The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (27 page)

At one point, Coonan had even tried to get Mickey, Jimmy McElroy, and a few others to
socialize
with Roy Demeo’s crew, with predictable results. After a night on the town together, Featherstone had gotten in a heated argument with one of Demeo’s underlings, which Roy eventually had to break up.

Coonan backed off a little after that. Perhaps he realized he could only go so far when mixing business with pleasure—at least when it involved the rest of his crew. On a personal level, Jimmy was as solicitous of the Italians as ever, acting as if he himself were a made member of La Famiglia.

The night that really brought it all home for Mickey came in mid-November of ’78. He and Jimmy had gone to see Spider Tassiello at Sonny’s Cafe on 47th and 9th Avenue. It was nearly ten months since they had killed Spider’s son, Rickey Tassiello. Throughout the summer and into the fall Spider’s other son, Arthur, had been telling people in the neighborhood he was going to get revenge by wiping out the entire Coonan family. Specifically, he had been saying he was going to drive by Coonan’s Tax Service and throw a hand grenade in the window.

Jimmy had a bug up his ass about the Tassiello family long before Rickey’s murder. Years earlier, Angelo Tassiello, Spider Tassiello’s brother, had had an affair with Coonan’s mother. Everyone in the neighborhood knew about it, and it had been a source of great humiliation for Coonan’s father. Within a few months of the affair, the elder Coonan died of natural causes. But Jimmy and his brother Jackie felt their old man had died of a broken heart, and they blamed the Tassiellos for it. When the murder of Rickey Tassiello went down, Mickey had a feeling it was for more than just the $1,250 Rickey owed Coonan. It was Jimmy Coonan settling an old score on behalf of his father.

When Coonan and Featherstone arrived at Sonny’s Cafe, Spider Tassiello was behind the counter.

“We got somethin’ to talk about,” Jimmy told Tassiello, motioning towards the back of the bar.

As the two of them walked into the back room, Mickey stayed at the counter and sipped on a bottle of beer. From where he was seated he could only see Coonan’s back, but old man Tassiello was facing him. The TV was on, so Mickey had to strain to hear what was being said. He could see Jimmy motioning with his hands, and he got the distinct impression he was telling Spider Tassiello how they’d killed his son Rickey.

Occasionally, Jimmy’s voice rose above the sound of the TV. “If I hear any more bullshit about your kid threatenin’ my family, we’re gonna come back here and take care of every one a youse. Do y’know what I’m pointin’ out?”

Spider Tassiello was in tears, nodding his head in agreement.

Featherstone found the whole scene pathetic. Wasn’t it enough to kill the guy’s son? Did they now have to berate and humiliate him on top of it?

Mickey turned away to watch the television, hoping it would take his mind off things. To his amazement, there on the tube was
The Godfather
. He sat transfixed for a full minute watching these Hollywood mafiosi on the TV perched high above the bar counter; then his eyes would drift down to Coonan threatening Spider Tassiello. If there were such a thing as an epiphany, a supreme moment of awakening, for Mickey this was it. It was like a light bulb flicked on in his head …

Jimmy Coonan thought he was the fucking Godfather!

At 12:30 on the morning of November 22, 1978, Featherstone, Coonan, and Jimmy McElroy arrived at the Plaka Bar, a saloon connected to the lobby of the Opera Hotel at 2166 Broadway, between 76th and 77th streets on the Upper West Side. It was a bar not unlike those in Hell’s Kitchen, only slightly cleaner and less populated. As you entered, a long wooden counter ran the full length of the left wall. At the far end of the bar a doorway led into the kitchen. On the right wall another doorway led into the lobby of the Opera Hotel. There were no restrooms in the Plaka Bar. To go to the can, you had to pass through the hotel lobby and go down a flight of stairs.

It had been a long day for Featherstone, Coonan, and McElroy, and they were beat. Most of the day had been spent trying to find a union official they were supposed to whack. In fact, they’d been trying to whack the guy for months without any luck. It was fast becoming a contract hit they wished they’d never taken.

The whole thing began as a favor to Billy Murtha, the guy whose shower Jimmy was hiding in the morning he got busted in his underwear for the Canelstein/Morales hit. It was Murtha who drove the car the night of the shootings in Queens twelve years earlier. Both he and Coonan had done a few years in prison for that one. Since then, Murtha had gone into the construction trade with two good friends from Hell’s Kitchen, Buddy Leahy and Mickey Cahill.

