Westies

by T. J. English

  Jimmy said thanks, he appreciated it, and that’s where they left it.

  Over the months that followed, Featherstone thought about Coonan’s offer every now and then. The only money he had coming in were his $150-a-week veteran’s benefits (he’d been declared 100 percent disabled) and social security. At the moment, he was living with his half-brother Bobby and not paying rent, so he didn’t have many expenses. But he knew he was going to need some steady bread somewhere along the line. A straight job was out of the question, of course, even if he had been able to get one with his prison record, which was doubtful. He’d tried a few quick-cash schemes, but nothing seemed to add up to much. All roads kept leading back to Jimmy Coonan’s offer.…

  One thing was sure: If Mickey Featherstone wanted to get involved in organized crime, he wouldn’t have to spend much time establishing a reputation. Since beating his murder rap on an insanity plea, he’d served just under five years (including his pre-trial incarceration) for possession of an unregistered weapon in the Willis shooting. After being sentenced in early ’73, he’d bounced from facility to facility. First it was the Bronx State Hospital for eight months, then Sing Sing for a month, then Comstock for nine months, Matteawan for two months, Great Meadow for eight months, Attica for a few weeks, then back to Matteawan for the remainder of his “bit.”

  Unlike Coonan, who’d done his time for the Canelstein/Morales shooting without incident, Featherstone’s five years had been a horror show. He kept getting relocated from psychiatric wings to general population, where he’d get into fights and be sent back to the nuthouse.

  When he was finally released in May of 1975, his attorney, Larry Hochheiser, plea-bargained on the remaining charges. Manhattan district Judge Harold Rothwax gave Featherstone five years’ probation for both the John Riley homicide and possession of a weapon in the shooting death of Emilio “Mio” Rattagliatti. Soon he was back on the West Side.

  When he returned, those who knew Featherstone detected a slight difference. He seemed somewhat less agitated than before and a little more outgoing. His years in prison had helped bring his anger into focus, making him less wantonly dangerous, though harder and more calculating. Before prison, Mickey didn’t have a concrete identity. Now, emboldened by his experiences, he saw himself as a survivor. He’d never allow himself to be “victimized” again like those years after ’Nam.

  Despite the personality changes, as he settled back into the neighborhood the end result was largely the same: Mickey found trouble at every turn. Along with the police, who he was sure were out to get him, there were the folks in the neighborhood saloons. With his Vietnam background, numerous homicides, dozens of barroom brawls, and ex-con status, he was already a legend in Hell’s Kitchen. When people met him, they were often surprised by how small and unassuming he looked. Some fools figured it would enhance their reputation if they kicked his ass, just so they could tell their friends they’d made a punk out of Mickey Featherstone.

  On one such occasion Mickey was drinking in the 596 Club in the middle of the afternoon. A guy who wasn’t even from the neighborhood was there with his girlfriend giving Mickey a hard time. He was bragging about being some kind of karate expert. After numerous insults were hurled back and forth, the guy asked, “You think you’re a motherfuckin’ war hero? Is that it? You think you got balls? Well, I got more balls than the balls you got.”

  Eventually he and Featherstone faced each other down. When the so-called karate expert went into his kung fu stance, Mickey, without even putting his drink down, belted him once in the face. The karate expert fell to the floor, whereupon Mickey grabbed a barstool and set it on the floor over the guy, pinning him helplessly to the ground. Then he made the guy’s overweight girlfriend sit on the stool and have a drink.

  “But I don’t want no drink,” she said.

  “So what,” said Featherstone. “You’re gonna sit there on that stool till you finish the drink, whether you like it or not.”

  Sometimes it was so crazy Mickey just had to laugh. He’d gone from Hell’s Kitchen to ’Nam to nuthouses to prisons. Now he was back in the environment he knew best. But he was beginning to think maybe this was the worst of all, and it was getting worse every day.

  In December 1975, just days after his conversation with Billy Beattie and Jimmy Coonan about Paddy Dugan’s demise, Featherstone’s life took an unexpected turn. Once again, it began in a bar—this time in Amy’s Pub, one of the neighborhood’s more respectable saloons, located on 9th Avenue between 55th and 56th streets. Much of Amy’s clientele came from the television and recording studios on West 57th Street, one of midtown Manhattan’s busiest crosstown thoroughfares. The bar had a large picture window that overlooked 9th Avenue. The inside was always well lit and thick with plants and hanging ferns. They even had tablecloths at Amy’s, an amenity unheard of at most of the places Featherstone frequented.

