The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (19 page)

Beattie had met Ruby Stein through Coonan a few months earlier at the Aeon Club. He was introduced to Ruby as “one of the okay guys,” which meant he would be free to gamble at the club and, if need be, borrow money through Stein or one of his many midlevel shylocks. Beattie didn’t know a lot about Stein at the time. But he later learned that Ruby was one of the biggest loansharks on the East Coast.

The thought that Coonan was going to knock off Ruby made Beattie’s mouth go dry. This was not like killing somebody from the neighborhood. Ruby Stein was big-time, as big as they get.

In the car on the way uptown, Jimmy explained his reasoning. “I got a feelin’ this fuckin’ Ruby Stein had somethin’ to do with Devaney and Cummiskey bein’ taken out—know what I’m sayin’?”

But even more pressing than the revenge motive, Jimmy admitted, was the fact he was now in debt to Stein to the tune of $70,000. Supposedly, Tommy Collins and a few other West Siders owed Stein similar amounts. So it was an opportunity to clear everyone’s slate and maybe even take over Ruby’s operation after he was gone.

Although Coonan wasn’t saying it, Beattie knew there was one other reason Ruby was a goner. One way or another, Stein’s death was going to attract a lot of attention from
La Cosa Nostra
. And that’s just how Jimmy wanted it. By forcing his relationship with the Italians to the next stage, this was Jimmy’s first big power play. And it was either going to get them all killed or make Coonan’s crew a definite force to be reckoned with in the underworld.

Jimmy must have worked out some arrangement ahead of time to get Ruby out of the Aeon Club, because when they arrived he was waiting for them. Beattie drove, with Coonan in the passenger seat and Ruby in the back. First they went to Delsomma’s restaurant, at 47th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue. Much to Beattie’s surprise, they dropped Ruby off there and he and Jimmy headed back to the 596 Club. Something to do with setting up an alibi. They’d only been in the bar a few minutes when Jimmy took Billy’s car keys and said, “Be ready. I’ll have him here in ten.”

Beattie stood to the right of the entrance, near a pay phone on the wall. It was his job to lock the door and pull the shades once Jimmy brought Ruby into the bar. Danny Grillo went into the kitchen. Tommy Hess was behind the bar and Richie Ryan was seated at a stool on the other side. As they waited, the tension overwhelmed whatever desire there may have been to make small talk. The only sound was an occasional squeaky bar stool.

Finally, Coonan walked in the door with Ruby Stein right behind him. Beattie immediately pulled the shades and pretended he was using the pay phone. Then he locked the door. Hess and Ryan greeted Ruby, who walked into the middle of the bar. Jimmy told him to take a seat at the counter, he’d be right back. Sensing something was not right, Ruby hesitated.

“Go ahead,” said Jimmy, smiling like a cat with a secret, “have a seat.”

Suddenly Danny Grillo burst out of the kitchen with a .32-caliber automatic aimed straight ahead. “Oh my God!” gasped a startled Ruby Stein as Grillo fired six shots, hitting him in the chest, arms, and leg. The jolt lifted Ruby an inch or two off the ground and spun him completely around. He collapsed on the floor in the middle of the bar.

It was over just that fast. Tommy Hess stepped outside to stand guard. The others gathered around to look at Ruby’s contorted body. There was a stunned silence. Then Coonan nodded towards Billy Beattie. “Go ahead,” he said solemnly, “put a bullet in him.”

Beattie wasn’t about to ask questions. He removed a .22-caliber pistol with a silencer on it from inside his coat and fired a bullet into Ruby’s face. The impact caused Ruby’s head to twitch, but the rest of his body hardly moved. Then Coonan nodded towards Richie Ryan. Beattie handed the .22 to Ryan, who also fired a shot into Ruby’s bullet-riddled corpse.

Jimmy Coonan smiled at this gesture of solidarity; they were all accomplices now. The emotions were so strong that Jimmy and Danny Grillo embraced, holding each other in a bear hug for three or four seconds as the others looked on.

Then they all went to work.

Several of the plastic bags that Beattie had bought at the supermarket that day were split down the seams and laid out flat like a sheet. As they were rolling Ruby’s body onto the plastic bags, his shoe came off and a wad of bills fell out on the floor. Coonan picked it up, looked it over quickly and tossed it onto the bar. “Whack it five ways,” he said to no one in particular. “Looks to be about a grand.”

