The Coffey Files

by Coffey, Joseph; Schmetterer, Jerry;

  For instance, Funzi Tieri, head of the Genovese family, told the godfather of the Gambinos about his conversation with Joe Coffey about a murder case that involved a victim who wasn’t even a family member, just as in the Briguglio homicide the Provenzano organization got the help of Genovese capo Matty Ianiello in setting up Briguglio. And now Paul Castellano admitted that the Gambinos knew Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan, heads of a gang that did little more than hijack trucks and bust heads. Coffey surmised correctly that Castellano was using the Westies to do strong-arm and contract killings.

  All this cooperation was going on while the city was under the impression that a gang war raged. Coffey made a mental note to discuss this new trend with his old friend Ron Goldstock, who as an assistant district attorney specialized in organized crime matters.

  As things turned out, Castellano did not pass the word that he was not protecting McElroy—so much for the Mafia code of killing only your own—but Coffey did come up with an eyewitness who finally agreed to cooperate.

  He received a message at his desk one day to call a man about the “Billy Walker thing.” The man turned out to be an older member of Local 817 of the Theatrical Workers Union who admitted being out with Walker the night of the murder.

  What he witnessed had made him sick, and he had been having nightmares ever since. He decided that the only way to feel better was to help nail the killer, no matter what the personal risk was. He was afraid he might be killed because of what he saw. The police, he reasoned, would protect him.

  He identified McElroy from the picture McDarby had taken in the station house that night, and based on the eyewitness account and identification, McElroy was indicted and arrested for the murder of Billy Walker.

  At the trial the witness testified that he and Walker and a few other coworkers spent the night of the murder, which was their payday, drinking and using cocaine, going from one West Side bar to another.

  Toward the end of the evening, he testified, they found themselves playing pinball at a Hell’s Kitchen bar.

  He said that McElroy was in the bar drinking with another group and that he and Walker got into some kind of argument over a pinball game.

  There was a little pushing and shoving, and Walker, a tough guy, held his own. Someone else broke it up, and McElroy stormed out of the bar.

  Exhausted after his night of binging, Walker went outside to sleep it off in the back of his van. A little while later McElroy returned with a gun and found Walker asleep.

  The eyewitness testified that without waking him, McElroy opened Walker’s mouth and put the gun barrel in. With a bunch of stoned theatrical workers standing around, the witness said, McElroy pulled the trigger once. The shot blew off the back of Billy. Walker’s head.

  It went down just as Coffey imagined. It was a case he couldn’t have made without the eyewitness, who did a great job of describing the harrowing murder. Unfortunately he did too good a job. McElroy was acquitted of the murder of Billy Walker.

  “We were stunned by the verdict and decided to interview the jurors to see where we went wrong,” Coffey says. “It turns out we lost to what we call the ‘Perry Mason’ syndrome. The witness seemed so well prepared and our case seemed so airtight that the jurors thought we had concocted it. The jury bought the defense argument that we coached the witness.”

  It was not the first time Joe Coffey had experienced a severe amount of frustration following months of hard police work. Sometimes the frustration was caused by the jealousy and narrow-mindedness of his colleagues, sometimes by the public’s misunderstanding of police work.

  The Coffey Gang was demoralized by the loss of McElroy. They were also starting to take some heat from their fellow cops and former bosses who would warn them they were throwing away good careers by chasing mutts like McElroy whom they couldn’t put in jail anyway. In saloon bull sessions around Police Headquarters Joe found it more and more necessary to be a cheerleader.

  He tried to emphasize the positive. The Walker case was solved, after all, according to police guidelines. They knew McElroy was the killer. The Chief of Detectives’ Organized Crime Homicide Task Force was clearing almost one case a week. No one was talking about its being disbanded. In fact, it would operate for eight more years.

