American Gangsters

by T. J. English

  Shargel immediately interrupted, moving for a mistrial and calling Brodsky’s outburst “an emotional trick” and “an act.” After Brodsky shouted back, “That’s a lie,” Judge Knapp quieted the courtroom and overruled Shargel’s objection.

  In his summation, Shargel did the only thing he could—he attacked “the content and character” of the government’s case, calling special attention to the high number of convicted felons who were used as witnesses. Featherstone in particular, he claimed, was a “lowlife” who was using the Westies as his ticket to freedom. “If you examine Mickey Featherstone’s past,” Shargel told the jury, “you will find that when the government entered into an agreement with this man, they were shaking hands with the devil.”

  Now, eight days later, with the various summations still ringing in their ears, the jury filed into the courtroom with their verdict. The relatives of the defendants had gathered on the right side of the gallery. Billy Bokun’s wife, Carol, who was Tommy and Flo Collins’s daughter, was there. So was Billy Bokun’s old man. Jimmy McElroy’s niece, who was also Kevin Kelly’s wife, was there. Also Mugsy Ritter’s wife. And in the very back, seated all alone, was Jimmy Coonan’s mother. Over the past few months, she’d heard her son being accused of despicable acts of violence. Whether or not she’d heard these accusations before—and what she thought of them—she never shared with anyone, not even neighbors and relatives.

  It took the court clerk fifteen minutes to read the voluminous thirteen-page verdict. But within the first few minutes, it was apparent where things were headed. Except for Johnny Halo, who was acquitted of all charges, the rest of the defendants were nailed to the wall—guilty on all fourteen counts of the indictment.

  “He never had a chance,” cried Billy Bokun’s father when the reading of the verdict had been completed. The elder Bokun had now lost two sons to the Westies. As Billy and the other defendants were led from the courtroom, his emotions boiled over.

  “Them people shamed themselves!” Bokun called to his son, gesturing towards the jury box.

  “Don’t worry, pop,” Billy shouted back. “I’ll be alright. Fuck them!”

  “Yeah,” the anguished father replied. “Tell it to the Marines.”

  * * *

  Within thirty minutes of the verdict, Mickey Featherstone got a visit in his cell from one of the marshals who’d been in the courtroom. “It’s all over, Mick,” said the marshal. “Except for Halo—he was acquitted—they all went down. Pretty much across the board.”

  After the marshal left, Mickey stood up from his bed, stretched, and began pacing back and forth. For over a year he’d been waiting for this moment, not knowing exactly how he would react when it finally came. He’d prepared for it, reminding himself over and over that some of these people had framed him for a murder he didn’t commit. The others, those who knew nothing about the frame, had used his name and reputation for their own gain as far back as he could remember.

  But even with all that, he couldn’t say he felt any great satisfaction. To take the stand and testify like he had violated a standard near and dear to criminals the world over. Mickey was reminded of this during the trial, when Shargel played a portion of the Urshal tapes in which Mickey was asked how he felt about informants. “Even if my life was on the line,” he told the interviewer, “I still wouldn’t rat.… A stool pigeon would kill his own mother, man. He’s worse than a junkie.”

  Featherstone burned with shame at the realization that he’d become exactly what he never wanted to be. A stoolie; a rat; a cheese eater.

  Mickey had paced back and forth often in his cell during the trial, just like he was now. His thoughts would drift back over the events of his life, and he’d begin to think of all the violence he’d seen. Sometimes, he would close his eyes and he wasn’t in prison anymore at all. He was back on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, among the people. Among the victims.…

  Like Ugly Walter. There was one that, along with the Rickey Tassiello murder, he’d spent his entire life trying to forget. It had been early in 1976, and he’d only been out of prison on the Linwood Willis gun possession rap and his parole violation for about six weeks. At the time he was twenty-seven years old and hadn’t hooked up with Jimmy Coonan yet. He was still looking for a way to stay out of trouble and make a few extra bucks for himself and his new girlfriend, Sissy.

