Above and beyond these factors was the harsh reality of violence. The American underworld was based on the law of the jungle. In most instances of gangland confrontation, brute force won out over diplomacy, at least in the short term. Gangland murders peaked during Prohibition, tapered off in the early 1930s, then continued to climb throughout the century. Increased public exposure of mob activities and prosecutions did not lessen the violence. In fact, it could be argued that, from the late 1950s (starting with Robert Kennedy’s assault on organized crime) through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the forces of organized crime in America were never more violent. In cities like New York and Boston, where the Irish Mob was most active, the underworld was, to coin an old-fashioned phrase, no place for a lady.
Nonetheless, Hell’s Kitchen was a tough, working-class neighborhood that produced its share of tough, working-class women. They weren’t necessarily gang molls in the Hollywood sense—pistol-packing mamas like Ma Barker or Bonnie Parker—but they knew what the underworld was all about. As mothers, they sometimes saw their sons get drawn into the dangerous world of the gang. As wives, they either knew or chose not to know what their husbands were up to. They hid guns, drugs, money, or other contraband when the occasion called for it, or they played dumb when the cops came sniffing around. They may have played a subsidiary role in terms of actual criminal activity, but the life of a mobster’s wife could be an existence fraught with as much fear and paranoia as that of any hoodlum on the street.
Sissy Featherstone knew what she was getting into when she hitched her wagon to the legendary kid from West Forty-third Street who’d already fought in a violent war halfway across the world, killed numerous people in the neighborhood, done time in prisons and mental hospitals, and formed a partnership with the most ambitious young gangster in Hell’s Kitchen. Many women would have run for the hills upon meeting Mickey Featherstone, but Sissy was attracted to his choir boy good looks and his troubled reputation, which brought out her maternal instincts. Having grown up in the neighborhood herself, she knew what it took to survive. She was petite, just five foot three inches tall, with long sandy-blond hair, a tight, curvaceous figure, and a face that could be either glamorous or tough. People who knew her sometimes compared her to the actress Ellen Barkin, who exhibited a similar combination of toughness and vulnerability.
Her birth name was Knell, and she was German-Irish. When she was still an infant, her mother married a neighborhood laborer named Houlihan. Marcelle “Sissy” Houlihan became part of a large star-crossed Hell’s Kitchen family that experienced more than its share of tough times. Over the years, six out of Sissy’s eleven brothers and sister would die tragically from overdoses, murder, or suicide. The familial trauma and hardship she experienced growing up made Sissy all the more determined to create a safe haven for her own family, which had expanded with the birth of a son, Mickey, Jr., in 1977. Five years later, while Mickey was away in prison, tragedy once again struck the Houlihan family: Sissy’s oldest sister became the latest family suicide. Sissy took in her daughter, and she and Mickey agreed to raise the child as their own.
Shaken by her sister’s sudden death, Sissy and the two kids moved out of the neighborhood and into a small apartment in New Milford, New Jersey. Sissy had steady income from a job as a ticket taker at the U.S.S. Intrepid, a battleship/museum docked on a West Side pier that had been a steady source of plundering by the Westies since the day it opened for business. In addition to her job at the Intrepid, Sissy received other gang-related drips and drabs: $100 a week from Tommy Collins, who owed Mickey $5,000 from a shylock loan; $1,000 every now and then from Mugsy Ritter’s coke business; and $150 a week from the neighborhood bookmaking operation, which she received from Edna Coonan.
The pittance from Edna was a source of bitterness that had eaten away at Sissy since the day Mickey and Jimmy were arrested for the Whitehead murder. While Sissy cobbled together money from various sources to make ends meet, Edna was raking in thousands every week just by making Jimmy’s old rounds in the neighborhood. Initially, Sissy had accompanied Edna on her shylock runs. In the months during and after the Whitehead murder trial, she and Edna would come back from Rikers Island after visiting their husbands and spend the afternoon trying to hunt down people who owed the Westies money.
“It’s funny,” Edna would say. “When your husband goes away, nobody wants to pay. They always seem to disappear on you. Well, when Jimmy gets back, he’ll take care of ’em.”
