Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  “He took out my guys in broad daylight,” Jeff said. “His DNA was everywhere.”

  “Then there’s no way it was a hit,” Bruno said. “No way.”

  “No,” Jeff said, and then he told Bruno about how Sal Cupertine had figured out he was dealing with agents, how he got Jeff’s name, how he’d gone back upstairs and killed the whole room.

  “That’s why you’re here?” Bruno said. “You’re taking a personal affront to this?”

  “I am,” Jeff said.

  “Dumb,” Bruno said. “Sal Cupertine will kill you and not even miss a meal afterward. Personal vendettas are stupid, and this is coming from a person who has a lot of personal vendettas.”

  “It’s about justice,” Jeff said.

  “You keep telling yourself that,” Bruno said. “Anyway, my thinking? Sal must have snapped. Just exploded.”

  “Do you recall him ever doing that before?” Matthew asked. It was a phrase hammered into young agents: If possible, find a pattern.

  “When we were kids, yeah, sure,” Bruno said. “After his dad got thrown off that building, he had some anger problems. But last ten, fifteen years? Nothing. I mean, I never got why he went into the killing business, except that he was good at it. And Ronnie was his only family. Sal didn’t have shit. Murdered father, mother was a nut job. For a time, rumor was she was fucking the principal at Winston so Sal could get free lunches. I mean, crazy shit like that. That was his life. That’s what he dealt with before he fell in with Ronnie. So I don’t begrudge him a few problems, you know?”

  “So why now?” Matthew asked. “He’s methodical. He’s smart. He’s got this nice family now. Living the perfect gangster life. Why just lose it?”

  “There any drugs involved?”

  “Heroin,” Jeff said. “The initial report was that he sampled a bit of everything.”

  “He was a mean fucker on heroin,” Bruno said. “Once he had a kid, he stopped doing any kind of junk. But you know, if some good shit came through, he’d have a taste. Last guy you wanted paranoid at a party was Sal Cupertine.”

  “Then you go home, get your family, and run away,” Matthew said. “You don’t murder four people.”

  “Normal person, maybe,” Bruno said. “This isn’t a normal person. Killing is what he does, that’s his nature. You put him in a situation where he might kill someone, he’s gonna do that. So, probably realized he was caught. Realized everything he’d been doing for fifteen years was gonna get undone, and he did what he could to get out. Frankly, I’m surprised he didn’t kill everyone in the whole Family for putting him in that position.”

  “He didn’t have the time,” Jeff said.

  “Still,” Bruno said. “Ronnie Cupertine shows up somewhere missing his head, don’t act surprised. Only reason Ronnie would send Sal out in the day would be to get caught. Ronnie, he’s the one with problems. On TV playing a gangster. The perfect cover. A fucking embarrassment, you ask me. Sal was just doing what he was told and if he blew, it was because someone put him in a position where that was the only choice.”

  That was the problem. Sal Cupertine was consistent. By acting inconsistent, by being reckless, he’d thrown everything off. Jeff couldn’t figure out what his next move might have been, couldn’t even figure out where he was. Once they got the records, the FBI had pinged his cell phone off towers close to Ronnie Cupertine’s and then, hours later, it looked like he was driving in circles around southern Illinois. And then . . . nothing. He surely ditched his phone, but that there was no chatter at all about him, that the Family all spoke of him in the past tense, and that Jennifer Cupertine was alone and not exactly prospering made it all clear enough.

  “What about the body in the dump?” Jeff asked.

  “Not him,” Bruno said. “My opinion? That body was a kid called Chema, real name Jose Espinoza. Half Mexican on his dad’s side. Couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, twenty-three.”

  Jeff hadn’t heard of any half-Mexican members of the Family, though he supposed it wasn’t beyond possible. The Gangster 2-6 street gang ran a lot of the cocaine and heroin in the city for the Family, so it reasoned that they might occasionally find an able body there. Still, that Bruno had a specific idea on who had been murdered and then dumped was curious. “How do you know him?” Jeff said.

  “He used to come up to Milwaukee to hit the rainbow clubs,” Bruno said. “So I recognized him. His brother Neto used to courier H for the Family before he got sent up to Stateville. I’d check and see if he’s dead, too. My guess is he is. Family is good about that sort of thing. If Neto is dead, then for sure that’s Chema they dumped.”

