The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (50 page)

To say that Featherstone’s cooperation had stunned Hochheiser and his partner, Ken Aronson, wouldn’t begin to tell the story. Since 1972, when Hochheiser got Mickey acquitted on an insanity plea in the Linwood Willis murder trial, he’d represented Featherstone time and time again, usually for little or no fee. He did so because he liked Featherstone, but also because, in his mind, Mickey was linked so inexorably with his career as a successful attorney. The Willis case had been his first great triumph, the first time he’d really known that being a criminal defense attorney was the only job for him.

Since then, Hochheiser and Aronson had represented Mickey and his West Side friends on some thirty different occasions. There had been literally hundreds of arraignments, motion filings, bail hearings, parole board appearances, trials, and appeals. In fact, Hochheiser and his partner had come to be known in police and legal circles as “the Westies’ lawyers.” And they had carried that moniker with a certain amount of pride, knowing that it had been acquired against great odds. Every cop, assistant D.A., and county judge was after them from the start.

Then came the Michael Holly trial, a disaster from beginning to end. Hochheiser knew that Featherstone had come to believe he’d been convicted by design, that some unholy alliance had been forged between the attorneys and his perceived enemies. To Hochheiser, this was patently ridiculous. Yes, the trial, in retrospect, had not been handled very well. For one thing, they made a tactical error by putting Kevin Kelly on the stand. But to believe that Kelly’s surly performance was part of a deliberate plot to throw the case, to believe that the three eyewitnesses who identified Mickey had somehow all been put up to it by Coonan or Kelly or the attorneys—this, to Hochheiser, was the product of a disturbed mind.

Hochheiser knew very well that Mickey Featherstone was a diagnosed “paranoid schizophrenic.” On many occasions, beginning with the Willis trial, he’d used this fact to wriggle Featherstone through the clutches of the criminal justice system. If it hadn’t helped him beat charges altogether, it often got Mickey preferred treatment in sentencing and in the prisons. But even though he had been responsible, in a way, for Featherstone’s being officially designated as “crazy,” Hochheiser chose not to think of him that way. He and his partner had come to believe the legend of Mickey Featherstone as it was presented at the Willis trial: a troubled Vietnam vet from a tough neighborhood, a little guy whose crimes were all about self-preservation, not profit motive.

Now here was Mickey Featherstone seated on the witness stand—a stool pigeon, a rat. In the world of the highpriced criminal defense attorneys, a fraternity of which Hochheiser and Aronson were now prominent members, there was nothing worse than a stoolie. They were a threat to the livelihood of so-called mob lawyers everywhere. The assumption, of course, was that everything a stoolie said was a lie; that they were desperate people liable to say anything to save their own skin. No criminal defense attorney worth his salt would ever represent a stoolie—on principle. Simply put, a stool pigeon was the lowest form of human life.

“Daddy,” Hochheiser’s thirteen-year-old daughter had asked after hearing that Featherstone would be testifying against his own people, “you mean all this time Mickey Featherstone was a fake?” Many times Hochheiser’s family had heard him talk about Mickey as if he were a character from a Dickens novel.

“Yes,” he reluctantly told his daughter. “Mickey Featherstone is not everything he was cracked up to be.”

Later, after all the indictments were announced and it seemed possible that Hochheiser might someday be crossexamining Mickey on behalf of one of his clients, he used stronger language. “Mickey Featherstone is a pimp and a liar,” he told a reporter for the
Daily News
, knowing full well that being called a pimp, in Mickey’s mind, would be the lowest possible insult.

As for Ken Aronson, Featherstone’s cooperation with the government was, if anything, even more of a blow. It was Aronson, after all, who Mickey was claiming had deliberately brought about his conviction in the Holly case. After Mickey and Sissy began working with the government, Sissy had even gone so far as to secretly tape phone conversations with Aronson, hoping that he might inadvertently reveal his role in the so-called frame-up. To Aronson, this was an unconscionable act of betrayal, one which he still found hard to believe months after it was revealed.

