The witnesses, their paper bags still securely in place, peered through the glass partition.
“Turn to the left,” one of the cops commanded to the six men in the lineup. “Turn to the right,” he commanded a few seconds later.
Within minutes, one of the witnesses said he was unable to make an identification. But the other, his eyes still fixed on the lineup, had no doubts at all.
“The guy on the left,” he said. “Second from the end. Number five. That’s the guy.”
“You’re sure?” asked the detective.
“Yeah. No question about it.”
The person he identified was Mickey Featherstone.
Ken Aronson didn’t know quite what to make of it. This was the third time Mickey had been picked out of a lineup, and two of the three witnesses had been absolutely certain of their choice. Normally, Aronson might have thought it meant that maybe, just maybe, his client was guilty. But in the few times he’d talked to Mickey since his arrest, Featherstone had sworn adamantly that he had not done this killing.
“You gotta believe me on this one,” he’d told Aronson, practically in tears. “I didn’t do it.”
The guilt or innocence of his clients was not something Aronson usually spent a lot of time thinking about. Unless you were told otherwise, you acted on the assumption they were innocent, often as the evidence piled up against you. In Mickey’s case, Aronson had no illusions. Initially, he suspected Mickey may have indeed done the shooting. He thought so because he’d been hearing through the Westies grapevine that, in the last year or so, Mickey had reverted to his old ways. At first the attorney had been saddened. Then he grew angry, and finally disgusted.
In the years he’d known Mickey, Aronson, the “nebbish” from Long Island, had grown emotionally attached to this Hell’s Kitchen tough guy who was so drastically unlike himself. He’d been charmed by Featherstone and was willing to put in ungodly amounts of time to help him out. Not just legal time, either, but hours on the phone trying to convince Mickey he could make it in the “legitimate” world. Often, his senior partner, Larry Hochheiser, joked that Aronson could claim Mickey Featherstone as a tax exemption.
At times, Aronson, who was single and without any family in the area, lived vicariously through Featherstone. He fondly remembered afternoons when Mickey would bring his son, Mickey, Jr., over to his office and play with him in the foyer. Aronson would watch them laughing together and say to himself, “I should be this good with a child if I had one.”
The fact that Mickey had fallen back into a life-style of gangsterism affected Aronson on a personal level. Over the years, he’d done everything he could to help straighten Mickey out. Now Mickey, he felt, had let him down. Even if Featherstone was innocent of the Michael Holly shooting, as he so vehemently claimed, Aronson had reluctantly come to the conclusion it was only a matter of time before Mickey Featherstone would be back in court on some other charge.
Aronson’s disillusionment persisted, even though two weeks after the lineup he heard a version of the Holly shooting that exonerated Mickey—at least as the person who had pulled the trigger. He was given this version at Billy Bokun’s wedding in Sacred Heart Church, the same church where Mickey Spillane had tied the knot with Maureen McManus some twenty-five years before. The Irish community in Hell’s Kitchen was nearly nonexistent by now, but Sacred Heart still held a special place in the hearts of those old enough to remember the glory days.
Aronson was invited to Bokun’s wedding not only because he was a friend of the community’s, but also because there were rumors that Billy might be arrested as an accomplice in the Holly murder. Bokun’s future mother-in-law, Flo Collins, wife of white-haired coke dealer Tommy Collins, told the attorney she didn’t want any “wiseguy detectives” interrupting the ceremony.
Aronson arrived at the church around 4:30 on the afternoon of May 26, 1985. The ceremony was not scheduled to begin for an hour or so, and few people were there. Inside the cathedral, Aronson spotted Bokun and approached to offer his congratulations.
“Kenny,” said Billy, looking anxious, “I gotta talk to you.”
Bokun was dressed in a white tuxedo which accentuated his red birthmark. He led Aronson to a quiet corner near the front of the church, just to the right of the altar. A soft late-afternoon light cascaded down from the high stained-glass windows, bathing the entire church in a golden hue.
In these somber and dramatic surroundings, Billy Bokun confessed to the Holly shooting. Nearly in tears, he told Aronson that Mickey hadn’t killed the guy, though, Bokun claimed, Mickey knew the murder was to take place that day.
