Palm Springs Life Magazine sat down with Tod to learn the secrets involved with forging a successful life in crime:

“A solid con hinges on finding the right man for the job. In this case, that’s Sal Cupertine, a Chicago mafia hit man who botches a massive job and is forced to take on the identity of Rabbi David Cohen, who leads a Las Vegas temple.

Goldberg conjured up the character when he was asked to write a short story for the Las Vegas Noir anthology. He needed to write about a crime in a bucolic place — in this instance, that’s Summerlin, an affluent master-planned community in the Nevada desert — and he also wanted to avoid writing an obvious bad guy.

“There’s the cliché of the gangster at home. That’s what made The Sopranos so compelling, that’s what The Godfather did. It’s been done,” Goldberg says. “So I knew I needed to write about the bad guy at a job, a fake job, but I needed the fake job to be something bizarre.”

Goldberg, who lived in Vegas for several years, understood the city’s religious leaders are the only people exalted there.

“It’s actually a very conservative town,” he says. “The religious leaders are the ones who are feared, respected.”