American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  Egan listened to Featherstone’s stories with utter fascination. Over the years, the West Side investigation had always suffered from a certain lack of cohesion. There had been so many seemingly related homicides that the Syndicated Crime Unit had barely been able to keep track of them all. Now, Mickey was connecting files and files of Intelligence data from more than a decade’s worth of surveillances and investigations.

  To Egan, some of Mickey’s most intriguing revelations involved jobs that went unfinished. Like the plot to murder Fat Tony himself. Apparently, around the time Coonan and Featherstone heard that Salerno was positioning himself to take control of the Convention Center, they decided to take matters into their own hands. On three separate occasions, said Featherstone, he and Coonan, along with Jimmy McElroy and Richie Ryan, armed themselves with an arsenal of weaponry and drove to Salerno’s favorite social club at 116th Street and Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem. The idea was to blow him away in broad daylight. Luckily for Salerno, they never spotted him.

  Another scheme that never materialized was Jimmy Coonan’s grand plan to link-up the Hell’s Kitchen Mob with an Irish gang in Boston run by Jimmy’s friend from Sing Sing, Pete Wilson (one of the original Irishmen spotted at the Stage Deli by Sergeant Tom McCabe in ’77). Once, after numerous meetings with Wilson in New York, Featherstone, Coonan, and his brother Jackie flew to Boston to carry out a heist with Wilson and his boys. Together they robbed a pharmaceutical warehouse one night, then returned to Manhattan with the intention of pursuing their Boston connection at a later date. But events in the neighborhood kept getting in the way, and the alliance—which would have been the first known partnership between Irish gangsters in the two cities—never went any further.

  Throughout the latter months of 1986, Featherstone was pumped relentlessly for information. Along with Egan, there were federal prosecutors, city D.A.s, FBI agents, and, at one time or another, cops from just about every department in the NYPD. Most had little interest in Featherstone other than as a source of information. In recent years, the Westies had become one of the city’s more notorious organized crime cases. Featherstone’s cooperation insured that from here on out, anyone connected with the case could expect lots of free publicity. To those investigators with their sights on career advancement, the Westies case, or, more pointedly, Mickey Featherstone, was their ticket to the promised land.

  And what a ticket he proved to be. Before Featherstone was done, he had given the government information on, among other things, thirty unsolved homicides in Manhattan going back some sixteen years. Of the thirty murders, six had been committed by Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey, four by Jimmy Coonan, five by Richie Ryan, three by Kevin Kelly, and three by Jimmy McElroy. On top of all that, Mickey detailed his own involvement in hundreds of beatings, stabbings, and shootings both before and during his time as Jimmy Coonan’s right-hand man.

  To Featherstone, the debriefing process was long and rough. It wasn’t his show. At times, he resented having his brain picked four, five, sometimes six hours a day. He would demand food and refreshments at odd intervals—anything to break the monotony and make him feel like he was in control. But eventually Mickey settled in and began to see the value in what he was doing. Not so much for the government, but for himself. It was his chance to set the record straight.

  A few of the investigators, like Egan, Marilyn Lucht, and Art Ruffles of the FBI, were aware of the toll it was taking on Featherstone. Mickey had stayed high or drunk for most of the violence over the years. Now, they were asking him to rehash, over and over again, gruesomely detailed descriptions of brutal killings and dismemberments totally sober. Egan, for one, realized if they pushed Featherstone too hard he might crack before they ever had a chance to get him into court.

  Sometimes, usually at the end of a marathon interview session, Egan would attempt to humanize these encounters, to take Featherstone beyond the names, dates, and facts. Once, he asked Mickey how it had gotten so violent; how, as human beings, they had been able to watch arms, legs, and heads being severed without realizing they had gone too far.

  “It was no big deal,” Mickey said with a forced bravado. “It’s like a coroner, right? After you’ve seen it a few times you can deal with it.”

  “Yeah,” said Egan. “But these were people you knew. Some of them people you’d known your whole life. Neighborhood people.”

