On the afternoon of May 6, 1986, two weeks after Mickey and Sissy cut their deal with the feds, Kelly and Shannon came to visit Sissy at her home in Teaneck. The Featherstone children played noisily in the next room while the three of them sat in Sissy’s kitchen. Kelly, the handsome young gangster who looked like Matt Dillon, was rarely seen these days without Shannon, his fair-haired partner. Since Mickey’s arrest, they’d become the most active Westies in Hell’s Kitchen, with their fingers in everything from loansharking to cocaine sales.
Anxious to put Sissy at ease, Kelly and Shannon spoke freely, not knowing that just inches away, resting on the arm of a nearby chair in Sissy’s pocketbook, was a small six-by-six-inch FBI-issue recorder.
“Alright, Sissy,” said Kelly, tossing an envelope onto the table. “There’s two here, you know, from us. And an extra six. We got another payment from the guy—three hundred from the pier.”
“Uh huh.”
“And that three hundred from last week, from the pier. So that’s twenty-six there.”
The $2,600 was Mickey’s monthly share of the loansharking money on the West Side piers. Kelly, Shannon, and Billy “the Indian” Bokun had also agreed to put up $11,000 for an appeals lawyer, but that money, Kelly said, had not yet been collected.
Then Kelly launched into a tirade against Bokun, who was slow coming up with his share.
“When we talked to Billy,” said Kevin, “Billy says, ‘Look, I wanna do the right thing.’ I said, ‘Well, Billy, mine and Kenny’s nut comes to seven thousand now. Five thousand for the lawyer, two for Sissy.’ I said, ‘So, you wanna do the right thing? Get it on with us. Give me five hundred for Sissy, right? And two thousand for the lawyer.’ So he makes his first payment, right? And he tells me, he goes, ‘I’m gonna sell my car at the end of the month so I’ll have next month’s payment.’ I said, ‘Hey, Bill, whatever you wanna do …’”
“Yeah.”
“Because, I mean, if he don’t come up with the money, you know, the kid has a fuckin’ accident or somethin’. I mean, what the fuck.”
Sissy was only half-listening to Kelly; she kept worrying about the recorder. Was it picking up the conversation? Was there enough tape? Was it even on? On top of all that, there was the constant fear that somehow Kelly and Shannon might become suspicious. She’d been instructed by FBI agents on how to use the recorder, but when she used it was totally up to her. There were no agents backing her up in the event she was found out. It was just her and the children alone in the house with Kelly and Shannon.
“You know what always bothered me?” she asked Kelly and Shannon. “Mickey said that when you spoke with him, you said youse didn’t tell Billy to wear a mustache that day?”
“It’s bullshit,” said Shannon.
“That’s nothing,” agreed Kelly.
“Yeah.”
“That’s fuckin’ bullshit.”
“Why did he make it up then?”
“Look, Sis,” said Kelly. “I mean, even if there was a mustache, what’s the difference? He don’t look nothin’ like your husband.”
“He can’t grow a fuckin’ mustache,” added Shannon.
Sissy was miffed. “Well, I wonder why he even wore one then. Oh, I could choke this guy.”
In their eagerness to convince Sissy, Kelly and Shannon began verbally tripping over one another: “He didn’t have one …” “He didn’t have a mustache …” “He didn’t have one that day.”
“Yeah,” said Sissy. “But they identified him as having a mustache. That’s why they picked Mickey out. The witness was sayin’, ‘That’s him!’ because of the mustache and the color of his hair.”
“That’s the cops tellin’ them,” insisted Kelly. “That’s all that is.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s gotta be, Sissy, like, coaching ’em.”
“They couldn’t see Billy do it,” offered Shannon. “Because Holly was behind ’em. You understand what I’m sayin’? And when Billy got out of the car, the car was right there, okay? He got out. He ran right in behind the truck, you know? Bing bing bing! He came out and went right behind the truck and got in the car. And we swung left. There’s no possible way they could see, even from the van.…”
“Yeah.”
“So they didn’t even see it happen. They might’ve heard it. But the van, you know, it’s about the size of this room. So if they were in the van—right?—they can’t see behind the van.”
