The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (11 page)

With no hesitation at all, Coonan produced a handgun—a .25-caliber semiautomatic—which he kept in his belt in the small of his back, covered by his jacket.

“Mickey, you need any help?” asked Jimmy.

“No,” replied Featherstone. “This is somethin’ I gotta take care of myself.”

With that, Featherstone split the scene. As he headed south on 9th Avenue towards the Leprechaun, he felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude towards Jimmy Coonan. Here was a guy who would be there when you needed him; a guy who could be trusted to do the right thing. Some people would have given a bullshit answer, tried to pretend they didn’t know anything about guns. Some might even have been scared. But Jimmy didn’t bat an eye; just turned over his piece like Mickey was his own brother.

To Featherstone, it was the ultimate act of friendship, and he would remember Coonan having come through in the pinch long after the other events of September 30, 1970, had become a hazy, troublesome memory.

Back at the Leprechaun, Linwood Willis was still holding court, drunkenly oblivious to the fate that awaited him. When Featherstone walked in, Willis immediately started shouting insults at him; words that were heard clearly by the bartender, the barmaid, and everyone else in the bar. Finally, Willis stepped out the front door, telling Featherstone and his friends he was going to wait for them outside. Mickey said to his buddies, “You guys stay here. I’ll take care of this.”

The barmaid at the Leprechaun sidled over to the window to watch the show. What she saw, and heard, was this:

When Featherstone and Willis got outside, the big Southerner pushed the Irish kid from behind. Mickey circled around so he was now standing opposite Willis, facing north.

“So you’re a tough guy?” Featherstone asked as Willis stumbled towards him. “You got your gun?”

“Yeah,” snarled Willis, reaching inside his jacket.

Mickey pulled the Beretta from his right coat pocket and fired twice, hitting his target once directly in the heart and again a quarter of an inch below. The body immediately dropped to the pavement.

Mickey froze for a moment, the sound of gunfire still echoing in his ears. Then he went over to look at what he’d done. Blood had already begun to run from Willis’s chest towards the curb.

Featherstone got a nasty surprise when he flipped open Willis’s jacket. There was no gun. The corpse was totally unarmed. His heart pounding and his temples beginning to throb, Mickey quickly headed west on 43rd Street.

A few minutes later, on 10th Avenue at 45th Street, he was confronted by a patrol car from Midtown North. Using the car as a shield, Sergeant John Hanno and Patrolman Robert Erben drew their revolvers and directed Featherstone to drop the gun which he’d been holding in his hand for all the world to see. Standing in the car’s headlights, looking dazed and disoriented, Mickey did what they asked. Then he put his hands out, waiting for the cops to slap on the cuffs.

At the precinct house on West 54th Street, three or four detectives interrogated the suspect. His hands and legs trembling uncontrollably, Mickey first claimed that Willis had pulled a gun on him and that he’d used his military expertise to disarm him. But nobody believed that. Eventually, as the darkness outside the squad room gave way to the soothing lightness of dawn, Mickey cut the bullshit.

“He was hasslin’ me for no reason,” said Featherstone. “That was the first mistake he made.”

In October 1970, within weeks of the Linwood Willis shooting, Featherstone landed in the third floor Mental Observation Unit of Rikers Island Hospital. It hadn’t taken a grand jury long to pass down an indictment for murder and criminal possession of a dangerous weapon. With Featherstone’s past, there was never much question whether or not he committed the act—and he wasn’t denying he had. The only real question was whether he would be found psychologically sound to stand trial.

Since Mickey’s return from a twelve-month tour of duty in Vietnam, all of Hell’s Kitchen had been witnessing his violent transformation from a shy, anonymous neighborhood kid into a stone-cold killer. At first, everybody figured Featherstone was just letting off steam and that once he readjusted to civilian life he’d be okay. But the violence kept getting worse and worse, until finally it was too late. Some people felt if he’d only gotten out of the neighborhood things could have been different.

