Westies

by T. J. English

  The gun was supposed to be used on Jimmy Coonan.

  But Billy Beattie didn’t have the nerve to do it alone. So other members of the Westies were brought into the conspiracy. McElroy, Kelly, and Shannon had all recently told Mickey they were fed up with Jimmy Coonan. To them, the idea of eliminating Jimmy certainly had its advantages: profit and survival. They’d all get more control over the neighborhood’s criminal bounty this way. And they knew how upset Featherstone was with Coonan. If he carried through on his plot to kill Jimmy, anyone too closely associated with Coonan might be next in line. Even if they didn’t agree with Mickey, it would be smart to at least act like they were on his side.

  Mickey, Beattie, McElroy, Kelly, and Shannon all met one evening in March ’85 and talked about how to get rid of Coonan. Someone raised the possibility of having a black guy they knew dress up as a Rastafarian, go out to Hazlet, and gun Jimmy down in his neighborhood. With a black dude as the shooter, the cops would never think to trace it to the Westies. Everybody liked that idea until they realized there probably wasn’t a single black person in all of Hazlet. Any Rastafarian seen in that neighborhood would probably be arrested just on general principle.

  The whole thing reached a low point, of sorts, one afternoon later in March when they all put on bulletproof vests, piled into a car, and drove out to Hazlet, hoping to catch Coonan at home. “The house that Ruby built,” they called Coonan’s home at 15 Vanmater Terrace, because Jimmy had purchased it with the money he saved by murdering Ruby Stein. They drove around the neighborhood for an hour or so bitching about Jimmy and Edna, passing a joint around and getting high. They never saw Jimmy that day.

  Although everyone was trying to act tough, the thought of killing Jimmy Coonan was not a pleasant one. It wasn’t that he didn’t deserve it. It was the uncertainty that lay ahead. After Coonan was gone, who would control the rackets? Who would give the orders?

  No one dared ask those questions aloud, but they were heavy on the minds of all five men that day as they drove around the immaculate suburban streets of Hazlet, halfheartedly looking to kill their lifelong friend and leader, Jimmy Coonan.

  Although it hadn’t happened by April of ’85, there were those who felt it was imminent. Maybe it would take place right on 10th Avenue when Jimmy drove by in his brand new Mercedes. Maybe it would happen in a restaurant when he was eating pasta with one of his Italian friends. Or maybe it would be quiet. Maybe Jimmy Coonan would just disappear one day, his body made to “do the Houdini,” just as he had made so many other bodies disappear over the years.

  The fact that Coonan knew nothing of this plot was an indication of just how far removed he had become. Since his return, he’d been spending less and less time with his West Side crew, which contributed to their resentment towards him. Jimmy didn’t seem to want to associate with his old pals anymore. The way they saw it, he was on the verge of just turning the neighborhood’s rackets over to the guineas in return for a spot in their organization.

  The very idea of Coonan’s demise had created a high level of paranoia among those Westies who were in on the plot. Who knew what bloodshed might result from even thinking about such an outrageous act?

  These thoughts were definitely on Mickey Featherstone’s mind on April 26, 1985, the day after the Michael Holly shooting. That morning, Sissy, who was six months pregnant, and their niece Esther rode with him in the family Oldsmobile to Erie Transfer, where he was going to pick up his paycheck. For the first time in a long time, he hadn’t gotten high the night before. He stayed straight so he could mull over all the sinister possibilities of the previous day’s events with a clear head.

  The Holly murder was just too goddamned suspicious, he kept thinking as he crossed the massive span of the George Washington Bridge and headed south on the West Side Highway towards the old neighborhood. Why did they use a car from Erie Transfer? Why didn’t they let him know exactly when and where it was going to go down so he could establish a clear-cut alibi?

  When Mickey pulled up in front of Erie Transfer he hardly noticed the car that was double-parked in front of him. And he wasn’t really paying much attention to the sedan behind him either, though he could see it plainly in his rearview mirror. It wasn’t until he spotted a car with four men in it driving the wrong way on West 52nd Street that he realized what was happening.

  Then all hell broke loose. More cops than he’d ever seen in one place in his life, both detectives and uniformed officers, descended on his car.

