Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg
Читать онлайн книгу.
going to be doing time in some ass factory, ended up getting six months in the minimum-security wing up at Warm Springs in Carson City—which was like doing time at a Radisson: shitty, but not torture—followed by six months home detention.
And that calmed shit down.
For a while, anyway.
Then the owner of Panthers Gentleman’s Club—a local named Vic Acosta, doing front work for some low-level Miami boys—skipped town after getting indicted on tax evasion a few months ago and the feds seized his club. The IRS was owed fifteen million, which they weren’t gonna get selling the building, so they figured they’d recoup it on the pole. They brought in the U.S. Marshals to run the joint, which wasn’t great for business, even after they dropped the price of lap dances from twenty dollars to ten. When that didn’t work, they got a food license, started to move steak and lobster in addition to tits and ass, tried to cater to gentlemen, as if gentlemen still came to Las Vegas. Still nothing. So they tried an Italian buffet, started giving the girls health benefits, since they were now federal employees, figuring they’d get some high-class girls that way, not realizing conventioneers didn’t want a high-class girl. Their last big move was a billboard on the Strip advertising Actually Legal Girls.
That got the national media interested, everyone from 20/20 to the Today show to the National Enquirer coming to town to do stories on how tax dollars were paying the hourly wages of lap dancers, which eventually dovetailed into tales of how antiquated the Italian American Mafia had become. While the Chinese Triads were training teenagers to hack half the world, the Mafia was still running protection schemes for a couple grand a month. While the Russian Mob was counterfeiting credit cards and stealing a million dollars a week from gas and oil companies overseas, the Mafia was running sex rings and blackmail scams. The Mexican Cartels owned an entire fucking country . . . and the Mafia was breaking city councilmen’s legs for unpaid debts on the Super Bowl. And who was scared of the Mafia anymore, anyway, when kids on the block had automatic weapons? People got shot in the head just for waking up and going to school.
Then they made it personal: Talking about how Al Capone had morphed into that Teflon pussy John Gotti. How Joseph “The Animal” Barboza, who ate the faces of his enemies, gave way to the likes of Sammy the Bull, who only stopped snitching long enough to write a tell-all book and flirt with Diane Sawyer on TV, all while still under witness protection. Or how Whitey Bulger had skipped Boston with the FBI’s assistance—not that he was real Mafia, just a dumb Irish thug, not that it mattered to Al Roker, that giggling fuck—long before Sal Cupertine, the Chicago Family enforcer known as the Rain Man—Matt Lauer acting up, too, the fuck: “I see that, I think of Dustin Hoffman, don’t you, Al? Not threatening in the least”—got away with killing three FBI agents and a CI, and then got shipped out of the city in a truck full of frozen meat. And now this fuckwit Vic Acosta, who lost his club to the government and didn’t even have the good sense to burn it down first.
David caught it all one morning while he sat at his kitchen table, eating his oatmeal, the one food that didn’t hurt his jaw. His old face flashed on the screen for ten seconds, the first time David had seen it in a couple years, along with some grainy video of him ordering a tuna sandwich inside a Subway in Chicago. David thinking how nice it would be to eat a sandwich without it sending white hot pain into his nasal cavity and out his ears, thinking, Shit, I hope Jennifer doesn’t see this. Thinking, Shit, I hope my mother doesn’t see this. Even if he hadn’t seen his mother in fifteen years.
First couple years after he dropped out of high school, he was deep in the life, and she was still in Chicago, going by her maiden name, Arlene Rigliano, because she’d given up the Family. He’d bump into her on the street, she’d act like he didn’t exist, and he was so hard, he didn’t want to believe he’d ever been someone’s kid, so what did it matter?
Except one time. He and Jennifer were in Target, buying mouthwash and cereal and greeting cards, that real-life stuff, and suddenly his mother came around the bend in the paper towel aisle. It was just the two of them there under those bright white lights—Jennifer still lingering in the vitamin row, adding up how much they’d spent; Target an indulgence for them in those days, they were so broke, they had to keep track of every dime, bouncing checks not the kind of thing Sal Cupertine wanted to get nicked for—Sal done up in a leather duster like he was in a western, Arlene white haired, wearing high-waisted pants, pushing a cart filled with laundry detergent, ice cream, cottage cheese, Diet Pepsi, the opposite of how Sal remembered her. When his dad was alive, his mother was always in designer jeans and ribbed turtlenecks, coral lipstick, perfect hair, a glass of wine or a Marlboro red in her hand. Then his dad got thrown off a building. Maybe it would have been different if they both hadn’t seen it happen from Billy Cupertine’s convertible, waiting for him to come back down from an errand he had to run, be gone two seconds, that’s what he said, and then fifteen minutes later he came back down all right. After that Sal’s mother couldn’t even put a comb through her hair for a few years, barely made it out of bed, started to take up with men who drove TR7s. By then, Sal was under Ronnie’s sway.
“Look at you,” she said, stopped there at the end of the aisle, right next to a display of Bounty, the contempt in her voice metallic. “A real professional.”
“That’s right,” Sal said. He was twenty-six. He didn’t know shit. Wouldn’t for years. His mother was just the lady who didn’t want him to be in the Family. If he had a time machine, man, he’d use it to punch himself in the gut.
“They murdered your father,” she said.
“Someone was going to,” he said.
“If only they’d waited a few years,” she said, “you could have done it.”
A boy and girl came running into the aisle, chasing a blue ball that came bouncing past, stopped, looked at Sal, and ran in the other direction. He had that effect.
She tilted her head to the right, tried to look around Sal, saw Jennifer back there. “She looks well.”
“She is.”
“You have any kids?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t,” she said, then she just turned around, left her cart where it was, and walked out. Sal played that scene in his head a hundred times, a thousand times, all the different things he should have said, though never once did he tell Jennifer about it. His mother lived in Arizona now, remarried, that was the story, which meant she was close by, could be in Las Vegas, even, dumping quarters into the slots at Treasure Island.
Then his face on the TV melted away into a shot of a U.S. Marshal in a shirt and a tie, sitting in his office at Panthers, talking about the perils of running a strip club. The Mafia in Las Vegas a big fucking joke.
David didn’t think it was funny. As it was, every time some hump in New York or Chicago or Miami got busted doing some gangster shit, they’d drag Sal Cupertine back into the news for a few days, sure to mention that the FBI was offering a $500,000 reward for his capture now that they admitted he wasn’t dead. David conveniently got a head cold whenever that happened, kept his face away from the public, since Las Vegas was filled with bounty hunters, professional and amateur, the town the last stop for fugitives. Every other week America’s Most Wanted would feature some pedophile asshole who was last spotted on camera inside the ice cream parlor at the Frontier, or would note that some white supremacist militia wacko was apprehended in the parking lot of the Fashion Show Mall, the trunk of his car filled with ropes and handcuffs and diapers and brass knuckles and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. It was only a matter of time before John Walsh spent thirty minutes talking about Sal Cupertine and then what? Jennifer would see that, for sure. His mom, too. And everyone else, everywhere. David would have to fake shingles for a month.
Everyone thought Las Vegas was the kind of place you could hide in, that you could fuck up all you wanted. But the truth, David had learned, was that Las Vegas was a small, mostly conservative town and more isolated than a Hawaiian island. Five miles out of the city limits, going in any direction, sat the wild desert, hundreds of miles and several hours from the next big city, which meant you saw the same people everywhere . . . provided you