On the verge of his trial in March 1986, Mickey became even more convinced that something was amiss when he heard that Billy Bokun had confessed to the legal team of Hochheiser and Aronson that he, not Mickey, had shot Michael Holly. Bokun had even told the lawyers and Mickey that he felt terrible about Featherstone facing a life sentence for the hit; he wanted to “walk into the courtroom and confess.” But Hochheiser and Aronson, who were the attorneys of record for both Featherstone and Bokun, told Bokun to keep his confession to himself.
In fairness to the attorneys, their position was a complicated one. Just because Bokun wanted to confess didn’t mean that he was telling the truth. Bokun worshipped Mickey Featherstone: What if Mickey had put him up to this confession? If so, Bokun would likely crumble on the witness stand and the lawyers would be left with a defendant who, in the eyes of the jury, looked even more guilty than he had before. All things considered, they felt it was best to go to trial without Bokun’s confession and beat the charge against Featherstone by attacking the recollection of the government’s eye-witnesses—a tactic they had successfully employed many times in the past.
To Mickey, the logic of his lawyers’ position made no sense and became even more inexplicable as the trial began. For three straight weeks, Featherstone watched in a semistupor as his life went up in flames. He was identified by three eyewitnesses, none of whom were effectively cross-examined by defense counsel. Even more distressing to Mickey was when his lawyers called Kevin Kelly to testify on his behalf. Mickey told his lawyers, “Don’t do it; he’ll come off as a gangster,” but they felt it was important to establish that Mickey was left-handed, whereas the gunman had been identified as being right-handed. On the stand, Kelly was rude and menacing, reaffirming Mickey’s suspicion that there was some kind of setup afoot. His conspiracy theory expanded to include his attorneys when he heard that Billy Bokun had arrived outside the courtroom one day, still wanting to confess, but the lawyers turned him away.
It was obvious to Mickey: Coonan must have heard that he and the other Westies were conspiring to take him out. Rather than kill his popular number two man, Jimmy had devised a plan to make Mickey take the fall for the Holly murder. It was an ingenious plot that Featherstone might have admired were he not on the receiving end.
When the guilty verdict was delivered, Mickey was devastated but not surprised. He’d seen it coming. For weeks he’d watched his own trial like a cornered animal, frustrated and helpless, his options dwindling day by day until there was only one choice left. It was not an alternative that he relished, but he was willing to take the step. As the entire New York Irish Mob was about to find out, Mickey Featherstone felt he had nothing left to lose.
Settling Old Scores
Jimmy Coonan was mostly an offstage presence during the months of Featherstone’s demise. He was a full-time Italian now, and his relationship with the Gambino family had taken some unexpected twists and turns. On December 18, 1985, while Featherstone was still awaiting trial for the Holly murder, Paul Castellano got whacked. The capo di tutti capi and his bodyguard were filled with lead on a busy Midtown Manhattan street during rush hour. It was an outlandish mob hit in the old style, and it brought about the ascension of a new boss of the Gambino family, a thuggish, sartorially inclined former button man named John Gotti—the same John Gotti who first made his bones by whacking the small-time Irish gangster Jimmy McBratney.
Within weeks of the Castellano hit, Coonan was introduced to the new boss. Coonan and the Dapper Don immediately hit it off. They met numerous times in early 1986 at the Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy and also at Gotti’s club in Howard Beach, Queens. With his penchant for violence and fervent belief in street justice over boardroom diplomacy, Gotti was more Coonan’s style than Castellano had been. Like Jimmy, he was a brute, a man inclined to strike first and ask questions later (Gotti was once recorded on government wiretaps saying of an underling, “I’ll sever his fuckin’ head off.”). The new boss was bound to find common ground with Jimmy Coonan, who was anxious to expand his relationship with the Italians by way of Marine Construction, his mob-affiliated contracting company.
Constantly on the lookout for ways to endear himself to the Gambinos, in May 1986, Jimmy heard about a dispute la famiglia was having with an Irish-born union official. At the Brooklyn funeral of a recently murdered Gambino family capo, Jimmy was told how John O’Connor, business agent for Carpenter’s Union Local 608, had run afoul of Gotti and his people by ordering the trashing of a downtown Manhattan restaurant that was using nonunion labor. Unbeknownst to O’Connor, the restaurant was under the protection of the Gambino crime family.