  “Oh my God!” gasped Sissy.

  “Stay in the car!” Mickey shouted at his wife and daughter, as he opened the door and stepped out into the street.

  The cops, guns drawn, swarmed around the car. They pulled Sissy and Esther out on the passenger side and led them away.

  “You’re under arrest, Mickey,” one of the detectives barked, pushing Featherstone up against a chain-link fence and slapping on a set of cuffs.

  “Mind tellin’ me what the fuck for?” asked Featherstone.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  An unmarked police car pulled up. As he was being led away, Mickey peered past the sea of cops towards Erie Transfer, where many of his fellow workers had gathered.

  “Call my lawyers!” he yelled as he was pushed into the detective’s car. “They ain’t tellin’ me what I’m under arrest for!”

  On May 13, 1985, two and a half weeks after Featherstone’s arrest, Ken Aronson got a call from a detective in the 10th Precinct.

  “Is this Mickey Featherstone’s attorney?” asked the detective.

  “Yes.”

  “We located the witnesses. Today’s the lineup. You’re here, you’re here. You’re not, you’re not.”

  Then he hung up.

  Aronson was suitably annoyed. Since Mickey’s arrest, there had already been one such lineup. It had taken place within hours of the bust, and Hochheiser and Aronson had not been notified. Apparently, that lineup involved two people who had been driving a delivery van on West 35th Street the day Michael Holly was shot. Their van was forced to stop when a beige station wagon in front of them came to an abrupt halt. They watched in amazement as a man got out of the station wagon on the passenger side, screwed a silencer onto a chrome-colored pistol, and fired five shots at a pedestrian dressed in construction clothes. Then the shooter hopped back in the car and it drove off.

  One of the witnesses swore he saw the shooter plain as day. The other was slightly less certain of the assailant’s appearance, though he’d definitely seen the guy. They both described the shooter as roughly five-feet-seven-inches tall and about 150 pounds. He had sandy-blond hair about collar length, a mustache, and was wearing a white painter’s cap and sunglasses.

  The two witnesses had identified Featherstone from the lineup as the person they’d seen shoot Michael Holly.

  Now, two more witnesses—construction workers who’d been walking on West 35th Street and observed the entire incident from start to finish—had finally been located by the police. They, too, would now get a chance to pick Featherstone out of a lineup.

  Aronson got over to the 10th Precinct as fast as he could. From what he’d been hearing from Mickey, the cops had been mistreating him since the day of his arrest. Featherstone was something of a legend in law enforcement circles, and the attorney didn’t doubt for a minute that the NYPD was making the most of having him in custody. Aronson also felt it was entirely possible that the cops, pissed that Featherstone had beaten so many cases in the past, might try to railroad him by establishing bogus witnesses to the shooting.

  At the station house, the attorney was led into a small, narrow area—more like a hallway than a room—with no windows. There were two file cabinets along one side, and along the other a large plywood panel with hinges on the top. The detectives lifted up the panel to reveal a two-way mirror which looked out onto the lineup room.

  Aronson stood against the back wall, near the file cabinets. The only light was from the lineup room, where a coup
le of detectives waited patiently for the order to bring in Featherstone and the assorted crooks and cops—“fillers”—who would stand next to Mickey in the lineup. But first, a gruff-sounding detective called for the witnesses to be brought in.

  Given the reputation of Mickey Featherstone and the Westies, the cops were taking no chances. The Whitehead murder trial had resulted in two suicidal witnesses, and they were determined that would not be the case this time around. Even Aronson wasn’t told the names of the witnesses.

  As they were led into the room, the attorney, who had been present at many police lineups in his career, observed something he had never seen before. Both witnesses had paper bags over their heads. Small holes had been cut in the bags so they could see.

  With a cop on each side, the witnesses stood directly in front of the two-way mirror.

  “Bring ’em in,” a detective shouted to the cops in the other room.

  Mickey Featherstone and five other people were led into the room and stood against the wall. The fillers were all about Mickey’s size, with mustaches like his and hair of a similar sandy-blond color. They were all wearing painter’s caps of the type the witnesses remembered the shooter wearing on the day in question. The lights in the lineup room were doused, except for a fluorescent light on the ceiling, which shined down on Featherstone and the others.

