Westies

by T. J. English

  What’s more, the word on the street was that Spillane “didn’t have the balls” anymore. He was always getting other people to pull the trigger for him, just so he could stay clean in the eyes of the legitimate folk. There was even a story making the rounds that Spillane had agreed to pay a neighborhood kid, Alfred Scott, $5,000 to do a shooting for him. When Scott did it, Spillane reneged on the deal and the kid had to go on the lam in Arizona without a cent to his name.

  True or not, that didn’t wash anymore. There was a new breed now, more restless and violent than their immediate predecessors. If the working-class Irish of Hell’s Kitchen had become something of a lost tribe in the 1960s, then this younger generation were the children of that lost tribe. The most dominant symbol of their lives was not J.F.K. riding proudly along Pennsylvania Avenue on Inauguration Day, but J.F.K. slumped over in the back seat of a limousine in Dallas, his brains splattered all over his wife Jackie’s dress.

  It was only a matter of time before one of these Young Turks stepped forward to lay claim to his generation’s inheritance. Since the earliest days of gangsterism in Hell’s Kitchen it had always happened that way, youth rising up to exert its physical authority. The only question was whether this person would have the cojones to take on someone as popular as Mickey Spillane, and once he’d done that, whether he’d be able to instill discipline into this increasingly wanton younger generation.

  It was a daunting proposition. But before long a nineteen-year-old neighborhood kid with golden hair and a broad smile began to make his moves. Not since the days of the goofy and homicidal Mad Dog Coll would Hell’s Kitchen see someone make their presence felt with such youthful audacity, such ambition, such brutal panache. This kid had all the makings of a serious challenger: he was manipulative, physically impressive, and he had a personal vendetta against Spillane he’d been harboring for years.

  The year was 1966. The kid’s name was James Michael Coonan.

  3

  JIMMY SOWS HIS OATS

  It’s this fuckin’ Mike Spillane,” said Eddie Sullivan. “We wanna take him out.”

  Sullivan looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He was sporting a five-day stubble on his chin, his eyes were bloodshot, and he was chain-smoking cigarettes like they were the only thing keeping his lungs going. It was March 1966 and Sullivan was seated in a Naugahyde booth in the back of Tony’s Cafe, a nondescript little bar on West 72nd Street in upper Manhattan, speaking to his old friend and criminal partner, Bobby Huggard. Huggard was accompanied by Georgie Saflita, his criminal partner. Rounding out this ragged ensemble was young Jimmy Coonan and his older brother, Jackie.

  Built like a bull, with bulging forearms and a vacant, steely look in his eyes, Bobby Huggard was a hard-core criminal. Though only twenty-one, he’d already been charged a half-dozen times with an assortment of violent crimes, including numerous counts of felonious assault, his specialty. Even in jail Huggard was known as a mean dude. In other words, not a bad guy to have at your side if you were planning to engage in an all-out gang war.

  Huggard knew all about Mickey Spillane. Recently, he’d moved from Queens to the West Side of Manhattan, where he rented a small apartment on 43rd Street, just a few blocks from Spillane’s White House Bar. Huggard had a cousin who regularly placed bets with Spillane. One afternoon, his cousin had introduced him to Spillane, Eddie Cummiskey, and some of the others who hung out regularly at the White House.

  Huggard didn’t really give a fuck about Spillane one way or the other. He’d met him, that was all. In fact, once he got a look at Spillane, he couldn’t really figure out how he’d gotten to be such a power on the West Side. Spillane was about forty pounds lighter than Huggard and dressed in a suit and tie. The way Huggard saw it, he didn’t seem like a tough guy at all; just a high liver.

  While Huggard demurred, Eddie Sullivan sipped on his beer and lit up another cigarette. “What we wanna know, Bobby, is are you with us on this thing or not.”

  Huggard shrugged. It wasn’t the best offer he’d ever had, but it was something to do. “Sure, Eddie. You know you can count on me.”

  For the next thirty minutes, Eddie Sullivan explained how they were going to build an arsenal to take on Spillane. But before they did that, he said, they would need cash. And to get cash they would have to pull a robbery. Sullivan knew a bar in the Bronx he felt would be a pushover. That would be their first target.

