It was ambitious, of course, and maybe not even feasible. If they hoped to trace these bills backward through perhaps dozens of intermediaries to the source, they’d probably have to go undercover. And to go undercover, they’d need a point of entry, always the most difficult part of any operation. At the moment, they knew very little about Coonan, Featherstone, or the circles in which they traveled. What they needed was a knowledgeable source to familiarize them with their subject on short notice.
Enter the NYPD’s Intelligence Division.
For McCabe, Egan, and the other cops with Intell’s Syndicated Crime Unit, the prospect of working with the Secret Service was a dream come true. Unlike, say, the FBI, who preferred to control their investigations from top to bottom, the Secret Service liked to work in tandem with local law enforcement. Partly, it was because their criminal focus was much more limited than the FBI, making them more dependent on regional intelligence sources. But also, agents with the Secret Service and their sister agency, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, seemed to be under a lot less pressure from higher-ups in the Treasury Department than their fellow agents at Justice.
Like the Intelligence Division, the Secret Service was willing to allow an investigation to evolve slowly. They knew from experience that a counterfeit conspiracy had many tentacles, and if they moved too quickly in one area they might blow their chance to trace the notes to their source.
Unlike the Intelligence Division, however, the Secret Service had a sizable budget. This meant that not only were they willing to assign the necessary manpower, but they also provided the necessary tools—like technologically advanced surveillance equipment, the latest weaponry, and plenty of cash for those costly counterfeit buys. Also, with a federal agency like the Secret Service it was a hell of a lot easier to secure the proper court authorization for phone taps and other eavesdropping strategies.
Once the feds had committed themselves to a full-scale undercover operation, it hadn’t taken the boys from Intell long to come up with a point of entry. It was Frank Hunt, the same cop who’d given Intell their first confidential informant back in late 1977, who got the ball rolling. A rotund and gregarious guy known as Fat Frankie on the streets, Hunt had a “mole” in the neighborhood who was willing to introduce an undercover agent to nineteen-year-old Raymond Steen, Alberta Sachs’s boyfriend and Mickey Featherstone’s next-door neighbor. The word on the street was that Steen had been pushing counterfeit $100 notes up and down 10th Avenue.
What the cops didn’t know yet was that the counterfeit operation was basically something Mickey Featherstone had cooked up all on his own. Along with Billy Comas, the West Side Mob’s uptown contact, Mickey had been looking to establish some independent financing. Nothing elaborate, he had told Comas, just something where he might be able to make a quick killing. After all, by 1978 Mickey had expenses; he was a married man now with a recently born son and an increasingly expensive cocaine habit.
Comas, who was of part-Greek extraction, told him about a counterfeit ring he knew of run by a handful of Greek-Americans from New Jersey. It all sounded good to Mickey, who agreed to purchase some notes from Comas.
To peddle the counterfeit bills, Featherstone turned to Steen, a virtually illiterate young hood who had given himself the pathetically inappropriate nickname “Little Al Capone.” Mickey knew Steen was inexperienced and a potential fuck-up, but he figured, what could go wrong? As with most of the neighborhood gangsters who’d risen to prominence in recent years, Mickey had begun to think he was invulnerable. After all the unsolved homicides in Hell’s Kitchen, it was hard to take the NYPD seriously.
What Mickey didn’t really stop to consider was that a counterfeit operation, which came under the jurisdiction of the feds, would up the ante considerably.
“How long’s he been in there?” asked Richie Egan, seated at the window of an empty classroom at John Jay College, across the street from the Westway Candy Store at 827 10th Avenue. It was a clear winter day just before Christmas, 1978. Egan’s binoculars were focused on a black van parked just south of the candy store on the far side of West 55th Street.
“I’d say about an hour,” replied Secret Agent Donald L’Huillier. “Hasn’t stopped talking either.”
L’Huillier was wearing headphones that were connected to a small receiver. The voices he was listening to came from a Motorola Motrec transmitter with four microphones, each planted in a different spot inside the black van. As they came over the receiver, the voices were being recorded on a large reel-to-reel tape recorder.
“Here,” said L’Huillier, handing the headphones to Egan. “Have a listen.”
