The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (25 page)

One of two line-ups that Mickey Featherstone (second from left) was required to stand in following the murder of Michael Holly.

“I already ate a plateful,” said Mickey, laughing. “What, you want I should wind up with a fat belly like youse guys?”

Mickey felt Jimmy kick him under the table, but the Italians didn’t seem to mind the joke; they laughed good-naturedly.

Meanwhile, outside in the main area of the restaurant, Alberta Sachs and Maher were dining among the normal everyday patrons. Ever since she had watched Mickey and Jimmy being led towards the back room, Alberta’s curiosity had been eating away at her. It took constant vigilance on the part of Maher to keep her from trying to sneak a peek.

After they’d been sitting there for more than an hour, she couldn’t resist anymore. She told Dick she was going back to the ladies’ room, but she had every intention of trying to find out what was going on behind that closed door.

Alberta walked down the short hallway past the restroom doors. After looking around to make sure no one was watching, she put her ear against the door. She could hear the muffled sounds of men talking and laughing but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Frustrated, she went into the ladies’ room to freshen up.

When she stepped out of the bathroom, an elderly Italian gentleman was just coming out of the back room. Alberta didn’t see him at first and as she opened the door she accidentally bumped into the man, knocking his cigar out of his mouth. Flustered, Alberta bent down to pick it up, but the man bent down also.

Thwack!
went their heads.

Alberta was embarrassed now. She tried to make it look like she was drunk and didn’t know what was going on. When the elderly gentleman just smiled politely and continued on into the men’s room, she finally got a good look at him. For a second, she thought she was going to pass out.

The man she’d smacked heads with was none other than Paul Castellano, the Godfather himself.

After everyone at the meeting had finished eating, Jimmy and Mickey were taken to the Vets and Friends social club, a nondescript storefront two doors down from the restaurant with the shades pulled shut and an American flag in the window. Inside, the club was populated with thirty or forty immaculately dressed mafiosi. There were a few card games underway and some people were watching a hockey game on TV, but mostly it was just gangsters drinking, laughing, and talking.

Jimmy and Mickey were introduced as “the kids from Manhattan” to a number of people in the room, including Nino Gaggi’s nephew Dominick Montiglio, the former Green Beret who Mickey had heard about earlier.

After a while, Castellano took Jimmy and Mickey aside and talked to them more about their new alliance.

“If ever you are called to come to Brooklyn,” said Big Paulie, “you must come—no questions asked. And you don’t bring weapons. No weapons allowed inside the club.”

Mickey could feel the sweat begin to run down his back when Castellano said this, since he currently had a .25 stuffed in the crotch of his pants and a .38 in his belt at the small of his back. As far as he knew, Jimmy did too.

“Another thing,” continued Castellano, “I do everything I can to keep my name out of the newspapers. You boys been attracting too much attention. Publicity is not good for us. I once had to buy a story from a reporter just to keep it from being published. I was happy to spend the money and the reporter was smart enough to accept.…

“Because when I get a thorn in my side, it’s never a problem for me. I just pull it out and get rid of it.”

After they were in the club about thirty minutes enjoying the Cuban cigars, fine whiskeys, and general hospitality of the Brooklyn Italians, Jimmy and Mickey realized it was well past nine o’clock. They had told the boys back in Hell’s Kitchen they were supposed to come in shooting if they didn’t hear from them in two hours, and the time had already elapsed.

“Holy shit,” Mickey whispered to Jimmy. “We gotta get outta here and make a phone call.”

“I know,” replied Coonan. “Least we gotta get outside. This way, they drive by they see us and know we’re okay.”

Trying to stay cool, Jimmy and Mickey said their goodbyes and maneuvered Roy Demeo, Nino Gaggi, and a few of the others they were talking with out to the sidewalk, where they’d be easily spotted by any cruising car.

It was a clear, pleasant evening. They stood in front of Vets and Friends for a while engaging in small talk, but Jimmy and Mickey were hardly paying attention. They were on the lookout for their own people, armed with machine guns and hand grenades, bent on revenge.

Finally, the group split up. Sweating, Jimmy and Mickey rushed to a phone booth and called Featherstone’s home number.

