Westies

by T. J. English

  For the better part of a day, Hochheiser, and then Coonan’s attorney, Gus Newman, banged away at Crowell. Of particular interest to the defense lawyers was an incident in 1972 when Crowell had slit a guy’s throat in the backseat of a taxi when a methadone deal he was making went bad. There were other arrests for assault and drug use. Even Crowell’s personal life was portrayed as being outside the bounds of normal behavior. At one point Hochheiser asked him, “By the way, your girlfriend, Victoria, does she carry a whip?”

  “Yeah, she had a whip.”

  “What was her business or occupation?”

  “From what I know, it’s dominatrix.”

  “I was just curious.”

  As he had with Steen and Bruno, Hochheiser wanted to show the jury that Crowell was a witness “of the lowest possible character.” Yet he also knew that Crowell’s version of the murder may have raised the specter of reasonable doubt, which was alright with him. The jury had been hearing for days that Mickey Featherstone was the killer. Now Crowell was saying in no uncertain terms that it was Coonan. Hochheiser used this turn of events not only to bolster Mickey’s position as a “maligned innocent,” but to characterize the government’s case as “specious” and the prosecutor as totally incompetent.

  The jury, apparently, was buying it, and during the second week of testimony they took matters into their own hands. They were being asked to choose between the Steen/Bruno version and the Crowell version of the murder, but there was another person they kept hearing about. A person who all of the witnesses claimed had been in the bathroom when Whitey Whitehead got shot.

  The day after Crowell’s testimony, the jury foreman passed a note to the clerk, who passed it to the judge. It contained three simple words: “Where is Huggard?”

  Currently, Bobby Huggard was being held at Rikers Island. He’d been called before the grand jury to testify on the Whitehead shooting and had given a version of the facts that didn’t quite square with the other testimony. Subsequently, the grand jury had indicted him for perjury.

  “Is there some way we can accommodate the jury?” Judge Greenfield asked the lawyers.

  Mullady had no intention of calling Bobby Huggard. He already had his hands full with Steen, Bruno, and Crowell. Even with immunity, he knew, chances were that Huggard would stick with his original testimony. In fact, Mullady had asked Huggard after his grand jury appearance whether he was going to “straighten up and fly right” in time for the trial. Huggard had answered, “I got a cock. I got balls. Know what I mean? I’m a man. You do what you gotta do.”

  As for Hochheiser and Newman, it was obviously to their advantage to have Huggard take the stand and give his version of the facts. Except for one thing: They had based their entire defense on denigrating the government’s witnesses as “scumbags” and “lowlifes.” They couldn’t very well call Huggard, who had a criminal record even more unsavory than the others, and say to the jury, “Now listen to my scumbag; he’s telling the truth.”

  After both the defense and the prosecution made it clear that they would not call Huggard, Judge Greenfield came up with a shocking alternative. He would call Huggard. He would ask the questions. Then the prosecution and the defense would have a chance to cross-examine.

  Greenfield waited until both the prosection and defense had rested their cases to call Bobby Huggard to the stand. As Featherstone and Coonan had predicted, Huggard “did the right thing”—and then some. He testified that he had been in the Plaka Bar on the night in question. He’d had a few drinks with Whitey Whitehead at the bar, then left. At no time did he see Mickey Featherstone, Jimmy Coonan, or John Crowell. Furthermore, he claimed to have had a discussion with Billy Comas a few weeks after Whitehead was murdered in which Comas had said that he, Comas, was the one who did the killing.

  The jury was stunned. This was the first time anyone—the defense, the prosecution or the judge—had heard of this alleged meeting between Comas and Huggard.

  “Exactly what was said?” asked Judge Greenfield. “Tell us how the conversation began, how the subject was raised.”

  “Yes, Your Honor. Mr. Comas said that he had information that I was going around getting drunk, talking in bars about the Whitehead incident.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I denied it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Well, you know, I took care of him and if there is any more conversations the same thing will happen to you.’”

  By the time Mullady got up to cross-examine Huggard, viciously attacking his credibility, the damage was already done. Huggard had fingered a dead man. And the jury had yet another possible scenario to contend with.

