American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  There was another murder Cummiskey was telling people he’d done that the cops didn’t even know about. In 1971, Mike “the Yugo” Yelovich disappeared from the neighborhood, never to be seen again. Cummiskey was claiming he’d had to kill Mike the Yugo for accidentally shooting him in the shinbone with a rifle. After he’d dispatched Mike, Cummiskey said, he cut up the body and put it in plastic bags. When he was loading the bags into the trunk of his car, one of the legs fell out just as a police car was driving by. Cummiskey figured the cops must have thought it was a mannequin’s leg, because they just smiled, waved, and kept on driving.

  Cummiskey used to laugh like hell when he told these stories, so people never knew quite what to make of them. But it was known that while at Attica, Cummiskey had trained to be a butcher. So that’s what they nicknamed him—Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey.

  Another gangster from Spillane’s generation that Coonan was beginning to be seen with a lot was Anton “Tony” Lucich. Born in 1919, Lucich was now a retiree with a reputation as a shrewd businessman. At five-feet-nine-inches tall, with a barrel chest and a broad midriff, Lucich looked like somebody who might have been a tough guy years ago. In fact, he never was. Unlike Eddie Cummiskey, Tony was the kind of guy who always let somebody else pull the trigger. That, he felt, was the secret of his longevity.

  Back when he had lived in an apartment on West 47th Street, Lucich was a well-known loanshark in Hell’s Kitchen. In the years following World War II, loansharking was a relatively common way for a neighborhood kid to supplement his income. Lucich had begun lending out money while he was working the docks as a shipfitter’s helper, then as a welder, and later when he became an asbestos installer.

  The first time he ever shylocked was when a fellow dockworker suggested that if he lent him twenty bucks, he would pay him back twenty-four the following week. Something clicked; Lucich saw it as the easiest four bucks he’d ever made. After that, he started lending out small amounts to bartenders, cabbies, neighborhood shop-owners, and gas station attendants. He even started lending to an elderly woman on 10th Avenue who would hang a towel from her tenement window if she needed money that week. Unlike most customers, she always paid her debt off in one lump sum.

  Along with loansharking, Lucich became adept at the various other low-level rackets that flourished in Hell’s Kitchen throughout the early 1950s. A man of temperate habits, he was able to parlay his modest criminal enterprises into a substantial savings, which allowed him to put down a mortgage on a home in Valley Stream, Long Island. But the rackets in Valley Stream were not quite as lucrative as those in Hell’s Kitchen. So before long, Lucich was sniffing around the old neighborhood looking for an investment.

  That’s where Jimmy Coonan came in. Lucich knew that in the early 1970s, the kindly neighborhood loanshark was a thing of the past. Lucich was fifty-three, with a heart condition. He was a threat to no one. What he needed now was a strong-arm man, someone a lot younger than himself. Someone like Coonan, whose well-deserved reputation for violence would make collecting outstanding debts a hell of a lot easier.

  So one afternoon, sometime in late ’73 or ’74, Lucich said to Coonan, “Jimmy, you’re a good kid; a smart kid. This cowboy shit is beneath you. Why don’t you go in with me? Partners. We front the same amount. I teach you the ropes, share my wisdom. All you gotta do is provide the protection.”

  It was the kind of arrangement Coonan had been looking for for years.

  Together with Charlie Krueger, a bartender at the 596 Club, they all kicked in $1,000 to get things started. It was agreed they would have their own customers, but once a week, on Friday afternoons, they would meet at the bar and pool their resources. The idea was to keep the cash flowing. Once it came in, it went back out on the street immediately.

  Over the next few months, Coonan learned a lot from Tony Lucich. They started out shylocking in increments of $50, $150, or $250. Interest could be anywhere from 2 to 5 points a week, meaning if they lent $100 to somebody, the person had to pay between $102 and $105 the following week. A person could pay back the whole sum, or they could pay just the interest, or “vigorish,” without touching the principal.

  If a customer went weeks without paying his debt, the “vig” or “juice” could add up pretty quick, causing the inevitable friction between lender and borrower. With Coonan’s reputation, though, it rarely came to that.

