Westies

by T. J. English

  Finally, the group split up. Sweating, Jimmy and Mickey rushed to a phone booth and called Featherstone’s home number.

  Back in Hell’s Kitchen, Jackie Coonan, Richie Ryan, Billy Beattie, and Ray Steen had spent the evening sitting around Mickey’s apartment, drinking beer and watching TV. When two hours were up, someone suggested they better head out to Brooklyn. “Nah,” Jackie said, nervously, “give ’em another few minutes.” Before long, those “few minutes” had stretched to a half-hour.

  “Where the fuck you been?” Mickey asked incredulously when Jackie answered the phone.

  “Where the fuck you been?” replied Jackie.

  “No, where the fuck you been!?”

  “Hey, where the fuck you been!?”

  “Okay, forget about it. Tell your brother.” Mickey shoved the phone at Jimmy.

  Coonan listened for a few seconds, then told Jackie to “shut the fuck up,” adding, “I shoulda known better’n to leave somethin’ like this with you lame brains.” He hung up.

  Jimmy and Mickey laughed about it in the car on the way back to Manhattan. For Jimmy, the meeting had been successful beyond his wildest dreams and nothing could spoil that. He’d thought they were gonna get whacked. Instead they were now directly tied in with the most powerful organized crime group in the United States. It was a fantasy come true.

  He promised Mickey he was going to “take care of him” for making the trip. There was going to be lots of money now—additional money from the piers, loansharking, extortion of the unions, gambling, hijackings, burglaries, and more. Supposedly, Mickey would be getting a sizable cut.

  “You’ll see,” said Jimmy. “This is gonna make us big, bigger’n anybody on the West Side’s ever been.”

  Mickey had enjoyed the meeting, and he certainly liked the idea of making more money. But all he could think about was what would have happened if Jackie Coonan, Richie Ryan, and the others had shown up like they were supposed to and opened up on the Vets and Friends Social Club. Most of the big-time Mafia leaders in New York City had been there. No doubt it would have been one of the most apocalyptic hits in the history of organized crime.

  “Man, can you imagine?” asked Mickey, who smiled gleefully every time he thought about it. “Now that woulda been somethin’.”

  Over the course of the next few months, Jimmy and Mickey met often with members of the Gambino hierarchy. There were a few meetings with Paul Castellano and his bodyguard, Thomas Bilotti, in Little Italy. There was a meeting with Nino Gaggi at the Vets and Friends Social Club in Brooklyn. There were many more meetings with Roy Demeo and members of his Canarsie crew, both in Brooklyn and on the West Side of Manhattan.

  Mostly, these were meetings to exchange information. When they met with Castellano and Bilotti, Coonan wanted to pass along information he’d heard concerning a planned hit against one of Castellano’s underlings. In the Gaggi meeting, it was information about a series of hits that had already taken place. And with Demeo, there were a broad range of topics revolving mainly around money. Following the death of Ruby Stein, Demeo had become Coonan’s primary financier. So there was always money to be borrowed or loanshark payments to be made.

  For Jimmy, it was a comfortable arrangement. The Italians seemed to expect very little from him, other than a commitment to share 10 percent of his profits—a nebulous demand given the nature of underworld bookkeeping. In exchange, Coonan and his people were now able to go around saying they were “connected,” thereby strengthening their position on the West Side.

  But to those who now comprised the inner circle of Jimmy Coonan’s crew—Featherstone, Billy Beattie, Jimmy McElroy, Richie Ryan, and a half-dozen others—the Italian connection was met with something less than overwhelming enthusiasm. As far as they were concerned, it was the latest in a series of moves Coonan initiated on his own and then expected gang backing on.

  There had been grumbling ever since the Ruby Stein hit. One of the reasons everyone had quietly played along with that killing was Jimmy’s claim that once Ruby was gone, it would wipe everyone’s slate clean. But after the murder, Coonan went around the neighborhood telling people that from now on they owed him the money. Only three or four guys were in deep enough with Stein to be directly affected by it, but even those who weren’t felt Coonan was being devious and cheap.