  As the jury deliberated, Featherstone, Coonan, and their counsel waited anxiously. Throughout the trial Featherstone and Coonan had sat next to each other, Mickey usually dressed in his blue suit, Coonan in brown. At times they acted like brothers; one would have his arm around the other. They seemed to have grown even closer as the trial wore on.

  No one could be certain what the verdict would be. But just in case, Aronson thought he’d better prepare his client.

  “You know, Mickey,” he said one afternoon. “It could happen that the jury might come through with an acquittal for you but a conviction for Jimmy. That’s very possible.”

  Featherstone had paid close attention to the proceedings. Ever since he and Jimmy had been arrested for the murder, Mickey had felt guilty as hell. Yes, he had been pissed off at Coonan before. He had gone ahead and sold the counterfeit notes even though Jimmy told him it was too risky, even though he knew Ray Steen was dealing with an undercover cop. But he had never expected Steen to flip. That had touched off a series of arrests and a lot of “innocent” people had been dragged into this mess. Mickey never wanted it to turn out this way. If Coonan were convicted and he wasn’t, he’d never be able to show his face in the neighborhood—or in prison—again. In criminal circles, he’d be seen as a classic fuck-up.

  “No,” he told Aronson, emphatically. “That’s no good, Kenny. That can’t be.”

  On the evening of December 21st, after nearly six hours of deliberation, the jury filed back into the courtroom. As Hochheiser waited, he could feel the tension mounting. He wanted an acquittal in this case more than any he had ever tried. He felt he owed it to Gus Newman, his friend and former associate, who had agreed to represent Coonan as a favor to him. Also, throughout the trial Hochheiser’s dislike for the prosecutor, Mullady, had grown. As far as he was concerned, the constant gibes had gotten personal. At one point during a recess Mullady had even suggested that Hochheiser was being paid by the Brooklyn Mafia to represent the Westies. Hochheiser had to laugh at that; he would be lucky to get any money out of his client at all.

  As the jury members filed past the defendants and took their seats in the jury box, they seemed to be avoiding eye contact. Hochheiser took this as a bad sign. “Look,” he said to the others at his table, “whatever happens, let’s be gentlemen, alright? This guy Mullady expects us to act like scumbags. Nothing will piss him off more than us just walking out of here like gentlemen.”

  Then, to Hochheiser’s surprise, Mullady, standing no more than twenty feet across the aisle, began to let him have it.

  “Hey, Hochheiser,” he said under his breath. “You told the jury all about our tricks. You think you know. Well, you been out of the D.A.’s office for a long time, my friend. We got new tricks.”

  Hochheiser was astonished. Judging by the way the jury looked, he thought he had lost the case. Now here was this prick rubbing it in.

  The jury took their seats and the clerk called for quiet. The jury foreman handed the clerk a sheet of paper. Speaking in a voice that echoed to the far corners of the room, the clerk announced, “The jury finds the defendant, Francis Featherstone … not guilty.”

  A loud gasp of relief came from the audience. Many of Mickey’s family were there, including Sissy. The rest of the gallery was made up largely of Jimmy and Mickey’
s Hell’s Kitchen friends.

  The clerk cleared his throat and spoke again. “The jury finds the second defendant, James Coonan … not guilty.”

  Some in the audience cheered. Coonan and Featherstone embraced. The reporters seated in the first two rows of the gallery swarmed towards the attorneys, notepads in hand.

  Larry Hochheiser turned to congratulate the assistant D.A., who looked stunned, his face drained of color, his shoulders slumped.

  “Well, John,” said Hochheiser, sarcastically, “you tried a good case. It could have gone either way.”

  Mullady attempted to raise his arm to shake hands, but his arm was limp.

  The following day, all three daily newspapers carried reports on the verdict. In the New York Post one of the jurors was quoted as saying, “It was a weak case.” The jury knew that Coonan and Featherstone were somehow involved in Whitehead’s death. They knew it was possible they were pardoning two people who had perhaps killed a man in cold blood. But what could they do?

  “The government witnesses,” the juror said, “that was the problem. We thought most of them were lying through their teeth.”

