Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (67 page)

At the time, McElroy almost panicked, but he laughed about it now as he related the story to Featherstone. All the car windows had been rolled up, he said, and the shots were so loud that they rang in his ears for hours afterward.

“Two days later,” said McElroy, “we drove over to the prison and visited Jimmy C. We told him we took care of that Italian fuck, Leone, and now we wanted the piers, just like he said.”

“And?” asked Featherstone.

“He said, ‘You got it, you know. Long as Mickey’s in it with youse.’”

Okay, thought Mickey. All right. So they finally got to the point. Mickey was ready for this, so ready he even had a little speech prepared.

In a coke-induced torrent, Featherstone let it all out, expressing anger about his wife and family not being taken care of while he was gone. If he were to come back, he said, things would not be the same. “’Cause I ain’t in it for friendship no more,” said Mickey. “And I ain’t in it for loyalty. I’m in it for one thing: money.”

McElroy and Kelly both assured Mickey that things would be better this time and that the piers were theirs to do with as they pleased. From now on, anytime Mickey’s name was used by any member of the crew in any transaction, he would get his cut.

“We’ll make sure of that,” promised Kelly.

In the days and weeks that followed, the word spread like a hot tip at the race track: Mickey Featherstone was back. He stopped showing up for work at Erie Transfer and instead began making the rounds, tying up loose ends on behalf of the Westies. He met with ILA officials from Local 1909 and told them that if they didn’t resume making full weekly payments to the gang, they were going to wind up like Vinnie Leone, with their brains splattered all over the inside of a car. The president of Teamster Local 817 was told that if he didn’t provide the requisite number of union books for certain West Side workers, the gang would kill one member of his local a week until there were enough openings for their people. All freelance operators on the West Side—loan sharks, drug dealers, sports betting operations—were told that they had better fork over a percentage to the Westies, or they would be put out of business.

Within months, Featherstone was pulling in $4,000 a week, twice what he’d been making while working a legitimate job. He finally had enough money to make a down payment on the house in Teaneck. The timing was perfect. Sissy had recently given birth to their third child, and she was already pregnant with a fourth.

Mickey was happy about the kids and the house, but other than that he didn’t seem to give a fuck. He was zonked out on coke and booze much of the time. Those who knew him noticed that he seemed to be reverting back to the old Mickey Featherstone—angry, unfocused, violent—all of it geared toward one thing: an inevitable showdown with his former friend and mentor, Jimmy Coonan.

The Return of Jimmy C.

From the beginning of the Irish American underworld, loyalty was the glue that held everything together. In the famine years, when the Irish arrived en masse—starving, disease-ridden, and despised by the Anglo-Saxon elite—banding together was not a choice but a survival mechanism. The Irish became known as clannish for this very reason. Seen as human cockroaches by society at large, they relied on one another and devised social systems by which they were able to crawl out of the woodwork and advance, whether others liked it or not. For these social systems to operate successfully, loyalty was considered essential, whether it was to the church, the police department, the union, or the gang.

Loyalty is a positive value, but also a trait highly susceptible to manipulation. The very nature of loyalty implies a willing dispensation of power; a person pledges loyalty to something other than him or herself, knowing that he or she is giving up an element of personal choice. Given the magnitude of this proposition, a pledge of loyalty is often accompanied by a ritual or ceremony of some kind.

For Jimmy Coonan, the ritual involved the bloodletting, dismemberment, and disposal of a human body, which was always done in consort with other gang members. An outsider might surmise that Coonan was exposing himself to potential prosecution by creating witnesses to his grisly acts, but Jimmy figured that he was doing just the opposite. Men who cut up a body together entered into a pact so horrible that they were not likely to talk about it with others; it was like a pledge of loyalty: Coonan’s version of the West Side Code.

Jimmy was counting on the West Side Code when he returned to the neighborhood in December 1984, after an absence of over four years. At first, everyone tried to act as if nothing had changed. There were a series of meetings on the West Side with Featherstone, McElroy, Kelly, and others in which Coonan sought to lay out his agenda for the 1980s. There were a number of people who Jimmy felt needed to be killed. One of them was a former West Side resident named Michael Holly. Coonan and other Westies wanted Holly dead because they believed he had played a role in the death of another gang member many years before. There had been a contract out on Holly’s life for at least eight years, and Coonan felt it was an embarrassment to the gang that it had never been resolved.

