Tod Goldberg: The Reformed

“You’ve done an excellent job letting me know that we are cut from the same cloth, that you’ve been saved and that the world is going to be just fine now that you’re on the job. So, Eduardo, what do you need me for? You need help getting out of the sand trap the mayor left you in?”

Eduardo exhaled through his mouth and his entire body wilted a bit inside his expensive suit. He loosened his tie and took off his coat, and then held up another blueprint. “You see this?” he asked. “This is going to be our new library. Paid for entirely through donations. It will be state-of-the-art-computer retrieval system, digital library of every newspaper in America-everything-and we will be training librarians here. It’s true. Library science classes will take place on Northwest Fourth Street. This?” He pointed at yet another blueprint. “This is going to be an auto shop. We had one before, but it wasn’t here. It was out near the juvie, so I couldn’t watch it, and soon it became a chop shop. You know? Kids, they will fall back into bad habits. So many plans. Next year, I’ll have another hundred fifty people working, if everything goes as planned.”

“Who is shaking you down?” I said.

Eduardo got up, went to his desk and came back with a thick manila envelope. “I can trust you?” he asked.

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

He handed me the envelope and then sat behind us on one of the leather sofas. It was as if he didn’t even want to be in proximity to the contents I was pulling out and sharing with Sam. But the thing was, there wasn’t anything particularly incriminating in the envelope, just old photos of Eduardo with various other members of the Latin Emperors. There were several photos that featured pictures of Eduardo with guns and a few that showed drugs, but none of this was a mystery to anyone-it was, apparently, what had made Eduardo such a superstar.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Those men,” he said, “most of them are dead.”

“Did you kill them?” I said.

“No.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“No one knows where their bodies are, either,” he said.

I gave Sam a look. This was where things tended to get dicey. I reminded myself to give Ernie Paseo a call at some point to tell him to forget I ever existed. “Do you know where the bodies are?” I said.

“No, no, of course not,” he said. “But someone does.”

“Here’s the deal, Eduardo,” I said, “I need you to just tell me what the problem is. I’ll tell you if I can solve it, and this will all be over in a matter of moments.”

“I have divorced myself from this life, you understand,” he said.

“I understand. Everyone does. President Clinton does. God does. Now, spill it.”

Eduardo peeled himself off the sofa and came back to the table, went through the photos one time, very quickly, and then stopped when he landed on a picture of himself at maybe twenty-five, his shirtless torso thick with muscles and ink, his eyes hidden behind wraparound sunglasses, standing beside a man who could have been his twin, right down to the prison tattoos. “This is Jaime Gonzalez. People called him Junior. He’s a few years older than me, but was held back two years. Played football, too.”

“He ever smack around Mike’s brother?” Sam asked.

“Most likely,” Eduardo said.

“I don’t remember him,” I said.

“He recruited me into the Latin Emperors, jumped me in, helped me run the set. We both went up at the same time, ended up taking over the prison branch, diversified our interests.”

“He help with El Salvador?” Sam asked.

Eduardo actually twitched backward in surprise. “How did you…” he began. “Never mind. Never mind. But yes. His mother is from El Salvador, so he had dual citizenship. It was his idea to start moving into the voids there.”

It was actually a smart move on Gonzalez’ part, even if it was an illegal one that caught the attention of the United States government and certain covert operatives. I didn’t bother to tell Eduardo that, but I believed it to be true nevertheless.

“Let me guess,” I said, “you snitched on Junior to get a break on your sentence.”

“It wasn’t snitching,” Eduardo said. “It was a calling. It was the right thing. I didn’t know it would reduce my sentence, and I, frankly, didn’t care. It was the right thing to do.”

I took a look at the photo again. Junior Gonzalez had muscles where other people had hair follicles. “Where was he when this all went down?” I asked. “Because I can’t see him not putting a shank in you if he knew about it.”

“I’d already been transferred to the minimum-security section,” he said. “I was a priest, after all.”

“What did you give up?” I asked.

Eduardo did that big exhaling thing he seemed to enjoy. A guy that big, when he exhaled through his mouth, it was like a jet engine starting. “Everything,” he said. “Me, you know, I didn’t get dirty. I kept up above the game, you know? Slang here and there. Set up jobs. Maybe move a little product myself. Maybe make a big deal about someone disrespecting us, but I didn’t put a cap in anyone, you know?”

There was that weird language shift. It was funny. When Eduardo Santiago was in his element, talking about his mission in life now, he sounded like a CEO, but when he got involved in the old times, he started to sound like a gangster again.

“You talk like that when you speak with the kids?” I asked.

“Like what?” he said.

“You just sounded like you were still on the streets.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “Five minutes ago, I thought you were running for Congress. Just now, I thought you were going to ask me to spot you in the chow line.”

“I guess I don’t even notice it,” he said. “The devil, he’s in all of us, or he tries to be. Maybe that’s him trying to weed his way out into the world.”

This devil-and-God talk was wearing thin-if I had a core belief, it was probably one my dad taught me: never write bad checks. He’d done it enough to know, but when applied to every aspect of your life, it was good advice.

“Anyway,” Eduardo said. He cleared his throat, and I could tell he was about to try to tell his story without sounding like a thug. “I told the feds who Junior had killed, what shots he’d called, gave them information on the drug trade we had. But mostly? Mostly they wanted to get control of the prisons. At the time, Latin Emperors ran all the prisons up from Florida to New York. La Eme had the West Coast; Texas Syndicate was running Texas, Oklahoma-that cowboy shit. Black Guerilla Family and all those Blood and Crip sets run the South and places like Rikers. But we were political, too, and that made it different. We had clout.”

“Funny,” Sam said, “I don’t see the Latin Emperors running some Attica game.”

“Not from the outside, you don’t,” he said. “But it’s a whole other culture on the inside. And we ran it. By the time I was running the show, I was like Obama. All hope and change and all that. Junior, he didn’t see it like I saw it. He was down for crime, not empowerment. That’s where we diverged. So I gave up what I gave up and things got easier for me, relations cooled inside, and eventually I got my release and now here I am.”

“And where is Junior?” I said.

“He was released last year,” he said.

“Blood in, blood out,” I said. “So I take it he’s looking for yours now?”

“More a pound of flesh,” Eduardo said. “He wants in on this business, says because of our oath to each other, every dime that passes through Honrado, half is his. And he wants to run Latin Emperor business through here, launder their money through my organization. And he wants payback. I think that is the largest issue. He did twenty-five years.”