Westies

by T. J. English

  Billy knew he was in deep shit after that. He’d been trying to run two businesses at one time—the drugs and the shylocking—both of which were losing big-time bucks. To make matters worse, in recent months he’d become a regular cocaine cowboy, shooting into his own veins what he was supposed to be pushing on the street. Then he’d backed out on this killing Jimmy had assigned him.

  He’d been having Jimmy Coonan nightmares. Then came the Whitehead murder. When he first heard about it from Mickey Featherstone, he had to laugh. It was so fucking crazy. He was reminded of something Jimmy had told him around the time of the Rickey Tassiello murder. Beattie asked Jimmy why he had to kill Tassiello over such a small amount of money.

  “It’s to prove a point,” Jimmy had said. “Where we’re headed, it’s good business.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “See, the people we’re dealin’ with now, the more bodies we got the better we look. That’s what they’re into.”

  The more bodies the better. This was becoming Jimmy Coonan’s professional credo. And after the Whitehead thing, Billy Beattie had this queasy feeling he might just be next on the hit parade.

  Well, he thought, I ain’t going to wait for a friggin’ invitation. I ain’t that dumb.

  “What about the money you’re owed?” one of Beattie’s shylock customers asked when Billy told him he was going to take a permanent vacation.

  “Hey,” said Beattie, “just tell everybody Billy Beattie’s givin’ ’em a free ticket.”

  Then Beattie headed for the mountains, intending never to return to Hell’s Kitchen.

  11

  THE FEDS AND LITTLE AL CAPONE

  In the wake of the Whitehead homicide, the Intelligence cops began their most concerted initiative yet. Ironically, it had nothing to do with the events surrounding Whitehead’s November 22, 1978, demise in the basement of the Opera Hotel. By early December, detectives from the 4th Homicide Zone were still investigating the murder, running evidence through ballistics and trying to track down the “Bobby” whose love letter had been left next to Whitehead’s corpse. As of yet, nobody had connected anything to Coonan or Featherstone.

  But even as Homicide continued pursuing the Whitehead matter, the Intelligence Division was following up on a totally unrelated lead of their own—one that would eventually overtake the Whitehead investigation, incorporating it in a barrage of criminal charges designed to get the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob off the streets once and for all.

  Intell’s latest line of investigation had actually begun roughly six weeks before Whitehead’s death, in September ’78, when Greg Derkasch, a Special Agent with the U.S. Secret Service’s New York Field Office, called Sergeant Tom McCabe. “Hey,” said Derkasch, “we’re holding a guy here named Coonan, James Coonan. Possibly a counterfeit rap, definitely gun possession. We know all about him, but we’re trying to track down a possible partner of his. All we got is a first name, Mickey. Know anything about it?”

  “Oh, man,” replied McCabe, “are you kiddin’?”

  After McCabe gave Derkasch an extensive rundown on Featherstone, the Secret Service agent let out a loud, sustained whistle. “Wow. That’s some file you got.”

  “Yeah,” said McCabe. “We been hopin’ to nail these guys for months. So what’s this about Coonan?”

  Derkasch told McCabe that a few days earlier, on the morning of September 14th, he’d gotten a call from the manager of Bowery Savings Bank on Lexington Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The manager was holding a woman who had just tried to deposit what looked to be two counterfeit $100 federal reserve notes. Derkasch went to the bank immediately and examined the bills. They were counterfeit alright, and not particularly good ones at that. He recognized them as part of a series that had recently started circulating in the New York metropolitan area.

  The woman who’d tried to deposit the notes identified herself as Joanne DePalma. She’d gotten them that night at her place of business, the Spartacus Spa #1, an upscale massage parlor located at 146 East 55th Street. Ms. DePalma, it seemed, was a high-class hooker, and she’d received the bills for services rendered.

