“Get rid of the shells.” Mickey said, turning to McElroy. “There should be three of ’em.”
After McElroy got up, Coonan walked over to a sink between the counter and the door to the kitchen. He coughed and gagged for a few seconds, then threw up violently. Mickey was surprised. Many times in recent years he himself had vomited at the sight of murder and dismemberment, but this was the first time—and would be the only time—he saw Jimmy Coonan do it. Mickey didn’t know whether to laugh, be disturbed, or what. He watched in utter fascination for a few seconds until he was jarred back to reality by McElroy’s return.
“You get ’em?” Mickey asked.
“Yeah,” answered Jimmy Mac, the red painter’s cap pulled low on his forehead.
“Where are they?”
“Flushed ’em down the toilet.”
“All three?”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry.”
They finished their drinks and got ready to leave. As the entire group made for the door, Huggard began to pat himself down. “Hey, my card! I had a greeting card from my girl. In an envelope. Where the fuck is it?” He looked around for a few minutes but couldn’t find it anywhere.
“Bobby, forget it,” Comas finally said. “You probably left the bastard somewhere and it got thrown out.”
It was late and the streets outside were nearly deserted. For a moment, the entire group stood awkwardly on the sidewalk in front of the Plaka Bar. Then, without anyone saying good-bye, the Clinton prison alumni went their way and the Hell’s Kitchen Irishmen went theirs.
In the van on the way back down to the neighborhood, Coonan, Featherstone, and McElroy began to wonder aloud about the trustworthiness of their uptown buddies. The shock of the killing had receded, and another instinct had kicked into gear—survival. Nobody liked the idea of having so many witnesses to the killing. It was going to make it awfully difficult to get a cohesive alibi together.
When they reached Mickey’s apartment building on West 56th Street, they went upstairs and entered quietly, so as not to wake his wife and child. As the early morning dawn cast a somber light through the apartment windows, they stood in the kitchen discussing their options.
“I don’t think we gotta worry about Comas and Huggard,” Coonan was saying. “We’re dealing with professionals there. Real stand-up.”
“Yeah,” said Mickey, “but what about Crowell?”
Nobody really knew much about John Crowell. As they parted, sallow and exhausted after another long night, that was the question that dogged them the most. How could they be certain they weren’t going to have problems with Crowell?
Later that same day, the body of Harold Whitehead was found in the basement of the Opera Hotel by a janitor. When detectives from the NYPD’s 4th Homicide Zone arrived, they found Whitehead pretty much as he had been left the night before. Only now there was a white envelope resting next to the body. On the envelope, in clear handwritten letters, was the name “Bobby.”
Inside was a greeting card with a picture of a woman looking out at the ocean and a glorious golden sunset. “I’ve been thinking of you all day,” it read on the front.
On a piece of paper accompanying the card was a handwritten message that read:
“Hello my love. It’s me. There are so many thoughts going on inside of me I had to try and express a few.…
“Honey, I can’t say in words how happy you and the relationship we have has made me feel. Dear God it feels Good! Every way. Mentally, Physically and Spiritually.
“You know, it’s funny. I spent a year and 3 mos. with a man because of what I Believed the relationship could be. Not what it was—And you and I have it automatically!
“Babe, I’m a fool in a lot of ways—but I’m not going to give up filet mignon for hamburger!!
“Honey, I’m really starting to feel Close to you and it feels Good and right. I can only hope you feel the same.”
It was signed, “Hey Babe, I love you, Elena.”
After the area had been secured, detectives from the Crime Scene Unit traced the smeared blood and scuff marks leading from the body back through the basement to the men’s room. They found more traces of blood, both on the floor and on the doorjamb. Detective William Nasoff got down on his knees and checked behind the toilet bowls. Behind the one closest to the door he found the brass casing from a .25-caliber bullet. Later, the bullet itself would be found in one of the sinks against an adjacent wall.
Nasoff shook his head in amazement. Some murder scenes revealed nothing, not a single shred of evidence. But on this one, in less than thirty minutes, they had already secured two potentially devastating pieces of evidence. In his more than eighteen years as a member of the Crime Scene Unit, he had learned this usually meant one of two things: It was either an incredibly sloppy murder, or the evidence had been deliberately planted.
