Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  “Why not?” Bennie asked.

  “Why not what?”

  “Why haven’t you left the country?”

  “My wife,” David said, “is always getting on me about wanting to go to the Bahamas. Once we had a kid, though, you know how that shit goes.”

  “You don’t have a wife,” Bennie said. Annoyed again. Or just being nasty. The prick.

  “No,” David said, “I guess I don’t.”

  “What about college?”

  “I was already in the business full on by the time I was nineteen,” David said.

  “You ever hear of a place called Harvard?” Bennie asked.

  “Yeah,” David said.

  “You ever hear of a place called Europe?”

  David thought he knew where this was headed. “Yeah, I’ve heard of both of those places.”

  “You think there’s a bunch of guys like you and me running around Harvard and Europe? You think if you walked into Harvard just to ask where the toilet was that they’d tell you?”

  “Me or the new me?”

  “The guy-who-shoots-people-in-the-back-of-the-head you.”

  “I don’t know,” David said.

  “Sure you do,” Bennie said. “Some gangster walks into Harvard and asks where the toilet is, they’re gonna take him down the service elevator and show him where the janitors piss. Same thing in Europe. Say you walk into, I don’t know, The Hague. Do you know what The Hague is?” David told him he didn’t. “It’s where they have trials for war crimes. The courtroom of the world, basically. It’s in the Netherlands. You know what happens if you and me walk in there right now? They throw us against the wall and frisk us, ask us if we’re fucking Cosa Nostra, like either of us even speaks Italian, throw us in a cell with a bunch of guys with towels on their heads.”

  “What are we doing in the Netherlands?” David asked.

  “Forget the Netherlands. The point is this: You ever see any Jews getting shown to the service elevator or on trial for war crimes? You ever see anyone named David Cohen getting jacked up on RICO charges?”

  “The difference is,” David said, “they got half the world trying to kill them all the time.”

  “Exactly,” Bennie said. “You mess with one Jew, you’re messing with all of them.”

  David thought about this, thought about how he was seriously concerned about his own cousin pulling his card over the shooting . . . which was a valid concern, considering he was pretty sure Fat Monte had killed his cousin Neal that same night, just to close the circle of information. Even the Kosher Nostra were all about family, literal family and cultural family. David couldn’t think of a single instance of one of those guys getting lit up.

  “So,” David said, “you want me to be your guy on the inside with the Jews?”

  Bennie started to smile, but then stopped himself, rubbed at that spot on his neck. He was a strange cat. There was something cunning about him, about the way he never came at you directly with information, instead let you come up with questions. “You really able to remember shit like they say?” Bennie asked.

  “I guess so,” David said. Up ahead, David could see the looming casinos of the Strip, including one that looked like a giant syringe.

  Bennie got off the freeway on Rancho and turned left, wound around a few streets, and then pulled into a parking lot beside a sprawling park. There was an RV in front with two black guys sitting on plastic chaise lounges on the blacktop, smoking cigarettes and roasting hot dogs over a tiny barbecue. The RV had a painting of the sun setting over a mountain lake across its entire back end. It had a personalized Arizona license plate that said RAMBLER, and the license plate frame said RALPH & LINDA’S WAGON.

  “These guys, they’re gonna get that shit out of your mouth.”

  “They doctors?” David asked.

  “The guy who did your surgery had an accident,” Bennie said.

  “I’ll wait for him to heal,” David said.

  “It wasn’t that kind of accident,” Bennie said, and he pointed at one of the black guys—he was maybe fifty-five, had a thick gray beard, and wore frameless glasses—“He used to be a doctor. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “When was he a doctor? Vietnam?”

  “He’s someone we go to when we can’t use our Blue Cross,” Bennie said. “All he needs to do is snip a couple tension wires.”

  “That are in my mouth,” David said.

  “Your choice, Rabbi. Either he does it or maybe we go back to your place and have Slim Joe do it. He has pretty steady hands when he’s not on the meth.”

