Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  “So, where was Agent Drew in all of this?” Biglione asked. He had his glasses on and was still looking at the report, though Jeff could see he wasn’t really reading it. Jeff knew that Biglione couldn’t afford to find Sal Cupertine yet, which meant unless Cupertine showed up on their doorstep, they weren’t going to go above and beyond to get him into custody. They’d follow the leads they had, because they had to. Fat Monte’s wife was sitting in a hospital with a bullet wedged into her head. Alive, but only barely. Her eyes were open, she was breathing, but there wasn’t much else going on. Just enough for her family to keep her alive and to keep the pressure on the FBI about Fat Monte’s last hours alive.

  “I’m not sure I get what you mean,” Jeff said, though he was certain he knew exactly what he meant. The bureau had likely combed through all his affairs from the last few months, and it wouldn’t have taken them long to see that he’d written Matthew checks every month.

  “I got a witness at the Four Treys who says he overheard Agent Drew threaten to kill Fat Monte,” Biglione said. “You care to explain that?”

  “You line up every person in Chicago who threatened to kill Fat Monte,” Jeff said, “you’d need to rent out Wrigley for the occasion.”

  “Let’s not bullshit, okay?” Biglione said. “I know he was working with you.”

  “So what?”

  “The Family might like him dead,” Biglione said. “And I’m frankly not exactly comfortable with him threatening to kill people while in the company of an FBI agent.”

  “Well, that’s been rectified.”

  Biglione put the report down on the table and rubbed at his eyes. “I know he was impersonating an FBI agent,” he said. “I could get proof if need be.”

  “What would the need be?”

  “Newspapers are starting to pile up in front of his door, and his sister is about to miss an important test in her Western civilizations class. She gets below 3.0, could be a problem with her federal student loan,” Biglione said.

  “He’s safe,” Jeff said. “He and his sister are on a road trip.”

  “Is he looking for Cupertine on this road trip?”

  “No,” Jeff said. In fact, Matthew and Nina were already safely at the Marcus Whitman Hotel in Walla Walla, the one town in America Jeff was reasonably sure did not have a tendril of the Family in operation.

  “I can’t protect them if I don’t know where they are,” Biglione said. “The Family decides to send a blackout team for them, they’re on their own.”

  “Matthew can handle himself,” Jeff said.

  “How do you handle yourself when ten guys shoot automatic weapons into your house?”

  It was a good question, but the larger issue was that Biglione seemed to know what was becoming more and more evident: The Family had a way to get the names of the FBI players. Jeff doubted there was mole in the bureau. That was some cloak-and-dagger shit that frankly was above the Family’s general purview. Nevertheless, Jeff was sure that there were CIs playing both sides, along with guys doing deep cover who would shovel a bit of helpful information to the Family if it meant keeping their own asses covered. And as it related to Matthew, his association with Jeff was enough to make him the sort of target they’d be willing to go a bit soft on if they didn’t think there was a good chance of him getting hurt. Give up the name of someone inconsequential, basically, just to have the act of giving up information. The same cat and mouse the bureau and the Family had been playing since Capone and Ness.

  “He deserves another shot,” Jeff said.

  “You renegotiating your deal?”

  “No,” Jeff said. “This Cupertine thing, that’s it for me. When he’s in custody, I’m done. But Matthew, he did good work. He’s a real agent.”

  Biglione didn’t say anything then, and now, weeks later, as they headed to Kochel Farms, and Matthew was still in Walla Walla, his sister back in Chicago but with an FBI tail, just in case, Jeff wondered if maybe he should have made Matthew’s rehiring a condition of all this. Even though Matthew wouldn’t let him, telling him that the only leverage Jeff had anymore was that Matthew was out there . . . somewhere . . . with all the knowledge Jeff had, including everything he hadn’t shared with the bureau. Sadly, it was true.

  “Here we go,” Biglione said. Up ahead, parked on the side of the freeway, about two hundred yards up from an exit, were three black Lincoln Navigators and a black Lincoln Town Car, the marshals always good about keeping the nice-seized vehicles for their own use. Biglione slowed down and flashed his brights twice and then pulled behind the marshals and followed them out toward Kochel Farms.

  “What’s that smell?” Jeff asked.

  “The cows,” Poremba said. He tapped on the window. “They’ve probably got most of them behind a windbreak or in a barn, because of the cold, but with thirty thousand head, it would be hard to keep them all inside, even now.”

  Jeff could see a few cows now as they drove, grazing on what looked like freshly dropped bales of hay. In the spring months, though, the field would be a solid black mass of animals, constantly walking and grazing, shitting and pissing on everything, the ground churned over and over by 120,000 hooves a day. A pretty good place to leave a body, Jeff thought.

  Jeff sat stewing in the Suburban for forty minutes while the marshals and Agents Biglione and Poremba cleared the house, which proved to be a bit of a task since the Kochels were having a Super Bowl party for about twenty-five people, most of whom came walking out of the house looking as though they’d been kicked in the stomach. The marshals hadn’t bothered knocking on the front door, opting instead to burst in using a door ram. That’s how it always was with them—always with the Wyatt Earp shit. Jeff was of the opinion that if you wanted to achieve anything with a suspect, you had to make sure you didn’t start off at an escalated emotional level. It’s what concerned him about Matthew, how quickly he’d gone from having a conversation with Fat Monte to beating him. How easy it was. How much he’d liked it.

