Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “Is that true?”

  “Being kind to a stranger is greater to Jews than seeing the face of the Divine,” David said.

  Harvey B. Curran pondered that.

  David clasped his hands together. “So, the business at hand.”

  “Right,” Curran said, but David could tell he was still thinking about the offer. David had, of course, known what he’d find when Harvey B. Curran showed up today. He’d kept a close watch on the man since their meeting at the Bagel Café—he’d been the one who got Bennie’s girls on record about the terrorist lap dances. He got the sense that Harvey B. Curran . . . liked him. David tried to remember the last time he’d had someone who appreciated him for something beyond his ability to kill. Paul Bruno had been one of the few kids he recalled liking absent any of this gangster shit, and how had that worked out? David ended up burying him in the temple’s cemetery under the name Lionel Berkowitz. Every day David walked out there, didn’t matter if he was burying some client’s body or someone he knew from Temple Beth Israel, he left a stone on Paul’s gravestone. So many now it looked like a fucking quarry. “I’ve been enjoying your recent reporting. You’re doing important work.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” Curran said. “It’s tough to break something new when the crime has already been committed and the perpetrators are dead. Cosa Nostra, at least they repopulate. These guys aren’t coming back. Though I don’t suppose you could help me get video from inside the Wild Horse?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “That’s too bad. Getting a shot of Mohammed Atta busting his nut in the Wild Horse’s VIP would probably get me the Pulitzer. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Savone ended up with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

  David didn’t think that’s how it would turn out. Least not for Bennie. Hadn’t worked for Lucky Luciano, back when he was fighting the Axis powers. It was good propaganda, but by the 1950s, all the crime bosses who had worked for the government were busy getting hauled into court, every Sonny and Tino was Cosa Nostra, every street boss was Joe Bonanno. Even random motherfuckers who just hit diners and liquor stores for the till were capos, the FBI cleaning up America like America had cleaned up Europe, and, likewise, were a good six years behind the curve of the scythe. No one from the families was getting off easy just because they stood up to the Nazis while all the Ivy League fucks were investing in steel companies and feeling cozy with their blue-blood anti-Semitism. That game was rigged to favor the perceived good guys. After all, no one asked for the Mob’s help with the Koreans or the Vietnamese. No one came sniffing around Cousin Ronnie to help with Desert Storm. If it came to it, David didn’t imagine the Bloods and Crips and Latin Kings and Aryan Nation and Hell’s Angels and Mongols and all the Italian families and the Russians and the Native gangs would line up along the border to stop whoever the fuck was attacking us now, unless they thought it might fuck with their paper, everyone out for that cash. You could tag up your street, pretend to be about that block, but what David understood now was that those tags were no different than the cross on the church or the Star of David on the synagogue or the glow of a Walmart Supercenter: They were all just signs of who was safe where. The whole world was a fucking ghetto, the whole nation filled with gangsters.

  “So what’s the story?” Curran hit record on the tape recorder, set it between them on the table. “You mind?”

  “Yes,” David said. He picked up the recorder, popped out the tape, handed it back to Curran.

  “This a national security issue?” Curran said.

  “In light of your previous reporting,” David said, “I think you recording anything in this room would be a bad precedent.”

  “All right,” Curran said. “Notes it is.”

  David told him how the horrors of 9/11 had brought about an unparalleled level of cooperation among the local leaders of the Jewish faith, how they recognized both the danger of the world and the need to honor the heroic first responders who protect the city, and that they would now be hiring a team of off-duty police officers to patrol their properties, to keep their people safe during these difficult times but also to help these first responders earn extra money, particularly since their pension funds had surely taken a hit when the stock market tumbled. “Temple Beth Israel is also making a sizeable donation to the Firefighters of Southern Nevada Burn Foundation,” David told him, “and the Friends of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Foundation.”

  “What does sizable mean?” Curran asked.

  “Ten thousand to each,” David said.

  Curran tapped his pen against his notebook. “Not much of a story there,” Curran said.

