Westies

by T. J. English

  Now Crowell was terrified. Last month his old friend Billy Comas had killed himself rather than testify, which is precisely what the government was now asking him to do—in open court. Crowell knew it wasn’t too late to run. His grand jury testimony was inadmissible unless he appeared at the trial. The way Crowell saw it, there were three things he could do. Testify in court and probably wind up dead; take the Billy Comas way out and definitely wind up dead; or go on the lam.

  On May 6th, when Crowell arrived at Rikers Island, Coonan and Featherstone were being held in the same cell block and happened to be together in the recreation area when a guard informed Jimmy that there was a visitor to see him. Coonan wasn’t expecting anyone, nor did he know anyone by the name “Murphy.”

  “You know who I bet it is?” Mickey said to Jimmy. “Crowell.”

  Jimmy smiled. “Yeah.”

  “Fuck it. This guy could be wired or any fuckin’ thing. Don’t go out there.”

  “Nah, I’m gonna go. I’m gonna see what’s goin’ down.”

  When Coonan arrived in the visiting area, there was Crowell, looking nervous and shifty as ever. Coonan walked over and sat down across the table from him.

  “Hey,” said Crowell, by way of a greeting.

  Coonan nodded his head. Since he wasn’t sure whether Crowell was wearing a wire, he planned on keeping his verbal responses to a minimum.

  “You know,” said Crowell, “this is some fuckin’ jam you got me in.”

  Jimmy shrugged.

  “Man, this thing has ruined my whole life, you know. This thing is a big goddamn disaster.… Don’t know what I can do here.”

  Jimmy studied Crowell. “Well,” he said, “what are you gonna do?”

  “Yeah, alright, here’s the deal. If I should decide not to testify.… First of all, they know everything.”

  “Who?”

  “The cops, the government. I was in front of a grand jury.”

  “So I heard.”

  “There were others too, I heard. I dunno …”

  “I know, I know. It’s a real circus, the whole case.”

  “Yeah. But I’m really in a mess here, my life.”

  Crowell went on to tell Coonan that he didn’t want to testify. But if he was going to run he needed “financial assistance” and a false ID.

  “Yeah,” said Jimmy. “We could arrange that, maybe. If you’re serious.”

  Crowell let out a nervous laugh. “Shit … yes, goddamn.”

  “Alright. Gonna give you a phone number. You call this number in a couple days. Give me time to work it out. See what I can do.”

  For weeks after the May 6th meeting at Rikers Island, Crowell walked around in a daze. He’d called the number Jimmy Coonan gave him. It turned out to be the number of a lawyer who put Crowell in contact with Jimmy’s brother, Jackie Coonan.

  Jackie told Crowell he had what was needed. Arrangements were made for Jackie to drop off a manila envelope for Crowell at the Ansonia Hotel. But Crowell got scared and stopped going into work. One day he called in and learned that the envelope had arrived. The next day he called again and asked a fellow worker to look inside the envelope. The guy looked at it and said there was $500 in cash, a blank New York Department of Motor Vehicles license, and other identification papers.

  “Hey, Johnny,” his co-worker said. “I don’t wanna have nothin’ to do with this, alright? Don’t get me involved.”

  Crowell never even picked up the money. All through the summer of ’79, alone in his apartment, he thought a lot about his options—about going on the run, about suicide, about testifying. He hardly slept or ate or even went outdoors.

  He just didn’t know what the fuck he was going to do.

  From the beginning, it was clear that the Whitey Whitehead murder trial was not going to be your average courtroom proceeding. Already, there had been the Comas suicide. That was followed by John Crowell’s nearly having a cardiac arrest in front of the grand jury. Then came the most startling development of all. Judge Edward J. Greenfield, with a reputation as one of the more inventive judges in New York County, decided that the case would be tried before two entirely separate juries—a short-lived idea that nonetheless landed the trial on the front page of the New York Times on November 25, 1979.