  David didn’t think Slim Joe was on meth. The kid was too lazy to cook. But he got the point, so he stepped out of the Mercedes.

  “Which one of you is the doctor?” David asked. He wanted to make sure at least Bennie knew who was who.

  “That would be me,” Gray Beard said. He didn’t bother to look up or even to stop turning his dog over the open flame.

  “This is the guy I was telling you about,” Bennie said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet—took five bills out and handed them to Gray Beard, who then handed the money to the other man, who counted the money, nodded twice, and slipped it into his sock. “How long is this gonna take?”

  Gray Beard stood up and walked over to David. “Smile big,” he said, and David did. Gray Beard peered into his mouth and shook his head once, almost imperceptibly. “Who did this work?”

  “Dr. Crane,” Bennie said.

  Gray Beard took a hold of David’s chin and moved it from side to side. “That hurt?”

  “Yeah,” David said.

  “Less or more than it did a month ago?”

  “Less,” David said.

  “That’s good, at least,” he said. David didn’t like that at least part. “You get titanium rods in there?”

  David had no idea, so he just shrugged, but Bennie said, “Yeah, for the elongation.”

  “I’m going to stick my finger in your mouth,” Gray Beard said to David, not asking, just letting him know it was about to happen. The finger smelled like a combination of cigarette smoke and deli mustard, tasted like that, too, and for a moment David thought he might vomit, which would be a particularly difficult proposition in his current position. “Just breathe through your nose,” Gray Beard said quietly. He began to poke around toward the back of David’s mouth, pressing alternately on the gums on the top and bottom of his mouth. “That hurt? You just nod your head.”

  David nodded his head.

  “Dr. Crane, he tied the wires too high up around the bicuspids and molars so that your gums would grow over the wires,” Gray Beard said. “He was old-school that way. He wanted people to really hate their doctors.” Gray Beard took his fingers out of David’s mouth and then disappeared into the RV for a moment, returning with a small compact mirror, which he handed to David. “Take a look at your gums,” he said. “You’re about eighty percent infected.”

  His gums were dark red and, he could see, had grown around the wires holding his jaw together. He’d noticed this before but figured that’s just how it was done. Bennie came over and looked, too.

  “So, what are you saying?” Bennie asked.

  “This is going to be bloody,” Gray Beard said. “Another hundred, I’ll shoot your friend up with enough Novocain that he won’t feel a thing. Two hundred, I’ll put him under.”

  “Just get this shit out of my mouth,” David said.

  “You don’t want to be numb?” Gray Beard said.

  “I just want this shit out of my mouth,” David said.

  “We’re talking two hours of me cutting and pulling wires out of your soft tissue,” Gray Beard said. “He even wired up your wisdom teeth. That’s going to be a real bitch. I’m being real candid with you.”

  “Just get this shit out of my mouth,” David said.

  Gray Beard looked at Bennie, presumably for approval, and Bennie threw his hands up. “Whatever he wants,” Bennie said.

  “Give me and my
assistant here a couple minutes to get everything sterilized,” Gray Beard said.

  Gray Beard and his assistant went inside the RV then, leaving Bennie and David alone. David thinking that if they brought out their needles and shit to be sterilized on the barbecue that he’d just pull the wires out himself, infection be damned.

  “I would have paid another hundred,” Bennie said.

  “I appreciate that,” David said, and he did. “But I’m not letting that motherfucker shoot me up with anything.”

  “I think his assistant does that,” Bennie said.

  “Even worse,” David said.

  Bennie smiled then. An actual, genuine smile. “I’m going to make this worth it for you,” Bennie said. “Five, ten years from now? When you and me are running this city? We’re gonna sit somewhere and laugh about this.”

