Westies

by T. J. English

  Okay, thought Mickey, so they finally got to the point. He had suspected this was why they called him here in the first place. Ever since he turned Edna down, he’d known it was coming. There was no way Jimmy Coonan was going to let him walk away from the Westies. No way. McElroy and Kelly were trying to make it sound nice, like the piers were being handed to him on a silver platter. But what this really was, he knew, was his last chance.

  Without saying so, they were letting him know that if he didn’t go in with them now, he would be following in Vinnie Leone’s footsteps.

  Featherstone was ready for this—so ready he even had a little speech prepared.

  “Alright, youse two listen to me for a minute. You fuckin’ guys wouldn’t be nowhere if it wasn’t for me and the sweat off my balls that made Jimmy Coonan what he is today. All the time I put myself out for this guy? Everybody used my name, and youse know it. Everybody. People get rich using my name, they don’t even tell me. Nothin’.”

  “Hey,” said Jimmy Mac, “that’s why it’s gotta be different this time.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Mickey, that was Coonan, not us.”

  Featherstone could feel the cocaine loosening his tongue; his words poured out in a nonstop torrent. “Let me tell youse. Nobody took care of my wife and kids when I was inside, that’s another thing youse know is true. Nobody. You want me back in the crew? Okay. But things is gonna be different, see? ’Cause I ain’t in it for friendship this time. I ain’t in it for loyalty no more. I’m in it for money. Youse people used me enough, man.”

  Kelly and McElroy both assured him that things would be different this time, that the piers were now theirs to do with as they pleased. From now on, anytime Mickey’s name was used by any member of the crew for any transaction, Mickey would get his cut.

  “We’ll make sure of that,” promised Kelly.

  As for Mickey’s family and kids, never again would they be hung out to dry. That was Jimmy Coonan, they said over and over. Everybody knew he’d done wrong.

  Hours later, on the drive back to New Jersey, Mickey thought about what he’d done. The “positive outlook” he’d had in those months when he first returned from prison had been slowly eroded by the alcohol, the cocaine, and the rage he was feeling inside. By the time the moment finally arrived—the moment where he was faced with the crucial decision of what he would do with his life—there was never any question. He wasn’t about to just sit there and let them take advantage of him. He wasn’t about to “take it up the ass.”

  Mickey thought about loyalty. Loyalty was the thing Jimmy Coonan had always talked about. It was the thing that supposedly made the West Side gang invulnerable. And it wasn’t just Coonan. The entire neighborhood had demanded loyalty, and Mickey felt he had come through for them. At one time, he would gladly have taken a bullet for Jimmy if he’d been asked to, and he’d have taken a bullet for the rest of the Westies.

  But all that was bullshit, and now Mickey knew it. He’d been used, that was all. And he felt like a douche bag for having taken so long to figure it out.

  It made him feel depressed, too, in a way. This was not what he had wanted. For the last few years he had harbored dreams of a halfway normal life. But that was all down the toilet now.

  Within days Mickey’s sadness disappeared and was replaced by anger. Anger at those who, he felt, had forced him into this position.

  The first order of business was ILA Local 1909. McElroy and Kelly had long suspected Tommy Ryan, who Mickey shook hands with when Leone brought him around the shop, of skimming their waterfront profits with Vinnie. John Potter, who seemed to have forgotten his encounter with Coonan and Featherstone at the Landmark Tavern six years earlier, might also have been in on it, though they weren’t sure about him.

  In late February 1984, two weeks after the Vinnie Leone murder, Featherstone, McElroy, and Kelly set up a meeting with Potter and Ryan at the Madison Diner, one of the neighborhood’s oldest diner/bars, at 57th Street and 11th Avenue. The meeting was set for one in the afternoon. Potter and Ryan were already there when Featherstone arrived.

  Both in their fifties, the two veteran union officials were well aware of the brutal interplay that often went on between the mob and organized labor. But still, to have their business manager disappear overnight had been an unsettling development. Now, at the Madison Diner, the sight of Mickey Featherstone taking a seat across the table reduced them both to helpless, quivering old men.

  “Hey, Mick,” said John Potter, his hand trembling as he tried to maneuver a cup of coffee from its saucer to his mouth.