“It makes us look disorganized, weak,” said Jimmy one afternoon at the Skyline. “Who’s gonna take care of this?” He looked directly at Mickey, but Mickey just glared right back and said nothing.

“Billy Bokun needs to do this job,” interrupted McElroy. “It was his brother who got killed.”

Coonan let it slide. After the meeting on Tenth Avenue, he and Featherstone exchanged small talk. It was awkward—like a husband and wife coming together after a long separation and realizing the magic is no longer there.

Coonan was seen in the neighborhood only sporadically after that. He was spending nearly all of his time with the Italians. His old buddy, Roy DeMeo, had been murdered by his own people; Coonan’s new point man was Danny Marino, a Gambino family capo based in Brooklyn.

To people on the West Side, Jimmy looked and acted different. When he was with Danny Marino and other mafiosi, he was deferential, almost like a lackey. “I never seen the guy act the way he does with those people,” said McElroy.

Featherstone particularly disliked Danny Marino, who dressed like a parody of a mafiosi, all silk, gold chains, and diamond-studded pinky rings. He made fun of Marino and the other Italians, referring to them as Al Calognes, which made Coonan angry.

“Whether you like it or not,” said Coonan, “we got business to do with these people. Besides, you could learn a thing or two from them.”

Among Jimmy’s assorted ventures with the Italians was a construction contracting firm he was in the process of starting with his brother-in-law. Marine Construction, based in Tarrytown, just north of Manhattan, was going to serve as a front for the Gambino Crime family; Coonan would use his West Side connections to obtain lucrative no-bid contracts, with the spillover going to the Gambinos. New York was experiencing a construction boom in the mid-1980s, so the arrangement had the potential to make millions for Coonan and the Italians. Jimmy had said nothing about this arrangement to his fellow Westies and apparently had no intention of sharing Marine Construction with them.

In addition, there was the Jacob Javits Convention Center, which had finally begun construction after nearly seven years of planning. Many lives had been lost in the power struggles over who was going to control construction contracts and other racketeering-related ventures associated with the largest convention center in the United States. The building was on the West Side and belonged to the Irish Mob. Coonan, not wanting to jeopardize his relationship with the Gambinos, had not advocated very strongly for his people. It looked like the convention center was going to be up for grabs, and the Irish would have to fight for their rightful piece of the pie.

Some members of the Westies were livid. In Hell’s Kitchen bars, Featherstone, McElroy, Kelly, and other longtime gang members began to voice the unthinkable:
Jimmy don’t want to be one of us no more. He wants to be an Italian. He needs to be taken out.
Featherstone was considered the number two man in the gang, so everyone turned to him. Mickey was equally pissed off that Coonan was turning over everything to the Italians, but he wasn’t sure whom he could trust. From deep within his own paranoia, Mickey half-believed the gang was out to get him, not Coonan. He certainly didn’t trust young Kevin Kelly, who seemed to be scheming to take over the West Side rackets. McElroy, he believed, was more loyal to Coonan than to him. The others would follow whoever wound up on top.

One person Featherstone did trust was Billy Beattie, the longtime Westie who had been marked for death by Jimmy and Edna Coonan. When Beattie heard that he was on Coonan’s hit list, he fled the neighborhood and never returned, hiding out in the Catskill Mountains in Upstate New York. Through Beattie’s brother, Featherstone got word to Billy that he wanted to talk to him.

A frightened Billy Beattie met with Mickey one afternoon near Central Park, far from Hell’s Kitchen.

“I just wanna tell you one thing,” Billy told Mickey, getting right to the subject that was on both their minds. “If Coonan’s gonna kill me, I want you to know why—the real story.”

Mickey smiled. He’d always liked Beattie, who was the designated comic relief of the Westies, a guy who could be counted on to puncture a tense situation with a joke or a funny comment. “Hey,” said Mickey. “You don’t have to tell me. I’ll tell you.”

Beattie looked startled.

“I’ll bet Edna tried to hit on you.”