  In addition, Ron Goldstock was increasingly fascinated by Coffey’s theory that the different Mafia organizations were cooperating with each other on a grand scale. While following McElroy leads, Joe’s men saw Westies delivering money to the East Harlem headquarters of the Genovese family don “Fat Tony” Salerno as well as to Roy DeMeo, one of Castellano’s most important henchmen. Goldstock thought that pursuing the possibility that Mafia families operated under one umbrella might be a way to bring them all down at once.

  In fact, the information gathered by the Coffey Gang was shared with investigators on all levels—city, state, and federal. They had turned over leads on more than thirty homicides, including that of Patty Dugan.

  In less than two years after the creation of the Coffey Gang, Joe reported to the Police Department that in the area of cooperation with other agencies his men had accomplished the following: They had informed the FBI about mob figures active in New York and New Jersey in connection with the murder of “Sally Balls” Briguglio and the disappearance and apparent murder of Jimmy Hoffa. They had provided witnesses and information developed during the Ladenhauf homicide to the Internal Revenue Service with regard to a major case of labor racketeering and income tax evasion in progress. They had assisted the Drug Enforcement Agency in making twelve arrests of drug smugglers and seizing six kilos of 100 percent pure cocaine at Kennedy Airport, thanks to leads developed in the investigation of the murder of “Patty Mack” Macchiarole. They had used their knowledge of the murder of Mickey Spillane to aid the U.S. Secret Service and the Division of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to make a major gunrunning and homicide arrest. They had developed an informant to work undercover for treasury agents; Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; and the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau in an investigation of a series of homicides at Kennedy Airport that led to the arrest of fifty important mob figures. They had passed on information enabling the Secret Service to bust a counterfeiting ring.

  By the end of 1981, the Coffey Gang had solved twenty-one gangland homicides and established an ongoing pattern of cooperation with the FBI, the Secret Service, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York State.

  A good example of how Joe’s network of information helped other units was the raid on the Collins family. At the time of the McElroy trial, the Coffey Gang discovered that a family named Collins was operating a loan-sharking and gambling ring out of their West Side apartment.

  Joe knew that detectives in the unit known as the Manhattan Detective Area were working a case that included a link to the Collins ring. He passed his information on to the Manhattan detectives and then joined them on a raid of the apartment. Inside, as he had suspected, they found evidence of extortion, gunrunning, loan-sharking and gambling.

  Also in the apartment were Tom Collins, his wife, Flo, and their son Mickey.

  Joe took the young man aside and offered him a deal. “Mickey,” Joe told him, “fess up to possession of these items and we’ll let your mother off the hook.”

  The young man did not hesitate before answering.

  “Fuck my mother. She can take care of herself,” he told Coffey. Tom, Mickey, and Flo Collins eventually received long prison terms.

  “So you see why I wanted to press on with the Westies. They were scum and they all belonged in prison. At least the Italians confined their killing to matters of money. The Westies killed for the fun of it, and they did not even honor their own mothers.

  “I would have been happy to devote all my time to pursuing them,” Joe says.

  But that was not possible. The Coffey Gang had become a victim of its own success. More and more they were being called on to take part in joint operations with othe
r jurisdictions, and Sullivan never let them lose sight of the Mafia as their main objective.

  In 1985, after Joe had retired in bitterness from the NYPD and joined Ron Goldstock’s New York State Organized Crime Task Force, he attended a party for an old friend on Staten Island.

  As he shared laughs and drinks with a group of men whom he had worked with for more than twenty years, an FBI agent he did not know very well grabbed him by the arm and eased him to a corner of the room.

  “Joe, I always admired your work on the West Side Irish. You really opened the door for everyone on that bunch of mutts. You’d probably like to know we’ve got an old friend of yours singing his brains out,” the agent said.

  “It’s Mickey Featherstone, right?” Joe responded.

  “That’s right, how did you know? We’ve got him hidden away pretty good since he contacted Ira Block, the assistant U.S. attorney.”

  Coffey knew because it had been only a matter of time before Featherstone struck back at the men who framed him and sent him to prison for murder.

  Featherstone was convicted in the murder of Michael Holly outside the Jacob Javits Convention Center on April 25, 1985.