  Furthermore, there were rumors spreading around the neighborhood that Jimmy was giving his Italian buddies more than their share of the neighborhood rackets, and that he treated the guineas better than his own people. As Tony Lucich later put it, “I never seen Coonan show nobody respect like he did Roy Demeo.”

  Whenever Mickey heard about Jimmy and the Italians it gave him an uneasy feeling. On the one hand, Jimmy had treated him right. In March of ’78, a few weeks after the meeting at Tommaso’s, Jimmy met him on the street outside Tony Lucich’s 10th Avenue apartment and told him he’d just put $5,000 into the numbers business for him. From that point on, he said, Mickey was to get 25 percent of the numbers money. In addition, Mickey would now be getting $200 a week for driving Jimmy around on his shylock runs. A guaranteed $400 or $500 a week was a lot of money to Featherstone. And for a long time it kept at bay whatever negative feelings he may have been developing towards Jimmy.

  But this stuff about Demeo and the Gambinos really got to him. Ever since the sit-down at Tommaso’s, it seemed to Mickey like he was spending half his life meeting with the guineas. He might as well work in a corporation. At first, he didn’t mind. But eventually their fancy clothes, formal manner, and general insincerity started to get on his nerves. They were always hugging each other and talking about how important their friendships were—which Mickey knew was bullshit, since nine out of ten mob hits were a case of one “best friend” killing another.

  In recent weeks he’d even come up with a name for these guys. He called them Al Colognes.

  “You mean Al Capone,” Coonan said when Mickey first used the term.

  “No,” replied Mickey, laughing. “Al Cologne. You know the type. They got that hundred-dollar cologne on; them rings on their pinky fingers. Hair slicked back and them thousand-dollar silk suits. Always talkin’ outta the side of their mouths.

  “Counterfeit tough guys. Wish-I-was guys. You know, fuckin’ Al Colognes.”

  More than anything, Mickey felt most wiseguys suffered from delusions of grandeur. Because they had such a large army of soldiers behind them, they felt they could do anything. In Mickey’s eyes, it made them impossible to trust.

  In some cases, Jimmy seemed to agree. And his success with the Stein hit made him brave. He knew that the Italians were afraid of the West Side Irish Mob because of their reputation for crazy, impulsive behavior. That was the main reason they hadn’t just whacked Coonan and Featherstone after the death of Ruby Stein. The Mafia was reluctant to go toe-to-toe in a street-level bloodfest with a group of gangsters whose murderous reputation was growing by the month.

  But even though Coonan told his underlings time and time again that he didn’t really trust the guineas, to Featherstone and some of the others his actions suggested otherwise. Behind Jimmy’s back, some of them were saying he had been blinded by the meeting at Tommaso’s; that his need to be “respected” by the Gambino family was making him stupid.

  A prime example was an incident involving Danny Grillo, Roy Demeo’s right-hand man. Supposedly, Grillo had been Coonan’s good friend ever since they clipped Ruby Stein together in the 596 Club. But Grillo was also a gambler and a coke fiend who always seemed to be deeply in debt. The main reason he had been so enthusiastic about helping Coonan stiff Ruby was because he owed Stein well over six figures.

  After the murder, Grillo started borrowing freely from Coonan and had fallen way behind on his payments. Mickey kept warning Coonan that Grillo was going to try to bump him off, just like he’d done Ruby when those debts got out of hand.

  One day in the summer of ’78, a few months after the meeting at Tomasso’s, Mickey was at home when he got a call f
rom Jimmy.

  “I gotta go see this fuckin’ Grillo,” said Coonan.

  “Okay,” said Mickey. “So when youse gonna pick me up?”

  “No. I’m gonna go this one alone.”

  “Man, I told you about that guy. He’s no good. He’s probably gonna try an’ whack you.”

  “Yeah. Well, do me a favor. Just sit by the phone at the Sunbrite, okay? I’ll call if I need you.”

  That afternoon Jimmy had coffee with Grillo at a diner in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. Grillo told Coonan he needed his help killing someone. Jimmy was suspicious, but he went along with it just to see what was up.

  From the diner, they drove to a nearby underground parking garage. Grillo had a gun with a silencer on it in a brown paper bag. He gave the gun to Jimmy and told him to hide out in the far corner of the garage and wait for a car with Florida plates. When Jimmy saw the car, he was supposed to open fire.

