Gangster Nation

by Tod Goldberg

  “What’s the next bad thing that’s out there?” Poremba asked. “What can I anticipate? That’s what I’m thinking about these days. I think I’ll try to prevent whatever that is. I’ll try to prevent that for as many people as possible.” He paused for a moment. “But I don’t know, Matthew. People who did that to your sister? They don’t care about the FBI. They don’t worry about prison.”

  “All the time you spent watching me, all the man hours,” Matthew said, “and no one can explain to me how my little sister ended up in the trunk of my car.”

  “You should have come to me,” Poremba said.

  “And done what?”

  “Admitted to beating Ronnie,” he said. “Told me what you knew about the Family. Told me what you suspected about the Chuyalla. About the Native Mob.”

  “And been arrested for attempted murder? Get a handful of RICO charges? Fraud? Or be marked for death for the rest of my life? You don’t have the kind of sway to keep me out of prison.”

  “Matthew,” Poremba said, “your silence killed your sister. The people who did this to her? They bought your silence first with your job at the casino and next with her blood. You think anything different, you’re just naïve.”

  A man and a woman, both in their thirties, came out of the shop then, AR-15s slung over their shoulders, the man dressed like he was an assistant coach for the Bears, the woman in tight pink pants, a matching Bears sweatshirt, and black headband. Matthew recognized them from the range, where they’d been getting a lesson. News said gun sales were way up since the planes hit, but for some reason Matthew imagined that was all country people adding one more piece to their arsenal, as if Al-Qaeda were about to invade Appalachia. Instead it was this couple, getting into their gold Lexus SUV now, laughing about something. Just a day like any other.

  “Why not just kill me?” Matthew asked, once the couple drove off. It was the profound guilt of Matthew’s life now, superseding his last profound guilt, which had been that he’d let Hopper go to Las Vegas alone.

  “You’re irrelevant to them. You’ve already been replaced at the casino. And before that, you were replaced at the FBI. Your sister’s death sends a clear message to people you’ll never meet not to step forward, not to investigate, not to engage. Fact is you’re worth more alive. You can tell the story. That’s what they want.”

  Matthew didn’t think that was how real life worked. It wasn’t mentioned at Quantico, the idea that if you were working organized crime or gang enforcement that you needed to consider the safety of your family. It wasn’t encouraged that you live in the same city as your subjects—the Bureau suggesting a twenty-five-mile separation was usually enough—but even still, they’d suppress your address, keep you out of searchable data farms, depending upon your clearance level, and they swore that if you were at a high enough level, your phones, your house, your car, everything was surveilled to keep you safe.

  It was, Matthew learned, unfeasible. The FBI didn’t have guys to watch criminal subjects around the clock; they sure as hell weren’t watching him 24/7. Not even local cops working in the toughest, most gang-infested parts of the country had significant concerns. East St. Louis, South Central Los Angeles, Detroit, Memphis, Oakland. In the last fifteen years, there hadn’t been a single instance of a family member being successfully targeted. It wasn’t about honor. It was about opportunity. Some gangster wanted to target a cop, all they had to do was wait for him or her to show up on their block. But no Deuce 9 gangster was going to drive out to the suburbs of St. Louis and commit a murder on a tree-lined street. That was so far removed from the game, it called into question the toughness of the man doing the hit. That’s what Matthew thought. It’s what he believed. Because it had been true forever.

  “They made me a pawn,” Matthew said. “I thought you or someone else at the Bureau had recommended me for the job at the casino, but that wasn’t it. They’d been watching me all along, just like you had. They set me up, hoping I’d kill Ronnie. This entire time. Killed my sister because they knew they could.” Matthew sniffed. Maybe last week he would have cried. But there wasn’t anything left in him. “Made me a dupe.”

  “You believed in old mythology,” Poremba said simply. He pointed into the sky, which was empty this afternoon, and brilliant blue, one of those late fall days in Chicago when you’re deluded into thinking winter will be pleasant. “Those planes last month? They were aimed at you, at me, at children not even born yet. They didn’t fly those planes into aircraft carriers. They didn’t crash them into nuclear power plants. They ran them into people. It’s the same thing. Don’t pretend it’s anything different.” Across the street, a murder of crows stalked slowly around the greenbelt between a self-storage facility and something called Diamond Logistics. “You can’t stop the nature of these things. They’re morphing faster than we can keep up with them.”