Sissy was ecstatic, though she tried hard not to show it. Shannon had admitted his role as the getaway driver, described the event itself, and even cast doubt on the validity of the government’s eyewitnesses.
In the weeks that followed, there were other conversations with Kelly and Shannon in which they gave even more details on the Holly shooting. Sissy taped these as well as phone conversations with other gang members using a simple device she purchased from a local Radio Shack. Since the government was interested in more than just the Holly murder, Sissy had been instructed by Marilyn Lucht, the FBI agent assigned to her case, to establish contact with as many other Westies as possible.
It wasn’t hard. On May 15th, just nine days after the kitchen meeting with Kelly and Shannon, Jimmy McElroy called Sissy to reassure her that she was going to be taken care of while her husband was away.
“Whatever we do,” McElroy told Sissy, “you’re gettin’.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m gonna make sure of that. I told the other guy—Blondie …”
“Who’s that?”
“Jimmy.”
“Oh. Mr. Coonan.”
“I was with him last week.”
“Yeah.”
“We were drinkin’, right? And I told him. I said, ‘Let me tell you somethin’. Whatever we do, Mickey’s gettin’ the same.’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I said, ‘Or else I ain’t doin’ anything anymore.’”
Sissy still got steamed whenever Coonan’s name came up. “He didn’t even give nothin’ to his benefit—the benefit they had for Mickey,” she said.
“I know. I know all about that. But he’s gonna make it up. He …”
“When? In the year 2000?”
“No. I’m gonna … I’ll take care of that. Because, listen, Sissy …”
“Yeah?”
“I tell ya, he knows he did wrong. Because I talked to him, and he says, ‘Nah, I didn’t really take care of none of you guys.’ He was drinkin’, you know? He came out with it. And it ain’t even him. It’s his fuckin’, stinking wife!”
“Edna. Right.”
“She’s a bitch, you know that.”
“Yeah, she is. She’s treacherous.”
“She fucking hates us.”
“Uh-huh. Well, she wants more money, more money, more money.”
“That’s it. Greed.”
Sometimes, after taping conversations like that, Sissy would get depressed. It was bad enough that she was eliciting damaging information from people she knew; there was also the fact that everyone seemed to have turned against one another. Kelly and Shannon were constantly bitching about Billy Bokun. Bokun, in return, felt that Kelly and Shannon were out to get him. Jimmy McElroy bitched about Edna Coonan and her scheming ways. And God only knew what Jimmy Coonan was up to.
On top of all this was the weight of Sissy and Mickey’s feelings of betrayal, and their participation in a plan that might bring the whole neighborhood operation to a crashing halt.
As the implications of what she was doing dawned on her, Sissy began to feel lonely and isolated. At the end of the day, after reporting to Lucht on the conversations she’d recorded that afternoon or evening, after tucking her children into bed and telling them for the umpteenth time that, no, their father was not coming home the next day, she would fall into bed, exhausted. The only way she could keep the fear and anxiety at bay was to think about her husband languishing away in his five-by-seven-foot prison cell. Only then could she muster the anger and indignation that would get her through the n
ight, and on to the next secret recording session.
* * *
Mickey’s pact with the government did nothing to change his status in general population at the Rikers Island House of Detention. The FBI, which was monitoring his taped conversations as well, insisted that his life follow the same daily routine as any convicted prisoner awaiting sentencing. Certainly no inmates, and as few members of the prison administration as possible, were to know anything about Featherstone’s status as a confidential informant.
The danger, of course, was overwhelming. If there was even the slightest inkling that Mickey Featherstone was cooperating with the government while he was still within the walls of Rikers, he would become an immediate casualty. No one knew this better than Mickey himself, who by now had spent more than ten years of his life absorbing the prison ethos.
On top of the anxiety and paranoia that went along with trying to live as an informant within the prison confines, Featherstone was under pressure from the U.S. Attorney’s office to come up with indictable information. Since Sissy was not central to the Westies, the burden was on Mickey to elicit details from his friends on criminal matters other than just the Michael Holly murder. Mickey knew that with people like Kelly, Shannon, and McElroy, to appear too inquisitive would tip his hand. The idea was to ask as few questions as possible, but to ask the right questions.
