The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (41 page)

“The fuck set my brother up,” Billy told Mickey. “I’m finally gonna get my revenge.”

“Hey, Billy,” replied Mickey, who had himself once plotted to kill Michael Holly. “You been sayin’ this for years, man. Why don’t you just fuckin’ do it and stop talkin’ about it?”

Later that same day Mickey met with Kelly and Shannon. They wanted to use his car—the Ford Tempo station wagon borrowed from Lifestyle’s—to scout out the location where Holly was working. They even made plans to meet the following day at the Skyline.

All of this came rushing back to Mickey as he spotted Billy Bokun, his hair and face dripping wet, hurriedly coming out of the bathroom at Erie Transfer. He was carrying a car mat and a few other items Mickey couldn’t really make out. Bokun looked stunned when he saw Mickey, and he froze in his tracks for a few seconds.

“Hey,” Mickey said to Bokun, realizing he must have just murdered Michael Holly. “Congratulations.”

Bokun smiled nervously and shook Mickey’s hand.

“What you got the car mat for?” asked Mickey.

“Uh, yeah, I spilled some makeup on it.”

Mickey nodded. He knew that Bokun usually wore makeup and a disguise to hide his facial disfiguration whenever he was doing criminal business. Although Bokun was a little guy—about five-foot-seven and 150 pounds—his birthmark gave him a slightly demented look. Some people in the neighborhood referred to Bokun by the nickname “Indian.”

Before Mickey had a chance to ask Bokun anything more, Billy said, “I gotta run.” Then he dashed off to his car and drove away.

Mickey was curious about how the murder went down, but he figured he would probably learn the details in due time. He ran a few more errands in the neighborhood without giving it any more thought. He and Henry got back to Erie Transfer an hour later, around three.

The place was crawling with detectives.

“Aren’t you Mickey Featherstone?” asked one of them excitedly as Mickey strolled into the parking lot.

“Yeah. So what?”

“Where were you at eleven-forty-five this morning?” asked another detective who had just walked over.

“Is this your car?” asked another, pointing towards the beige Ford Tempo parked in the barn.

“Mickey,” said his brother Henry. “Don’t be stupid. You don’t gotta tell these guys nothin’. Call your lawyer.”

After he’d made a call to the offices of Hochheiser and Aronson, Mickey told one of the detectives, “Look, I got nothin’ to say to youse people. I been advised against it.”

The cops let Mickey go, telling him they’d be in touch shortly.

That night, Mickey tried to act as if everything were normal. He decided to wait before he called around to find out what had happened. He and Sissy took a meatloaf over to a neighbor’s house and spent much of the evening there. But as the evening wore on, Mickey became more and more distracted. Something was not right, he felt. There was something about Billy Bokun, the way he had looked so surprised when he saw Mickey. And the detectives.

The events of the previous twenty-four hours stoked his paranoia. There was no reason for him to be worried, Mickey knew that. But he couldn’t help it. He knew all those cops swarming around Erie Transfer must have had something to do with the Michael Holly murder. But why had they started asking him all those questions? Even if there had been witnesses, Mickey knew he didn’t look anything like Billy Bokun. So why had they reacted as if
he
were a prime suspect?

There were too many unanswered questions. And these days unanswered questions made Mickey think, and thinking made him nervous. For good reason. In recent months, Mickey had hatched a plan so audacious that the very thought it might somehow become known had touched off his current cocaine binge, and kept him on edge for the last two months.

To Mickey, it was the most ballsy criminal act he had ever conceived.…

A plot, planned and put in motion by him, to murder Jimmy Coonan.

Four months before the Michael Holly shooting, in late December of 1984, Jimmy Coonan had returned home from prison after serving his time for gun possession and for the old Vanderbilt Evans assault. Initially, Mickey and everyone else tried to act as if nothing had changed. There’d been a few meetings on the West Side with Mickey, Jimmy McElroy, Kelly, and Shannon in which Coonan sought to lay out his new agenda for the Eighties. Jimmy had been gone just over four years, and there were a lot of loose ends to be addressed, including an eight-year-old contract on the life of Michael Holly. The fact that Holly had not been taken care of was a source of embarrassment to Coonan—one he wanted dealt with as soon as possible.

