The authorities were still in the dark about a lot of Coonan and his crew’s activities, but from what they did know, they figured they had enough to wage war confident of victory. As ammunition, they had informants like Steen, Sachs, Comas, and whoever else they might be able to bring into the fold. As evidence, they had the counterfeit notes Agent Malfi purchased from Steen and other items seized in the raid on Featherstone’s apartment. And they had mounds of incriminating taped phone conversations involving, among others, Mickey, Sissy, and Donald Mallay of the Westway Candy Store.
The only problem, as far as the government was concerned, was ferreting through the evidence and potential witnesses and deciding which cases should take priority.
In other words, it was a prosecutor’s dream.
On a cloudy spring day in April 1979, Larry Hochheiser stood in his law office in the elegant Chrysler Building, overlooking the frenzied midday traffic on East 42nd Street. On a clear day, the view from Hochheiser’s forty-ninth-floor window was spectacular; it took in the Empire State Building—just eight blocks south—the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, the East River, and in the distance, the enormous twin towers of the World Trade Center. Today, however, the view was gray and ominous, as a hovering mass of nimbus clouds hung over the city like smoke trapped in a bottle.
These were busy times for Hochheiser, now thirty-seven years old. He had just finished a staggering succession of trials, one right after the other, in state and federal court. It had been a good ten months since he’d had anything even remotely resembling a vacation. Now, having just closed the book on his most recent case, he was being asked to dive headlong once again into the wild and wicked world of Francis Featherstone.
Not that he had ever been all that far removed. In the seven years since Hochheiser first represented Mickey at the Linwood Willis murder trial, he’d developed a soft spot for Featherstone. Part of it was Mickey’s puppylike devotion, which Hochheiser found endearing. For example, only a few weeks ago, when Hochheiser’s wife Sandra was planning to attend a Broadway show and Mickey heard about it, he insisted she park for free in one of the many Hell’s Kitchen parking lots. He even offered to meet her there and walk her to the theater. When Hochheiser told him it wasn’t necessary, Mickey eagerly insisted. “Hey, believe me, it’s not a safe neighborhood. Your wife shouldn’t be walking around at night without a bodyguard.”
Hochheiser laughed and said thanks, but he’d make other arrangements.
Featherstone’s devotion was rooted in the Linwood Willis verdict. During that trial, Mickey had never expected to see the light of day again. What’s more, he didn’t seem to care. When Hochheiser pulled a rabbit out of his hat and got him an acquittal with the insanity defense, it literally gave Featherstone a reason to live.
Hochheiser also had fond memories of the Willis case, inasmuch as it more or less launched his career. Not long after that trial Hochheiser left the firm of Evzeroff, Newman, and Sonenshine to begin his own practice. As expected, there were lean years spent building a clientele. But before long Hochheiser had earned a reputation as a tenacious courtroom performer especially adept at the fine art of cross-examination.
In the early months of 1975, the attorney had been doing well enough to take on a young, inexperienced associate by the name of Kenneth Aronson. Aronson, like Hochheiser, was Jewish. But that’s where the similarities ended. Hochheiser was six-foot-one with a forceful, slightly cynical nature. Aronson was five-foot-six, pale and soft-spoken. Born in 1949, Aronson was eight years younger than Hochheiser, but seemed even younger than that. Raised in a sedate, middle-class neighborhood of Valley Stream, Long Island, he had none of his senior partner’s street smarts. Before hooking up with Hochheiser, in his two years with the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn, he’d come to be known as something of a nebbish.
But Aronson had a dedication and an attention to detail that Hochheiser—the consummate courtroom performer—lacked. Those who knew Aronson sometimes called him “Talmudic,” because of his willingness to spend hours and hours poring over documentation. Eventually, this became his forte. While other attorneys, including Hochheiser, derived sustenance from some of the more glamorous aspects of the profession, Aronson’s satisfaction came in unearthing obscure statutes that often made the difference between conviction and acquittal.
