Having a rabbi hit man is a crazy, stupid idea,” Tod Goldberg is saying about the basic concept of the Gangsterland trilogy, which comes to a close with his new novel, Gangsters Don’t Die. Much of what makes such a premise work is that Goldberg embeds his antihero, Sal Cupertine—a Chicago Mob killer masquerading as Rabbi David Cohen in the upscale Las Vegas community of Summerlin—in an accurately realized version of a place where very few things are truly implausible. I’m not talking about any sepia-toned Sin City heyday. Gangsters Don’t Die opens in 2002, with Sal sweating the onset of PATRIOT Act surveillance. The resulting erosion of civil liberties is one of several subthemes that lace the propulsive mayhem and pitch-black humor of the trilogy.
Goldberg, who once lived in Summerlin, directs the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts program at UC Riverside. It’s one of the few graduate programs that encourage straight-up genre fiction; as you’ll see, he has a few thoughts on the genre/literary divide.
Why set this trilogy in Las Vegas? Plenty of cities have Mob lore and rabbis.
The genesis of the books was a story I wrote for the anthology Las Vegas Noir. I was given Summerlin, which is where I lived in Las Vegas. It’s such a weird, not actual place, as though you could master-plan a perfect suburban city. But I wanted to write about it, because I wanted to examine organized crime at a community level. Writing the story allowed me to do that.
When I decided to write the books, I had a larger scope in mind. Partly, it was the nature of reinvention and the transactional nature of people. Las Vegas is the perfect city to explore that. You can be anyone in Las Vegas. Las Vegas and where I live now, Palm Springs, are related in this way. Grifters go to Vegas; they get kicked out. They stop in Palm Springs, pull their grift here, and get kicked out. Then I guess they go to, like, Missoula, I don’t know. Where do you go for your third grift?
Also, I knew the absurdity of Las Vegas. Back in 1999 or 2000, you’d go into a restaurant, the Venetian, supposedly Mob-owned, and all these guys sitting at the bar would turn and look at you and shake their heads. Was that them telling me I’m in the wrong place? Because I’m starving, and I can get Bolognese here for $4.99 at 3 a.m. I love that I could make it true that every place you think is a front is a front.
Your books are good at conveying how deeply ingrained criminality is in our daily lives.
When you get a new credit card and the percentage rate is 29 percent, that’s some loan shark shit! There’s no reason Mastercard should charge you 30 percent on your purchases, but we get used to it because of this integration of criminality into every part of our lives. It’s the price of the American dream—like, this is the usury tax to living a life where you can attempt to get away with it, whatever it is. And that’s part of the joy of writing about organized crime—it’s fun to write about guys trying to get away with it. It used to be that the American dream was about possibility, right? Go west, find your fortune. Now the dream is getting away with it. That’s what organized crime has always done. But it’s also what Countrywide tried to do. It’s what Enron tried to do. It’s what Donald Trump has tried to do. They all tried to get away with it.
Sometimes in Vegas, you hear people express a nostalgia for the days “when the Mob ran this town.”
It’s like people who miss dictators. The thing about dictators is they get shit done. The reason China could build an entire Olympic Village in two weeks is because there’s no human rights. But they get shit done. No one who lived in Vegas back then actually misses the Mob, because it was weird and scary and awful. People tend to have nostalgia for things that they were not directly involved with. What the tourists are saying, what the people who move there now are saying is, I miss the notion of glamour. I miss men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns and the vague notion of violence. It’s like Camelot with the Kennedys; it’s a memory of something that did not exist.
Did you hear from the Las Vegas Jewish community?
The synagogue I fictionalize is on Hillpointe Road in Summerlin. When Gangsterland came out in 2014, a friend of mine was like, “Hey, I just saw a crazy video on Facebook.” There was a young rabbi, and in the video he says, “Have any of you seen this book Gangsterland? Someone has written the story of my life. It’s about a rabbi in Summerlin, at a synagogue on Hillpointe.” He’s like, “I’m a rabbi in a synagogue on Hillpointe.” I was like, OK, this is weird, and he’s like, “And the curious thing is that the rabbi’s name is Rabbi Cohen, just like me.” And I was like, Oh, shit! I fucked that up! I did not bother to see the name of the actual rabbi at the synagogue. I contacted him immediately, and he was a lovely, wonderful guy, really funny. I’ve come to events at the temple two or three times, and he’s advised me on Judaism stuff.
What about mobsters?
There’s a criminal gang in Chicago that in the first book plays a larger role, and I used their real name. Which probably was a mistake, because I hear from those guys periodically. So I hear from criminals and clergy alike. They all seem very favorable.
Talk about the divide between genre and literary fiction.
When I was younger, I was scared of being called a crime novelist because I was a pretentious young person. But now I’m like, Fuck it, I’m just going to do everything I want to do. A crime novel lets you do that. Sometimes literary fiction has margins.
I feel that for this next generation of writers, people who grew up on The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner, genre is going to become less of a concern. Books are going to contain a little bit of everything. Good books are good books.•
Scott Dickensheets writes the daily Hey Las Vegas newsletter for City Cast Las Vegas. In previous lives he was features editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, deputy editor of Desert Companion, and editor in chief of Las Vegas CityLife and the Las Vegas Weekly; he also held numerous posts at the Las Vegas Sun. Scott has edited, co-edited, or contributed to eight volumes of the Las Vegas Writes book series; was an assistant editor of Nevada: 150 Years in the Silver State, the official book of the Nevada sesquicentennial; and co-edited Sagebrush to Sandstone: A Humanities Guide to Outdoor Nevada. He lives in Henderson.