  Tommy Ryan chose not to speak. He put a cigarette in his mouth and attempted to light it. But his hand was shaking so bad he accidentally knocked the cigarette from his mouth into his lap.

  “Take it easy, man,” said Featherstone. “Nobody’s gonna hurt youse.”

  There was terror in Tommy Ryan’s eyes. He stared at his broken cigarette, unable to look Mickey in the face.

  Featherstone spoke sternly. “Just don’t lie, Tommy. They know you was part of, you know, stealin’ with Vinnie. If you’re straight with Kevin and Jimmy, nothin’ bad’ll happen.”

  When Kelly and McElroy arrived, they sat down at the table with Potter, Ryan, and Featherstone. There was a sizable lunchtime trade in the diner, including many dock-workers and neighborhood folks who recognized one or all of the guys seated at Mickey’s table. Occasionally, someone passing by would say hello.

  “You’re lucky,” said Kevin Kelly, pointing a finger at Tommy Ryan. “You’re lucky you didn’t go too. We know what you and Vinnie were doing.”

  Kelly went on to explain that from now on Jimmy Coonan didn’t want Ryan handling the money at all. John Potter would now be responsible for the proceeds from illegal activities along the waterfront. Kelly told Ryan, “You just … you don’t touch nothin’ no more and you’ll still get yours, you know, your end of the money. But this is it. One more fuck-up and you might wind up just like that other bastard. Okay?”

  The very next day, they each got their first envelope, which contained $1,100 in cash. Thereafter, Featherstone, Kelly, McElroy, Coonan, Potter, and Ryan received the same amount each week. Eventually, this group would be expanded to include Kenny Shannon. Thirty years old, slender, with a thick head of sandy-blond hair that was turning prematurely gray, Shannon was originally from Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was Kevin Kelly who’d first introduced him to the Hell’s Kitchen crowd and gotten him his job as a timekeeper on the Intrepid. Since then he was known to almost everyone as Kelly’s “gofer.”

  With the ILA taken care of, the next problem was Jay Gee Motor Homes. Jay Gee was a West Side business that rented large campers to film and television companies. Kevin Kelly had heard that at a recent meeting with organized crime figures, some hotshot from Jay Gee was saying he had the Westies under his control; there would be no union problems or anything like that, he said, because the Westies were his own private crew. According to Kelly, this person from Jay Gee had the balls to specifically mention Mickey Featherstone as being “his guy.”

  Mickey was pissed. This was exactly the kind of thing he was determined would never happen again.

  Featherstone, McElroy, and Kelly hopped in a car and drove to Jay Gee’s garage, located on 59th Street between 11th and 12th avenues. McElroy came out of the front offices with a guy named Joe, who was supposedly the president of Jay Gee, and another guy named Vic.

  Mickey told Jimmy Mac and Kevin to take Vic “for a walk.” Then he turned to Joe. “Listen, man. I understand you was usin’ my name with some of your business people, and I don’t even know you.”

  “Holy fuck. Who told you?”

  “Don’t worry ’bout who told me. I wanna know why you’re usin’ my name. You don’t know me.”

  The color drained from Joe’s face. “Uh, look, I just thought we, you, ’cause of the West Side and all …”

  “Hey, I don’t wanna hear about that. You don’t know me, and if
you’re gonna use my name in your business, then you sure as fuck are gonna pay me for it. And if you don’t pay me for it and I understand you’ve been usin’ my name, I’m gonna put you out of business.”

  By this point, Joe had started trembling. There were tears in his eyes.

  “Don’t start cryin’ now,” said Mickey. “Don’t start puttin’ on an act. That don’t mean nothin’ to me.”

  “Smack the fuck in the face!” shouted McElroy, who was standing near the garage entrance with Kelly.

  “You remember my words,” said Mickey to Joe.

  The third and final order of business Mickey had to take care of was with Bull Maher. Maher was the older brother of Dick Maher, the kid who accompanied Alberta Sachs to the sit-down at Tommaso’s Restaurant in ’78 (but no relation to James Maher, the union official Coonan and Featherstone plotted to kill later that same year). In recent years, Bull had been helping Edna Coonan pick up loanshark proceeds in Jimmy’s absence. But he’d run afoul of Coonan when Edna determined he was opening the envelopes and reading Jimmy’s private correspondence.

