The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (52 page)

Eventually, Jimmy Coonan came over and threw an arm around Featherstone. “Don’t worry, Mick,” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”

Now, all these years later, from his small, lifeless prison cell, Mickey thought about Ugly Walter. He thought about all the Ugly Walters.

When he saw the blood and heard the screams, as he had so often in recent months, he didn’t feel so bad about what he’d done.

At least now, he thought to himself, there would be no more victims. There would be no more Ugly Walters.

EPILOGUE

F
our days before Christmas, on December 21, 1988 (Jimmy Coonan’s forty-second birthday), Francis Featherstone was once again led into U.S. District Court. This time he stood before Judge Robert W. Sweet, whose duty it was to sentence Mickey on his RICO conviction.

As promised in their agreement with Featherstone, Mary Lee Warren and other federal prosecutors had already urged the judge to “consider the scope and value of Mr. Featherstone’s cooperation” when sentencing. A favorable probation report and a psychiatric evaluation declaring that Featherstone was “mentally competent” were offered as evidence.

After the U.S. Attorney’s office stated their case, the judge spoke. “Mr. Featherstone,” he said. “You stand before me having admitted to fourteen specific acts of racketeering, including four murders, five conspiracies to murder, loansharking, extortion, numbers, counterfeiting and distribution of drugs … During the forty years of your life, you have experienced violence as a child, as a student in our city schools, as a soldier in Vietnam, as a criminal on the streets, and as a killer and an enforcer of one of the most feared gangs in our city.”

Despite this troubled history, the judge told Mickey, “the Westies have been broken as an organization, largely as a result of your cooperation.” Therefore, Sweet pointed out, the sentence he was about to impose was an attempt to balance “a violent past, a redemptive present, and an uncertain future.”

Noting that Mickey had already served three and a half years in prison since being wrongfully charged with the Michael Holly murder, the judge sentenced Featherstone to five years probation.

“We want to believe that violence, aggression … can be overcome by acts of contrition and redemption,” said Sweet, who concluded, “Mr. Featherstone, you are no longer a prisoner of your past.”

The next day Francis Featherstone disappeared into the Witness Protection Program.

It had been a long, bumpy ride. Since the end of the Westies trial some ten months earlier, Featherstone had been engaged in a vituperative battle with the U.S. Attorney’s office. Mostly, it centered around his agreement with the government. Featherstone felt that when he first made the decision to flip—in the hotel room in Westchester County in April of ’86—he had been promised bail. When bail was not forthcoming, Featherstone began to see a new conspiracy. This time it involved various prosecutors, members of the U.S. Marshals’ Witness Protection Program, and his government-appointed attorneys.

At one point, Mickey had gone so far as to file a motion with Judge Sweet to have his guilty plea withdrawn. Later, he changed his mind and the motion itself was withdrawn.

Of course, Mickey’s disagreements with the government were put to rest when Judge Sweet handed down his sentence—a sentence that many in the city’s law enforcement community felt was outrageously lenient. Egan, Coffey, and many of the cops who had pursued Featherstone for years felt betrayed by the judge. The way they saw it, Mickey had simply found a way to beat the system once again.

The other Westies were not nearly as lucky as Mickey. Eight months before Featherstone’s sentencing, the seven convicted gang members had been brought before seventy-two-year-old Whitman Knapp. Each had their attorney deliver a statement asking for leniency. The last to do so was Gerald Shargel, Jimmy Coonan’s lawyer. Shargel said that Jimmy Coonan himself had a statement he wanted to read, adding that Coonan was not an educated man and was unaccustomed to speaking before large groups.

Perhaps more than any of the others, Jimmy Coonan’s personal life had been a carefully constructed illusion. At the same time he was terrorizing people in Hell’s Kitchen, he’d sought to build a home and family life that were entirely separate. With his comfortable abode in suburban New Jersey and his children attending the finest parochial schools, he’d risen from the streets of Hell’s Kitchen to achieve a certain “respectability.”

That respectability was forever shattered during the Westies trial, in which the full extent of Coonan’s brutality became known—perhaps for the first time ever—outside the city’s criminal underworld.

