Westies

by T. J. English

  After Juanita left him in the fall of ’69, Featherstone, now twenty-one, became increasingly despondent. He moved back in with his parents. Whatever money he had came from Charlie Boyle, his father, and most of that was spent on whiskey. Mostly, he hung out in places where he could drink for free—places like the American Legion post on West 43rd Street, which was run by his father and his brother Henry. Mickey could be found there almost any night getting sloshed while watching TV. His favorites were old horror movies like Frankenstein and Dracula.

  No doubt his life would have continued this way were it not for a quirk of fate. Not long after Juanita left him, Mickey developed an abscess on his neck. He’d tried numerous home remedies, but they only made things worse. So he went for treatment to the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital on Kingsbridge Road, the same hospital where his father now worked as supervisor of security.

  While he was there, the doctors noticed Featherstone’s extreme nervousness and agitation. They treated his abscess and referred him to the psychiatric division, where he was described as anxious and hallucinatory with “suicidal and homicidal ideations.” They suggested he stick around.

  Mickey knew he was fucked up, so his parents didn’t have too much trouble convincing him that the hospital was the best place for him to be. Also, as long as he was in a psychiatric facility his homicide indictment for the Riley shooting would be kept “off calendar,” meaning a court date could not be set.

  At the Bronx V.A. hospital Featherstone was diagnosed as a “paranoid schizophrenic” with an alcohol addiction and something they called Traumatic War Neurosis. They kept him on the psychiatric ward and tranquilized him daily. Charlie Boyle often came by to see how his son was doing. Usually, Mickey was under heavy sedation and totally incapable of conversation.

  Although numerous tests and interviews were done to determine the extent of Featherstone’s illness, there was very little done to actually treat his condition. Doctors listened carefully as Mickey enumerated the nightmares from his past. He’d had to execute Cambodian spies in the war, he said, and this had caused him to resent authority. He’d witnessed other atrocities as well—soldiers being decapitated, friends being killed, prisoners tortured. Of course, there was nothing in Mickey’s military record to suggest any of this was true. But as he told these stories over and over, after a while it hardly mattered. In Mickey’s own mind they became true. The delusions became his reality.

  Physician after physician listened to these stories and filed remarkably similar reports. Certainly Mickey Featherstone was ill, they wrote. Certainly he was paranoid. Then they’d prescribe a daily dosage of antipsychotic tranquilizers—known in the trade as a “liquid straitjacket”—and suggest the patient be kept under observation. The idea was to shuffle him along to the next doctor and keep him off the street.

  In April 1970, however, a few months after his admission, Featherstone was declared healthy enough to be given an indefinite furlough. A steady diet of drugs had deadened his senses, and it was hoped his paranoid and aggressive tendencies had abated. After all, he’d conducted himself admirably while confined to his hospital room. He hadn’t attacked anyone at all.

  Unfortunately, Hell’s Kitchen was a long way from the V.A. hospital. Two weeks after his discharge, on April 23rd, Featherstone walked into a bar on 10th Avenue and killed again.

  This time he hardly knew what was going on, even as it unfolded right before his eyes. It was at the Sunbrite Saloon at 736 10th Avenue. The place was packed, the music loud. Mickey had been drinking for hours. Suddenly there was a lot of commotion. A gun was being passed around the bar, over everybody’s head.

  The next thing Featherstone knew it was in his hand. Or it looked like his hand. Was it his hand? The music blared, people were shouting. In front of Mickey was a guy he recognized named Emilio Rettagliatta, although he knew him as Mio. It was Mio’s gun, they said. Mio had pulled a gun on someone in the bar. Shoot Mio! they said. Mio made a move for the gun and Mickey fired, hitting him in the stomach. He looked in Mio’s eyes. He knew that look. It meant Mio was dead.

  At the sound of gunfire, everyone stampeded for the door. The body was taken outside and dumped in the street so the bar wouldn’t be held accountable. Mickey was hustled into the back seat of somebody’s car and taken to 414 West 46th Street, Johnny Diaz’s place. “Sit tight,” a voice commanded. “Don’t fuckin’ move. Just wait till things blow over.”