Egan clamped the headphones on and heard the squeaky, rapid-fire voice of Raymond Steen.
“These guys are no bullshit,” Steen was saying. “I mean, it maybe don’t look like it, but these guys are big, man, you know? They don’t fuck around.…”
Then Egan heard the familiar voice of Ron Malfi, the undercover agent. “I never heard of Coonan, I never heard of Featherstone.”
“Well, these guys are it, man. I mean, they’re big; they run this neighborhood.… If you know anybody in Brooklyn that’s with the Godfather. I mean, these guys, they sit at a fuckin’ table from here to that cab and Coonan and Featherstone are right next to the main man. He pushes his whole army down for these two fuckin’ guys, you know what I’m sayin’? They’re big. They call ’em ‘the Irish kids’ in Brooklyn, you know? I mean, maybe you come from a different part of Brooklyn.…”
Egan smiled and handed the headphones back to L’Huillier. “Yes, sir,” he proclaimed. “That’s our Raymond.”
In the beginning, the investigators hadn’t been sure whether Ray Steen was close enough to the action to provide the information they needed. He was a talker, all right, no problem there. But much of what he had to say seemed either intentionally misleading or outright ridiculous. Sure, he’d led them to the counterfeit notes and that had gotten things off to a great start. But as to his sources, Steen was giving them a lot of conflicting info. One day he would say the bills were being manufactured on a farm in upstate New York, the next he’d say they were coming from down South.
Yet, as they got to know Steen, he began to divulge more and more until they came to realize he was, in fact, the ideal source—a baby-faced tough guy eager to prove how “connected” he was to just about anyone who would listen.
Just weeks before, in early December 1978, Steen had been introduced to undercover agent Ron Malfi. A young kid not much older than Steen, Malfi was able to give the appearance of being a streetwise operator with Mafia contacts in Brooklyn. Yet he was also young enough to convincingly feign ignorance when it came to the West Side Mob, which helped get Steen talking.
The first buy had been on December 11th. Steen sold Malfi three counterfeit $100 notes as samples of the type of bills that were available. Malfi told Steen he was interested in purchasing $2,000 worth of counterfeit as long as the cost was below 50 points, or 50 percent of face value. They agreed on a price of around 30 to 35 percent and made arrangements to speak later. Steen gave Malfi two phone numbers—his home number and the number of the Westway Candy Store. Malfi gave Steen a number he said was for a social club in Brooklyn; actually, it was a Secret Service undercover line.
Intell kept a close watch on the neighborhood and over the next few weeks Steen and Malfi made four more transactions, the largest being a sale of two hundred $100 notes on January 9th. They eventually agreed to lower the price to 27 points—or $27 for each $100 note—which Steen, lying through his teeth, told Malfi was about half what he was charging other people in the neighborhood.
In the same deal, Steen sold Malfi stolen American Express traveler’s checks, and told him if he wanted to buy cocaine he could handle that too.
There always seemed to be long delays between buys. Steen claimed that Coonan and Featherstone, who he described as “his people,” were worried about dealing with complete strangers. Malfi was constantly trying to get St
een to introduce him to his people so he could “put them at ease.” But Steen wasn’t going for it.
“That can’t work,” he said. “I already found that out. These guys don’t want to talk with nobody.”
“What’s Featherstone’s big problem?” asked Malfi. “How come he won’t meet with us?”
“Look, there’s too much trouble with that. A lot of things been happening. It’s so hot, if these guys even knew I used their names I’d get my head chopped off.”
As backup on the undercover operation, there were always at least a half-dozen cops and agents down on the street and up in the observation post, linked by walkietalkie. Everyone was armed and ready to move if Malfi seemed to be in danger.
The closest call came on the afternoon of January 15, 1979, nearly two months after the Whitehead murder. Malfi and another undercover agent, John Libonati, were scheduled to purchase $6,900 worth of counterfeit. Arrangements had already been made to meet in front of the Westway Candy Store at 4 P.M. When Malfi pulled up, Steen came out and hopped in the back of the van. Agent Libonati was introduced to Steen as Malfi’s cousin “John.”
