American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  One person the cops questioned was Julius “Dutch” Grote, a strapping ex-con and neighborhood gambler who worked behind the bar at Pearlie’s, a saloon on 9th Avenue between 48th and 49th streets. Grote told the police he knew Lagville because they’d worked together in the Metal Lathers union. But that was all he had to say.

  What he didn’t tell the cops was that on March 22, 1966, the night Lagville disappeared, he’d stopped by Pearlie’s for a drink. Lagville told Grote he’d been called to a meeting with Sullivan, Jimmy and Jackie Coonan. Grote had been with Spillane and Tommy Collins when Jimmy Coonan sprayed them with machine-gun fire from a West 46th Street rooftop. So he knew there was a gang war going on. He asked Lagville, “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “I got no choice, Dutch,” Bobby replied. “They called me, I gotta go.”

  Now the cops were telling Grote that Bobby Lagville had been shot seven or eight times, stabbed repeatedly, then run over by a car.

  Only the car was an exaggeration.

  Not long after the Lagville murder, Jimmy, Jackie, and Eddie Sullivan stumbled into Pearlie’s. They looked demented, as if they’d been up for weeks without sleep. Dutch Grote knew they’d been hunting around the neighborhood for Mickey Spillane the last few days, and that Spillane had gone into hiding.

  Sullivan, his thick features frozen in some permanent, sinister expression of paranoia, had a long gray overcoat on. Underneath the coat he was holding a glistening chrome-colored submachine gun.

  “Where the fuck’s Spillane?” Sullivan asked Dutch Grote.

  Like a lot of people in Hell’s Kitchen at the time, Dutch had been trying to remain neutral during the Coonan/Spillane Wars. He’d gambled with Spillane a lot and thought of him as a godfather. But he knew the Coonans, too. In fact, John Coonan, Jimmy’s and Jackie’s father, had been the best man at his wedding. So he wasn’t about to take sides.

  “He was in here this morning,” said Grote, “but I ain’t seen him since.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “Hey, Dutch,” asked Jackie Coonan. “Whose side you on anyway?”

  “I’m on nobody’s side, Jackie; you know that. I walk right down the middle.”

  There was some mumbling among the three of them as they looked around the bar. Grote thought he heard Jackie say, “He’s a fuckin’ liar and we oughta get rid of him.” To which Jimmy said, “No, he’s neighborhood. He’s good people.” Then they left.

  A few days later, Jimmy, Jackie, and Eddie Sullivan met again with Bobby Huggard and Georgie Saflita uptown at Tony’s Bar. They were all in a surly mood, chain-smoking cigarettes and swigging beer. While they’d been looking for Spillane, there were all kinds of rumors surfacing about hired gunmen being flown in from Texas and Boston to blow them away. The Coonan/Spillane Wars had become like a runaway train. There wasn’t much time, they figured. They’d have to pull the Bronx stickup immediately.

  That night at around 12 A.M. they all piled into Eddie Sullivan’s girlfriend’s rented car. They drove to a small bar near Westchester Square in the Bronx, underneath the elevated railway. All five of them went into the bar. The take wasn’t much, but it was the easiest $800 any of them had made in a long time. They didn’t even have to fire a shot.

  From there, they drove through the night to Bennington, Vermont, where they had no trouble buying four handguns—two .38-caliber automatics, a .45, and a .25 Beretta. They slept the next morning at a hotel in Bennington, then headed to Georgie Saflita’s apartment in New Jersey.

  At Georgie’s place, the boys patted themselves on the back. So far, things were going swell. Eddie Sullivan said he knew of a numbers joint in Greenwich Village they should hit next, and everybody agreed that was a good idea. In the meantime, with Spillane’s alleged hitmen after them, they decided to split up and reconvene back at Georgie’s apartment in a few days. Georgie stayed put with his wife, Jimmy and Eddie Sullivan went to stay at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan, and Jackie and Bobby Huggard headed for Brooklyn. It was April Fools’ Day, 1966.

  In Brooklyn, Jackie and Bobby immediately went to a bar where Huggard used to hang out when he lived on Kent Avenue in Greenpoint. They planned to spend the night at Huggard’s ex-wife’s apartment, but first they would have a few drinks and relax. They were both carrying weapons from the buy in Vermont, Jackie a .45 and Huggard a .38.