With his old buddy Jimmy Coonan now firmly established as the premier gangster on the West Side, Murtha and his sidekicks had approached him with a proposition in July 1978. They were having trouble with a guy named James Maher, who had just been elected business manager for Local 46 of the Metal Lathers Union. Murtha, Leahy, and Cahill were members of the Local, and during an acrimonious campaign for the business manager’s position, they had supported Maher’s opponent. Now, to add insult to injury, Maher was promoting a collective bargaining agreement they were bitterly opposed to.

What they proposed was this: $10,000 if Coonan and Featherstone killed Maher, and $20,000 more if they made the body disappear. Jimmy and Mickey agreed to do the job and accepted $5,000 as a down payment.

As Jimmy would say later, “We shoulda known from the start it was a turkey.” The day after they agreed to do the hit, they were sitting in the restaurant area of the Hyatt-Atlantis Hotel, across the street from the union hall at East 76th Street and 3rd Avenue. Coonan, Featherstone, and McElroy were there, as was Billy Murtha. They were waiting for the union official, Maher, to come out of the Local 46 offices so that Murtha could identify him. But they wound up sitting there for a long time drinking, and everybody got a little stewed.

When Maher finally came out of the union offices, Billy Murtha, in a moment of drunken bravado, grabbed McElroy’s gun. “You guys don’t think I got the balls to do it myself? I’ll do it right now, goddammit.”

Coonan, Featherstone, and McElroy didn’t know whether to laugh or be pissed off. “Just sit down and stop being a jackass,” Coonan finally said.

Over the next four months there were a number of harebrained attempts to kill this guy Maher. Once, Billy Murtha sketched out a map of Maher’s home and the route he took to drive into Manhattan for work. The idea was to ambush him in his car. But that was too elaborate a plan and it never panned out.

Finally, they got tired of playing cat-and-mouse games and decided to wear disguises and just gun the guy down right in front of the union hall. That’s where they had been that very day, before they walked into the Plaka Bar. They’d waited across the street from Local 46 in the red van they’d used to stake out Danny Grillo at the Gemini Lounge. It was an invaluable vehicle for transporting weaponry, disguises, and the various dismembered body parts of murder victims. Coonan was especially fond of his red van. As a joke, he’d started calling it “the Meat Wagon,” a nickname even some of his own people found a tad ghoulish.

“That’s the guy,” Coonan blurted out when a man who looked like James Maher, partly obscured by other pedestrians, crossed the street and headed towards the union hall.

“You sure?” asked Mickey.

“Sure I’m sure.”

Coonan and Featherstone got out of the Meat Wagon on East 76th Street, leaving McElroy behind the wheel. They crossed the street and hurriedly tried to catch up with the guy Coonan had identified as Maher.

Mickey was having a hard time moving very fast. As a disguise, he’d worn a pair of shoes a couple of sizes too big over his regular shoes. He’d also gotten a pair of dirty old pants and worn them over a pair of clean pants. Topping off this grungy ensemble was a long black trenchcoat, also a few sizes too big, that hung all the way down to the ground. The idea was to do the hit in this getup, and then if need be, shed it and escape in his regular clothing.

Jimmy was also dressed down-market, in a pair of dungarees and a blue windbreaker with a hood on it to hide his blond hair.

When they finally caught up with the guy in front of the entrance to Local 46, Jimmy began to ease the .32-caliber automatic with silencer out from under his windbreaker.

“No, no,” said Mickey, tugging on Coonan’s jacket from behind. “That ain’t him.”

“What?”

“Forget about it. It ain’t the guy.”

They watched as the man they had been following opened the door to the building. Before he disappeared inside, he glanced up the street and they got a good look at him. It was definitely James Maher.

“What the fuck?” asked Coonan, dumbfounded. “What’d you do that for? That was the guy.”

Mickey shrugged sheepishly. “I thought it wasn’t.”

By the time they arrived at the Plaka Bar, all three of them were in a foul mood. They’d been trying to do this goddamned killing for months. Today, once again, they had whipped themselves into the kind of emotional frenzy that was required to kill someone in broad daylight. Now they had to suppress these emotions and deal with the frustration of having again bungled the job.

Once they were inside the Plaka Bar, the mood lightened somewhat. There were a number of familiar faces there. William Comas, a career burglar and hustler in his fifties who they knew as “Billy Uptown” was there. Comas kept a room next door at the Opera Hotel and frequently drank at the Plaka Bar. It was Comas who’d first introduced Coonan and Featherstone to the Plaka Bar years earlier.

