Westies

by T. J. English

  “Whitehead,” he was told.

  “Nope,” said Mickey, “you’ll never make it stick.” Then he put out his hands for the cuffs.

  Five weeks later, Jimmy Coonan was arrested in New Jersey for the same killing. While in custody at the Tombs, both he and Mickey were booked on federal counterfeit charges.

  Days later, in a totally unexpected development, Featherstone was taken from custody by Sergeant Joe Coffey of the Homicide Task Force, driven to central booking in Queens and charged with the 1977 murder of Mickey Spillane—a murder he swore he didn’t commit.

  At Featherstone’s arraignment on the counterfeit indictment in late April, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ira Block laid it all out for Ken Aronson. Block’s indictment alone contained a whopping thirty-one counts. Then there were the two homicides, Whitehead in Manhattan and Spillane in Queens. In addition, there was a parole violation, plus other charges. Assuming conviction, Block told the lawyers Mickey was facing a minimum of fifty years, but it would probably be more like two hundred. Under normal circumstances, Aronson might have dismissed the prosecutor’s claims as hyperbole. But as he surveyed the damage, he had to admit Block’s projections were not unrealistic.

  Block told the attorney he thought there was a way out.

  “Yes?” asked Aronson.

  “Get your client to become a cooperative witness.”

  Aronson had been expecting Block to make the offer, though he wasn’t looking forward to it. The idea of approaching a client with an offer like this was not something that pleased him. For one thing, if he was the messenger it might look to the client like he was the one pushing the idea. By the same token, if the offer was made and he neglected to convey it to the client, and that client later got convicted, he might be understandably upset at not having been given the option.

  “Look,” Aronson told Block, “here’s what we can do. I’ll bring my client to your office and tell him not to say anything. You tell him whatever you want to tell him.”

  The day after the arraignment, Featherstone was brought to Ira Block’s office at 1 St. Andrews Plaza in lower Manhattan. Block made his pitch. After he was done, Mickey asked to talk to his attorney privately.

  “Kenny,” he said firmly to Aronson after the Assistant U.S. Attorney had left the office. “I’ll do anything you and Larry ever want me to do. But never ask me to be a stool pigeon. No. Never. Fuck them.”

  With that out of the way, the various legal parties were free to negotiate a plea. Featherstone’s main concern was the charges against his wife. The feds had Sissy’s voice on the wiretaps sounding a lot like an accomplice in the counterfeit operation. Also, in their search of the apartment they’d confiscated a large cache of counterfeit copper slugs. Apparently, Sissy and Alberta Sachs had been using the slugs in the washing machines in their apartment building and in place of tokens on the New Jersey Turnpike. In other circumstances it might have seemed laughable; but here it gave prosecutors the chance to add one more violation to the indictment.

  The U.S. Attorney’s office was willing to drop Sissy from the counterfeit indictment and allow her to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge for possession of the copper slugs. But only if Mickey pleaded guilty to counterfeit possession, which carried a possible ten-year sentence. As for Coonan, they were willing to drop the counterfeit charge—not much of a concession, since they really didn’t have anything linking him to the crime. But they did have Coonan on a gun possession charge—the gun that had been found in the trunk of his car following the night at Spartacus, the brothel on East 55th Street. For that, they wanted Jimmy to plead guilty to a five-year max.

  With the Whitehead trial still pending and the counterfeit case virtually unwinnable, Featherstone and Coonan reluctantly agreed to accept the government’s offer. Mickey copped a plea on the counterfeit charges, and Jimmy took the rap on the gun possession.

  Hochheiser and Aronson were relieved to have the voluminous counterfeit indictment out of the way. But they were wary. They knew that for the government to allow those charges to go untried after such a lengthy and expensive undercover investigation, they must have felt they had a sure thing with the Whitehead case. Avoid a long and expensive federal trial, then nail ’em in state court on a murder rap. That, apparently, was the strategy.

  Once again, normally Aronson and Hochheiser might have dismissed this strategy as bravado on the part of the prosecution. But as they began to focus their attentions on the Whitehead case, they got that sinking feeling they sometimes had when the evidence in a case came at them from all sides.

