Westies

by T. J. English

  After seven years as an investigator in Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan’s office, Coffey was selected to head the city’s first Organized Crime Homicide Task Force. When Chief Sullivan approached him to form the unit following a rash of gangland slayings in February and March of 1978, he was told he could handpick his own team. Not surprisingly, he turned to cops like himself—high-rolling, streetwise operators who didn’t mind if their names or pictures wound up on TV or in the newspapers. They had citywide jurisdiction to go anywhere and do whatever it took to crack the Mob, and they behaved with the sort of brashness you’d expect from superstar cops.

  Among other things, Coffey didn’t hesitate to use the press in his investigations, a technique that earned him the nickname “Publicity Joe.” He knew that many cops and prosecutors didn’t care for his methods, but he wrote that off as jealousy. “The fact is,” Coffey used to say to anyone who would listen, “if properly used, the press can play an important role in the investigative process”—and if they doubted him, they could just look at his record. It had worked in the infamous “Son of Sam” serial murder case when Coffey made a direct plea to the public for information. In fact, it worked a lot. (In seven and a half years of existence, the Organized Crime Homicide Task Force helped solve over eighty murders.)

  Coffey chose Frank McDarby and John McGlynn as his partners in the West Side investigation. He’d first worked with these two detectives twelve months earlier on a case involving a terrorist bombing at Fraunces Tavern, a historic landmark in Manhattan’s Wall Street area. Like Coffey, McDarby and McGlynn were Irish Catholic, and they shared Joe’s outrage that these West Side toughs were using their ethnic heritage as a framework for their criminal deeds.

  McDarby and McGlynn shared another trait with Coffey: they were well over six feet tall. Together, the three of them looked as much like linebackers with the New York Giants as detectives with the NYPD.

  The first thing Coffey and his men did was call the Intelligence Division, where McCabe was happy to provide them with all the necessary background material, including files on the murders of Paddy Dugan, Ruby Stein, Mickey Spillane, and a half-dozen others that were still unsolved. The most recent case, McCabe noted, involved a young neighborhood gambler named Rickey Tassiello. He was last seen leaving Tom’s Pub on 9th Avenue with Coonan and Featherstone. According to a recent police interview with Tassiello’s brother, Rickey Tassiello owed Jimmy Coonan money. There were rumors all over the neighborhood that Tassiello had been murdered, dismembered, and disposed of.

  “Jesus Christ,” exclaimed Coffey. “Are these guys fuckin’ monsters or what?”

  McCabe just shook his head. “Joe, you ain’t gonna believe some of the things we been hearing.”

  With Coffey’s unit on the scene, there was mild resentment among some members of the Intelligence team. No doubt the Homicide Task Force would be creating waves and making headlines, an approach that was antithetical to the very nature of intelligence work. And there was the matter of Coffey’s reputation—a “hambone,” one Intelligence cop called him. But McCabe was not one of the begrudgers. Sure, Coffey had led a charmed life as a member of the NYPD. But he was a cop after all, and a good one at that. Besides, said McCabe, “You can’t be an Intelligence cop and worry about that kind of crap.” As long as he had anything to do with it, Coffey’s Task Force would get everything they needed to pursue their investigation.

  It didn’t take Coffey and his people long to make their presence felt on the West Side. Frequently, the Intelligence cops watched from their surveillance posts as the three strapping Irish detectives strutted into some well-known neighborhood hangout like the Market Diner and started asking questions. Within weeks, most of the area’s criminal element knew who they were—which was just the way Coffey and his guys liked it. Sometimes they would even walk right into a well-known neighborhood social club and place bets at the gambling tables.

  Initially, there were attempts by certain West Siders to bring Coffey and his boys into the fold. When Coffey’s partner, Frank McDarby, was brought into the investigation, he was approached by an old friend named “Mike” who he had worked with years ago in the Metal Lathers union. In a neighborhood diner, Mike asked McDarby why he was messing around with “his own kind” when there were so many mafiosi at large in the city.

  “Because these guys happen to be criminals,” McDarby said.

  “Aw c’mon, Frank,” replied Mike. “They’re not bad kids. Maybe a little wild, but they’re on our side.”