  While he was waiting, Coonan got nervous. He peeked out at the street through a small, ground-level window and saw the car with Florida plates. Inside were a bunch of people Coonan recognized as Grillo’s friends.

  Wait a minute, thought Jimmy, something’s definitely not right here. He popped the magazine out of the automatic Grillo had given him. The gun was empty. Not a single fucking bullet.

  “Motherfucker,” Jimmy whispered under his breath.

  He quickly left the garage, flagged down a cab and headed back to Manhattan.

  “You was right, my man,” he told Mickey when he got to the Sunbrite Bar. “Fuckin’ punk tried to set me up.”

  After that, Coonan, Featherstone, McElroy, and a few others made at least a half-dozen trips out to Brooklyn to blow Danny Grillo away. They discussed clearing it first with the Gambino family, like Castellano had said, but decided not to. No telling who was on Grillo’s side; if they were to consult with the Italians on this, it might tip their hand.

  The closest they came to getting the job done was one afternoon in October 1978 at the Gemini Lounge, a saloon in Canarsie that served as a base of operation for Roy Demeo’s crew. Coonan, Featherstone, and McElroy staked out the joint in Jimmy C’s latest vehicle, a dark-red van. Inside the van the boys sported an impressive collection of commando paraphernalia: army-issue ponchos, black ski masks, bulletproof vests, knives, numerous pistols, and an old-style Browning machine gun, commonly known as a “grease gun.”

  It was pouring down rain as they waited outside the Gemini Lounge for Danny Grillo. When Grillo finally came outside and headed for his car, Featherstone kicked open the back door of the van and got ready to blast away with the grease gun.

  “No!” shouted Jimmy. “Not here. We’ll be spotted.”

  They tried to follow Grillo as he drove away, but McElroy couldn’t get the van started and they lost him.

  Even after he’d been double-crossed by Grillo, Coonan still sucked up to the Italians. Danny, he kept telling Featherstone and the others, was just an isolated case. It was important that they maintain ties with Demeo, he said, even as they tried to eliminate his right-hand man.

  Just a few days after another unsuccessful attempt to kill Grillo, Jimmy and Mickey met with Roy Demeo at the Skyline Motor Inn on 10th Avenue. Roy didn’t know anything about Coonan’s problems with Danny, but apparently he’d been having problems of his own. He told Coonan he’d had to get rid of Danny Grillo for being “a punk and a lowlife.”

  Supposedly, Grillo withdrew $100,000 in cash from the Canarsie crew’s safe deposit box and gambled it away. “The kid was suicidal,” said Roy.

  After they killed Danny and disposed of his body, they drove his car to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and left it there, with the front door open on the driver’s side.

  “This way,” surmised Demeo, “they might think the guy got depressed and jumped off.”

  “See,” Jimmy said to Mickey. “I told you we shoulda let Roy know what was goin’ on.”

  “What’re you talkin’ about?” asked Demeo.

  Jimmy went on to tell Demeo all the problems he’d been having with Danny; how Danny had fallen way behind on his shylock payments and then tried to set him up.

  “Damn,” said Roy, the former butcher’s apprentice. “I wish youse woulda told me. I woulda chopped him up in pieces ’stead of just cuttin’ him in half.”

  A big grin spread across Jimmy’s face when Demeo said that, and from then on Coonan acted like the Irish Mob was more indebted to the Italians than ever before.

  * * *

  In late October ’78, when Tom McCabe, Richie Egan, and the other cops in the Intelligence Division’s Syndicated Crime Unit first started hearing that Coonan had hooked up with Paul Castellano, they were skeptical. They had been expecting an Italian connection, but not with the top man himself. La Cosa Nostra, as they knew it, had a strict caste system. At the top was the boss of the family, in this case Castellano. Immediately below were the underbosses and the consiglieri, or counsellors. Then came the caporegimes, or crew chiefs, like Roy Demeo. Finally, the lowest members of the family were the soldati, the soldiers who made up the various neighborhood crews.

