The Family Hightower (35 page)

“You going to tell anyone now?” she says.

He thinks about it all over again, because he's a journalist and it's a big story, and he has everything he needs to tell it. Between what he knows and the police reports, he could put it together like the police never could. He could solve the case, a dozen cases, more than a dozen, all at once. If he wrote it all up, it could be a career-making book, a real masterpiece of investigative reporting and memoir, a story about capitalism, the rise of organized crime and the fall of a family, all at once. The kind of thing other journalists would read and shake their heads afterward with envy.
Story of a lifetime,
they might say. It's so tempting because it seems so obvious how well it could do. The money he could make.
And almost everyone in it,
he thinks,
is already dead.
Who's it going to hurt?
But then he turns that last question over in his mind. He looks at Alex, at Silvana on the other side of the room, playing a hand game with an eight-year-old he doesn't recognize. Thinks about the room filled with blood, the feel of that rifle in his hand. All the dead, the murdered, the dismembered, the disappeared. All those people eaten alive by the animals that made one great sweep across three continents and a century that passed in the blink of an eye. The beasts are still out there, still getting closer, and they're crazy with hunger. There are people in their way, and he doesn't know who. He can't even see them. So he never says a word.

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

This
book could never have happened without the involvement of a lot of people, some of whom are great friends, some of whom I spoke with for only a minute, and some of whom I've never met and only read. Mark Olitsky showed me around Cleveland, Ohio, his hometown. Christina Crowder showed me around Romania and told me so much about living there. Andrew Fedynsky and everyone else at the Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland could not have been more generous with their time in helping me find what I needed. Same goes for the good people at the Western Reserve Historical Society and the Cleveland Public Library. Claude Cahn, John DeMetrick, Alexander Fedoriouk, Katharine Karpenstein, Jim Miner, and Brian Murphy let me talk their ear off, and told me so much that I needed to know. The people at the New York City Federal Bureau of Investigation organized crime office gave me precious minutes of their valuable time in explaining to a confused writer how certain aspects of organized crime work. Paul Ziats's memoir of growing up in Tremont and Marc E. Lackritz's paper on the Hough riots are the only reasons I could even think about trying to re-create them. Likewise, Wil Haygood's painstaking research and riveting description of the fatal fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Jimmy Doyle in
Sweet Thunder
is the only reason I could think about trying to re-create that, though I don't think I did it nearly as much justice as he did.

I owe a lot to Cameron McClure, my agent, who stuck with me through all of this. I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Amber Qureshi at Seven Stories, for believing in the book so much and also giving it the rigorous edit that it needed. Finally, my real extended family, for the record, is nothing like the fictional family in these pages; in writing about a deeply dysfunctional family like the one in this book, all I had to do was imagine the opposite of how my own family would act, and react. I'll always be grateful to them for showing me just how strong the bond can be.

Books and Articles

Aslund, Anders.
2009
.
How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy.
Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Badal, James Jessen.
2001
.
In the Wake of the Butcher: Cleveland's Torso Murders.
Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

Executive Office of the President, Office of National Drug Control Policy.
2
001
.
What America's Users Spend on Illegal Drugs.
Washington, DC: Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Fisman, Raymond, and Edward Miguel.
2008
.
Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Glenny, Misha.
2008
.
McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld.
New York: Knopf.

Harwood, Herbert H., Jr.
2003
.
Invisible Giants: The Empires of Cleveland's Van Sweringen Brothers.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Haygood, Wil.
2009
.
Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Kara, Siddarth.
2008
.
Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery.
New York: Columbia University Press.

Kapuscinski, Ryszard.
2002
.
The Shadow of the Sun.
New York: Vintage.

Kennedy, Maureen, and Paul Leonard.
200
1
. “Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices.” Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Washington, DC.

Kiev University.
1964
.
Ukrainian-English Inter-Lingual Relations: Ukrainian Language in the USA and Canada.
Kiev: Kiev University. (in Ukrainian)

Kuropas, Myron B.
1996
.
Ukrainian-American Citadel: The First One Hundred Years of the Ukrainian National Association.
Boulder, CO: East European Monographs.

