American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  After Whitehead and Comas, Crowell was now the third casualty from that lone night of brutality in the basement of the Opera Hotel.

  * * *

  To the cops and the prosecutors, the Whitehead verdict and related suicides were a shocking defeat. The whole West Side investigation had reached a crescendo during the trial, with frequent revelations about the dreaded Westies in the Post, the News, and the Times. The Whitehead verdict was supposed to be the grand finale, with the criminal justice system once and for all smashing the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob. Instead, the trial had been a disaster, with a key witness killing himself beforehand, the murder weapon getting thrown out, and people flagrantly perjuring themselves on the stand.

  It was a fucking travesty, as far as Egan, Coffey, and the other cops close to the investigation were concerned. It was an example of everything that was wrong with “the system.”

  But that was only the beginning. Six months after the Whitehead verdict, in June of 1980, Mickey Featherstone was acquitted of the Mickey Spillane murder. Unlike the Whitehead case, which initially appeared to be solid, the Spillane case was thin from the start. All the government had to offer as witnesses were Ray Steen and Alberta Sachs, both of whom claimed that Mickey told them he was the one who did the shooting. Once again, Hochheiser built his defense around the government’s use of “disreputable witnesses.” It took the jury less than three hours to deliver its verdict.

  Then came a trial that, to the cops, was the most maddening of all. Also in the summer of 1980, Hochheiser and Aronson represented Jimmy McElroy, who, after months on the lam in Arizona, had been caught and sent back to stand trial for the murder of William “Billy” Walker. The trial was of special interest to Joe Coffey’s Homicide Task Force, since this was the murder that had gotten Coffey involved in the West Side investigation in the first place.

  It looked like an open-and-shut case. In the Sunbrite Bar on 10th Avenue McElroy had gotten into an argument with Billy Walker, who he knew from their work together in the stagehands’ union. Then, along with Jack Paulstein, McElroy took Walker for a ride in his van to the West 79th Street boat basin, where he stuck a .32 in Walker’s mouth and pulled the trigger.

  As their main witness, the government produced Paulstein, who gave a devastating firsthand account of the shooting. Larry Hochheiser went home that night thinking he had lost the case. Then he came back the next day and did a truly creative number on Paulstein, attacking him for being too certain of the facts to be telling the truth. The jury took nine hours to deliberate. When they came back they not only exonerated McElroy, but one of the jurors was quoted as saying he thought Paulstein was the murderer; he wanted to meet McElroy and shake his hand.

  With three razzle-dazzle courtroom victories in a row, Hochheiser and Aronson became folk heroes in criminal circles on the West Side of Manhattan—and the scourge of the NYPD.

  As crushing as the defeats may have been for the cops and prosecutors involved, there was one major consolation. In early 1980, Coonan and Featherstone had been sentenced on the respective gun possession and counterfeit charges they’d pled guilty to before the Whitehead trial ever began. On January 15, 1980, before Judge Lawrence Pierce in U.S. District Court, Jimmy Coonan was given nearly the maximum sentence on his charge, four years and six months. One month later, on February 14, Featherstone was also brought before Judge Pierce. Pierce listened as Larry Hochheiser pleaded for leniency due to Mickey’s “troubled psychiatric history.” The judge was not swayed.

  “Mr. Featherstone,” said Pierce, after giving Mickey a six-year sentence. “The war in Vietnam is over.”

  For the first time, Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan would be serving simultaneous prison terms. It wasn’t as definitive as the various cops, agents and prosecutors had hoped for. They wanted to put Coonan and Featherstone away for life. But with the two most renowned West Side gangsters going off to prison, they felt reasonably certain that the Westies, so recently lionized in the press, were now a thing of the past.

  They could not have been more mistaken.

  PART III

  13

  BAD BLOOD

  By January 1981, Coonan and Featherstone may have been safely tucked away in federal prisons—Coonan in Pennsylvania and Featherstone in Missouri and then Wisconsin—but the publicity surrounding the Whitehead trial helped elevate Jimmy and Mickey’s reputations to unprecedented heights. The Hell’s Kitchen Mob had always been known within the city’s criminal underworld. But now, with blaring headlines about dismemberment murders, suicidal witnesses, and stunning courtroom victories, the Westies were known and feared in virtually every saloon and union hall west of 5th Avenue.