  Within months of the verdict, another of the government’s key witnesses “did the right thing.” John Crowell, who, though terrified, had given the only honest firsthand account of the Whitehead murder, followed in Billy Comas’s footsteps after all. On October 29, 1980, Crowell was found in his apartment in the Ansonia Hotel with a self-inflicted bullet hole in his right temple.

  After Whitehead and Comas, Crowell was now the third casualty from that lone night of brutality in the basement of the Opera Hotel.

  * * *

  To the cops and the prosecutors, the Whitehead verdict and related suicides were a shocking defeat. The whole West Side investigation had reached a crescendo during the trial, with frequent revelations about the dreaded Westies in the Post, the News, and the Times. The Whitehead verdict was supposed to be the grand finale, with the criminal justice system once and for all smashing the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob. Instead, the trial had been a disaster, with a key witness killing himself beforehand, the murder weapon getting thrown out, and people flagrantly perjuring themselves on the stand.

  It was a fucking travesty, as far as Egan, Coffey, and the other cops close to the investigation were concerned. It was an example of everything that was wrong with “the system.”

  But that was only the beginning. Six months after the Whitehead verdict, in June of 1980, Mickey Featherstone was acquitted of the Mickey Spillane murder. Unlike the Whitehead case, which initially appeared to be solid, the Spillane case was thin from the start. All the government had to offer as witnesses were Ray Steen and Alberta Sachs, both of whom claimed that Mickey told them he was the one who did the shooting. Once again, Hochheiser built his defense around the government’s use of “disreputable witnesses.” It took the jury less than three hours to deliver its verdict.

  Then came a trial that, to the cops, was the most maddening of all. Also in the summer of 1980, Hochheiser and Aronson represented Jimmy McElroy, who, after months on the lam in Arizona, had been caught and sent back to stand trial for the murder of William “Billy” Walker. The trial was of special interest to Joe Coffey’s Homicide Task Force, since this was the murder that had gotten Coffey involved in the West Side investigation in the first place.

  It looked like an open-and-shut case. In the Sunbrite Bar on 10th Avenue McElroy had gotten into an argument with Billy Walker, who he knew from their work together in the stagehands’ union. Then, along with Jack Paulstein, McElroy took Walker for a ride in his van to the West 79th Street boat basin, where he stuck a .32 in Walker’s mouth and pulled the trigger.

  As their main witness, the government produced Paulstein, who gave a devastating firsthand account of the shooting. Larry Hochheiser went home that night thinking he had lost the case. Then he came back the next day and did a truly creative number on Paulstein, attacking him for being too certain of the facts to be telling the truth. The jury took nine hours to deliberate. When they came back they not only exonerated McElroy, but one of the jurors was quoted as saying he thought Paulstein was the murderer; he wanted to meet McElroy and shake his hand.

  With three razzle-dazzle courtroom victories in a row, Hochheiser and Aronson became folk heroes in criminal circles on the West Side of Manhattan—and the scourge of the NYPD.

  As crushing as the defeats may have been for the cops and prosecutors involved, there was one major consolation. In early 1980, Coonan and Featherstone had been sentenced on the respective gun possession and counterfeit charges they’d pled guilty to before the Whitehead trial ever began. On January 15, 1980, before Judge Lawrence Pierce in U.S. District Court, Jimmy Coonan was given nearly the maximum sentence on his charge, four years and six months. One month later, on February 14, Featherstone was also brought before Judge Pierce. Pierce listened as Larry Hochheiser pleaded for leniency due to Mickey’s “troubled psychiatric history.” The judge was not swayed.

  “Mr. Featherstone,” said Pierce, after giving Mickey a six-year sentence. “The war in Vietnam is over.”

  For the first time, Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan would be serving simultaneous prison terms. It wasn’t as definitive as the various cops, agents and prosecutors had hoped for. They wanted to put Coonan and Featherstone away for life. But with the two most renowned West Side gangsters going off to prison, they felt reasonably certain that the Westies, so recently lionized in the press, were now a thing of the past.

  They could not have been more mistaken.

