American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  “Hi all,” he began, in a letter dated July 28, 1982. Mickey had just come from a parole hearing, and he wanted to let Hochheiser and Aronson know how well it went. “I’m really shocked,” he wrote. “I can’t really believe the way things are starting to turn out for me!” After promising his lawyers that he was determined to stay out of trouble from now on, he thanked them for all they’d done to help him. “I don’t know how I could ever pay you back in the way of money, but if there were a way I would. But you didn’t save me for money reasons, but for a very rare kind of love for which I’ll always love and remember you.”

  It was signed, “I love you all, Mickey.”

  On July 26, 1983, after serving just over four years of his six-year sentence, Mickey Featherstone was paroled and released to a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey. He spent a few weeks there before being reunited with his wife and family, which now included their ten-year-old niece, Esther, who had moved in with Sissy following the suicide death of Sissy’s sister.

  Shaken by her sister’s sudden death—the sixth of Sissy’s eleven brothers and sisters to die from either an overdose, murder, or suicide—she and the two kids had moved out of the neighborhood and into a small apartment in New Milford, New Jersey. Sissy had a steady income from her job at the Intrepid and other assorted financial dribs and drabs: $100 a week from white-haired Tommy Collins, who owed Mickey $5,000 from a shylock loan; $1,000 every now and then from Mugsy Ritter’s coke business; and $150 a week from the neighborhood bookmaking operation, which she received from Edna.

  The pittance from Edna was a source of bitterness that had festered inside Sissy since the day Mickey was arrested in early 1979. While she was constantly hustling around to make ends meet, Edna was raking in thousands every week just by making Jimmy’s old rounds. Initially, she had even accompanied Edna on her shylock runs just to make sure she and Mickey got their cut. In the months during and after the Whitehead trial, she and Edna would come back from Rikers Island after visiting their husbands, and spend the afternoon trying to hunt down the likes of Tommy Collins, Tony Lucich, and dozens of others.

  “It’s funny,” Edna would say, munching on a hot dog while driving the Coonans’ big Caddy. “When your husband goes away, nobody wants to pay. They always seem to disappear on you. Well, when Jimmy gets back, he’ll take care of ’em.”

  Eventually, Sissy got fed up with the whole thing. She grew tired of watching Edna stuff her face and brag about all the possessions they had in their New Jersey “mansion.” Sissy finally cut her ties with Edna and, after moving to New Milford, with just about everybody else in the old neighborhood as well. She knew that Mickey was getting screwed out of money just because he was away in prison. She knew that people were using his name in their various criminal dealings and not paying him for it. But she tried not to let it bother her. She had been trying to get Mickey to cut his ties with Coonan and his people for a long time anyway. So maybe this was all for the better.

  When Mickey got back in August of ’83, they talked about it. He was upset that his wife had not been taken care of. In Hell’s Kitchen, it had always been understood that if one of the neighborhood people wound up in prison, the other gang members were supposed to look out for his family. It was a tradition that had existed since the earliest days of West Side gangsterism. It annoyed Mickey that Coonan and the others had not lived up to their end of the bargain. But, like Sissy, he was not going to let it bother him. Still basking in his new “positive attitude,” which he had acquired in the prison therapy sessions, he was determined to try and make it on his own, away from Hell’s Kitchen, away from the Westies.

  Mickey’s first big test came in September ’83, just a few weeks after he returned from the halfway house in Newark. Late one afternoon he drove into Manhattan to pick up Sissy from work at the Intrepid Air-Sea-Space Museum. He was waiting outside, leaning against his car when along came silver-haired Vinnie Leone, whose office was less than two blocks away.

  The burly forty-eight-year-old union boss gave Mickey a big hug and said how nice it was to have him back. He asked Mickey to come over to the office to say hi to “the guys.”

  There were three or four men playing cards at a table in the front room when Leone and Featherstone entered the red-bricked ILA offices. Mickey recognized John Potter, who he and Coonan had once shook down at the Landmark Tavern, and Tommy Ryan, whom he also knew from his dealings with the ILA. Mickey shook hands with Potter and Ryan, then Leone led him into a back office.

