Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  The Chuyalla were the biggest employer for miles, the hotel and casino the best thing to happen to the region since a women’s prison was built up in Fond du Lac a few years earlier. In fact, the tribe had its own cops, its own courts. The Chuyalla was one of the few Wisconsin tribes that operated its own justice system, everything except prisons.

  There was an old guy in a velvet vest named Curtis who sat on a stool next to the sink and expected money for handing you a towel. When Matthew felt low—which was often lately—he thought about Curtis, who had to be pushing eighty, and how he spent his whole day listening to, and smelling, people’s bodily functions. Not even doctors got paid enough for that indignity, not even the ones who were curing cancer or doing brain surgery. Because people never did really heal, always waiting for the next thing to break.

  But he didn’t really empathize with Curtis. At some point, he’d made a choice—this was his life. So when he spied Curtis there, with the jaundiced caste to the skin around his eyes and the picked-open scabs on his forearms, Matthew didn’t want to help the man out with a dollar. He wanted to tell him to move to Oregon, where they had assisted suicide. Stop waiting for the end. It was already here.

  “How you doing, boss?” Curtis asked.

  “Fine,” Matthew said. He was heading to his preferred stall, the handicapped one at the very end. In Matthew’s experience, anytime someone called you “boss” what they were really saying was: I think you’re a fucking asshole.

  Matthew closed the door to the stall and locked it, sat down, closed his eyes, counted backward from two hundred. Then he started over from three hundred and did it again and again and again. He didn’t even need to go to the bathroom. He just wanted to not worry about anything for a few minutes. It’s bad when your one sanctuary is literally the shittiest place on earth, but that’s where Matthew Drew found himself these days. He was working in a fucking Indian casino because he needed the money, looking the other way when Native Mob OGs bought chips in the morning and cashed them in at midnight, never once playing a single hand in between and beating up on any rival gangs who showed their face on the game floor.

  Lucky to even have this job.

  Twenty-seven years old going on infinity.

  Ten minutes later, Matthew stepped out of the toilet and found Ronnie Cupertine at the pink marble urinal, one arm propped up against the tile wall. Curtis was gone from his spot, probably at the buffet, getting his free breakfast of pancakes and yesterday’s link sausage. Matthew was pretty sure he was hallucinating. He’d only ever seen Ronnie through his binoculars or on TV, acting like a tough guy in his car dealership commercials, always in a trench coat and hat, blowing holes into credit-rating reports with his fake tommy gun.

  In Matthew’s head, Ronnie Cupertine was maybe six foot two, six foot three, but wasn’t it funny how distance and anger made someone bigger in your mind? Because Ronnie couldn’t be more than five nine, Matthew saw, even with the little heel on his dress shoe. Back in the day, Ronnie was supposed to have been a hands-on bad guy, hammers and blowtorches and dismemberments with rusty screwdrivers and such. It seemed inconceivable, looking at him now in his tailored slacks, his perfect white shirt, his platinum President Rolex, his manicured nails, his understated black cufflinks. But Matthew had listened to the old FBI wire recordings, had read all the files, had seen the pictures of the decomposed bodies: Tino Loria, under the floorboards of his mother’s house in Wheaton; his brother Frank, missing his hands, feet, and ears, under a swing set in a backyard in Buffalo Grove; Mike Zornes, built into the community pool in Mundelein; of course, Chema Espinoza, cut up, burned, and dumped in the Poyter Landfill.

  Ronnie was always smart about having his boys bury their bodies away from the crime, out in the suburbs where no one bothered to look, at least not until someone snitched or new construction came along. The exception was when he wanted obvious messages to be sent, which was usually when he had his cousin Sal shoot someone in the back of the head, in public, because who was going to say anything? Or the time Ronnie and his boys pushed Sal’s father, who they called Dark Billy, right off the IBM Building while it was still under construction. Newspapers called it a construction accident, except Dark Billy Cupertine never did a day of construction work in his life, other than building a network for heroin distribution. Ronnie Cupertine probably hadn’t personally killed someone since then, maybe longer, but only because he’d been effective enough to get other people to do that work for him.