  Bobby Huggard listened as Eddie Sullivan babbled away. Some of it made sense; some of it made no sense at all. Occasionally Jackie Coonan jumped in with a comment. Nineteen-year-old Jimmy Coonan, by far the youngest person at the table, hardly spoke at all.

  To Huggard, this was intriguing. He knew all about Jimmy Coonan’s feud with Spillane. From what he’d heard, Spillane once pistol-whipped Coonan’s old man and Jimmy had turned vengeance into a personal crusade. There was definitely something about this kid, thought Huggard. Even as the others did all the talking here at Tony’s Bar—with the elder Eddie Sullivan assuming the role of leader—Huggard could tell the person really behind the move on Spillane was this intense little blond-haired kid, Jimmy Coonan.

  * * *

  Unlike a lot of Irish kids in Hell’s Kitchen who fell prey to the neighborhood’s “glorious” tradition of gangsterism, Jimmy Coonan had come from a respectable middle-class background. His father, John Coonan, was a certified public accountant. Coonan’s Tax Service at 369 West 50th Street was no great threat to E. F. Hutton, but it was steady employment. Coonan’s mother, Anna, who was of part German extraction, also worked there.

  Born on December 21, 1946, Jimmy was the second of John’s and Anna’s four children. Their residence was a five-room walk-up at 434 West 49th, between 9th and 10th avenues. As a teenager, Jimmy was only five-foot-seven-inches tall, but stocky, with a thick neck and broad shoulders. He showed a lot of promise as a boxer, a skill he would later hone at Elmira Reformatory. Although he was a reasonably affable youngster, he was known to have an explosive temper. Once, at the age of seventeen, he got in a fight with a neighborhood kid. The kid wound up in a local hospital with nearly sixty lacerations on his face and body.

  It was also at the age of seventeen that Coonan dropped out of high school and began running with the neighborhood’s professional criminal element. Because of his boxer’s physique, it was always assumed Coonan would be one of a dozen strong-arm types, the kind of kid a more established racketeer might use to do the dirty work for him. But Jimmy showed early on that he had higher aspirations, and he was smart, always looking to form alliances that might strengthen his position in the neighborhood.

  One of the first partnerships Coonan formed was with brawny, brown-haired Eddie Sullivan, a small-time burglar and bank robber who was nearly fifteen years his senior. Sullivan was a free-lance criminal, not attached to any gang, who often hung out in West Side saloons looking to borrow money or drum up business.

  Mickey Spillane, for one, never liked Sullivan. Not only was he not from Hell’s Kitchen, but he was a drunk and a troublemaker who seemed to have designs on the neighborhood rackets. One time, in the back of the White House Bar, Spillane and his brother even had to give Sullivan a beating just so he’d stop coming around the neighborhood.

  To young Jimmy Coonan, Sullivan was useful. For one thing, ever since the Spillane brothers smacked him around, Sullivan had been saying he was going to make a move on Mickey Spillane whether Coonan was with him or not. Jimmy knew Sullivan was crazy enough to do it, and that if he used Sullivan properly, Coonan would be the prime beneficiary.

  The other thing was that Sullivan had a lot of criminal contacts from his many years in prison. If Coonan was going to make a serious move on Spillane, he knew he’d need an arsenal and a few helping hands. At the moment, it was only himself, Sullivan, and his twenty-two-year-old brother, Jackie, against the Spillane twins and at least a dozen other guys who’d come to Spillane’s defense.

  It was Sullivan who reached out to Bobby Huggard, who he’d once done
stickups with. That’s how they’d all wound up at Tony’s Bar on West 72nd Street this sunny March afternoon. They were a ragtag collection of criminal misfits, an unlikely crew to take on someone as powerful and well-liked as Mickey Spillane. But with Sullivan’s know-how, Huggard’s brawn, and, most of all, Jimmy Coonan’s desire, they were determined to follow this thing through to its logical—or even illogical—conclusion.

  Within days of the meeting at Tony’s Bar, developments on the West Side were threatening to overtake Coonan, Sullivan, and their makeshift crew. For one thing, the Bobby Lagville killing went down. Lagville was the guy who was sent by Spillane to kill Eddie Sullivan. But Lagville had been found out by Coonan & Company, taken out to Long Island City, and turned into a receptacle for an assortment of large-caliber bullets.

