“When you say ‘nightmares,’” Hochheiser interjected, “can you describe what you observed with regard to Mickey having an apparent nightmare?”
“Can I give you an example of one?”
“Please do.”
“I had to buy a second television set because Mickey would sit up all night and watch television after he’d come home, because he couldn’t sleep at night. So I bought a portable television and I put it in the kitchen. So Mickey was sleeping in the day, and it was, I’ll say, about six o’clock …”
“Six o’clock P.M.?”
“Yes, sir. So I had the news on, and my dog, he went ‘Woo-woooo,’ you know, whining like. I looked in the room and the dog was backing up, and then when he came out further I seen my son was on his stomach crawling like a snake. The dog’s hair was up on his back. I run to the sink and I threw the towel in the sink and got water on it. I threw it at Mickey and run out of the house. And then I heard the dog bark, and Mickey was laughing. I went in the house, and he had the wet towel and he was playing with the dog, and he …”
Mrs. Boyle’s voice had been rising steadily. Now it began to crack. There were tears in her eyes.
“Mrs. Boyle, just relax for a moment,” said Hochheiser in a soothing tone.
Still sobbing, she continued. “And he said to me, ‘Momma, what happened?’ And I told him. I said, ‘You come out of your room like this …’”
“Indicating moving the elbows as in crawling.”
“Yes, on his stomach. Then he looked at me like he didn’t even see me. He was looking right … right through me. So he said to me, ‘Momma, I didn’t hurt you, did I?’ I said, ‘No, you didn’t hurt me.’”
“So I put him back into bed and he cried for over two hours. Then he … then he went to sleep.”
There was utter silence in the courtroom. Many of the jurors had tears in their eyes, and Hochheiser thought he’d even seen a touch of moisture in the eyes of crusty old Judge Murtaugh. After Dorothy Boyle there would be other witnesses. Dr. Stanley Portnow, the government psychiatrist, was finally called as part of the prosecution’s rebuttal. In keeping with Jack Evseroff’s advice, Hochheiser didn’t ask him nothin’ about psychiatry. He asked him about his fees, his practice, when he had time to read the background material on Featherstone. Certain that his expertise was being trivialized, Portnow became unglued. As Evzeroff put it to Hochheiser later, “You left him for dead, boobie.”
But the real clincher had been the sight of Mickey’s mother, broken and distraught. For all intents and purposes, the trial was over right there.
On October 28th, the jury delivered its verdict. Featherstone was convicted of possession of an unregistered weapon but found not guilty of murder by reason of “mental defect.”
Mickey’s family was ecstatic, and so was Hochheiser.
As for Featherstone, after his mother cried some more and he’d wished his father well, he was led back to the Tombs, where he stared at the blank walls of his cell. At the moment, it was hard for him to feel much joy. He still had to be sentenced on the gun possession charge; then there were his other cases. With all this still ahead, Featherstone figured it was a hollow, short-term victory.
Neither he nor Hochheiser had any idea that what had just gone down in Manhattan criminal court would later be seen by the city’s cops, judges, journalists, and lawyers as the genesis of the Featherstone legend.
At the same time Mickey Featherstone was scoring his first courtroom victory, a young, inexperienced cop was making his bones on the streets of New York. His name was Richard Egan, though everyone knew him as Richie. Born in 1946—the same year as Jimmy Coonan—Egan stood five-foot-eight, weighed 160 pounds dripping wet, and had a boyish smile and charm. He looked a bit like the comic book character Dennis the Menace, which was funny, since Egan was a menace to no one. To most cops who knew him, Richie was Mr. Nice Guy.
Like many of the gangsters in Hell’s Kitchen, Egan was Irish-American. He’d grown up in Elmhurst, Queens, at that time a relatively placid working-class neighborhood, mainly Irish, German, and Italian. Unlike most of the gangsters in Hell’s Kitchen, Egan came from a stable family background. His parents were both Irish-born, and Richie was their only child. By the time Egan’s father retired in the mid-Seventies, he’d worked forty-five years as a subway motorman.