  Bruno fell silent for a moment, and Jeff realized he needed to ask a question he really didn’t want to ask, had to ask the question he was hoping Bruno would explain on his own. “So,” Jeff said, “you two were a couple?”

  “Not in the traditional sense,” Bruno said. “You know, we had fun, but he was a dumb, confused kid. Had a girlfriend, was Catholic, also, which fucked him up. Plus, he thought he was going to rise up in the Family, even though he saw what happened to Neto.”

  “You know who he was working for?” Jeff asked.

  “He just got on Fat Monte’s crew,” Bruno said. “Day your boys got hit, he called me to say he couldn’t drive up to see me. He had an errand to do for Monte. I never heard from him again.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s the body,” Matthew said. “Maybe he just didn’t want to see you anymore. Maybe he decided to make it work with his girl. Could be a hundred different things.”

  “Could be, could be,” Bruno said. “What’s it been now? Seven months? How many people stay on Fat Monte’s crew for seven months and don’t end up getting pinched for some stupid gangster shit?”

  Bruno let his last statement hang there.

  “If Neto is dead,” Jeff said, “then I’d advise you to get a new address. Maybe a new name. You still have chits in the bureau.”

  “Fat Monte don’t scare me,” he said.

  “You’re not a gangster, Paul,” Jeff said. He used his first name on purpose, to remind him that he was a guy named Paul, not Bruno the Butcher, the name people on the street knew him by. Maybe he’d been a tough guy at one point, but he wasn’t on the level of a Fat Monte. Not now, anyway. “You don’t need this shit.”

  “I see that motherfucker,” Bruno said, “I’ll roll over his ass with my Hummer, drag him out here, and have my guys put him in the foundation of a nice three-bedroom. Give him a view of the pool and everything.” Paul Bruno turned away from Jeff and Matthew then and started shaking his head. “I told myself I wasn’t going to do this,” he said quietly, and then he abruptly jumped out of the Hummer.

  “What was that?” Matthew said.

  “I think he’s finally realizing his boyfriend is dead,” Jeff said.

  Jeff Hopper recognized two essential truths, as well, as he watched Paul Bruno walking off into the distance, his hands clutching at his scalp, his gait slow and deliberate: The first was that there was only one way for Paul Bruno to die, and it wasn’t from breaking into some old lady’s house to steal her furs and diamonds. Eventually, just as he’d told Jeff all this information, someone, somewhere, would give information to Ronnie Cupertine about Paul Bruno’s activities in Milwaukee, how he had this nice new legit business going and didn’t Ronnie think Paul owed him something for all their years of friendship? And did you know he was a queer? And then one day, Paul Bruno would wake up and find Fat Monte, or someone a lot like him, holding a gun on him. Diming out Fat Monte wasn’t something he had to do. It was something he wanted to do.

  The second truth was that Paul Bruno had been in love.

  “Wait here,” Jeff said to Matthew, and then he got out of the Hummer, too. It was cold outside, and Jeff immediately wondered just where Bruno hoped to find the seniors who would want to move here to live out their golden years.

  Bruno walked over to the construction trailer and sat down on the second of three stairs
that led to the door. There were no lights on inside, so Jeff made his way over, too, and sat down beside him, and the two of them waited there for a few minutes without speaking, the only sound Bruno’s periodic sniffling and the chirping of birds.

  “I’m sorry,” Bruno said eventually. “I think I’m going through menopause or some shit.”

  “It’s all right,” Jeff said.

  “He was just a dumb kid,” Bruno said. “We never even did it. He was working out his shit and trying to figure out where it all went, and that was cool. I mean, who was I to pressure anyone? But to be done ugly like that?”

  “Look,” Jeff said, “I need your help on Cupertine. I find him, I can put a lid on this whole Family. Get all of them what they deserve.”

  That got Bruno to laugh. “You even hear yourself? This shit will just keep going on. You might find Cupertine, but don’t think it’s gonna change shit. You think Eliot Ness thought he’d solved it all? Poor motherfucker didn’t even make sixty, you know that? Dead at fifty-four. True story. And he didn’t stop shit. You find Sal Cupertine, just be content with that.”