  Ten years from now, David thought, I’ll be on a beach somewhere with my wife and kid. And you’ll probably be dead, and I’ll probably have killed you. It was a good thought. A thought that made David smile, though with his jaw wired shut, he was pretty sure no one could really tell what emotion he was trying to convey. And that was good, too.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Jeff Hopper was still studying for his MA in criminology at the University of Illinois, he’d occasionally stuff his books and lunch into his backpack and jog the one mile to the FBI field office on Roosevelt to study between classes. It was a silly thing, really, since he wasn’t allowed inside. This was the late 1980s, and Jeff was already in his early thirties but still somehow felt like everything was possible, including working as a special agent for the FBI. He knew it wasn’t a glamorous job, not like how the recruiters who came to campus said it was; that it, in all likelihood, was just as mundane on a day-to-day basis as any job. But at least there was some grander purpose to it, which appealed to Jeff.

  He’d been a cop in Walla Walla, Washington, for a decade prior, and while the work was steady and not terribly dangerous—he unholstered his gun once the whole time, to break up a fight between two drunk migrant farm workers—it also wasn’t the kind of heroic thing Jeff had imagined for himself while growing up in Seattle. He certainly never saw himself living in a city like Walla Walla, with its charming downtown and flowing wheat fields and . . . that was about it. He’d made a life there, even bought a house over by the country club, had managed to find a little romance with the occasional visiting professor at Whitman College (Jeff liked knowing these affairs were on a clock, since no one visiting Walla Walla dared to stay in town very long). But when the city announced it had to cut its police force in half during a particularly ugly budget crisis, Jeff readily stepped forward to take the parachute the city offered. He had a bit of money saved, the result of being single and well paid in a shitty place, and he started looking at graduate schools.

  He knew he couldn’t get into the CIA since he wasn’t ex-military and his undergrad degree from the University of Washington probably tabbed him as a tad too liberal for those guys. Age was likely a factor, too. The FBI, on the other hand, liked guys who were a bit older, more mature, happy to do investigative work from a desk if need be, and so that became Jeff’s goal. Not the desk, exactly, though Jeff figured that was where he might start out. And if the FBI didn’t pan out? Maybe the NSA. And if NSA didn’t work? Jeff had a full list of options written out on a yellow legal pad, and he even conceded that a job doing special investigative work for the IRS would be cool, maybe catching mob guys in tax evasion schemes or something. What Jeff Hopper wanted most of all was to wear a suit, a really nice suit that concealed a gun, and he wanted to stop bad guys and save America.

  More than a decade later, though, standing in his office and staring out the window at that berm he used to sit on (even during clear days in the winter), Jeff wondered just what the hell he thought he was trying to prove. Did he think the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover would walk across the street and offer him a job? Did he think he’d assimilate some divine intelligence simply by breathing the same air as the agents he saw walking in and out every day? How did he not know that it would take him so long just to get into that building, that he’d bounce from Quantico to Kansas City to Cleveland to Rochester and then, finally, to Chicago, at which point his romantic vision of being in the FBI would be trumped by the hard understanding that he hated the feel of a tie around his neck? Had he even learned anything while sitting out there, what with all the exhaust from passing cars and trucks? It didn’t seem possible.

  Few things seemed possible to Special Agent Jeff Hopper anymore. For the last six months, he’d spent more time in his therapist’s office than his own. He knew intuitively that he wasn’t responsible for the death of his three colleagues and their CI, that he hadn’t pulled the trigger on them, that legendary hit man Sal Cupertine had done it. If he knew anything about Sal Cupertine, it was this: If he wanted you dead, you were dead. And he understood that those men—Cal Hodel, Keith Baldwin, and Derek Lewis, he reminded himself that they were people and not just men—knew that working undercover came with its own unique set of dangers, including death. All that was clear to him. You deal with wild animals, you can’t be surprised when they act like wild animals, his therapist told him, and he agreed.

  That didn’t change the fact that Jeff had lacked specific attention to detail—the billing information on the hotel bill, of all things—and that the result had been fatal. Four times fatal. And though his therapist told him not to blame himself, not to doubt his own abilities, the FBI had already made a few decisions for him: They’d knocked him down a grade, from senior special agent to special agent, and though they allowed him to stay on the task force looking into the workings of the Chicago crime families, he’d been completely shunned by the other agents. Not that Jeff blamed them. It had been his idea to get Cal, Keith, and Derek into the Family, and for the previous year that’s all he’d done, little by little, getting those three established locally.