Once Ruby was completely laid out, they grabbed the plastic by the ends and dragged his body back to the ladies’ room, where Coonan and Richie Ryan began stripping him naked. Coonan took Ruby’s little black book, with the names and phone numbers of his loanshark customers in it, and tossed it to Beattie. “Copy those numbers down,” he said. “That’s money in the bank, right there.”

When they had Ruby completely naked, Coonan took the eighteen-inch serrated knife he’d picked up at the hardware store and grabbed Ruby’s bloody head by the hair. “Come here,” he shouted to Richie Ryan as he put the knife to Stein’s neck. “I want you to feel how fuckin’ heavy this head is. Feel that?”

Up to this point, Beattie had been watching. But he couldn’t take any more. As he saw the knife begin to tear through Ruby’s flesh, he walked over to the bar and poured himself a drink. He knew the reasoning behind all this—no corpus delicti, no investigation—but it still made him nauseous.

“Don’t have the stomach for it, huh?” asked Grillo, who’d also walked over to the bar.

“No,” replied Billy. “It’s not my bag.”

“Yeah, me neither. I’m a shooter. I’ll shoot anybody any fuckin’ time. But I ain’t into cuttin’ ’em up.”

As Beattie and Grillo waited, Coonan showed Ryan, the aspiring young tough guy, the finer points of human butchery. Occasionally, he could be heard offering a word of professional advice: “This here, the elbow, this is the toughest part.”

Finally, after about an hour, they were finished. The various body parts had been stuffed into six or seven bags. Whatever was left over in the way of excess flesh or gristle was flushed down the toilet. The walls were wiped clean, the floors mopped.

After that, Nick “the Greek” Kagabines pulled his powder-blue Chevy Caprice up in front of the bar. They all helped load the bags into the trunk. From there, Kaga-bines was to go to “the burial grounds” on Ward’s Island and dump what was left of one of the most notorious loan-sharks in the history of New York into the East River.

Presumably, the bags would then follow the strong southerly flow of the river’s currents, bobbing past the towering skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, past Governor’s Island, past the Statue of Liberty, until the remains reached their final resting place amongst the bass, barracuda, crabs, and other creatures of the deep.

A few days after the murder, Mickey Featherstone was walking north on 10th Avenue when Coonan pulled over in his big black Buick and honked. When Jimmy got out of the car, Mickey could see right away he was steamed.

“Hey,” said Featherstone, “what’s goin’ on?”

“It’s fuckin’ Ruby. They found part of Ruby.”

Featherstone had heard all about Ruby getting whacked and cut up. He wasn’t surprised. In fact, at one time he and Jackie Coonan were supposed to kill Ruby Stein. They didn’t want to do it, but Jimmy had insisted. So they hung around Ruby’s club a few times to make it look like they were trying to find him.

Mickey had always liked Ruby. When Ruby had heard that his wife Sissy was going to have a baby, he told Mickey he was going to buy them a case of Dom Perignon. That was the last time Mickey talked to Ruby. When he heard he’d been whacked in the 596 Club it made him kind of sad.

Now, here was Jimmy Coonan screaming about how Ruby’s bloated torso had washed ashore at Rockaway Beach in Queens. Although there was no head, arms, legs, or genitals, the medical examiner was able to identify it as Ruby’s by a scar on his chest from a recent heart operation.

“I fucked up,” said Jimmy. “Man, did I fuck up.”

“Yeah?”

“See, you gotta open ’em up. I was told this, but I didn’t do it.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The stomach, the lungs, they inflate. If you don’t cut ’em open the torso floats, which is what happened with Ruby.”

There was sure to be an investigation now, said Coonan. Since he was one of the last people seen with Ruby before he disappeared, he’d already had a detective come out to his house in Jersey. Now they would be snooping around Hell’s Kitchen asking a lot of questions.

“We got nothin’ to worry about, right?” asked Jimmy.

“Of course not,” Mickey answered, backing him up.

Later, when Featherstone thought about it, he got annoyed. He hadn’t even wanted Ruby to get whacked, and now he had to be concerned along with everybody else. Not only were the Italians going to be looking into this Ruby Stein thing, but now there were going to be “bulls,” or police, all over the neighborhood.

Mickey was pissed for a while, but then he felt ashamed of himself. Coonan had done a lot for him since he’d gotten out of prison, and there weren’t too many people he could say that about. This dismemberment thing was weird, as far as he was concerned, but it was no reason to sell out a friend. Now was the time to reaffirm his commitment to Jimmy, to show his loyalty, to be tough.