  “So that’s it, then. Everyone is looking for Bin Laden now? All the other cases are back-burner bullshit?”

  “Yes,” Poremba said.

  “My mother,” Matthew said, “what do I tell her, Agent Poremba? ‘Get used to the New World Order, your daughter doesn’t matter.’”

  “There’s good police here,” Poremba said. “There’s good police in Milwaukee. They’re going to keep working the case. Someone saw something. They’ll shake it out.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Matthew said. “And I don’t believe you do, either.”

  “No,” Poremba said. “I don’t.”

  They both knew who did it. Or at least who was behind it. The Family and the Chuyalla and the Native Mob had been in business together for at least a year, that’s what Agent Wilmore and Poremba had sussed out, what Matthew should have realized. The Family was consolidating its power up through Wisconsin, moving their drugs farther and farther north, so that they could start combating the Windsor Mafia in Canada, who were pushing marijuana and pills south, everyone trying to capture market share. The Native Mob had its tendrils in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, but also in Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska. All the places no Family guys wanted to go, but the Native Mob mitigated that problem. The Family could provide the financial backing, the Native Mob could move product. And the Chuyalla could open casinos. It was like Las Vegas all over again, except instead of Jews and Italians fighting other Jews and Italians, it was Native Americans and Mexican gangs backed by Cartels, often on sovereign land, with the Family providing the product, the weaponry, and the social infrastructure of compromised human cargo: the cops, the lawyers, the aldermen, all that, but also the truck drivers, the garbage men, the bulk food distributors, those file clerks and receptionists and janitors who worked in civic buildings who could all use a few extra bucks.

  Matthew had beaten down Ronnie Cupertine, had taken him out of the game, and all he’d done was unleash something more vicious and more eager.

  They didn’t care about the established allegiances, the courtesies, the rules and decorum. That shit was gone. And Matthew understood he’d played a role in that even before all of this: When he busted up Fat Monte Moretti and then a couple hours later, Fat Monte had killed himself. Matthew understood then that the stakes were different. That whatever the Family was trying to hide was big enough that a guy like Fat Monte was willing to pull his own roots versus having someone do him ugly. The Family had tried to get Sal Cupertine killed. They couldn’t, so they’d disappeared him. What was the Family trying to hide, that now, with Ronnie incapacitated, they had to act? All this time Matthew had been here. All this time his sister had been here. But now they acted? It didn’t make sense. Hopper—or someone—had revealed the workings of the Family to the press two years ago, and Matthew was convinced even more that it wasn’t Jeff who’d made that call. Maybe it had been Poremba himself. Maybe he’d never know.

  “Why didn’t Ronnie show up on my facial-recognition database?” Matthew asked.

  “You’re asking the wrong
guy.” But the way he said it, it was like he was relieved Matthew had finally put it together. It wasn’t something Poremba was going to tell him, but it wasn’t something he was going to avoid. Matthew just had to ask the right questions.

  “Who’s the right guy?”

  Poremba shrugged. Still not the right question.

  “Ronnie Cupertine . . . is a CI?”

  Poremba scratched at his cheek, Matthew noticing a hint of stubble there. “You know, a bad thing happens, you run all the scenarios back through your mind, imagining ways you could have answered a question that would have stalled a person for ten or fifteen minutes and that would have thrown the whole sequence of life’s events off by just a beat.” He looked at his nails, flicked invisible bits of skin off them. “Sinaloa has come up from Mexico and taken over the marijuana, the cocaine, not so much the heroin, yet, or the pills, but that’s just a matter of time. Probably a couple seasons away from having decent poppy fields down there. So they won’t need the Family to make money out here anymore, but as of right now, they still push fifty, sixty percent of their product through them, for the sake of convenience, keeping the peace. But that time’s up soon. Enterprising guy might try to protect his business interests in any way he saw feasible.”