  Not long after they started, Charlie Krueger dropped out, but Jimmy and Tony were doing better than ever. Their operation followed the usual progression from street-level gamblers and drinkers to more sophisticated borrowers. Soon neighborhood merchants, union members, and sometimes even other shylocks were seen coming to and from the 596 Club, picking up and dropping off cash. Since neither Lucich nor Coonan were heavy bettors or boozers themselves, they were able to keep it moving without touching their initial outlay. The juice alone was enough to live on.

  For Coonan, it was the beginning of what he hoped would be a growing enterprise. He told Lucich he wanted to start up a numbers racket, and after that maybe his own bookmaking operation. Coonan proved to be a good businessman with a nose for the bottom line and expansion opportunities. He’d been lending out money to some of the other guys in the bar who were using it to finance their own racketeering schemes. It was the beginnings of a group, or crew, that was increasingly beholden to Coonan. Slowly but surely, as the debts piled up, they were starting to see him as their “boss.”

  In the midst of his burgeoning business ventures, Jimmy Coonan got an unexpected visit from Cupid. He’d been hanging out with a neighborhood woman named Edna Fitzgerald who’d just recently broken up with her boyfriend. Before that she had been married to a cop named Frank Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had died suddenly of an overdose, leaving her with two children.

  Edna was a tough cookie. Born Julia Edna Crotty in 1942, she was orphaned at the age of fourteen and bounced from relative to relative before marrying Fitzgerald in 1962. She was five-foot-three, with dark hair, a plump figure, and her travails as a young widowed mother with little or no means of support had given her a hard, bitter edge. But Jimmy liked her.

  Coonan had never been much of a womanizer and wasn’t really one for elaborate courtships. Not long after he started seeing Edna, who was four years his senior, they made plans to get married. But first Jimmy wanted to meet with her old boyfriend, Billy Beattie, to make sure the coast was clear. Through a mutual friend of theirs, he arranged a get-together at Sonny’s Cafe on 9th Avenue.

  Coonan and Billy Beattie were roughly the same age and well aware of each other’s reputations, though they’d never been formally introduced. Beattie, who was tall and gangly with curly black hair, had gotten his start with Mickey Spillane. At the age of nineteen, he’d been given a maintenance job at Madison Square Garden, where he began his life of crime by stealing coin change from the pay toilets. After that, he stopped showing up for work altogether—except to pick up his weekly paycheck.

  Eventually, Beattie graduated to the art of auto theft. It was his job to steal the cars that Spillane and his crew used for their burglaries and bank heists.

  At Sonny’s Cafe, Coonan gave the appearance of being less interested in Beattie’s criminal career than he was in his romantic predilections. He asked Beattie what his current status was with Edna Fitzgerald.

  “I ain’t seen her in about a month,” said Billy. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s over and done with.”

  “That’s good,” replied Jimmy. “That’s what I was hopin’ to hear. I been hangin’ out with her myself.”

  “Hey, knock yourself out. She’s all yours.”

  The two of them relaxed, had a few drinks, talked about the neighborhood and other neutral topics. It was a seemingly innocuous conversation, but like so many of Coonan’s liaisons during this period, there was an ulterior motive. Within weeks, he hired Beattie as a bartender at the 596 Club, and Billy became the first of many neighborhood tough guys to openly shift his allegiance from Spillane
to Coonan.

  With his marriage to Edna on July 28, 1974, Coonan’s life looked more stable than ever before. He even talked about buying a nice middle-class home in New Jersey, a display of upward mobility that would have been financially impossible just six months earlier. On the professional front, he had the 596 Club and his thriving loanshark operation with Tony Lucich. At twenty-eight, with his well-deserved reputation as a tough guy and a smart businessman, Coonan had everything to look forward to.

  All of which made it even more aggravating for him when he finally fucked up.…

  It was stupid, really. A little shooting out on the avenue. A few folks from Harlem had been making their way uptown after spending an evening on the Circle Line, a sightseeing cruise boat docked at West 42nd Street. It was June 22, 1975, a warm summer evening. Around 12 A.M., Vanderbilt Evans, black, twenty-nine years old and a strapping six-feet-five-inches tall, went looking for a cab in front of the 596 Club. He was accompanied by two ladies and two male friends, both of whom were about his size.