  “Good morning, boss,” Matthew said, and Ronnie jerked back from the urinal, splashing piss onto his thousand-dollar shoes.

  “Jesus fuck,” Ronnie said.

  It was him all right.

  Ronnie glared at Matthew for two, three, four seconds like he was trying to figure out if Matthew was some asshole up from Memphis, hiding out in the bathroom waiting to kill him. So Matthew gave him that smile he used with people he was meeting for the first time, the one that showed off his perfect teeth and the one dimple on his left cheek. Matthew was always bigger than most, always more imposing, and it helped disarm them. He felt normal about his size only when he was playing lacrosse or, later, when he worked for the FBI, and everyone seemed like they’d been cut from the same fabric, physically, at least. Nina always had to tell her friends he was as friendly as a St. Bernard, which wasn’t true in the least. But he could look like one when he needed to.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you,” Matthew said, then turned his body slightly to the right so Ronnie could see his gold arrowhead-shaped name tag, the one that said captain matthew drew, like he was commanding a whaling ship. The Indians were funny about giving everyone a rank. “You’re safe here.”

  “My one bit of luck all night,” Ronnie said. He looked over his shoulder at the door, shook his head once, muttered, “Fucking idiots,” then went back to his business, the poor bastard squirting dashes of piss every few seconds like a sprinkler. Matthew’s dad had been like that a few years ago. One day it was an enlarged prostate, the next day it was cancer, the next day he was dead. That’s what it seemed like, anyway.

  Matthew stepped over to the bank of sinks, started to wash his hands. He was in the gray suit he liked to wear on the Friday night/Saturday morning shift. It was big through the shoulders, so he was able to wear the harness holster he preferred, his .357 SIG under his left arm, a sap under his right. It wasn’t legal in Wisconsin for private citizens or security guards to conceal a sap, strictly speaking, but the rules on Indian land were fungible, and who was going to stop him?

  Nine months he’d been working security for the Chuyalla tribe, splitting his time between the casino and the hotel, his bosses happy to tell potential convention clients how Matthew was ex-FBI, as if the accountants, notaries, travel agents, and paralegals renting space might need someone qualified for tactical assault to assist them with their awards banquet. Matthew wasn’t sure why the Indians wanted some former fed on their security payroll. Everyone else was local talent—ex–tribal cops and Desert Storm vets, guys who looked the part, anyway, even if they were shit at their jobs. Maybe they liked that he wasn’t Chuyalla, so he wasn’t constantly kicking his cousins out of the casino. Or maybe they just liked that Matthew didn’t mind putting blood on the floor.

  Earlier that night, he’d sapped a Latin King who’d walked into the casino to play some craps. Matthew made him and his girl on the parking lot cam, had his picture run through their facial-recognition database before he even hit the tables. Ten minutes later he had a positive ID on one Desmond Christopher, called his info into the tribal police, who gave him his sheet: thirty-nine years old, five foot nine, 227 pounds—not fat, just swollen with prison muscles like a linebacker, though he looked skinnier now, probably the meth—known Latin Kings shot caller and meth wholesaler with two years down in Stateville on trafficking, another nine months for pimping, five years at Waupun for attempted murder on a Gangster Disciples soldier, which wasn�
�t surprising since the dumb shit had Killer tattooed across his forehead in Old English script.

  The Chuyalla were sensitive about providing a family environment, and they hated the Mexican gangs working their way north into Native land, so Matthew went down to the floor to encourage the gentleman to take his drug money elsewhere. They were more tolerant toward the Native gangs, since the Chuyalla rented them a ballroom once a month to hold their council meetings; plus most of them were Chuyalla, and those that weren’t were careful not to show too much disrespect. The Native Mob controlled all the interests on reservation land, but the Mexican gangs were creeping closer and closer, the Cartels down south emboldening them with better guns and extra cash, which helped when they ended up getting arrested. Bloods and Crips kept to the big cities, but even still, on a weekend night, they’d roll in to wash their money at the tables, at least until Matthew pulled them out by their faces.

