Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  Copyright © 2014 Tod Goldberg

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goldberg, Tod.

  Gangsterland : a novel / Tod Goldberg.

  ISBN 978-1-61902-408-3 (eBook)

  1.Mafia—Fiction. 2.Criminals—Fiction. 3.Mystery fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.O35836G36 2014

  813’.54—dc23

  2014014920

  Cover design by Michael Fusco

  Interior Design by Neuwirth & Associates

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  For Wendy, my North, my South, my East and West.

  The foolish man knows not an insult, neither does a dead man feel the cutting of a knife.

  —THE TALMUD

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  April 1998

  When Sal Cupertine was going to kill a guy, he’d walk right up and shoot him in the back of the head. Shoot someone in the face, there’s a good chance they’ll survive. Sal never messed around with a gut shot or trying to get someone in the heart. It was stupid and made a mess. You get told to kill a guy, you killed a guy. You didn’t leave it up to variations in the wind and barometric pressure and all that Green Beret shit he saw on TV. No, Sal knew, you just went up and did it. Be professional about it and no one suffers.

  Still, he’d begun to appreciate that sometimes a little distance wasn’t a bad thing, particularly since he’d been picking pieces of those Donnie Brasco motherfuckers off himself for the last three hours. One of the guys had a mustache, and Sal was certain that the hair he’d finally been able to dig from beneath his thumbnail was from him, since it was coarse and light brown and didn’t have any blood on it, which meant it probably got jammed in there when he was choking him out. A mistake all around, that’s what that was. But what could he do now? Three hours sitting in the backseat of a Toyota Corolla aside Fat Monte, who wasn’t even fat anymore since he’d done six months and got hooked up with some steroids and had apparently hit the weights pretty hard, and all Sal had come to conclude was that he was probably only a few hours, at most, from his own death.

  Not that Sal was actually afraid, at least not yet. Fat Monte hadn’t taken his cell phone from him, which was a good sign; but it kept vibrating in his pocket, which to Sal meant his wife, Jennifer, was wondering where he was. She knew he wasn’t exactly a nine-to-five guy, knew that when he was off doing Family business that he could be gone until the next day, or might need to jet down to Florida or over to Detroit, but even in those cases he was pretty good about giving her a heads-up that he wouldn’t be back for dinner. The bosses understood that he couldn’t just disappear for weeks on end without a word, now that he had a kid. Because once the wives got talking, it was everybody’s problem. And on this day, of all days, he told Jennifer he’d pick up a prescription for her over at the twenty-four-hour Walgreens. His son, William, was in preschool over at Mt. Carmel Academy and brought home a dozen infectious diseases a week, or at least that’s what it felt like, all three of them constantly battling some kind of respiratory shit that winter. The codeine cough medicine was helping, and Sal promised to pick up a refill on his way home, and that all would have happened if he hadn’t lost it on those Donnie Brascos. And now here he was, maybe two hundred miles outside of Chicago in the middle of the night, nothing but black farmland on either side of the highway, Fat Monte breathing through his mouth next to him, two young guys up front—a half-Latino kid called Chema riding shotgun and Fat Monte’s cousin Neal driving, though he spent more time looking in the rearview mirror than at the road, which wasn’t helping Sal’s sense of dread.

  He wasn’t afraid to die, but he was afraid of how it would feel to leave Jennifer and William behind. It wasn’t something he’d thought about before, but today had been full of revelations. Dying was fine. He could handle that. He was only thirty-five, but he’d had enough close calls in the past that he wasn’t mystical about the process. He knew there’d come a time when he was on the other end of a gun and that would be that. But he didn’t want Jennifer and William to suffer for his stupidity. This whole deal was different. Preventable. That’s what kept niggling at him: Somehow all this was going to roll back on them.

  He fished his buzzing phone out of his pocket. If he was going to die tonight, at least he’d see his wife’s name one last time.

  “The fuck you doing?” Fat Monte said, though he didn’t snatch the phone from Sal’s hand. Interesting.

  “It’s been going off all night,” Sal said. He didn’t answer to Fat Monte, and he wasn’t about to start, so he kept himself calm, went the honest route. “My wife’s sick.”

  “Man, cops can triangulate that shit. You gotta lose that thing.”

  “You think they’re looking for me?”

  “Oh, you think your fingerprints aren’t on record? Your first mistake, and it was a doozy. A little restraint, Sal, and you’d be home right now.”

  “Yeah,” Sal said. “Well, things got clumsy. I admit that.”

  “You don’t have to admit shit,” Fat Monte said. “Everyone already knows it’s true.”

  Everyone. Sal hated to think about what that meant. Monte still hadn’t asked for the phone, so Sal just turned it off and stuffed it back into his pocket.

  One thing for certain, if it were Monte who’d fucked up, Sal would have already killed him. That much he knew. And he wouldn’t have bothered with any witnesses, either, especially not the half-Latino kid, whose neck Sal could see was covered in sweat; the bosses were all about diversifying lately, not keeping to the strict Italian edict, particularly not with so many good soldiers doing time. Supply and demand and a lack of good staff turned everything upside down.

