Westies

by T. J. English

  As the judge prepared to deliver his verdict, Mickey stood to face the court. Ever since he could remember, he’d been called “paranoid” by doctors, lawyers, and even friends. Nobody believed him when he claimed he was not the person who killed Michael Holly, and nobody believed him when he said he’d been deliberately set up. He’d been forced to pursue a path he never wanted to, a path that had isolated him from everyone in his life except for his wife and family.

  What he hoped for now was more than just vindication. What he hoped for was deliverance.

  “In the interest of justice,” declared Judge Schlessinger with the bang of his gavel, “I am compelled to overturn this conviction.”

  Mickey was asked if he had anything to say. He responded with a simple, “Thank you.”

  Later, he decided what he should have said—loud enough for every cop, prosecutor and judge in New York County to hear—was, “I told you so.”

  16

  MICKEY’S NEW FRIENDS

  Long before Richie Egan arrived at the offices of the U.S. Attorney, he had a pretty good idea why he’d been summoned. A prosecutor, Mary Lee Warren, had informed him it involved a federal racketeering case they were building against Jimmy Coonan and other West Side crime figures. Egan knew there was no way the Southern District would attempt a case of this magnitude unless they had a big-time witness on their side. Now that Mickey Featherstone’s conviction had been vacated, there was only one possible explanation.

  Featherstone must have flipped.

  Egan’s sixteen years as a cop had taught him never to be too surprised by anything, especially the whims and machinations of a professional racketeer. Yet he found it hard to imagine Mickey Featherstone cooperating with the government. In police circles, Featherstone always had a reputation as the ultimate tough guy, the kind of person who would just as soon spit in a cop’s face as shake his hand.

  In some ways, Egan found it comforting that people like Featherstone existed. It made it that much easier to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys.

  But if Featherstone was serving as a government informant, presumably he had decided to forswear his past. Egan wasn’t buying that just yet, but one lesson seemed clear: No matter how tough the criminal, there was always the possibility that one day he might join hands with the government, whatever his personal motivations.

  At the U.S. Attorney’s office, adjacent to the federal courthouse at 1 St. Andrews Plaza in lower Manhattan, Egan got a complete rundown on the case from Warren and the other investigators involved. Not only were Featherstone and his wife cooperating with the investigation, but extensive debriefings by the FBI and the Manhattan D.A.’s office had already begun.

  In order to put the Westies away for good, the government would have to charge them with the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Practices (RICO) Act. And in order to do that, they would need to go above and beyond the individual crimes and establish a “pattern of racketeering,” which is where Egan came in.

  “What we’re proposing,” Warren told Egan, “is that you move in with us full-time. Nobody knows this particular group of criminals as well as you. We could use your expertise on this. You’d have a desk right here with us, and you’d be working in conjunction with all the other branches of the investigation—the FBI, Narcotics, Homicide, and the Manhattan Task Force South.”

  Egan had plenty of reasons to say no to the government’s offer. For one thing, he’d been promoted to detective in ’79 and was currently working on an investigation of Colombian drug traffickers in Brooklyn. Along with the Drug Enforcement Administration, he’d been gathering intelligence on that case for nearly three years now, and it would soon be entering its crucial final stages. Like most cops, Egan didn’t like the idea of leaving an investigation just when it was beginning to heat up.

  And there were inherent pitfalls in working with the U.S. Attorney’s office. Throughout his career with the NYPD, Egan had heard many horror stories from cops who’d gone to work with federal prosecutors and regretted every minute of it. Federal prosecutors were a different breed—ivory-tower lawyers with no understanding of the streets, much less hard-core criminal behavior. Many had political ambitions of their own and tended to view a member of the city’s police department, however distinguished, as little more than a necessary evil.

  Egan was aware of this, yet knew immediately what his answer would be. In all his years as a cop, no case had gotten his adrenaline going quite like the West Side investigation. Plus, it was rare for an Intelligence cop to get an opportunity to see a case through to the end. Usually Intell laid the groundwork, then some other division came along and got all the credit when the arrests and convictions got handed down. Here was a chance to make sure the boys from Intell would be given due representation. Egan felt he owed it to himself—and the Division—to say yes.

