The Real Boss of Moldeth City Is the Zoning Board

People ask me who really runs Moldeth City. They want a name. They want the guy at the top of the pyramid, the one everybody's afraid of. I tell them it's the zoning board, and they think I'm being cute.

I'm not. The zoning board meets the second Tuesday of every month in a room with a coffee urn and folding chairs, and it is more dangerous than all three crime families put together, for one reason: it's legal.

Here's what people get wrong about a city like this. They think the families are the rot. The families are just the part of the rot you can see. The families you can indict. The feds proved that eleven years ago — came in one weekend, took the bosses and the captains and the soldiers, called it a victory. And the buildings still went up crooked, and the garbage contract still went to the mayor's brother-in-law, and the port still moved whatever it moved, because none of that was ever run by a guy you could put in cuffs. It was run by a board. A contract. An office with a public phone number.

Walk it with me. The garbage hauling in this city is a monopoly, and it's legal, and the man who holds it married into the mayor's family. The development authority decides which block gets the grant and which block gets condemned, and the chief of police has a daughter who married the biggest builder in the county, and nobody had to break a law for those two facts to sit next to each other and start paying rent. The longshoremen's local decides what gets unloaded and what sits on the water, and the parish council decides which festival gets the permit, and the whole thing hums along on nobody-ever-saw-a-bill and a wink at the steakhouse.

That's the thing about an institution. You can't shoot it. You can't RICO a zoning board. It doesn't have a body to bury or a boss to flip. It has minutes. It has an agenda. It has a coffee urn and a sign-in sheet and a vote, seven-to-two, to rezone the waterfront, and the vote is on the record, notarized, legal, and it moves more money and ruins more people than any soldier with a bad temper ever will.

The mobster is the amateur. He's the one who has to hide. The real professional in this city files paperwork.

And that's the part that ought to scare a reader more than any gun, because the gun is at least honest about what it is. The zoning board isn't. It comes dressed as the cure. It comes dressed as the very thing that's supposed to protect you from the families — the government, the process, the public meeting anybody can attend. The crime you can indict is the smallest crime in Moldeth City. The big theft is legal, it's on the record, and nobody goes to prison for it, because the machine is working exactly the way it was built to work.

You want to know who runs the city, don't look for the man in the dark. Look at the ones in the fluorescent light, the ones with the agenda printed and stapled.

Second Tuesday of the month. The coffee's already made. The vote's already counted. All they have to do now is raise their hands.