The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (48 page)

Before the grand jury, nervous and soaked with perspiration, Featherstone admitted what he had done. He admitted taking a knife and plunging it into the heart of a dead man.

With Mickey and Sissy Featherstone providing more and more pieces of the puzzle, the government got ready to throw out the net. Now that Mickey was on the side of the law, the Westies were like a wounded animal. And this time, the investigators were determined not to let the gang slip through their grasp. They resolved to eradicate what was left of the West Side Irish Mob, once and for all.

Along with Steve Mshar and other detectives from the Task Force South, Richie Egan took to the streets. Driving around Hell’s Kitchen again after all these years was a strange experience for Egan. It made him feel old. The neighborhood was hardly recognizable now. Long gone were the White House Bar, Sonny’s Cafe, the Sunbrite, the 596 Club, and the other saloons that Coonan, Featherstone, and their predecessors had frequented. Many of the old tenement buildings had been leveled and replaced by condos and co-op apartment buildings. The grizzled old Irish and Italian faces of a bygone era were few and far between. It was not uncommon to see people in suits and with briefcases hustling to and from Hell’s Kitchen, a neighborhood now known almost exclusively as Clinton.

It didn’t take a genius to figure it out, thought Egan. After the thousands of hours’ worth of surveillance they’d done, and all the trials and investigations, gentrification had probably done more to force the Westies out of Hell’s Kitchen than anything law enforcement was able to do.

Once they began their surveillance, the cops were surprised to discover that Jimmy Coonan had all but disappeared. Before it was known Mickey had flipped, they’d heard he was sometimes seen driving around the neighborhood in a black Mercedes 4-door with a cellular phone. Edna, the one-time orphan from 9th Avenue, also had a new Mercedes; hers was blue. She too was often seen cruising along the avenues of the West Side like some upwardly mobile expatriate who just couldn’t resist flaunting her wealth back in the old neighborhood.

When Mickey flipped
(WESTIES CON SINGS IRISH LULLABY,
trumpeted the
Post
), the Coonans were seen less and less frequently. Jimmy had done what all successful gangsters were supposed to do. He’d gone into a “legitimate” business. Along with his old pals Billy Murtha and Buddy Leahy—the guys who’d hired him and Mickey to whack James Maher of the Metal Lathers union in July of ’78—Jimmy had begun investing heavily in Marine Construction, a sizable contracting firm based just north of the city in Tarrytown. It was a profitable business, but its real purpose was to give Coonan a patina of respectability when the shit finally hit the fan. It also served as an ideal way for him to launder his criminal proceeds.

In Coonan’s absence, the remains of the West Side’s ground-level rackets were up for grabs. For years, Kevin Kelly—Jimmy Coonan’s protégé—had been positioning himself for just such a moment. Now, even though Featherstone’s cooperation was headline news, even though there were ongoing state and federal grand juries and subpoenas were being delivered up and down the West Side of Manhattan, Kelly stepped forward to seize what he felt was rightfully his.

Egan had heard about Kelly and Shannon during his interviews with Featherstone. Emboldened by Coonan’s inattentiveness, they’d even taken their criminal ambitions beyond the neighborhood by pushing cocaine in some of the swankier bars on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, near where sidekick Kenny Shannon had been born and raised.

One time, said Mickey, Kelly told him they’d heard someone was dealing coke out of one of “their” bars, the Comic Strip Bar and Grill on East 81st and 2nd Avenue. Kelly and Shannon drove to the bar, found the guy, and took him outside at knife point. They handcuffed the dealer, who was a mere novice, put him in the back seat of the car, and issued the usual warnings and threatening suggestions. Then Kelly and Shannon unzipped their pants and masturbated all over the guy.

Even Featherstone, who’d taken part in hundreds of stabbings, shootings, and dismemberments over the years, had to admit this was a new and twisted variation on the accepted rules of intimidation.

Throughout the summer and into the fall of ’86, Egan, Mshar, and others gathered hours of incriminating evidence against Kelly, Shannon, and Larry Palermo from a recording device placed in the dashboard of a blue ’85 Oldsmobile Cutlass driven by Shannon. One time they even overheard Kelly slapping around one of his loanshark customers on 9th Avenue.

“I don’t fuckin’ buy this, man,” proclaimed Kelly, who had stepped outside of the car to confront his victim. “I’m the one you’re supposed to pay. I’m the man on the street. You hear me? He ain’t the man. I’m the man.”

