Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  “Pleased,” Miguel said, and he gave David a shy smile. He was just another person doing a dirty job, David thought, which made David examine Ruben more closely. He was wearing a conservative suit, but it was cut precisely, and he had a thick gold watch on his wrist, an absurd topaz pinkie ring, perfectly shined black shoes on his feet. In fact, the more David examined the suit, the more familiar it looked, since he had a matching one in his own closet. Salary, benefits, and probably whatever they could pinch off the dead or get on the cheap from Bennie’s contacts, David thought.

  David followed Ruben through another set of double doors and into a well-lit waiting room that housed two coffins—both simple pine boxes—on wheeled platforms, two chairs, and another velvet sofa. A door led out of the room and onto the service road that wound through the cemetery. David saw through the one window in the room that there was already a hearse parked outside, the driver standing next to it, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

  “From now on,” Ruben said, and David realized he didn’t know if Ruben had been talking the entire time, he’d been so focused on keeping everything as normal and blasé as possible, “maybe it would be easier if you just came down in the morning before a service, so that we don’t need to reopen the coffins, since I know that’s against Jewish law.”

  “Yes,” David said. He didn’t know if that was strictly true, though he figured if Ruben knew that fact, it probably had some truth in it.

  Ruben went around and unlatched the top of both coffins, but didn’t open them. “Should I step out?” he asked. Polite guy. Probably was a real comfort to the actual grieving families. His manner even made David feel at ease.

  “Yes,” David said, “because of the Jewish law.”

  “I’ll be outside,” he said. “Just let me know when you’re ready, and then we can take Mr. Berkowitz down to his resting place.”

  “Which one is Mr. Berkowitz?”

  “The one on the right,” Ruben said.

  “Great, thank you,” David said, then he thought maybe he was being too informal, so he added, “And bless you for the work you do.”

  David waited until Ruben was engaged in conversation outside with the hearse driver before he opened the coffin completely. He noticed a few things almost immediately. The first was that he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at. Obviously, there was a body in the coffin, a head, a neck, a chest, he could make those out . . . but the head was missing its ears. And it wasn’t like they’d been severed in some kind of accident. David could see the jagged cuts that were made around the ears, even with all the dried blood that was gathered there. Though, that wasn’t what killed him. Getting his eyelids slit off hadn’t killed him either, nor had the cigarette burns on his face. All were survivable wounds.

  David didn’t know anyone who could survive without a throat, however, and they’d done a good job with that, cutting Paul Bruno’s neck in a full circle, likely using piano wire from the front, the way Fat Monte always liked to take out snitches, so they could see it happening.

  Bruno the Butcher. Poor bastard. He’d been snitching for years, but no one really gave a shit, since he only dimed out the people the Family wanted him to dime out, the loose threads, the idiots who were working on the fringes, guys like Lemonhead, who’d tried to blackmail a straight-edge city councilman over some prostitution shit. Ronnie was always smart about letting people like Paul Bruno do the dirty laundry for them.

  What the fuck was going on in Chicago? He’d known Paul Bruno his entire life, could remember playing jacks with him out front of the butcher shop while his dad and Paul’s dad talked shop inside. Paul’s dad gave them turkeys every Thanksgiving, free of charge, after David’s mom disavowed the Family and money got scarce; Paul’s mom always brought over soups and casseroles and magazines and books. Jennifer’s family was tight with them, too; the Frangellos and the Brunos bowled and played bridge together, just like regular people.

  Paul so confused growing up; David remembered that, too. Tried to be a tough guy. David remembered Jennifer telling him how she’d always known he was gay, from back when they were kids.

  And now here he was. Not just done ugly. Done ugly and personally—the cigarette burns, the eyelids. And that Paul was here, not just thrown into a ditch somewhere, told David that whatever information Paul had given out was not the negligible shit of the past, because the Family would make an example out of him if that was the case, leave him somewhere as a message to other snitches. This was private and personal, and that gave David pause.