Once the two men had established a rapport, the firm of Hochheiser and Aronson became the ideal legal partnership. Aronson spent his time preparing the cases, frequently working late into the night, and Hochheiser tried them in court. It was an arrangement that allowed both to focus on what they did best.
Aronson had only been with Hochheiser a short time when he first met Mickey Featherstone. It was May of ’75, more than a year before Mickey was to form his criminal alliance with Jimmy Coonan. Mickey was about to be released on parole after serving five years for gun possession in the Linwood Willis shooting, but he still faced charges for the John Riley and “Mio” shootings.
Aronson was surprised when he first laid eyes on Featherstone in Manhattan criminal court, where he had arrived to represent Mickey before Judge Harold Rothwax. As with most people who knew Featherstone’s résumé before they actually met him face to face, he was expecting someone bigger. Prison had taken a toll on Mickey, leaving him gaunt and frightened. His knees quivered, his hands shook, and he spoke in a wispy, uncertain little voice. Not exactly someone you would run for public office, thought Aronson, but certainly nobody’s image of a Vietnam vet turned street killer.
Since then, the young attorney and Featherstone had spent a good deal of time together; much more, in fact, than Featherstone spent with Hochheiser. It was Aronson who negotiated the plea bargaining agreement that put Mickey back on the street in ’75. And it was “Kenny” who Mickey called, at home or at work, whenever he got into trouble. Aronson had a bit of the Jewish mother in him, and he was constantly doting over Mickey’s health and well-being.
Ever since his release from prison in ’75, a grateful Mickey had been steering business to his lawyers. Mostly, it was other folks like Mickey—Irish kids from Hell’s Kitchen with little or no money. Generally they were burglary cases or barroom assaults, and the fees were based on what the client could afford—which usually wasn’t much.
A typical example was a time in 1977 when Hochheiser and Aronson represented Richie Ryan. It was a few months before Ryan, the kid with the soft Irish face, took part in the Ruby Stein murder, where Jimmy first showed him the fine art of vivisection in the back of the 596 Club. This was a simple assault charge. The fee was only $2,500, but Ryan’s payments still came in dribs and drabs—maybe $100 one month, $150 three months later. Finally, the lawyers told him to consider it paid. It would have taken a full-time bookkeeper just to keep track of what he owed.
It was also through their association with Featherstone that Hochheiser and Aronson first met Raymond Steen. In the mid-1970s they represented Steen on a mugging and robbery charge. After that, Steen was added to their regular client list.
Because they handled Steen, Aronson and Hochheiser were now able, in April of ’79, to determine just how formidable Mickey’s current legal predicament was going to be.
Following the police raids and Steen’s arrest on February 9th, Aronson had called Rikers Island in an attempt to locate Raymond, assuming he would be needing legal representation. But word came back that Ray Steen was refusing to be represented by Hochheiser and Aronson. The way Aronson saw it, that could mean only one thing: Raymond Steen was cooperating with the authorities. The attorney passed his feelings along to Featherstone, who agreed that Ray must have flipped.
Within weeks, their worst fears were realized. On March 9th, exactly one month after the raids in Hell’s Kitchen, Featherstone was surrounded by detectives at 55th Street and 10th Avenue. It was the middle of the day, and he was walking from his apartment to a check-cashing store on the corner.
“Okay, Mickey,” said Sergeant Tom McCabe, who was taking part in the arrest along
with detectives from the 4th Homicide Zone. “Let’s make this simple as possible.”
“What’s it for?” Featherstone calmly asked.
“Whitehead,” he was told.
“Nope,” said Mickey, “you’ll never make it stick.” Then he put out his hands for the cuffs.
Five weeks later, Jimmy Coonan was arrested in New Jersey for the same killing. While in custody at the Tombs, both he and Mickey were booked on federal counterfeit charges.
Days later, in a totally unexpected development, Featherstone was taken from custody by Sergeant Joe Coffey of the Homicide Task Force, driven to central booking in Queens and charged with the 1977 murder of Mickey Spillane—a murder he swore he didn’t commit.