  Mickey thought about this; his voice got quiet and uncertain. He admitted that after a while it got vicious, even evil. “But youse gotta realize,” he pleaded. “That wasn’t me. I never could stomach that—the cutting up. It was Coonan. Always Coonan.”

  At one point, Mickey’s shame had caused him to almost violate his agreement with the government. He had been warned—in writing—that if he ever withheld information about a crime he was involved in and it later came to light, the agreement would be terminated. Even so, in his description of the Rickey Tassiello murder, Mickey never mentioned stabbing Tassiello. Even though Coonan had told him to do it, Mickey always felt disgraced by that act. Throughout his life, he’d derived a scrap of twisted pride from the fact that he never inflicted violence on anyone who didn’t have a chance to defend himself. But sticking a knife in a dead man, that was something different.

  Eventually, Mickey was called before a grand jury to tell what he knew about the Tassiello murder. He sat in a holding pen before being led into the jury room and thought about what he was going to do. He reminded himself that he’d made a commitment to give the entire truth. After a life of crime, it was not a philosophy he embraced easily. But he knew that Tony Lucich was testifying. Lucich knew Mickey had stuck a knife into Tassiello’s chest. Mickey would have to come clean.

  Before the grand jury, nervous and soaked with perspiration, Featherstone admitted what he had done. He admitted taking a knife and plunging it into the heart of a dead man.

  With Mickey and Sissy Featherstone providing more and more pieces of the puzzle, the government got ready to throw out the net. Now that Mickey was on the side of the law, the Westies were like a wounded animal. And this time, the investigators were determined not to let the gang slip through their grasp. They resolved to eradicate what was left of the West Side Irish Mob, once and for all.

  Along with Steve Mshar and other detectives from the Task Force South, Richie Egan took to the streets. Driving around Hell’s Kitchen again after all these years was a strange experience for Egan. It made him feel old. The neighborhood was hardly recognizable now. Long gone were the White House Bar, Sonny’s Cafe, the Sunbrite, the 596 Club, and the other saloons that Coonan, Featherstone, and their predecessors had frequented. Many of the old tenement buildings had been leveled and replaced by condos and co-op apartment buildings. The grizzled old Irish and Italian faces of a bygone era were few and far between. It was not uncommon to see people in suits and with briefcases hustling to and from Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood now known almost exclusively as Clinton.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure it out, thought Egan. After the thousands of hours’ worth of surveillance they’d done, and all the trials and investigations, gentrification had probably done more to force the Westies out of Hell’s Kitchen than anything law enforcement was able to do.

  Once they began their surveillance, the cops were surprised to discover that Jimmy Coonan had all but disappeared. Before it was known Mickey had flipped, they’d heard he was sometimes seen driving around the neighborhood in a black Mercedes 4-door with a cellular phone. Edna, the one-time orphan from 9th Avenue, also had a new Mercedes; hers was blue. She too was often seen cruising along the avenues of the West Side like some upwardly mobile expatriate who just couldn’t resist flaunting her wealth back in the old neighborhood.

  When Mickey flipped (WESTIES CON SINGS IRISH LULLABY, trumpeted the Post), the Coonans were seen less and less frequently. Jimmy had done what all successful gangsters were supposed to do. He’d gone into a “legitimate” business. Along with his old pals Billy Murtha and Buddy Leah
y—the guys who’d hired him and Mickey to whack James Maher of the Metal Lathers union in July of ’78—Jimmy had begun investing heavily in Marine Construction, a sizable contracting firm based just north of the city in Tarrytown. It was a profitable business, but its real purpose was to give Coonan a patina of respectability when the shit finally hit the fan. It also served as an ideal way for him to launder his criminal proceeds.

  In Coonan’s absence, the remains of the West Side’s ground-level rackets were up for grabs. For years, Kevin Kelly—Jimmy Coonan’s protégé—had been positioning himself for just such a moment. Now, even though Featherstone’s cooperation was headline news, even though there were ongoing state and federal grand juries and subpoenas were being delivered up and down the West Side of Manhattan, Kelly stepped forward to seize what he felt was rightfully his.