Now, at his sentencing, Coonan sought to hold on to his final illusion. He began his statement by claiming something the evidence at the trial had already revealed to be untrue—that Edna was guilty of nothing other than having been his wife. Reading from a piece of paper, he claimed that Edna was an innocent bystander and therefore deserved special treatment. Soon his voice began to break. “There’s a lot more here, Your Honor. I can’t get through it right now. I would just ask you to take any frustration out and any hatred out on me—not my wife.”

Judge Knapp said that he had no hatred towards Coonan and found his sentiments admirable. Then he sentenced him to prison for seventy-five years without parole, or, as the judge put it, “the rest of your natural life.” In addition, Knapp fined Coonan $ 1 million.

Most of the others were given similarly stiff sentences. Jimmy McElroy received sixty years; Billy Bokun, fifty years; Mugsy Ritter, forty years; and Tommy Collins, forty years—all with a recommendation of no parole. Tommy Collins’s wife, Flo, whose involvement was limited to the sale of narcotics, was given six months.

The last to be sentenced was Edna, who stood before the judge holding her husband’s hand. Along with Jimmy’s tearful plea for leniency, Knapp had received a handwritten note from the Coonans’ eleven-year-old son asking that the judge not send his mother away. Knapp acknowledged that Mrs. Coonan presented him with his most troubling duty, since “you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t married Mr. Coonan.” All the same, he sentenced her to fifteen years behind bars and fined her $200,000. Knapp did, however, hint that her sentence might be reduced if she were to turn over the millions of dollars in criminal assets prosecutors claimed the Coonans had buried.

For months after the sentencing, the Westies continued to be an occasional newspaper item. In August of ’88, hitmen Kevin Kelly and Kenny Shannon, looking tanned and well rested, inexplicably turned themselves in to the FBI after nearly two years on the lam. At the time they surrendered, they were scheduled to be profiled on a national TV program, “America’s Most Wanted.” After they walked into the U.S. Attorney’s office the program claimed credit for having pressured the two Westies into giving themselves up.

The real reason was far more mystifying, given that the evidence against Kelly and Shannon was overwhelming. The only answer the public was to get came from Frank Lopez, Kevin Kelly’s attorney. “It’s tough being on the run,” he said at their arraignment. “They wanted to see their families.”

In announcing formally that Kelly and Shannon had surrendered, Rudolph Giuliani identified the two men as “the last of the ruling structure of the Westies,” and added that his office had, once and for all, crushed this “violent organized crime group that terrorized and exploited the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan for the last twenty years.”

It would be one of Giuliani’s last press conferences before quitting his job as U.S. Attorney to run for mayor of New York City.

Along with these developments, the latter months of 1988 and on into ’89 saw the emergence of Mickey Featherstone in his new role as a “professional witness.” Within the space of ten months, Featherstone was called to testify at three separate trials, two in state court and one in federal.

The federal trial involved what was left of the Roy Demeo crew of the Gambino crime family. In a massive RICO indictment, Joseph Testa, Anthony Senter, and nine others were charged with some sixteen murders, including the killings of Danny Grillo and Demeo himself. Featherstone spent six days on the stand detailing how his West Side compatriots had met often with Demeo, Testa, and Senter to discuss, among other things, how to dispose of murder victims. Testa and Senter were later sentenced before Judge Vincent L. Broderick, who gave them both life plus twenty years.

After he had testified already at the Westies trial, the name of Mickey Featherstone was no doubt high on hit lists everywhere. By testifying against the powerful Gambinos he’d upped the ante even more, becoming perhaps the most wanted man in the underworld.

In April of ’89, Mickey was called to testify at yet another important trial. Kelly and Shannon were being prosecuted in state court for their roles in the murder of Michael Holly. Billy Bokun, having heard the evidence against him on this charge at the Westies trial, had already pleaded guilty to shooting Holly.

It had been exactly four years since Holly was gunned down on West 35th Street, touching off a series of events that would eventually bring the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob to an end. Mickey, of course, still believed that he’d been set up to take the fall for the Holly murder as part of a power play involving Kelly, Shannon, Ken Aronson, and Jimmy Coonan. In the many days of testimony at the Westies trial, it had never been definitively shown that there was such a frame-up, though the evidence presented by the U.S. Attorney’s office suggested that there was one.