  Within days of his meeting with Warren, Egan moved in with the other investigators assigned to the case on the 9th floor of 1 St. Andrews Plaza, just down the hall from Warren and her thirty-one-year-old co-prosecutor, David Brodsky. The accommodations, of course, were a mere formality. With all the debriefings and surveillance operations yet to come, Egan knew he’d be spending very little time behind a desk.

  The first order of business was to join the ongoing debriefings with Featherstone. Art Ruffles, an FBI investigator, along with Detective Steve Mshar from the NYPD’s Task Force South, had been questioning Mickey on crimes involving Coonan, Kelly, McElroy, Shannon, and others. Already, they had gathered information on a staggering number of crimes spanning some twenty years.

  Where Egan’s expertise was needed most was in the area of historical background. Using the Intelligence Division’s voluminous files, he might be able to give the investigation the kind of overview necessary for the government to bring all the names and events together in one neat RICO package.

  Within days after Featherstone’s conviction was overturned, Egan had his initial meeting with Mickey. As had been the case at least once a day for the last few months, Mickey was brought from the Manhattan Correctional Center (MCC), where he was now being held, to a conference room in the U.S. Attorney’s office. It was the first time the two men had been face-to-face since March of 1979, when Egan, with about a half-dozen other detectives, had arrested Mickey for the Whitehead murder in front of a check-cashing store on 10th Avenue.

  “Mickey,” said Egan, extending his hand, “for what it’s worth, no hard feelings.”

  “No,” replied Featherstone. “I got no hard feelings for you. You was always straight with me.” Then he laughed and added, “Wish I could say the same for your fellow officers.”

  Egan had not really known what to expect from Featherstone. He’d heard how Mickey felt he’d been framed for the Michael Holly murder by his fellow gang members. There was no telling whether he would be embittered by this, and see his cooperation as an opportunity to settle old scores, or whether he would be contrite, hoping only to clean his own slate and start anew. As an Intelligence cop Egan had interviewed dozens of criminals in similar situations, and there were no set patterns. Some were surly and argumentative. Some felt shame and humiliation. Others were polite, even downright friendly.

  Over the following weeks, Egan found that Mickey was a little bit of everything. Often, after he was brought from his cell for his daily debriefing session, Featherstone would start out angry and uncommunicative. Usually his anger had something to do with the U.S. Attorney’s office, which he felt was not doing enough to get him a bail hearing. Sometimes it had to do with the treatment he was receiving at the MCC, where, he claimed, inmates in the Witness Protection wing were constantly derided as stoolies and “cheese eaters”—or rats—by the guards who worked there.

  After a while, though, Mickey always calmed down. “It’s not you, Richie,” he would say to Detective Egan. “I ain’t angry with you. It’s those other bastards.” Then the two men would begin to burrow back through Mickey’s past, dredging up memories of violence an
d criminal behavior that Featherstone had, over the years, buried deep in his memory.

  Egan was particularly interested in reviewing the years when Mickey first hooked up with Jimmy Coonan. That was when Sergeant Tom McCabe, Egan’s supervisor, had first begun to push for a full-scale investigation of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob. Specifically, it was the murders of Tom Devaney, Eddie Cummiskey, and Tom Kapatos in ’76 and early ’77 that had first piqued McCabe’s interest. Despite the hours and hours of investigation by McCabe, Egan, and others, those murders had never been solved.

  “You gotta remember,” Mickey told Egan. “Coonan kept me in the dark ’bout a lot of things. To tell ya the truth, I was never interested. But I can tell ya who was behind those murders—Fat Tony Salerno. Definitely.”

