Westies

by T. J. English

  Coonan wasn’t sure just what the hell was going on, he told Featherstone at the Skyline Motor Inn, but he didn’t like the looks of it. “I don’t know, Mick,” he said, “with Cummiskey outta the picture, I’m gonna need somebody to watch my back.” Once again, Jimmy asked Mickey if he’d be willing to come in on his loanshark operation. This time he emphasized his need for “protection,” telling Mickey his primary role would be as a bodyguard.

  Featherstone interpreted it as an appeal for help, and he couldn’t say no. Jimmy had been his friend. Now it was time to return that friendship. Of course, there was also the matter of $150 a week Coonan was willing to pay, plus the promise of a lot more down the line.

  “Okay,” said Mickey. “You can count on me.”

  After that, they established a routine. Coonan would drive in from New Jersey on Wednesday afternoons, usually around one or two o’clock. He’d pick Mickey up at his place on West 56th Street and they’d go over to Tony Lucich’s new apartment at 747 10th Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd. Lucich would be there, along with Andy Wheeler, a neighborhood racketeer who acted as their controller. Wheeler was another of the older breed who’d been slowly shifting his support from Spillane to Coonan. After the death of Cummiskey, Wheeler jumped ship entirely.

  Sometimes Coonan liked to kid Wheeler about his previous affiliations. Once, in front of Featherstone and Lucich, he reminded Wheeler about a time when he and a few others had kidnapped Wheeler and held him for ransom. Coonan had strapped him to a chair and called Spillane. “We got your controller,” he told Spillane. “You don’t come up with five grand we’re gonna put air conditioning in this motherfucker’s head.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Spillane. “Do what you gotta do.” Then he hung up.

  Coonan would laugh his ass off when he told this story, and so did Featherstone and Lucich when they heard it. “There’s your fuckin’ buddy Mickey Spillane,” Coonan used to say to Wheeler, who always got red in the face with embarrassment.

  In the apartment, Lucich would pass along a number of envelopes to Jimmy. “This is my portion of the shylocking money,” he’d say. “This is the numbers money. This is the pier money.” The loansharking and gambling money was always in cash. The money from the piers often came in the form of payroll checks from the International Longshoremen’s Association.

  Coonan and Lucich had been fanning out money to other neighborhood shylocks for years now. But it was only recently that Coonan had taken over the lucrative numbers racket. Up until Cummiskey’s death, it had been run by Spillane, Cummiskey, Lucich, and Wheeler. But when Cummiskey got whacked, Spillane got scared and wanted out.

  “No problem,” Lucich told Spillane. “You ain’t shit without Cummiskey anyway.”

  By that time, a principal of $10,000 had accrued. Lucich gave Spillane $2,500 and said good-bye. Coonan stepped in immediately.

  As for the money from the piers, that was a little something Coonan had cooked up himself. At the time, the piers were not exactly booming with business. But Local 1909 of the ILA, whose headquarters were located at 48th Street and 12th Avenue, still had a sizable payroll. Through Walter Curich, another old-timer from Spillane’s generation, Coonan had been able to extort a weekly tribute.

  After picking up the envelopes at Lucich’s apartment, Coonan and Featherstone would continue making the rounds collecting Jimmy’s debts. If Coonan had driven into town, they’d use his car. If he had taken the bus in, they’d make their rounds on foot. The Market Diner, the 596 Club and the Sunbrite were all regular stops. So was Donald Mallay’s candy store at 55th and 10th Avenue, William “Whoopi” Meyers’s auto garage on 46th Street between 11th and 12th Avenue, and one of Carl Mazzella’s many produce stands around the neighborhood.

  Usually an envelope was waiting for Coonan, filled with neat green currency. But sometimes there were problems. That’s why he and Mickey both carried .25-caliber automatics everywhere they went.

  Featherstone knew full well what his role was supposed to be in the event Coonan had to get rough with a customer. He’d gotten a crash course a few months earlier when he accompanied Jimmy, along with Tom Devaney and Tommy Hess, to a bar called Polly’s Cage on 57th Street near 8th Avenue. There was a construction worker there who was looking to borrow money from Coonan. But Jimmy had been tipped off that the guy was a “beat artist,” a person who borrows from shylocks and never pays his loans. So Jimmy had a message he wanted to deliver.

