Nonetheless, as the entire courtroom listened, here was Mickey’s voice, loud and clear, claiming undeniably that the Westies were a fiction. “Do you really think,” he was heard saying on tape, “if there was a gang making all this money, like they say, I’d be living in a small apartment [on 56th Street]?”
Over the next several hours, Shargel referred to “the Urshal tapes” time and time again. The jury read from written transcripts and listened to Mickey Featherstone, sounding exactly as he had under direct examination, telling lie after lie. At one point, Featherstone was heard absolving Coonan of the Whitehead murder, a murder he’d described in great detail just days earlier.
“Is it your testimony now, sir,” Shargel asked incredulously, “that in 1980 you sat down with this author and you made up a story out of whole cloth?”
“Parts of it were lies, yes.”
“Parts of it were truth and parts of it were lies?”
“Yes.”
“In other words, Mr. Featherstone, you took facts you knew to be true, right?”
“Yes.”
“And then you took facts you knew to be lies?”
“Yes.”
“And you jumbled together the truth and the lies to confuse or deceive the person who was listening to you, is that right?”
“I was a criminal, yes. So I gave the guy a bunch of lies.”
“Is there any way we have of telling when you are lying and when you are not?”
“Right now I’m telling the truth. That’s all I can say.”
“How do we know you’re telling the truth right now, even as you speak?”
As the afternoon wore on, Shargel’s cross-examination gained in intensity, requiring acute concentration from the witness, the jury and anyone else who hoped to follow. Unlike Mary Lee Warren, who had presented Featherstone’s direct testimony in neat chronological order, Shargel was all over the place. One moment it was 1967, the next, 1987. One moment he was in Vietnam, the next, Hell’s Kitchen. Sometimes subjects changed in midsentence. Crimes began to blur. There were murders, assaults, strategies, vendettas, betrayals …
What emerged was a life unlike anything anyone on the jury could possibly comprehend. The violence and depravity was numbing. This man, Shargel was telling the jury, is not a human being at all. This man is a killer.
A psychopath.
A monster.
“Mr. Featherstone,” he asked near the end of the afternoon. “You said at the end of your direct testimony, the very last part, that there was a time in your life when you were, I believe your words were, ‘vicious and an animal,’ something like that?”
“Yes, I was.”
“No question about it?”
“I was a liar, an animal, a criminal. I woke up every day and committed a crime every day.”
“And when you said vicious and an animal, you used the past tense because you are no longer that way?”
“I’m still angry at a lot of things, but I don’t believe I’m as violent as I was in the past.”
“Do you still have that hatred that caused you to kill people in the 1970s?”
“No.”
“But isn’t it a fact, sir, that you who are no longer vicious, you who are no longer an animal, called over the phone this past weekend and threatened to kill someone in this audience? Yes or no, Mr. Featherstone?”
“That’s a lie.”
Shargel’s voice was rising now, echoing to the far corners of the room. “Did you say you would be out in four years, in four years you’d be back on the streets and you would kill a certain member of this audience?”
“No.”
“Did you say it!?”
“No.”
Mickey knew Shargel’s accusation was bullshit, and he was certain Shargel did too. All phone calls at the MCC were monitored, so even if he’d wanted to he would never have made a threat like that over the phone.
Shargel let the accusation sink in, then waved his hand in the air. “I have nothing further, Your Honor.”
As the jury and the audience sat in stunned silence—the damning implications of the last question left dangling in the air—Mickey felt helpless, totally unable to defend himself. It reminded him of all those times when Hochheiser had destroyed witnesses on his behalf, asking dramatic, incriminating questions, smearing them with innuendo.
Mickey saw the smirks on the faces of Coonan and the others as they slapped Shargel on the back and shook his hand.
For the first time in his life, Mickey knew how it felt to be on the receiving end.
Featherstone’s cross-examination continued over the next four days. Each of the eight defense attorneys got their chance to bang away. After Mickey left the stand, a staggering cast of players followed, with their testimony stretching throughout November and December of 1987 and on into the early months of ’88. Even to those with a knowledge of the West Side, the flow of names, dates, and events was overwhelming. As the evidence piled up the proceedings took on an air of inevitability, and the long afternoons in Room 506 revealed countless ghoulish and indelible moments.