  Coonan’s and Featherstone’s incarceration also marked the departure of full-time police surveillance on the West Side. Even though it had not been as conclusive as the cops had hoped, the investigation, which lasted over two years, was considered a success. Richie Egan, who along with Sergeant Tom McCabe had spearheaded WEST SIDE STORY from its inception, was relocated to Brooklyn, where he immediately went to work on a case involving Colombian drug traffickers. Sergeant Joe Coffey and his Homicide Task Force also moved on, turning their attention back to the Italians. Soon they would become enmeshed in a massive racketeering investigation involving, among others, Paul Castellano and the Gambino family.

  The cops may have moved on, but the rackets remained the same. There was still loansharking, gambling, narcotics, tribute from the piers, extortion of the ILA and the Teamsters.

  And even from prison, Jimmy Coonan still controlled the purse strings. Given that his four-and-a-half-year sentence was likely to be shortened with parole, it would have been fatally shortsighted for anyone to try and move in on Coonan’s territory simply because he was gone from the neighborhood for awhile. Consequently, the proper respect was accorded Jimmy’s wife, Edna, who now made the rounds in Hell’s Kitchen collecting Jimmy’s weekly payments. Just in case, she sometimes took along Richie Ryan or Jimmy McElroy for protection.

  In Coonan’s absence, one of the Westies’ most lucrative rackets continued to stem from their relationship with Vincent “Vinnie” Leone, business manager of ILA Local 1909 and a long-time shill for the Gambino family. Leone had gone into business with the Irish Mob following Coonan and Featherstone’s meeting with Paul Castellano at Tommaso’s Restaurant. A loud and gregarious old-time union official, the silver-haired Leone helped lead the Westies into new areas of extortion.

  First, there was the outdoor concert season on Pier 82, sponsored every summer by the Miller Brewing Company. Leone saw to it that every stagehand and carpenter who worked the concerts kicked back a portion of his or her wages to the Local, part of which was passed on to Edna Coonan when she made her weekly rounds. She also picked up a portion of the proceeds from the concerts, which were almost always sellouts involving top name acts such as Elton John, Miles Davis, and Diana Ross.

  Then there was the USS Intrepid, docked directly across from the Local 1909 offices at West 48th Street. A massive aircraft carrier that had seen distinguished service in World War II and in Vietnam, the ship was opened as a museum in early 1982. Through Temco Service Industries, the ILA controlled some thirty jobs on board, including ticket takers, engineers, and general maintenance personnel.

  Almost from the day it opened, the Intrepid Air-Sea-Space Museum became the Westies’ private bounty. Sissy Featherstone and some of the other gang members’ wives worked there as ticket takers. In time, Sissy and the girls devised a little money-making scam of their own. They would save previously sold tickets, resell them, and keep the profits for themselves, sometimes taking home an extra two or three hundred a day. After another Westie, Kenny Shannon, became the timekeeper at the Intrepid, Sissy stopped coming to work altogether—except, of course, to pick up her weekly paycheck.

  The Intrepid also became a great way to dole out favors and settle old scores. In August of 1982 Bobby Huggard was put to work on the Intrepid. Huggard had been an okay g
uy with the Westies ever since he perjured himself at the Whitey Whitehead murder trial and almost singlehandedly secured an acquittal for Coonan and Featherstone. After the trial, in a holding pen at Rikers Island, Jimmy Coonan thanked Huggard and told him if ever he needed a job he would have no problem getting one on the West Side of Manhattan.

  Once on the Intrepid payroll, Huggard was told to do absolutely nothing, for which he was paid a handsome $227 a week. A couple of times he even showed up for work. But he quickly became bored and only showed up on Fridays to get his paycheck—one of a growing list of Westie-related “no-shows.”

