Gangster Nation
Copyright © 2017 by Tod Goldberg
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-1-61902-968-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Goldberg, Tod, author.
Title: Gangster nation : a novel / Tod Goldberg.
Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017024769 | eISBN 978-1-61902-968-2
Subjects: LCSH: Criminals—Fiction. | Mafia—Fiction. | GSAFD: Suspense
fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3557.O35836 G35 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024769
Jacket designed by Jarrod Taylor
Book designed by Domini Dragoone
COUNTERPOINT
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For Wendy, who makes me a better man
Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.
—The Talmud
Prologue
November 2000
Peaches Pocotillo never got to kill anyone anymore. All those years he’d spent perfecting his craft had led to bigger and better things, which in this case meant a mid-level leadership position in the Native Mob, overseeing tribal gang consolidation and farming operations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, even into Nebraska. He had Native Gangster Disciples reporting to him, Native Vice Lords, Native Crips, Native Bloods, Peaches the one guy everyone listened to, the one guy who could get everyone to the table, the one guy who you didn’t want to cross, because, man, he used to kill people for nothing, son.
That reputation got him in the room. Still had to make the sale. But he was good at that, too.
So he was the guy they’d send to sit down with some Native Crip shot caller to explain, patiently, why co-opting the iconography of a Los Angeles gang that would kill him on sight was bad business. It put everyone in jeopardy. So, sure, call yourself a Crip while you’re out tending the dirt fields in Nebraska. But you come to Minneapolis, Green Bay, or Chicago? You either called yourself Native Mob or you called yourself dead. Then he’d paint a more optimistic picture: See all this reservation farmland? See all those beets? See all that kale? Shit no one likes to eat. Imagine it green with marijuana. Don’t worry, we got the recipe. Don’t worry, we’ll front you the cost of machinery. Don’t worry, we got the protection. Don’t worry, we got distribution.
That advice? That’s fifty thousand dollars. Big bills are fine. By tomorrow. Next day? It’s seventy-five. End of the week? Don’t worry, we’ll give your mom something to help her with the bills.
Now, three in the morning, crossing over the Blackburn Point Bridge from Osprey, Florida, onto Casey Key, sitting in the passenger seat of a rented Ford Taurus—big trunk but it handled like a rhino, American cars absolute crap these days—Peaches could see his middle management career coming to an end. His own thing on the horizon. He was forty-five years old. The time for waiting was over.
His nephew Mike, who he liked but didn’t think was exceptionally bright, pulled up in front of the Pirate’s Cove Apartments and cut the engine. The Pirate’s Cove consisted of six low-slung white bungalows surrounded by stumpy palm trees and beds of hibiscus that had begun to grow wild, climbing up toward the blue Bermuda shutters that were pushed out, letting in the gulf breeze. It had been hot and humid all day. Mike’s Midwest blood was not suited to this Florida bullshit, even this late in the year, but Peaches liked it, particularly now that it was in the sixties and the air finally thin enough to breathe.
“Uncle,” Mike said, “this place is nice.”
It was. Or, well, the land was. The Pirate’s Cove was a dump but it was surrounded on either side by mansions—only a few hundred yards east of the Gulf of Mexico, a few hundred yards west of the Intracoastal Waterway. Prime real estate. Worth maybe a million, a million and a half. Even more if the bungalows were torn down. Peaches knew about real estate, had made it his specialty, had his broker’s license, was happy to sift through public records, knock on doors, talk about gentrification, talk about curb appeal, talk about market value, talk about how, for his tribe the Chuyalla, real estate was the ticket to prosperity. That if they wanted to move real weight, they had to take their casino profits and roll that into durable investments, which sometimes meant buying up land that had once been theirs in the first place.
Lately, though, he’d been all about buying up commercial space, medical buildings, but especially any empty plots next to phone company switching stations, particularly in shitty little towns, Peaches thinking ahead, seeing how the Internet was changing business. Phone companies were going to need that space. Build server farms. Data was a more durable crop than weed, but that wasn’t something Peaches was confident his soldiers could cultivate. So he knew something about how to improve investments and he knew no one had bothered to update these bungalows since 1953, which is when Ronnie Cupertine’s father, Tom “Dandy Tommy” Cupertine, bought the land in the first place.
Almost fifty years later, the Pirate’s Cove was in the name of an LLC and was operated by a property management company in Chicago. In all that time, though, the property had never been sold. Peaches stumbled on it while searching the records for every bit of residential property in the Cupertine family name, going all the way back to the early 1900s, looking for plausible safe houses for the Family, as far away from Chicago as possible. The Pirate’s Cove had been quit-claimed thirteen times up through the 1980s, but since then, nothing. It took Peaches about three months to plow through microfiche and old deeds and records, since he had to do it all by hand, couldn’t get some file clerk on the Family payroll interested in what he was looking for, not that anyone in Osprey looked particularly mobbed up.
Next, Peaches rented a house up the block from the Pirate’s Cove and spent a month walking up and down the beach, making friends. Started