One of the personal duties Coonan resumed when he came back from prison was collecting the tribute from the ILA. As soon as he did, everyone else’s share dropped drastically. There was a lot of grumbling about that, from Mickey as well as McElroy, Kelly, and Shannon (who’d now risen in status from gofer to partner with the ambitious Kevin Kelly). But what bothered Mickey and the group most of all was that since Coonan’s return, he’d rekindled his romance with the Italians.

One of the first times Mickey saw Coonan after he got out was in the lobby of an office building on Madison Avenue in January. Jimmy had summoned Mickey there to meet with a high-powered defense attorney named James LaRossa. LaRossa was the attorney for none other than Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family. Recently, Castellano had been ensnared in a massive federal racketeering indictment, and LaRossa was planning his defense.

In the lobby of LaRossa’s ornate office building, Mickey met up with Coonan, Mugsy Ritter, and an up-and-coming
capo
in the Gambino organization named Danny Marino. While Coonan was away in prison, his good buddy Roy Demeo had been murdered by his own people, and Marino had taken over as Coonan’s “Italian connection.”

Marino and Coonan were concerned about Castellano’s upcoming trial. Specifically, they were worried about Dominick Montiglio, the former Green Beret and nephew of Nino Gaggi whom Mickey had been introduced to after the sit-down at Tommaso’s Restaurant. Since then, Montiglio had flipped and was set to testify against Castellano.

What they wanted Mickey to do was come up with damaging personal information about Montiglio to help discredit him on the stand.

“Mickey, you talked to the guy,” said Coonan. “Whaddya know?”

“I don’t really know nothin’. We talked about ’Nam a little bit …”

“Okay, what’d he say?”

“Just about things he seen there and nightmares he been having.”

“What else?” asked Danny Marino.

“Nothin’ else.”

“Look, Mickey,” said Coonan. “It don’t have to be true, know what I’m sayin’?”

They all went up to the lawyer’s office and sat in the waiting room. Mickey was getting steamed. He knew what they wanted him to do. They wanted him to put himself on the line, to sign a bunch of papers saying Dominick Montiglio was a scumbag and a killer. They wanted him to perjure himself and risk doing prison time for Big Paulie.

Mickey was called into LaRossa’s office along with Coonan and Danny Marino. The lawyer asked Mickey what he knew about Montiglio, and Mickey repeated what he’d said in the lobby.

“What else do you know?” asked LaRossa.

“That’s about it.”

“C’mon, Mickey,” said Marino. “Tell us more.”

“Look, I only talked to the guy a few times and I told youse all I know. Now, if what you wanna do is make it up, whaddya need me for?”

Mickey could tell Coonan and Marino were annoyed with him when he left LaRossa’s office. But the way he saw it,
he
was the one who had a right to be annoyed. Why should he be asked to put his freedom on the line for the guineas?

Mickey was still incredulous about it the next day. “Those people,” he told black-mustachioed Mugsy Ritter, in reference to the Italians. “Sometimes they think they can do whatever they want just because they’re ginzos.”

It was the same deal a few weeks later, when Mickey found a message waiting for him at Erie Transfer after he’d put in a long twelve-hour day on a movie set. The message said to meet Jimmy Coonan at Visage, a nightclub/disco on the West Side partly owned by Danny Marino.

Mickey was still dressed in his work clothes—blue jeans, a heavy leather jacket, and a navy-blue knit cap. When he arrived at Visage, a burly doorman told him there was no way he could let him in dressed the way he was.

“Look,” said Mickey. “I’m a West Sider, a friend of Jimmy Coonan’s and Danny Marino’s. They’re expecting me. Why don’t you go inside and check?”

The doorman disappeared for a few minutes, then returned. “Sorry,” he said, pulling back the rope so Mickey could enter.

There were disco lights glittering amid flashy dresses and expensive suits as Mickey made his way through the club carrying his cap and leather jacket. Finally, he spotted Coonan and Marino seated at a booth and walked over.

“Jesus,” said Marino when he saw Mickey. “No wonder they wouldn’t let this guy in. Look at the way he’s dressed.”

