Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “Sorry,” Yehuda said when he popped back in. “We have contractors coming today to set up a hookah lounge and it’s just been one problem with the city after another. It was probably better when the Mafia controlled everything. You just handed over an envelope filled with cash? Is that how it was done?”

  Naomi Rosen-Solomon came in with a stack of manila folders—she worked part-time at the temple now, planned to stay on right up until her baby was due—and a refilled pitcher of water before anyone dared to answer. It wasn’t as if the other rabbis didn’t know of Bennie Savone’s involvement with Temple Beth Israel . . . it was just that they all had their own version in some form or fashion. It was Las Vegas. Crooked money, in the end, was still money.

  “Can I get a Diet Coke?” Yehuda asked Naomi.

  “I’m not a waitress,” Naomi said, “but I’ll see if we have any in the machine. Do you have a dollar?”

  Yehuda flipped through his wallet. “All I’ve got are fifties.”

  “You can owe me,” she said. When Naomi came back a few minutes later with another pitcher of coffee and a can for Yehuda, Yehuda noticed the red string on Naomi’s wrist.

  “Where’d you get that?” he asked her, all teeth and wide eyes.

  “Oh, we sell them in our Judaica shop now,” Naomi said, and David saw Yehuda’s smile waver. That’s right, motherfucker. Naomi turned her attention to David. “Do you need anything else, Rabbi Cohen?”

  “No,” David said. “Why don’t you lock up the front and go home. I’ll see these fine men out when we finish and get the doors open for the after-school program when the next round of volunteers arrive.”

  “Of course, Rabbi,” she said.

  “A little young to be having a child, isn’t she?” Rabbi Sigal said when Naomi was gone.

  “She’s graduated college,” David said. “A hundred and fifty years ago, she would have already lost two children during birth and traversed the country in a wagon train.”

  “I guess it is a matter of perspective.” Rabbi Sigal had eaten all of his borscht and his lips were a light pink color. “I remember when she was born. Her father and his father used to come to my shul.”

  “Times change,” David said.

  “Indeed,” Sigal said. He tapped his lips, a thing Rabbi Kales did, every rabbi a parrot, all the way to Maimonides.

  David pushed his chair a few inches from the table, regarded the four men around him with what he hoped was solemnity, but with his face in its current condition, he really had no idea. “So,” he said, “gentlemen, first I want to thank you for coming here. I know you each are very busy, that this time in our collective lives is fraught, and that after Thanksgiving, the last thing you want to do is spend an hour in a closed room with a bunch of Jews.” David waited for one of them men to laugh, but none did. He didn’t yet have the skill Rabbi Kales had of forcing people to laugh even when you hadn’t said anything particularly amusing. “But, as you can see, and as I’m sure the machinery of lashon hara has provided, I’m in the midst of a small medical problem, which is part of why I’ve called this meeting today. Time, I’m afraid, is short.”

  “I didn’t want to say anything,” Rabbi Roth said, and the other men nodded along like they’d each been holding a terrible secret, which, as it happened, they probably had been. “You must be in terrible pain. Is it . . . a stroke?”

  David liked Rabbi Roth. He was only a few years older than David and though his temple was less reformed, there were a lot of mid-level casino executives in their ranks, which equaled a lot of money but not a lot of activism. Rabbi Sigal had the casino owners in his stable, which meant he had endowments and investments in the tens of millions, owned property all over the county—housing tracts, office buildings in Green Valley, even the land under a new shopping center called the Commons in Henderson, anchored by a Pottery Barn, a Restoration Hardware, and a Williams Sonoma. Roth’s temple probably had a couple million in the bank, plus investments, including their own small, overpriced school, and some action in the Malibu Grand Prix franchise a few blocks off the Strip, the temple making bank on the video games and concessions, the expansion of their synagogue funded by tourists. David liked the idea of ripping off those who came to Las Vegas to win, not just his congregants, who were merely trying to survive.

  “The pain is manageable, at the moment,” David said. “It was not a stroke, thankfully.”

  “Is it . . . is it . . . cancer?” Roth asked.

