For at least 150 years, service in the military has been an especially proud tradition among Irish Americans, many of whom first overcame discrimination in the United States by proving their loyalty on the battlefield. The Fighting 69th Regiment, an Irish unit originally comprised of men mostly from Hell’s Kitchen, was established during the Civil War and reconstituted in World War I. The unit’s exploits were turned into a popular Hollywood movie, The Fighting 69th, starring none other than Jimmy Cagney. The neighborhood’s proud tradition of service continued in World War II with the 165th Infantry, another regiment made up mostly of Hell’s Kitchen natives.
Throughout the early years of the Vietnam War, young men in the neighborhood continued the tradition and volunteered in large numbers. All they had to do was walk a few blocks east to the Times Square army recruitment center and sign on the dotted line. One of the many young men to make this walk was Mickey Featherstone, a scrawny, tousled-haired kid from West Forty-third Street. Featherstone would spend twelve months in Indochina and return with a penchant for violence that outstripped even Jimmy Coonan’s. Mickey’s damaged psyche and hair-trigger reactions to all slights perceived or otherwise would come to define a new generation of Irish American gangsters in the post-Vietnam era.
Long before he was a troubled war vet, Featherstone was a street urchin, the last of nine kids from a Hell’s Kitchen family that had been in the neighborhood for a couple generations. His mother, Dorothy “Dottie” Boyle, first married a man named Charlie Featherstone in the late 1930s and started having babies right away. By most accounts, the elder Featherstone, who sometimes worked as a longshoreman on the West Side docks, was a drunk and a louse who beat his wife regularly. Eventually, he deserted Dottie, leaving her with little or no money and six kids to raise. Dottie then struck up a relationship with Charlie Boyle, a military man. They were unable to find Featherstone, who was still her legal husband, so proper divorce papers were never filed. Dottie and Charlie Boyle entered into a common-law marriage and had three children of their own, the youngest being Francis Thomas, whom everyone referred to as “Mickey.”
Young Featherstone had some minor disciplinary problems in school, but mostly he was a shy boy who steered clear of physical confrontations. It wasn’t until his teen years that Mickey started to manifest a need to prove his manhood. His father had been a proud soldier in Korea; two of his brothers had already enlisted and been shipped off to Nam. Mickey had every reason to believe he would establish his own identity as a warrior through military service. In April 1966, he lied about his age so that he could enlist in the army at the age of seventeen. After going through basic training, he was assigned to the Natrang headquarters of Special Forces, the elite commando unit commonly known as the Green Berets.
For the most part, Featherstone’s time in the service was a bust. Although he took some pride in being assigned to a Special Forces unit, he was an ordnance supply clerk who rarely saw combat and was generally regarded by his fellow soldiers as “ash and trash.” With his diminutive size and New York accent, he was a frequent target of ridicule. The kid from Hell’s Kitchen suffered from a severe sense of displacement in the jungles of Southeast Asia and took to spending much of his time drinking at the local Playboy Club in town. One night, while boozing with a couple army medics, he got so drunk that he passed out. When he woke up, he found that his penis was wrapped in gauze. Apparently, while he lay comatose, the medics had performed an impromptu circumcision on Private Featherstone, leaving him scarred for life.
The botched circumcision was a good metaphor for Mickey’s entire tour of duty. He returned stateside in 1968 with some pathologically unresolved manhood issues and a severe alcohol problem. He began hanging out in neighborhood bars and engaging in almost daily physical confrontations, many of which ended in bloodshed.
His first stateside kill took place in September 1968, when he shot a kid from New Jersey during a rumble outside the Market Diner on Eleventh Avenue. Mickey was held on manslaughter charges but released on bail, pending trial. Against the wishes of his mother and everyone else who knew him, he then requested another tour of duty in Vietnam. His request was denied after a psychological evaluation by an army doctor concluded that he was suffering from a nervous condition—including severe nightmares, heavy drinking, insomnia, and withdrawal from the outside world. The doctor wrote in his report: “The assigning of EM [emergency medical] back to a combat area will probably bring back the difficulties that it previously created and probably with much more intensification…. The experiences the young man went through while serving his one year appear to be too traumatic for even a mature, well-adjusted individual to cope with.” Featherstone fulfilled the remaining fifteen months of his military commitment as a driver and mail clerk at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn.