Judging from the way the body had been haphazardly left behind, with the bullet and casing carelessly left in the men’s room, it certainly had elements of the former. But there was also the greeting card left oh-so-conveniently next to the body. The detective figured that had to be a plant.
Nobody, he thought, could be that stupid.
In Hell’s Kitchen, news of Harold Whitehead’s murder wafted through the saloons along 9th and 10th Avenue like a malodorous breeze. Unlike the murders of Paddy Dugan, Ruby Stein, and Rickey Tassiello—murders that had been undertaken with a specific purpose in mind—the Whitehead killing was spontaneous and inexplicable. It was a murder unlike anything Coonan had done in recent years—totally impulsive, with a reckless disregard for everyone involved. The killing was especially terrifying to those closest to Coonan. If he was willing to stiff someone for as trivial an offense as Whitey Whitehead’s, just imagine what he would do to those who owed him, as most of his underlings did.
Inevitably, many of them blamed it on the Italians. Since the meeting at Tommaso’s, Jimmy seemed to believe that he could kill with virtual impunity. Here, finally, was the proof: He had blown a guy away for calling his brother a “rat” or a “fag” or some fucking thing.
Billy Beattie, especially, did not take the news of the Whitehead murder well. Formerly a part-time bartender at the 596 Club and Edna’s ex, Beattie had been on thin ice with Coonan ever since they first met ten years ago. Nothing he did, including helping Jimmy murder Paddy Dugan and Ruby Stein, seemed to make him any more secure. To make matters worse, he’d also run up huge debts with Coonan. Just a few months earlier he’d gotten Jimmy to front him $5,000 for a dope deal he wanted to make with a supplier in Florida. The deal had gone down but had yielded little or no return. On top of that was the money Beattie had been borrowing from Coonan to finance his shylock operation. All told, he must have owed Coonan at least $100,000.
But the money was only part of it. There was another reason Beattie knew he was in trouble with Jimmy, and the Whitehead murder reminded him of it.
Weeks earlier, Jimmy had ordered Beattie to whack Tommy Collins. Collins, then in his late forties, was not an easy guy to kill. It had been nearly thirteen years since Collins, along with Mickey Spillane and others, had ducked into a doorway on West 46th Street as young Jimmy Coonan sprayed them with machine-gun fire. In the intervening years, Collins continued to live on the fringe of organized crime without ever doing violence to anyone. Most West Side gangsters, including Beattie, thought of Tommy as an uncle; he was universally well liked.
Unfortunately for Tommy, he had a drinking problem that often got him into trouble. He’d developed the habit in the early Seventies, after one of his seven children was killed in a freak fireworks accident on the 4th of July. The tragedy took its toll. Within months, Tommy put on forty or fifty pounds and his hair turned completely white. Every year thereafter, around July 4th, he’d go on a drinking binge, piling up gambling debts and letting his business commitments slide. As the years passed, the drinking binges became more and more frequent.
In early November ’78, Coonan told Billy Beattie he was ti
red of Collins’s always being behind on his shylock payments, and he wanted to use him as an example. The order was simple: Kill Tommy Collins and make his body do the Houdini. No payment was mentioned for Beattie. The way Billy understood it, Jimmy just considered it to be the price of their friendship.
It put Billy in a tight spot, to say the least. Not only did he like Tommy Collins, but Tommy owed him something like $25,000. If he killed Collins, how the hell was he going to get his money? And if he didn’t get his money, how the hell was he going to settle his debt with Coonan?
Beattie had no choice but to go through the motions. He got a .32 automatic with a silencer from Jimmy’s twenty-four-year-old brother, Eddie, a little squirt who was trying to follow in his older brother’s footsteps, but who nobody liked very much. Then Beattie drove around Collins’s apartment building a few times, not knowing what the hell he would do if he actually ran into him. But he never saw Tommy Collins. After a week or so he gave the gun back to Little Eddie Coonan and told him to tell his brother he’d been unable to pull it off.