Sixty-eight-year-old Tony Lucich testified on the Rickey Tassiello murder, explaining how, as Jimmy Coonan was cutting up the body, he severed Rickey’s penis, held it in his hand, and said to Lucich in all seriousness: “See, this is somethin’ you gotta get rid of, because this could be identified by his girlfriend.”
Bobby Huggard explained why, even after he had been offered immunity by the government to testify at the Whitehead murder trial, he elected to perjure himself. “Yeah, immunity,” said Huggard. “That’s nice. Immunity protects me from the state. It don’t protect me from other people.”
And thirty-one-year-old Sissy Featherstone, anxious and combative, answered questions about Mickey’s plan to murder Coonan.
“You knew,” asked Shargel, “that your husband Mickey Featherstone hated this man Jimmy Coonan, right?”
“No,” replied Sissy. “Actually, he loved Jimmy.”
“He loved him?”
“Yes.”
“He just thought he needed killing?”
Sissy looked directly at Coonan. “No. Mickey loved him in the beginning, and Jimmy knows it.”
Among the numerous law enforcement people who testified was Richie Egan, whose daily surveillance reports became the glue that held many of the government’s charges together. On two separate occasions, Egan was called to the stand to lead the jury through a normal day’s surveillance, which usually involved following Featherstone and Coonan on their afternoon shylock runs.
As the weeks of testimony wore on, the press couldn’t get enough. The trial catapulted the Westies into some strange, exalted place in the city’s folklore. For so many years the Westies had been a crime story that wouldn’t go away. And now, not only was the full historical sweep of their reign being revealed for the first time, but the whole damn ball of wax was going up in flames.
Of course, not lost on the press was the sordidness of the gang’s activities—the dismemberment murders, the number of victims, and the bitter, jealous way in which they had reached their day of reckoning.
One writer, Anthony M. DeStefano of Newsday, compared the proceedings to the Grand Guignol theater of 19th-century Paris, where audiences gathered daily to hear sensational tales of murder and mayhem.
On Wednesday morning, February 24, 1988, after eight days of deliberation, the jury passed a note to the judge informing him they had reached a verdict. Over the next hour, relatives and friends of the defendants gathered in Room 506, as they had throughout the four-month-long trial. By 11 A.M. the courtroom was packed, with federal marshals lining the walls and a sizable press contingent, notepads in hand, crowded into the front two rows of the spectators’ gallery.
Days earlier, the jury had heard the government summarize its case. David Brodsky—whose short, curly brown hair, conservative suit and tie and well-scrubbed good looks gave him the appearance of a recent prep-school graduate—had delivered a long
, comprehensive overview of the charges and evidence against the Westies. As Gerry Shargel would later point out to the jury, Brodsky was ten years old when the March ’66 murder of Bobby Lagville—the earliest act in the indictment—took place. Unlike Mary Lee Warren, who approached her task with a severe, unemotional air of inscrutability, Brodsky was not above appealing to the jury with a boyish smile or an offhand comment.
As was traditional during government summations, the young prosecutor thanked the ten women and two men for their patience, acknowledging how difficult it must have been to listen to tales of violence and death in such polite, civilized surroundings. “But out on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen,” Brodsky reminded the jury, “Jimmy Coonan and his gang were vicious; they were not civilized. And the people of Hell’s Kitchen did not hear about the violence from the witness stand, they had to live through it day after day, year after year.…
“Well, I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to end this reign of terror on the West Side.”
