The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (39 page)

“That’s not my thing,” Mickey replied. “I can’t, you know, I can’t handle it.”

Kevin started laughing and slapped Mickey on the back. “Yeah, come to think of it Jimmy told me that once. He said you get sick like a dog every time they cut open the belly.”

Kevin reminded Mickey of Jimmy Coonan when he said that—something about the way he laughed when he talked about dismemberment.

Now, months later, Featherstone found himself seated next to Kelly in McElroy’s apartment, and he knew exactly why they had called him here. He’d heard about it a few days earlier. It was a killing. Vinnie Leone had finally been whacked out in Jersey. Edna was right. It got done one way or another. And from the moment he heard about it, Mickey had a sneaking suspicion that the ambitious pretty-boy, Kevin Kelly, had something to do with it.

“You know what this is about?” asked Kelly, bent over the coffee table to do another line.

“Yeah,” said Mickey. “I got a pretty good idea.”

“Vinnie Leone.”

“That’s what I figured. You wanna tell me about it?”

“The fuck deserved it,” said McElroy, jumping into the conversation. “That guinea bastard’s been rippin’ us off since day one.”

McElroy explained how Leone, who was their partner in the sports-betting operation being run out of Jimmy Judge’s basement, had been “past-posting.” He would call in after certain games were over and claim he had accepted late bets from various bettors and lost. Then he would take money out of the business, supposedly to pay off the losing bets. But really, McElroy said, it was going back into Vinnie Leone’s pocket. Over the last few months alone he’d taken out something like $30,000.

“How’d you find out about it?” asked Mickey.

“This fucking guy,” said Jimmy Mac, “was running his mouth off out in Jersey, to people in Jersey bars; saying he’s making assholes out of us, that he’s robbing the Irish kids blind.”

When Kelly and McElroy heard that Mickey had turned Edna down, they visited Jimmy at the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York and offered their services.

“We wanted this guy dead, Mick,” said Kelly. “Somebody had to do it.”

“Yeah,” answered Mickey, not wanting to commit himself one way or the other. “So how’d it go down?”

With great enthusiasm, McElroy and Kelly explained how a week earlier, on the afternoon of February 11th, they met Leone at the Local 1909 offices on 12th Avenue. Leone lived out in Jersey near one of McElroy’s girlfriends, and they had asked if he’d be willing to drop them off on his way home. “Sure,” Leone said.

In the car, McElroy told Vinnie they had some good coke they wanted to try out. Vinnie was game, so he pulled off the expressway in Guttenberg, New Jersey, and stopped on Bellevue Avenue, an idyllic tree-lined suburban street. Kelly was in the back seat, McElroy in the passenger’s seat, and Leone behind the wheel.

From the back, Kevin handed Vinnie the packet of coke. Vinnie carefully opened the pyramid paper, talking nonstop, as he was sometimes known to do. He dipped the corner of one of his car keys into the coke, put it to his nose, and inhaled. He leaned his head back to savor the effect. The coke worked its way through his sinuses to his brain, stimulating his nerve endings and causing a sudden rush of stark clarity and euphoria.

Just then, from behind, Kevin Kelly put a small-caliber automatic to the base of Vinnie’s skull and began firing. He emptied the chamber, firing six shots when one would have easily done the job. Leone’s head and brains sprayed like watermelon over the inside of the windshield. Particles of flesh splattered on Jimmy McElroy, who had his fingers pressed to his ears, trying to block out the deafening sound of gunfire. Kelly hadn’t even used a silencer.

McElroy had almost panicked, but he laughed about it now as he related the story to Featherstone. The windows in the car had all been rolled up, he said, and the shots were so loud that they rang in his ears for hours afterwards.

After the shooting, they fled to McElroy’s girlfriend’s place, where they quickly changed clothes. Then they met Billy Bokun, the young kid with the birthmark on his face, who was waiting for them at an agreed-upon spot nearby. Bokun drove them back into Manhattan, where they destroyed the clothes and got rid of the gun they’d used on Leone.

“Yeah,” McElroy told Featherstone. “Then we went to visit our man. You know, Blondie, Jimmy C. We told him we took care of that fuck and now we wanted the piers, just like he said.”

“And?”

“He said, ‘You got it, you know. Long as Mickey’s in it with youse.’”

