Many, including Featherstone, wondered why. Unlike Jimmy, whose criminal ambitions had always been grandiose, they were content to spend the money they were making on booze, women and—increasingly—cocaine. As long as no one had designs on the local bounty, why should they want to go into business with a bunch of “wiseguys”?
But Jimmy saw things differently. For one thing, he’d always admired the organizational structure of La Cosa Nostra. In the volatile world of organized crime, it was in the interest of those in power to have a strong system of accountability. Especially with his West Side Irish crew, known for their “craziness,” Coonan stood to gain if he could align himself with a more stable, businessminded class of racketeer. Coonan, after all, had always seen himself that way. Even his instincts for violence, he believed, were always part of a larger plan.
But even more than that, as Jimmy had told his underlings time and time again, he wasn’t sure just yet whether or not the Italians did have designs on the neighborhood rackets. “You never know with the guineas,” Jimmy used to say. “The bastards are always one step ahead of everybody.” It would be months before the Hell’s Kitchen Mob would know who was behind the gangland killings of Tom Devaney and Eddie Cummiskey. In the meantime, Coonan sensed a restlessness on the part of La Cosa Nostra. Now that Spillane had, for all intents and purposes, been moved aside, it was more important than ever that the Italians know that Coonan & Company were in charge.
It was in this curious spirit of ambition and paranoia that Coonan tentatively began to establish his “Italian connection.” Through the late Eddie Cummiskey, who’d once worked at a sewage treatment plant on Ward’s Island, Coonan had gotten to know Danny Grillo, a coworker of Cummiskey’s and a soldato, or soldier, in the powerful Gambino crime family. Grillo was connected with a notoriously violent crew based in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn headed by an up-and-coming capo, or crew chief, named Roy Demeo.
In the early months of 1977, Coonan began to trudge his underlings out to Ward’s Island, a sizable island in the East River that, among other things, served as a foundation for the massive steel towers of the Triborough Bridge. In a small industrial trailer on the island’s eastern flank, Coonan, Featherstone, McElroy, and Richie Ryan would meet a guy named Tony, who was a foreman at the sewage treatment plant. On most occasions, Danny Grillo and Roy Demeo were there as well.
As far as Coonan’s underlings could tell, the meetings had little to do with “serious” criminal business. Jimmy was just testing the waters. More than anything, it seemed like Coonan wanted to show off his crew in front of the powerful Roy Demeo and Danny Grillo.
“We can do business,” Jimmy once told Demeo.
Demeo nodded. “I got no prejudice against nobody,” he replied, assuring Coonan that the fact he was Irish would not get in the way.
One of the last West Siders to be dragged out to “Tony’s island,” as it eventually became known to the Irish gang, was part-time bartender Billy Beattie. It was a brisk afternoon in May of 1977. He and Coonan had arrived by car, driving past the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane, which occupied the western edge of the island in a series of connected brick buildings.
Beattie was introduced to Tony, the foreman at the sewage treatment plant, and to Danny Grillo. After thirty minutes of small talk in Tony’s trailer, Beattie and Coonan were led to another trailer nearby, where they climbed some portable wooden steps and, inside, a black guy named Louie showed them a lathe where silencers were made.
Coonan took one of Louie’s silencers, hot off the lathe, and screwed it onto a 9mm machine gun he’d brought with him. Then they all went outside, where cold gusts of wind swept off the East River and across the island. There were big piles of sand and gravel all over the place. Coonan fired the machine gun into one of the piles of sand and smiled like a little kid. Beattie was amazed. You couldn’t hear a fucking thing.
Later that afternoon, Coonan and Beattie said good-bye to Tony and Danny Grillo. They were in Billy’s car, heading south on the FDR Drive towards the Holland Tunnel, which would take them under the Hudson River to Coonan’s home in Keansburg, New Jersey.
Coonan was in a talkative mood, explaining to Beattie the importance of doing business with the people he’d just been introduced to. Grillo, he said, was a professional triggerman who got $20,000 and up for a killing. Tony was a bomb expert who knew how to build bombs that could be detonated electronically.
“Hey,” said Beattie, smiling, “that’s what we’ll call him—Tony the Bomb.”
