If the cold pills with additives or, particularly, the mirror-image pseudoephedrine had come to market, the effect may well have been enormous. Were the U.S. cold medicine market, the largest in the world, suddenly dependent on any new form of pseudoephedrine, it stands to reason that the nine factories that provide all the planet’s pseudo would have begun producing large amounts of the new meth-resistant drug. This in turn would have drastically reduced the amount of meth-ready chemicals available to the DTOs. Either drug could have effectively accomplished what Gene Haislip and DEA had five times been unable to achieve between 1984 and 1996.
Instead, by the time Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert in 2000, all research into a cold-medicine alternative ceased. Why should Pfizer worry about DEA when its predecessor had had such an easy time lobbying Congress? In 2002, meth lab numbers in Iowa topped one thousand for the first time, and were nearing two thousand in Missouri.
CHAPTER 7
THE COP SHOP
Oelwein’s difficult and unsure rebirth in 2006 began in the same place in which the town had been born 134 years earlier: in a cornfield. In 1872, Oelwein was founded on land belonging to Gustav Oelwein, a poor Bavarian farmer, as a place for what was then called the Rock Island Railroad to take on water and coal between Chicago and Minneapolis. The center point of town was plotted at the intersection of Charles and Frederick streets, so named for Gustav’s two sons. (Oelwein’s principal thoroughfare has three names—Charles, Frederick, and Old 150. Around town, all three are often referred to in the aggregate as “Main.”) By 1905, the population had soared to 5,134 people, and Charles and Frederick were among the wealthiest men in the Midwest. Driving south on Frederick Street today, you can still see the cabin where the Oelwein brothers were born. Heading farther south after a dogleg at the Country Cottage Café, what is now South Frederick dead-ends at Highway 150. To the left is an open parcel of land; to the right is a campground. Across Highway 150 is what might be the most important of all Oelwein’s undeveloped properties—the 250-acre Industrial Park. By the spring of 2006, the IP, as Mayor Larry Murphy calls it, was ready to be shopped to prospective customers and had unceremoniously been denuded of the corn that had grown there. Murphy foresaw the IP as the bright, shining future of his beleaguered town.
Unlike Gustav Oelwein, though, who’d already contracted with the three separate arms of the Rock Island Railroad (the Burlington, the Illinois Central, and the Minnesota), Larry Murphy did not know for whom he was preparing the IP’s land, which is bookended on one side by the two baseball diamonds of the grandiosely named Oelwein Sports Complex, and on the other by the once-famed Sportsmen’s Lounge. The idea was that, to reference one of Murphy’s favorite movies, Field of Dreams, if Oelwein cleared the land, somebody would come. The fact was that Oelwein had nothing to lose. And nowhere was this sentiment more clear than in the decrepit presence of the Sportsmen’s, whose mixed history underscores both the hope and the danger of a down-and-out place literally dying to grow bigger and stronger. It’s said around town that the Mob fronted the Pirillo brothers the money to open the Sportsmen’s, thereby adding to an already long and storied connection between the Cosa Nostra and the town that, in the 1950s, became known as Little Chicago.
Mafia history in Oelwein is taken today as a foregone conclusion. It’s a piece of the town’s cultural tapestry that’s at once as obvious as the cornfields and the railroad tracks and as illusory as the fading memories of the rail workers who once rubbed elbows with such American luminaries as Bugsy Malone and Jimmy Hoffa. Whether Little Chicago was really ever a cooling-out place for mobsters who needed a few days away from the heat in the Windy City is arguable, though the stories seem too well known, too oft-repeated, and too finely detailed to be false. These include how, for instance, the homes of three particular Italian families were not only immediately rebuilt but were rebuilt in grander style shortly after the tornado of 1968 nearly wiped Oelwein from the map. According to Clay and Nathan, those families—the Leos, the Pirillos, and the Vanattas—owned the bars and the clubs on Main Street beneath which the gaming dens were located, replete with revolving doors and hidden rooms dating back to Prohibition. The Sportsmen’s Lounge was founded by Dominic and Pete Pirillo shortly after they returned from World War II; they’d served only after an Oelwein judge gave them a choice between the army and jail. The Sportsmen’s was famed as much for the Pirillos’ twenty-four-hour slow-cooked prime rib as for the poker game that reportedly went on for five decades in the back room, which regularly had an audience of what were politely referred to as “dancing girls.” Mafiosi, people swear around Oelwein, would circulate between the Pirillos’ bar, the Leos’ Highway 150 South Club, and the Vanattas’ Pink Pussycat, all the while unafraid that any of Oelwein’s three cops (one of whom was part-time) would give them up to federal agents sent from Chicago.
The only undeniable truth in all the stories is that the more sinister side of the “good old days” has either been forgotten completely or has come to be shrouded in the golden glow of longing. Today, the Sportsmen’s Lounge is little more than a hulking afterthought. In place of the prime rib—which Larry Murphy remembers as being so tender you could cut it with a fork—there is something called a Blooming Onion, which involves a Vidalia that’s been crosscut, battered, and deep-fried. And that’s only when the Sportsmen’s is open, which doesn’t seem to be that often. The meaning of the place is palpable, if not quite tangible, and is less about that particular structure than the era in Oelwein’s history it evokes. Clay Hallberg laments the loss of the raucous Saturday nights of yore at the Pink Pussycat strip club, after which he claims Mrs. Vanatta would make her girls sit in the front pew down the street at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Nathan Lein wishes that there was a strip club somewhere—anywhere—closer than Waterloo. Seventy-five-year-old Herman “Gus” Gaddow, a former rail-man turned farrier, thinks back fondly on the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, says Gus, people had good manners, and three cops were enough to keep crime non existent. The implication is that no one stepped out of line for fear of having to answer to the boys from Chicago. It’s in this way that the melding of Oelwein’s history and present circumstance provides a case study of the complexity of trying to regain a throne that was perhaps epically tarnished in its heyday.
And so it seemed only fitting that the key to Murphy’s economic stimulus plan was the Industrial Park, kitty-corner from the Sportsmen’s, where in March 2006 a gridded road system already cut the acreage into blocks. Among the weeds sprouting up now that the farmer who once leased those 250 acres was no longer spraying herbicide, a sign read “Oelwein Industrial Park—Come Grow with Us!” Murphy said the city had been courting a call center to lease the space, but it had two competitors: a similar-sized town in Nebraska and a town near Mumbai, India. If the call center prospect fell through, there were bound to be other options, said Murphy. It just wasn’t entirely clear what they might be, or when they’d make themselves available. Meanwhile, things in Oelwein were growing more desperate every month. On March 17, 2006, Tyson had closed the doors of what had, a long time ago, been the old Iowa Ham plant, costing the town another hundred jobs. Upon getting the news, Murphy chose to look at things with his characteristic optimism. Rock bottom, he observed, provides a firm foundation. From there, Oelwein could do nothing but push itself up.