  Eyewitnesses had testified that it was Featherstone who screwed a silencer on a pistol and at high noon walked up behind Holly. The motive was the final settlement of an old feud in which Holly had been shot once before. In 1977 John Bokun, a Featherstone henchman, attacked Holly on Featherstone’s orders as part of a struggle over a construction contract. Holly was hit in the leg, but Bokun was killed by a cop as he fled the scene.

  Featherstone made it widely known that he believed Holly was cooperating with police in trying to nail him for that shooting in 1977.

  Witnesses to the second shooting of William Holly said they were sure it was Featherstone and said they saw the killer flee in a brown station wagon registered to the Erie Transfer Company, where Featherstone worked.

  Based on the eyewitness accounts, Featherstone was arrested and within a year was convicted and sentenced to at least twenty-five years in prison for murder.

  Mickey Featherstone was no virgin when it came to being accused of murder. The Coffey Gang had him as a prime suspect in seven homicides and he had already served a prison sentence for manslaughter, but he was not going to allow himself to be framed and not strike back. He suspected Coonan had set him up, and he resented being dealt with in such a manner. If Coonan and McElroy wanted him out of the way so that they could control the Westies, he would have preferred to be murdered rather than be put in prison for life.

  Featherstone was a supply room clerk in Vietnam who never saw a day of lighting but tried to explain away his murderous personality as battle fatigue. He decided to strike back. Not trusting the New York police, he called former Assistant U.S. Attorney Block, who interceded with the Manhattan DA.

  They listened to Featherstone’s story and agreed to let his wife Cissy wear a wire and try to trap the three men who Featherstone believed carried out the crime on the orders of Coonan: William Bokun, John’s brother; Kevin Kelly; and William Shannon.

  Cissy met with the men at the Ninth Avenue food festival, an annual event celebrating the ethnic diversity of the West Side, and on tape they admitted their roles.

  The Manhattan district attorney was convinced that the Westies used a Broadway makeup man to make Bokun look like Featherstone. Shannon, they believed, drove the getaway car provided by Bokun, who, like Featherstone, worked for Erie Transfer and was the mastermind. Kelly helped with the plan. The disguise was so good it actually fooled the witnesses, who picked Featherstone out of a lineup.

  Despite all the energy and interest the Coffey Gang invested in its 1979 investigation of the Westies, Joe never had a face-to-face confrontation with Featherstone. The one time the gang arrested him, Featherstone was a prisoner on Rikers Island, the city’s largest jail, where suspects are held awaiting trial.

  Nevertheless, Featherstone blamed Coffey for all the Westies’ troubles. He would often repeat in saloon conversations how “that fucking Joe Coffey shoulda kept his nose out of the West Side” and how “Coffey was trying to ruin things with ‘Big Paulie.’”

  Shortly after Featherstone agreed to be a government witness, he told the FBI that when Joe left the NYPD he tried to get a position as head of security for the Javits Convention Center. “I went to ‘Big Paulie’ and stopped it,” Featherstone bragged to anyone who would listen. The claim was a total lie.

  At this time Featherstone was being held at the Metropolitan Correction Center. He was transported to the Manhattan district attorney’s office every day for interviews with prosecutors and other law enforcement agencies. He talked for hours about the criminal exploits of his West Side crew.

  Coffey was then heading up a New York State Organized Crime Task Force unit looking into mob control of the construction industry. He was asked to interview Featherstone to see if the stoolie could help tie any loose ends together.

  “I remember Featherstone, who looked like a choirboy, sitting behind a table acting like he was king of the underworld. I knew him to be little more than a sadistic killer, but the assistant U.S. attorneys and the district attorney, basically a bunch of young kids, were fawning over him like he was Meyer Lansky,” Joe says. “I asked him a few questions, just to get his opinion for the record—I really already knew most of what he could possibly tell us—and then I couldn’t hold back any longer.”

  “Why did you tell the FBI that I tried to get the security job at the Javits Center?” Joe asked him.

