Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “Now would be one of those opportunities to say you’re sorry.”

  “I’m not sorry,” David said.

  It was his fault, however. David had fucked up their supply line with many of the traditional families when he wouldn’t let his cousin Ronnie muscle in on their operations after Bennie got pinched, not that Bennie knew the whole story. David hadn’t told him how he’d killed that FBI agent, Jeff Hopper, who’d shown up at the temple. Didn’t tell him he’d pretended to be Hopper when he dimed out the whole Family to the Chicago Tribune. Didn’t even tell him how he’d worked the game perfectly, getting Hopper’s head to a Dumpster in Chicago a few weeks later, right after the story hit the streets. All he’d said was that Ronnie had tried to buy in after Bennie was arrested and that David—well, Sal—had threatened to kill him if he didn’t keep to his own business, that his Vegas card was pulled.

  Not that it mattered. They were triple fucked. Once Sal’s faked death was talked about on Good Morning America, no families east of the Mississippi would touch work that went through any part of Chicago, and likewise, Bennie wasn’t keen on having any direct or indirect communication with the Family, not while he was in county jail working on his own beef. And since the Family had vouched for Bennie’s burial service to Detroit and Cleveland after Bennie bought Sal from Ronnie, everyone now considered Bennie to be Chicago-affiliated. A fucking mess all around.

  “Every now and then,” Bennie said, “saying you’re sorry even when you’re not is a thing you should do. Makes you seem human. People like the sentiment.”

  “Guys the Chinese are sending,” David said, like Bennie hadn’t even spoken, “are young. Street kids.”

  “And?” Bennie said. “You get birth certificates before you did a job?”

  “I’m just saying,” David said, “teenagers got parents who give a shit.”

  On top of that, David just wasn’t comfortable with a bunch of Chinese guys who were obviously not Jews sitting on the tables. Bennie knew the Triads from the Wild Horse, where they moved girls in and out over the years, Bennie and the Triads’ guy in San Francisco having done business since the late ’80s, escort shit, laundering chips, even pills back in the day, though Bennie was out of that now. Drugs, you depended on addicts and criminals not smart enough to get off their own block to do business.

  Bennie Savone wasn’t putting his livelihood in the hands of people who were still wrapped up in what public housing development they represented, and upper management in the Triads didn’t get down like that, either. They were a cash-and-influence business stateside. That was Bennie’s game, too . . . though David was beginning to wonder how much of either was enough. David was in the game to earn a living, initially, and then he was in the game because he couldn’t get out of it even if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to, not until he fucked everything up, and now? Well, now he was in the game for good. Bennie, on the other hand, had enough money that he could live comfortably out of it all . . . if it wasn’t for the fact that he knew where all the bodies were buried, literally, and that meant someone would come for him if he tried to walk away. Which is probably part of why he bought David in the first place, in addition to his desire to run this long con.

  “Our options are limited right now. I get out, we can be pickier.” Bennie paused, working through something. “You trust them? The Chinese?”

  “I don’t trust anybody,” David said. “But I’m not working with the living ones.”

  Bennie nodded. “Ford asking any questions?”

  “Never,” David said.

  “That’s good,” Bennie said, still working in his mind. The thing about Bennie Savone: He liked people to think he was stupid, liked people to underestimate him. Because he wasn’t stupid and he shouldn’t be underestimated, and that gave him an advantage in everything, self-awareness not exactly a trait of most crooks. David hadn’t taken him seriously to start with, seeing as he was used to working for Ronnie, who was a good businessman, but didn’t see the bigger picture like Bennie did. Bennie liked the slow bleed. “Any collection problems?”

  “Everything is smooth,” David said. “First-quarter tuition comes in next week.” Temple Beth Israel had a preschool, the Tikvah, and a K–12 operation rolling now, the Barer Academy, six hundred students, the temple minting money every day, never mind that they were also loaning tuition money out to families who couldn’t afford the full out of pocket, charging 12 percent interest, which was a shitty vig in David’s opinion, but it would be bad PR to be charging more than Citibank did. Though if you were late, that number jumped to 23 percent, which was better, but still six points less than Visa.