  “I was just up to see Jimmy a week ago,” said Vinnie, as they sat down across the desk from one another.

  “Yeah,” answered Mickey. “How is he?”

  “Good, good. You know Jimmy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, Mick, everybody’s real happy to have you back here. No shit. Things’ve been goin’ good, real good.”

  To illustrate his point, Leone pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and peeled off a few twenties.

  “Here,” he said, handing some money to Mickey. “Here’s a hundred. But that’s chickenshit. Just some chump change to get you started. They’ll be more from now on. Way more.”

  “Nah,” said Mickey, “that’s alright.”

  “What?”

  “No, thanks. I don’t want it.”

  Leone laughed and tried to stick the bills in Mickey’s shirt pocket. “C’mon, take it, you crazy bastard.”

  “Nah. Look, Vinnie, I appreciate what you’re doin’. Don’t get me wrong. But I got a clean slate right now; I’d rather just go my own way.”

  Leone stared at Featherstone. “Wait. Am I hearin’ this? Mickey-fuckin’-Featherstone? This is a fuckin’ joke, right? That’s what this is.”

  “No, Vinnie, I’m serious. I just wanna give it a try.”

  Leone stuck the bills back in his pants pocket. “Okay, Mick, but I gotta tell ya, Jimmy C ain’t gonna like this one bit.”

  Mickey just shrugged.

  For a while, Featherstone did his best to maintain the pact he’d made with himself and his wife. His brother-inlaw got him a job as a bartender at the Cameo Lounge, a catering hall in Garfield, New Jersey, where he made a modest living wage. Mickey and Sissy’s most immediate problem was their apartment. It was far too small to accommodate a family of four.

  Ever since they’d had their first child, the Featherstones dreamed of having a big house far from Hell’s Kitchen. Both Mickey and Sissy knew all too well what it was like to grow up amidst the street violence, drugs, and assorted other perils that plagued the West Side. They’d seen how Jimmy Coonan, by moving away from the neighborhood, was able to insulate his family not only from the daily violence of Hell’s Kitchen, but from the constant threats and dangers they might have faced because of his life as a gangster.

  Jimmy Coonan’s children, they were sure, didn’t get ostracized at school because their old man was a well-known criminal in the neighborhood. Jimmy and Edna Coonan, they were sure, didn’t have to deal with landlords who wanted to evict them for being undesirable tenants.

  For weeks following Mickey’s return from prison, he and Sissy spent their weekends driving around New Jersey looking for a house. They didn’t really have enough money to buy anything at the moment, but they could dream.

  One day in the fall of ’83, they saw a house they both loved on Newbridge Road in Teaneck, New Jersey, just thirty minutes from midtown Manhattan. It was a splitlevel Colonial, with a separate room for the baby, a swimming pool, and a big front yard. The mortgage was a reasonable $92,000, and the realtor said he would give it to them for $5,000 down.

  That night they discussed their options. They knew they weren’t likely to find anything that suited their needs as well as this house. But the money was a problem. They had so little saved up that if they were to spend it all on the down payment and closing fees they would be totally wiped out.

  The way Mickey saw it, there was only one way to go. “Let me try Jimmy,” he said. “Just this one time.”
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  Sissy was against the idea. As bad as she wanted the house, she knew that if they borrowed the money from Coonan, it would come with a price tag that far exceeded the money itself. But Mickey was persistent. He was certain there would be no problem getting a loan from Jimmy on the up-and-up.

  “Jimmy owes me,” reasoned Mickey. “He knows he owes me. Besides, if it does come with any strings attached, I’ll just say no.”

  Reluctantly, Sissy acquiesced.

  A few weeks later, in October, Mickey went to see Edna Coonan at her home in Hazlet. In a way, he was upset he had to beg like this, though he was trying not to think of it as begging. As far as he was concerned, it was money Jimmy had promised him. After the Whitehead verdict three and a half years earlier, just before Mickey was shipped out to Missouri, he and Jimmy had said their farewells at Rikers Island. “Don’t worry,” Jimmy told him. “I’ll take care of your wife and kids. We been through hell together. When you get out? There’s gonna be fifty grand—cash—just waitin’ for you.”