“So what am I gonna do, huh?” Billy asked Aronson. “I’ll turn myself in if I have to.”
“Billy, as your lawyer, this is what I’m going to suggest.… First of all, who knows about this?”
“A lot of people, you know. This is what I don’t understand. Mickey knew all about this. He knew. He didn’t fuckin’ cover for hisself.”
“Okay. Look, Billy, I can’t tell you what to do, okay? There’s a conflict. But I can tell you if you try to turn yourself in, they’ll just charge you as being the driver or something. It doesn’t mean they’ll let Mickey go. They have witnesses that identified him.”
Billy began to cry. “I can’t just let this happen.… Fuck, motherfuck … why didn’t he cover hisself?”
Kenny took a hard line. “Billy, look, this is your wedding day. Try to cheer up.”
Throughout the wedding ceremony and over the next few days, Aronson was in a mild state of shock. Both Bokun and Featherstone were clients of his. How could he exonerate one without convicting the other?
In the weeks following the confession at Sacred Heart Church, Aronson and Larry Hochheiser discussed their options.
“As the guy’s counsel,” cautioned Hochheiser, “we sure as hell can’t tell him to take the stand. It’s not exactly in his best interest.”
“You know,” replied Aronson, “we don’t even know if this confession is for real. I mean, what if he was put up to this? I don’t think we could count on this confession even if we did put him on the stand.”
Hochheiser sat at his desk and glanced out the window of his forty-ninth-floor office. It was a reasonably clear day, and in the distance he could see a small private plane soaring over the concrete peaks and caverns of Manhattan. Hochheiser, himself a licensed pilot who loved to fly in his off hours, was jealous. He would have liked to be out there right now.
He was not a kid anymore. At forty-four, Hochheiser’s once wild mane of brown hair was now speckled with gray. After fifteen years as Featherstone’s attorney, he was finally beginning to think maybe Mickey was more trouble than he was worth.
“Well,” said Hochheiser, asking the question he knew was on both their minds. “So who do we tell about this?”
Aronson didn’t look pleased. He knew they were trolling in murky legal waters. Already he’d checked the Canon of Ethics. There were no provisions that directly addressed their dilemma.
“The way I see it,” said Kenny, “we don’t tell anyone. If Bokun wants to turn himself in, that’s his business. But the confession itself is privileged.”
With that, the matter was closed. They agreed they would proceed with the case regardless of what Bokun intended to do, based on the evidence that was at their disposal. In the meantime, they would tell Mickey about the confession, but no one else—not the judge, not the prosecution, and certainly not the press.
But news of Billy Bokun’s confession to Aronson spread through Hell’s Kitchen like wildfire. Sissy Featherstone, for one, couldn’t believe that the attorneys weren’t going to make Bokun turn himself in. In June, a few weeks after Bokun’s wedding, she confronted Ken Aronson in a Chinese restaurant near the courthouse in lower Manhattan. They’d spent the morning in court during one of Mickey’s pre-trial hearings, and Sissy was uptight.
“I told you Mickey was innocent,” she said to Aronson.
“No,” replied the
attorney, “Bokun didn’t say innocent. He just said Mickey didn’t pull the trigger. He knew, Sissy. It was his fault he went to Erie. He shouldn’t have been so nosey. He should have stayed away.”
“Wait a minute. Mickey wasn’t being nosey. He was told by Kevin and Kenny to meet them at the Skyline.”
“He should have had an alibi, Sissy. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near Erie.”
As the conversation continued, Aronson found himself getting more and more upset. He could see how he had boxed himself into a corner. All these years he spent getting close to the West Side community was backfiring on him. All the weddings, engagement parties, and funerals he’d attended had led people to think of him almost as a member of the gang. It had all seemed so exotic to him at the time. But now Mickey and Sissy were expecting him to “do the right thing,” to do whatever he had to in order to make sure Mickey didn’t take the fall.
“So Billy confessed,” said Sissy. “What’re you gonna do about it? He wants to turn himself in.”
Aronson pursed his lips. “Sissy, that’s entirely up to him. I don’t know what he intends to do. Frankly, I wouldn’t hold my breath. This is real life, you know, this isn’t Perry Mason.”
