“Yeah,” answered Beattie, dejectedly, holding up his shirt.
“Don’t worry, Billy,” said another cop. “There’ll be a special place in Heaven for you.”
Beattie raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? Don’t be too sure about that.”
17
WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND
The arrests went down in late November and December of 1986. Jimmy Coonan was found in his hideaway in Jersey and peaceably taken in. Edna Coonan was arrested in front of the family Christmas tree in their home in Hazlet. Others, including Billy Bokun, Mugsy Ritter, Johnny Halo, and Florence Collins, were arrested in and around Hell’s Kitchen. Florence Collins’s husband, Tommy Collins, was already incarcerated on a narcotics rap at the time. He too was handcuffed, taken to central booking, and charged with being a member of the Westies.
Jimmy McElroy, after learning that his good friend Billy Beattie had been cooperating with the government, went on the run. But McElroy was a creature of habit. And the NYPD knew of a place in Mesa, Arizona, where he’d gone on the lam before. He was arrested there by federal authorities.
Kevin Kelly and Kenny Shannon could not be found, despite a combined local and federal multistate manhunt. In the few remaining working-class bars in Hell’s Kitchen, rumors circulated that they were either dead or hiding out in Ireland.
Over the next few months a succession of state murder indictments were returned against various members of the gang, with a litany of victims’ names sounding like a casting call for a 1930s gangster movie: Paddy Dugan, Ruby Stein, Rickey Tassiello, Whitey Whitehead, Vinnie Leone, Michael Holly.
The murder charges, all of which were brought by the office of Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau, made it possible for a steady stream of cops and assistant D.A.s to claim credit for having brought the dreaded Westies to justice. After all the career-enhancing press conferences had been held and the state indictments announced, the federal government moved in.
On March 26th, Rudolph Giuliani, the highly ambitious U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced an indictment that was to supersede all others. Ten people—including those already hit with the state indictments—were being charged on fourteen counts with having taken part in a “racketeering conspiracy.” The charges dated back some twenty years and included sixteen murders, attempted murders, and conspiracies to commit murder. These charges, assured Giuliani, would finally bring about an end to what he termed—with his usual penchant for dramatics—“the most savage organization in the long history of New York City gangs.”
Giuliani’s strong rhetoric underscored what had, for the Southern District, become something of a religious calling in recent years. Since his appointment in 1983 to head the most prestigious District in the United States, Giuliani had made the pursuit of organized crime groups his number one priority. Not since the days of Estes Kefauver and New York Governor Thomas Dewey’s Waterfront Commission had the Mob suffered such a relentless legal assault. Earlier in 1987, Giuliani’s office had imprisoned, among others, cigar-chomping Fat Tony Salerno, one-time nemesis of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob, who was sentenced to 100 years for his role as leader of the Mafia’s ruling commission. Then came the “Pizza Connection” case, the longest-running trial ever to be held in federal court, in which fifteen defendants were found guilty of an elaborate international narcotics and racketeering conspiracy.
More recently, however, the Southern District’s successes had been tarnished somewhat by yet another highprofile mob case. In the Eastern District of New York, which encompassed Queens, Brooklyn, and Long Island, Gambino boss John Gotti was tried in a racketeering case that dominated newspaper headlines for months. Much to the chagrin of the Justice Department, in March of 1987 the trial ended with Gotti’s acquittal.
Now prosecutors focused on the Westies case, the biggest mob trial in New York since the Gotti fiasco. A conviction would accomplish two things: It would get the government’s pursuit of organized crime squarely back on track, and it would reestablish Giuliani’s Southern District as the area’s preeminent prosecutorial branch, the first to take the Westies off the streets for good.
As it had in virtually every major mob case in recent years, the Southern District would once again be utilizing the RICO law, which seemed especially well suited to the Westies case. Under RICO’s somewhat controversial statutes—which have been attacked in many legal circles for being too far-reaching—the government was able to admit as evidence crimes that the defendants had already been charged, tried, and possibly even done time for. By using these crimes to establish “a pattern of racketeering,” the government was able to assert the existence of an “enterprise,” thereby implicating multiple defendants on a vast array of charges.
