Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  “Be discreet,” David said.

  “Always am,” Gray Beard said.

  “You got a ballpark figure for me?”

  “Why don’t we go a flat twenty thousand now, more later once I’m able to move some machinery and that Jaguar. Don’t know who might want an X-ray machine and bunch of surgical equipment, but I’m gonna find out.”

  “That works,” David said, making calculations in his mind. Twenty thousand dollars was the kind of money that could make a difference for a little while. Maybe another eight or ten from Jerry Ford, that would make an even bigger difference. Fifty thousand, now that would be the kind of money that a person and a child could maybe live a year on, particularly if they didn’t have a lot of other bills. “But if you can get me fifty in the next day or two, we’ll call it square for the whole job.”

  “Give me until Wednesday,” Gray Beard said. “Tuesday night if you’re in a rush.”

  “I trust you,” David said.

  “After what I’ve seen,” Grey Beard said, “I’m glad that’s true.”

  Thirty minutes later, right on time, Jerry Ford showed up in the refrigerated LifeCore truck.

  David already had Dr. Kirsch’s head and extremities set for burial tomorrow, and the rest of Dr. Kirsch was on a gurney and ready to go, so when he saw Jerry pull up, he met him outside with the body.

  “Just you tonight, Rabbi?” Jerry said.

  “It’s Super Bowl Sunday,” David said.

  “Better than Christmas,” Jerry said. He unzipped the body bag and examined Dr. Kirsch. “He’s been kept cool?”

  “Yes,” David said.

  “The whole time?”

  “As soon as his body was discovered, yes,” David said.

  “The major organs, those are probably shot, but we’ll see,” Jerry said. He pinched the skin on Dr. Kirsch’s bicep. “Everything else looks good.” He zipped the bag back up and then loaded Dr. Kirsch into the back of his truck and closed the doors back up.

  David handed Jerry a thick manila envelope filled with all the needed paperwork for the transfer of one Gabe Krantz to the good people at LifeCore, which Jerry didn’t even give a cursory glance to. He just reached into his pocket, took out a banded, half-inch stack of hundreds, and handed them to David.

  “Everything look in order?” Jerry asked.

  David flipped through the cash, just to be sure it wasn’t filled with singles, and suddenly it was like the old days, back when he did collections, back when this all seemed pretty glamorous, back when he thought his cousin Ronnie was the coolest man alive, back when he and Fat Monte were friends, hanging out, going on double dates. Back when none of this seemed even remotely plausible. Way back when.

  “Yes,” David said.

  “L’chaim,” Jerry said, and then he got back in his truck and was gone. It occurred to David then that there was a pretty good chance Jerry Ford wasn’t really a Jew. Not that it mattered.

  Rabbi David Cohen locked up the funeral home and mortuary and then, for a long time, he stood in front of the entrance to the cemetery and stared up at the sky. Most of the time, it was impossible to see any stars, the light pollution from the Strip giving everything a strange green glow at night. In Summerlin, though, there were still ordinances about that sort of thing, and this close to the Red Rocks, if you faced away from the Strip, you could actually imagine you were somewhere else.

  It wouldn’t always be this way, David knew. The newspaper had stories every other day about new casino developments getting approved on this end of town, along with huge shopping centers, to satisfy the needs of the one hundred thousand people who were supposed to eventually inhabit Summerlin.

  It wasn’t a bad place to live. In the last nine months, David had grown warm to the convenience of the villages of Summerlin. He had his coffee place. He had a pizza joint he liked—a Detroit pizza, of all things—called Northside Nathan’s. He’d come to depend on the Bagel Café for decent corned beef and a pretty fair bagel. He even had a few places he liked to knock around in: a pub called the Outside Inn that had cheap whiskey and salty prime rib and no Jews (owing primarily to their hunting motif, David thought); a shopping center called Best in the West a few streets down, off of Rainbow, that had an ice cream shop where some angry kid mixed flavors on a slab of marble. He’d go into that store sometimes and imagine what flavors Jennifer and William would choose.

