Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (65 page)

“You’ll do what I tell you,” Coonan said to the gang. “Or you can go out there and start your own fuckin’ crew.”

Coonan wasn’t interested in preserving the Westies as an exclusively West Side Irish operation. In fact, Jimmy didn’t even live in the neighborhood anymore. The economic realities of the modern-day underworld were such that, if the gang hoped to survive and prosper, they had to recognize that the Italians were the only game in town, plain and simple. In this regard, Coonan was determined to make the partnership work. He introduced other members of the gang to Castellano and began planning crimes with Roy DeMeo and his murderous Mafia crew in Canarsie. In Hell’s Kitchen bars like Amy’s Pub, the Madison Cocktail Lounge, and the bar of the Skyline Hotel, Coonan met with his own gang and pitched assignments, many of them murder-for-hire schemes that DeMeo’s Brooklyn crew either didn’t want or weren’t able to pull off.

It was just such a job that led Coonan, Featherstone, Jimmy McElroy, and a few other Westies to find themselves drinking at the Plaka Bar on the Upper West Side late one chilly night in November. All that afternoon and into the evening, the Westies had been hunting for a union official. In fact, they’d been trying to kill this union official for days, with no luck. Tensions were running high. Many members of the gang, including Featherstone, never wanted to take on the assignment in the first place, but now that they had, they were having a hard time finding the guy. Just that afternoon, in their frustration, they’d come perilously close to gunning down the wrong man on a crowded midtown street in broad daylight.

At the Plaka Bar, Coonan was in a dark mood. By chance, the gang had just bumped into a low-level criminal they knew named Harold “Whitey” Whitehead at the bar. Coonan hated Whitehead, who had supposedly once called his brother Jackie a “fag.” To lighten the mood, everyone, including Whitehead, went downstairs to the men’s room to smoke a joint. Coonan stood at the urinal of the cramped restroom while the others formed a circle, handing the joint around and laughing. Coonan never took his eyes off Whitehead. Then, with no warning whatsoever, he pulled out a .25-caliber Beretta, put the gun to the base of Whitehead’s skull behind his right ear and—BAM! The shot reverberated throughout the men’s room, and Whitehead went down. Coonan stood over the body, eyes ablaze. He fired two more shots into Whitehead and said, “There, you bastard. Now you can burn in hell.”

It was an incredibly stupid murder, uncharacteristic of Jimmy Coonan. The Plaka Bar was connected to a hotel, with people coming and going on a regular basis. The gang quickly dumped the body in a back stairwell (there was no time to make it do the Houdini) and, in their haste, left behind shell casings and other evidence.

Months later, Coonan and Featherstone were arrested and put on trial for the murder. It was a hectic time for the Westies. While being held for the Whitehead murder, Featherstone was charged with the homicide of Mickey Spillane, which had taken place almost two years earlier. And gang member Jimmy McElroy was on trial for another unrelated murder around the same time.

The Whitehead trial was a big media event that even appeared on the front page of the
New York Times
. The proceedings turned out to be something of a circus, with one witness withdrawing his sworn confession and another committing suicide instead of taking the stand. In the end, Coonan and Featherstone were found not guilty. When McElroy also beat his case in court and Featherstone was acquitted of the Spillane murder, the Manhattan district attorney’s office was stunned. Thanks to their highly skilled lawyers, the Westies had apparently beaten the rap.

All was not lost for the forces of justice, however. In an all-out effort to bring down the Westies, government prosecutors cast a broad net. They got Coonan on a gun possession charge, for which he was sentenced to four and a half years. Featherstone’s counterfeit currency charge was a federal rap; he could have gotten fifteen years, but he pled guilty to a reduced charge and got a nice deal, thanks again to his attorneys.

Even before he’d been shipped out of state to begin serving his sentence at a federal pen in Wisconsin, Featherstone had begun to have misgivings about his partnership with Coonan. The reason he’d gotten involved in manufacturing and selling counterfeit money in the first place was to create a revenue stream separate from Coonan and the Italians. Many of the gang’s younger members had begun to coalesce around Mickey, who, unlike Coonan, still lived in the neighborhood. They felt that Mickey was more devoted to the concept of the Westies as a neighborhood gang, whereas Coonan seemed content to subcontract for the guineas.

