The Reformed by Tod Goldberg Page B

asked.
    “Where Junior’s been kicking it,” he said. “One of my delivery guys made a drop there about a week ago.”
    “Why would you think I’d want that?”
    “You’re wearing a wire,” K-Dog said. He pointed at Sam’s chest, and Sam realized he’d unbuttoned his shirt at some point. It was those damn peppers.
    “Sorry,” Sam said. “I didn’t want to forget anything.”
    “It’s all right,” K-Dog said, “I’m not gonna remember that you were wired up, either. That’s the joy of pruno, right?”
    “Right,” Sam said. He read the address aloud so that it would get on his wire, since he was pretty sure he’d lose the paper before all things were said and done with K-Dog.

5
     
    The aim of terrorism, in all its forms, is maddeningly simple. If you blow up a plane or yourself or a car parked in front of a busy hotel, or even if you just walk up and shoot a political figure, the reasoning can usually be broken into one of three things:
    A desire for revenge.
    A desire for acknowledgment.
    A desire for publicity.
     
    On the occasion that terrorism is used for strictly religious purposes, it’s very rarely what any god has told someone to do, but rather the skewed interpretation that a god seeks revenge for being put behind the eight ball of some other religious idol.
    The difference between a terrorist organization and a prison or street gang is negligible. The Latin Emperors didn’t rise in prominence because of their political bent in the late nineties; they rose because they controlled a vast network of drug dealers and gave back to their own community—which is to say, they hired people in their own neighborhoods to do menial tasks, handed out money on holidays and gave the people of the projects a sense of identity and even a little bit of hope. When you’re hopeless, even a gang seems like a good idea. The difference between Hamas and the Latin Emperors isn’t that large: for both, it’s about defending a piece of land and defending a particular identity, and the conflicts between power and preeminence.
    How you defeat terrorism is more complex. But it begins with counterinsurgency. The level of violence—or the threat of violence—determines the response. Blow up the World Trade Center, for instance, and expect to have your country, or countries, invaded. Threaten the president via e-mail, and expect to have a Secret Service agent outside your door in about five minutes, just to make sure you’re not producing anthrax in your mother’s basement. Begin organizing an anarchist organization that believes violence is the only way to achieve the aims of the revolution—what this revolution will entail is anyone’s guess—and expect to have a new member within a few weeks who, eventually, will be writing your FBI file.
    As it related to Junior Gonzalez, I suspected we’d need a little of all of the above to stop his campaign against Father Eduardo.
    “Why don’t we just shoot him?” Fiona asked. I was at her place fixing her sink and explaining the situation I’d decided to enter all of us into, and, as per usual, Fiona had a very simple solution. That she had it while I was under her sink wasn’t my choice. I called her that night and told her we needed to talk about a new client, and she told me that she’d love to discuss our latest venture over dinner, except that she was having a household problem and only I, with my superior skills, could fix the issue.
    I thought she was speaking euphemistically.
    She wasn’t. So with wrench in hand, I told her all we knew.
    “He hasn’t actually done anything yet,” I said. “He plans to extort Father Eduardo. He plans to blackmail him. He’s maybe planning on killing him, but there’s nothing criminal in what he’s done yet, apart from maybe having some cops on his payroll, and that sort of makes it difficult to kill him, too.”
    “But let’s be honest, Michael. Eventually he will put himself in a position where it would be