Westies

by T. J. English

  It was also around this time that McCabe first heard about three West Side–related killings. The first was the Tom Devaney murder on July 20, 1976. Then came the Eddie Cummiskey murder on August 20th of that same year. And later, on January 27, 1977, Tom “the Greek” Kapatos had been gunned down in the middle of the afternoon on West 34th Street.

  These murders, which had taken place within six months of each other, seemed to suggest a pattern. All three victims had been born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen. All three had been shot gangland style. And all three were known associates of Mickey Spillane.

  McCabe checked around and began to hear stories about how Spillane was having problems. The word on the street was that Devaney, Cummiskey, and Kapatos were killed at the behest of Fat Tony Salerno, who was looking to establish control over the soon-to-be-built Jacob Javits Convention Center. At the time, the building was only in the planning stages. But the construction of one of the largest convention halls in the nation promised to be a gold mine for organized crime. Since Mickey Spillane controlled the neighborhood where the Javits Center was going up as well as many of the unions that would be involved in its construction, he figured it was his baby. Never a great friend of the Italians, Spillane had let it be known he wasn’t going to let the Genovese people anywhere near the Convention Center other than as a junior partner.

  Salerno responded by eliminating Devaney, Cummiskey, and Kapatos, three of Spillane’s closest underlings. The scuttlebutt was that Spillane himself would be next.

  Sergeant McCabe had heard these reports about Salerno and Spillane and the Convention Center, and as he watched the Stage Deli from their observation post at the Sheraton Hotel, he found himself wondering if there was any connection between them and these young West Side Irish kids meeting with Rocco Santamarie, one of Salerno’s shylocks. It was only a hunch. But in his more than twenty years on the force, McCabe had learned to go with his hunches, even if they sometimes seemed a bit off the beaten path.

  The Sergeant wasn’t able to do anything about it, though, until OPERATION FASHION was wrapped up and he was transferred to Intell’s Syndicated Crime Unit, or SCU. Even then, McCabe’s premise that these young Irish kids were somehow connected to the Spillane/Salerno power struggle went untested for months. To get an okay from his supervisors to pursue the matter full-time, he needed something that indicated definitively that the West Side Mob was in a state of flux.

  He got his wish on the night of May 13, 1977, around the same time Ruby Stein’s mangled torso floated ashore at Rockaway Beach.…

  On 59th Street in Woodside, Queens, a black Cadillac pulled up in front of building number 47–50. The driver got out of the Cadillac, buzzed apartment 5-J and spoke briefly into the intercom. Then he returned to the car.

  A few minutes later a handsome forty-three-year-old man wearing dark-blue slacks, a white V-neck T-shirt, and a brown leather jacket appeared from the building and walked over to the car. As he bent down to talk to someone in the car, a shot rang out. Then another and another and another and another. Five shots in all, hitting the man in the face, neck, chest, abdomen, and left arm. The body fell to the street and the car sped away.

  A police officer responding to the scene found the victim lying next to a parked car. His body looked like a sieve, with blood flowing freely from the multiple gunshot wounds. His face was half blown away by a bullet that had hit him in the right eye.

  The cop carefully reached inside the leather jacket and extracted a wallet. Opening the wallet, he found a driver’s license.

  The name on the license was Michael J. Spillane.

  To the Intelligence Division, the Spillane hit was the most promising development so far, but to many in Hell’s Kitchen, it was a cause for grief. On the afternoon of May 16th, mourners had gathered on West 47th Street at the McManus and Ahern Funeral Parlor, owned and run by “the McMani.” Mickey’s widow, Maureen, was there, as was her brother, Jim McManus, leader of the Midtown Democratic Association. Many found it especially ironic that Spillane, a gambler and a superstitious man, had been gunned down on Friday the 13th.

  To the older residents, the saddest fact of all was that Spillane’s murder was so totally unnecessary. At the time of his death, Mickey was no longer a “mover” in West Side criminal circles, and hadn’t been for months. There was even a story circulating in Hell’s Kitchen that following the gangland killings of Devaney, Cummiskey, and Kapatos, Spillane was understandably worried. He took a trip to Florida to see Eddie McGrath, one-time ruler of the West Side docks. When Spillane was a kid, McGrath was friends with all the big-time gangsters, Italian and otherwise. If the Mafia was behind these recent West Side killings, as Spillane suspected they were, he was certain McGrath would know all about it.