  It wasn’t the most surprising thing Matthew had ever heard. He knew the history of these deals: bosses had been snitching since there were bosses, making sweetheart deals with the government so whatever victimless shit they were doing—victim being a fungible term—like selling booze during Prohibition, marijuana since the 1950s, white-collar opiates since the ’80s, or simply running high-end sports books and other mostly nonviolent endeavors, like what the Native Mob had going, could keep on going without much interference. In exchange, maybe they put a name on an unsolved murder every now and again, maybe a bank heist got foiled, maybe a shipment of guns was held up. Traffic cop shit.

  “So Ronnie does a little snitching,” Matthew said, “it’s good for his business, and we get to grab up the Mexicans? That’s the trade? Even though Sal Cupertine killed three agents and a CI? Four agents if you count Jeff?”

  “I wake up thinking about Sal Cupertine,” Poremba said, “and I go to bed thinking about Jeff and those men. Trust me on this.”

  “I want to trust you,” Matthew said.

  “But I’ve got orders, too.” A UPS truck pulled up then and the driver hopped out, ran around to the back, came out with a dolly, stacked it with long boxes marked with corporate logos: Smith & Wesson; Sturm, Ruger and Company; Bushmaster. The driver pushed the dolly toward the building, his truck still idling in front. “That’s the next thing,” Poremba said. “These terrorists, they’ll show up in big cities, driving UPS and Fed Ex trucks filled with explosives. Stolen ambulances jacked with propane tanks and nails. Anything you trust, anything you recognize. That’s the next level of the attack.” A couple seconds later, the driver came running back out, hopped into the truck, and was gone. “Or maybe they’ll drop off packages filled with bombs. That way they don’t have to die.” He counted to ten, then snapped his fingers. “Boom. The UPS guy is already down the block.” Snapped his fingers again. “Five minutes later, whole building comes down. Would you be able to describe the UPS guy if you had to put out a BOLO?” Poremba asked.

  “I think he was white,” Matthew said. “I don’t know. I wasn’t paying close attention.”

  “That’s what the Patriot Act will be good for,” Poremba said. “Take the attention out of it. Everything will be empirical. We get these bad guys, we come back and use it on the Family. Lock everyone up. Sal Cupertine. Ronnie Cupertine, if he makes it. Whoever killed Hopper. Everyone.”

  “I should have killed Ronnie Cupertine,” Matthew said.

  “They wanted you to,” Poremba said. “You’re lucky you didn’t.”

  “Why? That’s what I don’t get.”

  “There’s not a Cupertine left in the Family,” Poremba said. “If you’d killed Ronnie, whoever set you up would have been able to slide right into power, not be worried about Ronnie bringing Sal back. If you had killed Ronnie, you’d be in jail right now. Or dead. I promise you.”

  “I should be in jail,” Matthew said. “You should have arrested me a year ago. Why didn’t you?”

  “You and Jeff were the only people to get close to Sal Cupertine.”

  “So this is about Sal? All this shit is about Sal Cupertine? I got set up just like he did? Except I got it from the FBI and the Mob.” Matthew spat onto the ground. “I never had a fucking chance.”

  What was it Paul Bruno had told them two years ago about Sal? Bruno was a Family snitch Hopper had flipped years before, then found him living outside of Milwaukee, moving model homes when everything went down. You put him in a situation where he might kill someone, he’s gonna do that. And: The only reason Ronnie would send Sal out in the day would be to get caught. And then a couple weeks later, Paul Bruno was gone. Disappeared.

  “You think whoever killed Hopper killed my sister?” Matthew asked.

  “No,” Poremba said.

  He looked at Matthew for a few seconds without saying anything, as if he was trying to make a decision, then muttered, “Fuck it,” under his breath.

  “Hopper was embalmed,” Poremba said.

  “What? His head was cut off.”

  “Postmortem,” Poremba said. “Whoever killed him also took out his eyes and replaced them with rubber pellets. But they embalmed him. Or at least his head.”

  “That’s not what the newspaper said.”

  “We don’t give everything to the press, Matthew,” Poremba said. “I think you know that.”