  If someone missed two payments, the temple would start getting liens right away, none of that Fair Debt Reporting crap, the temple got every family to sign contracts allowing property liens, never mind the public shame aspect. Worst-case scenario, David figured if someone had to accidentally get electrocuted at home to get their life insurance to pay the debt, well, then he’d go and fuck with their pool light. It hadn’t come to that, thankfully, because the nice thing was that everyone was rich as fuck these days.

  “How the donations looking?”

  “We’ll get our bump a little early,” David said. “Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur hit in mid-September.” David knew that Bennie had no concept of how the Jewish calendar worked, and the fact was David didn’t get it either. Rabbi Kales had tried to explain the lunar calendar, the concept that there were no hours in a day, only light and the absence of light. David just couldn’t get the reasoning behind it, when science had it all pretty much settled. Rabbi Kales told him, eventually, that if he had a problem with it, he should take it up with Maimonides.

  “Shit, that’s another six, eight weeks.”

  “There a problem?”

  “Some liquidity issues, that’s all,” Bennie said, a touch too dismissively. He yanked a handful of grass out by the root, smelled it, tossed it into the water. “That dentist fucker? His family has me in civil court. They already got two million from the insurance company and now they’re trying to get another five out of me. Pay for his long-term care, lost wages, everything. Fucker could live fifty years or he could die in his sleep tonight.”

  “I’d write the check,” David said.

  “You got an extra five million sitting around?”

  In fact, David had about two hundred grand in cash squirreled away in safe deposit boxes around the city, and that was just what he’d been able to skim. He didn’t dare keep the money in his house, since Bennie had closed-circuit cameras hidden all over the fucking property, plus if trouble came down and his house was surrounded, last thing he wanted was for the cash to go to the feds. That money belonged to his wife and kid. Anyway, nice thing about Las Vegas, everyone kept cash in safe deposit boxes. Monday morning, 9:00, there was a line of strippers, bouncers, bartenders, dealers, and pit bosses making their deposits from the weekend and none of them were putting it into their checking accounts, and no one thought any different about it.

  David figured he needed closer to a million, cash, before he could make his move. Get his wife and kid, fly to South America, wherever Butch and Sundance ended up; that seemed nice, until the army showed up. But he wouldn’t get there if Bennie kept getting nicked. Or if Bennie kept running the business himself, since he controlled the flow of cash. It was a double-edged sword David hadn’t quite figured how to grasp. Bennie had assured him from the start that he’d be getting paid handsomely, had shown him the ledgers, but didn’t let him hold his own money.

  “I pay,” Bennie continued, “every pervert who got punched in the mouth at my club is gonna come after me. I’ll be in court the rest of my life.” He picked a seed from his teeth, then flicked it out from under his fingernail.

  “They don’t want to be embarrassed, you said so yourself,” David said. “First guy who sues you, get a picture of him in the newspaper, have a
girl from the club tell Curran that she remembered the guy shooting his load on her, and believe me, they’ll be happy to settle for next to nothing. Maybe you have to cut a couple checks. Two, three grand and they get to tell their buddies they beat the Mob, big deal.”

  “Look at you,” Bennie said, “spending all my money.” He rubbed at the scar on his neck, from where he’d had his thyroid removed. It made him look hard core, like his throat had been slit and he’d lived, which, David supposed, was true, but it was actually a nervous habit Bennie had, the only one David had noticed, other than his propensity to pace. He was quiet for about a minute, thinking. David sensed his idea was taking root.