  Of all the extortions that flourished in Jimmy’s and Mickey’s absence, perhaps the most lucrative came from Teamsters Local 817, the theatrical truckers union that delivered props and cameras to and from movie locations. In the early 1980s, with the dramatic increase in movies and commercials being filmed in New York, the Teamsters signed a new contract with the entertainment industry. As a result, drivers for 817 became among the highest paid of any Teamster local in the city. The captain or field boss on an individual job earned somewhere around $2,000 for a five-day week; a driver just under $1,800; a helper just over $1,700.

  Local 817 had always been good for something. Back in the mid and late 1970s, when the Local’s main offices were located on 9th Avenue between 41st and 42nd streets, Coonan frequently suggested to his people that they sign on with the Teamsters. That way they would have documented employment, which would keep their parole officers happy and give them a better shot at getting bail if they were ever arrested. Not many took him up on it at the time, but through Coonan the West Side Mob had always kept one foot in the door. When Local 817’s wage rates increased in the early ’80s, the Westies sought to make the Local their own.

  For a legitimate worker, full-time membership in the union took years to secure. First you had to be sponsored by a union member. After that, you could begin shapingup for work at one of the many prop and trucking outlets on the West Side affiliated with Local 817. Eventually, if you stuck with it long enough, you might be eligible for one of the Local’s seven hundred or so union cards or “books,” which guaranteed you work without having to shape.

  In 1982, while Coonan was away in prison, Thomas “Tommy” O’Donnell, long-time president of Local 817, proclaimed that he was going to purge the union’s membership of its traditional gangster element. To do this, O’Donnell turned to what he believed to be a rival gangster element, the Italians, and took out a contract on Jimmy Coonan—or at least that’s what the Westies were told by the Italians.

  In response, Jimmy McElroy and Kevin Kelly, a relative of Jimmy Mac’s through marriage and an up-and-coming Westie in his own right, made a trip out to Local 817’s new offices in Nassau County, Long Island. They pistol-whipped O’Donnell in his office and slapped around Edward Fanning, the Local’s vice-president, out in the parking lot. The two men were told that from now on, whenever Jimmy Coonan or one of his people needed a union book, it was to be given to them immediately. O’Donnell said that there were only so many union books; the best he could offer was that Coonan’s people would be given preferential treatment when they shaped-up for a job.

  “Oh yeah?” McElroy replied. “Well then, we’re gonna kill one union member a week till there’s enough openings for our people.”

  The West Side boys had no trouble getting union books after that. McElroy, Kelly, Richie Ryan, Coonan’s younger brother Eddie, and others became card-carrying union members with erratic work records. As Jimmy Mac later joked, “You gotta be a sleeper, a drinker, or a card player to be a member [of Local 817].”

  Throughout the early ’80s, the Westies’ fortunes grew in other areas as well. Narcotics, which Jimmy Coonan had always frowned on, became a profitable racket in his absence. Fifty-year-old Tommy Collins, his wife Florence, and their son Michael became neighborhood coke dealers, selling grams out of their apartment in the Clinton Towers building on 11th Avenue and 54th Street. Mugsy Ritter, forty years old, black-haired, and mustachioed, and a young neighborhood kid, Billy Bokun, whose distinguishing characteristic was a garish red birthmark that covered the right side of his face, also went into the cocaine-selling business.

  Sports betting also became a more organized and lucrative racket in the early ’80s. James “Jimmy” Judge, superintendent of a building on West 55th Street just off 9th Avenue, ran a thriving gambling business in his basement office. It was bankrolled by, among others, Vinnie Leone, Jimmy McElroy, Kevin Kelly, and Kenny Shannon—the timekeeper at the Intrepid.

  As the rackets flourished, the specter of violence continued to hover over Hell’s Kitchen, though the backdrop had changed. In November of ’81, Edward I. Koch was reelected to a second term as mayor. In the previous four years, he’d presided over a hectic period of development throughout the city. His reelection assured more of the same. Gentrification, a by-product of the Koch years, became a common word in the city’s lexicon as wealthy real estate barons, in the absence of strict zoning laws, ran roughshod over long-standing communities.

