Westies

by T. J. English

  The closest call came on the afternoon of January 15, 1979, nearly two months after the Whitehead murder. Malfi and another undercover agent, John Libonati, were scheduled to purchase $6,900 worth of counterfeit. Arrangements had already been made to meet in front of the Westway Candy Store at 4 P.M. When Malfi pulled up, Steen came out and hopped in the back of the van. Agent Libonati was introduced to Steen as Malfi’s cousin “John.”

  They drove around the corner and parked the van on West 55th Street between 10th and 11th Avenue. Steen handed Malfi a white envelope secured with two rubber bands containing the $6,900 in counterfeit bills. As previously agreed, Malfi gave Steen $400 in partial payment, with the understanding that the remaining $1,463 would be paid within the next two days.

  Steen was on some kind of wild cocaine high that afternoon, talking a blue streak about some good acid he had for sale. He sold a lot of acid in Hell’s Kitchen, he said, ten to fifteen tabs to a customer at a price between $3 and $4 per tab. He also sold guns. To illustrate this, he produced a .25-caliber Beretta. He said he liked to purchase as many guns as he could because they were so easy to sell around the neighborhood. “I mean, four or five or ten ain’t nothin’,” he said, waving the Beretta around. “They go in one day.” He added that Donald Mallay, the owner of the Westway Candy Store, was an expert gunsmith. “He’s got a lathe right there in the back of the store where he makes silencers. And you wouldn’t believe them fuckin’ silencers. I got two or three of ’em in my apartment right now.”

  Malfi asked if they could take a look at the silencers. Steen was reluctant at first, but they finally got him to agree. They drove around the block to the entrance of his apartment building at 520 West 56th Street.

  The other cops and Secret Service agents were worried. Malfi and Libonati’s van was wired, but the undercover agents were not. Once they walked into the apartment building, they would no longer be within the realm of surveillance. Derkash, who was in an undercover vehicle monitoring the van, radioed to Richie Egan and the Intelligence cops to be on alert.

  Steen, Malfi, and Libonati got off the elevator on the fifteenth floor. “Wait here,” said Steen, pointing towards a stairwell. “And stay outta sight. My man Featherstone lives right there, 15-B. If he knew I was showin’ you these silencers … forget about it.”

  Steen entered apartment 15-C. Within minutes he returned, a cockeyed grin on his face and a .22-caliber Hi-Standard automatic with a silencer already screwed on. They all went up one flight to the roof, where Steen stood silhouetted against the late afternoon sky and popped off two shots, shoulder-level.

  “Wow,” said Malfi and Libonati. “Incredible. Can’t hear a fuckin’ thing.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Steen, barely able to contain his glee. “Twenty-two automatic. Best fuckin’ gun for whackin’ people, know what I’m sayin?” A short time later, the two undercovers and Steen came back out of the building smiling, and the cops on the street relaxed.

  In the weeks following the meeting on the roof, Steen continued to provide juicy morsels of information on the inner workings of West Side crime, most of it captured on what would come to be known as “the van tapes.” The cops and agents weren’t sure yet how much of it was reliable. But as an insight into the mind of an aspiring young gangster from Hell’s Kitchen, it was a fascinating study. Steen’s views, which ranged from comical to delusionary to casually brutal, often left them shaking their heads in amazement.

  Here, for example, was Steen on why the West Side Mob cut up their murder victims: “Take for instance, somebody came over and shot your sister, right? That guy, you can’t go over and kill him ’cause they gonna have a feeling it’s you or somebody in your family. So you do a disappearing act [on him]. Nobody knows where he is or what he’s doing, you know? Nobody knows. Nobody.”

  Steen on Jimmy Coonan: “The President, he owns everything, he fucking runs everything. All your theatrical unions? Coonan. The metal lathers and the constructions … I mean, this guy walks into the biggest unions in the world and says to the other guy, ‘I’m taking over now.’ You know? That’s the type of person he is.… He tells those other fucking people ‘no’ and there ain’t nobody in their right mind that’s gonna stand up to him.”

  Steen on his own exploits: “Well, I shot him in the chest with a shotgun, sawed-off. No, I couldn’t cut him up. This guy was fucking seven foot tall … Fucking hit missed him. I’m lucky the shotgun killed him. I shot him right in the chest, man. He died.”