  “Time to go,” Matthew told Killer, then reached down onto the craps table, picked up Killer’s bet—fifty on the hard eight; all these street gangsters bet the hard eight—and dropped it back on his chip stack. He had maybe another four grand piled in front of him. If he wasn’t washing money, he was doing a pretty good job faking it.

  “Me and my girl come here all the time,” Killer said. He wasn’t angry. Not yet, anyway. Probably because he knew he was caught. Last thing he wanted was the cops coming to see him. A felon with his sheet, he was always a parole violation waiting to happen. His girl was maybe twenty-two, and though she didn’t have any tattoos on her face, she did have an ace of spades playing card the size of a fist on her neck, prison ink for thieves and con artists. Consorting with her was probably a violation in itself.

  “Don’t make a scene,” Matthew said, “and you won’t go back to prison.”

  Killer looked around the table. There were two Red Hat Society ladies, a couple white boys with the backwards baseball caps and bottles of Michelob, an old-timer with his lip filled with dip. A bachelorette party, one woman in a veil with a balloon penis taped to her forehead, all her drunk friends in matching black tank tops that said mandy’s hitched! across their chests. “One of you got a problem?” Killer asked. They all kept their eyes down. “See? I’m just out on Friday night, keeping my own. No one said shit when I lost five bills here last week.”

  “Yeah,” his girl said, and she got up into Matthew’s face, pointing a finger at his chin like she was shooting a gun. Getting loud. “Everyone was real nice to us.” She pointed at the craps dealer now, a Chuyalla who everyone called Puny because he was a good 400 pounds. “Right, Puny?” Puny didn’t respond, which was good, because he would have been out of a job. “D, this pussy can’t tell you what to do.”

  “Chill,” Killer said.

  “I don’t need to chill,” she said. “This marshmallow motherfucker needs to chill.”

  The casino floor was filled with an Elderhostel group, fifty retirees in town for some kind of educational tour of Milwaukee, and they were all craning their necks around the slots now, standing up at their five-dollar blackjack tables; a couple ladies even had their cameras out, getting a real education. This wasn’t a show Matthew really wanted to put on.

  “I’m not going to ask again,” Matthew said.

  “You didn’t ask in the first place,” Killer said. “I know my rights. Fourteenth Amendment and shit. You can’t just be discriminating against me.”

  “I don’t know,” Matthew said. “Felon in possession of a hooker? That seems like a crime. But you can check with the ACLU.”

  Killer stared at him. “I say the word your whole family is in the ground.”

  There it was. He’d been waiting for it.

  First two smacks of his sap went on either side of Killer’s head, right across the ears. Matthew had to hold Killer up by his shirt so he could get his second shot in, since the first probably would have knocked him to the ground, and Matthew had a point to make, something Killer could take back to the rest of the Latin Kings: Listening is important.

  The shot across the lips? Well, that was for talking shit. Matthew busted Killer’s mouth open to the bone and out came most of his teeth, including two gold ones, his girl shrieking like Matthew had hit her, too, which he wasn’t planning on doing.

  He then dragged Killer through the casino by the throat, out through the loading dock, bounced his open wound of a face off a few Dumpsters, giving him a better-than-average chance of picking up a staph infection, and dropped him on the pavement, away from the cameras, not that it mattered, since Matthew was the guy who handled the video. Killer screamed the whole time, or made a noise that used to be screaming, back when his face worked right.

  “I don’t want you walking back in here,” Matthew said. Then he did the only thing he thought would emphasize the point, which was to stomp on Killer’s ankles until they snapped. He then went back inside, found Killer’s girl crouched under the craps table trying to find all of her boyfriend’s teeth, told his floor guys to get her a bag and get her the fuck out of the casino, since looking at her there on the floor, she didn’t seem all that threatening anymore, just a woman who had terrible taste in men but loved one enough to pick up his teeth. That was worth something.