  The idea that she was struggling to pay the bills made David sick. He wasn’t sure if Rabbi Kales had said that to make him feel that way. Once David got the money from Gray Beard, he’d get her some cash, and she’d be okay for a bit. A little breathing room was all she’d need while he figured out the plan.

  And maybe the plan was changing. Maybe it wasn’t about getting back to Chicago anymore. Maybe it was about getting Jennifer and William to Las Vegas, where he could protect them. Get William into the Tikvah Preschool here. Keep him in all the way through high school. Get him into a good college. Maybe he’d become a doctor or a lawyer, or just the kind of guy people weren’t afraid to strike up a conversation with at a bar. What must that be like?

  What would Jennifer make of this new life? It dawned on David then that in just nine months he’d been able to set up an entirely new life, here in the desert, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was a life and it had room for his wife and kid, for sure. And for the first time in his life, he was on top. Bennie was in jail, at least for a while. And then, who knew? Maybe he’d end up doing a year or two or ten, or just six months. Whatever. He wasn’t physically present, which meant that the only person who knew the truth about David was Rabbi Kales, and he was soon to be out of the picture, too. The day-to-day operations of two legit businesses—the temple and the funeral home and attached cemetery—would be under his control.

  There would be so much money: all the donations, and the tuition, and the general operating budget of the temple, and then the money moved through the funeral home. The real business alone was lucrative. The murder business was a windfall, and they hadn’t even gone outside the Italian families. If they started talking to the Chinese or the Russians or even the Mexicans and blacks . . . well, there were a lot of potential markets that weren’t being tapped, mostly because Bennie didn’t like dealing with anyone outside the traditional families. He just wasn’t thinking forward. The Bloods and Crips were killing each other at a pretty remarkable clip just a few miles away.

  In Chicago, the Family farmed out a lot of their drug trade to the Mexican gang—the Gangster 2-6—and that had worked out well enough, so at least there was a working template . . . though it wouldn’t exactly be easy to explain the sudden influx of dead Jews who were also Chinese or Mexican or black, David supposed. So that could wait.

  Maybe what he’d do, David thought, was just kill Bennie Savone and keep it all for himself and . . .

  He’d been set up to succeed. And tonight, after nine months, he had done just that. Wasn’t that all he ever wanted?

  “No,” he said aloud.

  And there it was.

  There was only one person alive who could predict how Sal Cupertine might react to this new life, one person who might benefit from knowing that Sal Cupertine wasn’t just efficient, wasn’t just ruthless, but was also adaptable, who could be taught to have a new life.

  Only one person who might, after all this, figure out how to profit from sending Sal Cupertine to Las Vegas to become Rabbi David Cohen.

  Only one person who knew where he was.

  Cousin Ronnie.

  It all made so much sense now.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Jeff Hopper loved Las Vegas. When he was still living in Walla Walla, he’d drive out to Pasco and pick up a flight to Las Vegas on a Friday afternoon and be playing blackjack at the Sahara by dinnertime. Sometimes he’d go with friends, but Jeff mostly preferred to go by himself. Once he settled in Chicago, his trips became less frequent, but he still managed to get out at least once a year . . . except for this last year, which
had been completely lost to him.

  He had a whole system: He never stayed at a casino—which meant he ended up staying at some shitty hotels over the years, invariably called the Royal Plaza Inn—so that once he went off to bed, there was no temptation to play just one more hand. He always had a cheap steak dinner at the Barbary Coast’s Victorian Room. And, without fail, he always played a couple of hands at the Frontier, just to see if the Culinary Union was still on strike there, as they’d been since the early 1990s.

  The hotel was a microcosm for just how terminally screwed up the city really was: Howard Hughes had purchased it, the Desert Inn, the Sands, and a handful of other casinos in the 1960s as part of his quest to clean the Mafia out of Las Vegas, only to turn those places into his own strange fiefdom. And then a few years after his death, the Frontier was sold to the Elardi family, who promptly gutted the casino, tried to bust the unions, and ended up with picketers for the better part of a decade. And no one even got killed in the process.