Featherstone, especially, liked Billy Uptown, who was short, with longish gray hair on the sides of his head and nothing but skin on top. Although Coonan didn’t know it yet, Mickey had even hatched a little something with Comas all on his own: a counterfeit operation that was beginning to look like it might pan out.

Also there with Billy Uptown was the solidly built Bobby Huggard, the same Bobby Huggard who helped Jimmy and Jackie Coonan knock over a bar in the Bronx in the spring of ’66. At the time, they’d plotted many other crimes together, all in anticipation of a planned showdown with Mickey Spillane. Those plans all went down the drain when Jackie gunned down a bartender in Brooklyn. After that, Jackie went to prison and Huggard went on the lam. Now, thirteen years later, Huggard had reappeared on the West Side.

After everyone said their hellos, Comas introduced Coonan, Featherstone, and McElroy, who was wearing a red painter’s cap, to a friend of his named John Crowell. Crowell was a former heroin addict and small-time criminal whom Comas and Huggard had met at the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Short and slight, with stringy black hair, Crowell spoke in a whiny Bronx accent. Although he had traveled with tough guys most of his adult life, he looked like a little weasel, with shifty eyes and a shifty manner to match.

The group proceeded to drink convivially, sharing prison stories and waxing nostalgic about days gone by. Occasionally other patrons came and went, but for the most part they had the bar to themselves.

After thirty minutes or so they were joined by yet another Clinton prison alumnus, Harold “Whitey” Whitehead. Whitehead had grown up in Astoria, Queens, along with Bobby Huggard. He knew Crowell and Comas from prison and assorted other criminal ventures. Years ago he’d done some drinking at the 596 Club, so he knew Jimmy Coonan and some of the other Hell’s Kitchen crowd.

Coonan recognized Whitehead as soon as he walked in the door. Thirty-eight years old, with curly brown hair, Whitehead was remembered at the 596 Club as a loud, arrogant prick. One night he even got in a fight with Richard “Mugsy” Ritter, one of the bartenders. When Jimmy’s brother Jackie intervened, Whitehead ran outside and called the cops from a phone booth at 44th Street and 10th Avenue. Whitey Whitehead had been on Jimmy Coonan’s shit list ever since.

After a while, Coonan walked over to Whitehead and began chatting him up. It started out civil enough, but before long it seemed to be getting heated—at least on Whitehead’s part. The only person close enough to hear anything was John Crowell. Crowell heard Whitehead telling Coonan, “Mugsy’s fulla shit. He’s a fuckin’ fag.”

Then Whitehead said: “And your brother Jackie, he’s a rat bastard. I got no beef with you, Jimmy, it’s that brother of yours.”

The conversation continued a while longer, then Jimmy walked back over to Featherstone and McElroy. Coonan had remained calm so far, but his ears were a bright red. Featherstone knew what that meant. Jimmy’s ears always got red when he was mad enough to kill.

“What’s that guy sayin’?” asked Featherstone.

“He called my brother a rat,” replied Jimmy.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Scumbag,” interjected McElroy.

“Yeah,” said Jimmy. “My brother may be a fleabag, but he ain’t no rat.”

Crowell could also see that Coonan was steamed. He’d brought some marijuana along to smoke and figured now might be a good time to torch it up. It might chill people out.

“Hey,” he said to Whitehead, Huggard, and Comas, “let’s go downstairs and smoke a joint.”

While the three Irishmen stayed at the bar, the four Clinton prison alumni headed through the lobby of the Opera Hotel and downstairs to the men’s room.

Dank and musty, the men’s room in the Opera Hotel was in bad need of repair. The tiling on the floor and walls was dingy and the low ceiling was stained, with peeling paint and corroded plaster. There were two sinks to the left as you entered, and beyond that, separated by a marble partition, two porcelain urinals. To the right was a slop sink, with a mop and a bucket nearby, then three wooden toilet stalls. There were bare waterpipes running from the floor to the ceiling, and the cheap lighting cast a sickly yellow pallor throughout the room.

Crowell and Whitehead stood with their backs to the urinals. Across from them were Comas and Huggard. They fired up a joint and passed it around, laughing and getting stoned.

After a few minutes, Jimmy Coonan walked into the men’s room. The group acknowledged his presence, but nothing was said. Coonan walked around them and went to the urinal.