“How the fuck did you know?”

“I don’t know, man, I just figured.”

Beattie explained how Edna, whom he’d dated years ago before she married Coonan, had found out where he was staying. While Jimmy was away in prison, she’d started calling up and making sexual advances. Beattie would hang up on her, but she’d call again the next night.

“That’s the whole reason she wants me dead. And that bitch probably told Jimmy I’m the one that was coming on to
her
!”

“Billy,” said Mickey, “I don’t wanna kill you, okay? I don’t intend to kill you. Neither do any of the other guys, ’cept maybe Jimmy. I believe he wants to kill me, too. So, you know, what else can we do? It’s like, kill or be killed, know what I’m sayin’?”

It had finally come to this. Featherstone, Beattie, McElroy, and the others agreed that Coonan needed to be whacked. They came up with various half-baked plans, then passed along a gun to Billy Beattie, who was given the assignment. But Billy got cold feet and refused to carry out the hit alone. At one point, the gang considered hiring a black guy to dress up as a Rastafarian, go out to Hazlet, and gun Jimmy down in his suburban Jersey neighborhood. If the shooter were black, the cops would never think to trace the hit to the Westies. Everybody liked that idea until they realized there probably wasn’t a single black person in all of Hazlet; any Rasta seen in that neighborhood would probably be arrested on general principle.

The whole thing reached a low point one afternoon around St. Patrick’s Day, 1985, when the gang put on bulletproof vests, piled into a car, and drove out to Hazlet, hoping to catch Coonan at home. “The house that Ruby built,” they called Coonan’s home at 15 Vanmater Terrace because Jimmy had purchased the place with money he saved by murdering Ruby Stein. They drove around the neighborhood for an hour or so bitching about Jimmy and Edna, passing a joint around and getting high. They never saw Jimmy that day.

Although everyone was trying to act tough, the thought of killing Jimmy Coonan was fraught with bad connotations. If the Westies had been mafiosi, the hit would have probably been cleared with higher-ups, all uncertainty assuaged and potential consequences agreed upon beforehand. But when it came to the Irish, a hit was a hit, let the consequences be damned. The gang’s subterranean concerns about what lay ahead made it hard for them to pull the trigger. After Coonan was gone, who would control the West Side rackets? Who would give the orders? The possibilities were paralyzing.

Although the hit had not happened by mid-April, everyone felt it was imminent. Maybe it would take place right on Tenth Avenue when Coonan drove by in his brand new black Mercedes. Maybe it would happen in a restaurant when he was eating pasta with one of his goomba friends. Or maybe it would be quiet, and Jimmy Coonan would just disappear one day, his body made to “do the Houdini” just as he had made so many other bodies disappear over the years.

The underworld had a way of creating its own bad karma. Even though everyone believed the Coonan hit was bound to happen, it never did. Instead, the tables were turned: An old Westie nemesis named Michael Holly got gunned down in broad daylight, and Mickey Featherstone, whose life with the gang had been an emotional roller-coaster ever since he returned from prison, was going to take the fall.

The murder took place outside the Jacob Javitz Convention Center, where forty-year-old Michael Holly worked as a laborer. On the afternoon of April 25, 1985, Holly was on his lunch break, walking along West Thirty-fifth Street toward Clarke’s Bar on Tenth Avenue. It was a few minutes before noon, with plenty of people on the street to witness a beige station wagon with New Jersey license plates come careening down the block. The car screeched to a halt near Holly, who had no idea what was happening. From the passenger side of the car, a man with sandy-blond hair bolted to the street and opened fire on Holly, hitting him five times. Holly’s final words were, “Aaaargh…You dirty motherfucker.” Then he fell to the pavement and died.

The morning after the Michael Holly murder, Mickey Featherstone, his wife Sissy (then six months pregnant), and their stepdaughter arrived at Erie Transfer on West Fifty-second Street. Mickey was there to pick up a paycheck. The second he stepped out of his car, he was surrounded by a swarm of NYPD cops and detectives, all with their guns drawn. He was quickly separated from his wife and stepdaughter, handcuffed, and placed under arrest.

“Mind tellin’ me what for?” asked Featherstone.