"Cristiano, kid, times have changed. They've changed so much that us old-timers could pull every last hair from our heads and still not make heads or tails of this crazy crap!"
Vito Luciano, an Italian-American gang boss, stood with his nephew in an empty warehouse deep in the neighborhood, watching members of his family fumble to assemble a row of cocoon-shaped mechanical pods. They bickered noisily as they struggled to get the pieces together, each holding up five fingers.
Robert-Yeru, Chicago's largest public housing complex, had twenty-five thousand households and a population of more than seventy thousand in that one development alone.
Shoddy pipes clung to the aging apartment buildings like ivy, while tiny rooms, each barely larger than a handspan, packed together like a hive to fit as many people as possible.
Wires stretched in every direction between the buildings, along with satellite dishes and cable boxes perched on rooftops. Like a spiderweb in a filthy corner, they formed an ecosystem all their own.
Still, it was hard to connect this place with Willis Tower, Chicago's landmark, completed less than two years ago and soaring into the clouds only two kilometers away.
Every major city in America was full of such jarring contrasts.
Luciano spat out the cigar tobacco stuck to his lips. If business weren't so bad these days, he wouldn't have had to smoke such cheap cigars.
After once tasting Nibelung, the Howlett Group's extremely rare premium cigar, the family patriarch had finally understood that even though he could throw his weight around and bask in the adulation of the more than one hundred thousand Italian Americans in his neighborhood,
he was still nothing more than a scavenger. He'd never made it onto any respectable stage.
"In Al Capone's day, we ran bootlegging operations. Later, we fought