They drove around the corner and parked the van on West 55th Street between 10th and 11th Avenue. Steen handed Malfi a white envelope secured with two rubber bands containing the $6,900 in counterfeit bills. As previously agreed, Malfi gave Steen $400 in partial payment, with the understanding that the remaining $1,463 would be paid within the next two days.
Steen was on some kind of wild cocaine high that afternoon, talking a blue streak about some good acid he had for sale. He sold a lot of acid in Hell’s Kitchen, he said, ten to fifteen tabs to a customer at a price between $3 and $4 per tab. He also sold guns. To illustrate this, he produced a .25-caliber Beretta. He said he liked to purchase as many guns as he could because they were so easy to sell around the neighborhood. “I mean, four or five or ten ain’t nothin’,” he said, waving the Beretta around. “They go in one day.” He added that Donald Mallay, the owner of the Westway Candy Store, was an expert gunsmith. “He’s got a lathe right there in the back of the store where he makes silencers. And you wouldn’t believe them fuckin’ silencers. I got two or three of ’em in my apartment right now.”
Malfi asked if they could take a look at the silencers. Steen was reluctant at first, but they finally got him to agree. They drove around the block to the entrance of his apartment building at 520 West 56th Street.
The other cops and Secret Service agents were worried. Malfi and Libonati’s van was wired, but the undercover agents were not. Once they walked into the apartment building, they would no longer be within the realm of surveillance. Derkash, who was in an undercover vehicle monitoring the van, radioed to Richie Egan and the Intelligence cops to be on alert.
Steen, Malfi, and Libonati got off the elevator on the fifteenth floor. “Wait here,” said Steen, pointing towards a stairwell. “And stay outta sight. My man Featherstone lives right there, 15-B. If he knew I was showin’ you these silencers … forget about it.”
Steen entered apartment 15-C. Within minutes he returned, a cockeyed grin on his face and a .22-caliber Hi-Standard automatic with a silencer already screwed on. They all went up one flight to the roof, where Steen stood silhouetted against the late afternoon sky and popped off two shots, shoulder-level.
“Wow,” said Malfi and Libonati. “Incredible. Can’t hear a fuckin’ thing.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Steen, barely able to contain his glee. “Twenty-two automatic. Best fuckin’ gun for whackin’ people, know what I’m sayin?” A short time later, the two undercovers and Steen came back out of the building smiling, and the cops on the street relaxed.
In the weeks following the meeting on the roof, Steen continued to provide juicy morsels of information on the inner workings of West Side crime, most of it captured on what would come to be known as “the van tapes.” The cops and agents weren’t sure yet how much of it was reliable. But as an insight into the mind of an aspiring young gangster from Hell’s Kitchen, it was a fascinating study. Steen’s views, which ranged from comical to delusionary to casually brutal, often left them shaking their heads in amazement.
Here, for example, was Steen on why the West Side Mob cut up their murder victims: “Take for instance, somebody came over and shot your sister, right? That guy, you can’t go over and kill him ’cause they gonna have a feeling it’s you or somebody in your family. So you do a disappearing act [on him]. Nobody knows where he is or what he’s doing, you know? Nobody knows. Nobody.”
Steen on Jimmy Coonan: “The President, he owns everything, he fucking runs everything. All your theatrical unions? Coonan. The metal lathers and the constructions … I mean, this guy walks into the biggest unions in the world and says to the other guy, ‘I’m taking over now.’ You know? That’s the type of person he is.… He tells those other fucking people ‘no’ and there ain’t nobody in their right mind that’s gonna stand up to him.”
Steen on his own exploits: “Well, I shot him in the chest with a shotgun, sawed-off. No, I couldn’t cut him up. This guy was fucking seven foot tall … Fucking hit missed him. I’m lucky the shotgun killed him. I shot him right in the chest, man. He died.”
After weeks of listening to Steen over the transmitter, the investigators developed a backhanded affection for the pudgy young gangster. They usually referred to him as Ray or Raymond, never by his last name. There was something almost endearing about Steen’s pathetic desire to prove what a tough guy he was.
“Okay,” Ray would constantly lament, “I’m a young guy. That’s what they look at me as, a kid. Well fuck that kid shit. I do anything in the notebook.”