When Egan graduated from Archbishop Molloy High School in 1962, like many Catholic working-class boys in the city, he saw himself as having three choices. He could go into the service; he could join the priesthood; or he could take a shot at the police training program. Ever since he could remember, Richie had dreamed of being a New York City cop. He took the entrance exam and wound up among the first 100 who were picked.
He joined the force in 1968 and spent the next four years on the streets of Spanish Harlem in upper Manhattan. In ’72, just months before Mickey Featherstone’s acquittal at the Linwood Willis murder trial, the twenty-six-year-old Egan was offered a chance to join the Intelligence Division.
Even as a young cop, Egan had a passion for information—gathering it, evaluating it, and following wherever it might lead. Making arrests interested him a lot less than formulating investigations. The Intelligence Division was perfect. Here, he was certain, he would find his calling—so he jumped at the chance to join.
It was a choice that would prove prophetic for Officer Egan, though he didn’t know it at the time.
In the following months, as Egan learned the basics of intelligence work, Mickey Featherstone would take up residence at Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane. Jimmy Coonan was establishing a name for himself in local criminal circles. And Hell’s Kitchen remained a product of its history—a history that would continue to be written in blood.
PART II
6
NO CORPUS DELICTI, NO INVESTIGATION
In the summer of 1975, Patrick “Paddy” Dugan murdered his best friend Denis Curley and the whole neighborhood got depressed about it.
It started as a barroom joke at the 596 Club, Jimmy Coonan’s saloon, the site two months earlier of the Vanderbilt Evans shooting. With a bunch of people watching, Curley aimed an unloaded pistol at Dugan. But Dugan didn’t know it was unloaded. “You pointed a fuckin’ gun at me!?” he asked his friend incredulously. The next thing people knew Dugan was going over the table, trying to get at Curley. A couple of guys held him back, but it only got worse after that.
It ended an hour later, on August 25, 1975, in front of Denis Curley’s apartment building at 444 West 48th Street. Before numerous onlookers, Dugan put a single .38-caliber bullet into his friend’s temple and fled. Curley died right there, the bullet lodged in his brain, a trickle of blood running across the pavement, over the curb, and into the street.
For weeks after the Denis Curley shooting, the neighborhood was gripped by a wave of near-hysteria. Everyone knew that Paddy Dugan and Denis Curley were best friends. They’d practically grown up together. Hell’s Kitchen had always been a violent place, but the idea that someone would shoot his best friend because of a barroom argument was horrifying to a lot of people. It represented a new kind of violence, where the traditions of loyalty and friendship no longer seemed to mean much.
Those in the know figured drugs had something to do with it. In the early and mid Seventies, a huge influx of street-level narcotics, including heroin, was being sold along 9th and 10th avenues. It was nickel and dime stuff, mostly, and the primary users were the poorer black and Hispanic residents. But many of the white kids were into it too. It was the new kick, the new high.
The professional criminals, of course, wouldn’t go near it. Not yet, anyway. Most of the Italians were still a few years away from the full-scale distribution of drugs. Local Irish gangsters like Mickey Spillane had no interest in it. Spillane didn’t use it and didn’t allow any of his inner circle to, either. He was against the sale of narcotics, even marijuana, on principle. But that didn’t stop a lot of the neighborhood kids from getting i
nvolved. Both Curley and Dugan were known junkies, and so were some of the other up-and-coming neighborhood criminals.
Supposedly, Paddy Dugan felt terrible about what he’d done to Denis Curley. Billy Beattie, who was bartending at the 596 Club the night it happened, asked Paddy about it. It was the morning after, and Beattie woke Dugan up from a deep sleep at 452 West 50th Street, a “flophouse” apartment they shared.
“Why’d you do it?” asked Beattie. “Why’d you kill your best friend?”
Dugan was hung over and looked grief-stricken. “I don’t know,” was all he could say, “I really don’t know.” A few days later, in front of two dozen people at Curley’s wake, Paddy cried like a baby.
To most people, though, Dugan’s remorse just wasn’t good enough. Retribution became the talk of the day. The notorious Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey, for one, had been a close friend of Denis Curley’s. Cummiskey used to call Curley the Rhinestone Cowboy because he and Denis drank together at the Sunbrite Bar and sang along with the Glen Campbell song “Rhinestone Cowboy” as it played over and over on the jukebox. Cummiskey was fifteen years older than Curley and thought of him as a younger brother. Not long after the shooting, he let it be known that he took Curley’s death as a personal insult.
