.

  “By the time someone is at a table,” Matthew said, “if they look suspicious, I already know who their parents are.” He pointed at his computer. “We run everyone through the facial-recognition database. If they’re local, or in the database tribal cops use, we’ll have them.”

  “And yet,” Wilmore said, “you’ve got every shot caller in the Native Mob upstairs.”

  “I’m only responsible for the casino,” Matthew said. “And even still, Native Mob, they don’t shit where they eat. Most of the time, if there’s a problem, it’s Latin Kings or Gangster Disciples or the odd Vice Lord who we end up putting back on the street. We had a situation with the Sons of Silence not long ago. Biker gang from Colorado? Came out for a Broncos preseason game with the Packers, ended up getting into a knife fight in the buffet with some Mongols down from Ontario.”

  “I didn’t hear about that,” Wilmore said, indignation creeping into his voice.

  “We kept it in house,” Matthew said.

  “Mongols and Sons don’t usually beef,” Wilmore said.

  Matthew could tell something was pissing him off and that made Matthew want to piss him off more. But at the same time, Wilmore was also trying to be . . . courteous. It didn’t seem like a natural series of emotions for him.

  “What about the Family?” Poremba asked. “Any known associates up here?”

  “Not in a while,” Matthew said.

  “Since when?” Poremba asked.

  Matthew examined Poremba and Wilmore for a second. Neither of them had cuffs on their belt. Matthew took Poremba at his word that he wasn’t personally being investigated for anything. If Poremba was here, though, that meant there was a crime going on that was larger than simple gang activity, which made sense, because the Chuyalla were surely running a skim operation, which operated on a few levels. They had a rigged poker table that Matthew had witnessed personally, there were at least three slot machines that were chipped, and the mere act of renting out space to the Native Mob for meetings was probably illegal, though it wasn’t as if they listed Native Mob LLC on their rental agreements. No, instead, it all went through a tattoo parlor called Demon Dogz in St. Francis, so that, technically, the Native Mob’s monthly meetings were a gathering of tattoo artists and their subjects. They even had insurance. A credit report. All of it legit. The Chuyalla also sponsored a powwow every July, right on the fairgrounds located just east of the hotel and casino. Ten thousand people would roll through over three days for a lacrosse tournament, singing, dancing, food, games, crafts.

  That was the public show, which the public paid fifteen dollars a head to view.

  The private show was more elaborate. Tribes throughout the country used the powwow circuit to move prescription drugs, coke, weed, money, and guns in and out of the reservations, all of it being taxied in tour buses filled with kids and seniors and sporting equipment and giant tenting materials. Not that the buses were being searched. They drove right onto the property, through the gates of the fairgrounds, and then the gates were closed at night. Tribal police guarded them to make sure no one tried to break in to steal the lacrosse nets.

  The Chuyalla also offered up more than fifty thousand in prize money for the singing, dancing, and lacrosse competitions, and that looked rigged to Matthew, too. At least the singing and dancing. The lacrosse matches looked legit. That was something Matthew knew something about.

  “Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing here,” Matthew said, “and then maybe I can answer your question with a little more accuracy.”

  “I have you on surveillance, carrying a weapon, stalking Ronald Cupertine pretty much every day for six months,” Poremba said. “Fifty to hundred feet away, sometimes. I have you at his children’s dance recitals. At his job. Everywhere. I’ve got a complaint from his wife, describing you right down to your dimple, saying you showed up at a school book drive, that you followed her and her children inside the Field Museum, and that you used to watch her from a Starbucks about a block from her house. She thought you might be a child molester. I even have the warehouse on Wolcott. I don’t know what your idea was with that and, honestly, I don’t want to know.” He stopped, dug a Kleenex from his pocket, blew his nose, tossed it in the trash. “Then you just stopped. Fell off him completely. So what brought me here, first, was trying to figure out if you were lying in wait when you hobbled Ronnie Cupertine in your high-roller toilet. Convince me that you didn’t take a job here because you knew you’d get this chance.”

  “I didn’t take a job here,” Matthew said. “They called me. Said I got referred to them.”

  “By who?” Poremba asked.

  “I kind of thought it was you.”

  “It wasn’t,” Poremba said.