  Biglione left Jeff with a radio so he could hear everything that was going on—a nice concession on his part, since Jeff wasn’t allowed inside during the raid—and, after the chaos, they began going through every person at the party to determine who was who and if anyone happened to be Sal Cupertine, which, of course, none were. Most were business associates or employees of the farm—a meat distributer (and his wife) in town from Chicago, the operations manager of the slaughterhouse, the farm’s marketing director and her husband and newborn—or just friends of the family. Once the marshals and Biglione and Poremba managed to sort the players, letting all the guests go on their way, Agent Poremba walked outside and stood in front of the main house and took several deep breaths, his frozen exhalations rising up in plumes and disappearing into the air.

  Poremba took a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose, and then absently waved Jeff out of the car. As Jeff made his way over, four marshals came strutting out of the house, one holding the ram, the other three holding shotguns, each wearing Kevlar vests that said U.S. MARSHAL across the chest and back.

  By the time Jeff reached Poremba, the marshals were already in one of the Navigators and pulling away.

  “They find Jimmy Hoffa in the guacamole?” Jeff asked Poremba.

  “Not today,” Poremba said. He blew his nose again and pointed at the warehouse-size barn that stood about fifty yards away. “That’s where they keep the packaged meat. They move three, sometimes four truckloads a day, every day, except Super Bowl Sunday and Christmas.”

  “What about Thanksgiving?” Jeff said.

  “One shipment,” Poremba said, “to a local food bank.”

  “You find that all out in forty minutes?”

  “No,” he said. “I got all that before I came out from Kansas City. Meat industry in KC is just as corrupt as ever. This place is a model of efficiency.”

  “Still the Sicilians out there?”

  “Almost seventy years they’ve been running the meat business in Saint Louis and
KC, running the unions, and here we are, freezing to death at a cattle farm on Super Bowl Sunday.” Poremba laughed in an unfunny way. “These are working people,” Poremba said, “and we just crashed into their house. This isn’t even a union farm, Jeff.”

  “I know what Fat Monte told me,” Jeff said.

  Poremba folded up his handkerchief and examined it for a few seconds. “Your father keep a handkerchief?”

  “My dad was military,” Jeff said. “He blew his nose on his arm.”

  “Mine didn’t either,” Poremba said. “It’s like something from antiquity, right?” In the distance, Jeff could see a white paddy wagon heading toward the farm. Poremba noticed it at the same time. “Wishful thinking on Special Agent Biglione’s part, no doubt.”

  “You need to let me in to interview these people,” Jeff said. “I know I can get . . . something. Fat Monte wouldn’t have spent his last breath telling me I needed to get out to this place for nothing.”

  “If the Family were connected to this farm, that would mean war with the Missouri boys by now, don’t you see? These people, they’re too successful to be connected. Can you imagine Ronnie Cupertine standing out here in one of his mohair overcoats, filling his nostrils with this lovely aroma?”

  Jeff couldn’t. It was true. But there was something in all this that kept worming in his mind, had been for weeks now. There was no evidence anywhere that the Family was in the meat business. They’d gotten out of it in the 1920s, when John Giannola moved down to Saint Louis to be with his brothers and started up the Green Ones, the only decent agriculture-based organized crime syndicate in the country, which is why the Missouri families still were in it, presumably, even in a minor way.

  “If there’s so much money here,” Jeff said, “there’s no good reason the Sicilians in Missouri wouldn’t move up a few miles and at least get in on the trucking, right? We’re ninety minutes from their operation in Saint Louis. What reason would they have for not being in this place? This farm has been here since the 1950s, and you mean to tell me no one in Missouri has ever tried to get their hooks into it?”

  Poremba started to say something, then stopped. It was a simple question. “Saint Louis is weak,” he said finally. “Lucky to hold on to what they have.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff said, “but if they have the meat industry, and the Family doesn’t give a shit about it, wouldn’t they cut a deal? Isn’t that what they do now? All one big happy crime family?”

  The paddy wagon pulled up in front of the house then, and a young marshal got out and looked around, as if he expected to see all the original Five Families lined up and cuffed, the history and future of organized crime snuffed out on a farm in southern Illinois. “Am I in the right place?” he asked.

  “You can go home,” Poremba said.

  “I drove for five hours,” the marshal said. “From Chicago.”

  “You can go home,” Poremba said again. “Or you can go inside and talk to your superior officer and have him tell you to go home.”

  The marshal didn’t say anything. He just walked back to the paddy wagon and got inside but didn’t bother to pull away.

  “I think someone in the bureau is giving the Family information about this case,” Jeff said. “I think from the beginning, from before Sal Cupertine took out my guys. Because the more I learn about Cupertine, the more unrealistic it seems to me that he’d have been the guy to be meeting our people. It just doesn’t make sense. I think somewhere down the line, someone tipped Ronnie Cupertine that we were getting close to his operation, and he put his cousin up for sacrifice, and then everything turned upside down. Everything has been too convenient. Even this, here, today.”