Back in Hell’s Kitchen, Jackie Coonan, Richie Ryan, Billy Beattie, and Ray Steen had spent the evening sitting around Mickey’s apartment, drinking beer and watching TV. When two hours were up, someone suggested they better head out to Brooklyn. “Nah,” Jackie said, nervously, “give ’em another few minutes.” Before long, those “few minutes” had stretched to a half-hour.

“Where the fuck you been?” Mickey asked incredulously when Jackie answered the phone.

“Where the fuck
you
been?” replied Jackie.

“No, where the fuck you been!?”

“Hey, where the fuck you been!?”

“Okay, forget about it. Tell your brother.” Mickey shoved the phone at Jimmy.

Coonan listened for a few seconds, then told Jackie to “shut the fuck up,” adding, “I shoulda known better’n to leave somethin’ like this with you lame brains.” He hung up.

Jimmy and Mickey laughed about it in the car on the way back to Manhattan. For Jimmy, the meeting had been successful beyond his wildest dreams and nothing could spoil that. He’d thought they were gonna get whacked. Instead they were now directly tied in with the most powerful organized crime group in the United States. It was a fantasy come true.

He promised Mickey he was going to “take care of him” for making the trip. There was going to be lots of money now—additional money from the piers, loansharking, extortion of the unions, gambling, hijackings, burglaries, and more. Supposedly, Mickey would be getting a sizable cut.

“You’ll see,” said Jimmy. “This is gonna make us big, bigger’n anybody on the West Side’s ever been.”

Mickey had enjoyed the meeting, and he certainly liked the idea of making more money. But all he could think about was what would have happened if Jackie Coonan, Richie Ryan, and the others had shown up like they were supposed to and opened up on the Vets and Friends Social Club. Most of the big-time Mafia leaders in New York City had been there. No doubt it would have been one of the most apocalyptic hits in the history of organized crime.

“Man, can you imagine?” asked Mickey, who smiled gleefully every time he thought about it. “Now
that
woulda been somethin’.”

Over the course of the next few months, Jimmy and Mickey met often with members of the Gambino hierarchy. There were a few meetings with Paul Castellano and his bodyguard, Thomas Bilotti, in Little Italy. There was a meeting with Nino Gaggi at the Vets and Friends Social Club in Brooklyn. There were many more meetings with Roy Demeo and members of his Canarsie crew, both in Brooklyn and on the West Side of Manhattan.

Mostly, these were meetings to exchange information. When they met with Castellano and Bilotti, Coonan wanted to pass along information he’d heard concerning a planned hit against one of Castellano’s underlings. In the Gaggi meeting, it was information about a series of hits that had already taken place. And with Demeo, there were a broad range of topics revolving mainly around money. Following the death of Ruby Stein, Demeo had become Coonan’s primary financier. So there was always money to be borrowed or loanshark payments to be made.

For Jimmy, it was a comfortable arrangement. The Italians seemed to expect very little from him, other than a commitment to share 10 percent of his profits—a nebulous demand given the nature of underworld bookkeeping. In exchange, Coonan and his people were now able to go around saying they were “connected,” thereby strengthening their position on the West Side.

But to those who now comprised the inner circle of Jimmy Coonan’s crew—Featherstone, Billy Beattie, Jimmy McElroy, Richie Ryan, and a half-dozen others—the Italian connection was met with something less than overwhelming enthusiasm. As far as they were concerned, it was the latest in a series of moves Coonan initiated on his own and then expected gang backing on.

There had been grumbling ever since the Ruby Stein hit. One of the reasons everyone had quietly played along with that killing was Jimmy’s claim that once Ruby was gone, it would wipe everyone’s slate clean. But after the murder, Coonan went around the neighborhood telling people that from now on they owed
him
the money. Only three or four guys were in deep enough with Stein to be directly affected by it, but even those who weren’t felt Coonan was being devious and cheap.

Furthermore, there were rumors spreading around the neighborhood that Jimmy was giving his Italian buddies more than their share of the neighborhood rackets, and that he treated the guineas better than his own people. As Tony Lucich later put it, “I never seen Coonan show nobody respect like he did Roy Demeo.”