  Was it all an extreme response? Maybe. Washing a few Gs through the casino wasn’t a hanging offense—hell, it was practically why casinos in the Midwest existed—but it was about the point: Matthew Drew hadn’t qualified for assault team work at Quantico, hadn’t made it all the way to the FBI’s top shop in Chicago, so people with their crimes cataloged on their faces could dictate his behavior. That’s just not how life worked.

  And yet.

  He’d somehow missed Ronnie Cupertine walking through the door, as did everyone else working the Eye in the Sky, not that anyone would have complained, least of all any of the Chuyalla management. Ronnie Cupertine was a celebrity, so famous for running the Family that people didn’t really believe he ran the Family.

  It was . . . impossible.

  And yet.

  Ronnie Cupertine gave everyone credit at his half a dozen car dealerships around Chicago. Warrantied every purchase for two years. Paid for the entire Little League from Chicago to Springfield. Donated a million dollars to establish Hope from Fear, a battered women’s home on the South Side. Pumped a couple hundred grand into AIDS and cancer research at Northwestern every year. The Chicago Historical Society needed money to preserve a building? Ronnie Cupertine wrote a check. The Field Museum was short fifty Gs for an art exhibit? No problem. Ronnie Cupertine even gave money for an independent film festival and attended the gala, shook hands with the actors and actresses, his wife on his arm draped in diamonds and furs, because Ronnie Cupertine? He was the philanthropic king of Chicago.

  So he occasionally had a motherfucker killed.

  At least Ronnie Cupertine didn’t have a tattoo on his forehead.

  Ronnie zipped up and flushed, made his way over to the sink next to Matthew. Up close, Matthew could smell the liquor seeping out of Ronnie’s pores. How long had he been at the casino? How many times had Matthew missed seeing him? Ronnie ran the hot water for a few seconds, then took a towel, soaked it, and scrubbed at his face, letting out an exasperated grunt when he was done.

  “Tough night?” Matthew asked.

  “Too much smoke in this place,” Ronnie said. “Feel like it’s in my skin, you know? Lungs are all congested. It’s unhealthy. Even Atlantic City has better ventilation.” He leaned toward the mirror, inspected his face, licked his pinkies, used them to push down his eyebrows. “Fuck it. Can’t tell an Indian not to smoke, right? It was their tobacco in the first place, right?”

  “Everyone’s got their culture,” Matthew said.

  “You believe that,” Ronnie said, “then you should work for me.” He took another towel, dried his face, then reached into his pocket, slipped a fifty from his billfold into Curtis’s tip jar. “Yo
u new here?”

  “Been here a few months.”

  “I haven’t seen you before.”

  “I bought my car from you, actually.”

  “Yeah?” Ronnie looked at Matthew in the mirror. “You from Chicago?”

  “Not originally,” Matthew said. “Relocated for a job. Didn’t pan out. So here I am.”

  “You recognize me from TV?” he asked.

  “That’s it,” Matthew said. How much time did he have before one of Ronnie’s boys came in, looking for their actual boss? Two, three minutes? Maybe five, at the most. It would be disrespectful to walk in on a boss while he was taking a shit, so maybe it would be more like ten. But that seemed like an excessive amount of time to be guarding the door, which Matthew presumed they were doing. They must have swept through and somehow missed seeing Matthew’s feet in the back of the handicapped stall. Or they hadn’t looked very hard. Matthew reached into his pocket, took out his car keys, jingled them. “You sold me a Mustang.”

  “You get a good deal?”

  “Not bad,” Matthew said. “Carburetor gave out after twenty-five thousand miles.”

  “I replace it?”

  “You did.”

  “I don’t welch,” Ronnie said. It was a catchphrase from one of his commercials, so popular it was even on the flyers that came in the junk mail and inside the Tribune on Sundays. “My opinion, that’s the problem with Detroit these days,” he continued. Ronnie checked his face in the mirror again, picked a piece of lint from his chin. “It’s like they forgot how to build muscle cars. Give me something with a big trunk, big tires, and nothing with the name of some country we bombed the shit out of on any of the materials, right? Every time I see a Japanese or Korean car I ask myself what the fuck we fought for, right?” He paused. “Not that I’m not happy to sell them. But I don’t want to drive one.”