Okay, thought Mickey, so they finally got to the point. He had suspected this was why they called him here in the first place. Ever since he turned Edna down, he’d known it was coming. There was no way Jimmy Coonan was going to let him walk away from the Westies. No way. McElroy and Kelly were trying to make it sound nice, like the piers were being handed to him on a silver platter. But what this really was, he knew, was his last chance.

Without saying so, they were letting him know that if he didn’t go in with them now, he would be following in Vinnie Leone’s footsteps.

Featherstone was ready for this—so ready he even had a little speech prepared.

“Alright, youse two listen to me for a minute. You fuckin’ guys wouldn’t be nowhere if it wasn’t for me and the sweat off my balls that made Jimmy Coonan what he is today. All the time I put myself out for this guy? Everybody used my name, and youse know it. Everybody. People get rich using my name, they don’t even tell me. Nothin’.”

“Hey,” said Jimmy Mac, “that’s why it’s gotta be different this time.”

“Definitely.”

“Mickey, that was Coonan, not us.”

Featherstone could feel the cocaine loosening his tongue; his words poured out in a nonstop torrent. “Let me tell youse. Nobody took care of my wife and kids when I was inside, that’s another thing youse know is true. Nobody. You want me back in the crew? Okay. But things is gonna be different, see? ’Cause I ain’t in it for friendship this time. I ain’t in it for loyalty no more. I’m in it for money. Youse people used me enough, man.”

Kelly and McElroy both assured him that things would be different this time, that the piers were now theirs to do with as they pleased. From now on, anytime Mickey’s name was used by any member of the crew for any transaction, Mickey would get his cut.

“We’ll make sure of that,” promised Kelly.

As for Mickey’s family and kids, never again would they be hung out to dry. That was Jimmy Coonan, they said over and over. Everybody knew he’d done wrong.

Hours later, on the drive back to New Jersey, Mickey thought about what he’d done. The “positive outlook” he’d had in those months when he first returned from prison had been slowly eroded by the alcohol, the cocaine, and the rage he was feeling inside. By the time the moment finally arrived—the moment where he was faced with the crucial decision of what he would do with his life—there was never any question. He wasn’t about to just sit there and let them take advantage of him. He wasn’t about to “take it up the ass.”

Mickey thought about loyalty. Loyalty was the thing Jimmy Coonan had always talked about. It was the thing that supposedly made the West Side gang invulnerable. And it wasn’t just Coonan. The entire neighborhood had demanded loyalty, and Mickey felt he had come through for them. At one time, he would gladly have taken a bullet for Jimmy if he’d been asked to, and he’d have taken a bullet for the rest of the Westies.

But all that was bullshit, and now Mickey knew it. He’d been used, that was all. And he felt like a douche bag for having taken so long to figure it out.

It made him feel depressed, too, in a way. This was not what he had wanted. For the last few years he had harbored dreams of a halfway normal life. But that was all down the toilet now.

Within days Mickey’s sadness disappeared and was replaced by anger. Anger at those who, he felt, had forced him into this position.

The first order of business was ILA Local 1909. McElroy and Kelly had long suspected Tommy Ryan, who Mickey shook hands with when Leone brought him around the shop, of skimming their waterfront profits with Vinnie. John Potter, who seemed to have forgotten his encounter with Coonan and Featherstone at the Landmark Tavern six years earlier, might also have been in on it, though they weren’t sure about him.

In late February 1984, two weeks after the Vinnie Leone murder, Featherstone, McElroy, and Kelly set up a meeting with Potter and Ryan at the Madison Diner, one of the neighborhood’s oldest diner/bars, at 57th Street and 11th Avenue. The meeting was set for one in the afternoon. Potter and Ryan were already there when Featherstone arrived.

Both in their fifties, the two veteran union officials were well aware of the brutal interplay that often went on between the mob and organized labor. But still, to have their business manager disappear overnight had been an unsettling development. Now, at the Madison Diner, the sight of Mickey Featherstone taking a seat across the table reduced them both to helpless, quivering old men.

“Hey, Mick,” said John Potter, his hand trembling as he tried to maneuver a cup of coffee from its saucer to his mouth.

Tommy Ryan chose not to speak. He put a cigarette in his mouth and attempted to light it. But his hand was shaking so bad he accidentally knocked the cigarette from his mouth into his lap.

“Take it easy, man,” said Featherstone. “Nobody’s gonna hurt youse.”

There was terror in Tommy Ryan’s eyes. He stared at his broken cigarette, unable to look Mickey in the face.