  David closed the coffin and wheeled it back into the morgue. “Miguel,” he said, “you need to clean this body.”

  “The man?”

  “Yes, the man,” David said.

  “I’m sorry, Rabbi, but Ruben said that the family requested he not be touched, which I understood to mean that he wasn’t to be cleaned.”

  “And I’m telling you to clean him.”

  “I’m sorry, Rabbi,” Miguel said, “but I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I don’t care what you understand,” David said.

  Miguel started to say something, stopped himself for a moment, then said, “I’ll do it right away, Rabbi.”

  “And I want you to fix all these wounds,” David said. “You understand that?”

  “Yes, Rabbi, that’s no problem.”

  David went back into the waiting room, grabbed a chair, and slid it into the morgue, where he watched Miguel wash down Paul Bruno’s whole body, from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Special Agent Jeff Hopper was always surprised by how pleasant prisons looked from the outside. The state penitentiary in Walla Walla, for instance, had a beautifully manicured front lawn, perfectly squared shrubbery, lines of evergreens, a sturdy redbrick facade. If you cut and pasted it into another part of the city, you might have mistaken it for one of the buildings at Whitman College.

  Stateville was the same way. Just thirty-five miles west of Chicago down Interstate 55, it was situated in the middle of verdant fields and farmlands, two miles from the new Prairie Bluff Golf Course. To get into the prison, you had to drive a quarter mile along a tree-lined road with a median of green grass and circular planting beds that, in the spring, were filled with roses, though which today, the first Sunday of 1999, were covered with a thick blanket of snow and ice, the result of a brutal, two-day storm that dumped nineteen inches of snow on the city and plunged temperatures to an arctic negative thirteen. From the outside, the administration building, a four-story made of red and yellow brick, looked like an old Chicago hotel, the kind of place with a bottom-floor restaurant that served only steaks bloody-rare. In fact, if you could ignore the thirty-foot-tall cement walls and sniper towers, Stateville Correctional Center looked downright inviting.

  Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy probably wouldn’t concur, Jeff thought, but then they got to see the place from the outside only once. Same as Neto Espinoza.

  “Do you ever wonder how people end up doing the things that put them in there? The process by which they decide to become that kind of person?” Matthew asked as they walked out of the administration building, back into the biting cold of the winter day, and down the long gravel road toward the parking lot. Matthew didn’t say much the entire time they were inside, waiting for the official paperwork on Neto Espinoza’s final days at the prison, and, before that, most of the ride out from Chicago.

  Jeff had learned what Matthew’s demeanor meant over the course of the last several weeks. Sometimes, he was silent because he wanted to listen carefully to what was being said around him—like when they’d been with Paul Bruno—so that he could figure out how to play a particular situation. Sometimes, he was silent out of simple necessity: He didn’t know enough about being an agent to argue Jeff’s thoughts on an issue, though that didn’t mean acquiescence. No, it actually meant he’d attack the topic an hour or a day or a week later, after he’d formed a determined opinion. It was one
of Matthew’s most admirable qualities, Jeff thought, and one not all that common in field agents.

  Other times he kept his mouth shut so he could contemplate an issue he found difficult to parse. Like when they found out that Neto Espinoza, Chema Espinoza’s brother, died of a heart attack while in custody at Stateville. That wouldn’t have been all that vexing if Neto hadn’t been twenty-six at the time of his death, or if he hadn’t been, according to his death certificate, otherwise physically fit. And then today, after the prison released Neto’s death-in-custody report to them and it showed exactly what Jeff thought it would show: nothing. Just a regular heart attack for a completely healthy young man.

  “That’s the reason I became a cop,” Jeff said, “and an FBI agent.”

  “Really? I thought you just wanted to catch bad guys.”

  “That was part of it, sure,” Jeff said. “But after a while, you see enough stupidity, you have to begin to wonder about the root causes. You don’t have to be evil to make the wrong choice. Don’t need to be good to make the right choice. You could save a kid from choking to death at McDonald’s one day and that night, to celebrate, you go out and get sloshed at the bar and plow your car through a bunch of disabled orphans. Next thing you know, you’re the worst person on earth.”

