The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (20 page)

The “long haul” was something Intelligence cops knew all about. Unlike most other divisions in the police department, Intell, by its very nature, had the luxury of allowing their investigations to evolve slowly, detail by detail. Since the Division was designed to gather information, not make arrests, there were few of the pressures that many other cops were under to come up with immediate results. Most higher-ups in the NYPD understood that accumulating names and locations and establishing criminal relationships could take weeks, months, sometimes years.

Following the outrageously high number of homicides on the West Side, it was inevitable that law enforcement would take an interest. Of course, each recent West Side murder had brought about its own local investigation. But these various isolated investigations had all been stalled by a lack of witnesses, or, in the case of Paddy Dugan, the lack of a corpse.

Along with an inability to crack the West Side code of silence, what was missing was a larger vision, an investigative approach that dealt with the various killings as part of an overall pattern.

The Intelligence Division not only had the right approach, they had the right men. Egan’s supervisor, Sergeant Tom McCabe, was from the old school. Born in 1934, he spent his youth in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights in the days when it was a working-class Irish enclave not unlike Hell’s Kitchen. Since joining the force in 1955, he’d heard all about the Irish Mob of the 20s, 30s, and 40s, and he was familiar with Mickey Spillane and other Irish gangsters from his own generation.

With his wavy white hair and no-nonsense manner, McCabe looked and sounded like a real-life Jimmy Cagney. Not one to mince words, he’d told the other Intelligence cops that the fact he was of the same ethnic background as the people they were investigating meant little one way or the other. “A crook is a crook,” McCabe laid it out to Richie Egan and the other officers in their first meeting at Intelligence headquarters.

Egan, the Irish kid from Elmhurst, Queens, had been given a special word of advice. Said McCabe: “You’ll be getting a lot of wiseass comments from people you know—maybe even other cops—about not causing problems for your own people. You just remind ’em you’re a cop first and an Irishman second, and let it go at that.”

As McCabe later explained it to Egan, he’d first gotten wind of the changing picture in West Side criminal circles earlier in 1977, during an altogether unrelated investigation of old-time Jewish and Italian gangsters from the Garment District. As part of that investigation—known as OPERATION FASHION—the Intelligence Division’s Monitoring Unit had been conducting a surveillance on the Stage Deli, the venerable Manhattan bistro at West 54th Street and 7th Avenue favored by show people and assorted old-time New Yorkers. From their observation post across the street at the Sheraton Hotel, a handful of detectives had photographed the comings and goings of, among others, Rocco Santamarie, an aging loanshark with Fat Tony Salerno’s Genovese family.

In the midst of these old codgers at the Stage Deli, McCabe and the other detectives began to see three young Irish kids. At first, nobody had any idea who they were. What would these Irish upstarts be doing hanging out with these decrepit Jewish and Italian gangsters from the Garment District? It didn’t make sense. But after checking with the Midtown North precinct, which took in Hell’s Kitchen, the detectives were able to ID Coonan and Featherstone. Much later, they learned that the third guy was Robert Michael “Pete” Wilson, a convicted felon from Boston whom Coonan had done time with in Sing Sing.

It was also around this time that McCabe first heard about three West Side–related killings. The first was the Tom Devaney murder on July 20, 1976. Then came the Eddie Cummiskey murder on August 20th of that same year. And later, on January 27, 1977, Tom “the Greek” Kapatos had been gunned down in the middle of the afternoon on West 34th Street.

These murders, which had taken place within six months of each other, seemed to suggest a pattern. All three victims had been born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen. All three had been shot gangland style. And all three were known associates of Mickey Spillane.

McCabe checked around and began to hear stories about how Spillane was having problems. The word on the street was that Devaney, Cummiskey, and Kapatos were killed at the behest of Fat Tony Salerno, who was looking to establish control over the soon-to-be-built Jacob Javits Convention Center. At the time, the building was only in the planning stages. But the construction of one of the largest convention halls in the nation promised to be a gold mine for organized crime. Since Mickey Spillane controlled the neighborhood where the Javits Center was going up as well as many of the unions that would be involved in its construction, he figured it was his baby. Never a great friend of the Italians, Spillane had let it be known he wasn’t going to let the Genovese people anywhere near the Convention Center other than as a junior partner.

Salerno responded by eliminating Devaney, Cummiskey, and Kapatos, three of Spillane’s closest underlings. The scuttlebutt was that Spillane himself would be next.