Fuck it
, he thought. If there was gonna be an investigation, bring it on home.

8

WEST SIDE STORY

A
cross the street from the Market Diner, on the corner of 43rd Street and 11th Avenue, Officer Richie Egan took a sip of coffee from his Styrofoam cup, scrunched down in the front seat of his unmarked police car, and fixed his eyes on the diner’s main entrance. It was around midnight, and Egan’s partner, Detective Abe Ocasio, had just gone inside to take a look around. There was nothing heavy going on; it was just a routine surveillance. But with what they’d been hearing about the West Side Irish Mob, you never knew. With his partner all alone inside one of the local boys’ favorite hangouts, Egan wasn’t about to let his attention wander.

Within minutes, Detective Ocasio returned to the car. “The place is packed,” he said in his unmistakable Bronx accent.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. One guy I recognized—Ryan. Richie Ryan, the young kid. In there throwin’ money around like it was nothing. Said something about a bar in the Village he knocked over.”

“Hey, good. Gotta remember to check that out when we get back home.”

It was December of 1977, more than six months since the decaying, bullet-riddled torso of Ruby Stein washed ashore at Rockaway Beach in Brooklyn. In that time, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division had begun conducting fulltime surveillances in Hell’s Kitchen—though it didn’t look like the Stein case would be solved any time soon. As with most mob-related killings, no witnesses had come forward and few people were willing to admit they even knew Ruby Stein, much less did business with him.

But “Intell,” as the Intelligence Division was known to most cops, was not so much interested in the Stein homicide, per se; their interest had been piqued even before Ruby’s death by a slew of other killings. It was the possibility that those killings—Curley, Dugan, Devaney, Cummiskey, and others—might somehow be connected that had caused Richie Egan, Abe Ocasio, and a half-dozen other Intelligence cops to begin spending their days and evenings cruising the avenues of the West Side.

Egan and his partner sat quietly across from the Market Diner for a few minutes listening to a ballgame on the car radio. Then a spanking new Cadillac Coupe DeVille pulled into the parking lot.

“Hey,” exclaimed Egan. “There’s our man with his brand new Caddy.”

Jimmy Coonan, with his familiar shock of blond hair, stepped out of his new Caddy on the driver’s side. Another guy stepped out on the passenger side who was about the same height, but much thinner.

“Who the fuck is that?” asked Egan.

“Shit, I don’t know,” replied his partner. “Who the fuck is it?”

“Wait a minute. Is that … is that who I think it is?”

“Who?”

“Featherstone … it’s fuckin’ Featherstone.”

“Naaah.”

“It is. It’s fuckin’ Mickey Featherstone.”

The Featherstone they’d been tailing the last few months had long, straggly hair and usually dressed like a construction worker on a bad day. But now Mickey had a whole new look, including newly trimmed hair and a nice sports coat.

“Shit,” laughed Egan. “Coonan’s really havin’ an effect on this guy.”

Egan thought back to the first time he’d seen Mickey Featherstone, in October ’77. It was a surveillance photograph passed around at the very first meeting on the West Side Mob. Egan was a bit surprised when his supervisor, Sergeant Thomas McCabe, told him about Featherstone, Coonan, Spillane, and the others. Irish gangsters, he figured, were something that had gone out in the 1930s and 40s. When he saw the photographs, he’d been even more surprised. At five-foot-nine and roughly 140 pounds, Mickey Featherstone sure didn’t look like the feared enforcer he was rumored to be.

But then Egan took a look at Featherstone’s criminal record. Three homicides by the age of twenty-one; a half-dozen arrests on assorted other charges; five years in prison. Then there was Coonan, another five-foot-nine guy with numerous arrests for violent crimes who’d done time inside. It reminded Egan of something he learned many years ago, probably on his first day of officer’s training school: Give a guy a gun or a knife, and he might as well be ten feet tall.

Egan and his partner watched from across the street as Coonan and Featherstone headed into the Market Diner. The cops couldn’t have been more pleased. In the few months since October, when they began their investigation, they’d gotten used to going entire shifts without seeing any of the key players. But tonight it looked like they might be getting a full casting call, including the main man and his sidekick.

From here on out, wherever Coonan and Featherstone went, Egan and Ocasio would follow. If Jimmy and Mickey decided to stay put at the Market Diner, so would they—all night, if they had to. No matter what, they were there for the long haul.