Featherstone spoke sternly. “Just don’t lie, Tommy. They know you was part of, you know, stealin’ with Vinnie. If you’re straight with Kevin and Jimmy, nothin’ bad’ll happen.”

When Kelly and McElroy arrived, they sat down at the table with Potter, Ryan, and Featherstone. There was a sizable lunchtime trade in the diner, including many dock-workers and neighborhood folks who recognized one or all of the guys seated at Mickey’s table. Occasionally, someone passing by would say hello.

“You’re lucky,” said Kevin Kelly, pointing a finger at Tommy Ryan. “You’re lucky you didn’t go too. We know what you and Vinnie were doing.”

Kelly went on to explain that from now on Jimmy Coonan didn’t want Ryan handling the money at all. John Potter would now be responsible for the proceeds from illegal activities along the waterfront. Kelly told Ryan, “You just … you don’t touch nothin’ no more and you’ll still get yours, you know, your end of the money. But this is it. One more fuck-up and you might wind up just like that other bastard. Okay?”

The very next day, they each got their first envelope, which contained $1,100 in cash. Thereafter, Featherstone, Kelly, McElroy, Coonan, Potter, and Ryan received the same amount each week. Eventually, this group would be expanded to include Kenny Shannon. Thirty years old, slender, with a thick head of sandy-blond hair that was turning prematurely gray, Shannon was originally from Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It was Kevin Kelly who’d first introduced him to the Hell’s Kitchen crowd and gotten him his job as a timekeeper on the
Intrepid
. Since then he was known to almost everyone as Kelly’s “gofer.”

With the ILA taken care of, the next problem was Jay Gee Motor Homes. Jay Gee was a West Side business that rented large campers to film and television companies. Kevin Kelly had heard that at a recent meeting with organized crime figures, some hotshot from Jay Gee was saying he had the Westies under his control; there would be no union problems or anything like that, he said, because the Westies were his own private crew. According to Kelly, this person from Jay Gee had the balls to specifically mention Mickey Featherstone as being “his guy.”

Mickey was pissed. This was exactly the kind of thing he was determined would never happen again.

Featherstone, McElroy, and Kelly hopped in a car and drove to Jay Gee’s garage, located on 59th Street between 11th and 12th avenues. McElroy came out of the front offices with a guy named Joe, who was supposedly the president of Jay Gee, and another guy named Vic.

Mickey told Jimmy Mac and Kevin to take Vic “for a walk.” Then he turned to Joe. “Listen, man. I understand you was usin’ my name with some of your business people, and I don’t even know you.”

“Holy fuck. Who told you?”

“Don’t worry ’bout who told me. I wanna know why you’re usin’ my name. You don’t know me.”

The color drained from Joe’s face. “Uh, look, I just thought we, you, ’cause of the West Side and all …”

“Hey, I don’t wanna hear about that. You don’t know me, and if you’re gonna use my name in your business, then you
sure as fuck
are gonna pay me for it. And if you don’t pay me for it and I understand you’ve been usin’ my name, I’m gonna put you out of business.”

By this point, Joe had started trembling. There were tears in his eyes.

“Don’t start cryin’ now,” said Mickey. “Don’t start puttin’ on an act. That don’t mean nothin’ to me.”

“Smack the fuck in the face!” shouted McElroy, who was standing near the garage entrance with Kelly.

“You remember my words,” said Mickey to Joe.

The third and final order of business Mickey had to take care of was with Bull Maher. Maher was the older brother of Dick Maher, the kid who accompanied Alberta Sachs to the sit-down at Tommaso’s Restaurant in ’78 (but no relation to James Maher, the union official Coonan and Featherstone plotted to kill later that same year). In recent years, Bull had been helping Edna Coonan pick up loanshark proceeds in Jimmy’s absence. But he’d run afoul of Coonan when Edna determined he was opening the envelopes and reading Jimmy’s private correspondence.

Apparently, Maher had heard that Coonan put a contract out on him for “moving in on his shylock territory.” Maher immediately started calling in his loans, with the intention of recouping as much of his outlay as possible before splitting town. When McElroy—never a business whiz—and Kelly heard what Maher was up to, they decided to kill him for Jimmy Coonan.

“Look,” Mickey told them. “You kill the guy, you don’t get nothin’. What if I make him give us $30,000? We leave him alone, we get $30,000 plus we get his business.”