  When Mickey got out, he asked around. No fifty grand.

  Now, here he was sitting in Edna’s kitchen asking to borrow forty grand. And he was even offering to pay it back once he went to work with Teamsters Local 817, like he was planning.

  Edna’s response? “Gee, Mickey, I don’t know. I gotta talk to Jimmy about that.”

  Two weeks later Mickey got his answer, and it didn’t even come from Edna. It came from Bobby Herman, a neighborhood guy. Herman told Mickey that he heard from Edna’s brother, Joe Crotty, who heard from Edna, who heard from Jimmy, that the answer on the loan was “No.”

  At first Mickey was shocked. “After all the shit I been through with Jimmy Coonan?” he asked himself. “After all the times I put my life on the line for this guy? Ain’t nobody knows what I done for this guy except me and one person: Jimmy Coonan. And this ungrateful motherfucker tells me no? Unreal.”

  Sissy said she wasn’t surprised at all; she had expected it. But Mickey just couldn’t believe Jimmy would treat him this way.

  In November of ’83, just four weeks after Mickey’s meeting with Edna, he and Sissy received an invitation to an engagement party for the Coonans’ oldest son, Bobby. The party was to be held in a large room at the Hazlet, New Jersey, firehouse, and everyone from the old neighborhood was expected to attend. Edna had even rented a bus to pick up a group of people in front of the Skyline Motor Inn on 10th Avenue and transport them to and from Hazlet.

  “I can’t believe this bitch,” said Sissy when they got the invitation. “She treats us like dogs then expects us to come to an engagement party?”

  Mickey, on the other hand, was anxious to go. He knew there would be a lot of people there from the old neighborhood, some of whom he hadn’t seen in years. And there was the pride factor. “We can’t let her think she controls our lives,” he said. “We’ll go there and hold our heads up just like everybody else.”

  There was snow on the ground that night as over one hundred West Siders gathered at the firehouse in Hazlet. Edna had hired a live band, so there was dancing, and tables had been set up around the room for people to sit and talk. It was a festive atmosphere, with everyone drinking and getting reacquainted.

  The only thing missing was Jimmy Coonan. Jimmy had recently received parole and was actually out of jail for a few months. But then the Manhattan D.A.’s office nabbed him on an old assault conviction stemming from the Vanderbilt Evans shooting way back in 1975. As a result, Jimmy would be spending at least another twelve months behind bars.

  Midway through the evening Edna Coonan came over to Mickey and Sissy’s table. She was dressed in a bright red gown and had her dyed-black hair fastened with a bow. Edna had never really been what anyone would call a knockout, and in recent years she had put on a lot of weight, so much so that behind her back some neighborhood people called her a “cow.”

  “Mickey, do you need a drink?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he replied. “I’ll take a spritzer.”

  When Edna returned, she handed Mickey his drink and asked, “Can I talk to you, Mickey?”

  He turned his chair slightly so it was facing Edna, who took the vacant seat to his left.

  “Jimmy told me to talk to you,” she said, sounding deadly serious.

  “What’s up?”

  “He’s got a proposition for you, seein’ as you need money and all. He’s willin’ to turn over the piers to you, the whole thing. But you gotta do somethin’ for him.”

  “Yeah?”

  Edna explained how there were three people Jimmy wanted Mickey to kill. The first was Bull Maher, a neighborhood guy who’d been seated at Mickey’s table just a few minutes earlier. According to Edna, Jimmy had found out that Maher, who sometimes picked up ILA envelopes for Jimmy in New York, had been steaming open the envelopes and reading private correspondence between. Coonan and his criminal associates.

  “Jimmy wants him put outta business,” declared Edna. “Bull wouldn’t even be in the shylock business if it wasn’t for Jimmy. Jimmy says, ‘Youse do whatever you gotta do, but his shylock days is over.’”

  The second person was Edna’s own ex, Billy Beattie. Rumor had it that Beattie, who’d fled from Hell’s Kitchen years earlier after failing to kill Tommy Collins, was recently seen in one of the neighborhood bars. As far as Coonan was concerned, Beattie had run out on his debts, which were somewhere in the six figures at the time.

  “Jimmy wants him dead,” said Edna, stone-faced, “and so do I.”