Gotti wanted to deliver a message to O’Connor. Coonan jumped at the chance and volunteered the services of the Westies. The Dapper Don took him up on his offer. How could he resist? Using an Irishman to punish an Irishman was a proud Mafia tradition going back to the earliest days of Cosa Nostra in America.
Coonan assigned the job to Jimmy McElroy, who pawned it off on the new Westie hit team of Kevin Kelly and Kenny Shannon. They were not supposed to kill O’Connor, only deliver a pointed message. As the silver-haired union official arrived at his Midtown Manhattan office building for work one morning, he was shot multiple times below the waist by an unidentified assailant.
Meanwhile, Mickey Featherstone was supposedly awaiting sentencing on his murder conviction at Rikers Island. On the afternoon of May 16, Kevin Kelly visited Featherstone at Rikers and told him all about the O’Connor shooting in loving detail.
“We gave the guy a new asshole for being an asshole,” Kevin told Mickey.
What Kelly did not know was that Featherstone was cooperating with the government at the time, and that a bug had been planted behind a picture on the wall near where he and Mickey were seated.
The recording of Kelly’s description of the O’Connor shooting was just one of numerous tapes that Mickey and his wife Sissy would compile throughout the spring and summer of 1986. They had turned to the government in an attempt to prove Mickey’s innocence in the Holly murder, but the government played hardball. They were not interested in whether or not Featherstone had been wrongly convicted for the murder—unless Mickey first signed an agreement specifying his full cooperation with the government in a broad, far-reaching RICO case against the Westies. Rather than spend the rest of his life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, Featherstone agreed.
Sissy wound up shouldering most of the burden. She was the one who was still out on the street, so she had to gather much of the evidence that would exonerate her husband. In a series of conversations with Kelly, Shannon, Bokun, and others who were involved in the Holly murder, she tried to solicit information without asking questions that were too obvious. If the men discovered what Sissy was up to, she’d almost certainly be murdered on the spot.
Of the many incriminating confessions and crucial pieces of information that Sissy was able to get, the most poignant confession came from Billy Bokun, whom Sissy had known since he was a little boy. Bokun had been conflicted ever since Mickey Featherstone was arrested for the Holly murder, and he became even more distraught after Sissy’s husband was convicted. In a meeting between Sissy and Bokun that took place at the Ninth Avenue International Food Festival, an annual street fair in Hell’s Kitchen, Bokun poured his heart out. Standing on the corner of Fifty-first Street and Nineth Avenue, as thousands of people flooded around them, Bokun tearfully told Sissy, “They told me, they told me to wear a wig and mustache.”
“See, now, to this day, Kevin says you didn’t wear a mustache.”
“I wore a mustache. But it was so light and so thin I had to pencil it in. It was an eyeliner mustache.”
“That’s what’s messin’ Mickey up. Mickey’s goin’, ‘Why the fuck?’ ‘ ’Cause,’ I said to Mickey, ‘I don’t doubt Billy. Billy says to this day they told him to wear a mustache. I don’t doubt that.’ Were you high, though, that day?”
“No, I was straight.”
; “Yeah? Did Michael Holly ever see you comin’ toward him?”
“Uh, I was in the car. He didn’t see nothin’. I jumped out—boom! I just shot him. One-two-three-four-five. Back in the car. Ten seconds, no more…. I’m not ashamed of what I did. I think what I did is absolutely right.”
“Why you did it is, you feel—”
“I feel ’cause he whacked my brother. He was responsible for John. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.”
“But remember when you said, ‘Kevin fuckin’ set me up. And he didn’t only set me up, he set Mickey up along with me.’ Remember?”