  Now, though, four days after the Super Bowl Sunday raid on Kochel Farms, as he drove away from the Strip toward the tony suburb of Summerlin—a place built by the Howard Hughes Corporation, too, in the ultimate coup de grace for old Las Vegas—Jeff couldn’t help thinking it was better back then because the Mafia would never have put a Gilley’s in the Frontier. The idea of a mechanical bull on the Strip as absurd as the giant sword of Excalibur jutting into the sky, or the laser beam from the top of the Luxor. Hard to imagine Frank, Dean, and Sammy doing their show in a glowing pyramid. Of course, the Mafia was still operating out here, they just couldn’t afford to run the casinos anymore.

  Not the big ones, anyway. There were a few silent partners still involved with the sportsbooks, though the FBI was content to keep their eyes averted since they weren’t breaking tourists’ legs or getting involved in point shaving (at least not as obviously as they used to), and there was some decent grift going on with the prevalence of video poker machines in every bar and restaurant in town. All victimless crimes. No one seemed to be running to the FBI to complain they’d lost at video poker.

  The Mafia in Las Vegas these days was all about secondary markets: the booming construction business that had spoked out in every direction from the Strip; the warehouse-size strip clubs that promised huge cash hauls on a nightly basis; the resort drug trade of ecstasy, coke, and pills. They didn’t bother with the hard stuff or the easy stuff, leaving the heroin, crack, and weed to the Bloods and Crips, who mostly operated out of the slums of North Las Vegas.

  The strange thing about Las Vegas, the part that Jeff really loved, was that the local press treated everyone with an Italian name who got nicked for a crime like they were John Gotti. The front page of both the Review-Journal and the Sun this week ran a huge story on someone named Bennie Savone, a local hood who wasn’t even connected to a family, just running his own crew out of a strip club in town called the Wild Horse, who’d apparently overseen a series of wholesale beatings and shakedowns of his customers, plus some run-of-the-mill credit card scams. Jeff hadn’t bothered to read the whole story—it was bush-league stuff. That was the thing about open cities like Las Vegas: If you were criminal minded, no one was going to tell you what you couldn’t do, particularly if you were good for the ecosystem, and that included the local media. What else were they going to report on?

  Las Vegas had always been the second home for the crime families, with the Chicago crews running huge swatches of the city for decades before eventually receding into the background through the unions, particularly the Teamsters and Culinary Union, though with the corporatization of the casinos, they simply weren’t as prevalent anymore. Turns out, not even the Mafia can muscle an entire corporation.

  Not as prevalent, however, didn’t mean gone. Which is why Jeff was in Las Vegas in the first place. The delivery trucks that exited from Kochel Farms on that night the previous April had gone all over the country—as far east as Vermont, as far west as California, but nothing south of Missouri, which made sense considering how the Kansas City crews still had so much influence in the steak world—but the largest concentration was in Nevada and California, home to countless hotels and steak houses. There were only a few probable locations, based on where there was actual organized crime taking place and where the trucks had stopped, at least according to their logs, which could have been falsified.

  “You think Cupertine is living inside a Sizzler?” Matthew said to Jeff on the phone the morning after the raid, after Agent Poremba was able to get the trucking information Jeff had requested.

  “Someone saw him,” Jeff said. “I know it. That’s enough to get us moving in the right direction.”

  “What about the drivers?”

  “We can’t get to them yet,” Jeff said. “They’ve got no reason to speak to you and me. In a week, maybe the FBI will pick them up, but what will they say? They’ll be lawyered up long before any questioning.”

  “Maybe one of them has a conscience,” Matthew said. “Could be waiting the week is the way to do it. What’s the hurt in waiting?”

  “Because this is ours, Matthew,” Jeff said. “This is what we’ve been working toward. And it’s what I’m paying you for.” Matthew sighed on the other end of the line. He was still in Walla Walla; Jeff was still in Chicago, sitting at Midway, waiting to figure out where he was going to fly to. “We can only make a dent if we do this separately.”

  “This is about that night at the Four Treys. You don’t trust me anymore,” Matthew said.