  PART III

  13

  BAD BLOOD

  By January 1981, Coonan and Featherstone may have been safely tucked away in federal prisons—Coonan in Pennsylvania and Featherstone in Missouri and then Wisconsin—but the publicity surrounding the Whitehead trial helped elevate Jimmy and Mickey’s reputations to unprecedented heights. The Hell’s Kitchen Mob had always been known within the city’s criminal underworld. But now, with blaring headlines about dismemberment murders, suicidal witnesses, and stunning courtroom victories, the Westies were known and feared in virtually every saloon and union hall west of 5th Avenue.

  Coonan’s and Featherstone’s incarceration also marked the departure of full-time police surveillance on the West Side. Even though it had not been as conclusive as the cops had hoped, the investigation, which lasted over two years, was considered a success. Richie Egan, who along with Sergeant Tom McCabe had spearheaded WEST SIDE STORY from its inception, was relocated to Brooklyn, where he immediately went to work on a case involving Colombian drug traffickers. Sergeant Joe Coffey and his Homicide Task Force also moved on, turning their attention back to the Italians. Soon they would become enmeshed in a massive racketeering investigation involving, among others, Paul Castellano and the Gambino family.

  The cops may have moved on, but the rackets remained the same. There was still loansharking, gambling, narcotics, tribute from the piers, extortion of the ILA and the Teamsters.

  And even from prison, Jimmy Coonan still controlled the purse strings. Given that his four-and-a-half-year sentence was likely to be shortened with parole, it would have been fatally shortsighted for anyone to try and move in on Coonan’s territory simply because he was gone from the neighborhood for awhile. Consequently, the proper respect was accorded Jimmy’s wife, Edna, who now made the rounds in Hell’s Kitchen collecting Jimmy’s weekly payments. Just in case, she sometimes took along Richie Ryan or Jimmy McElroy for protection.

  In Coonan’s absence, one of the Westies’ most lucrative rackets continued to stem from their relationship with Vincent “Vinnie” Leone, business manager of ILA Local 1909 and a long-time shill for the Gambino family. Leone had gone into business with the Irish Mob following Coonan and Featherstone’s meeting with Paul Castellano at Tommaso’s Restaurant. A loud and gregarious old-time union official, the silver-haired Leone helped lead the Westies into new areas of extortion.

  First, there was the outdoo
r concert season on Pier 82, sponsored every summer by the Miller Brewing Company. Leone saw to it that every stagehand and carpenter who worked the concerts kicked back a portion of his or her wages to the Local, part of which was passed on to Edna Coonan when she made her weekly rounds. She also picked up a portion of the proceeds from the concerts, which were almost always sellouts involving top name acts such as Elton John, Miles Davis, and Diana Ross.

  Then there was the USS Intrepid, docked directly across from the Local 1909 offices at West 48th Street. A massive aircraft carrier that had seen distinguished service in World War II and in Vietnam, the ship was opened as a museum in early 1982. Through Temco Service Industries, the ILA controlled some thirty jobs on board, including ticket takers, engineers, and general maintenance personnel.

  Almost from the day it opened, the Intrepid Air-Sea-Space Museum became the Westies’ private bounty. Sissy Featherstone and some of the other gang members’ wives worked there as ticket takers. In time, Sissy and the girls devised a little money-making scam of their own. They would save previously sold tickets, resell them, and keep the profits for themselves, sometimes taking home an extra two or three hundred a day. After another Westie, Kenny Shannon, became the timekeeper at the Intrepid, Sissy stopped coming to work altogether—except, of course, to pick up her weekly paycheck.

  The Intrepid also became a great way to dole out favors and settle old scores. In August of 1982 Bobby Huggard was put to work on the Intrepid. Huggard had been an okay guy with the Westies ever since he perjured himself at the Whitey Whitehead murder trial and almost singlehandedly secured an acquittal for Coonan and Featherstone. After the trial, in a holding pen at Rikers Island, Jimmy Coonan thanked Huggard and told him if ever he needed a job he would have no problem getting one on the West Side of Manhattan.

  Once on the Intrepid payroll, Huggard was told to do absolutely nothing, for which he was paid a handsome $227 a week. A couple of times he even showed up for work. But he quickly became bored and only showed up on Fridays to get his paycheck—one of a growing list of Westie-related “no-shows.”