  The four of them walked into the saloon. Tommy Hess and Featherstone went to the back of the bar and stood guard, while Tom Devaney and Coonan grabbed the construction worker and took him outside for a chat. When the bartender tried to follow, Tommy Hess—dark-haired, five-foot-ten and muscular—advised otherwise.

  Featherstone sauntered up to the front of the bar and peeked out the window. He could see Tom Devaney with his gun wrapped in a newspaper, smacking the guy upside the head. “You think you’re gonna rob my friend?” he was saying. “Huh? Huh?”

  Jimmy was standing in front of the guy—who was now whimpering like a child—gesturing with his finger. “If you think you’re gonna get money off me, then rob me, I’ll make you suffer. Do you follow what I’m bringing out?”

  Weeks later, when it was just Coonan and Featherstone making the rounds, there were similar encounters. Bar owners, restaurant managers, and neighborhood gamblers were slapped and beaten. Sometimes the boys stuck loaded guns in their customers’ mouths for added emphasis.

  Mostly, though, both Jimmy and Mickey’s reputation was enough to ensure payment. If not, a verbal threat often did the job. Like the time Jimmy told Whoopi Meyers in front of his garage on 46th Street, “Just because your brother’s a cop don’t mean I won’t hurt you. Got it?” They had no trouble with Whoopi after that.

  Their midweek rounds almost always ended at the bar of the Skyline Motor Inn, where Jimmy met with his midlevel shylocks, the people he was lending money to so they could sustain their own loanshark operations. This group usually included Tommy Collins, who’d come over to Coonan from Spillane’s side even though he’d once had to duck Jimmy’s machine-gun fire, Billy Beattie, Paddy Dugan’s former partner, Nick “the Greek” Kagabines, and a few others. These were people who were close to Jimmy, members of his crew who often had large outstanding debts and endless stories to tell about how they were having trouble getting their own customers to pay up.

  One time, Billy Beattie was bitching about Jimmy McElroy, the former boxer, neighborhood ladies’ man, and a chronic late payer. “I don’t know what he does with his money. Where does it go? In his mouth, up his nose? I don’t know what to say.”

  “You havin’ a problem with Jimmy Mac,” said Coonan, “maybe it’s time to tighten back or lay up.”

  “Tighten back or lay up” was one of Jimmy’s favorite phrases. It usually meant he was tired of hearing about it. Either make your customer pay, Jimmy was saying, or come up with the bread yourself.

  Mickey Featherstone would listen to these and other conversations in total fascination. He had come back from prison with a thorough hatred of anything that represented the establishment. By extension, anything that represented a threat to the establishment was to be admired. Jimmy Coonan was the most sophisticated criminal he knew, a man who was brutal but also had foresight and organizational skills. To be near Jimmy gave Mickey a new identity, a feeling of self-worth. When he first started working with Jimmy, Mickey had always been quick to stress that he was doing it out of friendship. He still believed that. But as the weeks passed, Coonan’s ways began to rub off on him. He began to take pleasure in that sudden look of fear he and Jimmy would get when they walked into a neighborhood saloon. He began to laugh at the way grown men groveled and quaked whenever his or Coonan’s name was mentioned. You could see it in his walk, in the cockiness he began to exude.…

  Mickey Featherstone was becoming a gangster.

  It wasn’t anything he was ready to announce to the world, however. For months, even his girlfrien
d Sissy wouldn’t know the full extent of his involvement with Coonan. She was smart enough to figure out a lot of it, of course, but she was also smart enough not to ask questions. Even after they became husband and wife on October 28, 1976, there were few conversations over the dinner table about Mickey’s day at work. This was, after all, not “Ozzie and Harriet.” This was Hell’s Kitchen.

  Throughout 1976 and into ’77, Jimmy Coonan continued to consolidate his power. With the death of Eddie Cummiskey, Mickey Spillane had lost his “muscle” and all but disappeared from the neighborhood. Coonan pretty much ran everything now; the policy games, loansharking, extortion—you name it.

  There was no question in anyone’s mind that Jimmy Coonan was ruthless. The Paddy Dugan murder was still a topic of conversation in neighborhood bars nearly two years after it had happened. Now, with Mickey Featherstone at his side, there wasn’t a gangster in Hell’s Kitchen who would have considered conducting criminal business without first making sure it had been okayed by “Jimmy C.”