  “Maybe people are just fucked-up,” Matthew said.

  It was hard to argue that point. It had taken Jeff and Matthew weeks to find out the exact disposition of Neto Espinoza for just that reason. Finding out he was dead was easy—it was public record, after all—but when Jeff and Matthew went to question Neto’s mother, she was unwilling to talk to either of them. It didn’t matter that one of her sons was dead and another was missing. Jeff didn’t bother to tell Mrs. Espinoza what he knew about Chema, figuring that information would only get her killed, too. Not that he imagined many people in the Family would come down to Twenty-Fourth and Karlov to handle their business, the idea of rolling into the heart of the Gangster 2-6 territory probably not all that enticing even if the Family did employ many in their ranks. The Gangster 2-6 needed the drugs the Family provided, but their allegiance was to each other, not a bunch of Italians, and certainly not a bunch of Italians who may have killed some of their boys.

  None of that mattered to Mrs. Espinoza. That Jeff and Matthew were investigating at all was the problem: The entire Espinoza family was gang-affiliated—Neto and Chema’s father, an OG in the Gangster 2-6, was doing fifteen at Logan—so Mrs. Espinoza wasn’t going to say a thing to anybody.

  They had to move through back channels, Jeff calling every contact he had in the prison system to try to get anything beyond confirmation that Neto was dead in hopes of gleaning information that might lead to the Family’s attempts to cover their tracks with Sal Cupertine. If Neto had been murdered, that would mean another link in the chain, another person who could provide information, another cracked window. Problem was, no one wanted to give him anything, not with all the heat that had come down on the Illinois prison system recently, the stories of graft and obstruction of justice so regular that they began to dwarf the crimes of the men and women who got sent away.

  So Jeff did the one thing he didn’t want to do, which was contact Dennis Tryon’s office. Dennis was an old classmate from UIC who’d moved into prison management at Stateville just in time for a decade of corruption scandals to erupt around him. Stateville’s history of laxity—which included Richard Speck himself appearing on a videotape with mounds of cocaine and handfuls of money, talking about what a great time he was having in prison, before taking time out to give a blow job to another inmate—now made even the smallest corruption possible front-page news. So asking Dennis to give him anything on the side was strictly verboten.

  Lying to him, however, wasn’t. At least in theory. So Jeff called his office the previous day and simply asked for whatever documents could be mustered for what he described as a “wide-ranging FBI investigation.” It was a common code for a federal fishing exhibition, a nice exchange of information that the bureau and the prison carried on fairly regularly. He didn’t bother to mention to the clerk that he was on paid administrative leave. Jeff hoped the form would reach Dennis’s desk and Dennis would just sign off on his old friend’s request. It’s how business was usually conducted between people who trusted each other.

  Still, Jeff had spent enough time visiting Stateville in the past several years to know that any number of nefarious deeds were possible in that shit hole. They’d cleaned up some in the last few years, though not so much that a death connected to the Family, or the Gangster 2-6 for that matter, might occasionally go uninvestigated if the price was right . . . which is what the absence of paperwork on Neto Espinoza confirmed. He was a disposable person in a family of criminals. The kind of person Dennis Tryon probably didn’t give one shit about.

  Jeff took out his cell phone and tried calling Paul Bruno. He’d spoken to him twice after their visit, once to tell him that Neto was indeed dead, and once to ask him if he had any contacts at the slaughterhouses still, see if anyone might give him any information on anything that seemed shady in the last several months. And then . . . nothing. It was general policy not to leave messages on a CI’s voicemail, so at first Jeff just called and hung up, then eventually left a message anyway.

  “Shit,” Jeff said, and he closed his phone.

  “Nothing?” Matthew said.

  “Says his voicemail is full,” Jeff said.

  They walked a few more yards in silence, the crunch of ice beneath their boots the only soundtrack to what both were coming to realize.