  For one thing, there was the murder weapon. During the raid on Mickey Featherstone’s apartment, the feds had found a .25-caliber Beretta sitting on a shelf in the bedroom closet. They photographed its location, dropped it in a cellophane bag, and added it to the long list of items seized. Later, during their debriefings with Raymond Steen, Steen was asked about the Whitey Whitehead murder. Steen said he’d never heard of Whitehead, but he did know something about a killing Mickey and Jimmy had done uptown at the Plaka Bar. The gun in that murder, Steen said, was the gun that was found in Mickey’s apartment.

  Ballistics ran a check, using the empty shell casing and bullet that were found on the bathroom floor where Whitehead was killed. Bingo! The casing and bullet matched the Beretta found in Featherstone’s apartment.

  The fact that the cops were able to ID the murder weapon had surprised the hell out of Coonan and Featherstone. They thought Jimmy McElroy got rid of the casing and the bullet on the night of the murder. In addition, Featherstone later gave the gun to Donald Mallay, their so-called expert gunsmith, and told him to make the gun untraceable. Mallay had altered the threading inside the barrel of the gun and told Mickey it could never be traced.

  So much for criminal professionalism. McElroy fucked up, and Mickey and Jimmy should have gotten rid of the gun anyway, since ballistics experts matched the casing with the shooting mechanism, not the barrel.

  As if finding the murder weapon weren’t enough, it looked like there were going to be multiple eyewitness accounts of the Whitehead murder. Huggard, Crowell, and Comas had been identified as Whitehead’s companions that night and would probably be subpoenaed. There was no telling what they would say once they were questioned.

  Featherstone and Coonan, still protesting their innocence, told their attorneys that of the three people who might “claim” to have witnessed the murder, there was only one they could be sure would “do the right thing”—Bobby Huggard. Huggard, in fact, had originally been arrested as Harold Whitehead’s killer. The greeting card from his girlfriend found next to the body had Huggard’s fingerprints on it. But Huggard was a stand-up guy, willing to take the rap himself if he had to. Even while in custody, he kept his mouth shut. When Featherstone and Coonan were finally arrested and charged, Huggard was released—with a grand jury subpoena in his hand.

  As for John Crowell, he was crazy and high-strung. There was no telling which way he was going to go. He’d been a friend of Whitehead’s at one time and could be looking to exact revenge on Coonan and Featherstone. But Crowell was also a lifer who’d done enough time behind bars to have absorbed the jailhouse ethic. He would know that if you rat on somebody in a courtroom, quite possibly you or someone in your family winds up getting the worst of it.

  Then there was fifty-five-year-old Billy Comas. Under normal circumstances, Coonan and Featherstone would have been able to vouch for Comas. He was tight with a lot of the West Side crowd, and especially close to Mickey and Sissy. But already they had been hearing disturbing rumors about Comas’s cooperating with the cops on the counterfeit investigation. That didn’t necessarily mean he would be taking the stand against them, but it sure as hell wasn’t an encouraging sign.

  It was still early. But as they got deeper into preparations for the Whitehead trial, Hochheiser and Aronson realized that Comas was potentially the most troublesome witness against them. John Crowell alone was not credible. The prosecution would need c
orroboration. If Coonan and Featherstone were right and Huggard could be expected to toe the line, then Comas was the man in the hot seat. He was the one who could do the most damage.

  On March 22, 1979, two weeks after Featherstone’s arrest, Officer Richie Egan and his partner, Detective Abe Ocasio, were driving north on 8th Avenue, heading towards Hell’s Kitchen.

  “You really think we’re gonna find anything?” Egan asked his partner.

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t know. You’d of asked me a month ago I woulda said no way. But now …” Egan’s voice trailed off, the implication being that these days, with the stories they were hearing from Ray Steen and Alberta Sachs, anything was possible.

  It was one of these stories that had launched Egan and Ocasio on their current undertaking, the search of a basement at 442 West 50th Street. The building was a fivestory tenement where Sachs used to live with her mother, Catherine Crotty, Edna Coonan’s sister and Jimmy’s sister-in-law. During a recent debriefing session, Alberta had told the cops about a night in November of ’75 when her uncle Jimmy Coonan and Eddie Cummiskey came by the apartment to borrow some kitchen knives. About two hours later, she said, they returned carrying a plastic garbage bag with Paddy Dugan’s head in it, and they told her they were going down to the basement to get rid of it. As far as Alberta knew, it was still down there somewhere.