  That’s what got him in trouble in the first place.

  Three new guys started hanging around the fringes of the Family, trying to get inside any way they could, coming up with stashes of top-of-the-line televisions, heroin, even a truck full of leather office furniture, to the point that the bosses couldn’t ignore them. The TVs and office furniture were one thing, but when they produced bags and bags of the highest-grade heroin—Sal was no good on heroin, it made him twitchy and overly aggressive, but he’d been convinced to give it a taste and had something like a religious sexual experience that night—the bosses began to wonder where they were connecting from, since the Family had controlled the heroin in Chicago for the better part of a century. So they told Sal to dig around, learn what he could, and report back when he knew anything definitive.

/>   This truth-digging expedition was a significant growth in his duties. He was good at the whole stalk-and-kill process, that was simple work, but now the Family wanted him to be the point man on the business side, too. Not just lurking in the shadows. Out in the daylight and everything. He hadn’t ever shown his face to a stranger in the game. At least not a stranger who wasn’t about to become a corpse. But this was a chance to become a legit player, no more midnight murders, more time with his wife and kid. Whatever. It was a chance for something better than the business of killing. He even hazarded to tell Jennifer that big things were coming for them, that if everything went right, in the next year maybe they’d be able to take a vacation or see about moving somewhere warmer, both of them sick of freezing every winter in Chicago. Jennifer was taking art classes at City College—she enrolled at Olive-Harvey all the way down on the South Side so no one would recognize her, which Sal thought was stupid since no other wives were going to go anywhere near a community college—and every other week or so she’d bring in a painting of the ocean or a drawing of palm trees swaying in the wind. Though she wasn’t really much of an artist, Sal liked the idea of her one day sitting on a beach chair all day and drawing.

  Plus, the downtime between jobs could be maddening for Sal, to the point that he started doing outside work just to make ends meet around the holidays and such—it was nothing to drive down to East Saint Louis to take out some Crip for a shop owner, or even over to Springfield to put one in the head of a cheating spouse—but that was also dangerous. The bosses allowed a little freelance work, but not to the level Sal had entered into recently. But when the kid is sick every other week and you don’t have health insurance, man, you do what you have to do.

  Sal was pretty sure they had been driving aimlessly for hours. Chema, the mixed kid, consulted his map every now and then and told Neal to take exits, and then Neal would drive around for a bit before getting back onto the highway in a different direction, not saying a word the whole time. Even Sal could sort of appreciate the irony of the situation: He’d been killing people for the Family for over fifteen years, and now he was on a night ride into the fields for shooting three of those Donnie Brasco rejects in the face that afternoon and choking out the fourth. It was amateur hour on his part, really. Just one simple mistake.

  He’d gone to a fancy hotel just off Michigan Avenue—the Parker House—to meet the Donnie Brascos and their Mexican connect on heroin. The meeting had gone well enough; the Mexican guy let him get a taste of some shit called Dark Chocolate Tar that immediately turned Sal’s brain into a fuzzy, calm place.

  Just a dab of Dark Chocolate Tar on his tongue gave him a serene feeling of total clarity. He left the hotel room feeling . . . good. The world was softer. He’d had a nice meeting with some enterprising businessmen, that’s all, and they seemed like perfectly decent people, relatively speaking. He wouldn’t have to kill them. They’d die in their own time—probably sooner than later because they were criminals—but he wouldn’t be the instrument of their death.

  He was already out on the street and thinking about maybe getting some goulash over at the Russian tearoom when a random thought struck. Who was actually staying at the hotel? Which was followed by: Why were they even meeting at a hotel? They could have done this whole deal in the parking lot of a Krispy Kreme. He stopped on the sidewalk and tried to remember the exact layout of the room he’d just been in no more than ten minutes earlier: a king-size bed; bags of heroin spread out on the desk next to the bed, buffet-style; and four guys in tracksuits standing around smiling. He’d gone into the bathroom to take a piss before leaving because when he was high he actually loved the way taking a piss felt, just one of those weird things, and he was impressed by how nice the bathroom was, how everything gold-plated shined.

  But why wasn’t there a tube of toothpaste on the counter? Why wasn’t there any luggage in the room? Sal closed his eyes, right there in the middle of the sidewalk, and focused on every last detail he could remember, because if there was one thing he was known for, it was his memory. He hated it because guys called him Rain Man, but facts were facts: He saw something once, he saw it forever.

  Sal turned around and walked back to the Parker House. By the time he was inside the lobby, the soft fuzz from the tiny bit of heroin he’d tasted had turned jagged, and all the mirrored surfaces inside the hotel were making him angry. The hotel was done up like it was 1935, pictures of Al Capone on the wall and Tiffany-style lamps everywhere, their light magnified a thousand times over by the ornate floor-to-ceiling-mirrors and shined marble floors. Every step Sal took toward the registration counter was met with another glint, another flash, until Sal swore people were snapping his photo.