  One evening, while Mickey was minding his own business, a group of local girls sauntered in and took a table near the back of the bar. He recognized a few of them, particularly a nicely built blonde he’d seen a few times since he got back from prison. He leaned over to the barman, who he knew, and asked about her.

  “That’s Sissy,” said the man behind the bar. “Tommy Houlihan’s sister.”

  Mickey did a double take. “That’s Tommy Houlihan’s sister? Man, she’s grown.”

  Featherstone vaguely remembered Sissy as a nondescript little girl from around the neighborhood. Now nineteen, eight years younger than Mickey, she was five-foot-three, had brown eyes, a sharp, slightly upturned nose, and sandy-blond hair just like his. She also fit nicely, very nicely, into a pair of jeans. He knew a little bit about her past; that her last name was actually Knell and that her mother had remarried. He’d heard something about one of her brothers overdosing and another being beaten and paralyzed for life. Naturally, he was intrigued.

  He walked over to her table. “Hey, how ya doin’? I’m Mickey Featherstone.”

  “I know who you are,” she said in a tough, unmistakable Hell’s Kitchen accent. “So what?”

  Mickey was taken aback. “Hey, listen, I ain’t gettin’ smart with you or nothin’. I know your family and everything, so I was just sayin’ hello.”

  “So because you’re Mickey Featherstone I’m supposed to talk to you? Is that it?”

  “No. I was just tryin’ to be friendly. Forget about it.”

  Featherstone walked back over to the bar. After that, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He could see she was giggling and talking to her friends about him. Later, when there weren’t as many people around, he went over to the table again. She was friendlier this time. He bought her a drink. They got up and danced.

  After that, they started seeing each other regularly. They both came from broken families and violent backgrounds, so they had a lot in common. Since Mickey’s first marriage had been such a disaster, he wasn’t anxious to get involved in anything serious. But he and Sissy got along so well he couldn’t believe it. She was pretty and streetwise; he was a tough guy. They fit each other’s needs.

  Soon they were hanging out late at night at her mother’s apartment, sometimes making love on the floor by the light of the television. During the day, whenever Sissy got time off from her part-time job as an usherette at the nearby Broadway theaters, they’d go to Central Park. Sissy liked to go ice-skating. Mickey liked to watch her.

  For Sissy, the relationship with Mickey brought stability to her life—a pretty good indication of just how screwed up she’d been. When Mickey came along, she was just beginning to get out from under a heroin habit she’d developed at the age of seventeen. That habit had led her to engage in purse snatching and wallet stealing. She’d known she was headed in a bad direction, but it wasn’t until she saw two of her girlfriends reduced to hooking on 10th Avenue that she knew she had to pull herself out of it. Through her stepfather she’d landed a job as an usherette. Tentatively, she’d been putting the pieces back together when Mickey c
ame along. The way she saw it, he was her reward for kicking her junk habit.

  Eventually Mickey moved out of his brother Bobby’s apartment and in with Sissy’s family on West 51st Street, near Sacred Heart Church. It was crowded—there were maybe six or seven people living in a five-room flat most of the time—but they got by. Then they moved into their own place, a new apartment at 520 West 56th Street, on the fifteenth floor.

  Featherstone tried to lead some semblance of a normal life, but it wasn’t easy. For one thing, he was still drinking constantly, sometimes a quart of whiskey over the course of a day. He’d also gotten into smoking hash and marijuana. Whatever it took to deaden the senses, to get him to a place where he felt no pain—that was Featherstone’s daily goal. Increasingly, his habits were leading to a need for more cash.

  Undaunted by the state parole board, who’d warned him and Jackie Coonan not to consort with one another, Mickey and Jackie opened an after-hours club on 44th Street between 9th and 10th avenues. Ostensibly, it was supposed to make Mickey and Jackie a few bucks and serve as a place where the neighborhood crowd could drink peaceably without being hassled. A nice idea. But given the company Mickey and Jackie kept, there was never much chance it would work out that way.