In April of 1966, when he first left high school at the age of seventeen to enlist in the army, Featherstone might have agreed. The drugs and street violence that were then becoming so common in the neighborhood made the service seem like an attractive escape route. At the time, the war in Southeast Asia was still something of a mystery. It was pre–Tet Offensive. Pre–My Lai Massacre. There was no stigma attached to following in John Wayne’s footsteps, and even if there had been it wouldn’t have applied in Hell’s Kitchen. Joining the service was another of the neighborhood’s glorious traditions, dating back to World War I and the widely heralded “Fighting 69th” Regiment, known in the neighborhood as “Hell’s Kitchen’s own.” The tradition was continued in World War II with the 165th Infantry, another regiment made up mostly of Hell’s Kitchen natives.

Like many volunteers, Featherstone entered the service with a gung-ho attitude. He had every reason to believe this would be his calling. His father had served in the army for eight years and seen action in Korea. His brothers Bobby and Henry had enlisted a few years before him, and another brother, Joseph, had joined the same day he had as part of the army’s “buddy plan” and been assigned to the 173rd Airborne Division.

Within weeks after he completed basic training, Mickey was assigned to the Nhatrang headquarters of Special Forces, the elite commando unit commonly known as the Green Berets. Casualties were high among the Green Berets in 1966–67, and as a result, regular army personnel were often assigned to Special Forces compounds to serve in menial capacities. Featherstone had not gone through Green Beret training, nor would he be going on combat missions with specialized guerrilla units. But technically, he could now call himself a Green Beret.

At first, his Special Forces designation was a source of great pride. Like other kids in his neighborhood, he’d fantasized about being a member of America’s most glamorous fighting force. He and his teenage friends spent lots of time hanging out on stoops and streetcorners along 9th and 10th avenues singing the words to the “Ballad of the Green Berets”:

Fighting soldiers from the sky,

Fearless men who jump and die.

Men who mean just what they say,

The brave men of the Green Beret.

Silver wings upon their chests,

These are men, America’s best,

One hundred men we’ll test today,

But only three win the Green Beret.

In ’Nam, however, far from the stoops of Hell’s Kitchen, it didn’t take Featherstone long to realize his situation was not all it was cracked up to be. In Nhatrang he served as an ordnance supply specialist, spending most of his day cooped up in a warehouse or drinking at the local Playboy Club in town. Within the army’s rigid caste system, Private Featherstone was squarely at the bottom, and those higher in rank never let him forget it. “The ash and trash” was the name officers and soldiers in the field used for guys like Featherstone, stock clerks and mess-hall officers who lounged around the compound all day while the real soldiers got their asses shot off.

Featherstone hated his assignment. He was embarrassed that he had come this far only to work as a clerk in a warehouse. In tape-recorded letters he sent home to his mother, he was vocal about his dissatisfaction. He was bored and lonely, he said. Throughout his young life he had rarely been outside his own neighborhood, much less stationed in some far-off land with strange terrain and even stranger people. On the recordings, his voice was full of paranoia and bitterness, and his mother was so disturbed by what she heard that she would later destroy the tapes in a fit of anguish.

Mickey’s spirits rose somewhat in early 1967 when he was reassigned to D Company, 5th Special Forces Group, then based along the Mekong Delta in Cantho Province. The Delta was hot in ’67, and Featherstone was sure he’d finally get to see some action.

In Cantho, however, his situation only got worse. Once again he was assigned to the stockroom and later to the mail room. Much of his day was spent drinking at the Alamo Lounge, the base saloon, while Mobile Guerrilla Teams fought the war he’d hoped to fight out in the bush.

Occasionally, he got to go on chopper “milk runs” delivering mail to A and B teams out in the field. Sometimes mail got sent back with envelopes marked SEARCH, usually meaning the person had been killed in action. Featherstone would read the names on the envelopes and sometimes ask himself, Why them? Why not me?

As his tour of duty wore on, Featherstone’s sense of guilt and displacement deepened. He drank almost every day. Sometimes, he would get so fucked-up he would have blackouts and hardly remember what had happened the night before.

On one such occasion he was out drinking with a group of orderlies from the base hospital. “Hey,” said one of the orderlies, pointing towards Mickey. “Whaddya say we give this cherry a circumcision? He ain’t been initiated yet.”

Barely conscious of what was happening, Featherstone was taken to his hootch and operated on by a drunken medic. He woke up the next morning with his prick wrapped in gauze and covered with adhesive tape.