  Derkasch escorted DePalma back to Spartacus, where he was introduced to the night manager and another working girl named Felicia “Monique” Ledesma. It was around 6 that morning, Derkasch was told, that two guys, one named Jimmy and the other Mickey, entered the club and had a few drinks. Then they had “sessions” with Joanne DePalma and Monique. DePalma remembered that the guy she was with had a tattoo on his right arm with the name “Mickey” written underneath it. Mickey and Jimmy gave the girls a $100 bill apiece and paid the club’s fee with a third C-note.

  The night manager recalled that the two guys left Spartacus around 9 that morning. A few minutes later they came back to the club cursing under their breath. Apparently their Cadillac was missing from in front of the building. When the guy who called himself Jimmy mentioned where they had parked it, the manager said it had probably been towed away by the city.

  Derkasch made a quick phone call and found out that a brown Cadillac Coupe Deville, New Jersey license number 377 JLB, had indeed been towed that morning from East 55th Street. Another quick call and he’d identified the car as being registered to a James M. Coonan.

  Derkasch hauled ass over to the city’s impound lot, a huge warehouse straddling the Hudson River at West 37th Street. He was barely there long enough to locate Coonan’s car when he was informed by a cop on the premises that two people had just arrived looking for the car. It turned out to be Tony Lucich and Tommy Collins, two names which meant nothing to Derkasch at the time. He identified himself as a Secret Service agent and asked which one was the owner of the car.

  “What car?” they both replied.

  They were brought into the impound lot’s main office and searched. At first, Derkasch was surprised to find that neither was in possession of any Cadillac keys. But then he spotted a shiny object on the floor between Tony Lucich’s legs.

  “Gee,” said Derkasch, picking up the keys, “what have we here?”

  Derkasch was half-expecting to find a trunkload full of counterfeit currency, so he was somewhat disappointed when he opened the Cadillac’s trunk and found nothing but a cardboard box full of baby’s clothing. Then he dug down into the box. At the bottom, wrapped in a diaper, was a fully loaded .32-caliber Colt Special with silencer attached. Also in the box was a police-issue bulletproof vest.

  As arrangements were being made to have the car taken to the Secret Service offices downtown, a cop approached from the front desk. “Excuse me, Agent Derkasch, but we got two more guys out here askin’ about that Caddy.”

  Derkasch smiled. At age thirty-seven, after ten and a half years with the Secret Service, he’d been up against his share of dead ends. A skeptic by nature, he knew that a smart counterfeiter was almost impossible to catch. There were so many ways to cover your tracks. But these guys had passed bad bills in a cathouse and gotten their car towed with an unregistered gun in the trunk. Now they were walking into the middle of a nest of Secret Service agents? Derkasch loved crooks like this. They tended to make his job a lot easier.

  At the front desk, Jimmy Coonan and a friend of his named Bosco Radonjich stood nervously near a water cooler. After flashing his ID, Derkasch confronted the two of them with the fact that a loaded automatic had been found in the trunk of Jimmy’s Caddy.

  “Ain’t mine, sir,” said Coonan politely. “I didn’t even have my car last night. Friend of mine did.”

  “What’s the friend’s name?”

  “Lucich,” volunteered Bosco Radonjich. “Tony Lucich.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Derkasch, looking at Coonan. “So can you account for your whereabouts last night and early this morning—say around six A.M.?”

  “Well … for that I think you’ll need to talk to my lawyer.”

  Both Coonan and Radonjich were loaded into a Secret Service car and taken downtown. The agent who drove Radonjich’s car after them found yet ano
ther pistol—a .25-caliber Astra—resting handily in a utility tray between the front seats.

  Gun possession charges were filed against Coonan and Radonjich; both were out on bail within hours.

  After talking to Tom McCabe, Derkasch called the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, where he spoke with Assistant U.S. Attorney Ira Block. Derkasch told Block what they had so far regarding the counterfeit bills.

  “Sounds promising,” Block said. “But you need more before we can even think about empaneling a federal grand jury.”

  That was exactly what Derkasch had been hoping to hear. It didn’t make sense to bust two guys for possession of a few counterfeit notes. Since they’d confiscated other bills in recent months that looked to be from the same batch, chances were good that the source was somewhere in the New York area. If they were to set up an investigation, and were allowed to take the time to do it right, they had a shot at unearthing the entire network—a much more impressive bust than what they had at the moment.

