It was the contribution from the Organized Crime Division, however, that pulled me away from the now half-eaten filet Oscar. Chopper McNair was a one-time thug who had pulled his life together, but it was the name of his uncle that sat me back in my chair. Chopper had been raised since his early teens by his mother’s brother, Lanny “Ice” Culpepper, the notorious leader of the Gangster Apostles, the toughest, most murderous gang the Chicago streets had ever seen.
6
ARNIE’S GYM OPERATED in the sweaty basement of Johnny’s IceHouse, a large skating rink on the corner of South Loomis and Madison in the West Loop. Arnold “the Hammer” Scazzi was pushing seventy, but he still reported to work every day to open the gym and give hell to the young boxers who had dreams of making it to the big fight. Hammer remained a formidable-looking man with wide, square shoulders and a barreled chest that sagged a little but retained enough power to knock the shit out of two thugs who had tried to rob him last year as he’d walked to his car one night. Hammer had not only been the youngest Golden Gloves champion, but he had accomplished this feat two years in a row back in 1955 and 1956. His name hung up there with the giants in the sport, including Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Marvelous Marvin Hagler. Had it not been for a freak car accident that took away the peripheral vision in his right eye, Hammer might’ve become one of the best professional fighters of all time.
Hammer was against the back wall doing one-handed push-ups when I walked into the gym.
“Look who’s making a guest appearance,” Hammer said, finishing off a flurry of push-ups, then springing to his feet. Not a bead of sweat. “Figured you’d be out on the course chasing that pissant white ball.”
“I should be,” I said. “My handicap is in the crapper. But I’m doing a little detecting right now.”
“Mechanic’s in the shower,” Hammer said. “He just finished working the heavy bag. You should’ve been here too.”
Just as I turned toward the locker room, Hammer threw a left hook at me. I blocked it with my right, ducked a little, then rolled and quickly threw a left jab that tapped him square in the chest.
“Reflexes are still there,” Hammer said approvingly. “Get back in here before you lose everything I taught you.”
Dmitri “Mechanic” Kowalski sat on a small locker-room bench toweling off his compact body when I walked in. Mechanic was an even six feet and all hard muscle. Pound for pound he was the strongest man I had ever met. Those who had been punched by him in the ring would often compare it to the impact of a metal wrecking ball that destroys buildings. But beyond being a physical specimen, Mechanic was absolutely fearless. He had grown up on some of the toughest streets in Chicago, and with his immigrant parents barely scratching out a living, Mechanic had seen things growing up that no child should ever see. He had earned his nickname as a teenager when he was getting his trial-by-fire education in the unforgiving ways of street life. For Mechanic it was all about survival, whether that meant intimidating, fighting, or killing. He was an expert with a gun, sometimes demonstrating his prowess by shooting a bee that had come to rest on a flower fifty feet away. The neighborhood kids started to call him Mechanic because he had an unrivaled knack for fixing people’s problems. The understanding in the community was if you had a problem, take it to the Kowalski kid. He could fix anything.
Mechanic was officially my unofficial partner. We had done some mixed martial arts training together when we wanted to expand beyond the traditional confines of boxing. To those of us classically trained boxers, MMA was street fighting with a couple of rules thrown in to prevent someone from getting killed. We enjoyed it immensely. I called Mechanic when I needed extra muscle or some help with surveillance or intel. His fee never amounted to more than a good meal and a couple of bottles of imported beer.
“Gotta make a visit to K-Town,” I said, taking a seat across from him on one of the wooden benches.
“You’re moving up in the world,” Mechanic said. He stretched down to dry off his feet. Veins popped over his muscles like spiderwebs. He had been this way since the first day I’d met him at the Carrington Construction Company. We’d worked there one summer digging up roads around the city and pouring concrete. It was backbreaking work, but we were making our own money and spending it the way we saw fit.
“You have your equipment with you?” I asked.
Mechanic shot me a look as if the question offended him. “Who are we gonna visit in paradise?” he said.
“Ice Culpepper.”
Mechanic smiled, which was a rare event. “Fun,” he said. “Time to party.”
K-TOWN HAD BEEN DESCRIBED in many ways the last couple of decades, but “a walk in the park” had never been one of those descriptions. Located on the notoriously dangerous West Side of Chicago in the North Lawndale neighborhood, K-Town was a city within a city. Only ten minutes away from the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown Chicago and the Magnificent Mile, yet K-Town might as well have been in another country. It had become a circumscribed stretch of gang-ridden, drug-fueled, crime-infested streets that unapologetically operated under its own rule of law.
North Lawndale had once been the home to thousands of Jews of Russian and Eastern European descent, but as they became more prosperous, they started moving out and staking claim in the farther northern reaches of the city and then the suburbs. Blacks from the southern states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama joined those who already lived on the South Side of Chicago and took up