  One night, Mickey was there with Eddie Cummiskey, Jimmy Coonan, and a group of Puerto Ricans from Brooklyn. There was a card game going on, but Mickey was hardly paying attention. He’d been drinking most of the day, and then later that night somebody brought in some Thai stick. Mickey smoked a few joints and was flying high. Everything was a blur. He moved slowly past the card game, past the pool table, into a back room to lie down.

  The music was loud. Something in the back room was glowing in the dark, somewhere. Mickey closed his eyes and his head started to spin. He heard shouting and arguing in the distance. Maybe I should help, he thought to himself. Maybe they need me.

  The next afternoon, he woke up in the same spot he’d crashed the night before. As he walked into the front room, his head was throbbing. The place looked like a tornado had hit it—chairs and ashtrays were turned over, glasses were broken, debris was scattered all around. It stank of stale whiskey and cheap cigars.

  Standing by the pool table were Jimmy Coonan and Eddie Cummiskey. They looked haggard, as if they’d been up all night without sleep. Featherstone strained to see through his swollen, bloodshot eyes. He noticed that the smooth felt covering on the pool table was soiled with some dark liquid that looked like blood.

  “What the fuck?” he asked, staring in disbelief. “What happened?”

  “You don’t remember?” asked Cummiskey, a devious twinkle in his eyes. “You knifed a fuckin’ spic hustler last night. Cut the shit outta him. Killed the fucker.”

  Featherstone was skeptical. “Naaah. Where’s the body then?”

  Cummiskey smiled that twisted smile of his. “We made it do the Houdini act.”

  Mickey stared at Eddie and Jimmy, who were now laughing, then at the blood-stained pool table. He had no recollection of killing anybody that night, but anything was possible.

  His head felt like shit and so did his stomach. “You guys are full of it,” said Mickey, as he made for the toilet, his stomach beginning to heave.

  Eddie and Jimmy just kept laughing. Mickey went into the bathroom and threw up in the sink.

  A few days later, in January 1976, Mickey was to witness “the Houdini act” in living color. This time the victim was a neighborhood guy known as Ugly Walter, and once again the perpetrators were Eddie and Jimmy.

  Seeing Ugly Walter disappear piece by piece was a memory Mickey would spend the next ten years of his life trying to forget.

  At the same time bodies began to disappear in Hell’s Kitchen, Police Officer Richie Egan was assigned to the Syndicated Crime Unit of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. In 1974, he’d worked on OPERATION UNCOVER, a major narcotics investigation set in his old post in Spanish Harlem. After that, in ’75, he’d tracked a big-time cocaine dealer named James Austin, a bogus M.D. who’d set up a distribution ring in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

  While working on these cases, Egan was acquiring expertise on organized crime in general. Part of his job was to update files on some of the biggest mobsters in New York, including Fat Tony Salerno, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, and Carlo Gambino, then boss of the powerful Gambino crime family. Much of his workday was spent following gangsters on their daily routines. In time, Egan came to know their habits: where they conducted business, how they communicated, where they buried the bodies.

  He didn’t know it yet, but his expertise would soon lead him to the most hazardous investigation of his career, one that would require he spend most of his waking hours in the diners, bars, and backalleys of the bloody and volatile West Side.

  7

  DOIN’ BUSINESS

  In the summer of 1976, Hell’s Kitchen played an integral role in one of the most spectacular celebrations the city of New York had ever seen. On the Bicentennial, July 4th, an armada of sixteen tall ships from around the world and a parade of more than 225 sailing vessels made its way up the Hudson. A twenty-two-nation fleet of fifty-three naval units lined the river. The host ship of the review, the 79,000-ton aircraft carrier Forrestal, was moored at the West 46th Street pier. Among the 3,000 distinguished guests on board was President Gerald Ford, who reviewed the proceedings from a grandstand on the ship’s flight deck.

  The irony, of course, was that even as New York celebrated the nation’s 200th birthday in high style, the city itself was dying. An economic crisis had put New York on a crash course with bankruptcy. For months, Mayor Abraham Beame had been imposing severe austerity measures, cutting back on all manner of city services. Poor and working-class neighborhoods were hit the hardest. Development ceased. The streets went unswept. The police patrolled in smaller and smaller numbers.

