Jon Hickey’s riveting Big Chief follows a tribal “fixer” all to well-aware he’s barreling head-first down a slippery slope
Big Chief | Jon Hickey | Simon & Schuster, (320 pages)
In Michael Clayton (2007), George Clooney plays the Platonic ideal of a fixer: “special counsel” to a high-powered New York law firm, whose job is to quietly handle the firm’s messiest legal disasters, making them go away through murky backchannels. Clayton had a golden résumé, albeit of the hard-core, street-smart New York City variety: Bronx-born, NYPD-patrolman father, St. John’s University, Fordham Law, assistant district attorney in Queens, Joint Manhattan-Queens Organized Crime Task Force.
Fast-forward from Manhattan boardrooms to northern Wisconsin, and you get another ambitious lawyer, Mitch Caddo — the fixer at the heart of Jon Hickey‘s absorbing and sharply observed debut novel, Big Chief.
Mitch Caddo’s rise and the reality of fixing
Caddo is an enterprising young lawyer and enrolled member of the fictional Passage Rouge Nation. Armed with a degree from Cornell Law, Caddo is building his own golden résumé — he even drafts a piece of legislation, concerning logging rights and sovereignty, that becomes law during a Senate Indian Affairs Committee internship.
But this isn’t just a tale of career ascent. It’s a bildungsroman where Hickey uses Caddo’s journey to explore legal, moral and ethical gray zones, portraying the education of a young man whose idealism is slowly corroded by the compromises and calculations required of a tribal fixer.
“At first, it felt worthy and important, but after a year of writing suspension of parental rights petitions and dutifully submitting them to the court, a morbid train of thought started taking hold of me: If I wrote about fifty of these in a year, just how many traumatized, neglected kids were we talking about?”
OxyContin and heroin flowed into the reservation. Caddo craves getting at core systemic issues — and, not incidentally, wants more status and power.
Caddo becomes the chief of staff (though a formal title isn’t given) to his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck (Joe Beck’s adopted son). The title doesn’t matter — Caddo finds his calling as a fixer, someone who manages crises discreetly, pulling strings, cleaning up scandals, and maneuvering around legal exposure.
Together, Beck and Caddo run the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, including the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. In a nice touch, Beck lives at the top of the casino. Beck teases Caddo — who didn’t really grow up on the reservation — as a “J. Crew Indian.”
“I’m your fixer,” Caddo tells Mack when events spin wildly out of control on many fronts. “Trying to fix things.”
Mack isn’t buying it. “Things don’t look fixed to me. They look fucked.”
Election eve chaos and legal underpinnings
Boilerplate letters, justified use of force, house arrest, grand jury questions, land trust LLCs, jurisdictional conflicts — Big Chief is rich with legal details, woven deftly into the action.
The novel unfolds over a few mind-blowing days on election eve. The president is looking for votes.
“Know a good drug lawyer?” he asks Caddo after running into a potential voter with pending charges.
“Just bad ones,” I tell him. “Maybe we ought to keep out of this one.”
“But that’s an Ellison, you feel? You know how many Ellisons live on the reservation?”
Caddo adds it to his rapidly growing to-do list. The situation quickly turns sticky. Protesters gather at the Government Center against disenrollments and banishments. Banishments are administrative exclusions from the tribe, often used against pill pushers and dope dealers. The whole family is removed from the rolls, which opens scarce tribal housing spots. Caddo rationalizes: Why give them to felons?
No spoilers, but there’s corruption, political dirty tricks, overlapping jurisdictions (the FBI shows up). In Caddo’s words:
“A legal shitstorm.”
A lawyer to the core, Caddo is always assessing, even during the shitstorm and says what may be my favorite line of the book:
“None of this is irrevocable.
When the fixer questions the game
Caddo reflects on his path: “I had a few options, fantastical, even grandiose: K Street lobbyist, assistant U.S. attorney. Or go the other way: passionate public defender of the disaffected.”
But he chose to become a fixer. It’s not an easy gig. Even the battle-tested Clayton starts asking the one question you’re never supposed to ask in these jobs: “Wait — are we the bad guys?”
So, if you thought being the “fixer” meant having all the answers, Big Chief is here to remind you: sometimes you’re just the guy stuck cleaning everyone else’s mess.
Thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the ARC.
“Amazing rec! Thanks @judicialjunkie.bsky.social for highlighting. Such engaging book reviews.”
— Jon Hickey, Author