At the end of a long day, while Egan filled out his surveillance log, just as he had years ago when WEST SIDE STORY first began, he would think about Kelly, Shannon, and others who seemed to be following in Coonan’s footsteps. It reminded him of an adage he’d heard many years ago, probably from his Irish-born father:

Old habits die hard.

By the winter of ’86, a new kind of paranoia became the rule of the day in West Side criminal circles. With all the subpoenas that had been handed out, the remaining gang members had gotten a pretty good idea of exactly who and what was being investigated. The implications were truly frightening. There were ongoing grand jury hearings on the Paddy Dugan, Ruby Stein, Rickey Tassiello, and Vinnie Leone murders, just to name a few. Search warrants were being executed all over the neighborhood and the feds were accumulating evidence on gambling, narcotics, and gun possession charges. Federal agents had been to the offices of theatrical Teamsters Local 817 and ILA Local 1909 and seized files.

On top of all this, there were rumors floating around about who would be testifying along with Mickey and Sissy Featherstone. Tony Lucich, the old-time loanshark who initiated Jimmy Coonan into the business back in the early seventies and was best man at his wedding, had also flipped. From his hideout in New Jersey, Coonan immediately put out a contract on Lucich, but Tony hadn’t been seen around the neighborhood in weeks.

The cooperation of the Featherstones and then Lucich had created a justifiable concern that others would follow suit, and that as the domino effect fell into place, friend would turn against friend, brother against brother.

One person who was a likely candidate for the role of informant was Billy Beattie. Ever since he’d returned to the neighborhood to help Mickey plot the murder of Jimmy Coonan, he had lived in constant fear. Not only was Coonan still after him for debts incurred before he ran away to the mountains, but since his return he’d become more and more dependent on Mickey—half hoping that once they got rid of Coonan, Mickey would take over and he’d be sitting pretty.

But then Beattie had been in his kitchen watching TV one night, and a report came on the news about Featherstone’s cooperation. Billy felt like his whole world had just been pulled out from under him. Not only did Mickey know about his involvement in the Paddy Dugan and Ruby Stein homicides, but recently Beattie had been involved in another murder with a guy he knew out in Queens—a cop killing! Although he was reasonably certain Mickey didn’t know anything about this one, Beattie had a bad feeling that one thing might lead to another.

With a wife and six kids, it wasn’t like Billy could just run off to the mountains again. All through the summer of ’86, after he first heard about Mickey’s cooperation, Beattie lived in abject terror, fully expecting the cops to come knocking at his door, not knowing what he would do when they did.

In October of ’86, Beattie’s worst fear finally came to pass. There was a knock on his door one day. He answered. It was Detective Steve Mshar of the Manhattan Task Force South—with an arrest warrant.

One month later, on the afternoon of November 14th, Beattie was seated in Smoke Stacks Lightning, a chic bar and restaurant at West Broadway and Canal Street in lower Manhattan. He was there with a guy named “Ron,” who supposedly was looking to make a drug deal with Beattie’s lifelong neighborhood friend, Jimmy McElroy.

When McElroy walked in the door, he was carrying with him a package of barbiturates, wrapped in a brown paper bag. Beattie, McElroy, and Ron had been trying to consummate the deal for a week, but McElroy, as was often the case in recent months, kept getting stoned and missing the appointed meetings.

This time there was going to be another problem, which Jimmy Mac knew about before he even sat down. Beattie’s buyer had ordered a bag of 5,000 pink-colored “uppers.” But in his haste to make their meeting, McElroy had accidentally grabbed the wrong pills from his apartment in Jersey.

“How’s it going?” McElroy asked nonchalantly after walking over to the table where Beattie and Ron were sitting.

“Hey,” said Beattie. “I was just sayin’ I know this traffic’s got his fuckin’ ass.”

McElroy sat down and got right to the point. “Uh, you know what happened? The fuckin’ kid, the asshole, he sent the green ones over instead.”

“Oh, shit,” mumbled Beattie.

“I can go get ’em, though,” said Jimmy. “I got the green ones with me, you know. They’re better, I think. But I can get the pink ones. It’ll take me about an hour.”

It was 4:30
P.M.
, rush hour, and outside the restaurant the traffic was bumper to bumper on Canal Street.

“Jimmy,” asked Beattie, “do you know what time it is? You’re never gonna get through the tunnel in an hour. It’ll take you over an hour just to get to Jersey!”