Sergeant McCabe had heard these reports about Salerno and Spillane and the Convention Center, and as he watched the Stage Deli from their observation post at the Sheraton Hotel, he found himself wondering if there was any connection between them and these young West Side Irish kids meeting with Rocco Santamarie, one of Salerno’s shylocks. It was only a hunch. But in his more than twenty years on the force, McCabe had learned to go with his hunches, even if they sometimes seemed a bit off the beaten path.

The Sergeant wasn’t able to do anything about it, though, until OPERATION FASHION was wrapped up and he was transferred to Intell’s Syndicated Crime Unit, or SCU. Even then, McCabe’s premise that these young Irish kids were somehow connected to the Spillane/Salerno power struggle went untested for months. To get an okay from his supervisors to pursue the matter fulltime, he needed something that indicated definitively that the West Side Mob was in a state of flux.

He got his wish on the night of May 13, 1977, around the same time Ruby Stein’s mangled torso floated ashore at Rockaway Beach.…

On 59th Street in Woodside, Queens, a black Cadillac pulled up in front of building number 47–50. The driver got out of the Cadillac, buzzed apartment 5-J and spoke briefly into the intercom. Then he returned to the car.

A few minutes later a handsome forty-three-year-old man wearing dark-blue slacks, a white V-neck T-shirt, and a brown leather jacket appeared from the building and walked over to the car. As he bent down to talk to someone in the car, a shot rang out. Then another and another and another and another. Five shots in all, hitting the man in the face, neck, chest, abdomen, and left arm. The body fell to the street and the car sped away.

A police officer responding to the scene found the victim lying next to a parked car. His body looked like a sieve, with blood flowing freely from the multiple gunshot wounds. His face was half blown away by a bullet that had hit him in the right eye.

The cop carefully reached inside the leather jacket and extracted a wallet. Opening the wallet, he found a driver’s license.

The name on the license was Michael J. Spillane.

To the Intelligence Division, the Spillane hit was the most promising development so far, but to many in Hell’s Kitchen, it was a cause for grief. On the afternoon of May 16th, mourners had gathered on West 47th Street at the McManus and Ahern Funeral Parlor, owned and run by “the McMani.” Mickey’s widow, Maureen, was there, as was her brother, Jim McManus, leader of the Midtown Democratic Association. Many found it especially ironic that Spillane, a gambler and a superstitious man, had been gunned down on Friday the 13th.

To the older residents, the saddest fact of all was that Spillane’s murder was so totally unnecessary. At the time of his death, Mickey was no longer a “mover” in West Side criminal circles, and hadn’t been for months. There was even a story circulating in Hell’s Kitchen that following the gangland killings of Devaney, Cummiskey, and Kapatos, Spillane was understandably worried. He took a trip to Florida to see Eddie McGrath, one-time ruler of the West Side docks. When Spillane was a kid, McGrath was friends with all the big-time gangsters, Italian and otherwise. If the Mafia was behind these recent West Side killings, as Spillane suspected they were, he was certain McGrath would know all about it.

In Florida, Spillane had found an old and enfeebled Eddie McGrath, now well into his eighties. Spillane asked Eddie if he knew anything about this recent pattern of killings, in which he was rumored to be next. But McGrath was completely out of touch. His contacts in the New York underworld had dried up long ago. Mickey was on his own.

When he returned to New York, a frightened Spillane moved his family from Hell’s Kitchen—where he was born, raised and had risen to a position of prominence—to Woodside, a pleasant, working-class Irish neighborhood in Queens. Now, five months after moving to Queens, Mickey had come home to 10th Avenue—in a box.

At the same time the Spillanes, the McMani, and other long-time Hell’s Kitchen residents were mourning the passing of one of their own, Jimmy Coonan, Mickey Featherstone, and a few others were having a sit-down a few blocks away at the Skyline Motor Inn. Roy Demeo, Coonan’s contact in the Gambino family, had requested a meeting with Coonan and his people.

“Bet you’re wondering what happened with Spillane,” Demeo told Coonan after they’d all settled in at the bar area of the motel.

“I was, kinda,” replied Jimmy.

“Well,” said Roy with a smile. “You got an early birthday present.”