  “I’m not asking for a story,” David said. “Just a sentence or two in a column. We want to show our appreciation for law enforcement and we want to let the public know it is safe to come and worship again. This is a time when some good publicity for God is probably worth noting. All this death in His name. All this suffering. I want to do some good.”

  “Mr. Savone know you’re doing this?”

  “I imagine he’ll find out.”

  “You’re not worried you’ll end up in Lake Mead?” he asked. “Isn’t that where they found your predecessor? Rabbi Gottlieb?”

  “Did you know him?” David asked.

  “No,” Curran said. “I never met the man.”

  “Neither did I,” David said. “His parents came through not long ago. They were nice people.”

  “You really think he fell overboard out there?”

  “People die in tragic ways every day,” David said.

  “Gangsters do,” Curran said. “Rabbis? You guys live forever. I saw Rabbi Sigal walking out when I pulled up. What’s he? Close to eighty?”

  “Yes,” David said.

  “I bet he knows where some of the bodies are buried.” David didn’t respond. Curran tapped his pen again. “You should up your donation,” he said. “You want to make an impression, add some color to the stack.”

  “Fine,” David said. “We are now donating fifty thousand. In Rabbi Gottlieb’s name.”

  “That’s very generous of you,” Curran said.

  “A gift to the city,” David said.

  “Who all is in on it?”

  “Temple Beth Israel, Temple Beth Am, Temple Beth Shalom, Congregation Beth El,” David said, “and the new Kabbalah Center.”

  “Okay.” Curran snapped his notebook closed, but didn’t get up right away. He looked at all the books on the shelves, not in the wondrous way Jordan Rosen had a few months earlier—and it occurred to David, the motherfucker hadn’t returned his book—but rather in a seemingly more appreciative vein. “The People of the Book,” he said. “You know the Muslims came up with that?”

  “It’s an apt term.”

  “You reached out to any of the mosques in town?”

  “No,” David said.

  “You should,” Curran said. “Get them in on it.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “No charge,” Curran said. “I mean, you think you’re worried? Every day, there’s assholes with guns parked out in front of the mosque over on Morgan. Just goes to show you how crazy this world has become. People see what they want to see and you can’t tell them any different. Makes my job harder, I’ll tell you that much.” He stood up from this chair to leave, stared down at the note with Dr. Melnikoff’s number on it for a few seconds, then picked it up, shoved it inside his Day Runner. “I’ll see what I can do to get a little mention in the paper. No guarantees.”

  “Of course,” David said.

  David watched on the security feed as Harvey B. Curran exited the facility. He stepped into the shul for a moment, looked up at the vaulted ceiling, shook a volunteer’s hand—Max Mendelsohn, who’d served in Korea and liked to tell everyone about it—paused for a second in the Judaica shop, flipped through a couple books, and then finally mad
e his way back out to the parking lot, where, David noted, he was parked about five feet from where Agent Moss had died.

  No, David thought. Not died. Been killed.

  No.

  Murdered.

  He’d leave a stone for her, too.

  17

  For the first five days he was in Nevada, Matthew Drew avoided the Walmart Supercenter in Carson City. He tried not to even think about it. Instead, he flew out to Las Vegas, landing there during the third week of December, after a month back in Maryland. He promised his mother he’d be back for Christmas, though the truth was, he couldn’t imagine what they’d do on that day.

  His only goal was to find Sal Cupertine. And if Matthew died in that fight, fine. But some motherfuckers would be going out with him.

  So he walked in Hopper’s steps, just like Poremba suggested. Tried to get a room at the Royal Plaza Inn, where Jeff Hopper had stayed, two dingy blocks off the Strip, but it was roped off by the FBI already, since the bombers supposedly stayed there, so he ended up at the Courtyard Inn in Summerlin. It was all that he could find, the city overrun by something called the Power-Gen Conference, 25,000 energy and gas executives, politicians, start-up companies, and finance geeks who thought they could predict the future of energy and power had crowded into every decent hotel room near the Strip and off, the whole town thrilled for the influx of business.