  “Mike, even if I believed you, it wouldn’t make any difference. Murder is murder. I gotta do my job.”

  When Mike suggested he could possibly set up a meeting between the cops and Jimmy Coonan to straighten things out, McDarby said, “Hey, if you wanna set up a meeting, great. But there’s nothin’ to straighten out, Mike. It’s too late for that.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Frank, I really am. I’d hate to see anybody get hurt.”

  McDarby unfurled his six-foot-two-inch frame and glared at his former friend. He knew this routine inside out. First they try to bribe you; then they try to intimidate you. “Hey, Mike, I got something to say to you and whoever else it is you’re talkin’ for. We ain’t scared of you fuckin’ guys, okay? We got a job to do here and it’s gonna get done. And if you or anybody else gets in the way you’re gonna get taken down just like the rest of ’em. You hear me, you little shit?”

  After that, nobody from the West Side made any more attempts to “influence” the detectives from the Homicide Task Force.

  As expected, not long after Joe Coffey and his boys began their own version of WEST SIDE STORY, the investigation entered a new phase. Egan and the other Intelligence cops on the street often found themselves following in Coffey’s wake as he stormed around the neighborhood. Occasionally, his antics captured the attention of the local press.

  Such was the case one evening in late October of ’78. It seemed that Coffey, on a tip from an informant, had learned that the old New York Central railway tracks between 10th and 11th Avenue were being used as a dumping ground for West Side murder victims. Specifically, he’d been told the heads of Paddy Dugan and Rickey Tassiello were buried near the mouth of the West 50th Street underpass, directly behind the Skyline Motor Inn.

  Coffey immediately called in an Emergency Service Unit to begin excavation on the fourteen-block stretch of track. Then somebody tipped off two reporters from the New York Daily News, who jumped on the story. That morning, an article in the paper stated that while raking through mounds of debris scooped from beneath the underpass, “police discovered bone fragments which they hope will substantiate reports that a Manhattan railroad cut has been used as a burial ground by a Hell’s Kitchen gang of hitmen and racketeers.”

  When McCabe, Egan, and the other Intelligence cops first heard about the diggings, they had to chuckle. Nothing like a dramatic operation involving lots of manpower to make sure everybody knew what you were up to. It was vintage Joe Coffey.

  But like many of Coffey’s more outlandish efforts, it had its residual value. High-profile activities sometimes brought about high-profile reactions. Already the diggings had attracted a wide spectrum of interested observers, including neighborhood people and, according to a telephone call the boys from Intell received from Coffey that morning, some rather ominous-looking black sedans driven by well-dressed Italians from Brooklyn.

  Intell had been hearing a lot lately about Jimmy Coonan’s Italian connections. The word was out that since Spillane’s murder, Coonan had established contact with either the Genovese family, based on Pleasant Avenue in Spanish Harlem, or the Gambino family, located primarily in the Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst sections of Brooklyn. Intell stepped up its surveillance schedule—there were now four two-man teams working around the clock—but they hadn’t been able to land any solid intelligence on the alleged Mafia connection. The diggings could be the break they needed.

  When they arrived at the site, Egan and his
partner for the night, Detective James Tedaldi, could hardly believe their eyes. Not only were a dozen cops from the Emergency Service Unit, a half-dozen plainclothes detectives, and about twenty neighborhood onlookers there, but so was a local television crew. It was late at night, and there were mounted klieg lights all over the place, making the site look like a movie location. Dressed in a dashing trenchcoat, Coffey was holding a press conference, supposedly to downplay some of the more outrageous claims that had been appearing in the papers since the diggings began. (One Daily News report quoted a source “close to the investigation” as saying there were “60, 70, maybe 80” bodies buried near the railroad tracks.)

  Egan listened as Coffey explained to the press that “there might be at least two bodies or parts of bodies” buried in the soil near the railroad tracks. He said that the remains they were looking for belonged to two recent murder victims of a Hell’s Kitchen gang known as “the Westies.”

  Egan did a double take when he heard that. The Westies? It was a new one on him.