  It was ambitious, of course, and maybe not even feasible. If they hoped to trace these bills backward through perhaps dozens of intermediaries to the source, they’d probably have to go undercover. And to go undercover, they’d need a point of entry, always the most difficult part of any operation. At the moment, they knew very little about Coonan, Featherstone, or the circles in which they traveled. What they needed was a knowledgeable source to familiarize them with their subject on short notice.

  Enter the NYPD’s Intelligence Division.

  For McCabe, Egan, and the other cops with Intell’s Syndicated Crime Unit, the prospect of working with the Secret Service was a dream come true. Unlike, say, the FBI, who preferred to control their investigations from top to bottom, the Secret Service liked to work in tandem with local law enforcement. Partly, it was because their criminal focus was much more limited than the FBI, making them more dependent on regional intelligence sources. But also, agents with the Secret Service and their sister agency, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, seemed to be under a lot less pressure from higher-ups in the Treasury Department than their fellow agents at Justice.

  Like the Intelligence Division, the Secret Service was willing to allow an investigation to evolve slowly. They knew from experience that a counterfeit conspiracy had many tentacles, and if they moved too quickly in one area they might blow their chance to trace the notes to their source.

  Unlike the Intelligence Division, however, the Secret Service had a sizable budget. This meant that not only were they willing to assign the necessary manpower, but they also provided the necessary tools—like technologically advanced surveillance equipment, the latest weaponry, and plenty of cash for those costly counterfeit buys. Also, with a federal agency like the Secret Service it was a hell of a lot easier to secure the proper court authorization for phone taps and other eavesdropping strategies.

  Once the feds had committed themselves to a full-scale undercover operation, it hadn’t taken the boys from Intell long to come up with a point of entry. It was Frank Hunt, the same cop who’d given Intell their first confidential informant back in late 1977, who got the ball rolling. A rotund and gregarious guy known as Fat Frankie on the streets, Hunt had a “mole” in the neighborhood who was willing to introduce an undercover agent to nineteen-year-old Raymond Steen, Alberta Sachs’s boyfriend and Mickey Featherstone’s next-door neighbor. The word on the street was that Steen had been pushing counterfeit $100 notes up and down 10th Avenue.

  What the cops didn’t know yet was that the counterfeit operation was basically something Mickey Featherstone had cooked up all on his own. Along with Billy Comas, the West Side Mob’s uptown contact, Mickey had been looking to establish some independent financing. Nothing elaborate, he had told Comas, just something where he might be able to make a quick killing. After all, by 1978 Mickey had expenses; he was a married man now with a recently born son and an increasingly expensive cocaine habit.

  Comas, who was of part-Greek extraction, told him about a counterfeit ring he knew of run by a handful of Greek-Americans from New Jersey. It all sounded good to Mickey, who agreed to purchase some notes from Comas.

  To peddle the counterfeit bills, Featherstone turned to Steen, a virtually illiterate young hood who had given himself the pathetically inappropriate nickname “Little Al Capone.” Mickey knew Steen was inexperienced and a potential fuck-up, but he figured, what could go wrong? As with most of the neighborhood gangsters who’d risen to prominence in recent years, Mickey had begun to think he was invulnerable. After all the unsolved homicides in Hell’s Kitchen, it was hard to take the NYPD seriously.

  What Mickey didn’t really stop to consider was that a counterfeit operation, which came under the jurisdiction of the feds, would up the ante considerably.

  “How long’s he been in there?” asked Richie Egan, seated at the window of an empty classroom at John Jay College, across the street from the Westway Candy Store at 827 10th Avenue. It was a clear winter day just before Christmas, 1978. Egan’s binoculars were focused on a black van parked just south of the candy store on the far side of West 55th Street.

  “I’d say about an hour,” replied Secret Agent Donald L’Huillier. “Hasn’t stopped talking either.”

