Excerpts from Blood of Paradise

Every kid grows up knowing there’s a line between the life he wants and the life he gets. Jude walked that line as long as he could, then crossed over for good one afternoon his junior year in high school.

He was sitting on his bed in the basement, icing an ankle he’d torn up during tackling drills the day before, when he heard car doors slamming outside. The front door had a buzzer, not a bell, and someone jabbed the button three times hard. Jude listened as his mother droned, “I’ll get it,” and clopped in her flats down the hardwood hall. Then he heard her voice turn shrill and afraid as she argued with a man in the doorway.

It was just the two of them in the house. His sister Colleen had trundled off to her flute lesson. His dad had reported for duty.

He rose from the bed, tested his ankle and hobbled upstairs. Turning the corner at the top, he came up behind his mother and found a half dozen FBI agents in their blue windbreakers clustered on the chilly, sunlit porch with backup from Chicago PD. The lead agent loomed in the doorway, so eerily tall he had to stoop to make eye contact. The eyes were a milky green.

Holding out an envelope, he said, “We didn’t come here to talk it over, Mrs. McManus. Here’s your copy of the warrant. Now step aside, please.”

They planted Jude and his mother in the living room and turned on the TV. There was breaking news, reported by a chesty, moonfaced Asian woman in a bright red suit who’d chosen the Cabrini Green projects for her backdrop. Behind her, the skels were mobbing tall, draped in bling and pimped out in skullies or hats kicked right, Gangster Disciples, some of them throwing signs, stacking the Cobra Stones in contempt, the whole hand business, others crowing out, “All in one,” or just bellowing names-Raymont, Stocker, Girl Dog, D.T.-like everybody was missing the show.

      Jude noticed how the Asian newscaster pursed her lipsticked mouth around her vowels and cagily moved her microphone first to expose, then conceal, her cleavage. Looking back on it now, all these years later, he realized he’d focused on such things as a way to divert his attention from what she was saying. Regardless, whenever he dredged up the scene from memory, that’s how he pictured it: sitting next to his tight-lipped mother, watching as the plump Asian woman in her brassy red suit unmasked Sergeant Ray McManus as a rogue cop, complete with footage of him taken off in handcuffs from the 18th District station house.

      Jude’s dad wasn’t the only one named. His two best friends on the force, Bill Malvasio and Phil Strock, faced the same charges: jacking drug dealers, basically. Jude remembered thinking at the time (and on and off in the years since) that thousands, if not millions, in the greater Chicago area would shrug off such behavior as sign of a go-getter attitude, not guilt. And the accused seemed to know that only too well. According to the reports, they’d nicknamed themselves the Laugh Masters, mimicking rappers-Laugh Master Ray, Laugh Master Phil-to make it all sound like just some crazy prank. Except the stories of street dealers who were dragged off, pummeled with batons, boot-stomped until they lay unconscious in their own blood-then robbed of cash, drugs, jewelry, weapons—didn’t seem like such a stitch the fourth or fifth time around.

      Strock, on disability leave, got arrested at his north-side flat. Malvasio, the reputed ringleader, was never found. He’d fled, rumors went, to El Salvador, where he had contacts from taking part in a police training program. And that, for those who cared, added the final ironic twist to the whole business: the man who got away vanished down a path paved by good intentions, into the arms of another bent cop.