  But Mickey couldn’t wait. He’d heard in the car on the way over that the guy he’d shot was Mickey Spillane’s numbers runner. It didn’t take a genius to know that meant trouble. Mickey knew Spillane—everybody in the neighborhood did. He’d never had any beefs with him or his people. But this was different. Mickey knew what he had to do. He had to get Spillane before Spillane got him.

  Featherstone grabbed a .22-caliber pistol he knew Johnny Diaz kept stashed away in his closet. He stuck the gun in his pants and headed into the night, running south on 9th Avenue and west on 45th Street until he came to the White House Bar. It was now around 4 A.M. It looked like the bar was closed. Mickey peered in the front window and saw Spillane seated with a few other guys at a table. He knocked on the window and motioned for Spillane to come out.

  While he was running down the avenue, Mickey had decided he was going to try to explain things to Spillane first. Maybe Spillane would be understanding about it, and he wouldn’t have to shoot him. Because if he had to shoot Spillane, Featherstone knew his life probably wouldn’t last very long after that.

  Spillane came out of the bar dressed, as always, sharp as a tack. Mickey was in a T-shirt and blue jeans and he was shaking like a leaf.

  “Mr. Spillane, I just want you to know it couldn’t be helped …”

  “Mickey …”

  “I know he was your guy and all, but he pulled a gun …”

  “Mickey, don’t worry about it.”

  “Huh?”

  “I already heard. I know what went down, so don’t worry. You already got enough problems of your own.”

  Featherstone liked what he was hearing. Spillane was being a real gentleman about it. But then he saw a cop car slowly cruising up 10th Avenue. He looked at Spillane, then at the cops. Maybe this was some kind of setup, he thought. Maybe Spillane was just stalling.

  He didn’t wait around to find out. He bolted down 45th Street towards the river, leaving Spillane standing on the sidewalk. When he got to the Hudson, he tossed the .22 into the water. Then he got on a subway and headed up to the Bronx, where he stayed at his parents’ new apartment on Webb Avenue.

  Two weeks later he called Johnny Diaz on West 46th Street. “Mickey,” Johnny told him, “the fuckin’ neighborhood’s crawlin’ with cops. They know you was the shooter.”

  Mickey saw the writing on the wall. He took a subway down to Johnny’s place, called Midtown North, and turned himself in.

  After that, everything was a blur. He remembered being sent to the Manhattan Detention Center for Men, otherwise known as “the Tombs,” a prison adjacent to the courthouse in downtown Manhattan. Although the bar had been packed the night of the Mio shooting, few witnesses came forth, and even those who testified said there was so much confusion they didn’t really see what happened. A “justifiable homicide” is what the grand jury wound up calling it. They wouldn’t indict for murder, only for possession of an unregistered weapon.

  From the Tombs, Featherstone was sent back to the Bronx V.A. and pumped with 500 milligrams of Thorazine, the same antipsychotic drug he’d been taking since he first entered the hospital. It didn’t seem to help. He was more paranoid and unruly than ever. There were concerns that he would try to escape, so he was bound and shackled and transferred to another veterans’ hospital in Montrose, New York, known for its tight security.

  Four days later he was considered well enough to receive visitors. His wife, Juanita, came by with a psychiatrist. She was filing for divorce, she said, citing “extreme cruelty,” and she’d brought the doctor along
to offer his diagnosis. Mickey paid little attention. The only time he spoke was to ask if he could borrow some money. When Juanita and the doctor had left, he escaped by walking past the guards and out the front door. Still dressed in his army-green hospital garb, he hitchhiked to a local train station and used the money he’d borrowed to buy a one-way ticket to New York City.

  On the train on the way back to his hometown, Mickey stared out the window at the passing terrain. So much had been happening in his life, so many crazy things. I gotta slow down, he thought to himself. I gotta stop letting people get to me.

  When he got back to the neighborhood he crashed at his brother’s apartment on West 43rd Street. A week later, he walked into the Leprechaun Bar and came face to face with a loud, drunken Southerner named Linwood Willis.