The fact that he had been declared “unfit for combat” left Featherstone with much to prove. He continued his routine of drinking, smoking dope, and seeing “enemies” around every corner. Inexplicably, in the midst of this downward spiral, he married a Puerto Rican girl from the neighborhood. A few months into the marriage, Mickey awoke from a nightmare and attempted to strangle his wife in bed. When he snapped out of his rage, he apologized, but it was too late. His wife fled their home and never returned.
To Mickey, the failed marriage was one more example of a life out of synch; whenever he caught his reflection in a mirror, young Featherstone hated what he saw. He withdrew deeper into himself. Whatever money he had came from his father, Charlie Boyle, and most of that was spent on whiskey and beer. Mostly, he hung out where he could drink free, places like the American Legion Post on West Forty-third Street, which was run by his father and his older brother. Mickey could be found there most nights getting stewed and watching old horror movies on TV. On those rare occasions when he roused himself and tried to mix with other people, it often ended in disaster.
On one such occasion, Featherstone was having a drink at the Sunbrite Saloon, a popular neighborhood bar on Tenth Avenue. Being a Saturday night, the Sunbrite was crowded, and the juke box was loud. Mickey had been drinking for a couple hours and was feeling no pain when a commotion broke out in the bar. A gun was being passed around, over everybody’s head. The next thing Featherstone knew, the gun was in his hand. Was it his hand? It looked like his hand. A menacing figure came toward him, a guy he recognized named Mio.
“Gimme the gun,” barked Mio.
Mickey heard a swirl of voices in his head: “Watch out!” “Pull the trigger!” “He’s gonna kill you!”
Before he even knew what was happening, Mickey shot the guy dead.
Everyone stampeded from the bar. Featherstone was rushed out a back door and driven to an apartment, where he was told to hide out. After he’d been there a while, Mickey began to think it might be a setup. He fled the apartment and laid low at a friend’s place in the Bronx for a few days. When he called an acquaintance in Hell’s Kitchen, he was told, “Mickey, the fuckin’ neighborhood’s crawlin’ with cops. They know you was the shooter.”
Featherstone saw the writing on the wall. He took the subway back to Hell’s Kitchen and turned himself in at the local precinct. Everything after that was a blur. He remembered being sent to the Manhattan Correctional Center, the downtown prison also known as the Tombs. Then he was dragged in front of a grand jury. Although the Sunbrite saloon had been packed on the night of the shooting, everyone adhered to the neighborhood code: Whatever you say, say nothin’. The grand jury wound up calling it a “justifiable homicide.” They wouldn’t indict for murder, only for possession of an unregistered weapon.
Given Featherstone’s barely coherent state, both during the shooting and in the weeks that followed, it was determined that the kid was in serious need of psychiatric evaluation. He was shipped to a VA hospital in the Bronx, where he was officially diagnosed for the first time. “Traumatic War Neurosis,” read the report. “A paranoid schizophrenic with suicidal and homicidal ideations.” In layman’s terms, Feathers
tone was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.
They pumped the patient full of various antipsychotic medication—mostly thorazine, known in the trade as a liquid straight jacket. It didn’t seem to help much. Mickey was more paranoid and unruly than ever. There was some concern that he might try to escape, so he was transferred to another veterans’ hospital in Montrose, New York, that was known for its tight security.
Four days later, Mickey was considered well enough to receive visitors. His soon-to-be ex-wife came by with a psychiatrist. She was filing for divorce, she said, citing “extreme cruelty,” and she’d brought the doctor along to offer his diagnosis. Mickey paid little attention. The only time he spoke was to ask if he could borrow some money. When his wife and the doctor had left, he escaped by walking past the guards and out the front door. Still dressed in his lime-green hospital garb, he hitchhiked to a local train station and used the money he’d borrowed to buy a one-way ticket to New York City. A week later, he was ready to kill again.