  Oh, he thought, this will not do.

  He approached a young woman at the front desk.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I need to check out,” Sal said, and he gave the woman the room number. The woman stared at her computer screen for a few seconds, tapped at her keyboard a few times, and then sighed. “There a problem?” Sal asked.

  “Oh, no,” the woman said, “I’m sorry. It’s just that it looks like this is going through corporate. Did you make the reservation yourself?”

  “No,” Sal said, thinking now, realizing where this was all going, “my office made it.”

  “Ah, okay,” the woman said. “Well, it looks like you’ve got a government purchase order, so we can just go ahead and charge your incidentals to a card, or you can pay cash.”

  “Cash,” Sal said. “And could I get a copy of the bill?”

  “Of course,” she said. She made a few more taps on her keyboard, and within a few seconds Sal was looking at a bill for just over five hundred dollars in room service charges. He looked at the name on the bill—one Jeff Hopper with an address on Roosevelt Road in Chicago, the motherfucker not even bothering to hide the fact that he worked at the FBI. What an insult.

  Sal patted his back pocket. “Oh, darn it,” he said, “I think I left my wallet in the room. Could I get a key and then I’ll come right back down and finish checking out?”

  “Sure,” the woman said, because who wouldn’t trust an FBI agent named Jeff Hopper with a government purchase order and five hundred dollars in room service charges?

  General etiquette suggested that killing an FBI agent, let alone three, maybe four, presuming the Mexican was one of theirs, too, was not good business. You could kill a cop if he was crooked, or you could put a bullet into a city councilman if it looked like he was going to go running to the law to get out of his debts. But you just didn’t go around lighting up FBI agents. For the better part of the last decade, at least, the Family had a quiet détente with the authorities since although they moved a huge sum of heroin in and around Chicago and even up into Canada, they didn’t go around killing innocent children or housewives, and no one ever died in cross fire at the mall, not like the fucking kiddie gangsters in the baseball caps and baggy pants and lowered Pontiacs. They were running a professional business, and as long as the Family didn’t act too egregiously, the feds didn’t get involved. But in the last year, with the economy all moving to the Internet, the world got so much smaller, which meant you didn’t need to know someone locally to get your drugs or to get you a clean piece, and thus things had heated up between the Chicago Family and their rivals down south in Memphis for a smaller marketplace. And then there was online gambling—two months ago Sal was sent to Jamaica to kill a guy and ended up taking down five others just to make a point—all of which had caused the Family to retrench and consider different revenue streams. Killing everyone who took an interest in the business would be a twenty-four-hour-a-day proposition and would include half of Hollywood, too. But killing feds, specifically, was like asking for a RICO hailstorm.

  Sal knew and understood all that. But what became crystal clear to him on the walk from the registration counter to the elevator was that if anyone was going down, it was going to be him alone. They’d yank his
ass into the FBI field office and start showing him pictures of his family, start talking to him about how his son was going to be a foster kid raised in some butthole town or maybe even moved out to Indiana for “his own safety.” And then they’d show him some video of Jennifer getting boiled, showing her pictures of every person he’d ever killed, and then, what could she do? She’d have to roll on him. She sure as shit wasn’t going to do time, right?

  Sal did some quick math. How many people had seen his face? The three Donnie Brascos. The Mexican. The girl at the counter. There was surely a camera over the registration desk, which meant some rent-a-cop in the bowels of the hotel had probably put an eyeball on him.

  Six people. He could kill six people. Hell yeah. He’d done that plenty of times.

  But if he killed the girl and the rent-a-cop, he’d need to kill another dozen people just to get out of the hotel alive, and, frankly, he didn’t have enough bullets for that, nor any real desire for it. That wasn’t something he could return from.

  Shit.

  He’d control what he could control on his own, let the Family figure out how to take care of the girl, get any videotapes. They were good at that sort of thing, particularly at a union hotel like the Parker. But the feds, those guys needed to go.

  An old hotel like the Parker was actually a good place to kill a person: Thick walls and dense carpeting absorbed sound well, and, unlike some fucking Marriott, these old hotels didn’t lump rooms together as densely. Plus, they didn’t have huge banks of supermodern elevators shuttling hundreds at a time, opting instead for the charm of flying into the air in just a few ornate oak coffins. What really made the old elevators nice was that they still had stop buttons you could yank out to freeze the elevator in place, which Sal did when he got to the eleventh floor. In the amount of time Sal would take to do his job, if he did it right, no one would think twice about the elevator wait time.

  In retrospect, Sal should have found out if the Mexican was on the take, not that it mattered, really, since he was the first one Sal shot when he opened the hotel room door. In that case, it wasn’t personal; it was just about getting shit taken care of as quickly as possible. The first two Donnie Brascos went next, no problem, but the third guy decided he wanted to O.K. Corral the place; Sal eventually wrestled him to the ground and broke his windpipe. It was all done in maybe two minutes. Three at the most. And then Sal calmly walked down the hall to the service elevator and left.