  5

  POETIC JUSTICE

  Attorney Lawrence Hochheiser sat in his small Brooklyn office sipping on a cup of coffee and asked himself: Why do I always get stuck with cases like this? At thirty-one, he’d only recently left the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, where he’d worked in the Complaints Bureau, the Appeals Bureau, and finally the Rackets Bureau. Over the years, he’d seen it all, especially those twelve months he’d spent in downtown Manhattan working night court, where justice is a carnival. Three hundred cases in a twelve-hour period; a judge in one ear, a cop in the other, and a deranged Legal Aid attorney in front of you. Hochheiser loved it, but the pace was too much. He’d been lucky enough to land a job in private practice and get out with his sanity intact—relatively speaking.

  So now here he was with the respected criminal defense firm of Evseroff, Newman, and Sonenshine and he still always seemed to be dealing with society’s misfits, the little guy with no money and a rap sheet you could stretch from here to Hoboken and back.

  Part of the problem was the Bishop, a man Hochheiser could not say no to. Known as Salvatore Cella to the rest of the world, the Bishop was a seventy-year-old former New York City cop who’d served as Hochheiser’s mentor from his earliest days in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. A veteran of over thirty years on the force who spoke fluent Sicilian, the Bishop had an uncanny knack for coming up with eyewitnesses to crimes. Many times when Hochheiser had needed a corroborating witness, the Bishop would produce some old Italian woman who just happened to be sitting at her front window overlooking the street when the crime took place. Invariably, she would have seen it just the way Hochheiser had hoped she would to benefit his side of the case.

  Now that Hochheiser was in private practice, the Bishop had occasionally called in his chits. That’s how Hochheiser wound up with this latest client, Francis Featherstone. The way he heard it, the Bishop had been asked to help find Featherstone an attorney through one of his in-laws. A barrel-chested, physically imposing man with a kindly manner, the Bishop had told Hochheiser from the start, “Larry, the kid’s a complete loony-bird. There probably ain’t much of a case and God knows there won’t be much money. But you’d be doin’ me a big favor.”

  The young attorney didn’t know much about Featherstone, but he was reasonably certain of one thing: Whatever he got paid, it wasn’t going to be much. And a good portion of that would probably go to the Bishop.

  Hochheiser met Featherstone for the first time in the Tombs in the fall of ’71, nearly one year after the Linwood Willis killing. Mickey had been transferred there from the Fishkill Correctional Facility in upstate New York after being declared “no longer in a state of idiocy”—and therefore fit to stand trial.

  Conditions in the Tombs had recently been deemed inhumane by a U.S. judge for the Southern District of New York, who found the facility to be overcrowded and inadequately supervised. Built thirty years earlier, in 1941, on the same site as Manhattan’s first detention center for men (which had been designed to look like an ancient Egyptian tomb), the current structure sported a decaying institutional look. Prisoners were packed three to a cell, many of the toilets were broken, and recreational areas were breeding grounds for rodents and roaches. In December of ’74, the Tombs would be closed by court order and completely renovated, but right now it was a cesspool.

  When Hochheiser arrived in the prison’s bullpen area to meet with Featherstone, he was slightly taken aback. With Mickey’s military background and violent criminal record, he’d expected to find a loud, physically imposing figure—the toughest kid on the block. Instead, Mickey seemed like exactly the type neighborhood bullies always pick on. He was a nervous, soft-spoken kid who looked a lot younger than he really was. A street urchin.

  The young attorney listened as Featherstone tried to explain what had been happening in his life in recent years. Mickey was still on medication, so he talked in a rambling, colloquial manner that wasn’t entirely coherent. But Hochheiser liked what he heard. He respected the fact that none of Mickey’s crimes were for profit or vengeance. There seemed to be a principle behind Featherstone’s actions, though obviously, thought Hochheiser, somewhere along the line the kid had lost the ability to differentiate a real threat from an imagined one.