  Detectives from the 108th Precinct in Queens were asking questions up and down 10th Avenue trying to find out who might have had a motive for killing Little Bobby Lagville, a known Hell’s Kitchen gangster. In keeping with the West Side Code, nobody knew nothin’.

  One person the cops questioned was Julius “Dutch” Grote, a strapping ex-con and neighborhood gambler who worked behind the bar at Pearlie’s, a saloon on 9th Avenue between 48th and 49th streets. Grote told the police he knew Lagville because they’d worked together in the Metal Lathers union. But that was all he had to say.

  What he didn’t tell the cops was that on March 22, 1966, the night Lagville disappeared, he’d stopped by Pearlie’s for a drink. Lagville told Grote he’d been called to a meeting with Sullivan, Jimmy and Jackie Coonan. Grote had been with Spillane and Tommy Collins when Jimmy Coonan sprayed them with machine-gun fire from a West 46th Street rooftop. So he knew there was a gang war going on. He asked Lagville, “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “I got no choice, Dutch,” Bobby replied. “They called me, I gotta go.”

  Now the cops were telling Grote that Bobby Lagville had been shot seven or eight times, stabbed repeatedly, then run over by a car.

  Only the car was an exaggeration.

  Not long after the Lagville murder, Jimmy, Jackie, and Eddie Sullivan stumbled into Pearlie’s. They looked demented, as if they’d been up for weeks without sleep. Dutch Grote knew they’d been hunting around the neighborhood for Mickey Spillane the last few days, and that Spillane had gone into hiding.

  Sullivan, his thick features frozen in some permanent, sinister expression of paranoia, had a long gray overcoat on. Underneath the coat he was holding a glistening chrome-colored submachine gun.

  “Where the fuck’s Spillane?” Sullivan asked Dutch Grote.

  Like a lot of people in Hell’s Kitchen at the time, Dutch had been trying to remain neutral during the Coonan/Spillane Wars. He’d gambled with Spillane a lot and thought of him as a godfather. But he knew the Coonans, too. In fact, John Coonan, Jimmy’s and Jackie’s father, had been the best man at his wedding. So he wasn’t about to take sides.

  “He was in here this morning,” said Grote, “but I ain’t seen him since.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “Hey, Dutch,” asked Jackie Coonan. “Whose side you on anyway?”

  “I’m on nobody’s side, Jackie; you know that. I walk right down the middle.”

  There was some mumbling among the three of them as they looked around the bar. Grote thought he heard Jackie say, “He’s a fuckin’ liar and we oughta get rid of him.” To which Jimmy said, “No, he’s neighborhood. He’s good people.” Then they left.

  A few days later, Jimmy, Jackie, and Eddie Sullivan met again with Bobby Huggard and Georgie Saflita uptown at Tony’s Bar. They were all in a surly mood, chain-smoking cigarettes and swigging beer. While they’d been looking for Spillane, there were all kinds of rumors surfacing about hired gunmen being flown in from Texas and Boston to blow them away. The Coonan/Spillane Wars had become like a runaway train. There wasn’t much time, they figured. They’d have to pull the Bronx stickup immediately.

  That night at around 12 A.M. they all piled into Eddie Sullivan’s girlfriend’s rented car. They drove to a small bar near Westchester Square in the Bronx, underneath the elevated railway. All five of them went into the bar. The take wasn’t much, but it was the easiest $800 any of them had made in a long time. They didn’t even have to fire a shot.

  From there, they drove through the night to Bennington, Vermont, where they had no trouble buying four handguns—two .38-caliber automatics, a .45, and a .25 Beretta. They slept the next morning at a hotel in Bennington, then headed to Georgie Saflita’s apartment in New Jersey.

  At Georgie’s place, the boys patted themselves on the back. So far, things were going swell. Eddie Sullivan said he knew of a numbers joint in Greenwich Village they should hit next, and everybody agreed that was a good idea. In the meantime, with Spillane’s alleged hitmen after them, they decided to split up and reconvene back at Georgie’s apartment in a few days. Georgie stayed put with his wife, Jimmy and Eddie Sullivan went to stay at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan, and Jackie and Bobby Huggard headed for Brooklyn. It was April Fools’ Day, 1966.

  In Brooklyn, Jackie and Bobby immediately went to a bar where Huggard used to hang out when he lived on Kent Avenue in Greenpoint. They planned to spend the night at Huggard’s ex-wife’s apartment, but first they would have a few drinks and relax. They were both carrying weapons from the buy in Vermont, Jackie a .45 and Huggard a .38.