“Right. I said that after the fact. After I spoke to your husband, after me and Mickey decided that it was true…”
Bokun sputtered; he was so upset there were tears in his eyes. “Alls I was supposed to do was go over to that corner, you know, and go and shoot the guy. And I didn’t know nothin’ else about the plan, see. The reason I’m by myself is, I don’t know, I’m not the type of guy who can walk around and shoot everybody. I can shoot anyone for my brother, but I can’t just go out and whack everybody. It’s my personality. I mean, that’s my big fault. I guess it’s my loyalty to everybody, you know. I’m so loyal, ’cause I can’t help it.”
Sissy let Billy ramble on and hang himself. She got it all on tape. She felt sick about it because she liked Billy and had known him forever, but her survival and her family’s survival were at stake. The way she saw it, there was no choice.
On September 5, Mickey Featherstone was brought before Judge Alvin Schlessinger, the same judge who had presided over his murder trial. The same prosecutor who had secured Featherstone’s conviction now stood before the judge and read a statement: “On too many occasions to cite, the New York County D.A.’s office has gone to extraordinary lengths to investigate claims of innocence by people either charged or convicted of crimes which they claim they did not do. Usually those claims do not hold water. However, on those rare occasions when they do, our obligation to see that justice is carried out is clear: That conviction must be set aside…
“When all the evidence in this particular case is taken together, the People are now convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that it was William Bokun and not Francis Featherstone who shot and killed Michael Holly.”
“In the interest of justice,” declared Judge Schlessinger, “I am compelled to overturn this conviction.”
The next morning, those citizens with even a passing knowledge of the Westies looked at the morning papers and gagged on their coffee. Not only had Mickey Featherstone’s murder conviction been overturned, but it was also announced that the Westies’ most notorious hitman was now cooperating with the government against the gang. “Westies Con Sings Irish Lullaby,” was the headline in the New York Post. The long reign of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob had just taken a dramatic turn for the worse.
The gang scattered. Coonan went into hiding but was eventually cornered in New Jersey and placed under arrest. Edna was arrested in front of the family Christmas tree in their home in Hazlet. Others, including Billy Bokun, Mugsy Ritter, and a woman named Florence Collins were arrested in and around Hell’s Kitchen. Flo Collins, fifty-two years old, was a neighborhood coke dealer along with her husband Tommy Collins, who was also arrested.
Jimmy McElroy pulled a lambrooskie. But McElroy was a creature of habit. The NYPD knew of a place in Mesa, Arizona, where he’d gone on the lam once before, and he was arrested there by federal authorities. Kevin Kelly and Kenny Shannon also went into hiding. More successful than McElroy, they eluded capture for nearly two years until they were forced to turn themselves in after being profiled on the TV show America’s Most Wanted.
A number of gang members, upon hearing of Featherstone’s cooperation, struck their own deals with the government. Billy Beattie became a government informant, agreeing to testify in court against the Westies after pleading guilty to RICO charges. Throughout 1986 and into 1987, state murder indictments were returned against various members of the gang. Then in March, Rudolph Giuliani, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, stepped in and announced a massive federal indictment that would supersede all others. Ten members of the Westies, including those already hit with the state indictments, were charged on fourteen counts of having taken part in a racketeering conspiracy. The RICO charges dated back some twenty years and included extortion, loan-sharking, counterfeiting, gambling, and sixteen counts of murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy to commit murder. These charges, assured Giuliani, would finally bring about an end to what he termed “the most savage organization in the long history of New York gangs.”
The trial began in September, exactly one year after Mickey Featherstone’s cooperation with the government was first announced. On a daily basis, family members of the defendants, residents of Hell’s Kitchen, and other interested citizens filed into Room 506 in Manhattan federal court. They were there, for the most part, to see Featherstone—the once shy, neighborhood kid who became a troubled Vietnam vet, then a feared enforcer for the Westies, and now the unthinkable: a rat, a stool pigeon, an informer.