  L’Huillier was wearing headphones that were connected to a small receiver. The voices he was listening to came from a Motorola Motrec transmitter with four microphones, each planted in a different spot inside the black van. As they came over the receiver, the voices were being recorded on a large reel-to-reel tape recorder.

  “Here,” said L’Huillier, handing the headphones to Egan. “Have a listen.”

  Egan clamped the headphones on and heard the squeaky, rapid-fire voice of Raymond Steen.

  “These guys are no bullshit,” Steen was saying. “I mean, it maybe don’t look like it, but these guys are big, man, you know? They don’t fuck around.…”

  Then Egan heard the familiar voice of Ron Malfi, the undercover agent. “I never heard of Coonan, I never heard of Featherstone.”

  “Well, these guys are it, man. I mean, they’re big; they run this neighborhood.… If you know anybody in Brooklyn that’s with the Godfather. I mean, these guys, they sit at a fuckin’ table from here to that cab and Coonan and Featherstone are right next to the main man. He pushes his whole army down for these two fuckin’ guys, you know what I’m sayin’? They’re big. They call ’em ‘the Irish kids’ in Brooklyn, you know? I mean, maybe you come from a different part of Brooklyn.…”

  Egan smiled and handed the headphones back to L’Huillier. “Yes, sir,” he proclaimed. “That’s our Raymond.”

  In the beginning, the investigators hadn’t been sure whether Ray Steen was close enough to the action to provide the information they needed. He was a talker, all right, no problem there. But much of what he had to say seemed either intentionally misleading or outright ridiculous. Sure, he’d led them to the counterfeit notes and that had gotten things off to a great start. But as to his sources, Steen was giving them a lot of conflicting info. One day he would say the bills were being manufactured on a farm in upstate New York, the next he’d say they were coming from down South.

  Yet, as they got to know Steen, he began to divulge more and more until they came to realize he was, in fact, the ideal source—a baby-faced tough guy eager to prove how “connected” he was to just about anyone who would listen.

  Just weeks before, in early December 1978, Steen had been introduced to undercover agent Ron Malfi. A young kid not much older than Steen, Malfi was able to give the appearance of being a streetwise operator with Mafia contacts in Brooklyn. Yet he was also young enough to convincingly feign ignorance when it came to the West Side Mob, which helped get Steen talking.

  The first buy had been on December 11th. Steen sold Malfi three counterfeit $100 notes as samples of the type of bills that were available. Malfi told Steen he was interested in purchasing $2,000 worth of counterfeit as long as the cost was below 50 points, or 50
percent of face value. They agreed on a price of around 30 to 35 percent and made arrangements to speak later. Steen gave Malfi two phone numbers—his home number and the number of the Westway Candy Store. Malfi gave Steen a number he said was for a social club in Brooklyn; actually, it was a Secret Service undercover line.

  Intell kept a close watch on the neighborhood and over the next few weeks Steen and Malfi made four more transactions, the largest being a sale of two hundred $100 notes on January 9th. They eventually agreed to lower the price to 27 points—or $27 for each $100 note—which Steen, lying through his teeth, told Malfi was about half what he was charging other people in the neighborhood.

  In the same deal, Steen sold Malfi stolen American Express traveler’s checks, and told him if he wanted to buy cocaine he could handle that too.

  There always seemed to be long delays between buys. Steen claimed that Coonan and Featherstone, who he described as “his people,” were worried about dealing with complete strangers. Malfi was constantly trying to get Steen to introduce him to his people so he could “put them at ease.” But Steen wasn’t going for it.

  “That can’t work,” he said. “I already found that out. These guys don’t want to talk with nobody.”

  “What’s Featherstone’s big problem?” asked Malfi. “How come he won’t meet with us?”

  “Look, there’s too much trouble with that. A lot of things been happening. It’s so hot, if these guys even knew I used their names I’d get my head chopped off.”

  As backup on the undercover operation, there were always at least a half-dozen cops and agents down on the street and up in the observation post, linked by walkietalkie. Everyone was armed and ready to move if Malfi seemed to be in danger.