Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (55 page)

The Mafia had been involved in various West Side rackets at least since Prohibition, when the Combine was an ethnically diversified operation. There had been an uneasy working relationship between Irish and Italian racketeers in the neighborhood ever since. The Italians conceded the West Side docks to the Irish largely because they had their own waterfront fiefdoms in Brooklyn and New Jersey. Other areas of potential underworld commerce were more commonly in dispute; among them were two huge sources of gangland patronage, both located on the outer fringe of Hell’s Kitchen territory. One was Madison Square Garden, the city’s premiere sports arena, then located at Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue. The other was the New York Coliseum, a massive convention center at Fifty-ninth Street and Eighth Avenue.

Both of these venues employed hundreds of people. The Garden, in particular, had been a source of employment for local Hell’s Kitchen residents since the day it opened in 1925, and Mickey Spillane’s influence over ticket-takers, ushers, and Teamster jobs at the Garden was one of his most important symbols of power. The Coliseum, built in 1956, was another gangster’s paradise, with as many as fourteen different unions involved in the daily running of the place—contractors, union management, and the mob all looking for a piece of the action.

For years, patronage jobs and rackets like gambling, policy, and loan-sharking at both the Garden and the Coliseum had been equally divided among Spillane’s Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob and the Genovese crime family based in upper Manhattan. Spillane had inherited this arrangement when he succeeded Hughie Mulligan as the West Side boss. To Spillane, who was basically a neighborhood racketeer with no interest in exploring a more expansive business relationship with the Mafia, the arrangement seemed like a one-way street—a shakedown. As he once said to an underling, “Those buildings are in our territory. The Italians got no right demanding their pound of flesh.”

By the 1960s, Spillane had nowhere near the muscle to even think of taking on the Italians mano a mano. Instead, he waged a guerilla war, flagrantly violating certain ground rules that had been established by an earlier generation of mobsters. Spillane’s antics elicited a degree of mutual distrust, which no doubt took a turn for the worse when he snatched Eli Zicardi, who ran the policy games for Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese family.

The snatch racket had been a common gangster activity since the earliest days of the gangs. Spillane had been a practitioner early in his criminal career, often snatching legitimate neighborhood businesspeople and holding them for ransom; he gave up this menacing activity once he started to envision himself as a semilegitimate figure in the community. Kidnapping mafiosi, however, was fair game. It was a curious aspect of Spillane’s relationship with the Italians; he occasionally kidnapped wiseguys right off the street, held them for ransom, then let them go once he was paid. The Italians often knew that Spillane was the culprit, but they were willing to tolerate the activity as long as nobody got hurt, and the ransom never exceeded the $10,000 to $15,000 range.

But something went wrong with the Zicardi kidnapping. The ransom was delivered. Zicardi, however, disappeared from the face of the earth. There were no immediate repercussions, but Spillane must have known the Italians would come looking for their pound of flesh.

If the relationship between the Irish Mob and Cosa Nostra had been tense before, it was now entering a whole new era of paranoia, especially for the neighborhood boss. Over one shoulder, Spillane had to watch out for the guineas, who had crews and soldiers spread throughout the five boroughs of New York. Over the other, he had to watch out for a new generation of hoodlums coming of age in Hell’s Kitchen, any one of whom might challenge his authority the minute he showed signs of weakness. It was a predicament, to say the least, one that would pass through numerous permutations and close calls over the following months until one cold fact became clear: As formidable an enemy as
la famiglia
might have seemed to Mickey Spillane, the far more dangerous threat was the enemy within.

Death and Taxes

The Irish American underworld was and always had been a Darwinian universe. Those who survived did so through a combination of guile and ruthlessness. Some, like Spillane, were lucky. They ascended to the top through attrition and being in the right place at the right time. Others had to kill to get what they wanted.

James Michael “Jimmy” Coonan was thirteen years younger than Spillane. Born on December 21, 1946, he grew up in Hell’s Kitchen when the neighborhood was in a transitional phase, passing through the prosperous waterfront era into the “white flight” years of the 1960s. Although there were pockets of real poverty in Hell’s Kitchen, Coonan, unlike many Irish kids who got drawn into the neighborhood’s glorious gangster tradition, came from a respectable middle-class background. His parents, John and Anna Coonan, were certified public accountants and the proprietors of Coonan’s Tax Service located just a block away from the Coonan family home at 434 West Forty-ninth Street.