  But for Coonan, this newfound power wasn’t enough. In time, his interests began to extend beyond the roughly 150 square blocks that were the base of his budding empire. As the other neighborhood tough guys were beginning to find out, Jimmy was looking to forge some kind of alliance with the Italians that might take the rackets beyond the neighborhood.

  Many, including Featherstone, wondered why. Unlike Jimmy, whose criminal ambitions had always been grandiose, they were content to spend the money they were making on booze, women and—increasingly—cocaine. As long as no one had designs on the local bounty, why should they want to go into business with a bunch of “wiseguys”?

  But Jimmy saw things differently. For one thing, he’d always admired the organizational structure of La Cosa Nostra. In the volatile world of organized crime, it was in the interest of those in power to have a strong system of accountability. Especially with his West Side Irish crew, known for their “craziness,” Coonan stood to gain if he could align himself with a more stable, businessminded class of racketeer. Coonan, after all, had always seen himself that way. Even his instincts for violence, he believed, were always part of a larger plan.

  But even more than that, as Jimmy had told his underlings time and time again, he wasn’t sure just yet whether or not the Italians did have designs on the neighborhood rackets. “You never know with the guineas,” Jimmy used to say. “The bastards are always one step ahead of everybody.” It would be months before the Hell’s Kitchen Mob would know who was behind the gangland killings of Tom Devaney and Eddie Cummiskey. In the meantime, Coonan sensed a restlessness on the part of La Cosa Nostra. Now that Spillane had, for all intents and purposes, been moved aside, it was more important than ever that the Italians know that Coonan & Company were in charge.

  It was in this curious spirit of ambition and paranoia that Coonan tentatively began to establish his “Italian connection.” Through the late Eddie Cummiskey, who’d once worked at a sewage treatment plant on Ward’s Island, Coonan had gotten to know Danny Grillo, a coworker of Cummiskey’s and a soldato, or soldier, in the powerful Gambino crime family. Grillo was connected with a notoriously violent crew based in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn headed by an up-and-coming capo, or crew chief, named Roy Demeo.

  In the early months of 1977, Coonan began to trudge his underlings out to Ward’s Island, a sizable island in the East River that, among other things, served as a foundation for the massive steel towers of the Triborough Bridge. In a small industrial trailer on the island’s eastern flank, Coonan, Featherstone, McElroy, and Richie Ryan would meet a guy named Tony, who was a foreman at the sewage treatment plant. On most occasions, Danny Grillo and Roy Demeo were there as well.

  As far as Coonan’s underlings could tell, the meetings had little to do with “serious” criminal business. Jimmy was just testing the waters. More than anything, it seemed like Coonan wanted to show off his crew in front of the powerful Roy Demeo and Danny Grillo.

  “We can do business,” Jimmy once told Demeo.

  Demeo nodded. “I got no prejudice against nobody,” he replied, assuring Coonan that the fact he was Irish would not get in the way.

  One of the last West Siders to be dragged out to “Tony’s island,” as it eventually became known to the Irish gang, was part-time bartender Billy Beattie. It was a brisk afternoon in May of 1977. He and Coonan had arrived by car, driving past the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane, which occupied the western edge of the island in a series of connected brick buildings.

  Beattie was introduced to Tony, the foreman at the sewage treatment plant, and to Danny Grillo. After thirty minutes of small talk in Tony’s trailer, Beattie and Coonan were led to another trailer nearby, where they climbed some portable wooden steps and, inside, a black guy named Louie showed them a lathe where silencers were made.

  Coonan took one of Louie’s silencers, hot off the lathe, and screwed it onto a 9mm machine gun he’d brought with him. Then they all went outside, where cold gusts of wind swept off the East River and across the island. There were big piles of sand and gravel all over the place. Coonan fired the machine gun into one of the piles of sand and smiled like a little kid. Beattie was amazed. You couldn’t hear a fucking thing.

  Later that afternoon, Coonan and Beattie said good-bye to Tony and Danny Grillo. They were in Billy’s car, heading south on the FDR Drive towards the Holland Tunnel, which would take them under the Hudson River to Coonan’s home in Keansburg, New Jersey.