By the end of the Holly trial in April of ’89, all the old questions were still unresolved. Why had the assailants used a vehicle from Featherstone’s place of business as the getaway car? Did Kelly and Shannon in fact tell Billy Bokun to wear a disguise that would make him look like Mickey, and if so, why? And why had the dreaded Westies, known for their ability to persuade witnesses to “do the right thing,” allowed three different people to finger Mickey Featherstone free of retribution?

Sissy Featherstone was also called to testify at the trial. Her recorded conversations with Billy Bokun at the 9th Avenue Food Festival and with Kelly and Shannon at her home in Teaneck were played for the jury, as were portions of Mickey’s chat with Kelly and Larry Palermo in the visiting room at Rikers Island.

After two days of deliberations a jury convicted sandy-haired Kenny Shannon for his role as the getaway driver. As for ambitious pretty-boy Kevin Kelly, although the evidence seemed to indicate that he had, at the very least, known about the Holly shooting, his actual role remained nebulous. He was acquitted.

Kelly was not home free, however. Not by a long shot. Six months after the Holly murder trial, in late October and November of ’89, he was tried before Judge Whitman Knapp on a multiplecount federal RICO charge. Kenny Shannon, following his murder conviction in state court, had already pleaded guilty, so Kelly was on his own. The five-week trial before Judge Knapp was a virtual replay of the first Westies RICO trial, with many of the same witnesses and much of the same evidence. On November 16, 1989, Kelly was found guilty of racketeering.

Meanwhile, back in Hell’s Kitchen, the ravages of gentrification continued to reshape the neighborhood. In the summer of ’89, one block east of the building where Jimmy Coonan was born and raised on West 49th Street, Mary Dunn, a forty-year resident of Hell’s Kitchen and president of a local tenants’ association, placed four ceramic gargoyle masks on the front of her apartment building. The idea, she told a newspaper reporter, was to ward off developers.

The focus of her attentions was a massive structure directly across the street—Worldwide Plaza, a sparkling forty-nine-story office tower and condominium complex then under construction. The building, which takes up the entire block between 8th and 9th avenues, is the most notable of a dozen or so real estate projects that have altered the demographics in Hell’s Kitchen, once a bastion of working-class and low-income families.

For those who’ve remained, there are a few old-time gathering places where the memory of Mickey Featherstone, Jimmy Coonan, and others still lingers. Before the Westies trial, many West Siders assumed that whatever Featherstone might say on the stand was bullshit, the self-aggrandizing ravings of a government informant. Featherstone, after all, had not only violated the sacred West Side Code, he’d obliterated it, making it possible for others to follow in his wake.

At the trial, however, most of Featherstone’s claims had been corroborated by Billy Beattie, Tony Lucich, Bobby Huggard, and the rest. In the end, the level of violence revealed shocked most West Siders, even those who’d heard the rumors about Paddy Dugan, Ruby Stein, Ugly Walter, Rickey Tassiello, and all the others whose bodies had mysteriously disappeared over the years.

There were the diehards, of course, those who still believed—and would always believe—that Featherstone was a bold-faced liar. To these hardened few, the only plausible explanation for what transpired in U.S. District Court was that it was all a power play on Featherstone’s part. In fact, as the various Westie-related trials continued throughout 1989, a rumor began to make the rounds—a rumor that was endlessly dissected over cups of coffee and pitchers of beer at the Market Diner, the Madison Cocktail Lounge, and the bar of the Skyline Motor Inn.

The rumor went like this: Featherstone’s cooperation had all been a ploy to remove Coonan and the others from the neighborhood. In fact, it was said by some that Mickey had been spotted on 10th Avenue, that he was back in Hell’s Kitchen looking to pick up the pieces of the neighborhood’s shattered legacy.

It was nonsense, of course. Featherstone’s Witness Protection agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service precluded his ever returning to “the danger zone,” which in Mickey’s case included the entire northeast part of the United States. But to some old-timers, it was almost a comforting thought—Featherstone, a criminal through and through, returning to keep the traditions alive, traditions that had withstood the ravages of time since the earliest days of gangsterism.