In the many months leading up to his trial, Mickey Featherstone sat in Block C-95 at Rikers Island, his mind working overtime trying to untangle all the sinister forces that had landed him where he was. The stress was wearing him down. In July of ’85 Sissy gave birth to a baby girl, Gillian, her and Mickey’s third child. But with all that was going on, Featherstone hardly noticed. Through the summer, fall, and into the winter, he was constantly on the phone with his lawyers and fellow gangsters from the neighborhood, especially Kevin Kelly and Billy Bokun.
At first, Mickey couldn’t understand how or why these eyewitnesses had fingered him. He knew that Bokun, who had dark-brown hair and a chunky physique, had been the shooter. How could anyone think Bokun looked like him? Then Mickey talked with Billy Bokun on the phone, and Billy told him he’d worn a disguise that day. Along with the makeup he normally wore over the large red birthmark on his face, he’d worn a sandy-blond wig, a painter’s cap, sunglasses, and he’d darkened his normally wispy mustache with brown eyeliner. All of which made it conceivable that an eyewitness might later identify Mickey Featherstone as the assailant.
“Why?” Mickey had demanded. “Why’d you wear this fucking disguise?”
“It was Kevin,” said Bokun. “Kevin planned the whole fuckin’ thing. He had Kenny drive the car. He had me wear the goddamn wig, the mustache, everything.”
But when Mickey talked to Kevin Kelly about it, he denied that Bokun had worn any kind of disguise at all.
“You want my opinion?” Kelly said. “That’s just somethin’ the cops is makin’ up to turn everybody against each other.”
Mickey was shocked at first. Sure, he’d sometimes felt Kevin was a conniving bastard who couldn’t be trusted with his own mother. But he didn’t want to believe he’d deliberately set him up. Still, nothing else fit the facts.
In all his ruminations, Mickey tried not to think about his own screw-ups. Yes, he’d heard that the Michael Holly shooting was likely to take place that day. But he didn’t really give it much thought. Billy Bokun had spent so much time over the years bragging about how he was going to kill Holly that Mickey didn’t really believe it was going to happen. He was stoned the day before the shooting when Kelly and Shannon told him to meet them at the Skyline Motor Inn. And he was burned out from four straight days of debauchery on the morning of the shooting.
Maybe I was wrong for not having an alibi, thought Mickey, but does that mean I should get pinned with a murder I didn’t do?
For months, Mickey’s paranoia seethed. In time, an elaborate conspiracy theory began to take shape in his mind. From his conversations with Bokun, he didn’t think Billy had been in on the setup. Billy was a bit like Raymond Steen—a not-too-bright kid who’d do almost anything to endear himself with the neighborhood’s gangster element. Chances were, figured Mickey, Kelly and Shannon had used Bokun.
As for the larger conspiracy, the moving force behind the whole thing—that was easy. There was no doubt in Mickey’s mind. It had to be Jimmy Coonan.
Maybe Coonan had found out about the plot against his life, and he’d told Kelly, Shannon, McElroy, and Godknows-who-else that if they got rid of Featherstone he’d forget about their disloyalty. Or maybe Coonan was just getting his revenge for Mickey’s having refused to murder Vinnie Leone and the others. Or maybe it was the goddamned Italians. Maybe they’d told Coonan if he really wanted to be one of them he’d have to get rid of Featherstone, his crazy Irish partner.
By the early months of 1986 Mickey’s conspiracy theory had expanded to incorporate yet another person—his one-time friend and lawyer, Kenny Aronson.
Again, it was a phone call with Billy Bokun that got him thinking. Tearfully, Bokun had told Mickey there was no way he was going to let him go down. He’d turn himself in if he had to. Mickey had suggested that if he were going to do that, he’d better not go to the cops. They couldn’t be trusted. Mickey wanted him to turn himself in to Jimmy Breslin or Michael Daly, two journalists who’d written about him in the past.
But Bokun said he had a better idea. He’d wait till the trial was underway, then he’d walk right in the door, right in the fucking door with the same disguise on that he’d worn when he shot Michael Holly.