  Coonan was in a talkative mood, explaining to Beattie the importance of doing business with the people he’d just been introduced to. Grillo, he said, was a professional triggerman who got $20,000 and up for a killing. Tony was a bomb expert who knew how to build bombs that could be detonated electronically.

  “Hey,” said Beattie, smiling, “that’s what we’ll call him—Tony the Bomb.”

  Ever since Beattie had gone in with Coonan over a year ago, he’d been slightly nervous about where he stood. Beattie had gotten his start with Mickey Spillane, which he knew put him on shaky ground with Coonan. Then he’d dated Jimmy’s wife, Edna, before Jimmy got to her. As far as Beattie was concerned, it was never serious. But who knew what Edna had told Jimmy about him?

  Finally, there was the fact he was deeply in debt to Coonan. Jimmy had more or less financed his shylock operation. Billy had never been very good at collecting what was owed him, which made him equally erratic at paying what he owed.

  Whatever the reasons, Beattie felt Coonan sometimes went out of his way to make sure that he, Billy, knew who was on top. Which is exactly what Jimmy was doing as they drove south on the FDR, past the enormous glass towers of lower Manhattan.

  “You know,” said Jimmy, “back there at Tony’s island, that’s where we finished off Paddy.”

  Coonan knew the subject of Paddy Dugan’s death was not a pleasant one for Beattie, who’d been forced to set up his former partner. But Coonan seemed to take particular pleasure rubbing it in. He explained to Beattie, in great detail, how they took what was left of Dugan’s body out to Ward’s Island and dumped it in the river.

  In the old days, said Jimmy, Cummiskey used to work at the sewage plant along with Tony the Bomb and Danny Grillo. It was Cummiskey who first learned that the currents around the island were exceptionally strong. That’s why the passageway on the east side of the island had been named Hell Gate. But Cummiskey had his own name for it. He called it “the burial grounds,” because it was where he’d been dumping the severed body parts of his murder victims for years.

  As Coonan talked on and on about Paddy Dugan, the Italians, Spillane, and other subjects he’d become downright obsessive about in recent months, Beattie began to get the feeling he was building towards something. It was weird, he thought. One minute Jimmy was throwing an arm around you and letting you into his confidence—like he did with the trip to “Tony’s island”—and the next he was reminding you what happened to people who got on his bad side.

  When t
hey arrived at Coonan’s modest, wood-framed house on Forest Avenue in Keansburg, they stood outside the car. A pleasant breeze whisked through the trees that lined the street, a street very different from the ones back in Hell’s Kitchen where Jimmy and Billy had both grown up.

  “Billy,” said Jimmy, reaching out to rest a hand on his right shoulder, “I need you to pick me up tomorrow morning. We got a piece of work to do.”

  Okay. Alright. At least Beattie now knew exactly what was up. “A piece of work” was another of Coonan’s pet phrases. It meant somebody was going to get whacked. Beattie knew enough not to ask a lot of questions—not yet, anyway. In time, he’d probably learn more than he wanted to know.

  The following morning, on May 5, 1977, Beattie picked Coonan up in front of his house in Keansburg. The first thing they did was stop at a Food Town supermarket. Jimmy sent Beattie in to buy three boxes of plastic garbage bags—the jumbo size. Then they continued on through the Lincoln Tunnel to Manhattan, where they stopped at a hardware store on 9th Avenue, just south of 42nd Street. They went into the hardware store and Jimmy picked out an assortment of kitchen knives—one butcher knife, an eighteen-inch steak knife with a serrated edge, and a small filet knife.

  “This one,” said Coonan, holding up the filet knife. “You need this to take off tattoos, birthmarks, anything’s gonna make it possible to identify the body.”

  From the hardware store they went straight to the 596 Club at 43rd Street and 10th Avenue. Inside, Tommy Hess, dark-haired and muscular, was behind the bar. Richie Ryan, twenty-three years old, with curly brown hair and a soft Irish face, was playing pinball. After a few minutes, Danny Grillo, the professional hitman from Ward’s Island, came out of the bathroom.

  Hess, Ryan, and Beattie sat at one end of the bar while Coonan and Grillo went into a huddle at the other end. Beattie could hear Grillo saying he thought it would be best if he hid in the kitchen until “the stiff” walked in the door. Then he’d come out and pull the trigger.