At five-foot-ten, with slicked-back hair and a sizable paunch, the thirty-seven-year-old Demeo had established a reputation as a feared Mafia enforcer. A former butcher’s apprentice, Demeo had yet to be “made,” or officially initiated into
La Cosa Nostra
. But he was well on his way. His crew was thought to be responsible for dozens of murders, including many in which the victims’ bodies had disappeared without a trace.

Naturally, Demeo and Coonan hit it off well. Ever since their initial meeting at Ward’s Island, they’d been courting each other. Apparently, the gift of Mickey Spillane’s death was Roy’s latest overture.

“Yeah,” Demeo added. “Wanna know what his last words were?”

“Sure,” said Jimmy, his eyes beginning to twinkle.

“He started yellin’, ‘No, no, you was supposed to get Mickey and Jimmy, not me!’”

They all had a good laugh, then Jimmy asked, “What the fuck did he mean by that, anyway?”

“How the fuck should I know?” answered Demeo.

Jimmy was ecstatic, of course, and he told Roy and his sidekick, Danny Grillo, that from now on, anything they needed from the boys on the West Side was theirs for the asking.

“You don’t trust those bastards, I hope,” Mickey said to Coonan after the two Italians had driven off.

“I don’t know,” answered Jimmy. “I ain’t sure yet.”

Afterwards, Featherstone began to get worried about the Spillane murder. It wasn’t that he cared about Mickey Spillane; he agreed with most of the young guys in the neighborhood that Spillane was over the hill. But he knew how popular Spillane was with some of the legitimate people in Hell’s Kitchen. And he knew that he and Coonan would be the prime suspects in Spillane’s murder. He didn’t want that over his head. So he called Jim McManus, Spillane’s brother-in-law, to wash his hands of the whole thing.

“I just want you to know,” he told the district leader over the phone, “I had nothin’ to do with Mickey gettin’ killed.”

McManus said he appreciated the call.

Although Egan and the other Intelligence cops didn’t have a complete sense of the hierarchy just yet, it was clear that with the death of Spillane on May 13, 1977, the West Side Irish Mob had entered a new phase. Coonan, they knew, was the leader, and Featherstone his number-two man. After that were a whole host of small-time hoodlums, some of them younger guys around Jimmy and Mickey’s age, some of them holdovers from the Spillane years. There was Jimmy McElroy, the good-looking exboxer; Billy Beattie, the lanky bartender at the 596 Club; Tommy Hess, the muscular kid who also worked at Coonan’s bar; Tony Lucich and Tommy Collins, both older gangsters from Spillane’s generation; and Richie Ryan, the youngest of the bunch.

As had always been the case on the West Side, the backbone of their operation seemed to be loansharking and the policy games. After that came the unions. Coonan, the Intelligence cops were hearing, had his teeth into the ILA—a traditional neighborhood racket. Where Jimmy seemed to be breaking new ground was with the various entertainment unions, especially theatrical Teamsters Local 817, which delivered props and equipment to film and television studios throughout the city.

Through hours and hours of surveillance, Egan and the boys from SCU began to amass an updated West Side dossier. Not only were they getting a sense of the key players, but also of their daily routines and where they conducted their business. Although the cops heard plenty of barroom gossip about the recent rash of killings—all of which they passed on to local Homicide detectives—their own focus was much broader. The strategy was to keep methodically collecting details until events kicked the investigation into a higher gear.

Each day, after a long surveillance, Richie Egan would return to Intelligence headquarters on Hudson Street in lower Manhattan and fill out his daily log. Traditionally, an investigation is given a name by one of the detectives involved. Sometimes, there’s even a friendly competition to see who can come up with a name that sticks. This time, however, there was little argument. WEST SIDE STORY was the name Egan wrote down on the top of his surveillance report, and the other detectives immediately followed suit.

The first big break came in February 1978. Through Frank Hunt, a police officer at the Midtown North precinct who was well connected in Hell’s Kitchen, Intell got a lead on a possible confidential informant, or “C.I.” Hunt tipped them off that there was a kid in his late twenties who was up to his neck in debt with three or four neighborhood loansharks, including Tommy Collins, Tony Lucich, and a free-lance operator named Harry “the Hat” Wedgemont. The kid was soft, Hunt thought, and might be willing to cut a deal if the right pressures were brought to bear. When the kid got arrested for beating up his girlfriend, Intell made its move. They pulled the kid out of arraignment and gave him an option: He could take his chances back in the neighborhood, where he might wind up dead. Or he could go in with them.