  After weeks of listening to Steen over the transmitter, the investigators developed a backhanded affection for the pudgy young gangster. They usually referred to him as Ray or Raymond, never by his last name. There was something almost endearing about Steen’s pathetic desire to prove what a tough guy he was.

  “Okay,” Ray would constantly lament, “I’m a young guy. That’s what they look at me as, a kid. Well fuck that kid shit. I do anything in the notebook.”

  Yes, he was a two-bit punk and possibly a killer. The cops knew this. But he was their two-bit punk, their most valuable link yet with the West Side crime scene. For the time being, that made him as important as Coonan himself.

  One afternoon late in January ’79, Mickey Featherstone met with Ray Steen at Amy’s Pub on 9th Avenue. Amy’s had been a favorite of Mickey’s ever since he first met Sissy there years earlier, and lately he’d been conducting a lot of business at a table in the back of the bar.

  “That guy you’re dealin’ with?” he said to Steen, sipping on a Seven & Seven and smoking a Kool.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s the Man.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes. It’s gotta be.”

  Mickey explained to Steen how he had Jimmy McElroy run a check on the van’s license plates. McElroy had a friend who was a cop, he said, and his friend had discovered that the plates were registered to a stolen Dodge Dart.

  “There ain’t nobody with any sense that’s gonna drive around armed with stolen plates and counterfeit money in the car. Nobody ’cept the law. Plus, who the fuck would pay twenty-seven points on the shit? I mean, these guys is supposed to be wiseguys, right?”

  Steen looked dumbfounded. “Mickey, no way. I been dealin’ with this motherfucker. He’s cool.”

  “I’m tellin’ you Ray, it’s the Man.”

  It wasn’t even dinnertime yet and already Featherstone had a good buzz going. Ever since Coonan blew away Whitehead in the basement of the Opera Hotel, Mickey had been getting coked up on a daily basis. It wasn’t that the murder bothered him so much. He could handle that, just like he’d handled the Ugly Walter and Rickey Tassiello murders. What bothered him was that before that night he’d been priming himself to confront Coonan, to tell him how everyone felt he was selling out to the Italians. But then the murder went down and everything got tense. Once again, it was time to show loyalty, to keep your mouth shut and go along with the program.

  But Mickey was getting tired of it all. He’d started this counterfeit business even though Jimmy and Roy Demeo were against it. It was a federal charge, they warned him. It just wasn’t worth the risk.

  But Mickey didn’t give a fuck about that either. In fact, he was beginning to think prison might not be such a bad idea. There’d been something in Jimmy’s eyes the night of the Whitehead murder, something that made Mickey realize there would never be a way out of all this. Except maybe prison.

  With the wizard, Larry Hochheiser, as his attorney, Mickey figured he’d get the best deal possible on a counterfeit rap. Two, maybe three years max. He could handle three years. Then he’d be able to take Sissy and Mickey, Jr., and get the fuck out, with no strings attached.

  Lately these thoughts had festered inside Mickey’s head whenever he got juiced, and it was causing him problems. His resentment towards Jimmy was always followed by intense feelings of guilt. Loyalty, he knew, was what the West Side Mob was supposed to be all about. That’s what Jimmy always told him. Loyalty had kept them strong through the ge
nerations.

  But loyalty was a two-way street, thought Mickey, and Jimmy had violated their loyalty by trying to act like he was an Italian. The emotions this caused in Mickey made him confused. The confusion translated into self-loathing, and sometimes that translated into self-destructiveness.

  But just because he was feeling self-destructive didn’t mean he was going to be an idiot. With the profits from the counterfeit sales, he would cover his ass. Of the $27 per $100 note they were getting from Malfi, $7 went to Steen, $10 went to Mickey, and $10 went to Mickey’s private “lawyers fund.”

  Featherstone knew a guy had to take precautions when dealing with someone like Ray Steen. Steen liked to brag that he’d killed people, but Mickey knew that was bullshit. In fact, Ray was a notorious bullshitter, one of a half-dozen or so teenage toughs in the neighborhood who worshiped Mickey Featherstone. Ever since Mickey returned from prison in ’75, they’d treated him like some kind of hero. Sometimes this hero worship made them stupid.