Ever since Beattie had gone in with Coonan over a year ago, he’d been slightly nervous about where he stood. Beattie had gotten his start with Mickey Spillane, which he knew put him on shaky ground with Coonan. Then he’d dated Jimmy’s wife, Edna, before Jimmy got to her. As far as Beattie was concerned, it was never serious. But who knew what Edna had told Jimmy about him?
Finally, there was the fact he was deeply in debt to Coonan. Jimmy had more or less financed his shylock operation. Billy had never been very good at collecting what was owed him, which made him equally erratic at paying what he owed.
Whatever the reasons, Beattie felt Coonan sometimes went out of his way to make sure that he, Billy, knew who was on top. Which is exactly what Jimmy was doing as they drove south on the FDR, past the enormous glass towers of lower Manhattan.
“You know,” said Jimmy, “back there at Tony’s island, that’s where we finished off Paddy.”
Coonan knew the subject of Paddy Dugan’s death was not a pleasant one for Beattie, who’d been forced to set up his former partner. But Coonan seemed to take particular pleasure rubbing it in. He explained to Beattie, in great detail, how they took what was left of Dugan’s body out to Ward’s Island and dumped it in the river.
In the old days, said Jimmy, Cummiskey used to work at the sewage plant along with Tony the Bomb and Danny Grillo. It was Cummiskey who first learned that the currents around the island were exceptionally strong. That’s why the passageway on the east side of the island had been named Hell Gate. But Cummiskey had his own name for it. He called it “the burial grounds,” because it was where he’d been dumping the severed body parts of his murder victims for years.
As Coonan talked on and on about Paddy Dugan, the Italians, Spillane, and other subjects he’d become downright obsessive about in recent months, Beattie began to get the feeling he was building towards something. It was weird, he thought. One minute Jimmy was throwing an arm around you and letting you into his confidence—like he did with the trip to “Tony’s island”—and the next he was reminding you what happened to people who got on his bad side.
When they arrived at Coonan’s modest, wood-framed house on Forest Avenue in Keansburg, they stood outside the car. A pleasant breeze whisked through the trees that lined the street, a street very different from the ones back in Hell’s Kitchen where Jimmy and Billy had both grown up.
“Billy,” said Jimmy, reaching out to rest a hand on his right shoulder, “I need you to pick me up tomorrow morning. We got a piece of work to do.”
Okay. Alright. At least Beattie now knew exactly what was up. “A piece of work” was another of Coonan’s pet phrases. It meant somebody was going to get whacked. Beattie knew enough not to ask a lot of questions—not yet, anyway. In time, he’d probably learn more than he wanted to know.
The following morning, on May 5, 1977, Beattie picked Coonan up in front of his house in Keansburg. The first thing they did was stop at a Food Town supermarket. Jimmy sent Beattie in to buy three boxes of plastic garbage bags—the jumbo size. Then they continued on through the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan, where they stopped at a hardware store on 9th Avenue, just south of 42nd Street. They went into the hardware store and Jimmy picked out an assortment of kitchen knives—one butcher knife, an eighteen-inch steak knife with a serrated edge, and a small filet knife.
“This one,” said Coonan, holding up the filet knife. “You need this to take off tattoos, birthmarks, anything’s gonna make
it possible to identify the body.”
From the hardware store they went straight to the 596 Club at 43rd Street and 10th Avenue. Inside, Tommy Hess, dark-haired and muscular, was behind the bar. Richie Ryan, twenty-three years old, with curly brown hair and a soft Irish face, was playing pinball. After a few minutes, Danny Grillo, the professional hitman from Ward’s Island, came out of the bathroom.
Hess, Ryan, and Beattie sat at one end of the bar while Coonan and Grillo went into a huddle at the other end. Beattie could hear Grillo saying he thought it would be best if he hid in the kitchen until “the stiff” walked in the door. Then he’d come out and pull the trigger.
About thirty minutes passed before Jimmy said, “Alright, let’s get started.” He motioned for Beattie to go with him back outside to the car. As they walked into the small adjoining parking lot just north of the saloon, Jimmy told Billy they were going to the Aeon Club, Ruby Stein’s gambling parlor at 76th and Broadway.