At Featherstone’s arraignment on the counterfeit indictment in late April, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ira Block laid it all out for Ken Aronson. Block’s indictment alone contained a whopping thirty-one counts. Then there were the two homicides, Whitehead in Manhattan and Spillane in Queens. In addition, there was a parole violation, plus other charges. Assuming conviction, Block told the lawyers Mickey was facing a minimum of fifty years, but it would probably be more like two hundred. Under normal circumstances, Aronson might have dismissed the prosecutor’s claims as hyperbole. But as he surveyed the damage, he had to admit Block’s projections were not unrealistic.
Block told the attorney he thought there was a way out.
“Yes?” asked Aronson.
“Get your client to become a cooperative witness.”
Aronson had been expecting Block to make the offer, though he wasn’t looking forward to it. The idea of approaching a client with an offer like this was not something that pleased him. For one thing, if he was the messenger it might look to the client like he was the one pushing the idea. By the same token, if the offer was made and he neglected to convey it to the client, and that client later got convicted, he might be understandably upset at not having been given the option.
“Look,” Aronson told Block, “here’s what we can do. I’ll bring my client to your office and tell him not to say anything. You tell him whatever you want to tell him.”
The day after the arraignment, Featherstone was brought to Ira Block’s office at 1 St. Andrews Plaza in lower Manhattan. Block made his pitch. After he was done, Mickey asked to talk to his attorney privately.
“Kenny,” he said firmly to Aronson after the Assistant U.S. Attorney had left the office. “I’ll do anything you and Larry ever want me to do. But never ask me to be a stool pigeon. No. Never. Fuck them.”
With that out of the way, the various legal parties were free to negotiate a plea. Featherstone’s main concern was the charges against his wife. The feds had Sissy’s voice on the wiretaps sounding a lot like an accomplice in the counterfeit operation. Also, in their search of the apartment they’d confiscated a large cache of counterfeit copper slugs. Apparently, Sissy and Alberta Sachs had been using the slugs in the washing machines in their apartment building and in place of tokens on the New Jersey Turnpike. In other circumstances it might have seemed laughable; but here it gave prosecutors the chance to add one more violation to the indictment.
The U.S. Attorney’s office was willing to drop Sissy from the counterfeit indictment and allow her to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge for possession of the copper slugs. But only if Mickey pleaded guilty to counterfeit possession, which carried a possible ten-year sentence. As for Coonan, they were willing to drop the counterfeit charge—not much of a concession, since they really didn’t have anything linking him to the crime. But they did have Coonan on a gun possession charge—the gun that had been found in the trunk of his car following the night at Spartacus, the brothel on East 55th Street. For that, they wanted Jimmy to plead guilty to a five-year max.
With the Whitehead trial still pending and the counterfeit case virtually unwinnable, Featherstone and Coonan reluctantly agreed to accept the government’s offer. Mickey copped a plea on the counterfeit charges, and Jimmy took the rap on the gun possession.
Hochheiser and Aronson were relieved to have the voluminous counterfeit indictment out of the way. But they were wary. They knew that for the government to allow those charges to go untried after such a lengthy and expensive undercover investigation, they must have felt they had a sure thing with the Whitehead case. Avoid a long and expensive federal trial, then nail ’em in state court on a murder rap. That, apparently, was the strategy.
Once again, normally Aronson and Hochheiser might have dismissed this strategy as bravado on the part of the prosecution. But as they began to focus their attentions on the Whitehead case, they got that sinking feeling they sometimes had when the evidence in a case came at them from all sides.
For one thing, there was the murder weapon. During the raid on Mickey Featherstone’s apartment, the feds had found a .25-caliber Beretta sitting on a shelf in the bedroom closet. They photographed its location, dropped it in a cellophane bag, and added it to the long list of items seized. Later, during their debriefings with Raymond Steen, Steen was asked about the Whitey Whitehead murder. Steen said he’d never heard of Whitehead, but he did know something about a killing Mickey and Jimmy had done uptown at the Plaka Bar. The gun in that murder, Steen said, was the gun that was found in Mickey’s apartment.