  Used to be the best way to get information was to hope for a snitch; the problem these days was that the Family was simply too good. They hadn’t made an arrest that stuck for almost a decade—at least not of anyone significant, just soldiers, the kinds of guys whose level of information was so limited they couldn’t snitch. So the only way in was to go that whole Donnie Brasco route. But Cal, Keith, and Derek were serious men. Jeff liked that. Liked that they wanted to get bad people off the streets. Liked that they didn’t think the FBI’s policy of staying away from the Chicago families since they were better than the Crips and Bloods and Mexican gangs was worth shit. A criminal enterprise was a criminal enterprise, and Jeff was proud that those three men agreed with him.

  It had been Jeff’s idea to let them meet up with Sal Cupertine without a strike force in the next room. Jeff knew that Sal was a careful and considerate killer—if such a thing existed—that he wouldn’t shoot up a public place. It wasn’t his style, which is why on that day six months earlier, he was still a free man. Plus, if what everyone said was true and Sal had the memory of an elephant, it wasn’t safe to have a bunch of other guys waiting around in case something happened. If by chance Sal saw one of them and then saw him again on some later date . . . well, it would be trouble. Besides, it was just an exploratory meeting. The guys went for it, and why not? There were three of them, after all, plus their CI, and all three were top-notch FBI agents. Sal Cupertine, at the end of the day, was just a man with a gun.

  “Excuse me, Agent Hopper?” Jeff turned from the window and saw a young man in his doorway with a cart stacked high with boxes. Jeff didn’t recognize him, which probably meant he was one of the clerks who’d been hired in the last few months. Maybe even a criminology student like he’d been. “Where would you like these?”

  “Just leave them in the corner,” Jeff said. He watched the clerk unstack the boxes, each one marked s. cupertine in black marker with a date starting from 1983, and wondered how it was that a guy who’d been killing people for the mob for over fifteen years had never spent even a
night in jail, but had ten boxes of intelligence in an FBI office just down the street from his house. The last box the kid unpacked was the one Jeff was most interested in—marked 1998, it contained the report on what was purported to be Cupertine’s body. There were no dental records or fingerprint records to be found, because there were no teeth left in the head when it was located, nor even a jaw, and no hands or feet, either.

  In fact, all the cadaver dogs turned up (conveniently in a garbage dump owned by the Family) was half of a head, charred to the skeleton, with a hole from a .38 in the back, attached to just the trunk of a body, also burned to the bone. Helpfully, Sal Cupertine’s wallet was also found nearby. His driver’s license, which Cupertine inexplicably kept current, contained the only verified description of the man in the last decade: six foot, 215 pounds, brown hair, hazel eyes. He had an olive complexion, which made him look a bit more exotic than he was, since both of his parents, and their parents, too, were born and raised in Chicago. His file said he had a tattoo on his arm of an eight ball, which would have been a good identifying mark if the corpse happened to have had an arm.

  It was all too convenient, though not without precedent, that the Family would kill one of their own and make his body so easy to discover. The Family hadn’t done business in Chicago for the better part of a century without knowing how to make amends, even to the authorities. How many dead crooked cops had turned up over the years? Twenty-five? Fifty? Enough to be both a shame to the city as well as a tidy solution. Yes, there were bad cops . . . and this is what happened to them. So here was the body of Sal Cupertine, offered up as a peace offering to the FBI. The FBI hadn’t bothered to investigate much further to see if it really was Cupertine—Jeff knew it wasn’t, it just wasn’t possible—because the point was clear enough: We’ve given one back to you.

  “Can I get you anything else?” the clerk asked.

  Jeff looked up from the paperwork and saw that the clerk had arranged all the information into a kind of order—boxes containing information on Cupertine’s presumed victims were put into a nice pyramid, boxes about his close family members in another, boxes of general information in another—which Jeff rather appreciated. “What’s your name?” Jeff asked.