  Egan had heard about Kelly and Shannon during his interviews with Featherstone. Emboldened by Coonan’s inattentiveness, they’d even taken their criminal ambitions beyond the neighborhood by pushing cocaine in some of the swankier bars on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, near where sidekick Kenny Shannon had been born and raised.

  One time, said Mickey, Kelly told him they’d heard someone was dealing coke out of one of “their” bars, the Comic Strip Bar and Grill on East 81st and 2nd Avenue. Kelly and Shannon drove to the bar, found the guy, and took him outside at knife point. They handcuffed the dealer, who was a mere novice, put him in the back seat of the car, and issued the usual warnings and threatening suggestions. Then Kelly and Shannon unzipped their pants and masturbated all over the guy.

  Even Featherstone, who’d taken part in hundreds of stabbings, shootings, and dismemberments over the years, had to admit this was a new and twisted variation on the accepted rules of intimidation.

  Throughout the summer and into the fall of ’86, Egan, Mshar, and others gathered hours of incriminating evidence against Kelly, Shannon, and Larry Palermo from a recording device placed in the dashboard of a blue ’85 Oldsmobile Cutlass driven by Shannon. One time they even overheard Kelly slapping around one of his loanshark customers on 9th Avenue.

  “I don’t fuckin’ buy this, man,” proclaimed Kelly, who had stepped outside of the car to confront his victim. “I’m the one you’re supposed to pay. I’m the man on the street. You hear me? He ain’t the man. I’m the man.”

  At the end of a long day, while Egan filled out his surveillance log, just as he had years ago when WEST SIDE STORY first began, he would think about Kelly, Shannon, and others who seemed to be following in Coonan’s footsteps. It reminded him of an adage he’d heard many years ago, probably from his Irish-born father:

  Old habits die hard.

  By the winter of ’86, a new kind of paranoia became the rule of the day in West Side criminal circles. With all the subpoenas that had been handed out, the remaining gang members had gotten a pretty good idea of exactly who and what was being investigated. The implications were truly frightening. There were ongoing grand jury hearings on the Paddy Dugan, Ruby Stein, Rickey Tassiello, and Vinnie Leone murders, just to name a few. Search warrants were being executed all over the neighborhood and the feds were accumulating evidence on gambling, narcotics, and gun possession charges. Federal agents had been to the offices of theatrical Teamsters Local 817 and ILA Local 1909 and seized files.

  On top of all this, there were rumors floating around about who would be testifying along with Mickey and Sissy Featherstone. Tony Lucich, the old-time loanshark who initiated Jimmy Coonan into the business back in the early seventies and was best man at his wedding, had also flipped. From his hideout in New Jersey, Coonan immediately put out a contract on Lucich, but Tony hadn’t been seen around the neighborhood in weeks.

  The cooperation of the Featherstones and then Lucich had created a justifiable concern that others would follow suit, and that as the domino effect fell into place, friend would turn against friend, brother against brother.

  One person who was a likely candidate for the role of informant was Billy Beattie. Ever since he’d returned to the neighborhood to help Mickey plot the murder of Jimmy Coonan, he had lived in constant fear. Not only was Coonan still after him for debts incurred before he ran away to the mountains, but since his return he’d become more and more dependent on Mickey—half hoping that once they got rid of Coonan, Mickey would take over and he’d be sitting pretty.

  But then Beattie had been in his kitchen watching TV one night, and a report came on the news about Featherstone’s cooperation. Billy felt like his whole world had just been pulled out from under him. Not only did Mickey know about his involvement in the Paddy Dugan and Ruby Stein homicides, but recently Beattie had been involved in another murder with a guy he knew out in Queens—a cop killing! Although he was reasonably certain Mickey didn’t know anything about this one, Beattie had a bad feeling that one thing might lead to another.

  With a wife and six kids, it wasn’t like Billy could just run off to the mountains again. All through the summer of ’86, after he first heard about Mickey’s cooperation, Beattie lived in abject terror, fully expecting the cops to come knocking at his door, not knowing what he would do when they did.

  In October of ’86, Beattie’s worst fear finally came to pass. There was a knock on his door one day. He answered. It was Detective Steve Mshar of the Manhattan Task Force South—with an arrest warrant.