“Yeah,” replied Coonan, sheepishly. “Well, you know, he was out doin’ a piece of work.”

Mickey couldn’t believe the way Jimmy was kissing Danny Marino’s ass. Here was this fucking Al Cologne from Brooklyn making comments about the way he was dressed
in his own fucking neighborhood
, and Coonan was practically apologizing for it.

Mickey’s dissatisfaction with Jimmy had been festering ever since Edna refused him that loan he’d asked for. Then, a year later, Jimmy comes back to the neighborhood and starts cozying up to the Italians again. Add to that Mickey’s refusal to carry out the murders he’d been assigned through Edna, and he and Jimmy’s “friendship” could not have been more tenuous—on both sides.

The way Mickey saw it, there was only one way to go.

In the early weeks of 1985, Mickey sought out Billy Beattie, who, after many months on the lam in the Catskill Mountains had been trying to work his way back into the neighborhood. As soon as Coonan heard about it, he’d put out a contract on Beattie’s life, forcing him back into hiding.

Mickey knew he could get a message to Billy through his brother Tommy. He made arrangements to meet Billy one afternoon near Central Park, away from Hell’s Kitchen.

It was a brisk day as Mickey greeted Billy, who he hadn’t seen in nearly five years, since before the Whitehead trial. They strolled south on Central Park West, in the shadow of some of the city’s most stately apartment buildings.

“I just wanna tell you one thing,” said Billy, wasting no time getting 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. “Hey, don’t tell me. I’ll tell you, man.”

Beattie looked startled.

“I’ll bet,” said Mickey, “Edna tried to hit on you.”

“How the fuck did you know?”

“I don’t know, man, I just figured.”

Beattie explained how Edna, who he’d dated years ago before she married Coonan, had found out where he was staying. With Jimmy 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 comin’ on to
her!
”

Mickey laughed. “Billy, I don’t wanna kill you, okay? I don’t intend to kill you. Neither do any of the other guys, ’cept 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’?”

“Yeah.”

“Besides, Jimmy don’t wanna be an Irishman no more. He’s forgot where he come from, you know. He just wants to be an Italian now.”

“Yeah, that’s his thing.”

“Has been for a long, long time, I believe. We just didn’t wanna admit it.”

Mickey and Billy Beattie stood silently for a few minutes looking out at the heavy traffic on Columbus Circle. A chilly breeze whisked through the treetops along Central Park West, and mothers, bundled in their winter clothes, pushed babies in strollers to and from the park.

“I can’t say I like this,” said Billy, shaking his head. “But I guess we got no choice.”

One week later, on the movie set where Mickey was working, he met again with Billy Beattie. The movie was
9 1/2 Weeks
, starring Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger, and the crew was filming a scene right on 10th Avenue, in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. During a break they met in a camper and Mickey gave Billy a .32-caliber pistol wrapped in a towel.

The gun was supposed to be used on Jimmy Coonan.

But Billy Beattie didn’t have the nerve to do it alone. So other members of the Westies were brought into the conspiracy. McElroy, Kelly, and Shannon had all recently told Mickey they were fed up with Jimmy Coonan. To them, the idea of eliminating Jimmy certainly had its advantages: profit and survival. They’d all get more control over the neighborhood’s criminal bounty this way. And they knew how upset Featherstone was with Coonan. If he carried through on his plot to kill Jimmy, anyone too closely associated with Coonan might be next in line. Even if they didn’t agree with Mickey, it would be smart to at least act like they were on his side.

Mickey, Beattie, McElroy, Kelly, and Shannon all met one evening in March ’85 and talked about how to get rid of Coonan. Someone raised the possibility of having a black guy they knew dress up as a Rastafarian, go out to Hazlet, and gun Jimmy down in his neighborhood. With a black dude as the shooter, the cops would never think to trace it to the Westies. Everybody liked that idea until they realized there probably wasn’t a single black person in all of Hazlet. Any Rastafarian seen in that neighborhood would probably be arrested just on general principle.

The whole thing reached a low point, of sorts, one afternoon later in March when they all 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 it with the 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.