At the end of his six-hour summation, the fatigued prosecutor, his voice rich with emotion, cautioned that, “Jimmy Coonan, on his tax returns, claims to be a carpet installer and a construction consultant, and when Mr. Shargel gets up here he might even claim that Jimmy Coonan is one of those things.” Then Brodsky’s voice began to crack. His jaw tightened and his eyes moistened. He pointed directly at Coonan, who glared implacably from the defense table, and hollered, “Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence in this case shows that Jimmy Coonan is no legitimate businessman. Jimmy Coonan is a damn butcher! He has killed people over and over again, and he has cut up their bodies—”
Shargel immediately interrupted, moving for a mistrial and calling Brodsky’s outburst “an emotional trick” and “an act.” After Brodsky shouted back, “That’s a lie,” Judge Knapp quieted the courtroom and overruled Shargel’s objection.
In his summation, Shargel did the only thing he could—he attacked “the content and character” of the government’s case, calling special attention to the high number of convicted felons who were used as witnesses. Featherstone in particular, he claimed, was a “lowlife” who was using the Westies as his ticket to freedom. “If you examine Mickey Featherstone’s past,” Shargel told the jury, “you will find that when the government entered into an agreement with this man, they were shaking hands with the devil.”
Now, eight days later, with the various summations still ringing in their ears, the jury filed into the courtroom with their verdict. The relatives of the defendants had gathered on the right side of the gallery. Billy Bokun’s wife, Carol, who was Tommy and Flo Collins’s daughter, was there. So was Billy Bokun’s old man. Jimmy McElroy’s niece, who was also Kevin Kelly’s wife, was there. Also Mugsy Ritter’s wife. And in the very back, seated all alone, was Jimmy Coonan’s mother. Over the past few months, she’d heard her son being accused of despicable acts of violence. Whether or not she’d heard these accusations before—and what she thought of them—she never shared with anyone, not even neighbors and relatives.
It took the court clerk fifteen minutes to read the voluminous thirteen-page verdict. But within the first few minutes, it was apparent where things were headed. Except for Johnny Halo, who was acquitted of all charges, the rest of the defendants were nailed to the wall—guilty on all fourteen counts of the indictment.
“He never had a chance,” cried Billy Bokun’s father when the reading of the verdict had been completed. The elder Bokun had now lost two sons to the Westies. As Billy and the other defendants were led from the courtroom, his emotions boiled over.
“Them people shamed themselves!” Bokun called to his son, gesturing towards the jury box.
“Don’t worry, pop,” Billy shouted back. “I’ll be alright. Fuck them!”
“Yeah,” the anguished father replied. “Tell it to the Marines.”
* * *
Within thirty minutes of the verdict, Mickey Featherstone got a visit in his cell from one of the marshals who’d been in the courtroom. “It’s all over, Mick,” said the marshal. “Except for Halo—he was acquitted—they all went down. Pretty much across the board.”
After the marshal left, Mickey stood up from his bed, stretched, and began pacing back and forth. For over a year he’d been waiting for this moment, not knowing exactly how he would react when it finally came. He’d prepared for it, reminding himself over and over that some of these people had framed him for a murder he didn’t commit. The others, those who knew nothing about the frame, had used his name and reputation for their own gain as far back as he could remember.
But even with all that, he couldn’t say he felt any great satisfaction. To take the stand and testify like he had violated a standard near and dear to criminals the world over. Mickey was reminded of this during the trial, when Shargel played a portion of the Urshal tapes in which Mickey was asked how he felt about informants. “Even if my life was on the line,” he told the interviewer, “I still wouldn’t rat.… A stool pigeon would kill his own mother, man. He’s worse than a junkie.”
Featherstone burned with shame at the realization that he’d become exactly what he never wanted to be. A stoolie; a rat; a cheese eater.
Mickey had paced back and forth often in his cell during the trial, just like he was now. His thoughts would drift back over the events of his life, and he’d begin to think of all the violence he’d seen. Sometimes, he would close his eyes and he wasn’t in prison anymore at all. He was back on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, among the people. Among the victims.…
Like Ugly Walter. There was one that, along with the Rickey Tassiello murder, he’d spent his entire life trying to forget. It had been early in 1976, and he’d only been out of prison on the Linwood Willis gun possession rap and his parole violation for about six weeks. At the time he was twenty-seven years old and hadn’t hooked up with Jimmy Coonan yet. He was still looking for a way to stay out of trouble and make a few extra bucks for himself and his new girlfriend, Sissy.