  In Florida, Spillane had found an old and enfeebled Eddie McGrath, now well into his eighties. Spillane asked Eddie if he knew anything about this recent pattern of killings, in which he was rumored to be next. But McGrath was completely out of touch. His contacts in the New York underworld had dried up long ago. Mickey was on his own.

  When he returned to New York, a frightened Spillane moved his family from Hell’s Kitchen—where he was born, raised and had risen to a position of prominence—to Woodside, a pleasant, working-class Irish neighborhood in Queens. Now, five months after moving to Queens, Mickey had come home to 10th Avenue—in a box.

  At the same time the Spillanes, the McMani, and other long-time Hell’s Kitchen residents were mourning the passing of one of their own, Jimmy Coonan, Mickey Featherstone, and a few others were having a sit-down a few blocks away at the Skyline Motor Inn. Roy Demeo, Coonan’s contact in the Gambino family, had requested a meeting with Coonan and his people.

  “Bet you’re wondering what happened with Spillane,” Demeo told Coonan after they’d all settled in at the bar area of the motel.

  “I was, kinda,” replied Jimmy.

  “Well,” said Roy with a smile. “You got an early birthday present.”

  At five-foot-ten, with slicked-back hair and a sizable paunch, the thirty-seven-year-old Demeo had established a reputation as a feared Mafia enforcer. A former butcher’s apprentice, Demeo had yet to be “made,” or officially initiated into La Cosa Nostra. But he was well on his way. His crew was thought to be responsible for dozens of murders, including many in which the victims’ bodies had disappeared without a trace.

  Naturally, Demeo and Coonan hit it off well. Ever since their initial meeting at Ward’s Island, they’d been courting each other. Apparently, the gift of Mickey Spillane’s death was Roy’s latest overture.

  “Yeah,” Demeo added. “Wanna know what his last words were?”

  “Sure,” said Jimmy, his eyes beginning to twinkle.

  “He started yellin’, ‘No, no, you was supposed to get Mickey and Jimmy, not me!’”

  They all had a good laugh, then Jimmy asked, “What the fuck did he mean by that, anyway?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” answered Demeo.

  Jimmy was ecstatic, of course, and he told Roy and his sidekick, Danny Grillo, that from now on, anything they needed from the boys on the West Side was theirs for the asking.

  “You don’t trust those bastards, I hope,” Mickey said to Coonan after the two Italians had driven off.

  “I don’t know,” answered Jimmy. “I ain’t sure yet.”

  Afterwards, Featherstone began to get worried about the Spillane murder. It wasn’t that he cared about Mickey Spillane; he agreed with most of the young guys in the neighborhood that Spillane was over the hill. But he knew how popular Spillane was with some of the legitimate people in Hell’s Kitchen. And he knew that he and Coonan would be the prime suspects in Spillane’s murder. He didn’t want that over his head. So he called Jim McManus, Spillane’s brother-in-law, to wash his hands of the whole thing.

  “I just want you to know,” he told the district leader over the phone, “I had nothin’ to do with Mickey gettin’ killed.”

  McManus said he
appreciated the call.

  Although Egan and the other Intelligence cops didn’t have a complete sense of the hierarchy just yet, it was clear that with the death of Spillane on May 13, 1977, the West Side Irish Mob had entered a new phase. Coonan, they knew, was the leader, and Featherstone his number-two man. After that were a whole host of small-time hoodlums, some of them younger guys around Jimmy and Mickey’s age, some of them holdovers from the Spillane years. There was Jimmy McElroy, the good-looking exboxer; Billy Beattie, the lanky bartender at the 596 Club; Tommy Hess, the muscular kid who also worked at Coonan’s bar; Tony Lucich and Tommy Collins, both older gangsters from Spillane’s generation; and Richie Ryan, the youngest of the bunch.

