The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (34 page)

Egan found out later that Comas had telephoned Ira Block in the U.S. Attorney’s office and told him he’d made a decision to “check out” rather than testify. The cops were immediately dispatched to Room 1505. They had been banging on the door when they heard the shot. When they burst in, this was how they found Comas.

In the days following the suicide, Egan and the other Intelligence cops wondered if Coonan and Featherstone had gotten word to Billy Comas that he better not take the witness stand. Or maybe Comas felt a sense of loyalty to the West Side guys and didn’t want to become a rat. Or maybe it was something personal. Maybe his daughter, with whom he had a close relationship, was against the idea of disappearing into the Witness Protection Program, against having to assume a whole new identity and live a life of constant fear.

One thing was certain: Billy Uptown was now out of the picture. For good. And that didn’t bode well for the prosecution in the upcoming Whitey Whitehead murder trial.

*    *    *

Billy Comas’s untimely death soon became Topic A among everyone with a vested interest in the trial. To Hochheiser and Aronson, it was a godsend. Now that Comas was dead, he could be anything you wanted him to be—including the guy who shot Whitehead in the bathroom of the Opera Hotel.

As for the other potential witnesses in the case, the shot that killed Billy Comas had a particularly meaningful resonance, one that was certainly not lost on John Crowell.

On May 6, 1979, roughly six weeks after Comas’s suicide, John Crowell made a trip to Rikers Island penitentiary, where both Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan were being held. It was a short trip from Crowell’s apartment in Astoria to Rikers, just up the BrooklynQueens Expressway, near LaGuardia Airport. Crowell arrived in the middle of the afternoon, signed in under the name “Murphy” and asked to see Jimmy Coonan.

Crowell had a lot of things on his mind. Before the Whitehead murder, his life had been looking pretty good. He’d just landed a steady job as a superintendent at the Ansonia Hotel, a landmark hotel near the Plaka Bar then under renovation. He was in charge of a crew of some thirty maintenance and construction workers. He’d also just begun a relationship with Victoria Karl, a woman he’d met one afternoon in Central Park. It wasn’t exactly Easy Street, but Crowell’s life was looking about as “normal” as any ex-con, ex-heroin addict had a right to expect.

Then, purely by chance, he happened to stop by the Plaka Bar on the night of November 21, 1978, and things took a drastic turn for the worse.

In December ’78, a few weeks after the murder, in a bar in the Bronx, Bobby Huggard claimed that Crowell was the one who had planted his girlfriend’s love letter on Whitehead’s body. Crowell insisted he didn’t know what Huggard was talking about. From what he’d heard, it was Billy Comas who’d planted the letter on Whitehead’s body.

But Huggard wasn’t buying it. In the Bronx that night, he stabbed Crowell in the side with a six-inch blade. Luckily for Crowell, it was a short knife and the bar was crowded. The fight got broken up fast enough to let him escape alive—though with his insides hanging out.

After recuperating from the stab wound, Crowell was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury. On April 18, 1979, he’d gone there like he was supposed to, but when he walked into the courtroom he froze. He wasn’t even able to say his name. A judge threatened to cite him for contempt, but he still couldn’t speak. Finally, after postponing his appearance for a week, Crowell was given total immunity from prosecution for anything he might say. On April 25th, he appeared before the grand jury and reluctantly told the complete story of what had happened in the Plaka Bar.

Now Crowell was terrified. Last month his old friend Billy Comas had killed himself rather than testify, which is precisely what the government was now asking him to do—in open court. Crowell knew it wasn’t too late to run. His grand jury testimony was inadmissible unless he appeared at the trial. The way Crowell saw it, there were three things he could do. Testify in court and
probably
wind up dead; take the Billy Comas way out and
definitely
wind up dead; or go on the lam.

On May 6th, when Crowell arrived at Rikers Island, Coonan and Featherstone were being held in the same cell block and happened to be together in the recreation area when a guard informed Jimmy that there was a visitor to see him. Coonan wasn’t expecting anyone, nor did he know anyone by the name “Murphy.”

“You know who I bet it is?” Mickey said to Jimmy. “Crowell.”

Jimmy smiled. “Yeah.”

“Fuck it. This guy could be wired or any fuckin’ thing. Don’t go out there.”

“Nah, I’m gonna go. I’m gonna see what’s goin’ down.”