Billy knew he was in deep shit after that. He’d been trying to run two businesses at one time—the drugs and the shylocking—both of which were losing big-time bucks. To make matters worse, in recent months he’d become a regular cocaine cowboy, shooting into his own veins what he was supposed to be pushing on the street. Then he’d backed out on this killing Jimmy had assigned him.
He’d been having Jimmy Coonan nightmares. Then came the Whitehead murder. When he first heard about it from Mickey Featherstone, he had to laugh. It was so fucking crazy. He was reminded of something Jimmy had told him around the time of the Rickey Tassiello murder. Beattie asked Jimmy why he had to kill Tassiello over such a small amount of money.
“It’s to prove a point,” Jimmy had said. “Where we’re headed, it’s good business.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“See, the people we’re dealin’ with now, the more bodies we got the better we look. That’s what they’re into.”
The more bodies the better. This was becoming Jimmy Coonan’s professional credo. And after the Whitehead thing, Billy Beattie had this queasy feeling he might just be next on the hit parade.
Well, he thought, I ain’t going to wait for a friggin’ invitation. I ain’t that dumb.
“What about the money you’re owed?” one of Beattie’s shylock customers asked when Billy told him he was going to take a permanent vacation.
“Hey,” said Beattie, “just tell everybody Billy Beattie’s givin’ ’em a free ticket.”
Then Beattie headed for the mountains, intending never to return to Hell’s Kitchen.
11
THE FEDS AND LITTLE AL CAPONE
In the wake of the Whitehead homicide, the Intelligence cops began their most concerted initiative yet. Ironically, it had nothing to do with the events surrounding Whitehead’s November 22, 1978, demise in the basement of the Opera Hotel. By early December, detectives from the 4th Homicide Zone were still investigating the murder, running evidence through ballistics and trying to track down the “Bobby” whose love letter had been left next to Whitehead’s corpse. As of yet, nobody had connected anything to Coonan or Featherstone.
But even as Homicide continued pursuing the Whitehead matter, the Intelligence Division was following up on a totally unrelated lead of their own—one that would eventually overtake the Whitehead investigation, incorporating it in a barrage of criminal charges designed to get the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob off the streets once and for all.
Intell’s latest line of investigation had actually begun roughly six weeks before Whitehead’s death, in September ’78, when Greg Derkasch, a Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service’s New York Field Office, called Sergeant Tom McCabe. “Hey,” said Derkasch, “we’re holding a guy here named Coonan, James Coonan. Possibly a counterfeit rap, definitely gun possession. We know all about him, but we’re trying to track down a possible partner of his. All we got is a first name, Mickey. Know anything about it?”
“Oh, man,” replied McCabe, “are you kiddin’?”
After McCabe gave Derkasch an extensive rundown on Featherstone, the Secret Service agent let out a loud, sustained whistle. “Wow. That’s some file you got.”
“Yeah,” said McCabe. “We been hopin’ to nail these guys for months. So what’s this about Coonan?”
Derkasch told McCabe that a few days earlier, on the morning of September 14th, he’d gotten a call from the manager of Bowery Savings Bank on Lexington Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The manager was holding a woman who had just tried to deposit what looked to be two counterfeit $100 federal reserve notes. Derkasch went to the bank immediately and examined the bills. They were counterfeit alright, and not particularly good ones at that. He recognized them as part of a series that had recently started circulating in the New York metropolitan area.
The woman who’d tried to deposit the notes identified herself as Joanne DePalma. She’d gotten them that night at her place of business, the Spartacus Spa #1, an upscale massage parlor located at 146 East 55th Street. Ms. DePalma, it seemed, was a high-class hooker, and she’d received the bills for services rendered.
Derkasch escorted DePalma back to Spartacus, where he was introduced to the night manager and another working girl named Felicia “Monique” Ledesma. It was around 6 that morning, Derkasch was told, that two guys, one named Jimmy and the other Mickey, entered the club and had a few drinks. Then they had “sessions” with Joanne DePalma and Monique. DePalma remembered that the guy she was with had a tattoo on his right arm with the name “Mickey” written underneath it. Mickey and Jimmy gave the girls a $100 bill apiece and paid the club’s fee with a third C-note.