  As a low-income neighborhood in close proximity to the theater district and midtown Manhattan, Hell’s Kitchen was ripe for development. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, huge office towers servicing some of the most powerful law and advertising firms in the world went up along 8th Avenue. Condominiums and co-op apartment buildings were being constructed to house the financial analysts, lawyers, and investment bankers who now worked in the area. Inevitably, long-time residents were displaced.

  But the violence that had characterized the area for generations continued, as if the neighborhood were going through its last death throes before being reincarnated as “Clinton,” the name for Hell’s Kitchen now favored by real estate interests. Between 1981 and 1983 there were at least seven unsolved homicides believed to be Westierelated.

  One involved Henny Diaz, a low-level neighborhood gambler. In January of ’81, Diaz was last seen heading to a party at Manhattan Plaza, a recently built forty-six-story apartment complex on 43rd and 10th Avenue. The next time Diaz was spotted, he was flying through the air after having been tossed out the window of Manhattan Plaza in the middle of the afternoon. He landed on a car parked on 10th Avenue.

  The autopsy showed that Diaz had been dead for days, possibly even a week, from multiple stab wounds. The rumor around the neighborhood was that Diaz had been murdered during a gambling dispute. His dead body lay in the bathtub of an apartment at Manhattan Plaza at least three days before the killer decided to toss it out the window.

  Police questioned nearly every tenant in the building, but nobody knew nothin’. It would go down in the books as one more unsolved homicide in Hèll’s Kitchen, the neighborhood where dead bodies literally fell out of the sky.

  An even more outrageous killing, one that sent shockwaves through the neighborhood more than any murder since Paddy Dugan blew away his best friend Denis Curley in August of ’75, was the murder of Tommy Hess in the 596 Club. Hess, who’d been a bartender in the saloon since the early 1970s, supposedly had slapped a girlfriend of twenty-eight-year-old Richie Ryan’s one night in another neighborhood bar. Ryan and Hess were once good pals. They’d both been in the 596 Club the day Ruby Stein got whacked. Hess had stood guard outside while Jimmy C showed Richie how to dice up a human body. But in recent years Richie Ryan had become uncontrollable. He was shooting dope into his veins and drinking a fifth of whiskey a day. Once known for his pleasant good looks, he was now bloated, burned out, and more violent than ever.

  In retaliation for Tommy Hess’s having smacked his woman, Ryan came into the 596 Club on the night of February 26, 1982, and pistol-whipped his former friend. Then, in front of numerous unnamed witnesses, he pulled Hess’s pants down around his ankles, stuck a revolver up his rectum and squeezed the trigger.

  Everyone fled from the bar. By the time the cops arrived, Hess was dead and there wasn’t a witness in sight.

  It was an act worthy of the bar’s previous owner, Jim
my Coonan, who’d divested himself of the 596 Club in 1979. Not long after the murder of Tommy Hess the bar closed, then reopened under the name T-Bags as a respectable “fern bar” geared towards the neighborhood’s newer residents. Long gone were the memory of Denis Curley, Ruby Stein, Tommy Hess, and dozens of others whose blood had been shed at the same location over the generations.

  At the same time that Hell’s Kitchen was undergoing its latest transformation, Mickey Featherstone had been shipped out to Springfield, Missouri, and then a federal penitentiary in Oxford, Wisconsin. He was doing his time quietly for a change. It was his first stint ever in the federal system, and he was surprised by the amount of time devoted to actual therapy and rehabilitation. Among other things, he wasn’t immediately pumped with psychotropic drugs designed to neutralize his behavior, as he had been in his earlier stays in hospitals and prisons throughout New York State.

  His daily routine included regular afternoons of group therapy. It had taken him awhile to get used to the idea of acknowledging his problems even to himself, much less to a group of inmates. But after a few months, he began to look forward to these sessions. He had never really talked freely about his life with people like himself, people from the street. He was amazed to find other inmates who felt the same way about things as he did. In one session, he even wept openly—something he’d never done in front of anyone, other than Sissy, in a long, long time.

  Far from the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, Featherstone began to feel an optimism and peacefulness that seemed overwhelming at times, as if it were part of some purification process he did not, or could not, fully understand. On one occasion, he tried to explain these emotions when he wrote to his friends and lawyers, Larry Hochheiser and Ken Aronson.