It also meant that if the prosecution was able to show that a “relationship” existed between the various defendants, they could use one person’s previous convictions to establish the racketeering charge against another. As a result, in the case against the Westies, some of Jimmy Coonan’s kidnapping and assault convictions from the late Sixties and early Seventies would be used, as would Tommy Collins’s recent narcotics conviction.
Along with these charges, the fourteen counts in the indictment encompassed numerous others for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, gambling, extortion, loansharking, counterfeiting, and, as regards Jimmy and Edna Coonan, income tax evasion. As evidence to support their claims, the prosecution had assembled an assortment of guns, knives, narcotics paraphernalia, bags of amphetamines, gambling and loansharking records, police surveillance photographs and logs, ballistics and autopsy reports, phone records, tax records, and numerous taped conversations from telephone wiretaps, body wires, and recording devices placed in automobiles, restaurants, and prison visiting rooms.
Even more important to the prosecution were the witnesses. There were more than seventy scheduled to testify about crimes that, in some cases, were two decades old. Charles Canelstein, who’d been gunned down near Calvary Cemetery in Queens by nineteen-year-old Jimmy Coonan in April 1966, would be called to testify, as would Paddy Dugan’s sister, Rickey Tassiello’s brother, and Ruby Stein’s mistress. There were loanshark victims like sixty-four-year-old Julius “Dutch” Grote, one-time bartender and friend of Bobby Lagville and Mickey Spillane, who in the late Seventies once hid inside his Hell’s Kitchen apartment for fifteen months for fear of being killed by Coonan.
But the most devastating testimony of all was expected to come from the confidential informants. Just as the West Side criminals had feared, Mickey and Sissy Featherstone’s cooperation had opened the floodgates. Tony Lucich and Billy Beattie had followed, with Beattie circulating in the neighborhood for weeks before it was known he’d flipped. In addition, the old standbys, Alberta Sachs and Raymond Steen, were being called to testify again. And finally, there was the most unlikely stool pigeon of all—Bobby Huggard. The “stand-up guy” who had single-handedly secured an acquittal for Coonan and Featherstone at the Whitehead murder trial by perjuring himself on the witness stand was in prison on an armed robbery conviction when he heard Mickey Featherstone turned stoolie. Knowing that Featherstone had enough on him to have him put away for life, Huggard began singing to the FBI.
It was a staggering collection of evidence on the government’s part, enough to make even the most hardened West Side gangster flinch.
For the prosecutors—assistant U.S. attorneys Mary Lee Warren and David Brodsky—it was an unbelievably strong foundation. And as the proceedings got underway in late September of 1987, they had every reason to feel confident.
In the still, pristine air of Room 506, in the federal courthouse at 60 Centre Street in lower Manhattan, Larry Hochheiser grabbed a seat in the back row of the spectator’s gallery. It was November 12th, a gray, ominous day, and the large, wood-paneled courtroom was packed. Since the Westies trial first began two weeks earlier, Hochheiser had talked many times with the defense attorneys involved in the case. He’d followed the newspaper repo
rts, which had already devoted considerable space to the testimony of Billy Beattie, Alberta Sachs, and Tony Lucich. But Hochheiser had avoided making an appearance in the courtroom for many reasons, the most compelling being that the very existence of this trial had caused him more personal grief than any event in his career as an attorney.
To say that Featherstone’s cooperation had stunned Hochheiser and his partner, Ken Aronson, wouldn’t begin to tell the story. Since 1972, when Hochheiser got Mickey acquitted on an insanity plea in the Linwood Willis murder trial, he’d represented Featherstone time and time again, usually for little or no fee. He did so because he liked Featherstone, but also because, in his mind, Mickey was linked so inexorably with his career as a successful attorney. The Willis case had been his first great triumph, the first time he’d really known that being a criminal defense attorney was the only job for him.