  The problem, as far as the judge was concerned, was the murder weapon. In one of their first “motions to suppress,” Hochheiser and Aronson had contended that the gun found in Featherstone’s apartment was inadmissible as evidence, since it was seized during an entirely unrelated counterfeit investigation. Judge Greenfield agreed that the gun was inadmissible against Coonan, but not against Featherstone. It had, after all, been found during a legally authorized search, and there was going to be testimony claiming the weapon belonged to Featherstone.

  The government had given some thought to having two separate trials. But that would have taken too much time and been far too costly. Plus, the prosecution felt that if Hochheiser had a chance to familiarize himself with the witnesses at the first trial, it would give him a tremendous advantage at the second. The best alternative, proclaimed Judge Greenfield, was to have the defendants tried simultaneously by two juries in a single courtroom. When the gun was offered as evidence, the “Coonan jury” would be excused from the courtroom.

  Hochheiser and Axonson were dead set against the one trial, two-jury idea, as was Gustave Newman, Hochheiser’s former associate at Evzeroff, Newman, and Sonenshine, who they’d selected to represent Jimmy Coonan. The prosecutor, Assistant D.A. John Mullady, was initially for it. But he changed his mind after the judge’s ruling began to receive extensive media attention in the Times and elsewhere. Assuming Coonan and Featherstone were convicted, the prosecutor felt the defense might have been able to use the highly unorthodox procedure as the basis for their appeals.

  What Mullady agreed to do next surprised even Hochheiser, Aronson, and Newman. Not only was he willing to go with a single jury trial, but in order to do so he was willing to drop the gun as evidence against either Featherstone or Coonan. The murder weapon—the single most damaging piece of evidence against Featherstone—would not be entered. Mullady apparently felt they had a strong enough case without it.

  On December 5, 1979, more than one year after Whitey Whitehead’s killing in the basement of the Opera Hotel, the trial began in State Supreme Court at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan. An acrimonious tone was set early, as Hochheiser contended in his opening statement that the government witnesses were going to be “desperate men of the worst possible character,” men who would say anything to “satisfy their masters.” Assistant D.A. Mullady objected; Hochheiser objected to Mullady’s objection. And so it went.

  The bad feelings were genuine and had already reached a fever pitch before any of the witnesses ever took the stand. Much of the hostility was based on personality differences between Mullady, a humorless, somewhat priggish practitioner of the law, and Hochheiser, who viewed his profession as something of a contact sport. The die had been cast during a pre-trial conference when, during a heated argument in the judge’s chambers, Mullady jumped out of his chair and challenged Hochheiser to a fistfight. From then on, Hochheiser knew he could push Mullady’s button at will. He often did, especially with his outlandishly frequent motions for a mistrial (a total of sixty-five during the three-week trial).

  One of Hochheiser’s first motions created an incident that eventually wound up in the newspapers. Harold Whitehead’s wife, an Irish-born waitress who would later be called to testify, stood in the spectator’s gallery with her baby. The baby cried frequently, and Hochheiser called for a mistrial on the grounds that the baby was disruptive. He also claimed that the baby had probably been brought into the courtroom as a ploy by the prosecution, a “pathetic” attempt to win the jury’s sympathies.

  When Assistant D.A. Mullady took exception to Hochheiser’s claims and the judge turned down the motion, the defense came up with a ploy of their own. The next day Sissy Featherstone showed up with
two-year-old Mickey, Jr., who also cried frequently. The New York Post later dubbed the incident “the battle of the babies.”

  Along with Hochheiser’s antics, Mullady had other problems to worry about. He’d lined up an impressive number of cooperative informants as witnesses, people who would claim to have first-hand knowledge about Coonan, Featherstone, and the circumstances surrounding the murder of Whitey Whitehead. But as the assistant D.A. was about to find out, cooperative informants don’t always make the best witnesses—especially when they present conflicting versions of the facts.

  As his first big witness, Mullady called Raymond Steen. Freshly scrubbed and dressed in a fine new suit, Steen looked almost respectable. He was obviously nervous, and, at the tender age of twenty, seemed an ideal sympathetic character. Until he opened his mouth. Not only did he sound like a thug, but as the jury, the audience, and a sizable press contingent listened, Steen revealed the first—though certainly not the last—major contradiction in the government’s case.