As a teenager, Jimmy was only five foot seven inches tall, but stocky, with a thick neck, broad shoulders, and a full head of striking reddish-blond hair. He showed some promise as a boxer and would later hone his skills at various penal institutions. Although he was a reasonably affable youngster, he was also known to have an explosive temper. Once, at the age of sixteen, he got in a fight with a neighborhood kid. The kid wound up in a local hospital with nearly sixty lacerations on his face and body; Coonan wound up doing a short stint at the Elmira Reformatory for juvenile delinquents.

One of young Coonan’s more notable characteristics was his overriding ambition. His plans did not include school; he dropped out at seventeen and began running with the neighborhood’s established criminal element. Because of his boxer’s physique, it was assumed he would be one of a dozen strong-arm types, the kind of kid a more established racketeer might enlist to do the dirty work. Coonan willingly took on this role, but only as part of a larger design that involved the most renowned of underworld motivations: revenge.

Neuroscientists contend that the concept of payback is deeply rooted in human physiology; when people are wronged or insulted, a part of the brain is stimulated, the same part that triggers feelings of hunger and desire. The Irish may not have an exclusive monopoly on the notion of vengeance, but some Irishmen have been known to make it their own. The entire Irish American underworld in Boston nearly eradicated itself as the result of an overstimulated adrenal gland. The world of the gangster has always been inordinately susceptible to cycles of revenge, predicated as it is on a more direct kind of justice—street justice. This is why officers of the law sometimes refer to hot, gangster-prone neighborhoods as self-cleaning ovens.

In Hell’s Kitchen, legends were based on a person’s ability to do the right thing, which could mean taking matters into one’s own hands. Owney Madden was able to build an underworld empire on the strength of his early reputation for revenge, which led to his ascension as boss of the Gopher Gang. Exhibiting a talent for payback was one way an Irish American hoodlum distinguished himself.

Jimmy Coonan had been weaned in Hell’s Kitchen and spent time in the reformatory, which was a precursor to prison. He knew an opportunity when he saw one. Coonan had a bone to pick with Mickey Spillane, and, like an aspiring Wall Street broker fresh out of college, he seized on that fact as a way to make a name for himself in a highly competitive workplace. Back in Spillane’s kidnapping days, Spillane and his crew allegedly snatched Coonan’s father and held him for ransom. As Coonan would tell it over the years, Spillane pistol-whipped his father for no good reason. After a small ransom was paid, the neighborhood accountant was let go.

This act of humiliation did not sit well with young Jimmy Coonan or with his older brother Jackie. The Coonan brothers vowed to get even, first through a campaign of harassment. They routinely called the Spillane home at all hours of the day and night and said to Spillane’s wife, children, or whoever else answered, “Nobody’s safe in this house, you hear me? We’re gonna kill every one of youse.”

Mickey Spillane got wind of these calls and stormed over to Coonan’s Tax Office. On the street outside the office, he slapped Jimmy Coonan’s father and told him, “Leave the families out of this. Understand?”

Undoubtedly, Spillane believed that, with his reputation and standing in the community, he could force the Coonan brothers to back down. But he underestimated the extent of young Jimmy Coonan’s rage. What followed was a legendary period of violence in the neighborhood that came to be known as the Coonan-Spillane Wars.

Like most underworld contretemps—at least the Irish American version—the Coonan-Spillane Wars started in the bars and spilled out into the streets. In March 1966, a neighborhood gangster affiliated with the Spillane organization was taken from a saloon on Tenth Avenue, driven to a deserted back alley in Queens, and filled with lead. It was Coonan’s first known kill, undertaken with his brother Jackie and a couple of older gangsters whom Jimmy had methodically rallied to his cause. Spillane’s response was to snatch one of those older gangsters, Eddie Sullivan, who had aligned himself with Coonan, and give him a beating in the back of the White House bar.

A few days later, Spillane and a group of associates were headed to a late-night card game on West Forty-sixth Street between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues. On any given night, there were half a dozen casinos operating in various Hell’s Kitchen apartments, where games like blackjack, craps, and roulette were played. It made good business sense for Boss Spillane to make an occasional appearance at these casinos, as he got a sizable piece of the action. But he also happened to be a notorious addict, generally known on the street as a degenerate gambler. On this particular night, Mickey and a crew of seven or eight pals were walking along the dark street when, suddenly, someone opened fire from a rooftop. Spillane and the others all ducked for cover as bullets sprayed down like rain.