One opportunity came on May 16th, three and a half weeks after Mickey agreed to become an informant. The occasion was a meeting with Kevin Kelly and Larry Palermo, a friend of Kelly’s who’d been helping Kevin with his loanshark collections on the West Side. Before they arrived, FBI agents told Mickey they’d planted a transmitting device behind a picture on the wall in the visiting room. When Kelly and Palermo got there, they were seated under the picture.
The visiting room at Rikers Island was an open space, approximately forty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. There were large tables and chairs along the wall and even larger conference tables in the middle of the room. Two prison guards stood by the door, and at the far end of the room was a glass control booth where surveillance cameras kept a steady watch.
Mickey was brought into the room and took a seat across a wallside table from Kelly and Palermo. There were maybe fifty or sixty other people in the room, inmates and their visitors passing time.
Kevin Kelly still had no idea that Mickey believed he’d been deliberately set up to take the rap for the Holly shooting. As far as Kevin knew, Mickey was “doing the right thing”—sitting out the time as long as he was certain his wife would be taken care of.
“Just so’s I can clear my head,” said Mickey, after he’d arrived and taken a seat across the table from Kelly and Palermo. “What money are you givin’ Sissy?”
“We’re gonna give Sissy two thousand,” replied Kevin, “beginning of every month. It never stops.”
“Alright. ’Cause that’s all I’m worried about.”
“Oh yeah. I told you that. Your wife’s never gonna sell the house … just as long as we’re alive, you know. Long as I’m on the street, me and Kenny.”
It had been weeks since Kelly last talked with Mickey, so he spent five or ten minutes filling him in on the neighborhood gossip. Billy Bokun was pissing everybody off, said Kevin, because he was stoned all the time and not making his payments to Sissy. And ever since Mickey went away, Kevin said, McElroy had been getting tighter and tighter with Jimmy Coonan.
“Mac’s his bodyguard now,” sneered Kevin. “Can you believe that shit? He’s with him all the way, know what I mean? He drives him around. I seen him yesterday with a suit.”
“McElroy!?” asked Mickey skeptically.
“Yeah,” answered Kevin, laughing. “He was wearing polyester.”
Since they were on the topic of McElroy, Mickey said he wanted to ask Kevin about an item he’d seen in the paper a few days earlier. It involved the shooting of a Carpenter’s Union official named John O’Connor. In several phone conversations during the days leading up to the shooting, McElroy had alluded to something that “might be good,” which Mickey interpreted to mean some sort of criminal business.
The O’Connor shooting had all the makings of a Westies hit, and Mickey had immediately suspected there might be some connection between it and his conversations with McElroy.
Before Mickey could even finish asking about the shooting, Kelly spoke up. “Fucking guy just asked for it.”
“I swear to my mother,” said Mickey, laughing. “I knew you guys did it. For some reason, I just sensed it, you know? Papers said a Spanish guy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But, you know what? The description of the shooter fits your description. It’s your height and weight and everything.”
“Well, that’s what they said on the news; that this guy was a hundred and forty pounds, dark glasses. It said he wore a Band-Aid over his right eye. I’ve got a scar over my right eye.”
“So who was it for? For Jimmy?”
“Oh yeah. For the greaseballs. Somethin’ they needed quick.”
Kevin explained how Coonan and McElroy had attended the funeral of Frankie DeCicco, a Gambino family capo who’d recently been blown to smithereens while sitting in his car on a Brooklyn street. Coonan’s “Italian connection,” Danny Marino, was at the funeral, and mentioned that he’d been given an assignment to shoot O’Connor, a business agent for Carpenters Local 608. Supposedly, O’Connor had run afoul of the Mafia when he trashed a Gambino-run restaurant for using nonunion labor. Marino added that he was having trouble getting the job done.
“So they volunteered!” exclaimed Kelly. “They volunteered their fuckin’ services. Him and Mac. So about ten days ago they come up to me and Kenny, fuckin’ cryin’. And McElroy said, ‘What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?’ So I told them, I says, ‘Don’t be doin’ that, ’cause I ain’t doin’ it no more. This is the last time. Then, uh, me and Kenny set it up.”