  In Hell’s Kitchen, the terrain began to look a lot like the South Bronx, the city’s most notorious ghetto. Residents and small-shop owners pulled the gates down on their stores, locked them, and left in droves. Even in the best of times, the neighborhood often had a ramshackle, derelict air. But now, as the city’s finances worsened, it seemed perched on the edge of total neglect.

  On August 20, 1976, roughly six weeks after the Bicentennial, Eddie Cummiskey was drinking in the Sunbrite Bar at 1:30 in the afternoon. A car pulled up to the bar and double-parked. A lone man got out, went into the bar and put a gun to the back of Cummiskcy’s head. He fired one shot. The bullet entered Eddie’s skull on the right side just below the ear, then lacerated upward through the right and left lobe until it finally lodged itself in the upper left hemisphere of the brain. Bleeding profusely, Cummiskey slumped over on the bar and immediately lapsed into a coma from which he never recovered.

  The gunman calmly left the bar, got back in his car, and drove off.

  A small crowd soon gathered in front of the bar, drawn by the wailing sirens from the ambulance and the police cars rushing up 10th Avenue. Mickey Featherstone was there. So was Tony Lucich. As Cummiskey’s body was brought out on a stretcher, a nearby patrolman asked Lucich, “That’s Eddie Cummiskey, right?”

  “Yep,” said Lucich. “That was Eddie Cummiskey.”

  Lucich remembered seeing Eddie just a few weeks earlier, on the 4th of July. They’d had a couple of drinks together, and when Eddie got up to leave he slapped Lucich on the back and said, “Well Tony, we’ll have to do it again next centennial.”

  That was the way Lucich was always going to remember Eddie Cummiskey.

  After Cummiskey’s death, Featherstone met with Jimmy Coonan in the bar of the Skyline Motor Inn, just across the avenue from the Sunbrite. Ever since it was first built in 1959, the Skyline had been a frequent gathering place for the neighborhood’s criminal element. On Sunday mornings, Mickey Spillane and his crowd used to gather in the dining area so they could be seen by the dozens of neighborhood well-wishers who inevitably came by to pay their respects. Coonan preferred to do his business
in the bar, where it was darker and less populated.

  Jimmy was worried about the Eddie Cummiskey hit. Moments after Cummiskey was shot, Jackie Coonan had run over to his apartment and gotten an old photograph taken at Sing Sing Prison in 1969. In the picture were Jackie, Jimmy, and a few other people, including Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan. Jackie had shown the photograph to the bartender at the Sunbrite, who was still in a state of shock from just having seen Cummiskey get half his head blown off. But he was able to identify Mad Dog Sullivan as the triggerman.

  Joe Sullivan (no relation to Eddie Sullivan, Coonan’s partner from the late Sixties) was a well-known free-lance assassin from way back. His claim to fame was a prison break he’d made from the Attica Correctional Facility in April of ’71. At the time, no one had ever escaped from Attica—a maximum-security, upstate New York prison—in its forty-year history. Sullivan, then thirty-two years old, had done so by hiding himself beneath some grain and feed sacks piled aboard a truck that left the prison in broad daylight. He was captured five weeks later strolling down a street in Greenwich Village.

  Both in and out of prison, Sullivan was known as a trigger-happy gunman, frequently employed by La Cosa Nostra. In fact, it was long rumored in Hell’s Kitchen that Sullivan, along with Anthony Provenzano and a few others, was behind the disappearance of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa.

  If Mad Dog Sullivan was the one who killed Cummiskey, then chances were it was a Mafia hit. And if it was a Mafia hit, Jimmy Coonan suspected something serious was going down, something he was not privy to.

  Just a few weeks earlier, on July 20, 1976, Thomas Devaney, another neighborhood Irishman, had been gunned down in a similar fashion in a bar-and-grill on Lexington Avenue. Like Cummiskey, Devaney had been tight with Mickey Spillane. So it was possible, surmised Coonan, that these killings were somehow leading towards Spillane.

  But it was also true that both Cummiskey and Devaney recently had been shifting their allegiances to Coonan. Cummiskey, in particular, had been spreading his time evenly between Spillane and Coonan, acting as a strongarm man for both. So it was equally possible that these hits were, in fact, leading toward Jimmy.