  Together with Jackie Coonan and another neighborhood kid, Mickey had put what little money he had into starting up an after-hours club on 44th Street, between 9th and 10th avenues. It was a grungy old storefront looking in on what used to be an ice cream parlor, the kind of place that might have been a popular Hell’s Kitchen gathering place in the 1950s.

  The club was barely up and running more than a week, and already Mickey had installed a jukebox and a pool table. The neighborhood’s younger tough guys—those loyal to Jimmy Coonan—had quickly become steady patrons. Enthused by the club’s financial prospects, Mickey decided to go one step further and install a small stage so they could occasionally host live music.

  To build the stage, Mickey had turned to Walter Curtis, a maintenance man and carpenter who worked in the neighborhood’s hotels. Known to most people as Ugly Walter because of his crooked teeth, unfortunate complexion, and notoriously bad hygienic habits, Ugly Walter was nonetheless liked by those who knew him. He was a decent guy who might buy you a drink every now and then, and as far as most people knew, he had little or no involvement with the neighborhood’s gangster element.

  One afternoon, Mickey and Ugly Walter were in the club deciding where they should put the stage. Ugly Walter had just finished taking measurements, and he’d placed his tool belt on a barstool. The shades covering the club’s front windows were pulled, and it was dim and dusty as Mickey poured them both a drink at the bar.

  Suddenly, Eddie Cummiskey came in the door. Mickey looked up to see Eddie the Butcher glare at Ugly Walter. When Mickey glanced at Walter, he saw an expression of stark terror come into his eyes.

  Cummiskey pulled a pistol out of his jacket and aimed it. Bam! Bam! The gunshots echoed loudly throughout the nearly empty room. Ugly Walter never even had a chance to put his drink down. The bullets hit him squarely in the chest.

  Ugly Walter toppled off the barstool. There was blood pouring from his chest, but he wasn’t dead yet. He started to drag himself towards the back of the club, as if there were still some way he might be able to evade Eddie Cummiskey.

  Mickey froze in his tracks, his drink still held to his lips. Cummiskey came over and took a hammer out of Walter’s tool belt. With Walter gasping for air and blood seeping from his wounds, Cummiskey looked at Mickey and stammered, “This motherfucker … this cocksucker …”

  Without finishing his sentence, he walked over to Ugly Walter and began beating him with the hammer over and over. As Ugly Walter raised his bloodied hands in a helpless attempt to protect himself, Cummiskey just kept smashing away.

  Mickey knew there was nothing he could do. Cummiskey had a gun in one hand, a hammer in the other, and an expression on his face that suggested if anyone were to get in his way, he’d do to them exactly what he was doing to Ugly Walter.

  Cummiskey must have struck his victim thirty or forty times, crushing his skull and bludgeoning the last remnants of life from his body.

  “Get me a garbage bag,” he finally called to Mickey, breathing heavily from the exertion.

  He pulled it over Ugly Walter’s upper body. Then Mickey was instructed to help drag the body up a flight of stairs to the bathroom of a flophouse apartment.

  There, Ugly Walter’s body was dumped in the bathtub. As they stripped him naked, Cummiskey explained how he’d been waiting five years to kill Walter Curtis, who he said had witnessed a murder that he’d committed years earlier. Cummiskey had been forced to plead guilty to the killing and always believed that Walter talked to the cops.

  “Nobody,” said Eddie, “and I mean nobody, rats on Eddie Cummiskey.”

  After Ugly Walter was
stripped naked, Cummiskey took Mickey to the Market Diner on 11th Avenue, where they met Jimmy and Jackie Coonan. Eddie explained what happened and told Jimmy Coonan to get his “tools” and meet them back at the flophouse.

  Within minutes they were all back in the bathroom, standing over what was left of Ugly Walter. Cummiskey and the Coonan brothers took a number of large kitchen knives out of a paper bag and rolled up their shirt-sleeves.

  “Watch this, kid,” Eddie said to Mickey. “You’re about to get an education.”

  Mickey knew what was coming. Weeks earlier, Paddy Dugan had disappeared under similar circumstances, and Mickey had heard all about it. But this was the first time he would witness it for himself.

