Westies

by T. J. English

  Of all the extortions that flourished in Jimmy’s and Mickey’s absence, perhaps the most lucrative came from Teamsters Local 817, the theatrical truckers union that delivered props and cameras to and from movie locations. In the early 1980s, with the dramatic increase in movies and commercials being filmed in New York, the Teamsters signed a new contract with the entertainment industry. As a result, drivers for 817 became among the highest paid of any Teamster local in the city. The captain or field boss on an individual job earned somewhere around $2,000 for a five-day week; a driver just under $1,800; a helper just over $1,700.

  Local 817 had always been good for something. Back in the mid and late 1970s, when the Local’s main offices were located on 9th Avenue between 41st and 42nd streets, Coonan frequently suggested to his people that they sign on with the Teamsters. That way they would have documented employment, which would keep their parole officers happy and give them a better shot at getting bail if they were ever arrested. Not many took him up on it at the time, but through Coonan the West Side Mob had always kept one foot in the door. When Local 817’s wage rates increased in the early ’80s, the Westies sought to make the Local their own.

  For a legitimate worker, full-time membership in the union took years to secure. First you had to be sponsored by a union member. After that, you could begin shapingup for work at one of the many prop and trucking outlets on the West Side affiliated with Local 817. Eventually, if you stuck with it long enough, you might be eligible for one of the Local’s seven hundred or so union cards or “books,” which guaranteed you work without having to shape.

  In 1982, while Coonan was away in prison, Thomas “Tommy” O’Donnell, long-time president of Local 817, proclaimed that he was going to purge the union’s membership of its traditional gangster element. To do this, O’Donnell turned to what he believed to be a rival gangster element, the Italians, and took out a contract on Jimmy Coonan—or at least that’s what the Westies were told by the Italians.

  In response, Jimmy McElroy and Kevin Kelly, a relative of Jimmy Mac’s through marriage and an up-and-coming Westie in his own right, made a trip out to Local 817’s new offices in Nassau County, Long Island. They pistol-whipped O’Donnell in his office and slapped around Edward Fanning, the Local’s vice-president, out in the parking lot. The two men were told that from now on, whenever Jimmy Coonan or one of his people needed a union book, it was to be given to them immediately. O’Donnell said that there were only so many union books; the best he could offer was that Coonan’s people would be given preferential treatment when they shaped-up for a job.

  “Oh yeah?” McElroy replied. “Well then, we’re gonna kill one union member a week till there’s enough openings for our people.”

  The West Side boys had no trouble getting union books after that. McElroy, Kelly, Richie Ryan, Coonan’s younger brother Eddie, and others became card-carrying union members with erratic work records. As Jimmy Mac later joked, “You gotta be a sleeper, a drinker, or a card player to be a member [of Local 817].”

  Throughout the early ’80s, the Westies’ fortunes grew in other areas as well. Narcotics, which Jimmy Coonan had always frowned on, became a profitable racket in his absence. Fifty-year-old Tommy Collins, his wife Florence, and their son Michael became neighborhood coke dealers, selling grams out of their apartment in the Clinton Towers building on 11th Avenue and 54th Street. Mugsy Ritter, forty years old, black-haired, and mustachioed, and a young neighborhood kid, Billy Bokun, whose distinguishing characteristic was a garish red birthmark that covered the right side of his face, also went into the cocaine-selling business.

  Sports betting also became a more organized and lucrative racket in the early ’80s. James “Jimmy” Judge, superintendent of a building on West 55th Street just off 9th Avenue, ran a thriving gambling business in his basement office. It was bankrolled by, among others, Vinnie Leone, Jimmy McElroy, Kevin Kelly, and Kenny Shannon—the timekeeper at the Intrepid.

  As the rackets flourished, the specter of violence continued to hover over Hell’s Kitchen, though the backdrop had changed. In November of ’81, Edward I. Koch was reelected to a second term as mayor. In the previous four years, he’d presided over a hectic period of development throughout the city. His reelection assured more of the same. Gentrification, a by-product of the Koch years, became a common word in the city’s lexicon as wealthy real estate barons, in the absence of strict zoning laws, ran roughshod over long-standing communities.