Yes, Aronson would admit, he had begun to give up on Featherstone even before the Michael Holly trial began. And he realized now that those feelings of disillusionment, which he’d communicated to Mickey throughout the Holly trial, had probably contributed to Featherstone’s belief that the attorney had somehow joined forces against him. But even with all that, Aronson had never expected Mickey to flip. He had always thought he was a
mensch
, a stand-up guy.

To Aronson, it was now apparent that he’d gotten too close to his client, that he’d put himself in an impossible position by trying to be more than a lawyer to Mickey and Sissy and some of the others. Eventually, it had put him in a place he did not want to be—an unindicted co-conspirator in what the government was now calling a criminal enterprise.

From his seat in the back of Room 506, Larry Hochheiser watched as Featherstone took the witness stand. He recognized Mickey’s courtroom look—the slicked-down sandy-blond hair, neatly trimmed mustache, conservative suit and tie. It was strange to see Featherstone on the stand instead of at the defense table. He seemed comfortable, though, cocky even, as he leaned forward to take the questions from Gerald Shargel, the lead defense attorney.

“Mr. Featherstone,” said Shargel, standing near the large, rectangular jury box. “I think you told us that in the year 1984 carrying into 1985, before your cooperation, there was a plan to kill Jimmy Coonan, correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And there is no question in your mind, is there sir, that you, Mickey Featherstone, were a part of that plan, correct?”

“No, I was part of it.”

“There was one time, I think you testified, you went into New York because you heard Jimmy Coonan was in the neighborhood, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you were looking, with others, in the neighborhood bars to see if you could find Jimmy for the purpose of killing him, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Gerald Shargel was a veteran criminal defense lawyer in the Hochheiser mold—forty-three years old, smooth and wily, with a sharp, sometimes sarcastic wit. He usually dressed in elegant, dark-blue pin-striped suits with a red tie. He was bald on top, with black hair around his ears and a neatly trimmed black beard. He tended to strut like a peacock but was usually exceedingly polite. Occasionally, in the great tradition of high-priced legal talent, he got dramatic.

In the pre-trial stages of the case, when Judge Whitman Knapp declared it would be a conflict for Hochheiser and Aronson to represent
any
of the Westies because of their previous lawyer/client relationship with Featherstone, they’d recommended Shargel to Coonan. The choice seemed especially apt, since Shargel had once been the attorney for the late Roy Demeo, Jimmy Coonan’s one-time
paisan
in the Gambino family.

For four days running, Shargel had listened to Mary Lee Warren lead Featherstone through a mind-boggling litany of crimes during his direct testimony. He’d been impressed with Featherstone’s demeanor, with his willingness to admit that he had been, at one time or another, a drunk, a drug addict, a killer, and a nut case. Yet Shargel had no intention of allowing this witness—
especially
this witness—to imply that he had in any way been an unwilling participant in his crimes.

His voice rising in indignation, Shargel asked, “Didn’t you tell us, Mr. Featherstone, that there was a time when you got better?”

“Yes, the kind of—I didn’t have the hatred after I came back from prison in 1982. I just lost the hatred I had in the past.”

“You lost the hatred after 1982?”

“Yes.”

“You, sir, had no hatred when you had a gun and a silencer and you went to kill my client on the streets of New York? You had no hatred?”

“Yes. I had it then—definitely.”

“That was in 1984, wasn’t it, Mr. Mickey Featherstone?”

“Yes.”

“And what about the hundreds of people, according to your testimony, that you assaulted and you stabbed and you beat and you robbed? What about them? Did you
like
them?”

“They were my barroom brawls.”

“Didn’t you have hatred when you were in those barroom brawls, Mr. Featherstone?”

“Yes, I did.”

Along with Featherstone’s propensity for violence, the crux of Shargel’s cross-examination—in fact, the crux of his and the other seven defense attorneys’ main argument with the government—was that the Westies were a fabrication. In their opening statements, all of the attorneys voiced what had always been the unofficial position of the gang itself—that the Westies were a creation of the police and the media. “Hell’s Kitchen sink,” Shargel called the government’s case, a reference to all the crimes that had been thrown together in an attempt to establish a racketeering conspiracy.