  The witnesses, their paper bags still securely in place, peered through the glass partition.

  “Turn to the left,” one of the cops commanded to the six men in the lineup. “Turn to the right,” he commanded a few seconds later.

  Within minutes, one of the witnesses said he was unable to make an identification. But the other, his eyes still fixed on the lineup, had no doubts at all.

  “The guy on the left,” he said. “Second from the end. Number five. That’s the guy.”

  “You’re sure?” asked the detective.

  “Yeah. No question about it.”

  The person he identified was Mickey Featherstone.

  Ken Aronson didn’t know quite what to make of it. This was the third time Mickey had been picked out of a lineup, and two of the three witnesses had been absolutely certain of their choice. Normally, Aronson might have thought it meant that maybe, just maybe, his client was guilty. But in the few times he’d talked to Mickey since his arrest, Featherstone had sworn adamantly that he had not done this killing.

  “You gotta believe me on this one,” he’d told Aronson, practically in tears. “I didn’t do it.”

  The guilt or innocence of his clients was not something Aronson usually spent a lot of time thinking about. Unless you were told otherwise, you acted on the assumption they were innocent, often as the evidence piled up against you. In Mickey’s case, Aronson had no illusions. Initially, he suspected Mickey may have indeed done the shooting. He thought so because he’d been hearing through the Westies grapevine that, in the last year or so, Mickey had reverted to his old ways. At first the attorney had been saddened. Then he grew angry, and finally disgusted.

  In the years he’d known Mickey, Aronson, the “nebbish” from Long Island, had grown emotionally attached to this Hell’s Kitchen tough guy who was so drastically unlike himself. He’d been charmed by Featherstone and was willing to put in ungodly amounts of time to help him out. Not just legal time, either, but hours on the phone trying to convince Mickey he could make it in the “legitimate” world. Often, his senior partner, Larry Hochheiser, joked that Aronson could claim Mickey Featherstone as a tax exemption.

  At times, Aronson, who was single and without any family in the area, lived vicariously through Featherstone. He fondly remembered afternoons when Mickey would bring his son, Mickey, Jr., over to his office and play with him in the foyer. Aronson would watch them laughing together and say to himself, “I should be this good with a child if I had one.”

  The fact that Mickey had fallen back into a life-style of gangsterism affected Aronson on a personal level. Over the years, he’d done everything he could to help straighten Mickey out. Now Mickey, he felt, had let him down. Even if Featherstone was innocent of the Michael Holly shooting, as he so vehemently claimed, Aronson had reluctantly come to the conclusion it was only a matter of time before Mickey Featherstone would be back in court on some other charge.

  Aronson’s disillusionment persisted, even though two weeks after the lineup he heard a version of the Holly shooting that exonerated Mickey—at least as the person who had pulled the trigger. He was given this version at Billy Bokun’s wedding in Sacred Heart Church, the same church where Mickey Spillane had tied the knot with Maureen McManus some twenty-five years before. The Irish community in Hell’s Kitchen was nearly nonexistent by now, but Sacred Heart still held a special place in the hearts of those old enough to remember the glory days.

  Aronson was invited to Bokun’s wedding not only because he was a friend of the community’s, but also because there were rumors that Billy might be arrested as an accomplice in the Holly murder. Bokun’s future mother-in-law, Flo Collins, wife of white-haired coke dealer Tommy Collins, told the attorney she didn’t want any “wiseguy detectives” interrupting the ceremony.

  Aronson arrived at the church around 4:30 on the afternoon of May 26, 1985. The ceremony was not scheduled to begin for an hour or so, and few people were there. Inside the cathedral, Aronson spotted Bokun and approached to offer his congratulations.

  “Kenny,” said Billy, looking anxious, “I gotta talk to you.”

  Bokun was dressed in a white tuxedo which accentuated his red birthmark. He led Aronson to a quiet corner near the front of the church, just to the right of the altar. A soft late-afternoon light cascaded down from the high stained-glass windows, bathing the entire church in a golden hue.