  “Must have been someone at the FBI,” Matthew said. “I don’t know anyone else in Chicago.” Even as the words came out of his mouth, Matthew realized how absurd this was all beginning to sound.

  “Are you aware who owns this place?” Wilmore asked.

  “The Chuyalla sign my checks,” Matthew said.

  Poremba shook his head slowly. “You ever hear of the Chuyalla before you got this job?”

  “I don’t know,” Matthew said.

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Wilmore said. “You didn’t. There’s maybe two hundred Chuyalla. They don’t have the capital to be opening casinos and water parks, so you gotta work that backward, ask yourself who has that kinda cash, who might they partner with to open up an operation this big, even get an ex–FBI agent to run their security for them.” When Matthew didn’t respond, Wilmore said, “I’ll give you another hint. They’re having a party inside your casino right now.”

  “If they had that kind of money,” Matthew said, “why would they bother to run a book upstairs, knowing you’d find out and come looking for them?”

  “They don’t have that kind of money,” Poremba said. “But Ronnie Cupertine does. The Family does.”

  “Look,” Matthew said, “if I’d known I’d get the chance, I would have killed Ronnie Cupertine. And then I would have quit. But here I am. Showing up to do my job on a Sunday. Just like you two.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him?” Wilmore asked.

  “Did you know Jeff Hopper well, Special Agent Wilmore? Like, did you know anything about him, at all?”

  “He was hard to get to know.”

  What did Matthew know about Jeff Hopper? That he was alone by choice. That he’d come to Chicago and made no lasting relationships, would date a woman for a month or two, but when it got close to being serious, he ended it. He’d only really learned that much after Hopper died and Matthew was living in his place in Walla Walla and the cards and letters of condolence showed up and Matthew, the only thing like a close living relative, answered them, and suddenly he was thrust into Hopper’s private world. He’d known Jeff Hopper in one context only: as a man who was seeking some justice for the death of his friends.

  “When his agents got killed by Sal Cupertine,” Matthew said, “when you heard about that, what did you think?”

  “I thought it was an avoidable tragedy.” Wilmore paused. “I went to the academy with Cal Hodel,” Wilmore said, one of the four men Sal Cupertine had killed. “So it’s a little personal for me. They found Cupertine’s spit on him. He’d choked him.”

  “You planning on tracking down and killing every other member of the Family to exact your vengeance, then?”

  “Of course not,” Wilmore s
aid.

  “But I am?” Neither man responded. “Ronnie Cupertine didn’t deserve the honor of being killed by me. I’m not going to give him or his bullshit Family that respect. Yet you come here with three paddy wagons and an entire assault team to talk to me about beating down a guy who has deserved it since you were in middle school? The guy who called the fucking hit? Jeff Hopper died to bring justice to those men Sal Cupertine killed. Got his head chopped off. And you’re here sweating me?”

  Poremba pointed at the TV again. “You make him on this?”

  “No,” Matthew said. “I ran into him in the bathroom. But do you want to know something funny? I put his picture through the database the next day, because I was worried that maybe he’d been coming in and no one had noticed that he was pinging. I came up with zero hits. Guy’s been running a crime family for thirty years, has his own television commercials, but doesn’t have a file that local law enforcement can access through facial recognition. If he walked into a police station armed with a bazooka, they’d need dental records to figure out who he was. That struck me as odd.”

  “He show up on your own database?” Wilmore asked.

  “No,” Matthew said.

  “That didn’t make you wonder why?” Wilmore said.

  “No,” Matthew said, but it should have, it should have made him start to piece together what was only now becoming clear to him. That he wasn’t here by some happy accident. “But you didn’t show up on the system either, Agent Wilmore.”

  One by one, Poremba unplugged each of the five televisions, then sat back down next to Wilmore, yanked the power cord out from the back of Matthew’s computer, then did the same with Matthew’s telephone.

  “If someone were listening,” Matthew said, “it would be me.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Poremba said. He pulled out a slim pack of Kleenex from his pocket, took one out, blew his nose, set the rest of the pack on the desk. “The second reason I’m here,” he said, “is to do a health and welfare check. Cops pulled a car registered to you out of a pond in Lynwood yesterday.”