  Mickey had realized this years ago. Not long after he got out of prison, he’d fallen into a deep depression. Sometimes back in those days when he was high enough he would pull out his revolver and start playing Russian roulette. Once, he’d done it in front of Steen, who was sixteen at the time. To prove what a tough guy he was, Steen had picked up the revolver, put it to his own head, and pulled the trigger.

  That’s when Mickey realized what an impressionable little fucker Ray Steen could be.

  So now here he was, four years later, in the middle of a business deal with Steen that he knew was about to blow up in their faces. He could feel it.

  “Don’t worry,” Ray was saying. “I got this under control.”

  “Well,” replied Mickey, stabbing his cigarette into an ashtray. “If they are agents, they got you already. So you might as well go ahead.”

  “Right.”

  “But when this fuck starts wavin’ a badge in your face?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t come cryin’ to me.”

  On the evening of February 9th, Richie Egan strapped on his bulletproof vest, secured his .38 Special safely in its holster, and waited for instructions. Once again, he was in the John Jay College observation post across the street from the Westway Candy Store. Along with fellow officers James Tedaldi, Abe Ocasio, Don Gurney, and their supervisor, Sergeant Tom McCabe, Egan was waiting for Mickey Featherstone to arrive at the store. Once he did, the cops were ready to boogie. Search warrants had been secured, the Secret Service agents were in place and an all-out raid was about to get underway.

  Simultaneous with their operation, just down the street a half-dozen other federal agents—along with four or five members of the NYPD’s Emergency Service Unit—would also be conducting a raid. Both front and back entrances to 520 West 56th Street were being secured as the agents made ready to search apartments 15-B and 15-C—Featherstone’s and Steen’s.

  And there was more. Undercover agents Malfi and Libonati, along with four or five more Secret Service agents, would be carrying out the most important part of the night’s festivities—the arrest of Ray Steen.

  The decision to stage the raids and arrest had come suddenly. In recent weeks, there had been a complication in Steen’s supply of counterfeit. The cops got wind of it through a bug on the phone at the Westway Candy Store (by that time, they also had wiretaps on phones in Featherstone’s and Steen’s apartments). On the afternoon of February 5th, Agent Malfi called Steen at the candy store and asked why their planned transaction of the night before hadn’t gone down.

  “The guy got busted,” said Steen, referring to his source.

  “The guy got busted with our stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Holy Jesus! So what does that do to the deal?”

  “No, no, no, wait, wait. The guy got busted, but not with the stuff.”

  “Well, what is this, the guy got busted ’cause of counterfeit or what?”

  “No, he didn’t get busted for counterfeit. No, a jewelry heist.”

  “Oh, so what’d he have, the stuff with him or something?”

  “No, he didn’t have nothin’. He just had his body with him there.”

  “C’mon, Ray, what the fuck is this?”

  Steen was reluctant to reveal the name of his and Featherstone’s source, but before the conversation was over he’d told Malfi just about everything the cops needed to know. The source, said Steen, had been arrested on a burglary charge and would be arraigned that night at 8 P.M. in lower Manhattan. SCU immediately dispatched an Intelligence unit to set up surveillance at 100 Centre Street, the New York municipal courthouse. Sure enough, at 7:45 P.M., Mickey Featherstone arrived with the bail money for Billy Comas and a sidekick of his named Johnny Halo.

  The cops were familiar with Comas. They knew him as a veteran hustler who had been dealing with the West Side Mob for years. What’s more, detectives from the 4th Homicide Zone had recently informed the Intelligence Division that Billy Comas was believed to be a witness—if not a participant—in the brutal murder of Harold Whitehead at the Opera Bar.

  Now that they had Steen’s and Featherstone’s supplier, the investigators were inclined to play their last card. Things had heated up in the neighborhood considerably. It seemed to be common knowledge that the phones were bugged, which meant that Malfi might be in danger. They certainly had the evidence to arrest, indict, and convict Ray Steen, which they hoped would provide enough leverage to enlist his cooperation in the investigation.