  Apparently, Maher had heard that Coonan put a contract out on him for “moving in on his shylock territory.” Maher immediately started calling in his loans, with the intention of recouping as much of his outlay as possible before splitting town. When McElroy—never a business whiz—and Kelly heard what Maher was up to, they decided to kill him for Jimmy Coonan.

  “Look,” Mickey told them. “You kill the guy, you don’t get nothin’. What if I make him give us $30,000? We leave him alone, we get $30,000 plus we get his business.”

  Kelly and McElroy agreed.

  The next day Maher agreed to meet them near the baseball fields on 11th Avenue at 52nd Street. They found him sitting in the shade, sipping on a beer and watching a softball game.

  Featherstone had known Bull Maher all his life, as had Kelly and McElroy. Mickey always liked Bull. They had been in a bar softball league together and played often at this very park. When Mickey saw Bull sitting there watching a bunch of kids playing ball, it reminded him of how he and Bull had practically grown up together.

  “Let me talk to him alone,” Mickey said to the others.

  Maher was over thirty years old, but he looked like a helpless child as Mickey walked over and sat down next to him. Featherstone rested his hands on his knees and spoke firmly. “You know what this is all about, I’m sure, Bull?”

  “Yeah, Mickey.”

  “We all know about you pullin’ in your loans to recoup your money, and I’m tellin’ ya, if you don’t own up thirty grand, plus your shylock book, you’re gonna get killed, man.”

  “You want thirty grand plus my book?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Man, Mickey, you know that’s gonna wipe me out. I’m in a bit of a situation here.”

  “Hey, Bull, I may be the only friend you got. Since I get back from prison, everybody in the neighborhood’s been tellin’ me they want you dead. Coonan. His fuckin’ wife. Kevin and Jimmy Mac. Believe me when I say it—this is the best deal you’re gonna get.”

  Bull’s eyes began to well up with tears.

  “Hey,” said Mickey, “it ain’t so bad. We’ll get you a job with the Teamsters.”

  The next day Maher forked over thirty grand, along with his list of shylock customers and what they owed. There was around forty grand or so in outstanding loans, which, once collected, was to be split between Mickey, Jimmy Mac, Kevin Kelly, and Kenny Shannon.

  Everybody was pleased with the score, except Mickey. Sure, the money was great. The problem was seeing Bull Maher sitting there crying like a baby. It reminded him of all those times, years ago, when he’d gone with Coonan on his shylock runs and seen the neighborhood people reduced to tears. At one time he got off on it. But times had changed.

  Mickey was making about $4,000 a week now, more money than he’d ever made in his life. But he’d become something he did not want to be, something he had promised himself and his wife he would never become.

  He had become just like Jimmy Coonan.

  And yet, unlike Coonan, Mickey was not able to reconcile his life as a gangster with his new suburban home life. With the money he’d been making through his illegal activities, he was able to buy his and Sissy’s dream house in Teaneck. Each night, after running the various neighborhood extortions, he would drive home to his family. Sissy had given birth to another baby boy, Danny, in early ’84, and they’d just learned she was pregnant again. It was all supposed to make Mickey proud—the wife, the kids, the nice house.

  But the old dreams had started up again. Dreams of horror and violence.

  Around this time, in November of ’84, Mickey spoke to Charlie Boyle, his father, on the phone. Boyle, now a U.S. Customs agent, had been hearing stories about how his son was back on the West Side. Mickey and his dad had never really been close. Since his parents moved to the Bronx way back in the early ’70s, Mickey had hardly ever spoken to them.

  Charlie Boyle sensed Mickey’s agitation and despair. He had a feeling that now that Mickey was living the gangster’s life again, he was sure to wind up in prison—or dead.

  “The cemetery’s fulla tough guys,” he told his son. “What about your family? What are they gonna do when you disappear one day?”

  “Whaddya want from me?” Mickey snapped back. “There ain’t no way outta this, you know that.”

  Boyle suggested that Mickey offer to make a deal with the government.

  “You mean be a rat?”

  “Let me at least look into it, Mickey. Let me check it out. You don’t gotta do a thing.”

