Neon Teeth

The photographs were spread across Moe Goldberg's desk like a deck of losing cards, and Jack Corrigan looked at them the way a man looks at a funeral portrait: with the dull, mechanical acknowledgment that this is what death is, and there is nothing you can do about it.

The neighborhood was called Pilsen. It had been a Bohemian enclave, then an Irish neighborhood, then a Mexican one. Now it was a parking lot.

"This was South Side's best dance hall district," Moe said, tapping the photograph with a cigarette that had burned down to the filter. "Five dance halls, three nightclubs, a movie theater, a bar on every block. The Moretti family ran it all. Protection rackets on the bars. Bookmakers in the back rooms of the clubs. Numbers operators in the movie theater. For forty years, this neighborhood fed the Moretti empire, and when it was done being fed, it was paved over for a parking lot."

Jack looked at the empty lot in the photograph. There was a chain-link fence and a few weeds growing through cracks in the asphalt. A single streetlight flickered on and off like a Morse code message no one was translating.

"Sal built that empire," Moe said. "From nothing. His father came here with two suitcases and a face like a fist. Sal went to work in a factory, got his arm caught in a machine, lost two fingers, and used the settlement to open a bar. That bar became three bars. Those bars became a network. The network became an empire."

"And you want me to live in it. Sleep in it. Become part of it."

"I want you to become Sal Moretti's son. His adopted son. He has no biological children. He's looking for an heir, Jack. And you're the only kid in the FBI who speaks Italian and has a face that passes for Sicilian."

Jack was twenty-six, Korean War vet, five-foot-ten with broad shoulders and a face that people described as "honest" when they meant "forgettable." He had spent two years in Seoul watching men die for reasons he still couldn't articulate, and he had come home with a Silver Star and a addiction to sleeping with the lights on.

The Moretti mansion was in Beverly Hills, which was generous even by Los Angeles standards. It had twenty-four rooms, a swimming pool, a garage filled with cars that cost more than most Americans earned in a year, and walls lined with paintings that Sal had acquired through means that Moe had carefully not specified.

Jack lived there for three years. He called Sal "Father," and Sal called him "Figlio," which meant son in Italian, which meant something Jack was not sure he had ever had. Sal was a violent man—a man who had broken fingers for asking for lower protection payments and who had once stared a rival mobster in the face for forty-five minutes without blinking—but he was also a man who remembered Jack's favorite meal, who taught him to shoot, who cried at his mother's funeral (a woman who had not been Jack's mother, but who had cooked him dinner every night for three years and asked about his day every evening).

Dot Malone sang at the Moretti club on Sunset. She had a voice like honey and cigarette smoke, and she looked at Jack the way a woman looks at a man she wants to save but knows she can't. She knew what he was. She had been told by a man who knew men like Moe.

"You're FBI," she said one night after the club closed, when the staff had gone home and the dancers had unpinned their fringes and the bartender had started mopping the floor. "You're inside."

"Yes."

"Do you love him?"

"Sal? He's... he's my father."

"He's a criminal, Jack."

"He's a man who feeds people who aren't his family. Who pays for medical care for employees whose grandparents worked for him. Who builds things."

"Things that are built on blood don't last."

The raid came in 1951. Moe had planned it for a decade—every arrest, every raid, every indictment coordinated across the city in a single night. On a Tuesday in November, two hundred federal agents descended on Moretti properties across Los Angeles. The clubs were raided. The bookmakers were arrested. The banks were frozen. The empire collapsed in a single afternoon.

But Sal had anticipated it. He had anticipated everything.

While the FBI was busy arresting underlings, Sal had moved the empire's core assets—cash, bonds, deeds—to accounts in Switzerland that Moe would not find for years. More importantly, he had prepared a narrative: he had planted evidence implicating Moe in a bribery scheme that would destroy the FBI's case and potentially end Moe's career.

Jack stood in the Moretti mansion as the agents surrounded the building, and he made a choice. He took the evidence folder from Sal's safe and walked it to Moe's car, standing in the rain, watching the papers dissolve in water until they were nothing but pulp.

Moe looked at the pulp and understood. "You just destroyed ten years of work."

"I saved what was left."

In 1957, Moe and Jack sat in a diner on Broadway, drinking coffee that tasted like burnt water and watching the rain on the window. Moe was sixty, and the years had been unkind. He had retired from the FBI after the scandal, and now he ran a small restaurant in a neighborhood that nobody visited anymore.

Jack was thirty-two. He had left the FBI. He worked at a shipping company, six days a week, and spent his evenings sitting in Dot's apartment, listening to her sing into a microphone she had bought from a junk shop.

"You did the right thing," Moe said. It was the first time he had said it.

"It doesn't feel like the right thing."

"Nothing ever does, in the moment."

Outside, the rain continued to fall on Los Angeles, on the neon signs, on the parking lot where a dance hall used to be. In a club on Sunset, a woman was singing into a microphone. The empire was gone. The city remained.

Author Note & Copyright: