The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (38 page)

That night they discussed their options. They knew they weren’t likely to find anything that suited their needs as well as this house. But the money was a problem. They had so little saved up that if they were to spend it all on the down payment and closing fees they would be totally wiped out.

The way Mickey saw it, there was only one way to go. “Let me try Jimmy,” he said. “Just this one time.”

Sissy was against the idea. As bad as she wanted the house, she knew that if they borrowed the money from Coonan, it would come with a price tag that far exceeded the money itself. But Mickey was persistent. He was certain there would be no problem getting a loan from Jimmy on the up-and-up.

“Jimmy owes me,” reasoned Mickey. “He knows he owes me. Besides, if it does come with any strings attached, I’ll just say no.”

Reluctantly, Sissy acquiesced.

A few weeks later, in October, Mickey went to see Edna Coonan at her home in Hazlet. In a way, he was upset he had to beg like this, though he was trying not to think of it as begging. As far as he was concerned, it was money Jimmy had promised him. After the Whitehead verdict three and a half years earlier, just before Mickey was shipped out to Missouri, he and Jimmy had said their farewells at Rikers Island. “Don’t worry,” Jimmy told him. “I’ll take care of your wife and kids. We been through hell together. When you get out? There’s gonna be fifty grand—cash—just waitin’ for you.”

When Mickey got out, he asked around. No fifty grand.

Now, here he was sitting in Edna’s kitchen asking to borrow forty grand. And he was even offering to pay it back once he went to work with Teamsters Local 817, like he was planning.

Edna’s response? “Gee, Mickey, I don’t know. I gotta talk to Jimmy about that.”

Two weeks later Mickey got his answer, and it didn’t even come from Edna. It came from Bobby Herman, a neighborhood guy. Herman told Mickey that he heard from Edna’s brother, Joe Crotty, who heard from Edna, who heard from Jimmy, that the answer on the loan was “No.”

At first Mickey was shocked. “After all the shit I been through with Jimmy Coonan?” he asked himself. “After all the times I put my life on the line for this guy? Ain’t nobody knows what I done for this guy except me and one person: Jimmy Coonan. And this ungrateful motherfucker tells me no? Unreal.”

Sissy said she wasn’t surprised at all; she had expected it. But Mickey just couldn’t believe Jimmy would treat him this way.

In November of ’83, just four weeks after Mickey’s meeting with Edna, he and Sissy received an invitation to an engagement party for the Coonans’ oldest son, Bobby. The party was to be held in a large room at the Hazlet, New Jersey, firehouse, and everyone from the old neighborhood was expected to attend. Edna had even rented a bus to pick up a group of people in front of the Skyline Motor Inn on 10th Avenue and transport them to and from Hazlet.

“I can’t believe this bitch,” said Sissy when they got the invitation. “She treats us like dogs then expects us to come to an engagement party?”

Mickey, on the other hand, was anxious to go. He knew there would be a lot of people there from the old neighborhood, some of whom he hadn’t seen in years. And there was the pride factor. “We can’t let her think she controls our lives,” he said. “We’ll go there and hold our heads up just like everybody else.”

There was snow on the ground that night as over one hundred West Siders gathered at the firehouse in Hazlet. Edna had hired a live band, so there was dancing, and tables had been set up around the room for people to sit and talk. It was a festive atmosphere, with everyone drinking and getting reacquainted.

The only thing missing was Jimmy Coonan. Jimmy had recently received parole and was actually out of jail for a few months. But then the Manhattan D.A.’s office nabbed him on an old assault conviction stemming from the Vanderbilt Evans shooting way back in 1975. As a result, Jimmy would be spending at least another twelve months behind bars.

Midway through the evening Edna Coonan came over to Mickey and Sissy’s table. She was dressed in a brightred gown and had her dyed-black hair fastened with a bow. Edna had never really been what anyone would call a knockout, and in recent years she had put on a lot of weight, so much so that behind her back some neighborhood people called her a “cow.”

“Mickey, do you need a drink?” she asked.

“Sure,” he replied. “I’ll take a spritzer.”

When Edna returned, she handed Mickey his drink and asked, “Can I talk to you, Mickey?”

He turned his chair slightly so it was facing Edna, who took the vacant seat to his left.

“Jimmy told me to talk to you,” she said, sounding deadly serious.

“What’s up?”

“He’s got a proposition for you, seein’ as you need money and all. He’s willin’ to turn over the piers to you, the whole thing. But you gotta do somethin’ for him.”