Since then, Hochheiser and Aronson had represented Mickey and his West Side friends on some thirty different occasions. There had been literally hundreds of arraignments, motion filings, bail hearings, parole board appearances, trials, and appeals. In fact, Hochheiser and his partner had come to be known in police and legal circles as “the Westies’ lawyers.” And they had carried that moniker with a certain amount of pride, knowing that it had been acquired against great odds. Every cop, assistant D.A., and county judge was after them from the start.
Then came the Michael Holly trial, a disaster from beginning to end. Hochheiser knew that Featherstone had come to believe he’d been convicted by design, that some unholy alliance had been forged between the attorneys and his perceived enemies. To Hochheiser, this was patently ridiculous. Yes, the trial, in retrospect, had not been handled very well. For one thing, they made a tactical error by putting Kevin Kelly on the stand. But to believe that Kelly’s surly performance was part of a deliberate plot to throw the case, to believe that the three eyewitnesses who identified Mickey had somehow all been put up to it by Coonan or Kelly or the attorneys—this, to Hochheiser, was the product of a disturbed mind.
Hochheiser knew very well that Mickey Featherstone was a diagnosed “paranoid schizophrenic.” On many occasions, beginning with the Willis trial, he’d used this fact to wriggle Featherstone through the clutches of the criminal justice system. If it hadn’t helped him beat charges altogether, it often got Mickey preferred treatment in sentencing and in the prisons. But even though he had been responsible, in a way, for Featherstone’s being officially designated as “crazy,” Hochheiser chose not to think of him that way. He and his partner had come to believe the legend of Mickey Featherstone as it was presented at the Willis trial: a troubled Vietnam vet from a tough neighborhood, a little guy whose crimes were all about self-preservation, not profit motive.
Now here was Mickey Featherstone seated on the witness stand—a stool pigeon, a rat. In the world of the highpriced criminal defense attorneys, a fraternity of which Hochheiser and Aronson were now prominent members, there was nothing worse than a stoolie. They were a threat to the livelihood of so-called mob lawyers everywhere. The assumption, of course, was that everything a stoolie said was a lie; that they were desperate people liable to say anything to save their own skin. No criminal defense attorney worth his salt would ever represent a stoolie—on principle. Simply put, a stool pigeon was the lowest form of human life.
“Daddy,” Hochheiser’s thirteen-year-old daughter had asked after hearing that Featherstone would be testifying against his own people, “you mean all this time Mickey Featherstone was a fake?” Many times Hochheiser’s family had heard him talk about Mickey as if he were a character from a Dickens novel.
“Yes,” he reluctantly told his daughter. “Mickey Featherstone is not everything he was cracked up to be.”
Later, after all the indictments were announced and it seemed possible that Hochheiser might someday be cross-examining Mickey on behalf of one of his clients, he used stronger language. “Mickey Featherstone is a pimp and a liar,” he told a reporter for the Daily News, knowing full well that being called a pimp, in Mickey’s mind, would be the lowest possible insult.
As for Ken Aronson, Featherstone’s cooperation with the government was, if anything, even more of a blow. It was Aronson, after all, who Mickey was claiming had deliberately brought about his conviction in the Holly case. After Mickey and Sissy began working with the government, Sissy had even gone so far as to secretly tape phone conversations with Aronson, hoping that he might inadvertently reveal his role in the so-called frame-up. To Aronson, this was an unconscionable act of betrayal, one which he still found hard to believe months after it was revealed.
Yes, Aronson would admit, he had begun to give up on Featherstone even before the Michael Holly trial began. And he realized now that those feelings of disillusionment, which he’d communicated to Mickey throughout the Holly trial, had probably contributed to Featherstone’s belief that the attorney had somehow joined forces against him. But even with all that, Aronson had never expected Mickey to flip. He had always thought he was a mensch, a stand-up guy.
To Aronson, it was now apparent that he’d gotten too close to his client, that he’d put himself in an impossible position by trying to be more than a lawyer to Mickey and Sissy and some of the others. Eventually, it had put him in a place he did not want to be—an unindicted co-conspirator in what the government was now calling a criminal enterprise.