Now, to bolster this claim, Shargel used Featherstone’s own words. Through Hochheiser and Aronson, he’d gotten his hands on a series of taped interviews Featherstone had done with a would-be biographer in early 1980, following his acquittal for the Whitehead murder. At the time, even though he was incarcerated and awaiting sentencing on his counterfeit conviction, Featherstone was still very much one of the boys. As a result, most of what he told William Urshal, the interviewer, was either half-truths or outright lies designed to protect himself and others from possible prosecution.

Nonetheless, as the entire courtroom listened, here was Mickey’s voice, loud and clear, claiming undeniably that the Westies were a fiction. “Do you really think,” he was heard saying on tape, “if there was a gang making all this money, like they say, I’d be living in a small apartment [on 56th Street]?”

Over the next several hours, Shargel referred to “the Urshal tapes” time and time again. The jury read from written transcripts and listened to Mickey Featherstone, sounding exactly as he had under direct examination, telling lie after lie. At one point, Featherstone was heard absolving Coonan of the Whitehead murder, a murder he’d described in great detail just days earlier.

“Is it your testimony now, sir,” Shargel asked incredulously, “that in 1980 you sat down with this author and you made up a story out of whole cloth?”

“Parts of it were lies, yes.”

“Parts of it were truth and parts of it were lies?”

“Yes.”

“In other words, Mr. Featherstone, you took facts you knew to be true, right?”

“Yes.”

“And then you took facts you knew to be lies?”

“Yes.”

“And you jumbled together the truth and the lies to confuse or deceive the person who was listening to you, is that right?”

“I was a criminal, yes. So I gave the guy a bunch of lies.”

“Is there any way we have of telling when you are lying and when you are not?”

“Right now I’m telling the truth. That’s all I can say.”

“How do we know you’re telling the truth right now, even as you speak?”

As the afternoon wore on, Shargel’s cross-examination gained in intensity, requiring acute concentration from the witness, the jury and anyone else who hoped to follow. Unlike Mary Lee Warren, who had presented Featherstone’s direct testimony in neat chronological order, Shargel was all over the place. One moment it was 1967, the next, 1987. One moment he was in Vietnam, the next, Hell’s Kitchen. Sometimes subjects changed in midsentence. Crimes began to blur. There were murders, assaults, strategies, vendettas, betrayals …

What emerged was a life unlike anything anyone on the jury could possibly comprehend. The violence and depravity was numbing. This man, Shargel was telling the jury, is not a human being at all. This man is a killer.

A psychopath.

A monster.

“Mr. Featherstone,” he asked near the end of the afternoon. “You said at the end of your direct testimony, the very last part, that there was a time in your life when you were, I believe your words were, ‘vicious and an animal,’ something like that?”

“Yes, I was.”

“No question about it?”

“I was a liar, an animal, a criminal. I woke up every day and committed a crime every day.”

“And when you said vicious and an animal, you used the past tense because you are no longer that way?”

“I’m still angry at a lot of things, but I don’t believe I’m as violent as I was in the past.”

“Do you still have that hatred that caused you to kill people in the 1970s?”

“No.”

“But isn’t it a fact, sir, that you who are no longer vicious, you who are no longer an animal, called over the phone this past weekend and threatened to kill someone in this audience? Yes or no, Mr. Featherstone?”

“That’s a lie.”

Shargel’s voice was rising now, echoing to the far corners of the room. “Did you say you would be out in four years,
in four years
you’d be back on the streets and you would kill a certain member of this audience?”

“No.”

“
Did you say it!
?”

“No.”

Mickey knew Shargel’s accusation was bullshit, and he was certain Shargel did too. All phone calls at the MCC were monitored, so even if he’d wanted to he would never have made a threat like that over the phone.

Shargel let the accusation sink in, then waved his hand in the air. “I have nothing further, Your Honor.”

As the jury and the audience sat in stunned silence—the damning implications of the last question left dangling in the air—Mickey felt helpless, totally unable to defend himself. It reminded him of all those times when Hochheiser had destroyed witnesses on his behalf, asking dramatic, incriminating questions, smearing them with innuendo.

Mickey saw the smirks on the faces of Coonan and the others as they slapped Shargel on the back and shook his hand.

For the first time in his life, Mickey knew how it felt to be on the receiving end.