  “You got any ideas?” Jeff said.

  “Where was the last place you spotted him?”

  “His cell phone had him in south Illinois, near the border to Missouri,” Jeff said. “Last solid hit was outside Divernon.”

  “Nothing but farmland out there,” Bruno said. “Slaughterhouses, too. Could be we’re both wrong and you ate Sal Cupertine last time you had a Big Mac.”

  That thought had occurred to Jeff, too, when he’d seen the map. “You think of any safe houses the Family has outside of Chicago? Any other families they’re close enough with to have them harbor Cupertine?”

  “No one is gonna take that weight without a return,” Bruno said. “You wanna look for a syndicate that can use him for something, someone who’d buy him from Ronnie, not the other way around.”

  It was an idea so simple, so reasonable, and so fundamentally in line with Ronnie Cupertine’s way of doing business—selling people the things he didn’t want to hold on to for more than a month at a time was the very basis of his used-car business; the reason the feds had so much trouble making any case against him on his cars was that they were out the door before they could even be tracked—that it made Jeff feel foolish. It was also something Jeff had never heard of—the trading of assets between crime families. “That happens?” Jeff asked.

  “I worked for a lot of people,” Bruno said. “They all seemed to know how to find me. I assume they paid Ronnie for that information.”

  What Jeff couldn’t understand was what another syndicate would want with Sal Cupertine. Yeah, he was an efficient killer, but there were plenty of efficient killers working in all the families. “Who middled for Ronnie?” Jeff asked.

  “Might be a nice thing to ask Fat Monte the next time you see him,” Bruno said. His cell phone rang then. He pulled it from the clip on his belt and examined the number. “Oh, fuck me,” he said, and then he answered it after the second ring. “Paul Bruno,” he said, his voice an entirely different tenor. Mellifluous, even. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yes, well, I’m happy to hear that. Yes, of course, it would be my pleasure. I do think a two-story is something to really consider. Those girls of yours will be making a racket in a few years, and you’ll want the refuge! Yes, yes, of course. Okay, we’ll do that then. And thank you for calling, Mr. Stubbs. Thank you again.” Paul Bruno clicked his phone off and slipped it back into his belt clip.

  “They want to buy a house after all?” Jeff said.

  “Looks like it,” Bruno said. He stood up then and stuffed his hands into his pockets. Jeff stood, too, and for a moment they both looked at the view. It was a bit desolate, though Jeff could see the potential. The air was crisp and clean. The trees tall and stately in the distance. A little imagination? A few man-made lakes? Maybe it would be paradise. Stranger things had sprung from the dirt.

  “You get this place built,” Jeff said, “maybe in fifteen years I’ll come back and buy a condo.”

  “I shouldn’t have said all that about Fat Monte,” Bruno said.

  “No,” Jeff said, “you probably shouldn’t have.”

  Bruno sniffled one last time. “Fuck it,” he said. “I trust you won’t mention my name to anyone?”

  “Of course.”

  Bruno pointed at the Hummer, where Matthew was still sitting. “What’s his skin in this?”

  “I feel a debt to him,” Jeff said. “I cost him his job. He’s a good agent, or will be.”

  “He doesn’t like me,” Bruno said.

  “No,” Jeff said, “he doesn’t. Probably better for both of us, really.”

  Bruno spit through his teeth then, a nasty habit of his Jeff had forgotten. “I never understood you, Agent Hopper,” he said after a while.

  CHAPTER SIX

  David had his own preferred method for handling the guns he used for killing, and it involved buying them himself and making sure they were used only once and then immediately melted.

  Not sold.

  Not thrown in a river or a lake or buried or hidden under the dog house.

  Not even destroyed. Melted.

  It was a time-consuming process. In Chicago, he rented out a spot in a converted warehouse on West Fulton, near the old Kinzie Industrial Corridor, that had been turned into an artists’ space complete with a metal lathe, foundry, press, and furnace. He’d go straight there after a job to dispose of all his evidence, even the clothes he was wearing. If there was reason to be concerned that evidence had somehow ended up in the stolen car he was driving, he’d disassemble and melt the car doors, or trunk linings, or, one time, the whole front console of a Gran Torino. You don’t spend fifteen years killing people without learning how not to get caught.

