Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (59 page)

For Coonan, the removal of Spillane was like a coronation; he was now the official mob boss of Hell’s Kitchen. He could have been satisfied and reigned as Spillane had, as a local chieftain with his own small piece of the pie, but that wasn’t Coonan’s style. Jimmy realized that, apart from the proposed convention center, the Hell’s Kitchen rackets were mostly a nickel-and-dime operation. The Westies weren’t going to get rich off loan-sharking, policy, and penny-ante extortion alone. There was a bigger world out there, a constellation of big ticket rackets, most of which were controlled by the Italians. Coonan already had his sights on the big prize.

Since the days of Old Smoke Morrissey, moving forward, forging alliances, and thinking big had been the essential traits of a successful mobster. But you also had to know how to cover your ass. In this regard, the most important relationship in a mobster’s life, more important than his marriage, was his relationship with his right-hand man. Coonan trusted Featherstone and felt that he could depend on him for most things, but Mickey had not yet taken part in the cutting up of a body. Coonan and his new buddy DeMeo had talked about this fact. DeMeo himself had been a practitioner of vivisection ever since he, just like Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey, had learned the butcher trade in prison.

“Say a guy’s in your crew, and you think he’s a stand-up guy,” said DeMeo. “You can never really know for sure unless he’s willing to go all the way. You gotta break that guy, bring him into your world. Only then can he be trusted.”

Coonan took DeMeo’s advice to heart. A few months later, he knew the time had come to “break Mickey’s cherry” and initiate him into the macabre world of human dismemberment. All Coonan needed was a victim.

Rickey Tassiello was a small-time Hell’s Kitchen hoodlum with a bad gambling habit. To satiate his habit, he frequently borrowed money from Jimmy Coonan’s loan shark operation. Jimmy was constantly having to chase the kid down and extend him credit. Rickey was a classic deadbeat. At one point, Coonan even went to the kid’s brother, a bartender in the neighborhood, who paid Jimmy the $7,000 he was owed and begged him not to lend Rickey any more money because he was “a sick person, a degenerate gambler.”

A few months later, Coonan showed up at the brother’s place of business again. This time Rickey Tassiello owed him $6,000. They worked out a payment schedule whereby the brother would try to get Rickey to pay $100 a week.

Months passed. Coonan showed up again. Rickey Tassiello had stopped making his payments. He still owed $1,250. Exasperated, the brother said there was nothing more he could do.

They snatched Tassiello out of a booth at the Market Diner and drove him to an apartment on Tenth Avenue. In the kitchen of the apartment, Coonan shot Rickey once in the back of the head, then twice more as he lay on the floor. Coonan then dragged the body into the bathroom, stripped it naked, and dumped it in the tub.

“Thank God he was a small guy,” said Coonan. Using simple kitchen knives, he began cutting up the body.

Featherstone watched for a while and tried to help, but he couldn’t take it; he vomited in the toilet.

Coonan was sympathetic. He put a hand on Mickey’s shoulder and explained why it was important to make the body disappear. It made good business sense, he said. “No corpus dilecti; no investigation,” were his exact words. Then Jimmy handed Mickey a knife. “I want you to take this knife and stick it in his heart.”

“But he’s already dead,” said Mickey.

Jimmy was insistent. “Take the knife, and stick it in his chest.”

To Mickey, it seemed weird, perverse. He had killed before, out of rage or fear, but this was different—a crude blood ritual that Jimmy seemed determined to have him perform.

Mickey looked at Coonan. He took the knife and plunged it into the corpse.

Jimmy smiled and said, “Good. Good.”

After that, they cut up Rickey Tassiello’s body, put the pieces in jumbo-size plastic bags, and threw the bags in the trunk of the car. Then they drove out to Ward’s Island and dumped the bags in the river.

In the larger scheme of things, the killing of the small-time hood was a minor murder, nowhere near as significant as, say, the killing of Ruby Stein. But in terms of the emotional sinew and intestinal fortitude of Coonan’s operation, it was monumental. Jimmy had fully initiated his right-hand man into the macabre ways of the Westies. And Mickey had come through with flying colors, showing complete and total allegiance to the boss. There was no stopping them now.