Eventually, Sissy got fed up with the whole thing. She grew tired of listening to Edna brag about all the possessions she had in her New Jersey mansion while Sissy was living in a crowded one-bedroom apartment in New Milford. Sissy felt that Mickey was getting screwed out of money that was rightfully his, but she also knew that she wasn’t going to get anywhere with stout, foul-mouthed Edna, who was at least as tough as the man she had married.
In some ways, Edna and Sissy were opposites. Where Sissy was blond, lean, and sexy, Edna was raven-haired, overweight, and manly. Sissy wore tight jeans and tiny tops that accentuated her feminine side, while Edna tended to shroud herself in one-size-fits-all dresses. On the surface they were night and day, Beauty and the Beast, but in the ways that really mattered, Edna and Sissy could have been members of the same tribe. Both were tough women who had come up the hard way.
Edna was fifteen years older than Sissy and had graduated from the school of hard knocks when Mickey’s wife was still in diapers. Orphaned at the age of fourteen, she bounced from one inattentive relative to another until, at the age of twenty, she married a cop named Frank Fitzgerald. Frank and Edna had been married for a number of years and had two children when, sometime in the late 1960s, Fitzgerald died suddenly of an overdose. Now a widow in her mid-twenties with two young mouths to feed, Edna began dating a series of men who were not great husband material. Billy Beattie, a Hell’s Kitchen burglar and longtime criminal partner of Jimmy Coonan’s, dated Edna briefly in the early 1970s. It was through Beattie that Jimmy and Edna first met.
Coonan had never been much of a womanizer and wasn’t really one for elaborate courtships. A Hell’s Kitchen survivalist who spent his early years (what might otherwise have been years of sexual maturation) behind bars, he was straight-laced and even somewhat prudish. He liked and admired Edna, who was four years his senior, but he first wanted to make sure the coast was clear. One afternoon at Sonny’s Café on Ninth Avenue, Coonan asked Billy Beattie, the former flame, about his intentions vis-à-vis Edna Fitzgerald.
Beattie said, “I ain’t seen her in about a month. Far as I’m concerned, it’s over and done with.”
“Good,” replied Jimmy. “That’s what I was hopin’ to hear. I been hangin’ out with her myself.”
“Hey, knock yourself out. She’s all yours.”
Jimmy and Edna became an item, and within four months of Jimmy’s conversation with Beattie, he and Edna made plans to get married.
What Coonan liked about Edna was that she was tough, a classic defender of the throne. She was a good mother. She knew when to keep her mouth shut or when to circle the wagons. Her years as an orphan and as a struggling young widow with two kids had imbued her with a fierce sense of entitlement.
“We’re gonna get what we got coming to us,” she often told Sissy as they drove around Hell’s Kitchen collecting money for Jimmy.
“That woman is a bitch on wheels,” Sissy told Mickey on the phone while he was in prison. “She has the heart of a gangster. And she’s cheap. She’s cheating us outta money.”
Sometimes Mickey would laugh, but he also knew his wife was right.
“Stay the fuck away from her,” he told Sissy. “I’ll take care of things when I get back.”
In the Realm of the Westies
After serving just over four years of his six-year sentence, Featherstone was paroled and released from prison in July 1983. He spent a few weeks at a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey before being reunited with his wife and family. Still basking in the g
low of his new positive attitude, which he had acquired through group therapy sessions in prison, Mickey and Sissy talked about the future. It annoyed Mickey that Coonan and the gang had not taken care of his wife while he was away, but he was determined not to let it drag him down. He and Sissy both agreed that Mickey should try to steer clear of the Westies. They should try to make it on their own.
Mickey’s first big test came in September, two months after his return to civilian life, when he came into Manhattan one afternoon to pick Sissy up from work at the Intrepid Air-Sea-Space Museum. He bumped into Vinnie Leone, a union official from ILA Local 1909. Vinnie Leone was half a wiseguy who’d been instituted into Local 1909 as part of the Westies arrangement with Paul Castellano and the Gambino family.