Beattie had met Ruby Stein through Coonan a few months earlier at the Aeon Club. He was introduced to Ruby as “one of the okay guys,” which meant he would be free to gamble at the club and, if need be, borrow money through Stein or one of his many midlevel shylocks. Beattie didn’t know a lot about Stein at the time. But he later learned that Ruby was one of the biggest loansharks on the East Coast.
The thought that Coonan was going to knock off Ruby made Beattie’s mouth go dry. This was not like killing somebody from the neighborhood. Ruby Stein was big-time, as big as they get.
In the car on the way uptown, Jimmy explained his reasoning. “I got a feelin’ this fuckin’ Ruby Stein had somethin’ to do with Devaney and Cummiskey bein’ taken out—know what I’m sayin’?”
But even more pressing than the revenge motive, Jimmy admitted, was the fact he was now in debt to Stein to the tune of $70,000. Supposedly, Tommy Collins and a few other West Siders owed Stein similar amounts. So it was an opportunity to clear everyone’s slate and maybe even take over Ruby’s operation after he was gone.
Although Coonan wasn’t saying it, Beattie knew there was one other reason Ruby was a goner. One way or another, Stein’s death was going to attract a lot of attention from La Cosa Nostra. And that’s just how Jimmy wanted it. By forcing his relationship with the Italians to the next stage, this was Jimmy’s first big power play. And it was either going to get them all killed or make Coonan’s crew a definite force to be reckoned with in the underworld.
Jimmy must have worked out some arrangement ahead of time to get Ruby out of the Aeon Club, because when they arrived he was waiting for them. Beattie drove, with Coonan in the passenger seat and Ruby in the back. First they went to Delsomma’s restaurant, at 47th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue. Much to Beattie’s surprise, they dropped Ruby off there and he and Jimmy headed back to the 596 Club. Something to do with setting up an alibi. They’d only been in the bar a few minutes when Jimmy took Billy’s car keys and said, “Be ready. I’ll have him here in ten.”
Beattie stood to the right of the entrance, near a pay phone on the wall. It was his job to lock the door and pull the shades once Jimmy brought Ruby into the bar. Danny Grillo went into the kitchen. Tommy Hess was behind the bar and Richie Ryan was seated at a stool on the other side. As they waited, the tension overwhelmed whatever desire there may have been to make small talk. The only sound was an occasional squeaky bar stool.
Finally, Coonan walked in the door with Ruby Stein right behind him. Beattie immediately pulled the shades and pretended he was using the pay phone. Then he locked the door. Hess and Ryan greeted Ruby, who walked into the middle of the bar. Jimmy told him to take a seat at the counter, he’d be right back. Sensing something was not right, Ruby hesitated.
“Go ahead,” said Jimmy, smiling like a cat with a secret, “have a seat.”
Suddenly Danny Grillo burst out of the kitchen with a .32-caliber automatic aimed straight ahead. “Oh my God!” gasped a startled Ruby Stein as Grillo fired six shots, hitting him in the chest, arms, and leg. The jolt lifted Ruby an inch or two off the ground and spun him completely around. He collapsed on the floor in the middle of the bar.
It was over just that fast. Tommy Hess stepped outside to stand guard. The others gathered around to look at Ruby’s contorted body. There was a stunned silence. Then Coonan nodded towards Billy Beattie. “Go ahead,” he said solemnly, “put a bullet in him.”
Beattie wasn’t about to ask questions. He removed a .22-caliber pistol with a silencer on it from inside his coat and fired a bullet into Ruby’s face. The impact caused Ruby’s head to twitch, but the rest of his body hardly moved. Then Coonan nodded towards Richie Ryan. Beattie handed the .22 to Ryan, who also fired a shot into Ruby’s bullet-riddled corpse.
Jimmy Coonan smiled at this gesture of solidarity; they were all accomplices now. The emotions were so strong that Jimmy and Danny Grillo embraced, holding each other in a bear hug for three or four seconds as the others looked on.
Then they all went to work.
Several of the plastic bags that Beattie had bought at the supermarket that day were split down the seams and laid out flat like a sheet. As they were rolling Ruby’s body onto the plastic bags, his shoe came off and a wad of bills fell out on the floor. Coonan picked it up, looked it over quickly and tossed it onto the bar. “Whack it five ways,” he said to no one in particular. “Looks to be about a grand.”