  Just as McCabe and Egan had always suspected, the killings were part of Salerno’s struggle with Mickey Spillane for control of the soon-to-be-constructed Jacob Javits Convention Center. Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan, the freelance hitman famed for his Attica escape and long rumored to have been involved in Jimmy Hoffa’s demise, did the hits for Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, in expectation that he’d get a piece of the Convention Center rackets. But after the killings, Fat Tony reneged on his part of the bargain, and in 1978 a very pissed off Mad Dog Sullivan came to Coonan and Featherstone looking to join their crew.

  Egan listened to Featherstone’s stories with utter fascination. Over the years, the West Side investigation had always suffered from a certain lack of cohesion. There had been so many seemingly related homicides that the Syndicated Crime Unit had barely been able to keep track of them all. Now, Mickey was connecting files and files of Intelligence data from more than a decade’s worth of surveillances and investigations.

  To Egan, some of Mickey’s most intriguing revelations involved jobs that went unfinished. Like the plot to murder Fat Tony himself. Apparently, around the time Coonan and Featherstone heard that Salerno was positioning himself to take control of the Convention Center, they decided to take matters into their own hands. On three separate occasions, said Featherstone, he and Coonan, along with Jimmy McElroy and Richie Ryan, armed themselves with an arsenal of weaponry and drove to Salerno’s favorite social club at 116th Street and Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem. The idea was to blow him away in broad daylight. Luckily for Salerno, they never spotted him.

  Another scheme that never materialized was Jimmy Coonan’s grand plan to link-up the Hell’s Kitchen Mob with an Irish gang in Boston run by Jimmy’s friend from Sing Sing, Pete Wilson (one of the original Irishmen spotted at the Stage Deli by Sergeant Tom McCabe in ’77). Once, after numerous meetings with Wilson in New York, Featherstone, Coonan, and his brother Jackie flew to Boston to carry out a heist with Wilson and his boys. Together they robbed a pharmaceutical warehouse one night, then returned to Manhattan with the intention of pursuing their Boston connection at a later date. But events in the neighborhood kept getting in the way, and the alliance—which would have been the first known partnership between Irish gangsters in the two cities—never went any further.

  Throughout the latter months of 1986, Featherstone was pumped relentlessly for information. Along with Egan, there were federal prosecutors, city D.A.s, FBI agents, and, at one time or another, cops from just about every department in the NYPD. Most had little interest in Featherstone other than as a source of information. In recent years, the Westies had become one of the city’s more notorious organized crime cases. Featherstone’s cooperation insured that from here on out, anyone connected with the case could expect lots of free publicity. To those investigators with their sights on career advancement, the Westies case, or, more pointedly, Mickey Featherstone, was their ticket to the promised land.

  And what a ticket he proved to be. Before Featherstone was done, he had given the government information on, among other things, thirty unsolved homicides in Manhattan going back some sixteen years. Of the thirty murders, six had been committed by Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey, four by Jimmy Coonan, five by Richie Ryan, three by Kevin Kelly, and three by Jimmy McElroy. On top of all that, Mickey detailed his own involvement in hundreds of beatings, stabbings, and shootings both before and during his time as Jimmy Coonan’s right-hand man.

  To Featherstone, the debriefing process was long and rough. It wasn’t his show. At times, he resented having his brain picked four, five, sometimes six hours a day. He would demand food and refreshments at odd intervals—anything to break the monotony and make him feel like he was in control. But eventually Mickey settled in and began to see the value in what he was doing. Not so much for the government, but for himself. It was his chance to set the record straight.

  A few of the investigators, like Egan, Marilyn Lucht, and Art Ruffles of the FBI, were aware of the toll it was taking on Featherstone. Mickey had stayed high or drunk for most of the violence over the years. Now, they were asking him to rehash, over and over again, gruesomely detailed descriptions of brutal killings and dismemberments totally sober. Egan, for one, realized if they pushed Featherstone too hard he might crack before they ever had a chance to get him into court.

  Sometimes, usually at the end of a marathon interview session, Egan would attempt to humanize these encounters, to take Featherstone beyond the names, dates, and facts. Once, he asked Mickey how it had gotten so violent; how, as human beings, they had been able to watch arms, legs, and heads being severed without realizing they had gone too far.