When Coonan arrived in the visiting area, there was Crowell, looking nervous and shifty as ever. Coonan walked over and sat down across the table from him.

“Hey,” said Crowell, by way of a greeting.

Coonan nodded his head. Since he wasn’t sure whether Crowell was wearing a wire, he planned on keeping his verbal responses to a minimum.

“You know,” said Crowell, “this is some fuckin’ jam you got me in.”

Jimmy shrugged.

“Man, this thing has ruined my whole life, you know. This thing is a big goddamn disaster.… Don’t know what I can do here.”

Jimmy studied Crowell. “Well,” he said, “what
are
you gonna do?”

“Yeah, alright, here’s the deal. If I should decide not to testify.… First of all, they know everything.”

“Who?”

“The cops, the government. I was in front of a grand jury.”

“So I heard.”

“There were others too, I heard. I dunno …”

“I know, I know. It’s a real circus, the whole case.”

“Yeah. But I’m really in a mess here, my life.”

Crowell went on to tell Coonan that he didn’t want to testify. But if he was going to run he needed “financial assistance” and a false ID.

“Yeah,” said Jimmy. “We could arrange that, maybe. If you’re serious.”

Crowell let out a nervous laugh. “
Shit
… yes, goddamn.”

“Alright. Gonna give you a phone number. You call this number in a couple days. Give me time to work it out. See what I can do.”

For weeks after the May 6th meeting at Rikers Island, Crowell walked around in a daze. He’d called the number Jimmy Coonan gave him. It turned out to be the number of a lawyer who put Crowell in contact with Jimmy’s brother, Jackie Coonan.

Jackie told Crowell he had what was needed. Arrangements were made for Jackie to drop off a manila envelope for Crowell at the Ansonia Hotel. But Crowell got scared and stopped going into work. One day he called in and learned that the envelope had arrived. The next day he called again and asked a fellow worker to look inside the envelope. The guy looked at it and said there was $500 in cash, a blank New York Department of Motor Vehicles license, and other identification papers.

“Hey, Johnny,” his co-worker said. “I don’t wanna have nothin’ to do with this, alright? Don’t get me involved.”

Crowell never even picked up the money. All through the summer of ’79, alone in his apartment, he thought a lot about his options—about going on the run, about suicide, about testifying. He hardly slept or ate or even went outdoors.

He just didn’t know what the fuck he was going to do.

From the beginning, it was clear that the Whitey Whitehead murder trial was not going to be your average courtroom proceeding. Already, there had been the Comas suicide. That was followed by John Crowell’s nearly having a cardiac arrest in front of the grand jury. Then came the most startling development of all. Judge Edward J. Greenfield, with a reputation as one of the more inventive judges in New York County, decided that the case would be tried before two entirely separate juries—a short-lived idea that nonetheless landed the trial on the front page of the
New York Times
on November 25, 1979.

The problem, as far as the judge was concerned, was the murder weapon. In one of their first “motions to suppress,” Hochheiser and Aronson had contended that the gun found in Featherstone’s apartment was inadmissible as evidence, since it was seized during an entirely unrelated counterfeit investigation. Judge Greenfield agreed that the gun was inadmissible against Coonan, but not against Featherstone. It had, after all, been found during a legally authorized search, and there was going to be testimony claiming the weapon belonged to Featherstone.

The government had given some thought to having two separate trials. But that would have taken too much time and been far too costly. Plus, the prosecution felt that if Hochheiser had a chance to familiarize himself with the witnesses at the first trial, it would give him a tremendous advantage at the second. The best alternative, proclaimed Judge Greenfield, was to have the defendants tried simultaneously by two juries in a single courtroom. When the gun was offered as evidence, the “Coonan jury” would be excused from the courtroom.

Hochheiser and Axonson were dead set against the one trial, two-jury idea, as was Gustave Newman, Hochheiser’s former associate at Evzeroff, Newman, and Sonenshine, who they’d selected to represent Jimmy Coonan. The prosecutor, Assistant D.A. John Mullady, was initially for it. But he changed his mind after the judge’s ruling began to receive extensive media attention in the
Times
and elsewhere. Assuming Coonan and Featherstone were convicted, the prosecutor felt the defense might have been able to use the highly unorthodox procedure as the basis for their appeals.