  Huggard liked Jackie. He was about the same size as his younger brother Jimmy—five-nine and 175 pounds—and he liked to grease his sandy-blond hair straight back in a vintage 1950s ducktail. He seemed a lot more talkative and easygoing than his brother, who was about the most serious nineteen-year-old Huggard had ever met.

  Huggard and Jackie sat for a few hours, telling jokes and getting quietly stewed. Then Jackie said he had to go outside for a while and would be right back.

  It was now about 2:30 A.M. Huggard sat in the bar for at least an hour asking himself, “Where the fuck is Jackie?” Finally, the bartender told him he had to close up the joint. Huggard left the bar and walked a couple of blocks to Greenpoint Avenue. Two blocks to the north, at the intersection of Greenpoint and Manhattan avenues, Huggard saw two or three squad cars gathered around a corner saloon with their lights flashing. There were cops everywhere.

  Nervously, Huggard sidled up to the bar to find out what was going on. He peeked through a window.

  Inside the bar, spread-eagle on the floor, was Jackie Coonan. Standing over him were two cops with their revolvers pointed at his head.

  Huggard got the hell out of there as fast as he could. The next day, from his ex-wife’s place, he called Coonan’s father to find out what had happened. It turned out Jackie had tried to rob the bar on Greenpoint Avenue, and the bartender had jumped over the counter after him.

  So Jackie shot him dead.

  Huggard knew there was bound to be some kind of investigation. He got together what money he could and immediately got the fuck out of New York City.

  In the meantime, Jimmy Coonan and Eddie Sullivan heard what happened and stayed put at their friend Billy Murtha’s apartment. They were pissed off. Things had been building nicely towards a showdown with Spillane, and now Jackie had to screw it all up by killing a bartender in Brooklyn for no good reason. It would really be hot on the West Side now; they would have to be on their toes even more than usual.

  A few days later, Charles Canelstein and Jerry Morales walked into the Pussycat Lounge and bumped into a very paranoid Eddie Sullivan. Hours later, in a vacant lot across from Calvary Cemetery in Queens, they were both riddled with lead and left to die. Unfortunately for Coonan and the boys, it was a sloppy hit and Canelstein lived. (Unfortunately for Jerry Morales, it wasn’t that sloppy. He was dead by the time the cops arrived.)

  On May 12, 1966—thirty-seven days after the shooting—Charles Canelstein was wheeled into the Queens County criminal courthouse on a gurney. Before a grand jury, he identified Eddie Sullivan as the triggerman and Jimmy Coonan and the others as his accomplices. What he remembered most vividly was the noise coming from his assailants after he was shot.

  “I heard footsteps going back to the car,” he said. “I heard the doors shut and I heard a hysterical kind of laughter. It wasn’t like somebody told a joke, it was almost an animalistic kind of laughter coming from the car.”

  All four were indicted. Eddie Sullivan, a three-time loser, was convicted and given a life sentence.

  Jimmy Coonan plea-bargained and wound up getting five to ten for felonious assault. He served his time quietly at an assortment of penal facilities, including Sing Sing, where he was reunited with his brother Jackie.

  In the meantime, the Coonan/Spillane Wars were put on hold.

  At the same time Jimmy Coonan was waging war with Mickey Spillane, Francis Featherstone was passing through adolescence. He’d been born and raised in an apartment at 45th Street and 10th Avenue, just six blocks from Coonan, and later moved to 501 1/2 West 43rd Street. The last of nine children, Mick
ey, as he was known to family and friends, was two years younger than Jimmy. By 1966, the two Hell’s Kitchen Irishmen had heard of each other, but they traveled in different circles. Mickey was a baby-faced kid who nobody payed much attention to, Jimmy a young gangster on the make.

  On April 27, 1966, just three weeks after Coonan’s arrest for the Canelstein/Morales shooting, seventeen-year-old Mickey Featherstone enlisted in the army. Ultimate destination: Vietnam. While Jimmy Coonan put down his guns and readied himself for a prison sentence, Featherstone was being issued a weapon by the United States government. By November, they would be in opposite corners of the earth—Coonan in prison in upstate New York, Featherstone on his way to Saigon.

