Westies

by T. J. English

  Featherstone refused. He insisted he was innocent, and he’d rather take his chances in court.

  Five months later, Featherstone was convicted.

  Mickey knew the government would come calling again, only this time they held all the cards. He also knew that unless he wanted to rot away in prison the rest of his life, he had no recourse but to at least listen to what they had to say.

  As the car crossed the Whitestone Bridge, Mickey stared blankly at the soft blue expanse of the East River. He sat quietly as they continued north along the Hutchinson River Parkway through the Bronx, past the city limits, and into Westchester County. After exiting the expressway and driving through the streets of some suburban area Mickey was not familiar with, they arrived at a nondescript hotel at a remote outpost.

  Still in handcuffs, he was taken from the car into a hotel room. One of the detectives patted him down, then removed the cuffs. Coffee and buttered rolls were brought in while Nauwens and the detectives disappeared into an adjoining room.

  After sitting alone for ten minutes, Mickey was joined by John Kaley, his newly assigned government attorney.

  “Hello, Mickey,” said Kaley, dressed in a crisp new suit and tie. “Your wife’ll be in in a minute. She’s being searched by an FBI agent. Female, of course.”

  “Hey,” shot back Mickey. “Why didn’t you tell these people me and my wife didn’t wanna come? I told you at Rikers I wanted to talk to her first.”

  “It was too late when they called. Everything was set up.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Look. We’re here, okay? Let’s just see what they have to say.”

  At that moment, Sissy walked into the room looking sallow and shaken.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Mickey.

  “I was just stripped naked in there and searched by some woman in the bathroom.”

  Kaley, the attorney, interjected, “That’s security, Sissy. They have to do that.”

  “Yeah, but she could’ve just searched me. Not take my clothes off and look inside me.”

  “Well …”

  “Forget it. I don’t wanna talk about it no more.”

  Mickey and Sissy sat together on the couch, across the coffee table from Kaley.

  “Okay,” said the attorney, “Look. Here’s what I’m going to do. Mickey, you claim you’re innocent, right? That you didn’t do this killing. I’m going to ask them to look into that.”

  Sissy could hardly contain herself. She knew that Mickey had already been told if they were to look into his innocence, he would have to plead guilty to a federal racketeering charge, which carried a possible twenty-year sentence. “Hey,” she declared, “Mickey ain’t gonna take no twenty-year charge just so’s he can get help to prove his innocence. No way.”

  “I understand that. Let’s just tell them you want help and see what they say.”

  Kaley called the government people into the room. It was a large group led by Walter Mack, a rangy, blond-haired federal prosecutor. With him were Mary Lee Warren, another federal prosecutor, Jeffrey Schlanger, the assistant D.A. who prosecuted Featherstone for the Holly homicide, and Nauwens. Behind them were a half-dozen other men and women, a mix of FBI agents and NYPD detectives; all people with investigations—and careers—that would benefit greatly from the cooperation of Mickey Featherstone.

  “Alright,” said Kaley, after they’d all taken their seats. “We know why Mickey and his wife are here, so let’s get to it. He says he’s innocent and he’s looking for help to prove it.”

  “Okay,” replied Mack, who was acting as chief negotiator. “We can do that. But first he’ll have to plead to a racketeering charge, a RICO charge, and agree to cooperate. Then we can proceed from there.”

  “No way,” Mickey said fiercely. “This is the same old shit. Why should I have to plead to anything? I was set up by my lawyer, man, and everybody else too. I can prove it.”

  Sissy, who’d been on the verge of tears ever since she walked in the room, began to cry.

  “Look,” Kaley said to Mack. “Will you be willing to tap their phones, have Sissy and Mickey wear a wire so they can get the real killers on tape? Would you do that?”

  “Certainly. We’ll do all that.”

  “And the Witness Protection Program? Sissy and her kids will be relocated and cared for when this is all over?”

  “Certainly. They’ll have the full benefits of the Witness Program. But listen, I reiterate, none of this is going to happen unless Mickey agrees to take a plea.”