This time, it all started at the Leprechaun Bar, where he got into another drunken altercation. Featherstone was unarmed, so he dashed from the bar and headed out into the night in search of a gun. The Hell’s Kitchen Irish were a tight-knit community; the locals usually defended one another, especially when under siege from outsiders. Mickey had good reason to hope someone would help him out in his hour of need, which is exactly what happened when he rushed into Sonny’s Café on Ninth Avenue and came face to face with Jimmy Coonan.
Coonan didn’t usually spend his nights drinking late in neighborhood saloons, so Mickey was surprised to spot him sitting in a booth near the back. He was with a few people Featherstone didn’t recognize, so Mickey nodded for Jimmy to come into the men’s room. Coonan and Featherstone had known each other on a casual basis almost all their lives. Mickey knew about the Coonan-Spillane Wars, which had landed Jimmy a four-year stretch in the pen. Coonan, of course, was more of an aspiring racketeer than Featherstone, a lost soul whose craziness and gun-blazing ways were becoming part of the neighborhood lore. Featherstone had always sort of admired Coonan and figured, one day, if things worked out, they might even be able to make some money together.
But all that meant nothing at the moment; what Mickey needed right now was a gun, no questions asked, and that’s how he put it to Coonan.
With no hesitation at all, Jimmy produced a handgun, a .25-caliber semiautomatic, which he kept in his belt in the small of his back, covered by his jacket.
“Mickey, you need any help?” asked Jimmy.
“No,” replied Featherstone. “This is somethin’ I gotta take care of myself.”
With that, Featherstone headed back out into the night. At the Leprechaun Bar, he confronted his nemesis, a loud bully with a Southern accent who was nearly twice Mickey’s size. He lured the guy outside, and, on the sidewalk in front of the bar, shot the man twice—once in the chest and once between the eyes.
Mickey Featherstone was arrested and taken to the Mental Observation Unit at Rikers Island. It was his third kill in the less than two years since he’d returned from Vietnam. None of the shootings had anything to do with business or organized crime; it was merely Featherstone’s damaged psyche acting out on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. His troubled history fit the legal definition of “mitigating circumstances.” Mickey was put on trial for this most recent shooting and found not guilty by reason of insanity.
He wound up serving three years at the Mattaewan State Prison for the Criminally Insane on gun possession and assault charges stemming from the previous killings. Through it all, Mickey clung to one positive note, one noble gesture of friendship: Jimmy Coonan providing him with a weapon, no questions asked. This single act would develop into an alliance that would drag the Irish Mob into a whole new era of barbarism.
Mad Dog Redux
While Coonan and Featherstone were charting divergent criminal paths that seemed destined to intersect, the boss of Hell’s Kitchen, Mickey Spillane, was still dealing with his Italian problem. In fact, Spillane’s rivalry with Cosa Nostra was about to take a decidedly homicidal turn, due in part to a major new construction project on the West Side of Manhattan that was being discussed.
Ground had net yet been broken for what would eventually be called the Jacob Javitz Convention Center. The New York State Urban Development Corporation was still battling with various governmental licensing committees over whether or not such a major project was viable, but it looked like it was going to happen. In typical New York fashion, the project would take years to work its way through the city bureaucracy, but the mobsters and their various construction and union affiliates were already licking their chops at the prospect.
What was being proposed was the largest single convention center in U.S. history, a building that would cost $375 million to construct, with 1.8 million square feet of floor space, to be erected on a plot of land bounded by Thirty-eighth Street, Eleventh Avenue, Thirty-fourth Street, and Twelfth Avenue—the outskirts of Mickey Spillane’s Hell’s Kitchen territory.