  For days afterwards, the West Side diggings were an ongoing item in the New York press. The notion of a Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob proved to be an irresistible angle, evoking as it did innumerable gangster movies from the 1930s. One TV report used footage from Prohibition days as the lead-in to their story.

  What finally brought the festivities to a halt were the police lab reports, which came in a few days after the bone fragments were unearthed from behind the Skyline Motor Inn. It seemed that the remains were not those of a human being at all. They were dog bones.

  Some of the cops connected with WEST SIDE STORY found the whole episode embarrassing. Why call the press in when you’ve got a lead that might turn out to prove absolutely nothing? But Richie Egan defended Coffey’s actions. “After all,” he said to the other Intelligence cops as they gathered for drinks at Ronell’s, their favorite lower Manhattan watering-hole, “Joe had a tip from two different sources that there were human remains buried near the tunnel. Whaddya want him to do? Ignore it?” As for the press, said Egan, chances are they found out about it on their own and Coffey was only doing his best to control the situation.

  The only thing that bothered Egan and McCabe was that the diggings hadn’t yielded any intelligence on the Italian connection. Recently McCabe had become obsessed with the idea that Coonan had hooked up with the Italians. The forces at play were still somewhat confusing, but he believed, at least initially, that the tie was probably with Fat Tony Salerno’s Genovese family. It was Fat Tony, after all, who supposedly eliminated Devaney, Cummiskey, and Kapatos. The cops didn’t know yet who killed Spillane, but it seemed possible that was also Fat Tony’s handiwork. If so, Coonan would now be in debt to Salerno.

  This theory was complicated somewhat by the fact they figured it was Coonan who’d killed Fat Tony’s main man, Ruby Stein. In that case, Fat Tony would be mad at Coonan, and Jimmy would be forced to establish ties with the Gambinos out in Brooklyn.

  It was a tangled web, no doubt about that. And there were already enough bodies in the morgue to set some kind of record for an SCU investigation. Even so, McCabe was convinced the main event was yet to come.

  “Mark my words,” he said to Egan, Tedaldi, and anyone else who would listen. “This guy Coonan is up to somethin’.”

  9

  LINGUINI AND CLAM SAUCE

  I need some shoes,” yelled Alberta Sachs, looking down at her dirty white sneakers. “I can’t wear these shoes with this dress.”

  It was late February 1978, several months before Joe Coffey’s highly publicized railyard diggings. Alberta was standing in the bedroom of Mickey and Sissy Featherstone’s apartment. Sissy had just lent her a colorful two-piece outfit. Now she needed the appropriate footwear. She and Sissy wore the same size and had similar tastes, so Alberta figured Sissy could deliver. Something in dark brown, perhaps, or a pair of black pumps.

  Alberta, now sixteen, was so excited she could hardly stand still. Just forty-five minutes earlier she and her boyfriend, Raymond Steen, who lived in the apartment right next door to Mickey and Sissy, got a call to come over. When they arrived, Alberta’s uncle Jimmy Coonan was there, along with Mickey, Sissy, Richie Ryan, Billy Beattie, Dick Maher, a neighborhood kid, and Jimmy’s brother Jackie Coonan. Jimmy, Mickey, and Dick Maher wore suits—definitely not their usual attire—and everyone seemed to be in a serious mood. Alberta didn’t have a clue what was up until her Uncle Jimmy explained that he and Featherstone had been called to a sit-down out in Brooklyn at the behest of Paul Castellano. The name didn’t mean anything to her at first, but when they showed her a picture and told her who he was, Alberta thought she might just have a heart attack.

  Castellano was the head of the Gambino crime family, the largest of New York City’s five Mafia families. As the nephew of the legendary Carlo Gambino, he took over the family business in 1976 after the seventy-four-year-old Gambino died of a heart attack. For all intents and purposes, “Big Paulie” was now king of the underworld, the capo di tutti capi, godfather of all godfathers. Getting called to meet with Paul Castellano and his people could be either extremely good or extremely bad, depending entirely on how Paul Castellano looked at it.

  This was the moment Jimmy Coonan had been working towards for the last ten years, but under the circumstances he didn’t know whether to be excited or wary. He knew that Castellano and the heads of the other four New York families were concerned about the death of Ruby Stein. Jimmy considered it very possible that the Mafia intended to exact retribution.