  The day Matthew checked in, the Review-Journal had a fawning front-page interview with a Republican congressman from Texas and some New Jack energy CEO about how Enron was a blip, how the international heavyweights filling the convention center were about to bring forth a revolution, that the power industry was “on a roll,” how a combination of foreign and domestic oil production, wind energy, clean burning coal, and solar could create a “new power matrix” that would bring the world into “an illuminated future where you could always leave a light on.”

  There was also a tiny counterpoint article, on page three, that talked about the rampant corruption in the wind business overseas, how organized crime was getting its hooks into the building of massive wind farms in Italy, Japan, and Norway, and how the oil business in America, where slickwater fracturing was bringing on a new development rush, was once again riddled with scams, frauds, and crooked land deals, the same pack of hungry coyotes that always followed the industry, the government turning its head so that we all might pay a cent less for a gallon of unleaded.

  It disgusted Matthew. All that print for this bullshit. And yet, twelve pages into the newspaper, was an article about a dead kid in a crack house in Boulder City. A human less important than a lightbulb.

  He got to work that night.

  He walked through Jeff Hopper’s days in Las Vegas, tried to imagine what it might be like to know that your last days on earth would include billboards for Siegfried & Roy’s white tiger show, Rick Springfield in EFX, and Actually Legal Girls, whatever the fuck that meant, or maybe those were harbingers and Matthew was missing the point, that society had already crumbled, that death might be a relief from men in makeup taming a bleached cat.

  He visited high-end casinos and resorts like the Bellagio and Mirage, places that used to get their top-grade steaks from Kochel Farms before the company went out of business, no one wanting to get their meat from a farm that was hiding mob killers among their T-bones.

  He hit up the boutique hotels and family restaurants and burger joints, where Kochel Farms did a steady NY Strip and tri-tip and filet and premium-ground business. Swung by the delis and sandwich shops and meat markets, Las Vegas one of the few cities that still had butchers. Matthew figured they had to be fronts, though he couldn’t discern what you had to front in Las Vegas, where everything was legal. High-end pills and teenage prostitutes, most likely, or identity theft and fraud rings. You came in to buy a sandwich or get some chops, walked out with a mortgage in some other state. It was the kind of low-level racketeering that happened everywhere in the current climate, since neither the feds nor the cops really cared. If you weren’t flying commercial airplanes into major American structures filled with civilians, you could run whatever game you wanted.

  It was a gold rush for fuckups. You had to rip people off on the Enron level to really gain notice, and even then, who really gave a shit?

  A couple times, Matthew tried to sit down in a place, get a feel for the patrons and the proprietors, except Matthew wasn’t the undercover type. People noticed him. First there was his size. He got that. He was the kind of guy strangers didn’t mind calling a “big motherfucker.” But he also recognized that he’d begun to project a demeanor of casual violence.

  He’d understood that in a practical way before, when he and Jeff had been looking for Sal Cupertine, and of course when he was at Chuyalla, putting people on the ground once or twice a night. But now, trying to be inconspicuous in these mom-and-pop places in Henderson, Green Valley, and Summerlin, strings of Christmas lights everywhere, he understood the greater truth: On his best days—how long ago those were now—Matthew Drew looked like someone you didn’t want to fuck with. But these days? He looked like someone who wanted to fuck with you.

  Plus, he was armed for tactical assault. Brass knuckles in his pocket. A nine kept under his coat, already fixed with a silencer, another on his ankle. A shotgun in the trunk of his rental car. He’d flown across the country to fight a war without any apparent enemy, other than someone dialing a phone inside a Carson City Walmart. Was that Sal Cupertine? Matthew couldn’t make the evidence line up. If Sal Cupertine was able to call his wife, why was it just this one time? If he was able to call her, why wasn’t he able to get her and his kid? It was irrelevant now, Matthew supposed. If the feds didn’t want Sal Cupertine to find his wife and son, Sal Cupertine never would. Unless they decided Jennifer and William weren’t worth the time and money, which was possible.