  For the next twenty minutes the negotiations went back and forth with little headway. Mickey and Sissy couldn’t believe the government wasn’t the least bit interested in Mickey’s claims of innocence unless he was first willing to plead guilty to a federal racketeering charge.

  “It’s the only way,” Mack insisted. “If we were to help you establish your innocence, and you were able to do so, what guarantee would we have that you’d cooperate? Your plea is the only backup we’ve got.”

  Eventually, Kaley asked the government people to go into the other room.

  “Look,” he said, when he and Mickey and Sissy were alone again. “Let’s be realistic, Mickey. You’re thirtyseven years old—right?—facing twenty-five years to life for a murder you say you didn’t commit. Now, there’s no way you’re going to win on appeal, if that’s what you’re thinking. Let’s face it—you are who you are. There’s no judge alive that’s going to reverse that conviction. You’re going to get twenty-five to life for this murder.

  “Now, the government is offering a twenty-year RICO, okay? If you cooperate with them, it’s not likely you’ll get twenty years. Not likely at all. So if we can prove your innocence on the murder charge, get rid of that twenty-five to life … and your wife and kids’ll be taken care of in the Witness Program … I don’t know, that’s not such a bad deal.”

  “No,” cried Sissy. “Maybe I can find a way to prove his innocence on my own.”

  “And who’s going to believe you, Sissy? C’mon, let’s not be naive here. The only way you’re going to prove anything is if the government oversees it.”

  When the government team returned, the argument resumed with little or no progress until the issue of bail was brought up.

  “You can get me bail?” Mickey asked Mack, a glimmer of hope in his voice.

  “If your murder conviction is overturned,” said Mack, “and all you’re facing is the racketeering charge, I wouldn’t object to bail.”

  After the issues of bail and furloughs and conjugal visits had been tossed around for a while, Mickey and Sissy were left alone to make their decision. As Sissy tried to compose herself, Mickey glanced around at the empty room. For a brief second, he thought of just walking right out the door and starting to run. But there were cops and FBI agents all over the place. He’d just be caught and laughed at.

  “Sis,” said Mickey, as depressed as he could ever remember feeling. “What the fuck else can we do?”

  The most important thing, as far as both were concerned, was somehow proving Mickey’s innocence in the Holly murder. It was hard for them to think beyond that, to the hours of debriefings and grand jury hearings and trials that were sure to follow. They’d been told what might lie ahead, but it all seemed so remote. If they were somehow able to clear Mickey of the murder charge, and if at the same time he’d get bail and furloughs so he could be with his family, what else was there?

  Everyone was called back into the room. Kaley conferred briefly with Mickey, then turned to Mack and the rest of the government team. “Now let’s get this straight. If Mickey cooperates, you’ll investigate his innocence on the murder charge. You’ll recommend bail, and once he’s sentenced on the racketeering charge he’ll get furloughs a few times a year. Also, his family will be placed in the Witness Protection Program. They’ll be cared for during and after the period of cooperation. Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Mickey?”

  Feathe
rstone looked up from the couch at the group, most of them middle-aged men dressed in conservative suits and ties. “I don’t know … you people got me in a situation here. I guess I got no choice.”

  The government people all stepped forward to shake Mickey’s hand. A few of them told him reassuringly that he’d “done the right thing.”

  “Alright,” said Mack. “No sense wasting time with this. If we’re all agreed, I’d like to start the debriefings right now.”

  “Now?” asked Mickey.

  “Sure. Why don’t you just start by telling us everything you know?”

  Mickey took a deep breath and tried to get his head together. He didn’t have the faintest idea where to begin.

  From the moment they made their pact with the government, Mickey and Sissy were obsessed with establishing Mickey’s innocence. The key players, they knew, were Kevin Kelly, Kenny Shannon, and Billy Bokun. All three had been in contact with Sissy on a semiregular basis since Mickey’s conviction. With her husband going away for a murder they committed, they’d gone out of their way to assuage Sissy. As was the Hell’s Kitchen custom, a benefit had been held to raise money for her and the kids, and there’d been numerous phone calls and commiserations—none of which altered Sissy and Mickey’s conviction that the same people now showing so much “concern” were the very people who’d set Mickey up.