  Bennie Savone wasn’t a boss like Ronnie Cupertine was a boss, didn’t run a crew of a hundred-plus guys, wasn’t moving all the opiates in five states, plus back and forth into Canada, didn’t have a Mexican street gang on his payroll, wasn’t running multilevel rackets and gambling businesses, basically didn’t get down like Chicago at all. He ran his strip club, he ran Temple Beth Israel (kind of), had his construction outfit, took a little juice on some books, but was largely an independent contractor providing an indispensable service with the funeral and burial business, which made him unique. Didn’t answer to Chicago, New York, or Florida, never mind any of those Dixie Mafia or LA pussies. Bennie Savone had his own thing and, yeah, when an outfit came to do business in Las Vegas, even though it was an open city, they tended to come through Bennie first, not the other way around. But there wasn’t the structure of the Family in Chicago. No underboss. No capos. None of that Godfather shit. It was all a series of firewalls. There was Bennie. There was David. There used to be Rabbi Kales, but he’d been put on the farm. There was Ruben, handling the funeral business, and then there was Bennie’s crew, not that David ever saw them. Oh, he saw the construction workers hitting nails on the temple’s campus, but those were mostly Mexican laborers and actual employees of Savone Construction Partners, not guys running jobs.

  “If I were you,” David said, “I’d take the dentist out. You already did your time on him. If he dies now, you’re done. He’s off the books. And then I’d give his family money anyway.”

  “You would?”

  “Some appropriate amount.”

  Bennie cocked his head. “He’s in a care facility in Omaha.”

  “I could make a road trip,” David said.

  “No,” Bennie said, “you couldn’t.”

  “You afraid I’ll run?”

  “No,” Bennie said. “You got nowhere to go.” He fished through his bag of seeds, but it was just husks and salt, so he dumped the remnants into the grass, tossed the empty bag into the water, watched it float there. “You know someone in Chicago calls themselves Peaches?”

  “No. I don’t know anybody named Peaches.”

  “What’s with you guys and the names and shit?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “Tradition, I guess.”

  “I’m hearing some words about him being the new number two out there,” Bennie said. This was what Bennie really wanted to talk about, though it was all connected. Every problem they had stemmed from the same tree. “And that he’s putting people in the ground.”

  “Like who?”

  “Mothers and fathers and wives and kids and sisters and shit,” Bennie said. “Going into nursing homes and hotshotting old-timers. Taking motherfuckers out on the street in Boca. Staging car accidents. All kinds of shit. I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.”

  David tried to think of anyone who might be calling themselves Peaches, but it didn’t ring any bells. But then it occurred to him that the order of succession was probably pretty jacked up in Chicago these days. The only close blood relative Ronnie had in the game was . . . well, Sal Cupertine. And Sal’s son. Ronnie’s own son, James, was slow. “He from out of town?”

  “Personally? Sounds to me like Russians,” Bennie said.

  David used to not give a shit about the Russians. He didn’t like the way they operated in Chicago, in an ethical sense, killing families and pets, or all the purported ex-KGB fucks in Suburbans running counterfeit schemes and protection rackets out in Skokie, or that high-stakes poker shit they started to get in on for a while around the colleges, juicing twenty-year-olds for their student loan money, or even those old-school Chi-West Ukrainians with their goofy sweaters and allegiance to a bleak series of gray streets, stabbing Puerto Ricans for looking at them wrong. No, these days, because of the stories of his congregation, he thought about shit that had gone down in 1917. All that Pale of Settlement mishegoss. Pogroms and show trials and Cossacks chasing down toddlers with dogs. That shit pissed him off like it happened yesterday, because, in effect, it had. Three years ago, he was blissfully unenlightened. Now, could be he went to work and Gordon Simon would be waiting for him, wanting to talk about his nightmares, how he’d seen his little sister Lizi being killed on the streets of Odessa in his dreams again, set on fire, her ashes left to blow in the wind.

  “Ronnie wouldn’t be in business with Russians,” David said.

  “You think I’m working with the Triads because I enjoy their company?” David supposed not. “Global economy, Rabbi. Get used to it. That provincial shit is twentieth-century thinking. We’re twenty-first-century gangsters now.”