“Hey, Mickey. I heard you was back,” said Leone. The burly, silver-haired union boss gave Featherstone a hug. “You gotta come by the office; say hello to the fellas.”
There were three or four men playing cards at a table in the front room when Leone and Featherstone entered the red-brick ILA offices on Twelfth Avenue. Leone introduced Mickey to everybody and then said, “Hey, I was out of state visiting Jimmy last week.”
“Yeah?” said Mickey. “How’s he doing?”
“Tough as can be. You know Jimmy.”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, Mick, everybody’s happy to have you back here. No shit. Things’ve been goin’ good, real good.”
To illustrate his point, Leone pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and peeled off a few twenties. “Here,” he said, handing some money to Featherstone. “Here’s a hundred. But that’s chickenshit. Just some chump change to get you started. They’ll be more from now on. Way more.”
“Nah,” said Mickey. “That’s all right.”
Leone laughed; he thought Mickey was joking. He tried to stick the bills in Mickey’s shirt pocket. When Mickey insisted that he didn’t want the money and would rather “go my own way,” Leone turned serious. “All right, Mick, if you say so. But I gotta tell ya, Jimmy C. ain’t gonna like this one bit.”
Mickey shrugged and left the office.
For a while, Featherstone did his best to maintain the pact he’d made with himself and his wife. Through his brother-in-law, he got a job as a bartender at a catering hall in Garfield, New Jersey, where he made a modest living wage. Mickey and Sissy’s most immediate problem was their apartment. It was far too small to accommodate a family of four. They went house-hunting and found a place they liked in Teaneck, a pleasant middle-class town just a thirty-minute drive from the West Side of Manhattan.
“I love the house,” said Sissy. “But we can’t afford it right now.”
Mickey thought about it and said, “Let me try Jimmy. Just this one time. He owes me.”
Sissy was against the idea. As bad as she wanted the house, she knew that if they borrowed the money from Coonan, it would come with strings attached—strings that would inevitably entangle Mickey and draw him back into the realm of the Westies.
From the inception of the mob, going straight, or staying clean, was one of the most threatening things a gangster could try to do. Becoming involved in the criminal life was usually something that happened incrementally and without much thought, but getting out often required that a person go cold turkey and sever ties in a manner that was bound to create misunderstandings and deep suspicion on the part of those left behind. Few things are more dangerous to the mob than an ex-mobster, who knows where the bodies are buried and has no compelling financial stake in keeping his mouth shut.
Featherstone, whose very identity had been established as a prominent enforcer for the Westies, had the additional problem of trying to walk away from the gang while still psychologically and financially wedded to the neighborhood. Perhaps he was living in a dreamworld, thinking he could simply move to the suburbs and leave the Westies behind. Or maybe he was thinking he could still keep one toe in the water, as Jimmy Coonan had done, living in suburban New Jersey while controlling the neighborhood as a commuter criminal. In any event, Mickey wasn’t making it any easier for himself by going to his longtime buddy with his hand outstretched, especially when he had to ask for the loan through Jimmy’s battleaxe of a wife.
“Gee, Mickey, I don’t know,” said Edna, after Featherstone asked for a loan of $40,000, which he pledged to pay back in installments. “I gotta talk to Jimmy about that, see what he says.”
Two weeks later Mickey got his answer, and it didn’t even come from Edna. It came from a neighborhood contact of Mickey’s, who heard it from Edna’s brother, who heard it from Edna, who got the word from Jimmy. The answer was “No.”
At first Mickey was shocked. “After all the shit I been through with Jimmy Coonan?” he asked himself. “Murders, hacking up bodies, being willing to die for the guy? And this ungrateful motherfucker tells me no?”
Sissy said she wasn’t surprised at all; she had expected it. But Mickey found it hard to believe that Coonan, for whom he had literally put himself through hell, would treat him this way.
Four weeks later, Mickey and Sissy received an invitation to an engagement party for the Coonans’ oldest son, Bobby. The party was to be held in a large room at the Hazlet, New Jersey, firehouse, and everyone from the old neighborhood was expected to attend. Edna had even rented a bus to pick up a group of people in front of the Skyline Motor Inn on Tenth Avenue and transport them to and from Hazlet.