From his seat in the back of Room 506, Larry Hochheiser watched as Featherstone took the witness stand. He recognized Mickey’s courtroom look—the slicked-down sandy-blond hair, neatly trimmed mustache, conservative suit and tie. It was strange to see Featherstone on the stand instead of at the defense table. He seemed comfortable, though, cocky even, as he leaned forward to take the questions from Gerald Shargel, the lead defense attorney.
“Mr. Featherstone,” said Shargel, standing near the large, rectangular jury box. “I think you told us that in the year 1984 carrying into 1985, before your cooperation, there was a plan to kill Jimmy Coonan, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And there is no question in your mind, is there sir, that you, Mickey Featherstone, were a part of that plan, correct?”
“No, I was part of it.”
“There was one time, I think you testified, you went into New York because you heard Jimmy Coonan was in the neighborhood, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you were looking, with others, in the neighborhood bars to see if you could find Jimmy for the purpose of killing him, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Gerald Shargel was a veteran criminal defense lawyer in the Hochheiser mold—forty-three years old, smooth and wily, with a sharp, sometimes sarcastic wit. He usually dressed in elegant, dark-blue pin-striped suits with a red tie. He was bald on top, with black hair around his ears and a neatly trimmed black beard. He tended to strut like a peacock but was usually exceedingly polite. Occasionally, in the great tradition of high-priced legal talent, he got dramatic.
In the pre-trial stages of the case, when Judge Whitman Knapp declared it would be a conflict for Hochheiser and Aronson to represent any of the Westies because of their previous lawyer/client relationship with Featherstone, they’d recommended Shargel to Coonan. The choice seemed especially apt, since Shargel had once been the attorney for the late Roy Demeo, Jimmy Coonan’s one-time paisan in the Gambino family.
For four days running, Shargel had listened to Mary Lee Warren lead Featherstone through a mind-boggling litany of crimes during his direct testimony. He’d been impressed with Featherstone’s demeanor, with his willingness to admit that he had been, at one time or another, a drunk, a drug addict, a killer, and a nut case. Yet Shargel had no intention of allowing this witness—especially this witness—to imply that he had in any way been an unwilling participant in his crimes.
His voice rising in indignation, Shargel asked, “Didn’t you tell us, Mr. Featherstone, that there was a time when you got better?”
“Yes, the k
ind of—I didn’t have the hatred after I came back from prison in 1982. I just lost the hatred I had in the past.”
“You lost the hatred after 1982?”
“Yes.”
“You, sir, had no hatred when you had a gun and a silencer and you went to kill my client on the streets of New York? You had no hatred?”
“Yes. I had it then—definitely.”
“That was in 1984, wasn’t it, Mr. Mickey Featherstone?”
“Yes.”
“And what about the hundreds of people, according to your testimony, that you assaulted and you stabbed and you beat and you robbed? What about them? Did you like them?”
“They were my barroom brawls.”
“Didn’t you have hatred when you were in those barroom brawls, Mr. Featherstone?”
“Yes, I did.”
Along with Featherstone’s propensity for violence, the crux of Shargel’s cross-examination—in fact, the crux of his and the other seven defense attorneys’ main argument with the government—was that the Westies were a fabrication. In their opening statements, all of the attorneys voiced what had always been the unofficial position of the gang itself—that the Westies were a creation of the police and the media. “Hell’s Kitchen sink,” Shargel called the government’s case, a reference to all the crimes that had been thrown together in an attempt to establish a racketeering conspiracy.
Now, to bolster this claim, Shargel used Featherstone’s own words. Through Hochheiser and Aronson, he’d gotten his hands on a series of taped interviews Featherstone had done with a would-be biographer in early 1980, following his acquittal for the Whitehead murder. At the time, even though he was incarcerated and awaiting sentencing on his counterfeit conviction, Featherstone was still very much one of the boys. As a result, most of what he told William Urshal, the interviewer, was either half-truths or outright lies designed to protect himself and others from possible prosecution.
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