  As Cummiskey stuck a knife in Ugly Walter’s stomach, cutting a five-inch diagonal incision, Mickey began to heave into the toilet. The others, deeply engrossed in their task, hardly paid attention as Mickey retched in the background, over and over again.

  Eventually, Jimmy Coonan came over and threw an arm around Featherstone. “Don’t worry, Mick,” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Now, all these years later, from his small, lifeless prison cell, Mickey thought about Ugly Walter. He thought about all the Ugly Walters.

  When he saw the blood and heard the screams, as he had so often in recent months, he didn’t feel so bad about what he’d done.

  At least now, he thought to himself, there would be no more victims. There would be no more Ugly Walters.

  EPILOGUE

  Four days before Christmas, on December 21, 1988 (Jimmy Coonan’s forty-second birthday), Francis Featherstone was once again led into U.S. District Court. This time he stood before Judge Robert W. Sweet, whose duty it was to sentence Mickey on his RICO conviction.

  As promised in their agreement with Featherstone, Mary Lee Warren and other federal prosecutors had already urged the judge to “consider the scope and value of Mr. Featherstone’s cooperation” when sentencing. A favorable probation report and a psychiatric evaluation declaring that Featherstone was “mentally competent” were offered as evidence.

  After the U.S. Attorney’s office stated their case, the judge spoke. “Mr. Featherstone,” he said. “You stand before me having admitted to fourteen specific acts of racketeering, including four murders, five conspiracies to murder, loansharking, extortion, numbers, counterfeiting and distribution of drugs … During the forty years of your life, you have experienced violence as a child, as a student in our city schools, as a soldier in Vietnam, as a criminal on the streets, and as a killer and an enforcer of one of the most feared gangs in our city.”

  Despite this troubled history, the judge told Mickey, “the Westies have been broken as an organization, largely as a result of your cooperation.” Therefore, Sweet pointed out, the sentence he was about to impose was an attempt to balance “a violent past, a redemptive present, and an uncertain future.”

  Noting that Mickey had already served three and a half years in prison since being wrongfully charged with the Michael Holly murder, the judge sentenced Featherstone to five years probation.

  “We want to believe that violence, aggression … can be overcome by acts of contrition and redemption,” said Sweet, who concluded, “Mr. Featherstone, you are no longer a prisoner of your past.”

  The next day Francis Featherstone disappeared into the Witness Protection Program.

  It had been a long, bumpy ride. Since the end of the Westies trial some ten months earlier, Featherstone had been engaged in a vituperative battle with the U.S. Attorney’s office. Mostly, it centered around his agreement with the government. Featherstone felt that when he first made the decision to flip—in the hotel room in Westchester County in April of ’86—he had been promised bail. When bail was not forthcoming, Featherstone began to see a new conspiracy. This time it involved various prosecutors, members of the U.S. Marshals’ Witness Protection Program, and his government-appointed attorneys.

  At one point, Mickey had gone so far as to file a motion with Judge Sweet to have his guilty plea withdrawn. Later, he changed his mind and the motion itself was withdrawn.

  Of course, Mickey’s disagreements with the government were put to rest when Judge Sweet handed down his sentence—a sentence that many in the city’s law enforcement community felt was outrageously lenient. Egan, Coffey, and many of the cops who had pursued Featherstone for years felt betrayed by the judge. The way they saw it, Mickey had simply found a way to beat the system once again.

  The other Westies were not nearly as lucky as Mickey. Eight months before Featherstone’s sentencing, the seven convicted gang members had been brought before seventy-two-year-old Whitman Knapp. Each had their attorney deliver a statement asking for leniency. The last to do so was Gerald Shargel, Jimmy Coonan’s lawyer. Shargel said that Jimmy Coonan himself had a statement he wanted to read, adding that Coonan was not an educated man and was unaccustomed to speaking before large groups.

  Perhaps more than any of the others, Jimmy Coonan’s personal life had been a carefully constructed illusion. At the same time he was terrorizing people in Hell’s Kitchen, he’d sought to build a home and family life that were entirely separate. With his comfortable abode in suburban New Jersey and his children attending the finest parochial schools, he’d risen from the streets of Hell’s Kitchen to achieve a certain “respectability.”