One afternoon he strolled into the Sunbrite Bar and there stood Paddy Dugan, stoned out of his mind. Cummiskey, the bantam rooster, walked right up to him and said: “What kind of a scumbag kills his own friend?”
“Go ahead,” replied Dugan, taking a pistol out of his jacket and placing it on the bar. “Go ahead. You can’t make me feel any worse. Blow my fuckin’ head off.”
“Oh, no,” said Cummiskey. “No way. You’re not gettin’ off that easy.”
Not everyone got as worked up about it as Cummiskey. Mickey Featherstone, who’d just gotten out of prison after serving time for his gun possession conviction in the Linwood Willis killing, was at the 596 Club the night Denis Curley got killed. He thought what Dugan had done to Curley was wrong, but he felt a lot of people were responsible for what happened that night, not just Paddy. When he heard that Mike Ryan, a neighborhood kid, had talked to some detectives who were snooping around after the shooting, he found the kid and gave him a beating. “People don’t rat in this neighborhood,” he told Ryan. “And they especially don’t rat against my friends.”
James Coonan was not at the 596 Club on the night of the shooting, but he heard all about it. He knew that Cummiskey and Curley had been tight, and that Cummiskey would be looking to even the score. He knew this, and he began to think. It was a fact of life in the criminal underworld that most alliances are born out of other people’s anger and misfortune. For years Coonan had been looking for an event that might lure the dreaded Eddie Cummiskey totally over to his side. The death of Denis Curley might just do the trick, thought Jimmy. And Paddy Dugan might just be the sacrificial bait.
The last few years had been good to Jimmy Coonan. Since his marriage to Edna Fitzgerald a year ago, in 1974, he’d moved out of the neighborhood to a modest, two-story house just across the river in Keansburg, New Jersey, a quiet, lily-white middle-class suburb. They had the two children from Edna’s first marriage, and they’d quickly added one of their own. Jimmy owned a big black Buick four-door which he frequently drove into the old neighborhood, where he still did his daily business. Usually, there were messages and payments waiting for him at the 596 Club.
Not only had Coonan’s loansharking operation improved in recent years, but he’d established a relationship with a dapper, old-time gangster named Charles “Ruby” Stein. An exceedingly vain man with slicked-back hair and a formal manner, Stein, then sixty-two years old, was known in the trade as a “shylock’s shylock.” Indeed, he was one of the most successful loansharks the city of New York had ever seen, with a customer list that included big-time businessmen, politicians, and bank presidents. Lately, he had aligned himself with Fat Tony Salerno’s Genovese family. Cops and syndicate insiders usually referred to Stein as “Fat Tony’s Meyer Lansky,” a reference to the legendary underworld financier.
In early 1975, Coonan had met Stein, strangely enough, by way of Mickey Spillane. Since the late 1950s, Spillane had borrowed upwards of a million dollars from Ruby, some of which he used to finance his criminal operations and some of which he used to satisfy his own insatiable gambling habit. Because of Spillane, all West Side racketeers—not just Spillane’s crowd—were always welcome at the Aeon Club, Ruby’s posh gambling den at 76th Street and Broadway, where Spillane was often allowed to run his own table. It was there that Coonan and Stein first shook hands.
Stein took a liking to Coonan, even though he’d been warned by Fat Tony to stay away from the Irish Mob. They were “crazy” and undisciplined, Fat Tony used to tell Ruby, remembering no doubt Spillane’s Eli Zicardi kidnapping fiasco. But Stein didn’t listen; he felt Coonan was a step above the average thug. For one thing, Jimmy was polite and exceedingly deferential towards Stein. Also, he’d expressed a genuine interest in learning more about big-time loansharking from “the man who knows it best.” With Ruby, flattery always worked.
Of course, the fact that Coonan was built like a longshoreman didn’t hurt either. Stein immediately put him to work as a part-time driver, bodyguard, and all-purpose gofer.