Once Ruby was completely laid out, they grabbed the plastic by the ends and dragged his body back to the ladies’ room, where Coonan and Richie Ryan began stripping him naked. Coonan took Ruby’s little black book, with the names and phone numbers of his loanshark customers in it, and tossed it to Beattie. “Copy those numbers down,” he said. “That’s money in the bank, right there.”
When they had Ruby completely naked, Coonan took the eighteen-inch serrated knife he’d picked up at the hardware store and grabbed Ruby’s bloody head by the hair. “Come here,” he shouted to Richie Ryan as he put the knife to Stein’s neck. “I want you to feel how fuckin’ heavy this head is. Feel that?”
Up to this point, Beattie had been watching. But he couldn’t take any more. As he saw the knife begin to tear through Ruby’s flesh, he walked over to the bar and poured himself a drink. He knew the reasoning behind all this—no corpus delicti, no investigation—but it still made him nauseous.
“Don’t have the stomach for it, huh?” asked Grillo, who’d also walked over to the bar.
“No,” replied Billy. “It’s not my bag.”
“Yeah, me neither. I’m a shooter. I’ll shoot anybody any fuckin’ time. But I ain’t into cuttin’ ’em up.”
As Beattie and Grillo waited, Coonan showed Ryan, the aspiring young tough guy, the finer points of human butchery. Occasionally, he could be heard offering a word of professional advice: “This here, the elbow, this is the toughest part.”
Finally, after about an hour, they were finished. The various body parts had been stuffed into six or seven bags. Whatever was left over in the way of excess flesh or gristle was flushed down the toilet. The walls were wiped clean, the floors mopped.
After that, Nick “the Greek” Kagabines pulled his powder-blue Chevy Caprice up in front of the bar. They all helped load the bags into the trunk. From there, Kaga-bines was to go to “the burial grounds” on Ward’s Island and dump what was left of one of the most notorious loan-sharks in the history of New York into the East River.
Presumably, the bags would then follow the strong southerly flow of the river’s currents, bobbing past the towering skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, past Governor’s Island, past the Statue of Liberty, until the remains reached their final resting place amongst the bass, barracuda, crabs, and other creatures of the deep.
A few days after the murder, Mickey Featherstone was walking north on 10th Avenue when Coonan pulled over in his big black Buick and honked. When Jimmy got out of the car, Mickey could see right away he was steamed.
“Hey,” said Featherstone, “what’s goin’
on?”
“It’s fuckin’ Ruby. They found part of Ruby.”
Featherstone had heard all about Ruby getting whacked and cut up. He wasn’t surprised. In fact, at one time he and Jackie Coonan were supposed to kill Ruby Stein. They didn’t want to do it, but Jimmy had insisted. So they hung around Ruby’s club a few times to make it look like they were trying to find him.
Mickey had always liked Ruby. When Ruby had heard that his wife Sissy was going to have a baby, he told Mickey he was going to buy them a case of Dom Perignon. That was the last time Mickey talked to Ruby. When he heard he’d been whacked in the 596 Club it made him kind of sad.
Now, here was Jimmy Coonan screaming about how Ruby’s bloated torso had washed ashore at Rockaway Beach in Queens. Although there was no head, arms, legs, or genitals, the medical examiner was able to identify it as Ruby’s by a scar on his chest from a recent heart operation.
“I fucked up,” said Jimmy. “Man, did I fuck up.”
“Yeah?”
“See, you gotta open ’em up. I was told this, but I didn’t do it.”
“I don’t get it.”
“The stomach, the lungs, they inflate. If you don’t cut ’em open the torso floats, which is what happened with Ruby.”
There was sure to be an investigation now, said Coonan. Since he was one of the last people seen with Ruby before he disappeared, he’d already had a detective come out to his house in Jersey. Now they would be snooping around Hell’s Kitchen asking a lot of questions.
“We got nothin’ to worry about, right?” asked Jimmy.
“Of course not,” Mickey answered, backing him up.
Later, when Featherstone thought about it, he got annoyed. He hadn’t even wanted Ruby to get whacked, and now he had to be concerned along with everybody else. Not only were the Italians going to be looking into this Ruby Stein thing, but now there were going to be “bulls,” or police, all over the neighborhood.
American Gangsters Page 38
