Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

When Jeff Hopper was still studying for his MA in criminology at the University of Illinois, he’d occasionally stuff his books and lunch into his backpack and jog the one mile to the FBI field office on Roosevelt to study between classes. It was a silly thing, really, since he wasn’t allowed inside. This was the late 1980s, and Jeff was already in his early thirties but still somehow felt like everything was possible, including working as a special agent for the FBI. He knew it wasn’t a glamorous job, not like how the recruiters who came to campus said it was; that it, in all likelihood, was just as mundane on a day-to-day basis as any job. But at least there was some grander purpose to it, which appealed to Jeff.

He’d been a cop in Walla Walla, Washington, for a decade prior, and while the work was steady and not terribly dangerous — he unholstered his gun once the whole time, to break up a fight between two drunk migrant farm workers — it also wasn’t the kind of heroic thing Jeff had imagined for himself while growing up in Seattle. He certainly never saw himself living in a city like Walla Walla, with its charming downtown and flowing wheat fields and. . that was about it. He’d made a life there, even bought a house over by the country club, had managed to find a little romance with the occasional visiting professor at Whitman College (Jeff liked knowing these affairs were on a clock, since no one visiting Walla Walla dared to stay in town very long). But when the city announced it had to cut its police force in half during a particularly ugly budget crisis, Jeff readily stepped forward to take the parachute the city offered. He had a bit of money saved, the result of being single and well paid in a shitty place, and he started looking at graduate schools.

He knew he couldn’t get into the CIA since he wasn’t ex-military and his undergrad degree from the University of Washington probably tabbed him as a tad too liberal for those guys. Age was likely a factor, too. The FBI, on the other hand, liked guys who were a bit older, more mature, happy to do investigative work from a desk if need be, and so that became Jeff’s goal. Not the desk, exactly, though Jeff figured that was where he might start out. And if the FBI didn’t pan out? Maybe the NSA. And if NSA didn’t work? Jeff had a full list of options written out on a yellow legal pad, and he even conceded that a job doing special investigative work for the IRS would be cool, maybe catching mob guys in tax evasion schemes or something. What Jeff Hopper wanted most of all was to wear a suit, a really nice suit that concealed a gun, and he wanted to stop bad guys and save America.

More than a decade later, though, standing in his office and staring out the window at that berm he used to sit on (even during clear days in the winter), Jeff wondered just what the hell he thought he was trying to prove. Did he think the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover would walk across the street and offer him a job? Did he think he’d assimilate some divine intelligence simply by breathing the same air as the agents he saw walking in and out every day? How did he not know that it would take him so long just to get into that building, that he’d bounce from Quantico to Kansas City to Cleveland to Rochester and then, finally, to Chicago, at which point his romantic vision of being in the FBI would be trumped by the hard understanding that he hated the feel of a tie around his neck? Had he even learned anything while sitting out there, what with all the exhaust from passing cars and trucks? It didn’t seem possible.

Few things seemed possible to Special Agent Jeff Hopper anymore. For the last six months, he’d spent more time in his therapist’s office than his own. He knew intuitively that he wasn’t responsible for the death of his three colleagues and their CI, that he hadn’t pulled the trigger on them, that legendary hit man Sal Cupertine had done it. If he knew anything about Sal Cupertine, it was this: If he wanted you dead, you were dead. And he understood that those men — Cal Hodel, Keith Baldwin, and Derek Lewis, he reminded himself that they were people and not just men —knew that working undercover came with its own unique set of dangers, including death. All that was clear to him. You deal with wild animals, you can’t be surprised when they act like wild animals, his therapist told him, and he agreed.

That didn’t change the fact that Jeff had lacked specific attention to detail — the billing information on the hotel bill, of all things — and that the result had been fatal. Four times fatal. And though his therapist told him not to blame himself, not to doubt his own abilities, the FBI had already made a few decisions for him: They’d knocked him down a grade, from senior special agent to special agent, and though they allowed him to stay on the task force looking into the workings of the Chicago crime families, he’d been completely shunned by the other agents. Not that Jeff blamed them. It had been his idea to get Cal, Keith, and Derek into the Family, and for the previous year that’s all he’d done, little by little, getting those three established locally.

Used to be the best way to get information was to hope for a snitch; the problem these days was that the Family was simply too good. They hadn’t made an arrest that stuck for almost a decade — at least not of anyone significant, just soldiers, the kinds of guys whose level of information was so limited they couldn’t snitch. So the only way in was to go that whole Donnie Brasco route. But Cal, Keith, and Derek were serious men. Jeff liked that. Liked that they wanted to get bad people off the streets. Liked that they didn’t think the FBI’s policy of staying away from the Chicago families since they were better than the Crips and Bloods and Mexican gangs was worth shit. A criminal enterprise was a criminal enterprise, and Jeff was proud that those three men agreed with him.

It had been Jeff’s idea to let them meet up with Sal Cupertine without a strike force in the next room. Jeff knew that Sal was a careful and considerate killer — if such a thing existed — that he wouldn’t shoot up a public place. It wasn’t his style, which is why on that day six months earlier, he was still a free man. Plus, if what everyone said was true and Sal had the memory of an elephant, it wasn’t safe to have a bunch of other guys waiting around in case something happened. If by chance Sal saw one of them and then saw him again on some later date. . well, it would be trouble. Besides, it was just an exploratory meeting. The guys went for it, and why not? There were three of them, after all, plus their CI, and all three were top-notch FBI agents. Sal Cupertine, at the end of the day, was just a man with a gun.

“Excuse me, Agent Hopper?” Jeff turned from the window and saw a young man in his doorway with a cart stacked high with boxes. Jeff didn’t recognize him, which probably meant he was one of the clerks who’d been hired in the last few months. Maybe even a criminology student like he’d been. “Where would you like these?”

“Just leave them in the corner,” Jeff said. He watched the clerk unstack the boxes, each one marked s. cupertine in black marker with a date starting from 1983, and wondered how it was that a guy who’d been killing people for the mob for over fifteen years had never spent even a night in jail, but had ten boxes of intelligence in an FBI office just down the street from his house. The last box the kid unpacked was the one Jeff was most interested in — marked 1998, it contained the report on what was purported to be Cupertine’s body. There were no dental records or fingerprint records to be found, because there were no teeth left in the head when it was located, nor even a jaw, and no hands or feet, either.