McElroy complained, “Last night I told him, ‘Bring the pink ones,’ He gave me the green ones, the fucking jerk.”

“This is the second time, Jimmy. I had Ron here with me eight hours last time and you never showed.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“You showed me the pink. I gave him the pink ones last time.”

“I know, man.”

McElroy insisted he could have his girlfriend, who was staying at a place on 72nd Street in Manhattan, rush over to the apartment in Jersey and be back with the pink pills in an hour. Ron was dubious, but he said he would come back to the restaurant in an hour. If McElroy had the pills they could make the deal.

After Ron left and McElroy made the call to his girlfriend, Billy Beattie settled down. There was nothing to do now but wait.

“Hey, Jim,” he said, looking around the restaurant. “Maybe we should sit at the bar ’cause there’s people eatin’ here. You know?”

As they moved up to the bar and ordered a couple of beers, Beattie noticed that McElroy was not looking too healthy. He’d heard that Mac recently did a stint in the hospital, where he was diagnosed as suffering from severe weight loss and nervous exhaustion.

“So how you feeling, man?” Beattie asked.

“I feel great, man.”

“Yeah? You look like your face is drawn, your eyes …”

“This is nothin’. This is gaining weight, man. You shoulda seen me. It’s like fucking cancer. I fell into the hospital.… Had a whole bunch of them green ones, you know? Yellow and then green. Two of each. I was up for like three, four days, man, wide-eyed.”

“Yeah. It’s a fuck. That can only make you nuts, man.”

“I liked it. I’ll do it again.”

“You are fuckin’ nuts.”

“No, I’m not. If you can handle it …”

“Jim, but that shit you can’t handle. It catches up to you. You know that.”

“You can’t do it every day. Just, like, once a month.”

“Party time, huh?”

“Yeah, once a month.”

“Your girlfriend get high?”

“Not really. We give her a half gram of coke, it lasts her all week. I do that in one shot!”

Beattie had to laugh. In recent weeks the tension in the neighborhood had reached a fever pitch. Among other things, Kelly and Shannon had gone on the lam. But here was McElroy, with the world caving in all around them, still getting high and cracking jokes. Devil-may-care, that was Jimmy Mac. Beattie had known him just about all his life and he’d always thought of him as a fuck-up. But you had to like him.

Soon the conversation turned to the impending federal investigation. They instinctively spoke in whispers.

“Them other guys got a lot of heat,” cautioned Beattie. “They ever come for them motherfuckers, forget about it.”

“Who? Kevin and them?”

“Kevin and them. It’s fucking all I hear. Every time you speak to somebody, they say, ‘Oh, the fuckin’ heat’s on them motherfuckers.’ I mean, the way it sounds, I don’t think they’re ever gonna come back.”

“That’s what I heard, too.”

“They better stay the fuck away, man.”

McElroy mentioned how he’d recently been contacted by Jimmy Coonan, who’d offered him big-time money if he murdered Tony Lucich. Mac, who was definitely in need of capital, had taken Coonan up on the offer and waited patiently one night to kill Lucich.

“Where?” asked Beattie.

“In that building, 747 10th Avenue.”

“Is he still there?”

“Oh, he comes around on Sundays. He’s still collecting. The two marshals were with him. They go in the garage and stay there. He goes up by himself in the elevator. I was sittin’ in the fuckin’ sink. You know that door? It’s where the garbage goes. For three hours! Oh, fuck it, man. Fucking Jackie Coonan never shows up with the silencer.”

“Crazy fuck.”

“That’s the only one that can hurt Jimmy. Mickey can’t. Jimmy told me, ‘Mickey ain’t shit. You need somebody to give you, uh, collaboration. You need more than one.’ So Tony, he’s the guy.”

Billy took a swig of beer. “Speakin’ of Jimmy, I been lookin’ to get in touch with his brother, Eddie. The little guy, the fuckin’ dwarf.”

“Whaddya wanna get in touch with that prick for?”

“Well, I figured with Jimmy gone, he’s taking care of business.”

“Are you kiddin’ me? Him?”

“Well, he gave me all this shit: ‘Yeah, Jimmy says if you go see the lawyer, everything’s cool.’” Coonan had been trying to get Beattie to sign a legal document swearing there was no such thing as the Westies. “So I did. I went and saw the lawyer. I said, ‘Alright, I got no more problems now, right?’”