  David killed young men, middle-aged men, even old men. His first sanctioned hit was that German fucker, Rolf Huber, who’d been running girls in the suburbs since the 1950s and, at eighty, after the Family decided to colonize Batavia, started to talk about writing his memoirs for the feds. That was a gimme. Got him as he was walking out of his bar, the Lamplighter, on Christmas Eve. One shot, side of the head.

  Not how he’d do it now; the side of the head sometimes didn’t work, too many variables. But that was before he knew exactly what he was doing. He was only nineteen, and everything he knew about killing he’d picked up watching Cousin Ronnie. Ronnie was more of a bludgeoner, didn’t feel like he’d done a job until he was covered in someone else’s blood. No one knew shit about forensics and DNA back then.

  Now, parked a few doors down from Ibiza Tan, the salon Slim Joe visited every other day in order to keep his nice orange hue, David couldn’t believe how lucky he’d been. Killing disposable people helped. No one was sad to see another gangster dead. Besides, in those days, all the Chicago cops were on the take, and the FBI’s attention was focused on New York, everyone working John Gotti.

  Back before he was the Rain Man, back before he had any reputation to uphold, he was out hitting street dealers Ronnie said were skimming. Didn’t matter if the kid was seventeen. David would stalk the kid for a week, two weeks, however long it took to figure out how to take him out with no collateral damage, follow the kid on the train out to Aurora, watch him shoplift from Lord & Taylor in the Fox Valley Mall, the next day show up outside his high school, see if there was any recognition on the kid’s part, show up a few days later on his block, walk right by the kid, see if the kid started to mad-dog him, act tough, flash the gun in his waistband, whatever.

  Nothing.

  No one ever recognized him. His simple secret to killing was that he was always behind the guy about to die, days, weeks, sometimes months before it actually happened. It was the part of his legend he happily cultivated over the years. He was like an embolism: Just because you couldn’t see him didn’t he mean he wasn’t there, waiting.

  The only thing that bothered him now was that he knew he’d been trained, that the dealers he killed probably had done n
othing in the least to deserve their fate, that it was all Ronnie manipulating him into a perfect killing machine. Ronnie building a legend on the streets to control his bigger business, so that when he had to hit actual hard targets, it was just a job.

  David checked his watch. He had a lot of shit on his agenda, and Slim Joe was taking forever. He’d spent the last several days trying to figure out how he’d kill Slim Joe. David didn’t want to do it in the house, not with his own genetic material all over the joint, and he certainly wasn’t going to kill Slim Joe and then clean up afterward. Not after the last job he’d done in Chicago, a few months before the Donnie Brasco fuckup.

  That was Frank Picone, the Windsor Syndicate’s guy in Chicago. Ronnie told David at first that he wanted only intel on the guy, find out what the Mounties were doing in town, but not to kill him. It was no use killing a guy if it meant it would open up a job for some other, more capable asshole.

  In Canada, the Windsor Syndicate was into the computer and mortgage shit Ronnie and the rest of the Family had no interest in. Ronnie didn’t seem to mind when he found out that they’d moved down into Detroit, and then Chicago, running cons at nursing homes, stealing the identities of the patients, taking their whole portfolios out from under them, selling stocks, moving the cash back into Canada. It was irrelevant and frankly too risky for Ronnie. “That’s civilian business,” he told David. “Civilians have relatives. Relatives call the cops.”

  But when Picone started freelancing, flipped his cash into oxycodone, began dealing on AOL message boards, created a network of faceless buyers that handled their business with dead drops like they were the CIA, flooded the streets with an opiate cheaper and easier to handle than heroin? That was some shit Ronnie would not abide. The opiate business in Chicago belonged to the Family. And this asshole had just walked right around the Family, and in the process had taken intimidation and fear completely out of the game. That was a hanging offense.

  Not that David cared about any of that. The only thing that concerned him was that Picone was indiscriminate, that he was able to get the thread of his actions by following him for under a week, was able to break into his house twice without incident, even sat behind Picone and his wife at a Chili’s on a Tuesday night, the two of them talking about their business like they were discussing an episode of Law & Order.