Together with Jackie Coonan and another neighborhood kid, Mickey had put what little money he had into starting up an after-hours club on 44th Street, between 9th and 10th avenues. It was a grungy old storefront looking in on what used to be an ice cream parlor, the kind of place that might have been a popular Hell’s Kitchen gathering place in the 1950s.
The club was barely up and running more than a week, and already Mickey had installed a jukebox and a pool table. The neighborhood’s younger tough guys—those loyal to Jimmy Coonan—had quickly become steady patrons. Enthused by the club’s financial prospects, Mickey decided to go one step further and install a small stage so they could occasionally host live music.
To build the stage, Mickey had turned to Walter Curtis, a maintenance man and carpenter who worked in the neighborhood’s hotels. Known to most people as Ugly Walter because of his crooked teeth, unfortunate complexion, and notoriously bad hygienic habits, Ugly Walter was nonetheless liked by those who knew him. He was a decent guy who might buy you a drink every now and then, and as far as most people knew, he had little or no involvement with the neighborhood’s gangster element.
One afternoon, Mickey and Ugly Walter were in the club deciding where they should put the stage. Ugly Walter had just finished taking measurements, and he’d placed his tool belt on a barstool. The shades covering the club’s front windows were pulled, and it was dim and dusty as Mickey poured them both a drink at the bar.
Suddenly, Eddie Cummiskey came in the door. Mickey looked up to see Eddie the Butcher glare at Ugly Walter. When Mickey glanced at Walter, he saw an expression of stark terror come into his eyes.
Cummiskey pulled a pistol out of his jacket and aimed it. Bam! Bam! The gunshots echoed loudly throughout the nearly empty room. Ugly Walter never even had a chance to put his drink down. The bullets hit him squarely in the chest.
Ugly Walter toppled off the barstool. There was blood pouring from his chest, but he wasn’t dead yet. He started to drag himself towards the
back of the club, as if there were still some way he might be able to evade Eddie Cummiskey.
Mickey froze in his tracks, his drink still held to his lips. Cummiskey came over and took a hammer out of Walter’s tool belt. With Walter gasping for air and blood seeping from his wounds, Cummiskey looked at Mickey and stammered, “This motherfucker … this cocksucker …”
Without finishing his sentence, he walked over to Ugly Walter and began beating him with the hammer over and over. As Ugly Walter raised his bloodied hands in a helpless attempt to protect himself, Cummiskey just kept smashing away.
Mickey knew there was nothing he could do. Cummiskey had a gun in one hand, a hammer in the other, and an expression on his face that suggested if anyone were to get in his way, he’d do to them exactly what he was doing to Ugly Walter.
Cummiskey must have struck his victim thirty or forty times, crushing his skull and bludgeoning the last remnants of life from his body.
“Get me a garbage bag,” he finally called to Mickey, breathing heavily from the exertion.
He pulled it over Ugly Walter’s upper body. Then Mickey was instructed to help drag the body up a flight of stairs to the bathroom of a flophouse apartment.
There, Ugly Walter’s body was dumped in the bathtub. As they stripped him naked, Cummiskey explained how he’d been waiting five years to kill Walter Curtis, who he said had witnessed a murder that he’d committed years earlier. Cummiskey had been forced to plead guilty to the killing and always believed that Walter talked to the cops.
“Nobody,” said Eddie, “and I mean nobody, rats on Eddie Cummiskey.”
After Ugly Walter was stripped naked, Cummiskey took Mickey to the Market Diner on 11th Avenue, where they met Jimmy and Jackie Coonan. Eddie explained what happened and told Jimmy Coonan to get his “tools” and meet them back at the flophouse.
Within minutes they were all back in the bathroom, standing over what was left of Ugly Walter. Cummiskey and the Coonan brothers took a number of large kitchen knives out of a paper bag and rolled up their shirt-sleeves.
“Watch this, kid,” Eddie said to Mickey. “You’re about to get an education.”
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