“Yeah?”

Edna explained how there were three people Jimmy wanted Mickey to kill. The first was Bull Maher, a neighborhood guy who’d been seated at Mickey’s table just a few minutes earlier. According to Edna, Jimmy had found out that Maher, who sometimes picked up ILA envelopes for Jimmy in New York, had been steaming open the envelopes and reading private correspondence between. Coonan and his criminal associates.

“Jimmy wants him put outta business,” declared Edna. “Bull wouldn’t even be in the shylock business if it wasn’t for Jimmy. Jimmy says, ‘Youse do whatever you gotta do, but his shylock days is over.’”

The second person was Edna’s own ex, Billy Beattie. Rumor had it that Beattie, who’d fled from Hell’s Kitchen years earlier after failing to kill Tommy Collins, was recently seen in one of the neighborhood bars. As far as Coonan was concerned, Beattie had run out on his debts, which were somewhere in the six figures at the time.

“Jimmy wants him dead,” said Edna, stone-faced, “and so do I.”

The third person was Vinnie Leone, who, even as Edna spoke, was seated with his wife directly across the table.

“This bastard’s been rippin’ us off,” she said under her breath. “I seen it myself. I been over at his house last week. He’s got these antiques, statues like, and artwork all over the place. Stuff that’s worth thousands, maybe millions. Now where’s he gettin’ the dough-ray-me, huh? You oughta see this stuff. It’s like a damn museum!

“Jimmy wants him dead,” she said. “The sooner the better.”

Mickey listened to all this impassively without saying a word.

“Edna,” he finally said when she was done, “I don’t want it. Don’t want no part of this shit.”

“Mickey, this is serious. This is business.”

“I know what it is. I don’t want it.”

Edna stared into her drink. “Okay, Mickey. But Jimmy’s gonna be very disappointed.”

Mickey shrugged.

“I mean,” she added, “you know this is gonna get done, whether you do it or somebody else. It’s gonna get done.”

“That ain’t my problem. That’s your problem.”

After Edna went back out on the dance floor, Sissy turned to her husband. She’d heard bits and pieces of the conversation and was barely able to contain her anger. “Are you gettin’ involved with these fucking people? Are you gettin’ involved again?”

Mickey and Sissy argued at the table for awhile. Mickey was trying to explain that he’d said no to Edna’s proposition, but Sissy was so upset she was hardly listening. “That treacherous bitch!” she kept saying over and over.

Things got even stranger later on, when Mickey and Sissy drove through the snow to the Coonan house, where the party continued with a smaller group of neighborhood people. They were all in the kitchen drinking, waxing nostalgic about the old days, when Edna said she needed to talk to Mickey again. Edna and Mickey went downstairs to the recreation room.

At first, Edna started in again on the people Jimmy wanted to have whacked. Mickey remained adamant, saying he was on his own now. Then Edna started to act weird. She was standing rubbing her back up against the wall, striking what she thought was a seductive pose.

“See those matches?” she said, nodding towards a clear glass bowl filled with matchbooks from dozens of different bars and restaurants. “Collected all those since Jimmy’s been away. I ain’t sittin’ around doin’ nothin’ this time. I been havin’ a good time.”

Just then Sissy came downstairs. She looked at Edna, who’d walked over to the couch and was now stretched out, and at Mickey standing nearby with his drink.

“What the fuck is goin’ on here?” she demanded.

“Nothin’s goin’ on,” said Mickey, as Edna sat up. “Just the same old shit.”

By then Sissy could no longer contain herself. She laid into Edna, calling her a “fat cunt” and a “treacherous bitch” and every other insult she could think of. Edna just sat there like she was above it all.

“You just remember,” snarled Sissy, grabbing Mickey to leave. “You keep that fuckin’ husband of yours outta our lives or I’ll come back here and burn this goddamn house to the ground.”

Things quieted down for the Featherstones after that, at least temporarily. Mickey’s brother Henry got him a job at Erie Transfer, a garage affiliated with Teamsters Local 817 that rented trucks and automobiles to the entertainment industry. It was located at 52nd Street and 11th Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. Mickey didn’t have his union book yet, but he was getting work almost every day by shaping up.

Soon, however, he was back to using cocaine, which fueled his bitterness towards Edna and Jimmy. “He’s got some balls havin’ his wife give me an order like that,” he would say of Jimmy over and over again.

Mickey could feel the anger and hatred eating away at his insides. After all the bloodshed, all the trials and prison time, this is what he got in return?