What Mullady agreed to do next surprised even Hochheiser, Aronson, and Newman. Not only was he willing to go with a single jury trial, but in order to do so he was willing to drop the gun as evidence against
either
Featherstone or Coonan. The murder weapon—the single most damaging piece of evidence against Featherstone—would not be entered. Mullady apparently felt they had a strong enough case without it.

On December 5, 1979, more than one year after Whitey Whitehead’s killing in the basement of the Opera Hotel, the trial began in State Supreme Court at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan. An acrimonious tone was set early, as Hochheiser contended in his opening statement that the government witnesses were going to be “desperate men of the worst possible character,” men who would say anything to “satisfy their masters.” Assistant D.A. Mullady objected; Hochheiser objected to Mullady’s objection. And so it went.

The bad feelings were genuine and had already reached a fever pitch before any of the witnesses ever took the stand. Much of the hostility was based on personality differences between Mullady, a humorless, somewhat priggish practitioner of the law, and Hochheiser, who viewed his profession as something of a contact sport. The die had been cast during a pre-trial conference when, during a heated argument in the judge’s chambers, Mullady jumped out of his chair and challenged Hochheiser to a fistfight. From then on, Hochheiser knew he could push Mullady’s button at will. He often did, especially with his outlandishly frequent motions for a mistrial (a total of sixty-five during the three-week trial).

One of Hochheiser’s first motions created an incident that eventually wound up in the newspapers. Harold Whitehead’s wife, an Irish-born waitress who would later be called to testify, stood in the spectator’s gallery with her baby. The baby cried frequently, and Hochheiser called for a mistrial on the grounds that the baby was disruptive. He also claimed that the baby had probably been brought into the courtroom as a ploy by the prosecution, a “pathetic” attempt to win the jury’s sympathies.

When Assistant D.A. Mullady took exception to Hochheiser’s claims and the judge turned down the motion, the defense came up with a ploy of their own. The next day Sissy Featherstone showed up with two-year-old Mickey, Jr., who also cried frequently. The
New York Post
later dubbed the incident “the battle of the babies.”

Along with Hochheiser’s antics, Mullady had other problems to worry about. He’d lined up an impressive number of cooperative informants as witnesses, people who would claim to have first-hand knowledge about Coonan, Featherstone, and the circumstances surrounding the murder of Whitey Whitehead. But as the assistant D.A. was about to find out, cooperative informants don’t always make the best witnesses—especially when they present conflicting versions of the facts.

As his first big witness, Mullady called Raymond Steen. Freshly scrubbed and dressed in a fine new suit, Steen looked almost respectable. He was obviously nervous, and, at the tender age of twenty, seemed an ideal sympathetic character. Until he opened his mouth. Not only did he sound like a thug, but as the jury, the audience, and a sizable press contingent listened, Steen revealed the first—though certainly not the last—major contradiction in the government’s case.

According to Steen, on November 21, 1978, the day before the Whitehead murder, Mickey Featherstone had called his apartment and told him to bring over a .25-caliber Beretta that Steen was holding for him. When Steen gave the gun to Featherstone, Mickey supposedly said, “Thanks. I gotta use this tonight on a guy in the Plaka Bar.” Weeks later, Steen said, he overheard Featherstone describing the murder to Donald Mallay at the Westway Candy Store. Featherstone laughed as he told Mallay that he was the one who shot Whitehead, and that Whitehead would not die.

“I shot him once,” Steen quoted Mickey as saying, “and he wouldn’t go down. So I hit him. I hoofed him. He turned purple but he still wouldn’t go down.”

By itself, Steen’s story might have seemed plausible. Indeed, Mullady had already used it in his opening statement to underscore the government’s claim that the Whitehead murder had been carefully plotted ahead of time. Yet Whitehead’s own wife, who had taken the stand only moments before Steen, said her husband went to the Plaka Bar that night purely on a whim; it had not been planned or premeditated. So how could Featherstone have known Whitehead was going to be there?

Hochheiser seized on this detail in his cross-examination of Steen. But it was still early in the trial and the discrepancy didn’t even make the next day’s papers. The reporters, almost all of whom were coming into the story with no real knowledge of the West Side, were there mainly to hear what Steen had to say about an entirely different phenomenon—a phenomenon that they would turn, once and for all, into “the Westies.”