  “No,” David said. “Nothing like that.” He’d worked on this bit for a while. Was prepared for any question that might come his way. “I was in car accident as a child, in Italy, where my father was serving, and had to have much of my face reconstructed. I don’t like to talk of it, for a very simple reason: We lost my mother that day. She was driving and, as was the wont for many in that era, she’d been drinking. A touch of vodka, a glass of wine, a Halcyon to sleep, it was, sadly, predictable.”

  “Oy,” Rabbi Roth said. “I’m sorry, David.”

  “Medicine thirty-five years ago,” David said, “was not exactly cutting edge.” The men murmured. Everyone had lost someone in the past to some grave disease or accident or ailment that, today, would be solved with a pill or surgery. “The last few months, my plastic surgery has degraded to the point where I am in this condition. Part of me wanted to avoid it, so as not to think of the displeasure and sadness of my mother’s death. Part of me wanted to avoid it because I have an aversion to pain, as I’m sure many of you do.” Now the men smiled. Now they gave a fuck. David had to kill his fake fucking mother in order to get the empathy vote. “I am pleased to say Dr. Melnikoff will be working on me in the coming weeks and assures me I will be good as new by the New Year.”

  “An excellent surgeon,” Rabbi Sigal said. He didn’t elaborate, because Rabbi Sigal didn’t elaborate on anything, generally. His was the word of God, even on matters he had no expertise in whatsoever.

  “Oh, mazel, mazel,” Rabbi Goldstein said. “You will be fine, Rabbi.”

  Goldstein was from the Orthodox shul off of Desert Inn, which David always found amusing. Pimping Jewish orthodoxy on a street named for a casino owned by Moe Dalitz, a gangster so notorious he never got arrested, the Ronnie Cupertine of his time. Moe ran Las Vegas for years, did it so effectively he ended up getting philanthropy awards from Israeli generals and the Anti-Defamation League, everyone’s favorite Jew in Las Vegas, the big boys of the faith happy to look the other way since he was such a great supporter, an irony that did not escape David’s notice. But that was back before the Internet. You could be a scumbag without much publicity. David rarely saw Rabbi Goldstein on this side of town. Which was fine. Goldstein thought what David and Rabbi Kales had done with their progressive Reform synagogue was practically a shanda . . . well, until Yehuda came along. Also, Goldstein’s Orthodox Judaism made David nervous. He was more Jewish than David, had a deeper understanding of the texts, did not think liberally about the Talmud, and the result was that around him David felt like a fraud.

  “That said,” David started again, “I feel like we must address this issue of safety before something terrible occurs. I don’t want to be in a hospital bed worried about things beyond my control.” David stood up and paced back and forth, as if he were gathering his thoughts, though he already knew exactly what he was going to say. “I want to say that, first, I am not afraid,” David began. “Are any of you afraid?” If they were, they would never admit it. They were not men who were concerned about death. Their belief was so divine—death was merely another phase of the spiritual existence. They would pass on, and when the Moshiach arrived, they would rise again and stand beside him in Israel, the light of the Torah illuminating the world in peace and freedom. All that prophecy bullshit. That was the basis of their faith: Death was but a station, the train always coming. “But we all recognize that our people, our friends, our neighbors, even unaffiliated Jews, are co
ncerned, yes?”

  The men all nodded, except for Yehuda, who sipped at his Diet Coke and watched David intently.

  “They want to know what to do next, are bombers coming for them, do Christians fault them,” David said.

  “It is not new,” Rabbi Goldstein interjected. He picked up a napkin and wiped at his beard. “Violence is the only way to get noticed these days. It is no different than every day in Israel.”

  “Did you serve?” Yehuda asked.

  “I did,” Rabbi Goldstein asked. “Did you?”

  “In a way,” Yehuda said. “But I am a pacifist. It was a bad fit.”

  “I, too, am a pacifist,” Goldstein said.

  “Did you kill anyone?” Yehuda asked.

  “I did,” Goldstein said. “In Lebanon.”

  “That must haunt you.”

  “No,” Goldstein said. He picked up a pecan cookie, blew the sugar off it, ate it in two bites. “Not in the least.”