As it turned out, Jimmy’s gory test of Featherstone’s loyalty proved to be providential, for within weeks of disposing their latest murder victim, the Italians came knocking.

“Big Paulie wants to see you,” said Roy DeMeo to Coonan and Featherstone at the bar of the Skyline Motor Inn. “He wants to talk business.”

Coonan smiled. Everyone knew who Big Paulie was—Paul Castellano,
capo di tutti capi
, the boss of all bosses.

Apparently, Castellano had been hearing a lot about the Westies lately. Too much. There had been so many West Side–related homicides and suspicious disappearances over the last year that Cosa Nostra was becoming concerned. Most recently, the murders of Stein, Spillane, and Tassiello even made the nightly TV news when a prominent NYPD detective squad staged an archaeological-style dig along the deserted railroad tracks of the West Side. The cops had received numerous tips that body parts had been buried there, specifically the head of Rickey Tassiello. The diggings produced nothing in the way of evidence, but they garnered plenty of media attention. Castellano was concerned that the Westies were bringing too much heat down on the entire underworld, including
la famiglia
. Something needed to done.

There was also the matter of Ruby Stein and his black book.

“Don’t worry about that,” DeMeo said to Coonan. “If the boss asks, just tell him you don’t know nothin’ about it. You don’t know nothin’ about Ruby getting whacked or his black book. That’s it. Everything’s gonna be fine. In fact, this could be the best thing that ever happened to you guys.”

After DeMeo went back to Brooklyn, Featherstone told Coonan he was worried that this was some kind of setup. “Maybe we’re gonna get whacked,” he surmised.

“Nah,” said Jimmy. He had his concerns, too, but they were eclipsed by the prospect of forming a business alliance with the Italians. It was the sort of arrangement Coonan had been scheming toward his entire adult life.

The sit-down took place one night in late February 1978, at a private dining room in the back of Tomasso’s Restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Seated at a U-shaped table were more than a dozen of the most powerful Cosa Nostra figures in America at the time—Castellano, Funzi Tieri, Anniello Dellacroce, Carmine Lombardozzi, and others, most of them in their sixties or seventies. The two Irish kids were seated near Castellano and treated like kings. All of them ate a huge pasta feast, and it was only after the food was digested and the espresso served that Castellano asked about Ruby Stein and his black book.

“We don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Coonan, sticking to the script.

With his wire-rimmed spectacles and conciliatory demeanor, the sixty-five-year-old Castellano was known to be a judicious man who read the
Wall Street Journal
on a regular basis and fancied himself the CEO of a legitimate corporation. Others might have pressed Coonan more strongly on the matter of Ruby Stein’s murder, but Big Paulie let it go. He moved on to the main reason he had called for the sit-down, which was to tame the Westies and bring them into the fold.

“From now on, you’re with us,” said the
capo di tutti capi
. “You’re gonna be our crew. We get 10 percent of whatever you drum up, but you also get 10 percent of our operation in Manhattan. I think you’re gonna find it could be a most profitable business arrangement for you and your people. Only one thing: You gotta stop acting like cowboys. From now on, every time somebody gets whacked, it’s gotta be cleared with us first. It’s time for a little order over there on the West Side. Capisch?”

On the drive home to Hell’s Kitchen that night, Coonan was ecstatic, telling Featherstone that things were going to be different now. They were going to be major players in the underworld. They were going to get rich. They were going to go down in history.

In at least one sense, Coonan was right. Ever since the Atlantic City conference in 1929, when it was first determined that Irish American mobsters would be marginalized, if not flat-out eliminated via gangland assassination, the Irish Mob had been forced to fight for every scrap they could get. In some ways, the Irish American gangster had been pushed to the sidelines and forced to become a fringe player who had to kick up a big ruckus just to get noticed. By inheriting the rackets on the West Side and exploiting the reputation of the Irish gangster as a wild, unpredictable factor in the underworld, Coonan and the Westies had done something no Irish gang had done since the end of Prohibition: They had stabbed, shot, and dismembered their way to the main banquet table.