  “You did, you needed a job, didn’t ya?” Featherstone muttered in response.

  “You little prick, you know I never tried to get that job. You think anyone would believe I’d get myself mobbed up in an operation like the Javits Center?” Joe, his broad face now red with anger, bellowed.

  Featherstone, clearly afraid that his nemesis was about to reach across the table and grab him by the neck, turned to Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Lee Warren for help. The young woman quickly entered the fray, screaming at Joe to cool off and to stop badgering the killer.

  “What are you, his mother or a prosecutor?” Coffey barked at the woman.

  “That remark quieted the room down, and I got control of myself,” Joe recalls. “I think they all realized that the story about the security job was a figment of Featherstone’s imagination. I never went after the job. Not that there would have been anything illegal about it if I had. I just did not like the idea of his trying to be a big shot at my expense.”

  Featherstone eventually became one of the most celebrated canaries in mob history. He rolled over 100 percent on his old gang, telling the same tales of the brutal, senseless murders and the connections to Paul Castellano that had filled Joe Coffey’s reports eight years earlier. He told about the murder of a man whose decapitated head was tossed into a furnace. He testified about Eddie Commiskey’s penchant for cutting up bodies.

  The government called seventy witnesses to back up Featherstone’s testimony. One recalled the dismemberment of the gambler Ricky Tassiello, carried out in the bathroom of a West Side apartment. “Every time I looked in the bathroom he was getting shorter,” the witness said.

  Another time he testified that McElroy attacked a gangster named Bobby Lagville with Lagville’s baseball bat and then ran him over with his car several times.

  From the stand Featherstone called Joe Coffey “Joe Publicity” because he loved to make the Westies look bad in the press. Joe’s love for seeing his name in print was a charge that shadowed him throughout his career. Behind the scenes Featherstone told FBI agents, jealous of Coffey’s reputation as the man who had busted the Westies and trying to make a case against him, that Coffey could not be bribed.

  He reported being called to a meeting in a Brooklyn restaurant in 1977 with Paul Castellano. He admitted he and Jimmy Coonan were afraid of going to the meeting, thinking Castellano might want to kill them because they had knocked off a couple of Italian bookies. They order
ed a group of Westies to stand by in a West Side apartment with hand grenades and shotguns. If the two leaders did not return in two hours, the gang was to kill everybody in the restaurant.

  What Castellano wanted to know was if the Westies had killed the notorious loan shark Charles “Ruby” Stein in 1977. “We want his black book; it has millions of dollars in shylock loans,” Castellano said. The boys from the West Side denied having anything to do with Stein’s murder.

  Featherstone said Castellano told him and Coonan to stop acting like “wild cowboys—if anyone is going to be killed it has to be cleared with us.”

  “That meant we were with the Gambino family now,” Featherstone testified in November 1987. Hearing about that bit of testimony, Coffey remembered his own meeting with Castellano and how surprised he was when “Big Paulie” admitted knowing Coonan and Featherstone.

  “‘Big Paulie’ said he expected 10 percent of everything we made except for shylocking,” Featherstone continued that day on the witness stand.

  He told a nerve-wracking story of how the Westies were given a contract on Anthony Scotto, boss of the Brooklyn piers, in a dispute over jobs at the Javits Convention Center, and how it was called off minutes before it was to be carried out. “We were going to get $15,000 for the murder and $30,000 if we made the body disappear,” he testified.

  In the face of all this incriminating testimony, defense lawyers for the eight Westies on trial, including Coonan’s wife Edna, could only argue that Featherstone was a “hopeless alcoholic” and “paranoid killer.”

  When Featherstone was finished with his operatic performance, Jimmy Coonan ended up with a sixty-five-year stretch that included time for the murder of Patty Dugan. Jimmy McElroy got his long-overdue reservation in a prison cell for sixty years. Six other Westie leaders were also sent to prison. Shannon, Bokun, and Kelly were sent away for conspiracy to commit murder. Featherstone is a free man and is being hidden through the Federal Witness Protection Program.