  As had always been the case on the West Side, the backbone of their operation seemed to be loansharking and the policy games. After that came the unions. Coonan, the Intelligence cops were hearing, had his teeth into the ILA—a traditional neighborhood racket. Where Jimmy seemed to be breaking new ground was with the various entertainment unions, especially theatrical Teamsters Local 817, which delivered props and equipment to film and television studios throughout the city.

  Through hours and hours of surveillance, Egan and the boys from SCU began to amass an updated West Side dossier. Not only were they getting a sense of the key players, but also of their daily routines and where they conducted their business. Although the cops heard plenty of barroom gossip about the recent rash of killings—all of which they passed on to local Homicide detectives—their own focus was much broader. The strategy was to keep methodically collecting details until events kicked the investigation into a higher gear.

  Each day, after a long surveillance, Richie Egan would return to Intelligence headquarters on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan and fill out his daily log. Traditionally, an investigation is given a name by one of the detectives involved. Sometimes, there’s even a friendly competition to see who can come up with a name that sticks. This time, however, there was little argument. WEST SIDE STORY was the name Egan wrote down on the top of his surveillance report, and the other detectives immediately followed suit.

  The first big break came in February 1978. Through Frank Hunt, a police officer at the Midtown North precinct who was well connected in Hell’s Kitchen, Intell got a lead on a possible confidential informant, or “C.I.” Hunt tipped them off that there was a kid in his late twenties who was up to his neck in debt with three or four neighborhood loansharks, including Tommy Collins, Tony Lucich, and a free-lance operator named Harry “the Hat” Wedgemont. The kid was soft, Hunt thought, and might be willing to cut a deal if the right pressures were brought to bear. When the kid got arrested for beating up his girlfriend, Intell made its move. They pulled the kid out of arraignment and gave him an option: He could take his chances back in the neighborhood, where he might wind up dead. Or he could go in with them.

  The only way he would cooperate, the kid said, was if they could give him twenty-four-hour protection. “That,” replied Sergeant McCabe, “is definitely out of the question.” After further prodding, the kid caved and reluctantly agreed to make a $100 loanshark payment, with cash provided by the cops, while wearing a body recorder.

  Over the next few weeks, the C.I. made many more recorded loanshark payments. Lieutenant George Ahrens, McCabe’s supervisor, passed the recordings along to Michael Carey, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Carey thought they might constitute the beginnings of an indictment. He made a call to the FBI, which also thought the investigation looked promising.

  To McCabe, Egan, and the others at SCU, it was an exciting development. The trick with any Intelligence investigation is to acquire enough data to lure one of the big operational agencies into the picture. That’s when the arrests get made. If the FBI was going to come on board, as they were now indicating they would, it meant the case would go federal—a feather in everybody’s cap.

  The decision was made to take the investigation to the next stage. The Intelligence Division, now working with the U.S. Attorney’s office, felt their C.I. should open a candy store in the neighborhood, which they could then use as a virtual intelligence headquarters. The regional FBI contact liked the idea—an important approval since it was the FBI that would be funding the operation. An application was filed at the FBI headquarters in Washington for approximately $3,600 to set up the candy store—a relatively small sum for such potential big returns.

  Meanwhile, Egan and the other Intelligence cops on the street were running their C.I. ragged. They would follow him to places like Fran’s Card Shop, a candy store at 746 9th Avenue owned by Tony Lucich’s wife, where he would make loanshark payments and settle gambling debts. Another frequent drop-off spot was the Westway Candy Store on 10th Avenue, run by Donald Mallay, who was beginning to figure more and more prominently in their surveillances.

  Before long, the C.I. started to get nervous. The plan was to have him make his payments regularly at first, then act less and less able to come up with the money. Presumably, this would anger the loansharks and set events in motion. Things had, in fact, proceeded as planned, which is exactly why the C.I. was scared.

  “You don’t understand,” he said to Egan after one loanshark warned him that he’d have Mickey Featherstone take care of things if he didn’t get his money. “These guys’ll cut my nuts off if they find out what I’m doin’.”