  Much to Charlie Boyle’s surprise, Mickey did not get upset at the suggestion. “Look,” Mickey replied, “I ain’t callin’ no government people, okay? You do what you gotta do.”

  Boyle took this to mean that maybe, just maybe, Mickey was willing to come in from the cold.

  The very next day he called the New York office of the FBI. Without mentioning Mickey Featherstone by name, he said he was Charlie Boyle and he had a son who was looking to give information on New York organized crime figures. The person on the phone took his name and number and said an agent would get back to him.

  The FBI, perhaps unaware that Charlie Boyle was the father of Mickey Featherstone, never returned the call.

  Meanwhile, Mickey continued to get himself in deeper and deeper. In less than a month, Jimmy Coonan would be returning home from prison. When he did, Mickey knew that a lot of old wounds would be reopened. He knew that he’d now be seen as a threat to his old friend and might just wind up dead.

  Unless he acted first.

  14

  BETRAYAL

  On a grim, drizzly Thursday morning in April 1985, Michael Holly spent the last few minutes of his life strolling along West 35th Street, heading towards Clarke’s Bar on 10th Avenue. A laborer currently working on the nearly completed Jacob Javits Convention Center, Holly, aged forty, had received his weekly paycheck earlier that morning. It was now 11:45 A.M., lunch-break time; he hoped to cash his check at Clarke’s and maybe get a cold beer. He was dressed in his usual construction attire—blue jeans, a T-shirt, a lightweight jacket, and a white plastic hard hat.

  A one-time bar owner from the West Side of Manhattan, Holly used to be a well-known face in the saloons and diners along 9th and 10th avenues. Then, one night in 1977, there was a shooting in his bar. John Bokun, a neighborhood gangster, was gunned down by an off-duty transit cop. But a lot of John Bokun’s friends held Michael Holly responsible; they felt Holly had set John Bokun up. After numerous threats on his life, Holly was forced to close his bar and leave the neighborhood. He was lucky enough to land a union job as an ironworker, and even luckier still to be placed at the Convention Center, a long-term construction project if ever there was one.

  Holly stopped to buy a hot dog from a street vendor across from the Convention Center, then continued east on 35th Street, past the old brick warehouses that lined the block. He paid little attent
ion as a beige station wagon with New Jersey plates approached, headed in the opposite direction. The station wagon passed him, then came to an abrupt halt, forcing a van that was behind it to slam on the brakes.

  Seconds later, in a flickering moment of intense clarity, Holly heard what sounded like a muffled gunshot and felt an excruciating pain in his upper back, near his right shoulder. Then, in rapid succession, he heard another shot, another, another, and another. The pain exploded throughout his body before his mind had a chance to register what was happening. All but one of the bullets hit home, piercing his flesh and puncturing his right lung and his aorta. One of the bullets passed all the way through his body. Another grazed his temple, sending his hard hat flying.

  Riddled with bullets, his body contorted but still upright, Holly was able to turn and face his attacker. He caught a glimpse of a man standing roughly ten feet away, holding a gun with a silencer attached still pointed straight at him. As the life rushed from Holly’s body, there was a glimmer of recognition.

  “Aaaargh …” he gasped, his knees beginning to buckle. “You dirty motherfucker!”

  In the middle of West 35th Street, Michael Holly collapsed to the damp pavement.

  The assailant quickly ducked back into the beige station wagon on the passenger side. Before the door was even closed, the car speeded west on 35th Street towards 11th Avenue.

  By the time an ambulance arrived, siren wailing, a pool of blood had already formed underneath Holly’s body. A small gathering of onlookers stood in the drizzle and watched as one of the paramedics checked Holly’s vital signs. There was no blood pressure, no pulse, no sign of breathing.

  Before they had even loaded him into the ambulance, Michael Holly, the former bar owner from Hell’s Kitchen, was a dead man.

  * * *

  Early on the morning of the Michael Holly shooting, Mickey Featherstone was home in bed when he got a call from his friend and neighbor, Pat Hogan. Like Mickey, Hogan was a West Sider who now lived in Jersey and worked at Erie Transfer. That morning, Hogan was calling to see if Mickey was going in to shape up for work. If so, Hogan wanted to hitch a ride.