  The third person was Vinnie Leone, who, even as Edna spoke, was seated with his wife directly across the table.

  “This bastard’s been rippin’ us off,” she said under her breath. “I seen it myself. I been over at his house last week. He’s got these antiques, statues like, and artwork all over the place. Stuff that’s worth thousands, maybe millions. Now where’s he gettin’ the dough-ray-me, huh? You oughta see this stuff. It’s like a damn museum!

  “Jimmy wants him dead,” she said. “The sooner the better.”

  Mickey listened to all this impassively without saying a word.

  “Edna,” he finally said when she was done, “I don’t want it. Don’t want no part of this shit.”

  “Mickey, this is serious. This is business.”

  “I know what it is. I don’t want it.”

  Edna stared into her drink. “Okay, Mickey. But Jimmy’s gonna be very disappointed.”

  Mickey shrugged.

  “I mean,” she added, “you know this is gonna get done, whether you do it or somebody else. It’s gonna get done.”

  “That ain’t my problem. That’s your problem.”

  After Edna went back out on the dance floor, Sissy turned to her husband. She’d heard bits and pieces of the conversation and was barely able to contain her anger. “Are you gettin’ involved with these fucking people? Are you gettin’ involved again?”

  Mickey and Sissy argued at the table for awhile. Mickey was trying to explain that he’d said no to Edna’s proposition, but Sissy was so upset she was hardly listening. “That treacherous bitch!” she kept saying over and over.

  Things got even stranger later on, when Mickey and Sissy drove through the snow to the Coonan house, where the party continued with a smaller group of neighborhood people. They were all in the kitchen drinking, waxing nostalgic about the old days, when Edna said she needed to talk to Mickey again. Edna and Mickey went downstairs to the recreation room.

  At first, Edna started in again on the people Jimmy wanted to have whacked. Mickey remained adamant, saying he was on his own now. Then Edna started to act weird. She was standing rubbing her back up against the wall, striking what she thought was a seductive pose.

  “See those matches?” she said, nodding towards a clear glass bowl filled with matchbooks from dozens of different bars and restaurants. “Collected all those since Jimmy’s been away. I ain’t sittin’ around doin’ nothin’ this time. I been havin’ a good time.”

  Just the
n Sissy came downstairs. She looked at Edna, who’d walked over to the couch and was now stretched out, and at Mickey standing nearby with his drink.

  “What the fuck is goin’ on here?” she demanded.

  “Nothin’s goin’ on,” said Mickey, as Edna sat up. “Just the same old shit.”

  By then Sissy could no longer contain herself. She laid into Edna, calling her a “fat cunt” and a “treacherous bitch” and every other insult she could think of. Edna just sat there like she was above it all.

  “You just remember,” snarled Sissy, grabbing Mickey to leave. “You keep that fuckin’ husband of yours outta our lives or I’ll come back here and burn this goddamn house to the ground.”

  Things quieted down for the Featherstones after that, at least temporarily. Mickey’s brother Henry got him a job at Erie Transfer, a garage affiliated with Teamsters Local 817 that rented trucks and automobiles to the entertainment industry. It was located at 52nd Street and 11th Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. Mickey didn’t have his union book yet, but he was getting work almost every day by shaping up.

  Soon, however, he was back to using cocaine, which fueled his bitterness towards Edna and Jimmy. “He’s got some balls havin’ his wife give me an order like that,” he would say of Jimmy over and over again.

  Mickey could feel the anger and hatred eating away at his insides. After all the bloodshed, all the trials and prison time, this is what he got in return?

  The cocaine and alcohol were supposed to help ease the pain. But what they really did was draw him back into the same frame of mind he’d been in before he got “rehabilitated.”

  Jimmy McElroy was standing on the balcony of his 11th Avenue apartment, looking out at the Hudson River and the banks of New Jersey to the west. In his hand was a .25 with a silencer on it. From the couch in McElroy’s front room, Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Mac’s young in-law, Kevin Kelly, watched as he raised the gun and started firing, as if he were trying to shoot holes in the clear blue afternoon sky. It was mid-February 1984, three months since Edna’s party in Hazlet.