  So Jimmy and Mickey had devised a plan, sort of. They would send a scout team ahead to Tommaso’s Restaurant in Bay Ridge, where the meeting was scheduled to take place. In the event that anything looked even the least bit suspicious, the scout team would telephone back to Featherstone’s apartment, where the rest of the group would be on call.

  It was decided that Alberta and eighteen-year-old Dick Maher would be the scout team, since they were young and looked the least suspicious. They were told they had to be nicely dressed, since Tommaso’s was a respectable joint. All they had to do was go to the restaurant, order a big meal, and keep their eyes and ears open.

  In the bedroom, while Alberta experimented with various ensembles, the two women expressed somewhat different emotions about the meeting at Tommaso’s. Sissy was worried sick. As her husband spent more and more time with Jimmy Coonan, she began to suspect he was being used. Whenever she brought it up, Mickey told her she was wrong. He said Jimmy was like a brother, that he was the only one who had ever looked out for his welfare.

  But Sissy wasn’t buying it. She looked at Jimmy and Edna Coonan and saw a couple who had risen above their station. They were in a whole different social and economic class now. They’d just had a new home custom-built in Hazlet, New Jersey—a palatial, ranch-style house with a huge yard, a gymnasium, a game room, and a state-of-the-art security system. They both drove nice cars. And the Coonan children attended the best schools.

  Mickey, on the other hand, never seemed to have any money at all. Sissy even had to work as an usherette at Madison Square Garden to help support their new baby. Not that she minded—she enjoyed working. But it seemed to her that Coonan was using Mickey’s name and reputation and not giving him a fair share of the profits.

  Now, on top of everything else, here was Mickey being dragged out to Brooklyn, where he might get killed! What kind of shit was that?

  Alberta had an entirely different take. Ever since she’d seen Eddie Cummiskey and her Uncle Jimmy carrying Paddy Dugan’s head down the stairs of her mother’s apartment building roughly three years earlier, she’d become perversely enthralled by the world of Jimmy Coonan. To her, it was more exciting than any movie, more exotic and macabre than any story she might read in a book. Sometimes it was almost dreamlike. Like the previous Christmas, when she was over at Jimmy and Edna’s house in New Jersey. She went into the bedroom and saw her aunt’s and uncle’s beautiful new king-size bed. But she couldn’t figur
e out why the mattress was all tilted. Why would such a beautiful bed have such a lumpy mattress? She went over to the bed, lifted up the mattress and looked underneath.

  Alberta’s young eyes opened wide as could be. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of $10, $20, and $50 bills. Some of them were bound together, but most were loosely tossed about, forming a huge pile on top of the box spring. She would never forget the sight of all that money; for years, it would be her own little secret.

  Sometimes, Alberta’s excitement at her Uncle Jimmy’s antics caused problems with Sissy. They got along okay, on the surface. In fact, it was through Sissy’s father that Alberta had gotten a job at Madison Square Garden. They often walked to and from work together. But Alberta knew Sissy’s feelings about Coonan; she knew Sissy resented Jimmy and Edna. So Alberta usually tried to keep her enthusiasm to herself.

  Today, however, in the heady excitement of going to Brooklyn to see the Godfather, she couldn’t contain it. She preened and giggled in front of the full-length mirror like she was getting ready for her high school prom.

  While Alberta and Sissy were in the bedroom, Coonan spoke to the male members of the group gathered in the front room. “Me and Mickey gonna go to the restaurant,” he said, “just like we’re supposed to. See what these guys gotta say for themselves. But if you don’t hear from us in two hours—two fuckin’ hours—there’s a social club next to Tommaso’s. Vets and Friends, it’s called. You come in there blastin’ with everything we got.”

  The group looked at each other without saying a word. There was a tension in the air, a tension made all the more palpably by the determination in Jimmy’s voice. “We got no choice,” he was saying. “We been called. If we don’t go, we’s gonna get whacked. If we do go, we might still get whacked. But I swear to Christ, if we do, I want this to be the biggest fuckin’ slaughter since the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”