Now that Coonan was dealing with serious racketeers like Ruby Stein, it was more important than ever that he show the big boys just how feared he was. For years now he’d been establishing himself as the likely successor to Spillane. Slowly but surely he had been acquiring a crew of faithful young toughs like Richie Ryan, Jimmy McElroy, Tommy Hess, and, most recently, Billy Beattie, Edna’s former boyfriend, now a loanshark and a part-time bartender at the 596 Club. Even some of the old Spillane stalwarts like Cummiskey, Tom Devaney, and Walter Curich were now doing business with Coonan, not so much out of allegiance, but because anybody with any brains could see Jimmy was a man on the make. To align yourself with him now would put you in a “respectable” position in the event he did, through some sudden means, become boss of the entire neighborhood.
After Dugan killed Curley in August ’75, Coonan knew it was time to make his move. With the influence of drugs, the neighborhood seemed to be on the brink of tearing itself apart. The violence just kept getting crazier and crazier. If he could somehow harness that, somehow make it beholden to him and him alone, he would have the most feared gang the West Side of Manhattan had ever seen.
That’s where Paddy Dugan came in.
Ironically, Dugan had always been tight with Coonan. In fact, a few months earlier, when Jimmy was having trouble with Charlie Krueger, another part-time bartender at the 596 Club, he turned to Dugan. Coonan heard that Krueger had been free-lancing on the “business” they had with Tony Lucich, loansharking out in Queens and Brooklyn, using Jimmy’s name to get people to pay and not giving him a cut. When he first got the news, Coonan was mad enough to kill Charlie Krueger. But he had a better idea.
He arranged for Paddy Dugan and Billy Beattie to lure Krueger down to the 596 Club late one night on the pretense that they wanted to borrow money. When Krueger got there, they proceeded to strap him to a chair and beat the shit out of him. He could barely talk from the pistol whipping they gave him. Dugan and Beattie told Krueger they’d kill him unless he called Jimmy Coonan and demanded a $5,000 ransom. This had all been prearranged, of course, without Krueger’s knowledge.
In an extreme state of desperation, Krueger called Coonan and mumbled his predicament into the phone. When Coonan told him he’d be glad to loan him the $5,000 at 5 points—a relatively high rate of interest—Krueger was not only relieved, he felt indebted to Coonan. He thought Jimmy had saved his life.
Coonan paid Dugan and Beattie $1,000 apiece for their night’s work, and told them not to bother Charlie Krueger anymore.
Only problem was, Paddy Dugan was a junkie who couldn’t leave well enough alone. In November, three months after he’d killed Curley, Dugan nabbed Charlie Krueger again, this time
without Jimmy’s authorization. He had Krueger call Coonan and make the same demand as before.
Coonan was beside himself. That night he called Billy Beattie. “Do you know what that jerk buddy of yours did?” he screamed into the phone.
“What?”
“He’s got that fat bastard Krueger down at the club. He’s holdin’ him for ransom!”
“Oh, shit. Well, I hope you know I had nothin’ to do with it.”
“Yeah, he told me he was on his own. Billy, I’m glad you ain’t got a piece of that, you know. I warned the son of a bitch.”
The very next day, on November 17, 1975, Paddy Dugan disappeared. The last anybody saw of him he was headed for his bachelor pad at 452 West 50th Street.…
On the night Paddy disappeared, Alberta Sachs, Jimmy Coonan’s niece, was asleep in her mother’s apartment at 442 West 50th Street, just four buildings over from Paddy’s. She heard a knock at the door. It was her Uncle Jimmy and Eddie Cummiskey. They wanted to borrow some kitchen knives. They took three or four of the sharpest ones, gave Alberta $20, and left.
Alberta went back to sleep on the couch. About an hour later, she heard a noise out in the hallway. When she opened the door, she saw Coonan and Cummiskey again. This time Jimmy was holding a green plastic bag that had something round in it. Something about the size of a basketball.
It was dripping blood.
“What the hell is that?” asked Jimmy Coonan’s thirteen-year-old niece.
“It’s Paddy Dugan’s head,” replied Cummiskey.
Coonan told her they were going down to the boiler room and they wanted her to clean up the hallway after them. Then they disappeared into the dark stairwell.
Alberta did as she was told. Then she lay back down on the couch and pulled the covers up to her neck …
American Gangsters Page 35