  “Probably,” Poremba said.

  “That’s it?” Jeff said. “Probably?”

  “When you were running your unit,” Poremba said, “how many CIs did you have?”

  “That I trusted? Maybe two.”

  “So why should any of this be a surprise? The guppies have always been sacrificed so the big fish could swim.” Poremba took his handkerchief back out of his pocket, blew his nose again, then wadded it up and threw it into the snow.

  The door opened behind them, and a young woman stepped out, a little boy in a Bears winter coat holding her hand. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, which meant it was probably Tina Kochel, the elder Mel Kochel’s niece. A college student out in Springfield, if Jeff was remembering the files correctly. Jeff didn’t know who the kid was but immediately felt terrible that this whole day was going to be something he’d possibly remember: the day men with guns showed up during the football game.

  Tina took a few steps forward with the boy, but when she saw that Poremba wasn’t going to let her pass, she said, “Am I allowed to walk out of my own damn property?”

  “Is this your property?” Poremba asked.

  “It’s my family’s property,” she said. “You don’t have any right to do this, you know.”

  “Actually,” Poremba said, “we have all the rights we need, or else we wouldn’t be here. That’s how the federal government works. You can rest assured that if we show up somewhere with a bunch of guns, we have the right to do it. The warrant helps, too.”

  Jeff was surprised to hear Poremba’s rather snippy response—the girl was obviously scared and of no concern to the FBI, so he was just doing it to keep up appearances. Unlike Biglione, Poremba still appeared to wear human skin, so this all seemed unneeded.

  “My son is scared out of his mind,” Tina said. “I’d like to get some of his toys out of my car. Is that against the law? Do I have the right to do that?”

  “Sure,” Poremba said. “Where’s your car?”

  “The carport,” she said. She pointed to a covered area adjacent to the barn where there were five Ford trucks parked.

  Poremba took a step to one side, but just as Tina was about to pass, Jeff put a hand on Tina’s arm and stopped her. “For security reasons,” Jeff said, “why don’t you leave your son with us.”

  “This is infuriating,” Tina said.

  “Policy,” Jeff said, which wasn’t true, because outside consultants didn’t have any policies. What was true, however, is that he was certain he hadn’t read anything about Tina Kochel having a kid. He would have remembered that. What was also true was that it wasn’t illegal for him to question the kid, but it was illegal for Poremba to do so. The FBI couldn’t interrogate a preschooler—Jeff thought the kid was maybe four—but there was nothing wrong with a stranger doing it.

  “Fine,” she said. She kneeled down and took her son’s face in her hands. “I’m going to leave you with these nice men for two minutes. I’ll be right back. Be a good boy and don’t bother them.”

  “Okay!” the boy said. Or, essentially, shouted.

  Tina stood back up and glared at both Jeff and Poremba. “I know you’re just doing your job, but this is bullshit,” she said.

  “Federal agents were killed,” Poremba said, “so we need to follow all leads. As a taxpayer, I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

  “It’s the Super Bowl,” she said.

  “So imagine how little we want to be here, too,” Jeff said.

  Once Tina was out of earshot, Jeff said to Poremba, “Don’t listen to this,” and then he kneeled in front of the boy, so that he was at eye level, and said, “What’s your name? Is it Mel?”

  “No!” the boy said, and he stomped his foot. He didn’t seem exactly terrified. What he seemed, in fact, was fairly entertained. Either that, or shouting was his default setting. “That’s my uncle! I’m Nicholas!”

  “That’s right,” Jeff said. He looked over his shoulder at Poremba, who was watching this unfold with something like curiosity mixed with horror, but knew enough not to say a word. “That’s right. Your uncle is Mel. Who is your daddy?”

  Nicholas stomped his foot again, “My daddy is my daddy!”

  “That’s right,” Jeff said. “But do you know his name?”

  “Daddy,” Nicholas said
, but he didn’t sound terribly convinced that this was true. Odd.

  “Where does your daddy live?” Jeff said.

  “Heaven,” Nicholas said.

  Jeff thought it was somewhat possible that he’d forget Tina Kochel had a kid—she didn’t matter to him in the least, so maybe he’d just seen that she was going to school in Springfield and left it at that—but there was no way he would have overlooked a dead husband. Twenty-five-year-olds didn’t have dead husbands anymore. Or dead fathers of their children, at least.

  “Finish up,” Poremba said calmly. “She’s at the car right now.”

  He needed about thirty minutes with the kid, really. Maybe with a good child psychologist. But that wasn’t going to happen. “How long has your daddy been in heaven?”

  Nicholas shrugged. “Ten years!” he said.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. The problem with kids and time is that until they’re about six or seven, the concept of past, present, and future can get fairly muddled. Nicholas was maybe four. Nothing he said was reliable. Nothing he said was admissible, either.

  “What did he get you for Christmas?”

  “Nintendo,” Nicholas said, “and G.I. Joe and five games and popcorn.”