  According to Steen, on November 21, 1978, the day before the Whitehead murder, Mickey Featherstone had called his apartment and told him to bring over a .25-caliber Beretta that Steen was holding for him. When Steen gave the gun to Featherstone, Mickey supposedly said, “Thanks. I gotta use this tonight on a guy in the Plaka Bar.” Weeks later, Steen said, he overheard Featherstone describing the murder to Donald Mallay at the Westway Candy Store. Featherstone laughed as he told Mallay that he was the one who shot Whitehead, and that Whitehead would not die.

  “I shot him once,” Steen quoted Mickey as saying, “and he wouldn’t go down. So I hit him. I hoofed him. He turned purple but he still wouldn’t go down.”

  By itself, Steen’s story might have seemed plausible. Indeed, Mullady had already used it in his opening statement to underscore the government’s claim that the Whitehead murder had been carefully plotted ahead of time. Yet Whitehead’s own wife, who had taken the stand only moments before Steen, said her husband went to the Plaka Bar that night purely on a whim; it had not been planned or premeditated. So how could Featherstone have known Whitehead was going to be there?

  Hochheiser seized on this detail in his cross-examination of Steen. But it was still early in the trial and the discrepancy didn’t even make the next day’s papers. The reporters, almost all of whom were coming into the story with no real knowledge of the West Side, were there mainly to hear what Steen had to say about an entirely different phenomenon—a phenomenon that they would turn, once and for all, into “the Westies.”

  The name had been bouncing around for some time. Ever since Sergeant Joe Coffey had used it last fall during his televised press conference at the site of the railyard diggings, there had been occasional references in the media to a “loose confederation of West Side gangsters known as the Westies.” Though Coffey was the first to use the term publicly, he later claimed he’d gotten it from the cops in the Midtown North precinct. Whatever its origins, reporters liked the name. It fit nicely into a headline and evoked memories of previous Hell’s Kitchen gangs.

  Since Coonan and Featherstone’s arrest for the Whitehead murder, the New York Post and the Daily News had written dozens of articles on the Westies, usually with unnamed cops as their sources. One of the first was an article in the Post that claimed, with little substantiation, that “New York’s notorious Irish mob, known as the Westies,” were responsible for, among other things, the gangland slayings of Carmine Galante, Anthony Russo, and Angelo Bruno from the Philadelphia mob. This was followed by a number of other articles connecting the Westies to a staggering array of mob hits.

  Another Post article linked the late Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey, “the notorious Irish mobster,” with “at least 30 murders.” The article was typical of many that appeared around the time of the Whitehead trial. Cummiskey’s real casualty total was more like ten or twelve, but apparently that wasn’t outrageous enough for the tabloids.

  Perhaps the most widely read article of all was by Daily News writer Jimmy Breslin. In a column dated April 26, 1979, Breslin, already at the height of his fame, related the “tortured tale” of Mickey Featherstone. Written in Breslin’s inimitable style, it was largely a sympathetic piece presenting Mickey as a victim of war.

  “Mickey Featherstone,” it began, “discharged from the Army after serving as a Green Beret in Vietnam, stared at his sister. His face was the wall of a funeral parlor and his eyes were looking at a log fire that was something else.”

  Breslin’s article didn’t mention the Westies by name; it didn’t have to. That had been done elsewhere. What Breslin did by identifying Featherstone, at least symbolically, as the representative member of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob, was catapult the Westies into the city’s consciousness, where the idea of an old-style Irish mob turned ugly by the horrors of Vietnam would take seed and eventually flower during the Whitehead murder trial.

  As for Coonan, Featherstone, and the other West Side gangsters, they viewed the name with some amusement—at least initially. Although reactions varied from person to person, some gang members took pride in the notoriety they had achieved. But then the Westies began to get linked with mob hits they didn’t have anything to do with, and the gangsters cried foul. Many blamed “Publicity Joe” Coffey, who they felt was trying to advance his career by pinning a bunch of unsolved murders on the West Side Irish.