Kelly, whose jet-black hair and dark complexion could easily be mistaken as being of Spanish heritage, explained how he waited outside the offices of Local 608 near 51st Street and Broadway early on the morning of May 7th. Once O’Connor arrived for work, Kelly followed him into the lobby of the building and proceeded to shoot him four times below the waist. O’Connor fell into the elevator, bleeding profusely.
Kevin chuckled. “He’s a donkey, this guy O’Connor.”
“He’s hot-headed like?”
“Yeah, he’s got an Irish brogue. You know, one of them guys?”
“Right.”
“He’s got a hot ass now,” interjected Palermo.
They all broke up laughing.
“Yeah,” Kevin snorted. “He’s got … he’s got an extra asshole.”
“Oh, shit,” said Mickey, who was practically bent over laughing.
“’Cause, you know what happened was, he was supposed to get kneecapped, not murdered, and the bullets ended up high. One went in his ass, you know, the bullets. So Coonan told Danny Marino, he said to Danny, ‘One of the kids got pissed off and shot him in the ass for being an asshole.’ So Marino answers, ‘Wow!’”
“Yeah?”
Even as Kevin spoke, Mickey was astounded by the implications of what he was being told. He knew that just five months earlier, while he was in prison awaiting trial for the Holly murder, Paul Castellano, the capo di tutti capi, and his bodyguard, Thomas Bilotti, had been dramatically gunned down outside Sparks, a midtown Manhattan steak house, during the Christmas holidays. Castellano’s murder had set off a series of reprisal killings—including the car bombing of Frankie DeCicco. Once the dust had settled, the new leader of the powerful Gambino family was believed to be John Gotti, a previously unheralded capo from Howard Beach, Queens.
Mickey knew that Coonan’s buddy, Danny Marino, was tight with Gotti, which could mean only one thing. Now that Castellano was out of the picture, Coonan was already sucking up to the new Godfather. He’d volunteered to do this shooting for Marino knowing it would put him in good stan
ding with Gotti.
“Let me get this straight,” said Mickey, trying to make sure Kevin stated it as clearly as possible on tape. “What I don’t understand, right? Is Danny Marino with Gotti or …”
“Danny Marino’s with Gotti.”
“He is with him?”
“Danny Marino’s with Gotti.”
“See, I wasn’t sure.”
“Right. Yeah, he’s with him now. He even mentioned that to me.”
Later that night Mickey sat in his cell in C Block and ran it over and over in his mind. He’d had no contact with any FBI agents since his conversation with Kevin Kelly that afternoon. But he could imagine them sitting in a room somewhere, listening over headphones as Kevin bragged about the shooting he’d done for Marino and Gotti. He knew that ever since the Castellano killing the feds had had a hard-on for Gotti, whose sartorial splendor and flamboyant style hearkened back to an earlier era of gangsterism.
Just a few days earlier, one of the FBI agents handling Featherstone’s case had given him a stern lecture about not having gathered any useful information.
Well, thought Mickey, if this don’t satisfy the pointy-headed bastards, nothing will.
At least once every day, and sometimes three, four, or five times in a twenty-four-hour period, Mickey and Sissy spoke on the phone. Working with the platoon of lawyers and agents assigned to Mickey’s case, they had a pretty good idea what was needed to get his conviction overturned. Each week, Sissy pored over transcripts with their attorney, John Kaley, and with Assistant D.A. Jeffrey Schlanger, who would be instrumental if the Holly verdict were to be reversed.
So far, what they had gathered from Kevin Kelly and Kenny Shannon was strong. What they needed to tie it all together was a confession from the person who’d actually pulled the trigger that day.
In the few times Sissy had spoken with Billy Bokun since Mickey’s conviction, he’d been stoned out of his mind. Bokun had become convinced that Kelly and Shannon were going to kill him, and his conversations with Sissy were filled with anger and paranoia. One time, on 9th Avenue, he told Sissy flat out, “They set your husband up and now they’re tryin’ to set me up too!”
American Gangsters Page 58