  As a low-income neighborhood in close proximity to the theater district and midtown Manhattan, Hell’s Kitchen was ripe for development. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, huge office towers servicing some of the most powerful law and advertising firms in the world went up along 8th Avenue. Condominiums and co-op apartment buildings were being constructed to house the financial analysts, lawyers, and investment bankers who now worked in the area. Inevitably, long-time residents were displaced.

  But the violence that had characterized the area for generations continued, as if the neighborhood were going through its last death throes before being reincarnated as “Clinton,” the name for Hell’s Kitchen now favored by real estate interests. Between 1981 and 1983 there were at least seven unsolved homicides believed to be Westierelated.

  One involved Henny Diaz, a low-level neighborhood gambler. In January of ’81, Diaz was last seen heading to a party at Manhattan Plaza, a recently built forty-six-story apartment complex on 43rd and 10th Avenue. The next time Diaz was spotted, he was flying through the air after having been tossed out the window of Manhattan Plaza in the middle of the afternoon. He landed on a car parked on 10th Avenue.

  The autopsy showed that Diaz had been dead for days, possibly even a week, from multiple stab wounds. The rumor around the neighborhood was that Diaz had been murdered during a gambling dispute. His dead body lay in the bathtub of an apartment at Manhattan Plaza at least three days before the killer decided to toss it out the window.

  Police questioned nearly every tenant in the building, but nobody knew nothin’. It would go down in the books as one more unsolved homicide in Hèll’s Kitchen, the neighborhood where dead bodies literally fell out of the sky.

  An even more outrageous killing, one that sent shockwaves through the neighborhood more than any murder since Paddy Dugan blew away his best friend Denis Curley in August of ’75, was the murder of Tommy Hess in the 596 Club. Hess, who’d been a bartender in the saloon since the early 1970s, supposedly had slapped a girlfriend of twenty-eight-year-old Richie Ryan’s one night in another neighborhood bar. Ryan and Hess were once good pals. They’d both been in the 596 Club the day Ruby Stein got whacked. Hess had stood guard outside while Jimmy C showed Richie how to dice up a human body. But in recent years Richie Ryan had become uncontrollable. He was shooting dope into his veins and drinking a fifth of whiskey a day. Once known for his pleasant good looks, he was now bloated, burned out, and more violent than ever.

  In retaliation for Tommy Hess’s having smacked his woman, Ryan came into the 596 Club on the night of February 26, 1982, and pistol-whipped his former friend. Then, in front of numerous unnamed witnesses, he pulled Hess’s pants down around his ankles, stuck a revolver up his rectum and squeezed the trigger.

  Everyone fled from the bar. By the time the cops arrived, Hess was dead and there wasn’t a witness in sight.

  It was an act worthy of the bar’s previous owner, Jimmy Coonan, who’d divested himself of the 596 Club in 1979. Not long after the murder of Tommy Hess the bar closed, then reopened under the name T-Bags as a respectable “fern bar” geared towards the neighborhood’s newer residents. Long gone were the memory of Denis Curley, Ruby Stein, Tommy Hess, and dozens of others whose blood had been shed at the same location over the generations.

  At the same time that Hell’s Kitchen was undergoing its latest transformation, Mickey Featherstone had been shipped out to Springfield, Missouri, and then a federal penitentiary in Oxford, Wisconsin. He was doing his time quietly for a change. It was hi
s first stint ever in the federal system, and he was surprised by the amount of time devoted to actual therapy and rehabilitation. Among other things, he wasn’t immediately pumped with psychotropic drugs designed to neutralize his behavior, as he had been in his earlier stays in hospitals and prisons throughout New York State.

  His daily routine included regular afternoons of group therapy. It had taken him awhile to get used to the idea of acknowledging his problems even to himself, much less to a group of inmates. But after a few months, he began to look forward to these sessions. He had never really talked freely about his life with people like himself, people from the street. He was amazed to find other inmates who felt the same way about things as he did. In one session, he even wept openly—something he’d never done in front of anyone, other than Sissy, in a long, long time.

  Far from the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, Featherstone began to feel an optimism and peacefulness that seemed overwhelming at times, as if it were part of some purification process he did not, or could not, fully understand. On one occasion, he tried to explain these emotions when he wrote to his friends and lawyers, Larry Hochheiser and Ken Aronson.