Featherstone wasn’t interested in taking over the Westies, but he was interested in making a buck and staying alive. The various trials and legal entanglements had led him to consider the fact that maybe life in the gang wasn’t worth it. He had enough neighborhood contacts that, when he got out, he could find gainful employment some other way—either with the Teamsters or in the construction trades. In federal prison, far from the old neighborhood, he began to ponder the possibility of a life beyond the Westies.

The problem was that the old neighborhood ties were still strong. Mickey’s wife of six years was back in New York with their two kids. In Hell’s Kitchen, it had always been understood that if one of the neighborhood people wound up in prison, the other gang members would look out for his family. This tradition had existed since the earliest days of the Irish Mob, but it was not honored in Mickey’s case. The disappointment and anger that Mickey felt when he and Sissy were not given their due touched off a smoldering disenchantment that would eventually infect the entire gang and bring it crashing down.

That would all come later. In the meantime, even in Coonan and Featherstone’s absence, the Westies thrived. Various no-show union jobs were controlled by the gang and doled out according to seniority. There was still loan shark and gambling money coming in on a weekly basis. In many ways, life on the West Side went on as if nothing had changed. Edna Coonan, Jimmy’s wife, was making extortion collections from the unions and other local businesses for her husband, and Sissy, Mickey’s wife, sometimes tagged along in an attempt to get her piece of the action. The Westies had certainly taken a major hit with the incarceration of their two top men, but the organization continued to function. While Jimmy and Mickey monitored their own personal interests from afar, the daily operations of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob were now mostly in the hands of the women.

Sissy and Edna

In the beginning, when the early Irish gangs were still based on political-resistance sects from the Old Country, women played a vital role in the Irish American underworld. In the era of the Dead Rabbits, females like Hellcat Maggie and Sadie the Goat were notorious gang war combatants, either as warriors or as crucial suppliers of arms, medical aid, and logistical support. Women also played a significant role in the early bordello business, especially in New Orleans, where prostitution served as a lamentable though viable source of refuge for destitute immigrants during the immediate post-famine years.

For the most part, however, women were marginalized in the underworld in the same ways they were in the upperworld. Since they were unable to vote until nearly two decades into the twentieth century, they were not a factor in forging ties between the mobster and the politician, a key aspect of the Irish Mob. They did not own saloons or work on the docks, and there were no women in the ILA or Teamsters union. During the years of Prohibition, when the American underworld-at-large first began its transformation from a series of neighborhood fiefdoms into a corporate structure modeled after Wall Street, women played about as significant a role as they did on the real Wall Street.

Above and beyond these factors was the harsh reality of violence. The American underworld was based on the law of the jungle. In most instances of gangland confrontation, brute force won out over diplomacy, at least in the short term. Gangland murders peaked during Prohibition, tapered off in the early 1930s, then continued to climb throughout the century. Increased public exposure of mob activities and prosecutions did not lessen the violence. In fact, it could be argued that, from the late 1950s (starting with Robert Kennedy’s assault on organized crime) through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the forces of organized crime in America were never more violent. In cities like New York and Boston, where the Irish Mob was most active, the underworld was, to coin an old-fashioned phrase, no place for a lady.

Nonetheless, Hell’s Kitchen was a tough, working-class neighborhood that produced its share of tough, working-class women. They weren’t necessarily gang molls in the Hollywood sense—pistol-packing mamas like Ma Barker or Bonnie Parker—but they knew what the underworld was all about. As mothers, they sometimes saw their sons get drawn into the dangerous world of the gang. As wives, they either knew or chose not to know what their husbands were up to. They hid guns, drugs, money, or other contraband when the occasion called for it, or they played dumb when the cops came sniffing around. They may have played a subsidiary role in terms of actual criminal activity, but the life of a mobster’s wife could be an existence fraught with as much fear and paranoia as that of any hoodlum on the street.