Ballistics ran a check, using the empty shell casing and bullet that were found on the bathroom floor where Whitehead was killed. Bingo! The casing and bullet matched the Beretta found in Featherstone’s apartment.
The fact that the cops were able to ID the murder weapon had surprised the hell out of Coonan and Featherstone. They thought Jimmy McElroy got rid of the casing and the bullet on the night of the murder. In addition, Featherstone later gave the gun to Donald Mallay, their so-called expert gunsmith, and told him to make the gun untraceable. Mallay had altered the threading inside the barrel of the gun and told Mickey it could never be traced.
So much for criminal professionalism. McElroy fucked up, and Mickey and Jimmy should have gotten rid of the gun anyway, since ballistics experts matched the casing with the shooting mechanism, not the barrel.
As if finding the murder weapon weren’t enough, it looked like there were going to be multiple eyewitness accounts of the Whitehead murder. Huggard, Crowell, and Comas had been identified as Whitehead’s companions that night and would probably be subpoenaed. There was no telling what they would say once they were questioned.
Featherstone and Coonan, still protesting their innocence, told their attorneys that of the three people who might “claim” to have witnessed the murder, there was only one they could be sure would “do the right thing”—Bobby Huggard. Huggard, in fact, had originally been arrested as Harold Whitehead’s killer. The greeting card from his girlfriend found next to the body had Huggard’s fingerprints on it. But Huggard was a stand-up guy, willing to take the rap himself if he had to. Even while in custody, he kept his mouth shut. When Featherstone and Coonan were finally arrested and charged, Huggard was released—with a grand jury subpoena in his hand.
As for John Crowell, he was crazy and high-strung. There was no telling which way he was going to go. He’d been a friend of Whitehead’s at one time and could be looking to exact revenge on Coonan and Featherstone. But Crowell was also a lifer who’d done enough time behind bars to have absorbed the jailhouse ethic. He would know that if you rat on somebody in a courtroom, quite possibly you or someone in your family winds up getting the worst of it.
Then there was fifty-five-year-old Billy Comas. Under normal circumstances, Coonan and Featherstone would have been able to vouch for Comas. He was tight with a lot of the West Side crowd, and especially close to Mickey and Sissy. But already they had been hearing disturbing rumors about Comas’s cooperating with the cops on the counterfeit investigation. That didn’t necessarily mean he would be taking the stand against them, but it sure as hell wasn’t an encouraging sign.
It was still early. But as they got deeper into preparations for the Whitehead trial, Hochheiser
and Aronson realized that Comas was potentially the most troublesome witness against them. John Crowell alone was not credible. The prosecution would need corroboration. If Coonan and Featherstone were right and Huggard could be expected to toe the line, then Comas was the man in the hot seat. He was the one who could do the most damage.
On March 22, 1979, two weeks after Featherstone’s arrest, Officer Richie Egan and his partner, Detective Abe Ocasio, were driving north on 8th Avenue, heading towards Hell’s Kitchen.
“You really think we’re gonna find anything?” Egan asked his partner.
“Do you?”
“I don’t know. You’d of asked me a month ago I woulda said no way. But now …” Egan’s voice trailed off, the implication being that these days, with the stories they were hearing from Ray Steen and Alberta Sachs, anything was possible.
It was one of these stories that had launched Egan and Ocasio on their current undertaking, the search of a basement at 442 West 50th Street. The building was a fivestory tenement where Sachs used to live with her mother, Catherine Crotty, Edna Coonan’s sister and Jimmy’s sister-in-law. During a recent debriefing session, Alberta had told the cops about a night in November of ’75 when her uncle Jimmy Coonan and Eddie Cummiskey came by the apartment to borrow some kitchen knives. About two hours later, she said, they returned carrying a plastic garbage bag with Paddy Dugan’s head in it, and they told her they were going down to the basement to get rid of it. As far as Alberta knew, it was still down there somewhere.
American Gangsters Page 48