The cocaine and alcohol were supposed to help ease the pain. But what they really did was draw him back into the same frame of mind he’d been in before he got “rehabilitated.”

Jimmy McElroy was standing on the balcony of his 11th Avenue apartment, looking out at the Hudson River and the banks of New Jersey to the west. In his hand was a .25 with a silencer on it. From the couch in McElroy’s front room, Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Mac’s young in-law, Kevin Kelly, watched as he raised the gun and started firing, as if he were trying to shoot holes in the clear blue afternoon sky. It was mid-February 1984, three months since Edna’s party in Hazlet.

Kevin Kelly laughed. “Get in here, you bug. We know the fuckin’ thing works.”

There was a half-gram of coke spread out on the coffee table, and they’d all done a few lines. McElroy and Kelly were giggling, and so was Mickey. It had been a long time since Mickey had hung out in the neighborhood and gotten high. It felt good, just like the old days.

In the years since Mickey went away to prison, both McElroy and Kelly had made considerable inroads with Jimmy Coonan. McElroy had always had a reputation as one of the neighborhood’s most feared tough guys. But he had no business sense whatsoever. Everybody knew that. A self-styled ladies’ man who’d recently given himself the nickname “Studs,” he was the kind of guy who never thought more than four or five hours ahead. “A bellhead,” one of McElroy’s girlfriends, Fran Mostyn, used to call him—though never to his face.

Jimmy Mac liked to tell stories about when he worked briefly as a doorman at the luxurious Plaza Hotel on 5th Avenue. A couple of Arab sheiks, he claimed, were regular customers at the hotel. When they heard Mac used to be a boxer, they gave him $100 and asked him to come by their room late one night.

“What for?” asked Mac.

“Just come by,” said one of the sheiks, clad in traditional Arab dress.

When he arrived at the room that night, one of the sheiks asked McElroy to slap the other one around.

“Wait a minute,” said Mac, “what’re youse two? Wackos?”

But they offered him another $100, so, as requested, Jimmy slapped one of the sheiks around the room while the other one watched.

Featherstone used to ask McElroy to tell this story time and time again. He always got a good laugh out of it.

Only McElroy could have gotten away with a stunt like leaving the shell casing and bullet in the bathroom of the Opera Hotel the night Coonan stiffed Whitey Whitehead. McElroy had been told by Featherstone to get rid of
all
the casings that night, but he panicked. Mickey asked him about it later. McElroy replied, “Gee, Mick, I
thought
I got ’em all. Honest.” Anybody else and Mickey would have thought it was a deliberate plant. But you had to make allowances for Jimmy Mac.

Kevin Kelly, on the other hand, was considered to be a cut above the average thug. In recent years, he’d come out of nowhere to assume a position of leadership in West Side criminal circles. Born in 1955, he was eight or nine years younger than McElroy and Featherstone—a member of the generation that had grown up hearing stories about Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone, dreaming of the day when they would get their shot at the neighborhood’s lucrative rackets.

Kelly was born on West 56th Street just off 9th Avenue. His godfather was James McManus, the district leader. With his neatly trimmed black hair and thick black eyebrows, Kevin had been told he looked like Matt Dillon, the handsome young actor. Since his marriage to Kim McElroy, Jimmy Mac’s niece, he and the elder gangster had gotten close. Kim was expecting a baby, and Kevin had already told Jimmy he wanted him to be the godfather. Sometimes they also did business together, like, for instance, the day they smacked around O’Donnell and Fanning of the theatrical Teamsters Local 817 at their offices out in Long Island.

At five-foot-seven and 140 pounds, Kelly wasn’t much of a physical threat. On top of everything else, he was an epileptic—not exactly the kind of guy you’d want at your side in a neighborhood rumble. But like so many of the smaller guys in Hell’s Kitchen, Kelly rarely went anywhere without a gun. And he knew how to use it.

When Mickey first returned from Wisconsin, he’d been hearing that Kevin was now thought of as Jimmy’s protégé. Mickey had always been wary of Kevin, and this only reaffirmed his suspicions. The way he saw it, the kid was a bit
too
ambitious.

There was that time on 11th Avenue just after Mickey returned from prison. A group of neighborhood guys were hanging out in front of McElroy’s apartment building. Everybody was telling Mickey how well the rackets had been going since he went away. Eventually, Kevin had taken him aside and asked, “Hey, Mick, next time we whack somebody, I was hopin’ maybe you could show me how you and Jimmy made those guys do the Houdini. Know what I’m sayin’?”