  John Reid, a nineteen-year-old neighborhood kid, was pulling his car into a parking lot just north of the bar. Evans and his entourage made no great effort to get out of the way. Reid, who was a good ten inches shorter and 100 pounds lighter than Evans, stepped out of his car. He and Evans exchanged angry words, then Reid challenged the Harlem folks to a fight. Evans and his friends looked at this little kid and smiled.

  “Oh, you think it’s funny, do you?” asked Reid. “Why don’t you wait right here?”

  Reid disappeared into the 596 Club. A few seconds later Evans and his friends heard a commotion and turned around. Behind them was a group of five or six white folks charging from the bar. Some of them were carrying sticks and baseball bats. At the front of the pack was the bar owner and rising neighborhood leader, Jimmy Coonan.

  Two cops from the Midtown North Precinct’s anticrime unit happened to be sitting in an undercover taxi waiting at a red light. The whole thing was unfolding right before their eyes. As the mob advanced, they got out of the cab and approached. At precisely that moment, Evans, who was standing near some street construction on 10th Avenue, picked up a metal Con Edison sign to use as a weapon.

  That’s when Coonan pulled a .38-caliber Colt Special from his pocket. Amidst the yelling and confusion, Coonan fired, hitting Vanderbilt Evans once in the right shoulder, just inches from his heart.

  The cops charged. “Halt! Halt!” they shouted, grabbing Coonan and wrestling him to the ground.

  At the precinct house, Jimmy claimed that someone else pulled the gun and he’d only picked it up after it was dropped. As for the shot that was fired? Yes, sir, he’d heard it, but it must have been somebody else.

  The Vanderbilt Evans shooting was a complete pain in the ass, as far as Coonan was concerned. He was let out on bail, but there was sure to be a grand jury investigation. Not only that, but the cops had found him with $1,500 in his pocket, which they were saying they knew was part of his loansharking operation.

  In July and August of ’75, Jimmy spent a good deal of time trying to get his witnesses together. At one point he assembled a group of neighborhood people, including fellow loanshark Tony Lucich, at Eddie White’s apartment at 501 West 43rd Street, across from the 596 Club on the northwest corner of 10th Avenue. “Eddie,” Jimmy Coonan told White, “remember how you seen this thing. You seen it plain as could be from your window. And Jimmy Coonan didn’t pull no gun on nobody.” Lucich, who was best man at Coonan’s wedding and a stand-up guy, was going to back up Eddie White’s version, even though he’d been playing cards somewhere else on the night of the shooting.

  It was Coonan’s hope that he could confuse the issue enough that he wouldn’t get indicted. But with two cops as witnesses against him, he knew it was a long shot.

  Even if he was able to finagle his way out of this one, Jimmy knew this Wild West shit had to stop. Sure, it served a purpose, in a way. In Hell’s Kitchen these types of incidents tended to enhance a guy’s reputation, make him seem like someone who was quick with a gun, someone who had to be taken seriously. Also, John Reid had been in trouble with these menacing black dudes from Harlem and Jimmy had come to his defense. That was admirable.

  But Coonan knew that with his criminal record and his new business ventures at stake, it just wasn’t worth the risk.

  What he needed now was someone to share the violence with him. In racketeering circles, it is an acknowledged fact that a boss or crew chief has to have a right-hand man. Someone who’ll stand over a union official, a shopowner, or a loanshark customer and say, “Listen, friend, you best come up with the money. My boss here, he’s too nice, but not me. Me, I’ll break your fuckin’ legs.”

  In the old days, Eddie McGrath had his Cockeye Dunn and Squint Sheridan. Mickey Spillane had his Eddie Cummiskey. Hell, the Italians had whole crews for this sort of thing. Why not me? reasoned Coonan. For appearances’ sake, if nothing else.

  Before long, Jimmy found a kid who fit the bill—Mickey Featherstone had returned from Vietnam. Featherstone was not a gangster—not yet, anyway. His violent actions had nothing to do with profit motive. They had nothing to do with anything, really, other than the kid’s own personal demons.

  Everybody knew Featherstone because his family had been in the neighborhood for years. He’d had brothers and sisters who came before him. But they weren’t like Mickey. Nobody was. Jimmy had been told stories about this kid and he liked what he heard. Featherstone had potential.