  In the autumn of 1969, the New York Mets shocked the sports world by beating the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles four games to one in the World Series. After years of being the ugly ducklings of baseball, the Amazin’ Mets became the pride of New York City almost overnight.

  For Mickey Spillane and other bookmakers throughout the city, however, the World Series was a disaster. The Las Vegas odds-makers had the Mets as 7 to 1 underdogs, and when outfielder Cleon Jones caught the fly ball that ended it all, the city’s bookmakers took a beating. Every sentimental slob in the five boroughs who had put down a few bucks on the Mets had a big payday. As the rest of the city rejoiced with parties and a ticker-tape parade, operators like Mickey Spillane counted their losses. Such were the vagaries of being a neighborhood racketeer.

  A few months later, Spillane had even more serious problems. Both he and 300-pound Hughie Mulligan, his criminal “rabbi,” had been called before a grand jury investigating allegations of police corruption. Mulligan had already refused to answer questions, even though he was offered immunity from prosecution. Eventually, he would be cited for criminal contempt.

  Spillane took the stand in the fall of 1970 and also refused to talk. Among the questions he was asked by an assistant district attorney were: “Have you ever assaulted anyone in an attempt to collect a usurious loan for anyone?” and “Were you present on certain occasions when Hughie Mulligan paid bribes to police officers?” Other questions concerned an alleged conversation between Mulligan and Spillane, recorded by the police, in which Spillane was said to have sanctioned the murder of a government witness.

  After Spillane had refused to answer questions throughout his afternoon on the stand, an exasperated assistant D.A. finally asked, “Well, can you tell me this: Are you related to the other Mickey Spillane?”—the well-known pulp-fiction writer. After a momentary pause, Mickey smiled and leaned over to the microphone. “No. But I’d be happy to change places with him at the moment.”

  Everybody laughed, but Spillane’s refusal to talk still cost him sixty days on Rikers Island.

  Also in the autumn of 1970, Jimmy Coonan got an early parole from prison and returned to Hell’s Kitchen. As with most young adults who do time behind bars, he’d developed a slightly harder and leaner look, his physique enhanced by hours in the prison weight room. In certain circles, as a result of his time inside, he had also enhanced his reputation as a tough guy.

  Nonetheless, Spillane was still ruler of the West Side rackets, and Coonan, if anything, was in a worse position than before. His pal, Eddie Sullivan, was behind bars for good. His brother Jackie was still serving time for the murder of the bartender in Greenpoint. And Bobby Huggard had fled New York City. It was just Jimmy now, and it looked like he’d have to start all over again from scratch.

  It had always been Coonan’s ambition to move into more stable rackets like loansharking. In the pantheon of organized crime, loansharking was a halfway respectable endeavor. You always knew who your customers were, and if violence was needed, as far as the loanshark was concerned there was a built-in justification. After all, the customer knows who he’s borrowing from to begin with. And he knows exactly what’s supposed to happen if he doesn’t make his payments.

  To start a loanshark operation, however, you need capital, of which Coonan had very little. Once again, he had to start at the bottom pulling together contacts and engaging in assorted quick-cash schemes. He never lost sight of his goal of getting enough power to be able to challenge Spillane.

  For a few months in early ’71, Coonan worked as a carpet installer in lower Manhattan. But the rigors of a nine to five job were not only boring, they were a time-consuming impediment to his criminal aspirations. Before long, Coonan was back on the streets hijacking warehouses, sticking up liquor stores and—taking a page from Mickey Spillane—kidnapping local merchants.

  His most ambitious crime during this period was the kidnapping of a taxi broker from Staten Island who was supposed to be “mobbed up.” But that job took a sudden and disastrous turn when the kidnapee escaped from the back of a car he was being transported in. With his hands still in cuffs, the guy fled on foot through Times Square until he found a cop. Coonan had to go into hiding for a few months to escape arrest.

  When he returned to the neighborhood, Jimmy was immediately charged with the kidnapping. In February of 1972, there were grand jury proceedings. But the district attorney’s office in Richmond County had trouble finding witnesses. Even the victim was now reluctant to take the stand. Eventually the case was dismissed on “speedy-trial” grounds.