The night manager recalled that the two guys left Spartacus around 9 that morning. A few minutes later they came back to the club cursing under their breath. Apparently their Cadillac was missing from in front of the building. When the guy who called himself Jimmy mentioned where they had parked it, the manager said it had probably been towed away by the city.
Derkasch made a quick phone call and found out that a brown Cadillac Coupe Deville, New Jersey license number 377 JLB, had indeed been towed that morning from East 55th Street. Another quick call and he’d identified the car as being registered to a James M. Coonan.
Derkasch hauled ass over to the city’s impound lot, a huge warehouse straddling the Hudson River at West 37th Street. He was barely there long enough to locate Coonan’s car when he was informed by a cop on the premises that two people had just arrived looking for the car. It turned out to be Tony Lucich and Tommy Collins, two names which meant nothing to Derkasch at the time. He identified himself as a Secret Service agent and asked which one was the owner of the car.
“What car?” they both replied.
They were brought into the impound lot’s main office and searched. At first, Derkasch was surprised to find that neither was in possession of any Cadillac keys. But then he spotted a shiny object on the floor between Tony Lucich’s legs.
“Gee,” said Derkasch, picking up the keys, “what have we here?”
Derkasch was half-expecting to find a trunkload full of counterfeit currency, so he was somewhat disappointed when he opened the Cadillac’s trunk and found nothing but a cardboard box full of baby’s clothing. Then he dug down into the box. At the bottom, wrapped in a diaper, was a fully loaded .32-caliber Colt Special with silencer attached. Also in the box was a police-issue bulletproof vest.
As arrangements were being made to have the car taken to the Secret Service offices downtown, a cop approached from the front desk. “Excuse me, Agent Derkasch, but we got two more guys out here askin’ about that Caddy.”
Derkasch smiled. At age thirty-seven, after ten and a half years with the Secret Service, he’d been up against his share of dead ends. A skeptic by nature, he knew that a smart counterfeiter was almost impossible to catch. There were so many ways to cover your tracks. But these guys had passed bad bills in a cathou
se and gotten their car towed with an unregistered gun in the trunk. Now they were walking into the middle of a nest of Secret Service agents? Derkasch loved crooks like this. They tended to make his job a lot easier.
At the front desk, Jimmy Coonan and a friend of his named Bosco Radonjich stood nervously near a water cooler. After flashing his ID, Derkasch confronted the two of them with the fact that a loaded automatic had been found in the trunk of Jimmy’s Caddy.
“Ain’t mine, sir,” said Coonan politely. “I didn’t even have my car last night. Friend of mine did.”
“What’s the friend’s name?”
“Lucich,” volunteered Bosco Radonjich. “Tony Lucich.”
“Uh-huh,” said Derkasch, looking at Coonan. “So can you account for your whereabouts last night and early this morning—say around six A.M.?”
“Well … for that I think you’ll need to talk to my lawyer.”
Both Coonan and Radonjich were loaded into a Secret Service car and taken downtown. The agent who drove Radonjich’s car after them found yet another pistol—a .25-caliber Astra—resting handily in a utility tray between the front seats.
Gun possession charges were filed against Coonan and Radonjich; both were out on bail within hours.
After talking to Tom McCabe, Derkasch called the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, where he spoke with Assistant U.S. Attorney Ira Block. Derkasch told Block what they had so far regarding the counterfeit bills.
“Sounds promising,” Block said. “But you need more before we can even think about empaneling a federal grand jury.”
That was exactly what Derkasch had been hoping to hear. It didn’t make sense to bust two guys for possession of a few counterfeit notes. Since they’d confiscated other bills in recent months that looked to be from the same batch, chances were good that the source was somewhere in the New York area. If they were to set up an investigation, and were allowed to take the time to do it right, they had a shot at unearthing the entire network—a much more impressive bust than what they had at the moment.
American Gangsters Page 45