  What’s more, earlier that week Steen had told Malfi he’d seen the counterfeit plates for the $100 notes in Featherstone’s apartment. The investigators had used this bit of information as the pretext to file for a search warrant.

  At about 7 P.M., as Richie Egan and the other Intelligence cops watched from across the street, Mickey Featherstone arrived with a package at the Westway Candy Store, where Ray Steen was waiting to meet him. In twenty minutes, Steen was scheduled to sell $50,000 in counterfeit to Malfi. The package Featherstone was delivering contained the bogus bills, which Billy Comas had delivered earlier that day.

  At 7:07 Mickey called his apartment from the candy store. He told Sissy to tell Billy Uptown to stay put; he’d be right over as soon as he was done. The investigators, listening to the conversation over a transmitter, were pleasantly surprised. They had not known Billy Comas would actually be on the premises when they made their raid. It was icing on the cake.

  At 7:30 Malfi drove up in front of the candy store in his black undercover van. Steen slid back the side door and got in. Within minutes the van drove off. The cops waited to make sure it was safely out of the area, then Derkash gave the order for the raids to commence.

  Egan, his heart pounding, hit 10th Avenue running at full speed. Alongside him were McCabe, Tedaldi, Gurney, and Ocasio. Given the Intelligence cops’ usual role as backup players, it wasn’t often they got to take to the streets like this. Egan had to admit, it felt good. It made him feel like a rookie all over again.

  It was freezing outside and there were large ice patches on the street and sidewalk. As he crossed the avenue huffing and puffing, Egan inadvertently stepped on one of the ice patches and almost slipped on his ass. He righted himself without falling just as a half-dozen feds pulled up in two unmarked cars with flashing lights on top.

  Mickey Featherstone had just stepped out of the candy store and was standing on the sidewalk in front of the door. In the store behind him were the proprietor, Donald Mallay, Tommy Collins, and three or four other neighborhood people. As soon as he saw the cars hurtling towards the store, Featherstone backpedaled through the door.

  “It’s a raid!” he shouted, as the small army of law enforcement officers—shotguns and revolvers drawn—descended on the tiny store. Quickly, Mickey took a .25-caliber Beretta he had tucked in his belt and tossed it. It hit the ground near a glass-encased counter just as four of the agents burst in the door.

  There was pandemonium, with everyone shouting and bump
ing into each other. The phone in the candy store started ringing. Featherstone was ordered to get down on the floor, and one of the agents stood over him with a shotgun pointed at his head. Forty-one-year-old Donald Mallay, standing behind the counter, looked like he was about ready to have a heart attack. Along with Tommy Collins and the others, he was told to stand against a back wall near the pinball machines. Instructions were being shouted—“Hands behind your head!” “Feet spread!” “Don’t say a fuckin’ word!”—as the agents and cops frisked everyone in the store.

  “Whose is this?” asked one of the cops loudly, pointing at the gun on the floor.

  Nobody said a word.

  After an agent from the Drug Enforcement Administration read everyone their rights, a thorough search of the store got underway. Based on what Steen had been telling Malfi, the investigators were hoping to find cocaine and a lathe for making silencers on the premises. But it was soon apparent that neither was there. The cops confiscated the .25 Mickey had tossed on the floor, then lined everyone up and began asking questions—or “taking their pedigree” as the cops liked to call it. For the time being, they had nothing to hold anyone on. After turning the place upside down and asking their questions, they let everyone go.

  “We’ll be seeing you again,” one of the agents said to Featherstone as he sneered at the cops on his way out the door.

  Meanwhile, down the block at 520 West 56th Street, six federal agents and a four-man Emergency Service Unit had arrived at apartment 15-B. “This is the police,” announced one of the agents, knocking on the door. “We have a search warrant for this apartment. Open up.”

  The agents heard rustling inside, but no one came to the door.

  “Go ahead,” said the agent to one of the Emergency Service cops, who began smashing at the door with a sledgehammer.

  Inside the apartment, gray-haired Billy Comas heard the pounding and didn’t know what to do. There were no fire escapes on the building and he sure as hell couldn’t jump from the fifteenth floor. He ran through the bedroom, past Mickey Jr.’s crib, and started banging on the bathroom door.