Mickey liked that idea; it had a certain style. But when he asked Bokun about it a few days later, Bokun said Ken Aronson had told him not to do it.
Now Mickey was certain Aronson was in on it. First Bokun confesses and Aronson says they can’t tell anybody about it. Then Billy says he wants to turn himself in and Kenny says no. Sometimes Mickey thought it was all a bad dream. Here was his own attorney knowing who really whacked Holly, and he was still going to let this fucking thing go to trial!?
There could be only one explanation, figured Mickey. Jimmy Coonan must have gotten to Aronson, too.
By the time the trial got underway, Mickey was so strung out he could hardly focus on what was happening. He’d been getting high almost every day, using coke and marijuana Sissy had smuggled in to him at Rikers Island. She would wrap the illegal substance in a tiny rubber balloon, then when she kissed Mickey in the prison visiting room, pass the balloon from her mouth to his. Mickey would swallow it, retrieve it later when he defecated, and snort or smoke whatever Sissy had been able to get her hands on.
For three straight weeks in March of 1986, Mickey watched in a semistupor as his life went up in flames. In the criminal courts building in lower Manhattan—familiar terrain for Mickey Featherstone—three eyewitnesses took the stand and identified him as the person they’d seen shoot Michael Holly. The last one, a black construction worker who just happened to be on West 35th Street on the day of the shooting, was terrified when he took the stand. Larry Hochheiser asked him, “So, as you sit here now you are one hundred percent positive that you were correct in your identification [on the day of the lineup], right?”
“Yes,” the construction worker answered, hesitantly.
“Heaven and earth wouldn’t change that view now, is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“Are you absolutely certain?”
“Yes.”
It was an old Hochheiser ploy, one he’d used successfully in 1980 when he savaged Jack Paulstein—the main witness at the William Walker murder trial—by making him seem too certain to be telling the truth. But it wasn’t working here. The more he pressed the construction worker, the more confident he became, until it started to sound like Hochheiser was part of the prosecution.
Not only was the government able to deliver eyewitness testimony, but as the trial unfolded the alleged motive for the shooting was established by none other than Raymond Steen, who’d long since disappeared into the Witness Protection Program. On the stand, Steen told of a time seven years earlier when Mickey Featherstone had given him a bottle of
poison—or what he’d been told was poison—to drop in Michael Holly’s beer. Featherstone, Steen related to the jury, believed that Holly was responsible for the death of his friend, John Bokun.
“Mickey explained to me,” said Steen, “that he owed the family of John Bokun this killing of Michael Holly.”
At first, Mickey watched with some amusement as Ray Steen jabbered away on the stand. He knew that for once in his life, Steen was telling the truth. He had, in fact, given Steen a bottle of knockout drops, telling him they were poison. But Steen, Mickey was certain, was a totally unreliable witness. Without corroboration, who in their right mind would believe fast-talking Ray Steen? The prosecution rested.
Days later, to Mickey’s utter astonishment, his own attorneys put Kevin Kelly on the stand. Hochheiser and Aronson explained that since all the eyewitnesses had described the shooter as holding the gun in his right hand, they wanted to use Kevin, who would identify himself as a lifelong friend of Featherstone’s, to establish that Mickey was left-handed.
“But you can’t put a guy like this on the stand,” argued Mickey. “He’s from the street. He’s got rough edges, man. I’m tellin’ ya, this fucker sounds like a hood.”
Hochheiser believed it was better to have a witness who was weak on elocution than one who was liable to wilt under cross-examination. “Look, Mickey,” he explained, “it’s a lot easier to smooth rough edges than it is to grow a pair of balls on a guy.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Mickey,” Larry sighed, “just let us try the case, alright?”
As it turned out, Featherstone was right. When Assistant D.A. Jeffrey Schlanger cross-examined Kelly, he sat on the stand sounding like the tough guy that he was, claiming disingenuously that he’d never even seen a gun in his life. Furthermore, the assistant D.A. was able to use Kelly to more or less corroborate Steen’s claim that everyone in the neighborhood, including Mickey Featherstone, blamed Michael Holly for the death of John Bokun back in 1977.
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