  “Tonight,” Jeff said, “we’re going to have a conversation with Fat Monte. You ready for that?”

  “I was ready a month ago,” Matthew said.

  A horn honked, and Jeff turned to see a black Dept. of Corrections Cutlass, the official car of any decent prison, coming up behind them. Jeff and Matthew stepped off the road to let the car pass, but instead it pulled to a stop, and Dennis Tryon stepped out.

  Dennis was a few years older than Jeff and had worked in criminal justice since he was eighteen. Jeff remembered that. It was one of those things Dennis used to say when they were in school, the ultimate trump card, that he’d been working with bad guys since he was a teenager. Now, though, he had the paunch of a man in his sixties and the sagging neck to match, even though he wasn’t yet fifty. He wore navy-blue wool pants and a blue-and-white striped shirt that bulged out over his belt, a red tie, a blue sport coat. Jeff liked Dennis a decade ago, though he wasn’t sure he still did.

  “Shouldn’t you be behind a desk somewhere?” Jeff said.

  “You didn’t come by the office to say hello,” Dennis said.

  Jeff wagged the envelope containing Neto Espinoza’s report in front of Dennis’s face. “I got what I came for.”

  “Did you know you’re on paid administrative leave?” Dennis said.

  “I was aware of that, yes,” Jeff said.

  “You failed to mention that when you asked for Neto Espinoza’s death records.”

  “I didn’t think it was important,” Jeff said.

  “Of course not,” Dennis said. A shiver went through him and he pulled his sport coat closed. He couldn’t button it over his gut, so he just held the two sides together. “Christ, it’s cold as hell out here. I hear Chicago is socked in. That right?”

  “There something you want to talk about, Dennis?” Jeff asked.

  “I called your office,” Dennis said, “and they said you are on an extended vacation. Stateville isn’t the kind of place most people visit while on vacation. Even fewer people do independent investigations into the natural death of drug mules.” He paused and looked at Matthew, who was watching the whole interaction with something close to amusement. “And you,” Dennis said to Matthew, “who are you, exactly?”

  “Just a friend,” Matthew said.

  “I’m sure,” Dennis said. Another black Cutlass pulled down the road, and Dennis straightened up, tried to look dignified. The Cutl
ass slowed as it went by, so Dennis gave it a wave, as if to let the driver know Jeff and Matthew weren’t escapees. “Jeff always was great about making friends,” Dennis said, once the car passed. “You keep in touch with anyone else from school?”

  Jeff didn’t keep in touch with many people. That he kept in touch with Dennis Tryon had mostly to do with their infrequent meetings at the prison, though Jeff had no delusions that Dennis was simply one of the good guys or one of the bad guys. You work in prison management, those roles are generally pretty fungible, which made everything about Dennis questionable. He’d helped Jeff on a few occasions, Jeff had helped him on a few occasions, and even those interactions were strictly business, albeit salted with periodic attempts at familiarity, Dennis always going on about his wife, Lisa, who worked at the zoo in Chicago, and his son Devin, who had some developmental problem, or showing Jeff photos from his hunting trip; Jeff promising that the next time he came out, they’d get a beer in Crest Hill afterward, really catch up, that sort of thing.

  Not exactly a friendship. More like two people with a tacit understanding that they should treat each other better than common strangers. The debt you pay for shared experiences, Jeff thought.

  “No,” Jeff said. “I don’t want to ruin the possibility of chance reunions.”

  Dennis laughed. “See?” he said to Matthew. “Jeff has friends everywhere.” He walked back to the Cutlass and popped open the trunk, then came back holding a bulging manila envelope sealed with packing tape. “You left this,” Dennis said, and he handed the envelope to Jeff.

  “If whatever is in this envelope is bad enough that we gotta go through all of this,” Jeff said, “then I’m not sure I want you to give it to me.”

  Dennis said, “I read about that Family business in the paper, figured that was your people. I probably should have called you, but I thought you probably didn’t need to hear from anyone else.”