  “I don’t trust us together,” Jeff said.

  “You know the bureau would have given Fat Monte a deal,” Matthew said. “Would that have been better?”

  “His wife is showing some signs she might come out,” Jeff said.

  “So, what, she can have Ronnie Cupertine toss her into Lake Michigan? She’s better off staying in a coma the rest of her life.”

  “If she can talk,” Jeff said, “we’d have another chip in this. We have a week to get something solid, and if that happens, it’s all yours. I’m done.”

  “That’s a big if,” Matthew said.

  “It’s what we’re left with.”

  “What’s your hunch?” Matthew asked.

  Kochel Farms had over a hundred accounts in Nevada—sixty-nine in Las Vegas, seventeen in Reno, another dozen in Tahoe, another seven in Carson City—and over a hundred and fifty in California—thirty-two in the San Francisco Bay Area, seventy-five in and around Los Angeles, twenty in Palm Springs, and then a few more spread out in San Diego, the California side of Tahoe, and Silicon Valley.

  Jeff examined the list of businesses: Kochel Farms trade was in either supplying high-quality meats—prime rib, porterhouse steaks, and the like—or low-quality meats—ground beef, rump roasts—so they worked with high-class hotels and pricey restaurants, but also with schools, ethnic meat markets, and crappy burger stands.

  There was no way they’d stick Cupertine in Tahoe, he’d be too obvious, and the Mafia there was like a boutique business these days, mostly running low-level slot machine scams, the odd bit of prostitution, the occasional loan sharking business. Too family-oriented. No room for tough guys. And no one out there could afford whatever Ronnie’s asking price would have been.

  He had to be strategic about this.

  “I know Las Vegas,” Jeff said, “so I’ll start there, then move up to Reno. You ever spent any time in L.A.?”

  “I went to Disneyland when I was eleven,” Matthew said. “So I could stake out the Haunted Mansion if you think that will help.”

  “What about Palm Springs?”

  “My grandparents have a time-share,” he said. “You think the Bonannos bought Cupertine and he’s calling bingo numbers now? Is that our best shot?”

  “It’s not impossible,” Jeff said.

  “You have some metric on how to approach this list of places?”

  “One by one sounds like the only way, starting with any places that have strong old-school union or crimin
al ties, people who still might be willing to do a favor for the Family or who might actually need someone like Sal Cupertine,” Jeff said. “We need to shoe-leather this, Matthew. Hand out photos. Talk about the people he killed. Get anyone who might be scared of talking feeling comfortable that they’ll be protected.”

  “Will they?” Matthew asked. Then: “Will I? Because that’s a question I have.”

  “I know,” Jeff said.

  “I want to live a long life, and I don’t want to spend all of it looking over my shoulder if we somehow muck this up.”

  “Look,” Jeff said, “after this, you’re done. Okay? I’ll pay you your whole nut, and we’ll consider it a done deal, with or without Cupertine.”

  Matthew didn’t say anything for a moment, and Jeff assumed the kid would say no, no, he was in for the long haul, that this was his obsession, too, and that he’d chase this white whale around perdition’s flames if need be. Instead he said, “Okay.”

  Now, three days after that conversation, Jeff merged onto the Summerlin Parkway feeling no closer to Sal Cupertine and farther away from Las Vegas in general. He’d spent the last days working the Strip, Downtown, the joints clustered around UNLV, then down into Green Valley and Henderson, and it was, frankly, depressing. Sometime in the last few years, the Las Vegas he remembered had turned both into a place to bring the family—the number of people he saw pushing strollers down the Strip was truly appalling—and a place to descend into absolute, opulent, asshole-fueled debauchery. $3.99 prime rib had been replaced by $100 artisan burgers. The strip clubs were essentially legalized prostitution, twenty-four hours a day, twenty bucks to get a girl to bounce on your lap for five minutes at a time. And inside every restaurant or bar or casino or strip club, there was a group of five or ten unsmiling guys trying to look tough, wearing too much cologne and jewelry, calling cocktail girls “bitch” and tossing money at them, like they were acting out characters in a movie.