  In theory, very little got done within this structure that wasn’t authorized by at least a capo or an underboss. Castellano was known to be one of the most cautious and judicious mob bosses in recent history. Although it was not unprecedented that he would associate himself with a crime group whose ethnic origins were different from his own, why would he hook up with a bunch of crazy Hell’s Kitchen Irishmen?

  If it was true—and the boys from Intell weren’t certain yet that it was—the only thing they could figure was that Castellano thought he might be able to neutralize Coonan’s crew by bringing them into the fold. At least this way he’d be able to impose some control over what happened on the West Side. And if anybody got killed there would definitely be some accountability.

  Partly, the Intelligence cops’ skepticism was based on the fact that for the time being, all they had to go on were unsubstantiated claims from various neighborhood sources. In the thousands of hours worth of surveillance they’d conducted on the West Side so far, they had yet to make visual contact with Castellano, Demeo, or any other member of the Gambino hierarchy. All they could do was keep on gathering intelligence and hope it might eventually lead to a telltale meeting or phone call, something that would establish a definitive link between Coonan’s crew and the boys from Brooklyn.

  Detective Sergeant Joe Coffey’s Homicide Task Force wasn’t so patient. When Coffey first heard through Intelligence sources that the Irish Mob was using Castellano’s name around the neighborhood, he decided there was only one way to find out if it was legit. He would check with Castellano himself.

  Although Coffey had listened to Castellano’s voice on wiretaps many times, he’d never met the man face to face. He did have a connection, however, through Funzi Tieri’s nephew Francois, who he’d once served with a subpoena. He knew that Tieri felt he’d been dealt with squarely and would probably give Coffey a good recommendation.

  Sure enough, once Coffey put out the word that he wanted to meet with Big Paulie, he got a call one morning in his office. “Joe Coffey the cop?” asked the voice on the line.

  “Yeah.”

  “Seven o’clock tonight. Tommaso’s.”

  Sergeant Coffey and his partner, Frank McDarby, arrived at Tommaso’s at exactly 7 P.M. They sat in the bar area near the huge brass coffee urn, right where Coonan and Featherstone had waited several months earlier.

  Three minutes after seven, in walked Castellano with an entourage of seven or eight wiseguys. An exceedingly polite man, Castellano introduced Coffey and McDarby to each of his bodyguards. Then Castellano and Coffey made their way to the back of the restaurant while McDarby waited in the bar area with the others.

  After those who were dining near Castellano’s table had been politely relocated to another part of the restaurant, Big Paulie and Coffey were seated.

  “I just want you to know,” said Castella
no. “The only reason I’m meeting with you is because Francois says you’re okay.”

  Coffey thanked Castellano for taking the time, then got right to the point. “The reason I’m here is that there’s a couple Irish kids that are causing a lot of havoc; and they’re throwing your name around and it’s causing us many, many problems. I think it would kind of behoove you if you would tell them to cease and desist using your name. We have every intention of taking these kids out, and you might just get dragged into it.”

  Castellano listened carefully. When Coffey finished, he smiled. “Yes, I know these two kids. Two nice Irish kids.”

  He admitted having a meeting with Coonan and Featherstone, but when Coffey asked what the meeting was about he just smiled again. “What happens in this place is private, just like this meeting now is private.”

  They continued talking, with Coffey trying to lure information out of Castellano and Castellano deflecting all inquiries in a gentlemanly manner. Eventually, the conversation drifted to Castellano’s Staten Island home, the food at Tommaso’s, the weather. Coffey liked the aging Mafia don; he felt he was respectful and engaging. But he knew two minutes after he sat down that he wasn’t going to get anything of any value out of him.

  Meanwhile, in the bar area, Frank McDarby found himself surrounded by seven or eight wiseguys. They stood there for five minutes or so in an atmosphere that was less than congenial. Finally, McDarby figured he would try to break the ice. So he asked the Italians if they wanted to hear a joke.

  They looked at each other like they couldn’t believe this big dumb mick cop, but no one voiced any objections. So McDarby went right ahead with the joke. “There’s just one thing,” he said as a preface. “You got to let me finish this joke before you make a decision, okay? Don’t get upset before you hear the punchline.”

  They looked at McDarby suspiciously, then looked at each other and shrugged.