  On the afternoon of May 6, 1986, two weeks after Mickey and Sissy cut their deal with the feds, Kelly and Shannon came to visit Sissy at her home in Teaneck. The Featherstone children played noisily in the next room while the three of them sat in Sissy’s kitchen. Kelly, the handsome young gangster who looked like Matt Dillon, was rarely seen these days without Shannon, his fair-haired partner. Since Mickey’s arrest, they’d become the most active Westies in Hell’s Kitchen, with their fingers in everything from loansharking to cocaine sales.

  Anxious to put Sissy at ease, Kelly and Shannon spoke freely, not knowing that just inches away, resting on the arm of a nearby chair in Sissy’s pocketbook, was a small six-by-six-inch FBI-issue recorder.

  “Alright, Sissy,” said Kelly, tossing an envelope onto the table. “There’s two here, you know, from us. And an extra six. We got another payment from the guy—three hundred from the pier.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “And that three hundred from last week, from the pier. So that’s twenty-six there.”

  The $2,600 was Mickey’s monthly share of the loansharking money on the West Side piers. Kelly, Shannon, and Billy “the Indian” Bokun had also agreed to put up $11,000 for an appeals lawyer, but that money, Kelly said, had not yet been collected.

  Then Kelly launched into a tirade against Bokun, who was slow coming up with his share.

  “When we talked to Billy,” said Kevin, “Billy says, ‘Look, I wanna do the right thing.’ I said, ‘Well, Billy, mine and Kenny’s nut comes to seven thousand now. Five thousand for the lawyer, two for Sissy.’ I said, ‘So, you wanna do the right thing? Get it on with us. Give me five hundred for Sissy, right? And two thousand for the lawyer.’ So he makes his first payment, right? And he tells me, he goes, ‘I’m gonna sell my car at the end of the month so I’ll have next month’s payment.’ I said, ‘Hey, Bill, whatever you wanna do …’”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because, I mean, if he don’t come up with the money, you know, the kid has a fuckin’ accident or somethin’. I mean, what the fuck.”

  Sissy was only half-listening to Kelly; she kept worrying about the recorder. Was it picking up the conversation? Was there enough tape? Was it even on? On top of all that, there was the constant fear that somehow Kelly and Shannon might become suspicious. She’d been instructed by FBI agents on how to use the recorder, but when she used it was totally up to her. There were no agents backing her up in the event she was found out. It was just her and the children alone in the house with Kelly and Shannon.

  “You know what always bothered me?” she asked Kelly and Shannon. “Mickey said that when you spoke with him, you said youse didn’t tell Billy to wear a mustache that day?”

  “It’s bullshit,” said Shannon.

  “That’s nothing,” agreed Kelly.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s fuckin’ bullshit.”

  “Why did he make it up then?”

  “Look, Sis,” said Kelly. “I mean, even if there was a mustache, what’s the difference? He don’t look nothin’ like your husband.”

  “He can’t grow a fuckin’ mustache,” added Shannon.

  Sissy was miffed. “Well, I wonder why he even wore one then. Oh, I could choke this guy.”

  In their eagerness to convince Sissy, Kelly and Shannon began verbally tripping over one another: “He didn’t have one …” “He didn’t have a mustache …” “He didn’t have one that day.”

  “Yeah,” said Sissy. “But they identified him as having a mustache. That’s why they picked Mickey out. The witness was sayin’, ‘That’s him!’ because of the mustache and the color of his hair.”

  “That’s the cops tellin’ them,” insisted Kelly. “That’s all that is.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s gotta be, Sissy, like, coaching ’em.”

  “They couldn’t see Billy do it,” offered Shannon. “Because Holly was behind ’em. You understand what I’m sayin’? And when Billy got out of the car, the car was right there, okay? He got out. He ran right in behind the truck, you know? Bing bing bing! He came out and went right behind the truck and got in the car. And we swung left. There’s no possible way they could see, even from the van.…”

  “Yeah.”