  Noted, David thought.

  “None of us want to hurt anyone,” David said, attempting to keep them on track. This was the problem when Jews got around a table. They simmered. “But most people, all they know of the pogroms, for instance, is Fiddler on the Roof.” Rabbi Roth tsked. “Decades of violence and oppression whittled into song. And what does the world remember if our own Jews can barely articulate it? This ignorance eventually gave permission to do it again, on a larger scale. Which, in its own way, gave birth to these maniacs with the planes.”

  David let that sit there for a moment.

  Rabbi Sigal cleared his throat. It made a phlegmy sound. David walked over to where he was sitting and poured him some water, put a hand on his shoulder, squeezed, felt the man’s sweat through his jacket. He’d put the AC in the room to a chilly 69 degrees, since each of the men, save for Yehuda, was wearing a full suit. Yehuda had on tan slacks and an open-collared gingham shirt.

  “To make a mark,” David continued, “violence must be on a grand scale. So this feeling everyone has? It is genetic and specific. They fear what they saw on the TV, they fear a repetition of the history which we have so ingrained in our people, and they fear something more existential, which is blame. The mob will not blame itself for inviting this horror upon our country. But they will scapegoat someone if they have to, find some segment of society to say, If not for these people, we would be safer. When that time comes, eventually, it will be us.” David paused. “We are attacked from three sides and yet none of us have protected our faces.”

  “Rabbi,” Yehuda said, and rose from his seat, “if I can interject, I think this is where I am in tune with how young people and more, shall we say, enlightened people view the world. I just don’t see the level of anti-Semitism that you do. People come to the Kabbalah Center, they’re not looking to become more marginalized after the experience. They’re looking for greater acceptance and I think that’s what we’re doing. So yeah, people are scared, but I think if we try to get people to look more into the healing powers that exist outside of quote-unquote Western medicine, it demystifies part of the fear, which is of the unknown. I feel like that’s a role I could take on, locally, if I had a bit more support from the four of you.”

  “Sit,” Rabbi Sigal said, and Yehuda did. Sigal had a touch of Eastern Europe in his vocal inflection, the benefit of having grown up around immigrants, which gave his words a vague sense of Cold War menace. Rabbi Sigal fixed a glare across the table at Yehuda. “Your role here,” he said, “is to listen. When we wish to hear from you, we’ll ask. You are among rabbis, not your caftan acolytes. Act like it.” He blew his nose into his napkin. His eyes were watering now, too. “Finish up,” he said to David. “I’m feeling under the weather and would like to leave.”

  “Of course,” David said. He walked to the head of the table and passed out the manila folders. “We need armed protection,” David said. “I am not talking about security guards that flunked out of high school. I mean actual police protection, stationed in front of our synagogues—and the Kabbalah Center—during all business hours, seven days a week, for the foreseeable future. You will see in your folders an extensive budget proposal for us to share these costs. I think it is in our duty, as Jews, to protect one another. I know there are more synagogues in town, and we will pull them into our orbit once we have shown how successful this endeavor can be. As well, in good faith, Temple Beth Israel is prepared to manage this program for all of us.” David paused, allowed the men to open their files and read in silence for a few moments, save for Rabbi Sigal, who merely looked at the spreadsheet and then pushed his file into the middle of the table, like he was going all in. It had taken David a few weeks to put together all the necessary numbers, a plan that would create a wall between him and the rest of

  the world.

  Rabbi Goldstein held up the spreadsheet. “This figure,” he said, pointing to a number in bold red at the bottom of the page. “This is exorbitant. Eighty-five to one hundred dollars per hour for a single armed man?”

  “When you hire a man to keep you from death,” David said, “you don’t take the lowest bid.” David lowered his voice an octave. “The Sincerity Tone,” as Rabbi Kales called it. He needed to use it here, since in reality the price was closer to fifty bucks per hour. “I know that these last few months have been difficult. Temple Beth Israel finds itself in good financial standing and we are willing to pay all costs through January 1, to show our commitment to this.”

  “Do these men come with tanks?” Rabbi Roth asked. He had his glasses on now and was running his finger down the sheet. “This seems like a high price to pay for perception.”