  On his last day in Las Vegas, before making the drive north, he cruised by the private schools, the churches, and the synagogues that took Kochel Farms’ low-end products for their cafeterias: premade hamburger patties, hot dogs, cube steaks, all that. He didn’t bother walking into those places, because he realized what Jeff surely had, too: that he wasn’t going to find Sal Cupertine hiding in the bushes by the jungle gym at Prevatt Lutheran Prep, wouldn’t discover him leading afternoon Bible study at Our Lady of Las Vegas, was unlikely to see him mopping floors at Levine Torah Academy. It was the same empty feeling Matthew had been carrying around for years, and he felt it more acutely following the loss of his partner and now his sister. No one had seen anything. No one was even looking.

  After hitting his last spot, the Tikvah Preschool and Barer Academy at Temple Beth Israel in Summerlin, an expansive and well-guarded facility, what with the four paramilitary-looking men spread out in strategic locations along Hillpointe Road, a winding tree-lined street surrounded by million-dollar homes, bifurcated by a sprawling cemetery, Matthew circled back to Bruce Trent Park. He’d passed it on his way into Summerlin, saw the sign for that afternoon’s farmer’s market, and made a mental note to come back, get some food for the road trip to Carson City, make sure he knew where he was going.

  But now, after he parked his rental car and got out, he saw a boy pushing a girl on the swing set and a familiar melancholy landed on top of him. What the fuck was he doing, twenty-five hundred miles from his grieving mother in Maryland, chasing the ghost of his dead partner and the specter of Sal Cupertine through the haze of sadness over his sister? Why wasn’t he in the woods somewhere, by himself, getting in tune with nature? Why wasn’t he in some kind of institution? Why was he out here, chasing footsteps in sand?

  Because that’s what Las Vegas really was: sand. Matthew couldn’t get beyond the impermanence of the place. The Red Rocks were the only thing that seemed real. Not the sprawl of development he saw on either side of the Strip, thousands of homes being built for people who didn’t mind living in a place conceived to con people. Not t
he absurdity of the casinos built to look like Paris and New York and King Arthur’s castle and the pyramids of Giza. Not the tourists quoting gangster movies while they threw dice, as if it were all make-believe. The Mafia built Las Vegas on the bodies of the dead, then Hollywood made that seem glamorous, and then the public made it seem like culture. And a couple thousand miles away, Nina Drew lay buried in pieces.

  Matthew bought ten bucks’ worth of beef jerky and a bag of saltwater taffy for the drive to Carson City and then headed back to the parking lot. When he got to his rental car—he’d only been gone fifteen minutes—his windshield was stuffed with flyers. Don’t miss the two-for-one pizza special at Northside Nathans! Don’t miss the move-in bargains at the Adagio Luxury Condominiums! Don’t miss the Kabbalah classes that could help you “Energize and Invigorate Your Earning Potential!” A missing thirty-five-year-old woman named Melanie. A missing five-year-old dog that answers to Huey. A missing twelve-year-old cat named Tiger, needs its medication, will die without it. Come to Power-Gen and learn how to harness the future of energy!

  Everybody was missing something, all the time. Only energy persisted. He tossed it all into his backseat. He needed to get the fuck out of Las Vegas.

  •

  At nine the next morning, Matthew checked out of the Carson City Nugget Hotel and Casino, where he hadn’t really slept the night before, his nerves shot after being caught in a rainstorm between Las Vegas and Carson City, the rural highways a sludge of red dirt, roadkill, and clouds so low, he could barely get much over fifty miles per hour for fear he’d slam into some wandering cow. Ingesting the entire bag of taffy hadn’t helped. An eight-hour drive turned into eleven, Matthew getting into Carson City at two in the morning, a light snow falling around him. He expected to wake up surrounded by drifts, but the morning was clear and chilly, maybe 45 degrees, and dry, whatever snow had fallen in the night melted away.