  One month later, on the afternoon of November 14th, Beattie was seated in Smoke Stacks Lightning, a chic bar and restaurant at West Broadway and Canal Street in lower Manhattan. He was there with a guy named “Ron,” who supposedly was looking to make a drug deal with Beattie’s lifelong neighborhood friend, Jimmy McElroy.

  When McElroy walked in the door, he was carrying with him a package of barbiturates, wrapped in a brown paper bag. Beattie, McElroy, and Ron had been trying to consummate the deal for a week, but McElroy, as was often the case in recent months, kept getting stoned and missing the appointed meetings.

  This time there was going to be another problem, which Jimmy Mac knew about before he even sat down. Beattie’s buyer had ordered a bag of 5,000 pink-colored “uppers.” But in his haste to make their meeting, McElroy had accidentally grabbed the wrong pills from his apartment in Jersey.

  “How’s it going?” McElroy asked nonchalantly after walking over to the table where Beattie and Ron were sitting.

  “Hey,” said Beattie. “I was just sayin’ I know this traffic’s got his fuckin’ ass.”

  McElroy sat down and got right to the point. “Uh, you know what happened? The fuckin’ kid, the asshole, he sent the green ones over instead.”

  “Oh, shit,” mumbled Beattie.

  “I can go get ’em, though,” said Jimmy. “I got the green ones with me, you know. They’re better, I think. But I can get the pink ones. It’ll take me about an hour.”

  It was 4:30 P.M., rush hour, and outside the restaurant the traffic was bumper to bumper on Canal Street.

  “Jimmy,” asked Beattie, “do you know what time it is? You’re never gonna get through the tunnel in an hour. It’ll take you over an hour just to get to Jersey!”

  McElroy complained, “Last night I told him, ‘Bring the pink ones,’ He gave me the green ones, the fucking jerk.”

  “This is the second time, Jimmy. I had Ron here with me eight hours last time and you never showed.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “You showed me the pink. I gave him the pink ones last time.”

  “I know, man.”

  McElroy insisted he could have his girlfriend, who was staying at a place on 72nd Street in Manhattan, rush over to the apartment in Jersey and be back with the pink pills in an hour. Ron was dubious, but he said he would come back to the restaurant in an hour. If McElroy had the pills they could make the deal.

  After Ron left and McElroy made the call to his girlfriend, Billy Beattie settled down. There was nothing to do now but wait.

  “Hey, Jim,” he said, looking around the restaurant. “Maybe we sh
ould sit at the bar ’cause there’s people eatin’ here. You know?”

  As they moved up to the bar and ordered a couple of beers, Beattie noticed that McElroy was not looking too healthy. He’d heard that Mac recently did a stint in the hospital, where he was diagnosed as suffering from severe weight loss and nervous exhaustion.

  “So how you feeling, man?” Beattie asked.

  “I feel great, man.”

  “Yeah? You look like your face is drawn, your eyes …”

  “This is nothin’. This is gaining weight, man. You shoulda seen me. It’s like fucking cancer. I fell into the hospital.… Had a whole bunch of them green ones, you know? Yellow and then green. Two of each. I was up for like three, four days, man, wide-eyed.”

  “Yeah. It’s a fuck. That can only make you nuts, man.”

  “I liked it. I’ll do it again.”

  “You are fuckin’ nuts.”

  “No, I’m not. If you can handle it …”

  “Jim, but that shit you can’t handle. It catches up to you. You know that.”

  “You can’t do it every day. Just, like, once a month.”

  “Party time, huh?”

  “Yeah, once a month.”

  “Your girlfriend get high?”

  “Not really. We give her a half gram of coke, it lasts her all week. I do that in one shot!”

  Beattie had to laugh. In recent weeks the tension in the neighborhood had reached a fever pitch. Among other things, Kelly and Shannon had gone on the lam. But here was McElroy, with the world caving in all around them, still getting high and cracking jokes. Devil-may-care, that was Jimmy Mac. Beattie had known him just about all his life and he’d always thought of him as a fuck-up. But you had to like him.