  By the time of the Whitehead trial in December ’79, Coonan and Featherstone’s official position was to disassociate themselves from the name. The Westies, their lawyers complained to the press, was a media creation, an attempt by the cops and the newspapers to smear the God-fearing, taxpaying people of Hell’s Kitchen. But the more they decried the name, the harder it seemed to stick, until many West Siders began secretly using it among themselves.

  Later, after the Whitehead trial, the name would reach its apotheosis when a number of strange bumper stickers began to appear around the New York area. Mostly they were affixed to the rear bumper of cars with license plates from New Jersey, home of Jimmy Coonan. Modeled after the “I Love New York” bumper stickers that used a red heart in place of the word “Love,” these stickers read: “I ♥ Westies.”

  To some citizens of New York, the stickers might have held no special meaning. If they’d noticed them at all, they might have thought they were a reference to some country-western bar in Passaic. But to most cops, prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers, gangsters—and to those people in the city of New York who read their newspapers assiduously—there was another explanation.

  As the cops and the press trumpeted the existence of the Westies, labeling them, among other things, “the new Murder Inc.,” they catapulted Coonan’s crew beyond the headlines into the mythology of the city.

  Larry Hochheiser stood as close to John Crowell as he could; another two feet and he would have been sitting in the witness’s lap.

  “Sir,” he commanded. “It is your claim, isn’t it, that Mr. Coonan, who you claim shot Mr. Whitehead, it is your claim that he put the pistol to his head, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” replied Crowell. “He put the gun to his head.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just that it was pointed towards the head, and it was fired.”

  “Tell this jury what your sworn testimony is today. Demonstrate on me, if you will, please, what you mean by putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. Would you like to step down? Assuming I am Mr. Whitehead, show what you meant by that.”

  John Crowell was flustered. In fact, he’d been flustered ever since he first took the witness stand the day before, on December 13, 1979. Just like the time he appeared before the grand jury months ago, Crowell was overcome with fear. As the entire courtroom watched silently, Judge Greenfield asked him to give his name and place of birth, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t speak at all.

  A recess was called and Crowell was taken into a back room. After the jury filed out of the courtroom, Crowell’s voice could be heard from behind
the closed door.

  “I don’t wanna get killed! I got a family! They’re gonna kill them!”

  Hochheiser, Aronson, and all the other attorneys and spectators listened. In the back row of the gallery, Crowell’s girlfriend, Victoria Karl, wept openly.

  Two hours later Crowell was brought back into the courtroom and put on the stand. Tentatively, in a voice barely audible even with a microphone, he began to give his version of what happened on November 22, 1978, in the basement of the Opera Hotel. He remembered going downstairs to the men’s room to smoke a joint with his old prison buddies, Bobby Huggard, Billy Comas, and Whitey Whitehead. They were standing in a circle getting high. Then Jimmy Coonan came in. A few seconds later, Coonan stepped forward and shot Whitehead in the back of the head.

  “What happened to Whitehead when you heard the shot?” the prosecutor asked.

  “What happened to Whitehead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whitehead’s face went blank.”

  “What did his face look like before he was shot?”

  “Well, everybody was more or less in good spirits and laughing.”

  “And then after? Describe what you mean by ‘blank’.”

  Crowell squirmed. “Just went lifeless.”

  “Can you show?”

  “It was, pow, just dead.”

  Crowell’s description of the Whitehead murder and its aftermath had the ring of truth. Yet it presented the jury with a dilemma. Already they had heard Ray Steen say it was Mickey Featherstone who planned to kill Whitehead and then bragged about it afterwards. Following Steen, the prosecution called another witness, Robert Bruno, to back him up. Bruno claimed that he, Featherstone, and Mugsy Ritter—the guy Whitehead called a fag on the night in question—got together shortly after the killing went down. Again, Featherstone supposedly bragged that he was the one who had shot Whitey.

  Now here was Crowell, who had actually seen the murder take place. But if the jury was to believe Crowell, then the testimony of Steen and Bruno was contradictory at best, and at worst, just plain untruthful.