  “So they didn’t even see it happen. They might’ve heard it. But the van, you know, it’s about the size of this room. So if they were in the van—right?—they can’t see behind the van.”

  Sissy was ecstatic, though she tried hard not to show it. Shannon had admitted his role as the getaway driver, described the event itself, and even cast doubt on the validity of the government’s eyewitnesses.

  In the weeks that followed, there were other conversations with Kelly and Shannon in which they gave even more details on the Holly shooting. Sissy taped these as well as phone conversations with other gang members using a simple device she purchased from a local Radio Shack. Since the government was interested in more than just the Holly murder, Sissy had been instructed by Marilyn Lucht, the FBI agent assigned to her case, to establish contact with as many other Westies as possible.

  It wasn’t hard. On May 15th, just nine days after the kitchen meeting with Kelly and Shannon, Jimmy McElroy called Sissy to reassure her that she was going to be taken care of while her husband was away.

  “Whatever we do,” McElroy told Sissy, “you’re gettin’.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m gonna make sure of that. I told the other guy—Blondie …”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Jimmy.”

  “Oh. Mr. Coonan.”

  “I was with him last week.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We were drinkin’, right? And I told him. I said, ‘Let me tell you somethin’. Whatever we do, Mickey’s gettin’ the same.’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.’ I said, ‘Or else I ain’t doin’ anything anymore.’”

  Sissy still got steamed whenever Coonan’s name came up. “He didn’t even give nothin’ to his benefit—the benefit they had for Mickey,” she said.

  “I know. I know all about that. But he’s gonna make it up. He …”

  “When? In the year 2000?”

  “No. I’m gonna … I’ll take care of that. Because, listen, Sissy …”

  “Yeah?”

  “I tell ya, he knows he did wrong. Because I talked to him, and he says, ‘Nah, I didn’t really take care of none of you guys.’ He was drinkin’, you know? He came out with it. And it ain’t even him. It’s his fuckin’, stinking wife!”

  “Edna. Right.”

  “She’s a bitch, you know that.”

  “Yeah, she is. She�
�s treacherous.”

  “She fucking hates us.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, she wants more money, more money, more money.”

  “That’s it. Greed.”

  Sometimes, after taping conversations like that, Sissy would get depressed. It was bad enough that she was eliciting damaging information from people she knew; there was also the fact that everyone seemed to have turned against one another. Kelly and Shannon were constantly bitching about Billy Bokun. Bokun, in return, felt that Kelly and Shannon were out to get him. Jimmy McElroy bitched about Edna Coonan and her scheming ways. And God only knew what Jimmy Coonan was up to.

  On top of all this was the weight of Sissy and Mickey’s feelings of betrayal, and their participation in a plan that might bring the whole neighborhood operation to a crashing halt.

  As the implications of what she was doing dawned on her, Sissy began to feel lonely and isolated. At the end of the day, after reporting to Lucht on the conversations she’d recorded that afternoon or evening, after tucking her children into bed and telling them for the umpteenth time that, no, their father was not coming home the next day, she would fall into bed, exhausted. The only way she could keep the fear and anxiety at bay was to think about her husband languishing away in his five-by-seven-foot prison cell. Only then could she muster the anger and indignation that would get her through the night, and on to the next secret recording session.

  * * *

  Mickey’s pact with the government did nothing to change his status in general population at the Rikers Island House of Detention. The FBI, which was monitoring his taped conversations as well, insisted that his life follow the same daily routine as any convicted prisoner awaiting sentencing. Certainly no inmates, and as few members of the prison administration as possible, were to know anything about Featherstone’s status as a confidential informant.

  The danger, of course, was overwhelming. If there was even the slightest inkling that Mickey Featherstone was cooperating with the government while he was still within the walls of Rikers, he would become an immediate casualty. No one knew this better than Mickey himself, who by now had spent more than ten years of his life absorbing the prison ethos.