At the time, it must have looked peachy. Immediately following the sit-down in Brooklyn, the money rolled in. Mickey Featherstone, for one, saw his weekly pay as Coonan’s muscle increase from $150 a week to $4,000 a week. Other opportunities to make money proliferated, especially in the construction rackets where the Westies were hiring themselves out as Mafia subcontractors. And for things like murder and extortion, acts they might have committed anyway just for the hell of it, various members of the gang were now being well compensated.

Money, however, can be a whore, an illusion, or a beautiful diversion. In time, the Italians’ largesse would seem less like a bounty and more like a paltry trade-off in comparison to the down side. It was bad enough that, by the late 1970s, the Mafia was an insatiable, multi-tentacled octopus who believed the entire underworld was their oyster; now they were the
official
overlords of the Irish. It was an arrangement many Irish gangsters had been trying to avoid since the earliest days of the battle between the dagos and the micks.

This new arrangement made things especially difficult for the independent operator. The Westies, after all, had been called to the table not because they were Irish, but because they had something to offer: a neighborhood bounty that, however diminished, had historical antecedents going back to the beginnings of organized crime in America. Most Irish American gangsters weren’t so lucky; they operated outside Hell’s Kitchen or even outside the protection of the Irish Mob, as freelance operators looking for work wherever they could find it. Shorn of any overriding ethnic structure that might guarantee them a piece of the pie or back them in underworld disputes, they were, in many cases, underworld pariahs—lone meteors in a universe that was no longer of their making.

It would take a while for the Westies to realize that their pact with the Mafia had been a gangland version of the Trojan Horse. For non–West Side gangsters, however, the consequences were as clear as a slap in the face. The era of the Irish American hoodlum as independent operator was pushed further along the road to extinction. But given the breed’s reputation for irascible, hard-headed acts of mayhem, there was a better-than-even chance they would not go down without a fight.

CHAPTER
#
Twelve

12. last call at the celtic club

J
immy McBratney was a typical Irish American mook working the fringes of the underworld in the early 1970s. He did his criminal business mostly in the outer boroughs of New York—Staten Island, Brooklyn, and across the river in New Jersey. At a formidable six foot three inches tall and 250 pounds, McBratney was a tough hombre known more for his brawn than his brains. People who knew Jimmy best thought of him as something of a gentle giant, a slow-witted man who rarely initiated a fight unless he was riled. Eddie Maloney, a fellow small-time hood who did prison time with McBratney, wrote about him in his 1995 book,
Tough Guy: The True Story of “Crazy” Eddie Maloney
.

Jimmy McBratney was locked up for armed robbery. He was quiet, a listener and a learner, and soon we were discussing heists we might do together. He knew about guns and wanted to become a collector, but closest to his heart was his wife and two small children and their house on Staten Island, and his goal of saving enough to own a nightclub. I learned Jimmy was very loyal to his wife, and that all the talk in the yard about “broads” upset him. His wife visited regularly and wrote every day.

McBratney and Maloney eventually did go into business together. In the early 1970s, they became part of a small multiethnic crime crew that kidnapped wiseguys from the Gambino crime family and held them for ransom. It was a dangerous way to make a living, but the remuneration could be fabulous—as much as $150,000 for a couple nights of work.

The key to a successful snatch-and-pay was to make sure the kidnapee never knew who his kidnappers were. This was done with the aid of a hood and a blindfold. McBratney and Maloney’s crew also used a two-team approach. The first team, pretending to be police officers and using a stolen badge, would snatch the wiseguy, usually from his home, and hold him at a secure location. The second team would pick up the ransom money.

The first guy they kidnapped was a Gambino family capo known as Frankie the Wop. This escapade went off without a hitch, and the gang got away with a cool one hundred grand. Over the next two months, the gang completed three more successful body snatches. Their luck changed, however, on December 28, 1972, when they clubbed a Gambino loan shark named “Junior” on a street in Staten Island, threw him in the back of their car, and skedaddled out of the neighborhood. A couple of local kids, who just happened to witness the snatch and getaway, passed along the license plate number to some neighborhood wiseguys.