Whenever Mickey heard about Jimmy and the Italians it gave him an uneasy feeling. On the one hand, Jimmy had treated him right. In March of ’78, a few weeks after the meeting at Tommaso’s, Jimmy met him on the street outside Tony Lucich’s 10th Avenue apartment and told him he’d just put $5,000 into the numbers business for him. From that point on, he said, Mickey was to get 25 percent of the numbers money. In addition, Mickey would now be getting $200 a week for driving Jimmy around on his shylock runs. A guaranteed $400 or $500 a week was a lot of money to Featherstone. And for a long time it kept at bay whatever negative feelings he may have been developing towards Jimmy.

But this stuff about Demeo and the Gambinos really got to him. Ever since the sit-down at Tommaso’s, it seemed to Mickey like he was spending half his life meeting with the guineas. He might as well work in a corporation. At first, he didn’t mind. But eventually their fancy clothes, formal manner, and general insincerity started to get on his nerves. They were always hugging each other and talking about how important their friendships were—which Mickey knew was bullshit, since nine out of ten mob hits were a case of one “best friend” killing another.

In recent weeks he’d even come up with a name for these guys. He called them Al Colognes.

“You mean Al Capone,” Coonan said when Mickey first used the term.

“No,” replied Mickey, laughing. “Al Cologne. You know the type. They got that hundred-dollar cologne on; them rings on their pinky fingers. Hair slicked back and them thousand-dollar silk suits. Always talkin’ outta the side of their mouths.

“Counterfeit tough guys. Wish-I-was guys. You know, fuckin’ Al Colognes.”

More than anything, Mickey felt most wiseguys suffered from delusions of grandeur. Because they had such a large army of soldiers behind them, they felt they could do anything. In Mickey’s eyes, it made them impossible to trust.

In some cases, Jimmy seemed to agree. And his success with the Stein hit made him brave. He knew that the Italians were afraid of the West Side Irish Mob because of their reputation for crazy, impulsive behavior. That was the main reason they hadn’t just whacked Coonan and Featherstone after the death of Ruby Stein. The Mafia was reluctant to go toe-to-toe in a street-level bloodfest with a group of gangsters whose murderous reputation was growing by the month.

But even though Coonan told his underlings time and time again that he didn’t really trust the guineas, to Featherstone and some of the others his actions suggested otherwise. Behind Jimmy’s back, some of them were saying he had been blinded by the meeting at Tommaso’s; that his need to be “respected” by the Gambino family was making him stupid.

A prime example was an incident involving Danny Grillo, Roy Demeo’s right-hand man. Supposedly, Grillo had been Coonan’s good friend ever since they clipped Ruby Stein together in the 596 Club. But Grillo was also a gambler and a coke fiend who always seemed to be deeply in debt. The main reason he had been so enthusiastic about helping Coonan stiff Ruby was because he owed Stein well over six figures.

After the murder, Grillo started borrowing freely from Coonan and had fallen way behind on his payments. Mickey kept warning Coonan that Grillo was going to try to bump him off, just like he’d done Ruby when those debts got out of hand.

One day in the summer of ’78, a few months after the meeting at Tomasso’s, Mickey was at home when he got a call from Jimmy.

“I gotta go see this fuckin’ Grillo,” said Coonan.

“Okay,” said Mickey. “So when youse gonna pick me up?”

“No. I’m gonna go this one alone.”

“Man, I told you about that guy. He’s no good. He’s probably gonna try an’ whack you.”

“Yeah. Well, do me a favor. Just sit by the phone at the Sunbrite, okay? I’ll call if I need you.”

That afternoon Jimmy had coffee with Grillo at a diner in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. Grillo told Coonan he needed his help killing someone. Jimmy was suspicious, but he went along with it just to see what was up.

From the diner, they drove to a nearby underground parking garage. Grillo had a gun with a silencer on it in a brown paper bag. He gave the gun to Jimmy and told him to hide out in the far corner of the garage and wait for a car with Florida plates. When Jimmy saw the car, he was supposed to open fire.

While he was waiting, Coonan got nervous. He peeked out at the street through a small, ground-level window and saw the car with Florida plates. Inside were a bunch of people Coonan recognized as Grillo’s friends.

Wait a minute
, thought Jimmy,
something’s definitely not right here
. He popped the magazine out of the automatic Grillo had given him. The gun was empty. Not a single fucking bullet.

“Motherfucker,” Jimmy whispered under his breath.

He quickly left the garage, flagged down a cab and headed back to Manhattan.