Yes, he was a two-bit punk and possibly a killer. The cops knew this. But he was their two-bit punk, their most valuable link yet with the West Side crime scene. For the time being, that made him as important as Coonan himself.
One afternoon late in January ’79, Mickey Featherstone met with Ray Steen at Amy’s Pub on 9th Avenue. Amy’s had been a favorite of Mickey’s ever since he first met Sissy there years earlier, and lately he’d been conducting a lot of business at a table in the back of the bar.
“That guy you’re dealin’ with?” he said to Steen, sipping on a Seven & Seven and smoking a Kool.
“Yeah?”
“It’s the Man.”
“No way.”
“Yes. It’s gotta be.”
Mickey explained to Steen how he had Jimmy McElroy run a check on the van’s license plates. McElroy had a friend who was a cop, he said, and his friend had discovered that the plates were registered to a stolen Dodge Dart.
“There ain’t nobody with any sense that’s gonna drive around armed with stolen plates and counterfeit money in the car. Nobody ’cept the law. Plus, who the fuck would pay twenty-seven points on the shit? I mean, these guys is supposed to be wiseguys, right?”
Steen looked dumbfounded. “Mickey, no way. I been dealin’ with this motherfucker. He’s cool.”
“I’m tellin’ you Ray, it’s the Man.”
It wasn’t even dinnertime yet and already Featherstone had a good buzz going. Ever since Coonan blew away Whitehead in the basement of the Opera Hotel, Mickey had been getting coked up on a daily basis. It wasn’t that the murder bothered him so much. He could handle that, just like he’d handled the Ugly Walter and Rickey Tassiello murders. What bothered him was that before that night he’d been priming himself to confront Coonan, to tell him how everyone felt he was selling out to the Italians. But then the murder went down and everything got tense. Once again, it was time to show loyalty, to keep your mouth shut and go along with the program.
But Mickey was getting tired of it all. He’d started this counterfeit business even though Jimmy and Roy Demeo were against it. It was a federal charge, they warned him. It just wasn’t worth the risk.
But Mickey didn’t give a fuck about that either. In fact, he was beginning to think prison might not be such a bad idea. There’d been something in Jimmy’s eyes th
e night of the Whitehead murder, something that made Mickey realize there would never be a way out of all this. Except maybe prison.
With the wizard, Larry Hochheiser, as his attorney, Mickey figured he’d get the best deal possible on a counterfeit rap. Two, maybe three years max. He could handle three years. Then he’d be able to take Sissy and Mickey, Jr., and get the fuck out, with no strings attached.
Lately these thoughts had festered inside Mickey’s head whenever he got juiced, and it was causing him problems. His resentment towards Jimmy was always followed by intense feelings of guilt. Loyalty, he knew, was what the West Side Mob was supposed to be all about. That’s what Jimmy always told him. Loyalty had kept them strong through the generations.
But loyalty was a two-way street, thought Mickey, and Jimmy had violated their loyalty by trying to act like he was an Italian. The emotions this caused in Mickey made him confused. The confusion translated into self-loathing, and sometimes that translated into self-destructiveness.
But just because he was feeling self-destructive didn’t mean he was going to be an idiot. With the profits from the counterfeit sales, he would cover his ass. Of the $27 per $100 note they were getting from Malfi, $7 went to Steen, $10 went to Mickey, and $10 went to Mickey’s private “lawyers fund.”
Featherstone knew a guy had to take precautions when dealing with someone like Ray Steen. Steen liked to brag that he’d killed people, but Mickey knew that was bullshit. In fact, Ray was a notorious bullshitter, one of a half-dozen or so teenage toughs in the neighborhood who worshiped Mickey Featherstone. Ever since Mickey returned from prison in ’75, they’d treated him like some kind of hero. Sometimes this hero worship made them stupid.
Mickey had realized this years ago. Not long after he got out of prison, he’d fallen into a deep depression. Sometimes back in those days when he was high enough he would pull out his revolver and start playing Russian roulette. Once, he’d done it in front of Steen, who was sixteen at the time. To prove what a tough guy he was, Steen had picked up the revolver, put it to his own head, and pulled the trigger.
American Gangsters Page 46