  Huggard liked Jackie. He was about the same size as his younger brother Jimmy—five-nine and 175 pounds—and he liked to grease his sandy-blond hair straight back in a vintage 1950s ducktail. He seemed a lot more talkative and easygoing than his brother, who was about the most serious nineteen-year-old Huggard had ever met.

  Huggard and Jackie sat for a few hours, telling jokes and getting quietly stewed. Then Jackie said he had to go outside for a while and would be right back.

  It was now about 2:30 A.M. Huggard sat in the bar for at least an hour asking himself, “Where the fuck is Jackie?” Finally, the bartender told him he had to close up the joint. Huggard left the bar and walked a couple of blocks to Greenpoint Avenue. Two blocks to the north, at the intersection of Greenpoint and Manhattan avenues, Huggard saw two or three squad cars gathered around a corner saloon with their lights flashing. There were cops everywhere.

  Nervously, Huggard sidled up to the bar to find out what was going on. He peeked through a window.

  Inside the bar, spread-eagle on the floor, was Jackie Coonan. Standing over him were two cops with their revolvers pointed at his head.

  Huggard got the hell out of there as fast as he could. The next day, from his ex-wife’s place, he called Coonan’s father to find out what had happened. It turned out Jackie had tried to rob the bar on Greenpoint Avenue, and the bartender had jumped over the counter after him.

  So Jackie shot him dead.

  Huggard knew there was bound to be some kind of investigation. He got together what money he could and immediately got the fuck out of New York City.

  In the meantime, Jimmy Coonan and Eddie Sullivan heard what happened and stayed put at their friend Billy Murtha’s apartment. They were pissed off. Things had been building nicely towards a showdown with Spillane, and now Jackie had to screw it all up by killing a bartender in Brooklyn for no good reason. It would really be hot on the West Side now; they would have to be on their toes even more than usual.

  A few days later, Charles Canelstein and Jerry Morales walked into the Pussycat Lounge and bumped into a very paranoid Eddie Sullivan. Hours later, in a vacant lot across from Calvary Cemetery in Queens, they were both riddled with lead and left to die. Unfortunately for Coonan and the boys, it was a sloppy hit and Canelstein lived. (Unfortunately for Jerry Morales, it wasn’t that sloppy. He was dead by the time the cops arrived.)

  On May 12, 1966—thirty-seven days after the shooting—Charles Canelstein was wheeled into the Queens County criminal courthouse on a gurney. Before a grand jury, he identified Eddie Sulliva
n as the triggerman and Jimmy Coonan and the others as his accomplices. What he remembered most vividly was the noise coming from his assailants after he was shot.

  “I heard footsteps going back to the car,” he said. “I heard the doors shut and I heard a hysterical kind of laughter. It wasn’t like somebody told a joke, it was almost an animalistic kind of laughter coming from the car.”

  All four were indicted. Eddie Sullivan, a three-time loser, was convicted and given a life sentence.

  Jimmy Coonan plea-bargained and wound up getting five to ten for felonious assault. He served his time quietly at an assortment of penal facilities, including Sing Sing, where he was reunited with his brother Jackie.

  In the meantime, the Coonan/Spillane Wars were put on hold.

  At the same time Jimmy Coonan was waging war with Mickey Spillane, Francis Featherstone was passing through adolescence. He’d been born and raised in an apartment at 45th Street and 10th Avenue, just six blocks from Coonan, and later moved to 501 1/2 West 43rd Street. The last of nine children, Mickey, as he was known to family and friends, was two years younger than Jimmy. By 1966, the two Hell’s Kitchen Irishmen had heard of each other, but they traveled in different circles. Mickey was a baby-faced kid who nobody payed much attention to, Jimmy a young gangster on the make.

  On April 27, 1966, just three weeks after Coonan’s arrest for the Canelstein/Morales shooting, seventeen-year-old Mickey Featherstone enlisted in the army. Ultimate destination: Vietnam. While Jimmy Coonan put down his guns and readied himself for a prison sentence, Featherstone was being issued a weapon by the United States government. By November, they would be in opposite corners of the earth—Coonan in prison in upstate New York, Featherstone on his way to Saigon.