  In these somber and dramatic surroundings, Billy Bokun confessed to the Holly shooting. Nearly in tears, he told Aronson that Mickey hadn’t killed the guy, though, Bokun claimed, Mickey knew the murder was to take place that day.

  “So what am I gonna do, huh?” Billy asked Aronson. “I’ll turn myself in if I have to.”

  “Billy, as your lawyer, this is what I’m going to suggest.… First of all, who knows about this?”

  “A lot of people, you know. This is what I don’t understand. Mickey knew all about this. He knew. He didn’t fuckin’ cover for hisself.”

  “Okay. Look, Billy, I can’t tell you what to do, okay? There’s a conflict. But I can tell you if you try to turn yourself in, they’ll just charge you as being the driver or something. It doesn’t mean they’ll let Mickey go. They have witnesses that identified him.”

  Billy began to cry. “I can’t just let this happen.… Fuck, motherfuck … why didn’t he cover hisself?”

  Kenny took a hard line. “Billy, look, this is your wedding day. Try to cheer up.”

  Throughout the wedding ceremony and over the next few days, Aronson was in a mild state of shock. Both Bokun and Featherstone were clients of his. How could he exonerate one without convicting the other?

  In the weeks following the confession at Sacred Heart Church, Aronson and Larry Hochheiser discussed their options.

  “As the guy’s counsel,” cautioned Hochheiser, “we sure as hell can’t tell him to take the stand. It’s not exactly in his best interest.”

  “You know,” replied Aronson, “we don’t even know if this confession is for real. I mean, what if he was put up to this? I don’t think we could count on this confession even if we did put him on the stand.”

  Hochheiser sat at his desk and glanced out the window of his forty-ninth-floor office. It was a reasonably clear day, and in the distance he could see a small private plane soaring over the concrete peaks and caverns of Manhattan. Hochheiser, himself a licensed pilot who loved to fly in his off hours, was jealous. He would have liked to be out there right now.

  He was not a kid anymore. At forty-four, Hochheiser’s once wild mane of brown hair was now speckled with gray. After fifteen years as Featherstone’s attorney, he was finally beginning to t
hink maybe Mickey was more trouble than he was worth.

  “Well,” said Hochheiser, asking the question he knew was on both their minds. “So who do we tell about this?”

  Aronson didn’t look pleased. He knew they were trolling in murky legal waters. Already he’d checked the Canon of Ethics. There were no provisions that directly addressed their dilemma.

  “The way I see it,” said Kenny, “we don’t tell anyone. If Bokun wants to turn himself in, that’s his business. But the confession itself is privileged.”

  With that, the matter was closed. They agreed they would proceed with the case regardless of what Bokun intended to do, based on the evidence that was at their disposal. In the meantime, they would tell Mickey about the confession, but no one else—not the judge, not the prosecution, and certainly not the press.

  But news of Billy Bokun’s confession to Aronson spread through Hell’s Kitchen like wildfire. Sissy Featherstone, for one, couldn’t believe that the attorneys weren’t going to make Bokun turn himself in. In June, a few weeks after Bokun’s wedding, she confronted Ken Aronson in a Chinese restaurant near the courthouse in lower Manhattan. They’d spent the morning in court during one of Mickey’s pre-trial hearings, and Sissy was uptight.

  “I told you Mickey was innocent,” she said to Aronson.

  “No,” replied the attorney, “Bokun didn’t say innocent. He just said Mickey didn’t pull the trigger. He knew, Sissy. It was his fault he went to Erie. He shouldn’t have been so nosey. He should have stayed away.”

  “Wait a minute. Mickey wasn’t being nosey. He was told by Kevin and Kenny to meet them at the Skyline.”

  “He should have had an alibi, Sissy. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near Erie.”

  As the conversation continued, Aronson found himself getting more and more upset. He could see how he had boxed himself into a corner. All these years he spent getting close to the West Side community was backfiring on him. All the weddings, engagement parties, and funerals he’d attended had led people to think of him almost as a member of the gang. It had all seemed so exotic to him at the time. But now Mickey and Sissy were expecting him to “do the right thing,” to do whatever he had to in order to make sure Mickey didn’t take the fall.