Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

“And I’m telling you to clean him.”

“I’m sorry, Rabbi,” Miguel said, “but I’m not sure I understand.”

“I don’t care what you understand,” David said.

Miguel started to say something, stopped himself for a moment, then said, “I’ll do it right away, Rabbi.”

“And I want you to fix all these wounds,” David said. “You understand that?”

“Yes, Rabbi, that’s no problem.”

David went back into the waiting room, grabbed a chair, and slid it into the morgue, where he watched Miguel wash down Paul Bruno’s whole body, from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet.

Special Agent Jeff Hopper was always surprised by how pleasant prisons looked from the outside. The state penitentiary in Walla Walla, for instance, had a beautifully manicured front lawn, perfectly squared shrubbery, lines of evergreens, a sturdy redbrick facade. If you cut and pasted it into another part of the city, you might have mistaken it for one of the buildings at Whitman College.

Stateville was the same way. Just thirty-five miles west of Chicago down Interstate 55, it was situated in the middle of verdant fields and farmlands, two miles from the new Prairie Bluff Golf Course. To get into the prison, you had to drive a quarter mile along a tree-lined road with a median of green grass and circular planting beds that, in the spring, were filled with roses, though which today, the first Sunday of 1999, were covered with a thick blanket of snow and ice, the result of a brutal, two-day storm that dumped nineteen inches of snow on the city and plunged temperatures to an arctic negative thirteen. From the outside, the administration building, a four-story made of red and yellow brick, looked like an old Chicago hotel, the kind of place with a bottom-floor restaurant that served only steaks bloody-rare. In fact, if you could ignore the thirty-foot-tall cement walls and sniper towers, Stateville Correctional Center looked downright inviting.

Richard Speck and John Wayne Gacy probably wouldn’t concur, Jeff thought, but then they got to see the place from the outside only once. Same as Neto Espinoza.

“Do you ever wonder how people end up doing the things that put them in there? The process by which they decide to become that kind of person?” Matthew asked as they walked out of the administration building, back into the biting cold of the winter day, and down the long gravel road toward the parking lot. Matthew didn’t say much the entire time they were inside, waiting for the official paperwork on Neto Espinoza’s final days at the prison, and, before that, most of the ride out from Chicago.

Jeff had learned what Matthew’s demeanor meant over the course of the last several weeks. Sometimes, he was silent because he wanted to listen carefully to what was being said around him — like when they’d been with Paul Bruno — so that he could figure out how to play a particular situation. Sometimes, he was silent out of simple necessity: He didn’t know enough about being an agent to argue Jeff’s thoughts on an issue, though that didn’t mean acquiescence. No, it actually meant he’d attack the topic an hour or a day or a week later, after he’d formed a determined opinion. It was one of Matthew’s most admirable qualities, Jeff thought, and one not all that common in field agents.

Other times he kept his mouth shut so he could contemplate an issue he found difficult to parse. Like when they found out that Neto Espinoza, Chema Espinoza’s brother, died of a heart attack while in custody at Stateville. That wouldn’t have been all that vexing if Neto hadn’t been twenty-six at the time of his death, or if he hadn’t been, according to his death certificate, otherwise physically fit. And then today, after the prison released Neto’s death-in-custody report to them and it showed exactly what Jeff thought it would show: nothing. Just a regular heart attack for a completely healthy young man.

“That’s the reason I became a cop,” Jeff said, “and an FBI agent.”

“Really? I thought you just wanted to catch bad guys.”

“That was part of it, sure,” Jeff said. “But after a while, you see enough stupidity, you have to begin to wonder about the root causes. You don’t have to be evil to make the wrong choice. Don’t need to be good to make the right choice. You could save a kid from choking to death at McDonald’s one day and that night, to celebrate, you go out and get sloshed at the bar and plow your car through a bunch of disabled orphans. Next thing you know, you’re the worst person on earth.”

“Maybe people are just fucked-up,” Matthew said.

It was hard to argue that point. It had taken Jeff and Matthew weeks to find out the exact disposition of Neto Espinoza for just that reason. Finding out he was dead was easy — it was public record, after all — but when Jeff and Matthew went to question Neto’s mother, she was unwilling to talk to either of them. It didn’t matter that one of her sons was dead and another was missing. Jeff didn’t bother to tell Mrs. Espinoza what he knew about Chema, figuring that information would only get her killed, too. Not that he imagined many people in the Family would come down to Twenty-Fourth and Karlov to handle their business, the idea of rolling into the heart of the Gangster 2–6 territory probably not all that enticing even if the Family did employ many in their ranks. The Gangster 2–6 needed the drugs the Family provided, but their allegiance was to each other, not a bunch of Italians, and certainly not a bunch of Italians who may have killed some of their boys.

None of that mattered to Mrs. Espinoza. That Jeff and Matthew were investigating at all was the problem: The entire Espinoza family was gang-affiliated — Neto and Chema’s father, an OG in the Gangster 2–6, was doing fifteen at Logan — so Mrs. Espinoza wasn’t going to say a thing to anybody.

They had to move through back channels, Jeff calling every contact he had in the prison system to try to get anything beyond confirmation that Neto was dead in hopes of gleaning information that might lead to the Family’s attempts to cover their tracks with Sal Cupertine. If Neto had been murdered, that would mean another link in the chain, another person who could provide information, another cracked window. Problem was, no one wanted to give him anything, not with all the heat that had come down on the Illinois prison system recently, the stories of graft and obstruction of justice so regular that they began to dwarf the crimes of the men and women who got sent away.

So Jeff did the one thing he didn’t want to do, which was contact Dennis Tryon’s office. Dennis was an old classmate from UIC who’d moved into prison management at Stateville just in time for a decade of corruption scandals to erupt around him. Stateville’s history of laxity — which included Richard Speck himself appearing on a videotape with mounds of cocaine and handfuls of money, talking about what a great time he was having in prison, before taking time out to give a blow job to another inmate — now made even the smallest corruption possible front-page news. So asking Dennis to give him anything on the side was strictly verboten.

Lying to him, however, wasn’t. At least in theory. So Jeff called his office the previous day and simply asked for whatever documents could be mustered for what he described as a “wide-ranging FBI investigation.” It was a common code for a federal fishing exhibition, a nice exchange of information that the bureau and the prison carried on fairly regularly. He didn’t bother to mention to the clerk that he was on paid administrative leave. Jeff hoped the form would reach Dennis’s desk and Dennis would just sign off on his old friend’s request. It’s how business was usually conducted between people who trusted each other.