“Holy shit!” one of the crew exclaimed. “Who the fuck is that?”

Spillane leaned forward and peered up toward the roof. “It’s that bug Jimmy Coonan. He’s got a machine gun!”

They had to stay down for a while until Coonan ran out of ammunition. Then they scampered off to their card game.

On another occasion, in the middle of the afternoon, Coonan and Spillane were seen exchanging words on Tenth Avenue. They both pulled guns and traded fire, just like in an old-fashioned Western shootout.

For the people of Hell’s Kitchen, the onset of the Coonan-Spillane Wars had ominous overtones. By the late 1960s, the era of the gangster as lovable rogue and provider of harmless vice had been buried under decades of gangland killings, exploitation of labor unions, political corruption, extortion of local businesses, and general thuggery and intimidation in the bars and on the street. For some members of the community, Spillane represented the last vestiges of decency in a tradition that had gone to seed. The fact that he was under siege seemed to be part of a larger social maelstrom that included shocking political assassinations, ongoing violence in the Vietnam War, tumultuous antiwar protests throughout the country, and a general disrespect for authority that appeared to be undermining the very foundation of American life.

In Hell’s Kitchen, the fear and paranoia trickled down into the social fabric of the neighborhood and found its focus in the Coonan-Spillane Wars. Nearly everyone was forced to take sides. Rumors swirled that Spillane had flown in professional hitmen from Texas and Boston to take out Jimmy Coonan. The Coonan brothers began to circulate in the neighborhood, establishing alliances and demanding loyalty oaths from bar owners and tough guys. In a tight, cloistered community like Hell’s Kitchen, where the Coonans and Spillanes were both well-known, residents found themselves in a dangerous position.

One night in March 1966, an old-time bartender at Pearlie’s Bar on Ninth Avenue was accosted by the Coonan brothers and Eddie Sullivan. They looked demented, as if they’d been up for several nights without sleep. Sullivan, a large brute of a man, carried a black chrome submachine gun partially concealed by his trench coat.

“Where’s Spillane?” eighteen-year-old Jimmy Coonan demanded of the bartender.

“He was in here this morning,” said the man, “but I ain’t seen him since.”

The older Coonan, Jackie, glared at the bartender. “Whose side you on anyway?”

“What?”

“Don’t play dumb. You heard me.”

The bartender hemmed and hawed. He knew the Coonans well—in fact, John Coonan, Jimmy and Jackie’s father, had been the best man at his wedding. But he was also friendly with Spillane, with whom he played cards on a weekly basis and thought of as the neighborhood godfather. “Come on Jackie,” he said. “I’m on nobody’s side, you know that. I walk right down the middle.”

There was mumbling among the three gangsters. The bartender thought he heard Jackie say, “He’s a fuckin’ liar, and we oughta get rid of him.” To which Jimmy said, “No, he’s okay. Let him live.” The Coonans moved on that night; the incident was just one example of the perilous nature of friendship in Hell’s Kitchen during the time of the Coonan-Spillane Wars.

On April Fool’s Day, 1966, Jackie Coonan got spooked at a bar in Queens and shot the bartender dead. He was arrested on the spot and hauled off to jail.

Shaken by his brother’s incarceration, Jimmy Coonan only became more desperate and paranoid. Three nights after Jackie Coonan’s arrest, Jimmy, Eddie Sullivan, and two others from their crew were getting drunk at an East Side bar called the Pussycat Lounge. Eddie Sullivan got into a heated discussion with two male patrons and became convinced that they were hired hitmen flown into New York by Spillane. Sullivan and Coonan produced police badges and pretended to be cops. They rounded up the two patrons and drove them across the Fifty-ninth Street bridge into the borough of Queens. In a vacant lot across from Calvary Cemetery, they stopped, took the men from the car at gunpoint, and stood them up against a stone wall. Then they shot them both, hitting one directly in the face and the other multiple times in the body, and left them for dead. Miraculously, one of the victims survived; from a gurney in a hospital emergency room, he was able to give the police a detailed account of what went down.