  That respectability was forever shattered during the Westies trial, in which the full extent of Coonan’s brutality became known—perhaps for the first time ever—outside the city’s criminal underworld.

  Now, at his sentencing, Coonan sought to hold on to his final illusion. He began his statement by claiming something the evidence at the trial had already revealed to be untrue—that Edna was guilty of nothing other than having been his wife. Reading from a piece of paper, he claimed that Edna was an innocent bystander and therefore deserved special treatment. Soon his voice began to break. “There’s a lot more here, Your Honor. I can’t get through it right now. I would just ask you to take any frustration out and any hatred out on me—not my wife.”

  Judge Knapp said that he had no hatred towards Coonan and found his sentiments admirable. Then he sentenced him to prison for seventy-five years without parole, or, as the judge put it, “the rest of your natural life.” In addition, Knapp fined Coonan $ 1 million.

  Most of the others were given similarly stiff sentences. Jimmy McElroy received sixty years; Billy Bokun, fifty years; Mugsy Ritter, forty years; and Tommy Collins, forty years—all with a recommendation of no parole. Tommy Collins’s wife, Flo, whose involvement was limited to the sale of narcotics, was given six months.

  The last to be sentenced was Edna, who stood before the judge holding her husband’s hand. Along with Jimmy’s tearful plea for leniency, Knapp had received a handwritten note from the Coonans’ eleven-year-old son asking that the judge not send his mother away. Knapp acknowledged that Mrs. Coonan presented him with his most troubling duty, since “you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t married Mr. Coonan.” All the same, he sentenced her to fifteen years behind bars and fined her $200,000. Knapp did, however, hint that her sentence might be reduced if she were to turn over the millions of dollars in criminal assets prosecutors claimed the Coonans had buried.

  For months after the sentencing, the Westies continued to be an occasional newspaper item. In August of ’88, hitmen Kevin Kelly and Kenny Shannon, looking tanned and well rested, inexplicably turned themselves in to the FBI after nearly two years on the lam. At the time they surrendered, they were scheduled to be profiled on a national TV program, “America’s Most Wanted.” After they walked into the U.S. Attorney’s office the program claimed credit for having pressured the two Westies into giving themselves up.

  The real reason was far more mystifying, given that the evidence against Kelly and Shannon was overwhelming. The only answer the public was to get came from Frank Lopez, Kevin Kelly’s attorney. “It’s tough being on the run,” he said at their arraignment. “They wanted to see
their families.”

  In announcing formally that Kelly and Shannon had surrendered, Rudolph Giuliani identified the two men as “the last of the ruling structure of the Westies,” and added that his office had, once and for all, crushed this “violent organized crime group that terrorized and exploited the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan for the last twenty years.”

  It would be one of Giuliani’s last press conferences before quitting his job as U.S. Attorney to run for mayor of New York City.

  Along with these developments, the latter months of 1988 and on into ’89 saw the emergence of Mickey Featherstone in his new role as a “professional witness.” Within the space of ten months, Featherstone was called to testify at three separate trials, two in state court and one in federal.

  The federal trial involved what was left of the Roy Demeo crew of the Gambino crime family. In a massive RICO indictment, Joseph Testa, Anthony Senter, and nine others were charged with some sixteen murders, including the killings of Danny Grillo and Demeo himself. Featherstone spent six days on the stand detailing how his West Side compatriots had met often with Demeo, Testa, and Senter to discuss, among other things, how to dispose of murder victims. Testa and Senter were later sentenced before Judge Vincent L. Broderick, who gave them both life plus twenty years.

  After he had testified already at the Westies trial, the name of Mickey Featherstone was no doubt high on hit lists everywhere. By testifying against the powerful Gambinos he’d upped the ante even more, becoming perhaps the most wanted man in the underworld.

  In April of ’89, Mickey was called to testify at yet another important trial. Kelly and Shannon were being prosecuted in state court for their roles in the murder of Michael Holly. Billy Bokun, having heard the evidence against him on this charge at the Westies trial, had already pleaded guilty to shooting Holly.