  “It was no big deal,” Mickey said with a forced bravado. “It’s like a coroner, right? After you’ve seen it a few times you can deal with it.”

  “Yeah,” said Egan. “But these were people you knew. Some of them people you’d known your whole life. Neighborhood people.”

  Mickey thought about this; his voice got quiet and uncertain. He admitted that after a while it got vicious, even evil. “But youse gotta realize,” he pleaded. “That wasn’t me. I never could stomach that—the cutting up. It was Coonan. Always Coonan.”

  At one point, Mickey’s shame had caused him to almost violate his agreement with the government. He had been warned—in writing—that if he ever withheld information about a crime he was involved in and it later came to light, the agreement would be terminated. Even so, in his description of the Rickey Tassiello murder, Mickey never mentioned stabbing Tassiello. Even though Coonan had told him to do it, Mickey always felt disgraced by that act. Throughout his life, he’d derived a scrap of twisted pride from the fact that he never inflicted violence on anyone who didn’t have a chance to defend himself. But sticking a knife in a dead man, that was something different.

  Eventually, Mickey was called before a grand jury to tell what he knew about the Tassiello murder. He sat in a holding pen before being led into the jury room and thought about what he was going to do. He reminded himself that he’d made a commitment to give the entire truth. After a life of crime, it was not a philosophy he embraced easily. But he knew that Tony Lucich was testifying. Lucich knew Mickey had stuck a knife into Tassiello’s chest. Mickey would have to come clean.

  Before the grand jury, nervous and soaked with perspiration, Featherstone admitted what he had done. He admitted taking a knife and plunging it into the heart of a dead man.

  With Mickey and Sissy Featherstone providing more and more pieces of the puzzle, the government got ready to throw out the net. Now that Mickey was on the side of the law, the Westies were like a wounded animal. And this time, the investigators were determined not to let the gang slip through their grasp. They resolved to eradicate what was left of the West Side Irish Mob, once and for all.

  Along with Steve Mshar and other detectives from the Task Force South, Richie Egan took to the streets. Driving around Hell’s Kitchen again after all these years was a strange experience for Egan. It made him feel old. The neighborhood was hardly recognizable now. Long gone were the White House Bar, Sonny’s Cafe, the Sunbrite, the 596 Club, and the other saloons that Coonan, Featherstone, and their predecessors had frequented. M
any of the old tenement buildings had been leveled and replaced by condos and co-op apartment buildings. The grizzled old Irish and Italian faces of a bygone era were few and far between. It was not uncommon to see people in suits and with briefcases hustling to and from Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood now known almost exclusively as Clinton.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure it out, thought Egan. After the thousands of hours’ worth of surveillance they’d done, and all the trials and investigations, gentrification had probably done more to force the Westies out of Hell’s Kitchen than anything law enforcement was able to do.

  Once they began their surveillance, the cops were surprised to discover that Jimmy Coonan had all but disappeared. Before it was known Mickey had flipped, they’d heard he was sometimes seen driving around the neighborhood in a black Mercedes 4-door with a cellular phone. Edna, the one-time orphan from 9th Avenue, also had a new Mercedes; hers was blue. She too was often seen cruising along the avenues of the West Side like some upwardly mobile expatriate who just couldn’t resist flaunting her wealth back in the old neighborhood.

  When Mickey flipped (WESTIES CON SINGS IRISH LULLABY, trumpeted the Post), the Coonans were seen less and less frequently. Jimmy had done what all successful gangsters were supposed to do. He’d gone into a “legitimate” business. Along with his old pals Billy Murtha and Buddy Leahy—the guys who’d hired him and Mickey to whack James Maher of the Metal Lathers union in July of ’78—Jimmy had begun investing heavily in Marine Construction, a sizable contracting firm based just north of the city in Tarrytown. It was a profitable business, but its real purpose was to give Coonan a patina of respectability when the shit finally hit the fan. It also served as an ideal way for him to launder his criminal proceeds.