In the years of the Westies, no single person had personified the West Side Code more than Featherstone. For nearly a decade, he was the one who beat up or warned any neighborhood person who was even rumored to have spoken to the bulls. He enforced the neighborhood’s revered code of silence with an iron fist. His years as a soldier in Vietnam and as a gang member had placed his loyalty beyond question. Even people who were not gangsters or associated with the criminal rackets accepted and admired Mickey. Like most of the Westies, he was not big or physically imposing, but he was always ready to fight, shoot, and kill on behalf of certain longstanding neighborhood traditions. The thought that Featherstone—Mickey fucking Featherstone!—was the one who was going to divulge the neighborhood’s darkest criminal secrets to the public at large was too much for some West Siders to bear. They could not believe that it was true, and so they made the trek downtown to the criminal courthouse to see for themselves.
On the stand, Mickey was dressed in a suit and tie. His hair was neatly trimmed, and he had the same sandy-blond mustache that had contributed to his conviction for the Holly murder. In a soft voice that sounded like that of one of the Dead End Kids, he revealed a litany of crimes and events that spanned a lifetime. Throughout four long weeks of direct testimony and cross-examination, he was an unflappable witness. The neighborhood people listened, mostly in hushed silence.
There were many others who took the stand, seventy witnesses in all—gangsters, crime victims, collaborators, coconspirators, cops, federal agents, and organized crime experts—with a mountain of evidence that was presented throughout late 1987 and into 1988. The neighborhood people mostly disappeared during the middle months of the trial, but they returned again for the verdict. When they did, the courtroom was packed to the rafters, with many tough, grizzled Irish faces right out of a 1930s Cagney flick. Sisters, brothers, nephews, mothers, fathers, and neighbors were there to see not only the final adjudication of the core members of the Westies, but also the passing of a way of life.
The Irish hardly existed in Hell’s Kitchen anymore. They had long since moved onward, upward, and assimilated into the suburbs. The Westies represented those who did not have the resources or the inclination to leave the neighborhood; they were a throwback to a different era, when the Irish had been forced to fight, claw, and scheme to survive. The criminal rackets, which they had spawned and fostered for nearly a century, were the last lethal strain of an ecosystem that should have died out long ago.
The verdict was guilty on all counts.
Facing certain extinction, the Irish Mob was now hanging by a thread, down to its final frontier, Boston, and its last boss, a man named Whitey—who would prove to be the most wily and diabolical survivor of them all.
CHAPTER # Fourteen
14. southie serenade: whitey on the run
According to Pat Nee, an early leader of the Mullin gang who was also
an occasional crime partner of Whitey Bulger until the late 1980s, the Irish mob boss of Boston once received a call from Jimmy Coonan, leader of the Westies. The overture was made sometime in the mid-1980s, when Bulger was sitting pretty in Southie, and Coonan, recently released from prison, was looking to expand his operation beyond the confines of Hell’s Kitchen. Whitey received word of the overture through an underling, who reported that Coonan had a “business proposition he wanted to discuss.”
Bulger knew who Coonan was, of course. The American underworld was a loosely interconnected private fraternity, like the Moose Lodge or the Shriners, whose regional criminals frequently crossed paths while in federal prison or on the lam. Bulger gave some consideration as to whether or not he should return Coonan’s call and see what he had to say. Apparently, Whitey decided against it. As a regional criminal who had a good thing going in his own backyard, Bulger saw no benefit in forming an alliance with the Irish guys from New York. They might make their own demands, or even worse, jeopardize his secret, unprecedented partnership with the number one law enforcement agency in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Nothing ever came of Coonan’s overture, and the anecdote can now be filed under the heading: What Might Have Been. If Bulger’s Boston operation and the Westies had hooked up, they would have been a major force to contend with in the underworld, particularly in the lucrative northeastern part of the United States. Given the Irish Mob’s penchant for violence, they would have posed a formidable threat to the Mafia and perhaps brought about a bloody crescendo to the war between the dagos and the micks—the longest running rivalry in the underworld. For a variety of reasons, that war never did materialize into the kind of face-to-face showdown that many had expected. One reason was that the Irish Mob had no interest in taking on the mafia’s role as corporate overseers of organized crime in America. Loosely based on a pre-famine clan system in which power was dispersed through regional fiefdoms, the Irish Mob tended to be antiauthoritarian in nature, with little talent for intergang coordination, even when the other gangs were Irish.
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