  “It’s not perception,” David said. “It’s sanctuary. These are all off-duty Las Vegas police and U.S. Marshals protecting us. In uniform and fully armed. If we want them to carry automatic weapons in their vehicles, it is a slightly higher charge, as noted on page two. If you want your congregants to open their wallets to you, you must make temple feel like the most sanctified place in the city. An armed man or two out front will bring our people back into our shuls. And, I should note, our funerals.”

  The rabbis exchanged looks. There’d been a wave of terrorist attacks at funerals throughout the Middle East, suicide bombers dressed as mourners. None of the rabbis wanted to admit that their attendance was flagging, that their donations were down, that they were worried about sustaining certain programs into the New Year; that they themselves feared standing over an open grave, surrounded by strangers, waiting for one of them to explode. Everyone was watching the terror ticker on CNN.

  “So if something should transpire,” Rabbi Sigal said now, “these guards can arrest someone?”

  “Yes,” David said.

  “Could they, conceivably, shoot someone?”

  “Yes,” David said. “That’s the law in Nevada.”

  Being a Jew was inherently dangerous to your health. So you watched your back, you listened for anti-Semitic talk, you identified other Jews in a room, you stayed vigilant. Every synagogue in town, at some point, had fielded a threat. Every synagogue in town had woken up to find a swastika painted on the property. It happened.

  “You’re going to pay the whole bill for over a month and if we don’t like the service, we walk free and clear?” Roth asked eventually.

  “We are prepared to, yes,” David said.

  “That’s almost two hundred thousand dollars, David. That’s a lot of money.” Roth took off his glasses, rubbed at his eyes. “Why would you do this?”

  “It’s a mitzvah. A small one. And once you decide to stay on,” David said, “and we begin sharing costs, according to your ability to pay, I would hope that you’d carry that mitzvah forward to a smaller synagogue that perhaps cannot afford the price either. Maybe you and Rabbi Goldstein agree to pay a bit more so that Temple Ohabai Sholom in Pahrump may be protected a few days a week.” There were only thirty Jews in all of Pahrump, so they re
nted a tiny, windowless basement in a church for services. David had tried to get them to drive into Las Vegas, but they were steadfast in not being driven from their neighborhood simply because they didn’t own any land. “I know that Rabbi Sigal and I are in better financial shape than most, so I wouldn’t expect you to pay what we can. For instance, Rabbi Goldstein. I know you do not generate revenue like we do.”

  “To put it mildly,” Rabbi Goldstein said. “We don’t have an aquatic center. Or even a kid’s pool. Much less a cemetery. You’re a profit center. We are a religious center. If you don’t mind me saying.”

  “Of course not,” David said. He really didn’t. If Goldstein had even an inch of ambition beyond speaking Torah, David would be out of a steady cash stream, particularly since David charged Rabbi Goldstein’s congregants a fee of twenty-four hundred dollars just for a burial plot, another fifteen hundred to dig and then fill the grave, plus a five-hundred-dollar fee to become a member of Temple Beth Israel’s Circle of Donors, which all Temple Beth Israel members who were buried in the cemetery agreed to ahead of time. And then the cost of the casket—a simple pine box was one thousand, which the Orthodox almost always preferred, though a few opted for the next level up, which included some understated satin adornments, and which began at three thousand—and then various fees, costs, and assessments . . . all of which were discounted prices offered to Rabbi Goldstein’s people, because Jews took care of one another. When you died you were looking at ten thousand out the door, at least, with the funeral home’s cost being around one thousand. A 900 percent markup. Goldstein’s Jews also came by for things like swim lessons and art classes, because if the choice was to learn how to swim or scrapbook from a Jew or a non-Jew, Jews always picked one of their own, another ghetto of their choosing. “You will not be charged beyond your ability to pay,” David said.

  “If that’s understood,” Goldstein said, “we agree.”

  That was one.

  “Well, I either pay equally or I pay nothing,” Rabbi Roth said, just as David thought he would. “The protection of one is the protection of all. I believe my congregation will support this. But it might take me two weeks to get them to support it with a check.”