Sissy Featherstone knew what she was getting into when she hitched her wagon to the legendary kid from West Forty-third Street who’d already fought in a violent war halfway across the world, killed numerous people in the neighborhood, done time in prisons and mental hospitals, and formed a partnership with the most ambitious young gangster in Hell’s Kitchen. Many women would have run for the hills upon meeting Mickey Featherstone, but Sissy was attracted to his choir boy good looks and his troubled reputation, which brought out her maternal instincts. Having grown up in the neighborhood herself, she knew what it took to survive. She was petite, just five foot three inches tall, with long sandy-blond hair, a tight, curvaceous figure, and a face that could be either glamorous or tough. People who knew her sometimes compared her to the actress Ellen Barkin, who exhibited a similar combination of toughness and vulnerability.

Her birth name was Knell, and she was German-Irish. When she was still an infant, her mother married a neighborhood laborer named Houlihan. Marcelle “Sissy” Houlihan became part of a large star-crossed Hell’s Kitchen family that experienced more than its share of tough times. Over the years, six out of Sissy’s eleven brothers and sister would die tragically from overdoses, murder, or suicide. The familial trauma and hardship she experienced growing up made Sissy all the more determined to create a safe haven for her own family, which had expanded with the birth of a son, Mickey, Jr., in 1977. Five years later, while Mickey was away in prison, tragedy once again struck the Houlihan family: Sissy’s oldest sister became the latest family suicide. Sissy took in her daughter, and she and Mickey agreed to raise the child as their own.

Shaken by her sister’s sudden death, Sissy and the two kids moved out of the neighborhood and into a small apartment in New Milford, New Jersey. Sissy had steady income from a job as a ticket taker at the
U.S.S. Intrepid
, a battleship/museum docked on a West Side pier that had been a steady source of plundering by the Westies since the day it opened for business. In addition to her job at the Intrepid, Sissy received other gang-related drips and drabs: $100 a week from Tommy Collins, who owed Mickey $5,000 from a shylock loan; $1,000 every now and then from Mugsy Ritter’s coke business; and $150 a week from the neighborhood bookmaking operation, which she received from Edna Coonan.

The pittance from Edna was a source of bitterness that had eaten away at Sissy since the day Mickey and Jimmy were arrested for the Whitehead murder. While Sissy cobbled together money from various sources to make ends meet, Edna was raking in thousands every week just by making Jimmy’s old rounds in the neighborhood. Initially, Sissy had accompanied Edna on her shylock runs. In the months during and after the Whitehead murder trial, she and Edna would come back from Rikers Island after visiting their husbands and spend the afternoon trying to hunt down people who owed the Westies money.

“It’s funny,” Edna would say. “When your husband goes away, nobody wants to pay. They always seem to disappear on you. Well, when Jimmy gets back, he’ll take care of ’em.”

Eventually, Sissy got fed up with the whole thing. She grew tired of listening to Edna brag about all the possessions she had in her New Jersey mansion while Sissy was living in a crowded one-bedroom apartment in New Milford. Sissy felt that Mickey was getting screwed out of money that was rightfully his, but she also knew that she wasn’t going to get anywhere with stout, foul-mouthed Edna, who was at least as tough as the man she had married.

In some ways, Edna and Sissy were opposites. Where Sissy was blond, lean, and sexy, Edna was raven-haired, overweight, and manly. Sissy wore tight jeans and tiny tops that accentuated her feminine side, while Edna tended to shroud herself in one-size-fits-all dresses. On the surface they were night and day, Beauty and the Beast, but in the ways that really mattered, Edna and Sissy could have been members of the same tribe. Both were tough women who had come up the hard way.

Edna was fifteen years older than Sissy and had graduated from the school of hard knocks when Mickey’s wife was still in diapers. Orphaned at the age of fourteen, she bounced from one inattentive relative to another until, at the age of twenty, she married a cop named Frank Fitzgerald. Frank and Edna had been married for a number of years and had two children when, sometime in the late 1960s, Fitzgerald died suddenly of an overdose. Now a widow in her mid-twenties with two young mouths to feed, Edna began dating a series of men who were not great husband material. Billy Beattie, a Hell’s Kitchen burglar and longtime criminal partner of Jimmy Coonan’s, dated Edna briefly in the early 1970s. It was through Beattie that Jimmy and Edna first met.