  Later, they would form an alliance that was as terrifying as anything any West Sider had seen since the days of the Gophers. But for now, they had slightly different priorities. For Coonan, the early Seventies had been days of planning and hustling and laying the foundation for a time when he could resume his war with Spillane.

  For Featherstone, they were days of random violence and self-hatred.

  4

  MICKEY

  When Mickey Featherstone walked into the Leprechaun Bar with two friends early on the morning of September 30, 1970, he had every reason to believe there might be trouble. Just forty-eight hours earlier, across the street from the bar on the northwest corner of 9th Avenue and 44th Street, there had been an altercation. A bunch of female impersonators were beating up a neighborhood kid and Mickey had done his bit.

  A fight between someone from the neighborhood and a group of “fags in drag” was not an altogether uncommon sight in Hell’s Kitchen. Especially on 9th Avenue, just a few blocks from the heart of Times Square, prostitutes, transvestites, and other creatures of the night often made the rounds looking for business, drugs, or just plain companionship. It was Frank McCarthy, a neighborhood kid in his early twenties, who had been walking home with his girlfriend when he came across three men dressed as women cruising along West 42nd Street. Various insults were hurled back and forth; then McCarthy and his girlfriend headed north. The drag queens followed. A scuffle broke out across the street from the Leprechaun Bar, located at 608 9th Avenue. When Featherstone arrived, he did what any self-respecting West Sider would have done. He dove right in, no questions asked.

  Before Mickey even had a chance to land a punch, a huge black guy who identified himself as a police officer intervened. The guy moved and spoke with a certain authority, so his claim seemed plausible enough. He was also carrying a police billyclub, which he used to force Featherstone and McCarthy up against the wall.

  When a squad car from the Midtown North Precinct pulled up, much to Mickey’s surprise the black dude and the drag queens scattered.

  “What the fuck’s going on here?” asked one of the patrolmen as he stepped out of the car and approached.

  By this time Mickey realized the guy who had said he was a cop wasn’t really a cop at all. He and McCarthy told the patrolmen what had happened—that the three transvestites had jumped McCarthy and his girlfriend, and that a big black guy with a billyclub had pretended he was a cop and tried to shake them down. The patrolmen didn’t seem too concerned; and since
no one was willing to press charges, McCarthy, his girlfriend, and the cops went on about their business.

  Mickey would have let it slide, too, if he hadn’t walked into the Leprechaun Bar two nights later to find the asshole who had pretended to be a cop, billyclub and all.

  The Leprechaun Bar was another typical Hell’s Kitchen bistro. To the right, as you entered, were four booths against the wall. In the middle of the room there was enough space for three or four tables. To the left, running nearly the length of the wall, was a counter flanked by a half-dozen stools. There was a cigarette machine near the front door and a jukebox in the back. The rest of the room was cluttered with empty beer kegs, cases of booze, and cardboard boxes that lined the walls leading down a hallway to the restrooms.

  Mickey was with two neighborhood acquaintances, Jimmy Russell and Kevin Kerr. They ordered a few drinks; then Featherstone asked the old Greek bartender, “Who’s the dude with the billyclub?”

  The Greek looked to see who Mickey was talking about, then answered: “That’s Milton. Security.”

  Oh shit, thought Mickey, this fucking guy’s a bouncer!?

  The last thing he and his companions needed was trouble. Jimmy Russell was a small-time criminal with an assault charge pending. He was also a heroin addict. Kevin Kerr had no criminal record, but he had been seen hanging out with neighborhood crooks so often that the cops had his name right up there with all the others. And Featherstone … well, twenty-one-year-old Mickey Featherstone had the kind of criminal record that would make a parole officer blanch. Not one but two homicides, numerous arrests for assault, and one outstanding charge for possession of an unregistered weapon—all in the last eighteen months.

  Not only that, but right this moment, as he sat in this bar with the music blaring and the cigarette smoke billowing and intimations of violence beginning to swirl in his head, Mickey Featherstone was an escapee from the psychiatric ward of a veteran’s hospital. “A passive-aggressive personality with an acute impulse disorder,” is how doctors had described him just days before he snuck away from their fine upstate New York facility.