  “Hi all,” he began, in a letter dated July 28, 1982. Mickey had just come from a parole hearing, and he wanted to let Hochheiser and Aronson know how well it went. “I’m really shocked,” he wrote. “I can’t really believe the way things are starting to turn out for me!” After promising his lawyers that he was determined to stay out of trouble from now on, he thanked them for all they’d done to help him. “I don’t know how I could ever pay you back in the way of money, but if there were a way I would. But you didn’t save me for money reasons, but for a very rare kind of love for which I’ll always love and remember you.”

  It was signed, “I love you all, Mickey.”

  On July 26, 1983, after serving just over four years of his six-year sentence, Mickey Featherstone was paroled and released to a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey. He spent a few weeks there before being reunited with his wife and family, which now included their ten-year-old niece, Esther, who had moved in with Sissy following the suicide death of Sissy’s sister.

  Shaken by her sister’s sudden death—the sixth of Sissy’s eleven brothers and sisters to die from either an overdose, murder, or suicide—she and the two kids had moved out of the neighborhood and into a small apartment in New Milford, New Jersey. Sissy had a steady income from her job at the Intrepid and other assorted financial dribs and drabs: $100 a week from white-haired Tommy Collins, who owed Mickey $5,000 from a shylock loan; $1,000 every now and then from Mugsy Ritter’s coke business; and $150 a week from the neighborhood bookmaking operation, which she received from Edna.

  The pittance from Edna was a source of bitterness that had festered inside Sissy since the day Mickey was arrested in early 1979. While she was constantly hustling around to make ends meet, Edna was raking in thousands every week just by making Jimmy’s old rounds. Initially, she had even accompanied Edna on her shylock runs just to make sure she and Mickey got their cut. In the months during and after the Whitehead trial, she and Edna would come back from Rikers Island after visiting their husbands, and spend the afternoon trying to hunt down the likes of Tommy Collins, Tony Lucich, and dozens of others.

  “It’s funny,” Edna would say, munching on a hot dog while driving the Coonans’ big Caddy. “When your husband goes away, nobody wants to pay. They always seem to disappear on you. Well, when Jimmy gets back, he’ll take care of ’em.”

  Eventually, Sissy got fed up with the whole thing. She grew tired of watching Edna stuff her face and brag about all the possessions they had in their New Jersey “mansion.” Sissy finally cut her ties with Edna and, after moving to New Milford, with just about everybody else in the old neighborhood as well. She knew that Mickey was getting screwed out of money just because he was away in prison. She knew that people were using his name in their various criminal dealings and not paying him for it. But she tried not to let it bother her. She had been trying to get Mickey to cut his ties with Coonan and his people for a long time anyway. So maybe this was all for the better.

  When Mickey got back in August of ’83, they talked about it. He was upset that his wife had not been taken care of. In Hell’s Kitchen, it had always been understood that if one of the neighborhood people wound up in prison, the other gang members were supposed to look out for his family. It was a tradition that had existed since the earliest days of West Side gangsterism. It annoyed Mickey that Coonan and the others had not lived up to their end of the bargain. But, like Sissy, he was not going to let it bother him. Still basking in his new “positive attitude,” which he had acquired in the prison therapy sessions, he was determined to try and make it on his own, away from Hell’s Kitchen, away from the Westies.

  Mickey’s first big test came in September ’83, just a few weeks after he returned from the halfway house in Newark. Late one afternoon he drove into Manhattan to pick up Sissy from work at the Intrepid Air-Sea-Space Museum. He was waiting outside, leaning against his car when along came silver-haired Vinnie Leone, whose office was less than two blocks away.

  The burly forty-eight-year-old union boss gave Mickey a big hug and said how nice it was to have him back. He asked Mickey to come over to the office to say hi to “the guys.”

  There were three or four men playing cards at a table in the front room when Leone and Featherstone entered the red-bricked ILA offices. Mickey recognized John Potter, who he and Coonan had once shook down at the Landmark Tavern, and Tommy Ryan, whom he also knew from his dealings with the ILA. Mickey shook hands with Potter and Ryan, then Leone led him into a back office.