  Coonan had gotten lucky with that one, and he knew it. He also knew his luck wasn’t going to last forever. Here he was, just twenty-five years old and already he’d chalked up one homicide the authorities hadn’t gotten him on and one they had. He’d spent four years of his young life in prison and six or seven months on the lam. Now, he’d just barely missed a kidnapping indictment.

  It was definitely time to lead a more careful existence.

  In early 1973, a venture came Coonan’s way that was to give him some breathing room and lay the foundation for all that would come later. Using what little capital he’d been able to muster, he bought into a saloon once known as McCoy’s, now known as the 596 Club because of its location at 596 10th Avenue. Since Coonan was a convicted felon and prohibited from owning an establishment where liquor was sold, the ownership was in his brother-in-law’s name. But everyone knew it was Jimmy’s bar, and it quickly became his base of operation.

  With its old brick facade and two tiny front windows covered by cast-iron bars, from the outside the 596 Club looked like a World War I bunker. On the inside, it looked like a typical Hell’s Kitchen gin mill. As you entered, the bar was to the left, running about twenty feet back towards a doorway that led into a small kitchen. To the right of that was an elevated area that looked like a small stage. Beyond that was a doorway leading to the restrooms.

  In the early 1970s, the younger neighborhood criminals started hanging out at the 596 Club. On any given night of the week you might find Patrick “Paddy” Dugan, Denis Curley, Richie Ryan, Tommy Hess, James “Jimmy Mac” McElroy and a dozen others drinking into the early hours of the morning. Many of these guys had known each other since they were kids. They’d played hockey together at Hell’s Kitchen park just up the Avenue, or maybe they’d boxed together on the local Boys Club boxing team. Eventually, they had gone into crime together, pulling burglaries in the commercial buildings to the east and stealing cargo from the warehouses to the west.

  They were high school dropouts, mostly, known more for their nerve than their brains. Their existence seemed predicated on three simple maxims: You don’t rat, you don’t kill a cop, and you don’t smack your woman—at least not in public. At the time, there was little indication that they would eventually form the nucleus of the wild and fearsome Westies, who prosecutors called “the most savage organization in the long history of New York City gangs.”

  Before long the 596 Club was seen as a rival headquarters to Spillane’s White House Bar, which was located only two blocks north. That was where the older generation held court and the gangsters loyal to Spillane cursed the recklessness of this new breed. The kids seemed motivated only by a desire for profit, not by any fidelity or respect
for the neighborhood where they’d grown up.

  One local tough guy who moved easily between the two saloons was Edward “Eddie” Cummiskey. With his curly black hair, piercing blue eyes, and the cockiness of a bantam rooster, Cummiskey looked and sounded like a gangster from the 1920s. At thirty-nine, he’d already done a long stretch in Attica on an assault and robbery conviction and was there during the infamous Attica riot of 1971. He’d also once spent the better part of a year on the lam after hopping an ILA freighter to Brazil in order to avoid a murder rap. Even by Hell’s Kitchen standards, Cummiskey’s life as a gangster had been an unusually eventful one.

  Maybe it was because Coonan knew that Cummiskey was Spillane’s “muscle.” Or maybe it was just Cummiskey’s “innate charms.” But in the months following his takeover of the 596 Club, Coonan spent a good deal of time cultivating a friendship with the elder gangster. They were often seen together sitting in the back of the bar, drinking and discussing business. Sometimes Cummiskey would come forward to tell the other kids stories from his violent past, stories that usually left everybody in stitches.

  One of Eddie’s most infamous homicides had taken place just up the street at the Sunbrite Bar, located at 736 10th Avenue. As Cummiskey would tell it, he’d been walking by the bar one afternoon when a young neighborhood woman came out the front door in tears. Cummiskey asked her what was wrong. She told him the bartender inside had insulted her.

  Eddie knew the bartender, so he walked inside and confronted him. When the bartender told him he had indeed insulted the woman and it was none of Cummiskey’s business, Eddie hauled off and belted him. The bartender was quite a bit huskier than the diminutive Cummiskey, so the punch barely fazed him.

  “You punch like a little girl,” snarled the bartender.

  Cummiskey pulled a .38 from inside his jacket, pointed it at the bartender.

  “Oh yeah?” he asked. “Well do I shoot like a little girl?” He pulled the trigger twice, striking the barman in the chest and the head. Then he climbed over the bar and shot him again.