“I can’t believe this bitch,” said Sissy when they got the invitation. “She treats us like dogs, then expects us to come to an engagement party?”
Mickey, however, wanted to go. “We can’t let her think she controls our lives. Why give her the satisfaction? We’ll go there and hold our heads high just like everybody else.”
It was a snowy night in November when over one hundred residents from Hell’s Kitchen arrived at the firehouse in Hazlet. Edna had hired a band, so there was dancing, and tables were set up around the room where people could eat and talk. It was a festive atmosphere, with everyone drinking and getting reacquainted.
At some point in the evening, Edna sidled up to Mickey and said, “I need to talk to you.”
“Okay,” said Mickey.
“Jimmy feels bad about the loan. He knows you need money and all, so he’s got a proposition. He’s willin’ to turn over the West Side piers to you, the whole thing. But you gotta do something for him.”
“I’m listening.”
Edna explained that there were three people Jimmy wanted whacked. One was Vinnie Leone, the ILA official the Italians had ensconced on the West Side. According to Coonan, Leone was ripping off the Westies, and Jimmy had received authorization from the Gambino family to take him out.
The other guy Jimmy wanted whacked was Billy Beattie, Edna’s ex-boyfriend. Beattie had welched on a loan shark debt that was long overdue. “Jimmy wants him dead,” said Edna, “and so do I.”
The third person was another neighborhood guy who had run afoul of Jimmy.
Mickey listened to all of this and said, “Edna, I don’t want it. Don’t want no part of this shit.”
“Mickey, this is serious. This is business.”
“I know what it is. I don’t want it.”
Edna looked hard at Featherstone. “Okay, Mickey, I’ll tell Jimmy. I know he’s gonna be very disappointed.”
Mickey shrugged.
“’Cause you know this is gonna get done anyway, right? Whether you do it or somebody else does it, it’s gonna get done.”
“That ain’t my problem. That’s your problem.”
After Mickey and Edna separated, Sissy Featherstone approached her husband. She’d overheard bits and pieces of his conversation with Coonan’s wife, and she could hardly contain her anger. “Are you gettin’ involved with these fucking people? Are you gettin’ involved again?”
Mickey and Sissy argued loudly, attracting the attention of those around them. Mickey tried to explain that he had said no to Edna’s proposition, but Sissy was so upset she was hard
ly listening. “That treacherous bitch!” she kept saying over and over.
Things got even more heated later on that night, when a smaller group of neighborhood people reconvened over at the Coonan house. After watching Edna gleefully show off each and every new gadget in her house and catching her once again trying to lure Mickey back into Jimmy’s schemes, Sissy could no longer contain herself. She laid into Edna, calling her a “fat cunt,” a “treacherous bitch,” and every other insult she could think of. Edna just sat there like she was above it all.
“You just remember,” snapped Sissy, grabbing Mickey to leave. “You keep that husband of yours outta our lives, or I’ll come back here and burn this goddamn house to the ground.”
After that, Mickey tried to stay on the straight and narrow. He got a job at Erie Transfer, a Teamster garage based in Hell’s Kitchen that supplied rented trucks and trailers to the entertainment industry. He didn’t have a union book yet, but he was getting work almost every day just by showing up. There was plenty of idle time on the job—and lots of cocaine. Coke was prevalent at every level of the entertainment business at the time, and it was commonly sold in working-class bars throughout Hell’s Kitchen. Mickey had tried to avoid it at first, preferring marijuana and alcohol. But the boredom and routine nature of daily employment, plus his estrangement from his fellow Westies, ate away at Featherstone’s resolve until he was snorting coke on the job almost every day.
Working on the West Side, he was never far away from his old haunts and old ways. As much as he may have wanted to, Featherstone could not entirely separate himself from the gang. He’d heard through the grapevine that certain people in the neighborhood were using his name, as in “You better pay up, or Mickey Featherstone is gonna be pissed.” Or, “We’re with Mickey Featherstone, so you better not try an’ cross us.” The idea that certain members of the Westies were making money off his reputation without his authorization was enough to push him over the edge.
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