  The story about Paddy Dugan’s head was just one of many outrageous yarns the cops had been hearing from Alberta and Ray Steen since they began their cooperation. Some of the stories, the cops figured, had to be horseshit—like Steen’s claim that Jimmy Coonan had some kind of a machine he used to grind up human bodies.

  “What kinda machine?” they asked Steen.

  “You know,” said Ray. “A machinelike thing. But first he drains the blood.”

  Under normal circumstances the cops might have laughed, called Steen a whacko, and let it go at that. But there were so many outlandish stories about Coonan and Featherstone, coming from so many different sources, that eventually they had to take them seriously. After all, Paddy Dugan did disappear without a trace, as did Ugly Walter and Rickey Tassiello. Ruby Stein’s severed torso did wash ashore out in Brooklyn. And there were about a dozen other known but unsolved homicides. Every lead, no matter how outrageous, had to be checked.

  By the time Egan and Ocasio arrived at 442 West 50th there were two or three other cops from Intell’s Syndicated Crime Unit there, including Sergeant Tom McCabe. There were also a few cops from the Crime Scene Unit, Detective John O’Connell from the Chief of Detectives office, and Greg Derkash of the U.S. Secret Service.

  Within minutes, Alberta Sachs arrived, accompanied by two armed U.S. marshals. Then the entire assemblage, led by Alberta, made its way to the basement of the building. It was a comical sight, this nineteen-year-old kid leading no less than a dozen cops and agents on what some might have called a wild-goose chase. But here they were.

  Once they were in the basement and flicked on the lights, Alberta froze in her tracks. “No. It’s all different. Everything’s different.”

  The others watched silently as Alberta walked around the basement pointing out where her Uncle Jimmy used to take target practice, and where her boyfriend Ray used to shoot arrows at a dummy dressed up in his father’s clothing.

  But it was all changed now. Things had been moved around. Even the boiler was new.

  The cops did a quick search of the premises. They found a wooden target with bullet holes in it from a small-caliber weapon. There were some holes in a wall that looked like bullet holes. They also found some hair particles that might be human hair, though it looked more like what it later proved to be: animal hair. The cops were out of the basement within an hour.

  Egan and Ocasio laughed about it later that afternoon. Maybe they would have found Paddy Dugan’s head down there, or human bones. Who the fuck knew? With the West Side investigation, just about anything was possible.

  They were still chuckling about it when a call came over the radio at 3:45 P.M. They were told to get to a phone and telephone Alpha Base immediately. Both Egan and Ocasio knew it had to be serious if headquarters wasn’t willing to put it out over the radio.

  “Listen,” said Sergeant McCabe when Egan got him on the phone, “get over to the Opera Hotel next to the Plaka Bar. You’ll meet Donnelly and Aab there.”

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s Billy Comas. Some kind of trouble there, we’re not sure what.”

  As Egan maneuvered through traffic on the West Side, he thought about Comas and his refusal to testify in front of a grand jury investigating the Whitehead murder. Comas said his cooperation agreement with the feds only covered the counterfeit investigation. In fact, he’d already worn a recording device in his meetings with “the Greeks,” just like he’d promised. But nobody told him the Manhattan D.A.’s office had big plans for him as their star witness in the Whitehead case. Nobody told him that he’d have to take the stand and rat on Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone, right there for all the world to see.

  They were offering him the Witness Protection Program, but Comas wasn’t crazy about it. He’d thrown a few temper tantrums already, claiming that the feds lied to him and set him up. But he wasn’t getting a lot of sympathy. Now a date had been set for his appearance before the grand jury. There was no way out. He was destined for prison if he didn’t show up and tell the full story. And destined for something worse if he did.

  By the time Egan and Ocasio pulled up in front of the Opera Hotel at 2166 Broadway, a slew of cops was already there.