  “You know the story of the Jews of the Roman ghetto?”

  “Let me guess,” Bennie said, “they suffered and then died?”

  “No,” David said, “they were the one people who never knelt before Caligula. Fifteen hundred years of Holy Roman emperors and what the Jews did was never change, never paid homage to the ruling assholes. They set themselves on fire before they’d let someone baptize them.”

  “So, yeah, they suffered and then they died, like I said.”

  “They died pure of belief, souls intact.”

  “You saying you want us to go back to selling whiskey in olive oil bottles and stealing cigarettes?”

  “No,” David said. “What I’m saying is, root pulls are some shit from the old times. Burn the graves and salt the earth. All that.” He thought about it for a second. Thought about what it might mean for Jennifer and William. Thought about getting on a fucking bus, getting to Chicago in a few days, breaking into his house in the night, taking his family, running to . . . where? Wasn’t that always the question? “I don’t see it with the Russians. They wouldn’t kill for the Family. And they’d be no one’s number two. They got too much invested in Europe to have word get out that they’re doing dog work for Cosa Nostra, you know? Because Ronnie’s just gonna flip them to the FBI eventually and the story will be that the Russians tried to muscle the Mafia out of Chicago and lost. And then it’s a war. No one wants that.”

  “What about the Indians? Native Americans,” Bennie said. “Whatever the fuck they’re called now. Fuck if I know. If you people made it easy and went by normal names, I wouldn’t need to DNA-test my information with you. Give me a motherfucker named Scott every now and then.”

  Across the way, the string band was playing “Unforgettable” and David could see some of the old folks were already taking to the dance floor, the bride and groom not even back from taking pictures yet. Put on Nat King Cole and old Jews slow-danced. He saw it at every wedding and bar or bat mitzvah he went to.

  Doing business with the Russians and Chinese didn’t make sense to David. If some shit went down, they could just run back to their own countries. Working with the Gangster 2-6 back in Chicago made sense—the only place they had to flee to was their block or back to prison, two places they could be taken out if the need arose. David didn’t see himself flying to Beijing to kill a motherfucker. But Ronnie was never going to have someone from the 2-6 at his shoulder.

  Chicago had controlled the street gangs for decades. It was never equal footing. Hard to see the boys falling in line with that. They’d just call Detroit, muscle up. Align with Memphis if they had to.<
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  The Native gangs, that was different. They owned property. Casinos. Farmland. Had their own cops. Made better sense.

  “Could be,” David said.

  “You been in contact with anyone out there?” Bennie asked.

  “No,” David said, which was true, save for getting his wife some money after all this shit with Hopper went down, but nothing since. But now he was thinking about it. Because this news? It was out of the ordinary. And out of the ordinary meant Ronnie was making some kind of move. He’d survived David tipping off the press about his operations, but he was weak now. He really only had two moves left, if shit got untenable: Kill Sal, or give him up to the authorities, hope he got a plea deal out of it.

  “Haven’t tried to get in touch with your wife?”

  “I don’t have a wife.”

  “Say you did. Would you be talking to her on the down low?”

  “Never,” David said, which was a lie. If he thought he could, he would. But he wasn’t about to put Jennifer and William in jeopardy. One consensual phone call with Jennifer and she could be looking at time; feds might even try to put fifteen accessory-to-murder charges on her if they were feeling particularly litigious.

  “Comes to it,” Bennie said, “you may need to go underground for a bit. We gotta stay nimble, understand?”

  “You put me in another meat truck,” David said, “you better be next to me.”

  Bennie then cupped his hand around his mouth, shouted at his kid, “Come on in, Soph, let’s get you some dinner.” The wedding party on the dock turned and looked, the bride and groom giving a big enthusiastic wave to Bennie, Bennie waving right back. Best day of their lives, all right. “You better get back to your duties, Rabbi,” Bennie said eventually. “Looks like the bride and groom are about to make their big entrance.”