Gangsterland By Tod Goldberg, $26.
(Full disclosure: Gang-sterland author Tod Goldberg is a frequent book reviewer for Las Vegas Weekly.)
Much like Gangsterland protagonist Sal Cupertine, I don’t care for Tom Clancy or books about the Mafia. Our reasons are completely different, though. Maybe not about Clancy, but certainly about gangster capers. I have no use for crime books, TV series or movies—except maybe The Godfather—because the characters uncomfortably remind me of jerks I went to high school with. Sal, who occasionally needs something to read to pass time before killing someone, just doesn’t want to read about his business.
After stupidly murdering three FBI agents and a confidential informant, Sal finds himself in a bit of pickle with the wing of the Chicago “Family” headed by his cousin. Ronnie Cupertine’s tidy solution is a deal with a Las Vegas kingpin that sends Sal to Sin City, inexpertly transformed by plastic surgery into Rabbi David Cohen and given plenty to read besides crime tales—such as the Talmud.
“David kept finding himself with these tiny earthquakes of epiphany, particularly when he read about the sanctity of life,” Tod Goldberg writes in a cleverly spun novel that forced me to abandon my wiseguy moratorium. Goldberg has an amusing flair for contemporary hard-boil, and he knows his crime and crime-fighting procedures. He sets his story in 1998, a neat hinge point for Las Vegas, too, morphing from the Mob’s skimming pool to a corporate spa town. The madly growing city sold itself as Disneyland with gambling. And, well ... other amusements, like Wild Horse, the strip club owned by Bennie Savone.
Bennie’s got other “interests,” too, including a massive synagogue, cultural center and cemetery complex in Summerlin, run by his rabbi father-in-law, where Sal finds himself cribbing verses from the Talmud and the Boss, hoping his faithful are unfamiliar with Springsteen lyrics. For Bennie, the new Rabbi David also keeps his killer skills rust-free, despite those moments of moral awakening. Bennie, though, seems to know where everything’s headed: “Twenty years from now, there won’t be any need for people like us. Everything will be on the level.”
They don’t have that long, however. Former FBI Agent Jeff Hopper, whose mistake led to Sal’s murder of the three agents, refuses to drop the case even after he’s been demoted and eventually fired. Hopper’s sleuthing leads to a confrontation and a surprising resolution—which, I gather, is not unusual for this type of book.