  Matthew tried to process this. “Why would someone kill Jeff and then embalm him?”

  “I assume,” Poremba said, “so that he could be preserved for identification.” Poremba let that sit with Matthew for a few seconds. “You hear about that kid, few days before all this with your sister, that they caught shoplifting at Carson’s? Shot a security guard in the head?”

  “Vaguely,” Matthew said. “I think I saw it on the news.”

  Poremba unrolled the newspaper, handed it to Matthew. “There was an update in the Tribune yesterday. Worth a read.”

  Poremba slid a cell phone from his pocket, punched in a number, turned his back to Matthew, walked a few feet away, to the curb.

  Okay.

  Cook County prosecutors said Saturday they will not criminally charge a seven-year-old Lincolnwood child for the shooting of Mitchell Thompkins, 27, of Chicago. Thompkins was shot by the child during the course of an attempted shoplifting September 6 in Carson’s Department Store. The child, prosecutors said, came into possession of the handgun outside his mother’s home, though the gun was not registered to the mother. Charges against the child’s parent remain a possibility, prosecutors said, though District Attorney Teri Rhyne suggested that it was all “a terrible tragedy, made worse by the banality of the situation. The store overreacted to the shoplifting. The boy thought it was a toy gun. He just did what he’d seen on TV.” Thompkins remains in critical condition at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where doctors . . .

  The article continued, and when Matthew flipped the page over, there was a plain white envelope placed between the pages, unsealed. Matthew looked up and Poremba still had his back to him, phone to his ear. Matthew opened the envelope and found a record of calls coming into Jennifer Cupertine’s home in Lincolnwood, as well as a cell phone registered in her name to the same address over the course of the last sixty days. Five calls on September 11 had been circled in pencil, four to the home phone, one to the cell, from a number in Carson City, Nevada. They’d come within two minutes of one another, between 7:40 and 7:42 p.m. There had been no calls going out from either of Cupertine’s numbers since September 6.

  “What is this?” Matthew asked. Poremba didn’t respond. He was talking on his phone now. Ordering a cab, it
sounded like.

  Matthew looked at the other incoming numbers. Almost all were from Chicagoland area codes. A few were from 800 numbers. Solicitors. Collection agencies. By and large, Jennifer Cupertine’s home phone rang about six times a week. It didn’t surprise Matthew. She must have known they were on her phone. But it was the same with her cell. She hadn’t received five phone calls in a single day anytime in the last two months, other than in that two-minute period. She rarely called anyone on her home phone, maybe a call or two every other day, usually to the same few numbers, all in Chicago. On her cell, she was on it at least once a day, usually more. But nothing since September 6.

  He took his cell phone from his pocket.

  “Unless you meant what you said about going to jail,” Poremba said over his shoulder, hand over the receiver, “don’t call the local numbers.”

  Noted. He dialed the circled incoming phone number. An automated voice picked up.

  “Thank you for calling your local Walmart. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you.”

  Matthew hung up, looked at the number again, redialed, the same. Went back to the list of calls. Why had a Walmart in Carson City, Nevada, called Jennifer five times on September 11 and never before or since?

  He went back to the news story.

  What had he missed?

  It didn’t say where the kid was, just that he wasn’t being prosecuted. But it also didn’t give the name of the mother. That wasn’t unusual. If the kid wasn’t being prosecuted, naming the mother would be a violation of privacy.

  Matthew concentrated. Slowed himself down. Imagined he was looking down the scope of a rifle. Position on the target. And there it was, what he’d missed: September 6. And then: Lincolnwood.

  He’d been to Jennifer Cupertine’s house. He and Hopper. He’d met that kid. William. He was four then. Matthew, when he’d been talking to Jennifer, pretended to have a kid, too. Tried to build an empathetic bridge to her, like he’d been taught. Matthew didn’t think he’d ever have kids now. Couldn’t imagine it, anyway. Bringing a child into this world? So that one day he or she could watch their father get killed for some Mob shit that happened years earlier? And now, William. Being charged or not didn’t matter. He’d shot a guy in the head. That was a moment he’d remember forever.