At a time when the city of New York was famously headed toward bankruptcy, construction projects of this scope were few and far between. The Genovese crime family, which had for years battled with Spillane’s Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob over control of the Coliseum and Madison Square Garden, had no intention of going through a similar struggle over this new convention center. The stakes were too high. The cement contract alone might net $30 million, not to mention carpentry, wiring, food concessions to feed a workforce of 12,000 workers, and the attendant loan-sharking, gambling, and policy proceeds that went along with any major construction project.
Fat Tony Salerno, boss of the Genovese family, was a crude, rotund, cigar-chomping mafioso from the old school. The man had ordered dozens, if not hundreds, of mob hits over the years. From his headquarters on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem, he opined about the best way to neutralize the Irish Mob. It was determined that rather than kill Spillane outright, leading, perhaps, to an unruly shooting war with the West Side Irish, it would be better to take Spillane down piecemeal by first eliminating his closest associates. That way, Spillane would be forced to step aside, leaving the convention center to its rightful overlord, the Genovese crime family.
Taking out Spillane’s people was not as easy as it sounded. The idea was not only to “whack” the Hell’s Kitchen mob boss’s three top associates systematically, but also to do it in such a way that it would be unclear who was behind the killings, creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia. For this, the Mafia would need to use a non-Italian outsider, a professional assassin who could move in and out of the insular Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood without being identified as a Mafia hitman. Fat Tony found his man through an Irish American union official who served as the Genovese family’s point man at the New York Coliseum. The union official was well-connected in the underworld and had no trouble identifying the right man for the job.
Joseph Sullivan was a hardened contract killer who, in May 1976, had only recently been released from prison after serving ten years on a second-degree manslaughter charge. Sullivan was a well-known figure in the New York underworld. Born in the neighborhood of Woodside, Queens, he was a virtual product of the state who had spent twenty-five of his thirty-six years on Earth incarcerated in various penal institutions. He became famous in April 1971 when he escaped from Attica Correctional Facility in Upstate New York. At the time, no one had ever escaped from the maximum-security prison in its forty-year history. Sullivan did so by hiding himself beneath some grain and feed sacks piled aboard a truck that left the prison in broad daylight. He was captured five weeks later strolling down a street in Greenwich Village.
Even Sullivan was surprised when he was paroled by the state of New York just four years later. He was aided greatly by the fact that he had a powerful lawyer, Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general of the United States during the Johnson administration and a family friend. Upon his release, Sullivan resettled back in th
e borough of his birth. Before long, he was circulating in the underworld looking for work.
On a warm, mid-May afternoon, Sullivan walked into the Coliseum Restaurant, located on Fifty-nineth Street and Columbus Circle, across from the Coliseum. There he met up with a man he knew only as J. J., whom he had first met in prison. J. J. was now a corrupt union official affiliated with Fat Tony Salerno. The two men sat at a booth, sipped bottles of beer, and talked about old times. Eventually, Joe Sullivan said, “Okay, enough small talk. What I wanna know is, can you use me or not?”
“Yeah, I can use you,” said J. J. “In fact…,” he pointed toward a man sitting at a table near the door, “see that guy, the guy sitting over there?”
Sullivan looked. “Yeah. What about him?”
“Ever seen him before?”
“No. Never.”
“Well, would it bother you terribly if I passed you a piece beneath the table and asked you to blow his brains out before we walked out the door?”
Sullivan laughed. “Just like that, huh?”
“Yeah, pal, just like that.”
“Damn. Is he the butcher, baker, candlestick maker, or somebody like us?”
“Does it matter to you who or what he is, Joe?”
“No, J. J., it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter at all.” J. J. explained that the man’s name was Devaney, Tom Devaney, right-hand man of Mickey Spillane. He told Sullivan that Spillane and the West Side Irish Mob were on the outs with Fat Tony, who was looking to position himself as the Godfather of the Javitz Convention Center. Sullivan asked few questions. He left the diner that day without killing Devaney, but the contract was now his; over the following months, he would do the bidding of the Italians and send a ripple of fear through the Irish American underworld.
Paddy Whacked Page 43