Kuzio, Taras, and Andrew Wilson.
1994
.
Ukraine: Perestroika to Independence.
Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press.

Lackritz, Marc E.
1968
. “The Hough Riots of
1966
.” Senior thesis, Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

Mencken, H. L.
1941
.
The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Miller, Carol Poh, and Robert Wheeler.
1997
.
Cleveland: A Concise History,
1796
–
1996
.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Porello, Rick.
1995
.
The Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia: Corn, Sugar and Blood.
Fort Lee, NJ: Barricade Books.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy.
2000
. “The Global Traffic in Human Organs.”
Current Anthropology
41
, no.
2
:
191
–
224
. Available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/
0
fm
776
vf (accessed April
20
,
2010
).

Quammen, David.
2
003
.
Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind
. New York: W. W. Norton.

Svendsen, Margaret T., and Charles E. Hendry.
1936
.
Between Spires and Stacks.
Cleveland, OH: Welfare Federation of Cleveland.

Ukrainian National Association.
1936
.
Jubilee Book of the Ukrainian National Association in Commemoration of the Fortieth Anniversary of Its Existence.
Jersey City, NJ: Svoboda Press.

Van Tassel, David D., ed.
The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
Available at http://ech.cwru.edu/.

Wiese, Andrew.
2004
.
Places of Their Own: African-American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century.
Chicago: University of Chicago.

Ziats, Paul. n.d.
Tremont: Cleveland's Southside.
Self-published memoir.

Newspaper and Online Articles

Browne, Anthony. “Drugs Push Scarred Land to the Brink.”
The Observer
(UK). December
2
,
2001
. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/
2001
/dec/
02
/anthonybrowne.theobserver (accessed July
24
,
2010
).

Candea, Stefan. “Abandoning a Broken Model of Journalism.” Nieman Reports, Spring
20
11
. Available at http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/article/
102575
/Abandoning-a-Broken-Model-of-Journalism.aspx (accessed September
19
,
2011
).

Keller, Martina, and Markus Grill. “
42
.
90
Euros Per Arm: Inside a Creepy Global Body Parts Business.”
Spiegel Online International
, August
28
,
2009
. Available at http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/
0
,
1518
,
645375
,
00
.html (accessed April
20
,
2010
).

Marino, Jacqueline.
1999
. “Hidden History: Did the Old Arcade Once Harbor a Speakeasy?”
Cleveland Scene,
October
7
,
1999
. Available at http://m.clevescene.com (accessed December
13
,
2010
).

O'Connor, Clint. “Welcome to Cleveland
1976
A.D.: Bombing Capital of America.”
The Plain Dealer,
March
6
,
2011
. Available at http://www.cleveland.com/moviebuff/index.ssf/
2
011
/
03
/welcome_to_cleveland_
1976
_ad_b.html (accessed January
2
,
2012
).

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. “The International Organ Trafficking Market.” Interviewed by Neal Conan on
Talk of the Nation,
National Public Radio, July
30
,
2009
. Available at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=
1
11379908
(accessed September
21
,
2011
).

The Ukrainian Weekly,
various issues. Available at http://www.ukrweekly.com/ (accessed July
24
,
2010
).

Zetter, Kim. “Scientist Turns Microscope on Herself.”
Wired.
February
28
,
2008
. Available at http://www.wired.com/epicenter/
2008
/
02
/scientist-turns/.

 

 

About the Author

Novelist, musician, and editor
Brian Francis Slattery
is the author of three previous novels.
Spaceman Blues
(
2007
) was nominated for the Lambda Award and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award.
Liberation
(
2008
) was named by Amazon's editors the best science-fiction book of
2008
.
Lost Everything
(
2012
) won the
2012
Philip K. Dick Award. As an editor, he specializes in economic development and human rights, working for a variety of public-policy think tanks and traveling widely. He was previously a senior editor of the
Journal of International Affairs
and an editor and co-founder of the
New Haven Review
. His short fiction is published in
Glimmer Train
,
McSweeney's
, the Revelator, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and young son in New Haven, Connecticut.