  The homicide Hochheiser wanted to hear about was the most recent one, the shooting of Linwood Willis, which would be the first to go to trial. Hochheiser listened as Featherstone gave his version of what happened on September 30, 1970, in front of the Leprechaun Bar. Mickey admitted he’d been drinking that night and had gone without his medication for a few days. The events weren’t very clear in his head. About the only thing he really remembered was that Willis had threatened to “blow his brains out.”

  Hochheiser wasn’t surprised to hear Featherstone say he thought the best way to fight the case would be to plead self-defense, but the attorney knew that wouldn’t wash with a jury. From what he’d heard about Featherstone, Hochheiser knew there was only one way to go.

  “Mickey,” he said, pausing to let the words sink in, “there’s only one way to fight this case, and that’s with an insanity defense.”

  Featherstone eyed Hochheiser with skepticism and anxiety. It was his half-sister’s family who’d found the attorney, so he hadn’t really known what to expect. He didn’t have much experience with lawyers, and those he had dealt with seemed far removed from life on the streets. Mickey had to admit it though, Hochheiser seemed different. For one thing, his unruly mane of curly brown hair, droopy mustache, and cowboy boots made him look kind of wild. And Mickey liked the fact that he spoke in a language any streetwise hustler could understand.

  Eventually, Hochheiser convinced his client. The clincher came when he told Featherstone if they were able to beat this case with an insanity defense, it would lay the foundation for all his future cases. To Mickey, that was good planning.

  What Hochheiser didn’t tell Featherstone was that nobody had beaten a murder rap on an insanity defense in New York County in more than fifteen years. It was definitely a long shot.

  As soon as Hochheiser went to work on The People of New York v. Francis Featherstone, he could see there was a lot more to it than he’d originally anticipated. Granted, since even the Bishop thought the kid was nuts, his expectations had been outrageously low. Yet the more Hochheiser delved into Featherstone’s past, the more he liked what he saw. Yes, there was violence. But there was also pathos. He could work with it.

  The Vietnam War, of course, would have to be a factor. By 1972, the war was reaching its ignominious conclusion, and even many of the hard hats and middle-Americans who had supported it were admitting it had been a mistake. There was a growing awareness of the atrocities some American soldiers had witnessed or taken part in, and a sensitivity to the psychological problems they experienced when they got home. Based on the war stories Mickey had been telling doctors over the last few years—stories that Hochheiser had no reason to believe were untrue—the attorney thought there was a good chance they could find a sympathetic juror or two.

  The war, however, was an abstraction to most people. Hochheiser knew his testimony also had to address more specific issues. Therefore, to explain the nature
of Featherstone’s mental instability in technical terms, he would need to call some of the many psychiatrists who’d examined Mickey in recent years. And to describe the kind of person Mickey had become in human terms, he would need to call Featherstone’s family.

  The latter was a risky proposition. There wasn’t a juror alive who would believe the family was objective. If the jury thought Hochheiser was being unduly manipulative, he could lose the case right there. But when the attorney met Featherstone’s mother and father, his brother Henry, and his two half-sisters Doris and Joan, he instinctively knew they had to be subpoenaed. Although none of them had much formal education, when Hochheiser listened to what they had to say about Mickey he was genuinely moved. As a middle-class Jewish kid born and raised on Long Island, Hochheiser was from a different world. But it was obvious that their anguish was real. And in their own way, they articulated their emotions clearly and powerfully.

  Along with getting his witnesses together, Hochheiser spent a good deal of time preparing his client for trial, and it was proving to be a delicate situation. The attorney didn’t doubt for a minute that Mickey was indeed “troubled.” But he knew that Mickey believed it was all a charade, that he had once been crazy but was now better, and that the insanity defense was in fact a scam.

  Hochheiser played along. “Remember, Mickey,” he told Featherstone on one of their many meetings in the visiting room at the Tombs, “you’re supposed to be crazy. When we get into that courtroom, I don’t want you doing anything that might lead the jury to believe otherwise.”

  Often, after these encounters, Hochheiser would shake his head in disbelief. Here he was asking someone he knew was crazy to pretend he was crazy so they could beat a murder rap with an insanity defense. It was a strategy he didn’t recall ever being mentioned in law school.