  The C.I. operation came to a crashing halt one afternoon when Egan and Ocasio spotted Featherstone with his newborn baby in a neighborhood park near St. Clare’s Hospital. The detectives had information that Featherstone was selling marijuana out of a baby carriage on the street. While they watched Mickey from an undercover taxi, the detectives told the C.I. they wanted him to attempt a drug deal with Featherstone while wearing the body mike.

  The kid became apoplectic. “There’s no fuckin’ way you’re gonna get me to go near that guy with a wire,” he stated emphatically. “No fuckin’ way!” When the cops insisted, the C.I. ripped the wire from his chest, taking off some flesh in the process. When the cops still insisted, threatening to expose him as an informant if he didn’t cooperate, the C.I. wet his pants in the backseat of the cab.

  Shortly after that the kid fled the neighborhood. Then word came down from FBI headquarters in Washington that the request for $3,600 had been inexplicably denied. As a result, the FBI dropped out of the investigation and the U.S. Attorney’s office lost interest.

  For the time being, things had stalled. But with such a “glamorous” investigation, one that included murders, extortion, and old-time racketeers, Richie Egan and the other Intelligence cops knew it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey walked into Paparazzi, an elegant restaurant/saloon on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and took his favorite seat at the bar. The commanding officer of an elite, citywide unit known as the Organized Crime Homicide Task Force, Coffey was the living embodiment of the cop as celebrity. In recent years, through his association with many high-profile crime cases, he had become a familiar figure on the local TV news. But even without this, Coffey was the kind of guy you noticed when he walked into a room. With his impeccably tailored suits and six-foot-two-inch frame, he looked like the kind of detective you might see on an NYPD recruitment poster.

  On this particular October evening business was the last thing on the Sergeant’s mind. Along with his chauffeur, he had stopped into Paparazzi looking to unwind after a long day’s work. But while there, he met a boyhood acquaintance he hadn’t seen in years. They got to talking about the old neighborhood in Queens, where Coffey’s family had moved from an apartment in Manhattan when he was a kid.

  “Hey,” said his old neighborhood buddy, “did you hear about Toby Walker’s kid?” Toby Walker was a mutual acquaintance from the old days.

  “What about him?”

  “He got murdered on the West Side.”

  Something in Coffey’s mind clicked. He had seen a homicide report a few days earlier in Chief of Det
ectives James Sullivan’s office about somebody named William Walker, whose body had been found at the West 79th Street Boat Basin on October 3, 1978.

  “Was that Toby’s son?”

  The acquaintance nodded. “And what makes it worse, everybody knows who did it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. He was playin’ shuffleboard in a West Side gin mill with this kid McElroy. Jimmy McElroy, West Side Irish. They had an argument. He left the place with this McElroy. That’s the last they seen him.”

  “No shit?”

  “Ask around, Joe, you’ll see.”

  “I might just do that.”

  The next day Coffey pulled the file on the Walker homicide. Just like the guy said, Walker had last been seen at the Sunbrite Bar with James McElroy. There was also a notation that McElroy hadn’t been spotted in the neighborhood for a week; he’d apparently gone on the lam. At the time, the focus of Cofffey’s Homicide Task Force was almost exclusively La Cosa Nostra. But he told Chief Sullivan, “Look, I know it’s not mafioso, but let me take a look at this one. I got a personal interest.”

  Joe Cofffey knew a thing or two about the Irish Mob. Most of it he’d learned from his old man, who drove a beer truck during Prohibition and was a boyhood chum of Eddie McGrath. After Prohibition, McGrath took over the West Side docks, but Joe Coffey, Sr. forswore his criminal contacts and drove a delivery truck for Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and some of the other large department stores. In 1946, he co-founded Local 804 of the Teamsters Union.

  Coffey had grown up hearing stories from his father about the West Side Irish Mob. In fact, in the late 1940s the murderous John “Cockeye” Dunn, McGrath’s triggerman, had made efforts to take over Teamsters Local 804 by threatening the life of Joe Coffey, Sr. The only thing that saved Coffey was that he knew McGrath, who intervened on his behalf. Joe Jr. always remembered this story. He remembered how the gangsters were always trying to intimidate legitimate working people. It was one of the reasons he had become a cop.