  “I was just up to see Jimmy a week ago,” said Vinnie, as they sat down across the desk from one another.

  “Yeah,” answered Mickey. “How is he?”

  “Good, good. You know Jimmy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, Mick, everybody’s real happy to have you back here. No shit. Things’ve been goin’ good, real good.”

  To illustrate his point, Leone pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and peeled off a few twenties.

  “Here,” he said, handing some money to Mickey. “Here’s a hundred. But that’s chickenshit. Just some chump change to get you started. They’ll be more from now on. Way more.”

  “Nah,” said Mickey, “that’s alright.”

  “What?”

  “No, thanks. I don’t want it.”

  Leone laughed and tried to stick the bills in Mickey’s shirt pocket. “C’mon, take it, you crazy bastard.”

  “Nah. Look, Vinnie, I appreciate what you’re doin’. Don’t get me wrong. But I got a clean slate right now; I’d rather just go my own way.”

  Leone stared at Featherstone. “Wait. Am I hearin’ this? Mickey-fuckin’-Featherstone? This is a fuckin’ joke, right? That’s what this is.”

  “No, Vinnie, I’m serious. I just wanna give it a try.”

  Leone stuck the bills back in his pants pocket. “Okay, Mick, but I gotta tell ya, Jimmy C ain’t gonna like this one bit.”

  Mickey just shrugged.

  For a while, Featherstone did his best to maintain the pact he’d made with himself and his wife. His brother-inlaw got him a job as a bartender at the Cameo Lounge, a catering hall in Garfield, New Jersey, where he made a modest living wage. Mickey and Sissy’s most immediate problem was their apartment. It was far too small to accommodate a family of four.

  Ever since they’d had their first child, the Featherstones dreamed of having a big house far from Hell’s Kitchen. Both Mickey and Sissy knew all too well what it was like to grow up amidst the street violence, drugs, and assorted other perils that plagued the West Side. They’d seen how Jimmy Coonan, by moving away from the neighborhood, was able to insulate his family not only from the daily violence of Hell’s Kitchen, but from the constant threats and dangers they might have faced because of his life as a gangster.

  Jimmy Coonan’s children, they were sure, didn’t get ost
racized at school because their old man was a well-known criminal in the neighborhood. Jimmy and Edna Coonan, they were sure, didn’t have to deal with landlords who wanted to evict them for being undesirable tenants.

  For weeks following Mickey’s return from prison, he and Sissy spent their weekends driving around New Jersey looking for a house. They didn’t really have enough money to buy anything at the moment, but they could dream.

  One day in the fall of ’83, they saw a house they both loved on Newbridge Road in Teaneck, New Jersey, just thirty minutes from midtown Manhattan. It was a splitlevel Colonial, with a separate room for the baby, a swimming pool, and a big front yard. The mortgage was a reasonable $92,000, and the realtor said he would give it to them for $5,000 down.

  That night they discussed their options. They knew they weren’t likely to find anything that suited their needs as well as this house. But the money was a problem. They had so little saved up that if they were to spend it all on the down payment and closing fees they would be totally wiped out.

  The way Mickey saw it, there was only one way to go. “Let me try Jimmy,” he said. “Just this one time.”

  Sissy was against the idea. As bad as she wanted the house, she knew that if they borrowed the money from Coonan, it would come with a price tag that far exceeded the money itself. But Mickey was persistent. He was certain there would be no problem getting a loan from Jimmy on the up-and-up.

  “Jimmy owes me,” reasoned Mickey. “He knows he owes me. Besides, if it does come with any strings attached, I’ll just say no.”

  Reluctantly, Sissy acquiesced.

  A few weeks later, in October, Mickey went to see Edna Coonan at her home in Hazlet. In a way, he was upset he had to beg like this, though he was trying not to think of it as begging. As far as he was concerned, it was money Jimmy had promised him. After the Whitehead verdict three and a half years earlier, just before Mickey was shipped out to Missouri, he and Jimmy had said their farewells at Rikers Island. “Don’t worry,” Jimmy told him. “I’ll take care of your wife and kids. We been through hell together. When you get out? There’s gonna be fifty grand—cash—just waitin’ for you.”