  “Emergency Services just went up,” Detective Donnelly told Egan. “We got reports of a shot fired.”

  The police had commandeered the hotel elevators. There were at least fifteen cops now, including patrolmen from the 20th Precinct, detectives from Homicide, Intelligence cops, and Secret Service agents—just about everyone with an interest in the West Side investigation.

  Egan arrived at Room 1505 within minutes of the Emergency Service Unit. It was a small room with a kitchen off to the right, a hallway to the left with a bathroom, and at the end of the hallway a tiny bedroom.

  Egan entered the bedroom; there were three or four Emergency Service cops already there. On the floor, lying propped up next to the bed, was Billy Comas, short, grayhaired and balding. There was a bullet hole in his right temple, a .32-caliber automatic in his right hand.

  Egan found out later that Comas had telephoned Ira Block in the U.S. Attorney’s office and told him he’d made a decision to “check out” rather than testify. The cops were immediately dispatched to Room 1505. They had been banging on the door when they heard the shot. When they burst in, this was how they found Comas.

  In the days following the suicide, Egan and the other Intelligence cops wondered if Coonan and Featherstone had gotten word to Billy Comas that he better not take the witness stand. Or maybe Comas felt a sense of loyalty to the West Side guys and didn’t want to become a rat. Or maybe it was something personal. Maybe his daughter, with whom he had a close relationship, was against the idea of disappearing into the Witness Protection Program, against having to assume a whole new identity and live a life of constant fear.

  One thing was certain: Billy Uptown was now out of the picture. For good. And that didn’t bode well for the prosecution in the upcoming Whitey Whitehead murder trial.

  * * *

  Billy Comas’s untimely death soon became Topic A among everyone with a vested interest in the trial. To Hochheiser and Aronson, it was a godsend. Now that Comas was dead, he could be anything you wanted him to be—including the guy who shot Whitehead in the bathroom of the Opera Hotel.

  As for the other potential witnesses in the case, the shot that killed Billy Comas had a particularly meaningful resonance, one that was certainly not lost on John Crowell.

  On May 6, 1979, roughly six weeks after Comas’s suicide, John Crowell made a trip to Rikers Island penitentiary, where both Mickey Featherstone and Jimm
y Coonan were being held. It was a short trip from Crowell’s apartment in Astoria to Rikers, just up the BrooklynQueens Expressway, near LaGuardia Airport. Crowell arrived in the middle of the afternoon, signed in under the name “Murphy” and asked to see Jimmy Coonan.

  Crowell had a lot of things on his mind. Before the Whitehead murder, his life had been looking pretty good. He’d just landed a steady job as a superintendent at the Ansonia Hotel, a landmark hotel near the Plaka Bar then under renovation. He was in charge of a crew of some thirty maintenance and construction workers. He’d also just begun a relationship with Victoria Karl, a woman he’d met one afternoon in Central Park. It wasn’t exactly Easy Street, but Crowell’s life was looking about as “normal” as any ex-con, ex-heroin addict had a right to expect.

  Then, purely by chance, he happened to stop by the Plaka Bar on the night of November 21, 1978, and things took a drastic turn for the worse.

  In December ’78, a few weeks after the murder, in a bar in the Bronx, Bobby Huggard claimed that Crowell was the one who had planted his girlfriend’s love letter on Whitehead’s body. Crowell insisted he didn’t know what Huggard was talking about. From what he’d heard, it was Billy Comas who’d planted the letter on Whitehead’s body.

  But Huggard wasn’t buying it. In the Bronx that night, he stabbed Crowell in the side with a six-inch blade. Luckily for Crowell, it was a short knife and the bar was crowded. The fight got broken up fast enough to let him escape alive—though with his insides hanging out.

  After recuperating from the stab wound, Crowell was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury. On April 18, 1979, he’d gone there like he was supposed to, but when he walked into the courtroom he froze. He wasn’t even able to say his name. A judge threatened to cite him for contempt, but he still couldn’t speak. Finally, after postponing his appearance for a week, Crowell was given total immunity from prosecution for anything he might say. On April 25th, he appeared before the grand jury and reluctantly told the complete story of what had happened in the Plaka Bar.