Gangsterland

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’ve been blessed by the help of so many people during the years I wrote this book: Dan Smetanka, editor extraordinaire, should have received hazard pay for the work he did on this novel — I am so grateful for his careful, inspired, and insightful notes, thoughts, deletions, additions, strong-arm tactics, and hour-long phone calls to keep me off the ledge. Likewise, I’m so thankful for the steady hands of my agents Jennie Dunham, who has been by my side since the start and who always provides wise counsel, firm editorial advice, and just the right amount of forceful intervention, and Judi Farkas, who has navigated so many rough seas for me she should probably have her own boat by now.

This novel came out of a short story entitled “Mitzvah” that I wrote for Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene and Todd James Pierce. I owe both Jarret and Todd a huge amount of gratitude for knowing that I could come up with something dark and violent about Summerlin. I don’t know if any of these characters would exist if I hadn’t been asked to write that story, so I thank you both for including me in your book. And thank you to Stacy Bierlein for her astute editing of the story when it appeared in Other Resort Cities, a line change that opened up an entire novel in its wake.

Mark Haskell Smith, for his great notes and his continued moral and ethical support; Gina Frangello, for her help with all things Chicago and life; Daniel Krugman, for answering all of my odd questions about funerals and undertaking; Geoff Schumacher, my former editor at a variety of defunct Las Vegas newspapers, for his excellent book Sun, Sin, and Suburbia: An Essential History of Modern Las Vegas, which was an invaluable resource; Vitaly Sigal for his insight into Russian Jews, criminals, and criminal defense; the poor rabbis who responded to my tortured metaphorical and existential queries on AskMoses.com in the middle of the night (really, they are there all night long); Ross Angelella, for his middle-of-the-night support and wisdom, and for giving me a better title; Carl Beverly and Sarah Timberman for believing in the idea long before it became a novel; my siblings, Lee Goldberg, Karen Dinino, and Linda Woods, who travel this same path as I do, and whose unending support means the world to me; Agam Patel, my partner in crime at the University of California, Riverside, who everyone thinks knows how to bury a body, but who actually knows how to keep one upright; all my talented and smart colleagues at UCR Palm Desert Low Residency MFA, whose tremendous work inspires me, and all my students, whose promise and dedication embolden my spirit; Rider Strong and Julia Pistell, my Literary Disco partners and dear friends, who are also my de facto literary therapists twice a month; Mechtild Dunofsky, for sanity, and her insight into the motivations of people. Mikayla Butchart, for catching all my mistakes — there are few things more valuable on the planet than a copyeditor.

I am not a rabbi, so I am deeply appreciative to a variety of sources for the spiritual wisdom included throughout this work, including, obviously, the Torah, Talmud, and collected works of the Midrash, but also, namely: A Book of Jewish Thoughts (Bloch Publishing, 1926), Selected and Arranged by Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz, the edition that once belonged to my grandparents, and then was handed down to my mother, and then, when I needed it most, to me; Holy Mountain: Two Paths to One God (Binfords & Mort, 1953) by Rabbi Raphael H. Levine, given to my mother when she graduated from high school; A Treasury of Jewish Humor (Doubleday, 1951) edited by Nathan Ausubel; and Judaism: An Anthology of the Key Spiritual Writings of the Jewish Tradition (Simon & Schuster, 1991) edited by Arthur Hertzberg. My fictional interpretation of the meanings found in all of the above isn’t to be taken as actual Jewish law, or even as my own beliefs, which is not the fault of the wonderful writers, scholars, and religious leaders who wrote the above. Also, thank you to the United States Treasury Department, Bureau of Narcotics, for keeping such assiduous records and compiling them in Mafia (Harper Collins, 2007), an indispensable compendium of bad guys.

Finally, my beautiful wife, Wendy, whom I write all of these books for, and who reads every word, but has to live with them for much longer. I’m coming to bed now.