A few days later, Mickey’s brother Joseph got a weekend pass from the Airborne Rangers and came to see him in Cantho. They hadn’t been together since basic training, so they immediately went into the city to celebrate. After a night of drinking they wound up at a local whorehouse. Mickey was led into a makeshift bedroom. When he got a hard-on he experienced incredible pain. He pulled down his pants and saw that his incision had ripped open—his prick was covered with blood.

Featherstone felt like crying. The frustration and humiliation of his entire tour of duty welled up inside him. He came to ’Nam to be a war hero, to follow in his father’s footsteps as a dedicated soldier. But the whole thing was a bust. Not only was he treated like shit and given bullshit duties, but now here he was in some two-bit blow-job joint in Cantho with a dick that would probably be scarred for life.

After that, Mickey didn’t seem to give a shit. He had frequent disciplinary problems. Once, he stole a jeep from the compound and drove into town for a night of debauchery, missing the next morning’s flag-raising ceremony. The company commander docked his pay and reduced his rank, but it was all perfunctory. No one seemed to care much. It wasn’t like Mickey was one of the army’s most prized commodities. On the contrary. Private Featherstone was just one of the faceless thousands in ’Nam who got stuck in the most menial of jobs, had friends die in combat, was harangued and humiliated by supervisors, then abruptly released stateside to sort it all out.

Long before he gunned down Linwood Willis in front of the Leprechaun Bar in September of 1970, Mickey’s life had degenerated into a succession of violent, drunken episodes. Ever since his return to Hell’s Kitchen, he’d fallen into a routine of sleeping during the day and drinking through the night and into the early hours of the next morning. He seemed to have no interests, no personality, no ambition. He withdrew from his family and friends.

In the neighborhood saloons, Mickey usually sat at the end of the bar and drank alone. He viewed everyone with suspicion. Of the barflies he spent most of his time boozing with, he used to say, “I hate the people. They hang on you with their faces.” He took any imagined slight as a fullfledged insult, and he’d lash out with a pent-up fury that shocked people who’d known him as a kid.

Not that Mickey was any saint before he joined the service. Like any kid growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, he’d seen his share of violence. At age ten he threw his chair at a teacher who smacked him in the head for sleeping in class. Young Featherstone was dragged into Children’s Court, but the charges were eventually dropped. As punishment, he was assigned to a “600” school for kids with discipline problems. But those who knew him best—his family and close personal friends—remembered Mickey as a shy, slightly skittish kid with a quiet disposition.

There was, however, a lack of supervision around the Featherstone household that made it possible for Mickey and his brothers to roam the streets at all hours of the day and night. Many people figured it was only a matter of time before Mickey started to get into trouble, just like so many other kids who roamed these same streets before him.

Some folks looked at Mickey’s mother, Dorothy Boyle, and figured the Featherstone kids never had a chance. Dottie, as she was known to her friends, had married Charlie Featherstone in the late 1930s. By most accounts, the elder Featherstone, who sometimes worked as a longshoreman, was a drunk and a louse who beat his wife regularly. Eventually he deserted Dottie, leaving her with little or no money and six children to raise.

She then struck up a relationship with Charlie Boyle, a military man. They were unable to find Featherstone, who was still her legal husband, so proper divorce papers were never filed. Dottie and Charlie Boyle entered into a common-law marriage and had three children of their own, the youngest of whom was Mickey.

Boyle was a mild-mannered presence around the house, at the time a modest five-room railroad flat located at 43rd Street and 10th Avenue. Along with working long hours at his job as a guard in a veterans’ hospital in the Bronx, there was the strain of trying to raise nine children while not even legally married. Often Boyle withdrew into himself, leaving the disciplining of the children to their mother.

The fact that they had to keep the Featherstone name while their actual father’s name was Boyle always bothered Mickey and his two older brothers, Henry and Joseph. That, along with the fact they often had to wear hand-me-down clothes, made for a lot of teasing at school and in the neighborhood. They fought a lot with neighborhood kids and with their various half-brothers and halfsisters. Mickey, it seemed, was always running away from these skirmishes, leaving his brothers to fight his neighborhood battles for him.