The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (12 page)

That was one of the first things everybody noticed about Mickey when he came back from ’Nam. He didn’t run from fights anymore.

His first major altercation took place within days of his return from overseas duty. Four guys jumped him after an argument in a bar on 9th Avenue. One of them used a baseball bat to break his nose and knock a few of his teeth out.

One month later, again on 9th Avenue, a would-be robber confronted him with a .22-caliber target pistol. Rather than give up what little change he had, Mickey defended himself with a garbage-can lid. The robber fired and hit him in the arm. The next day Mickey was discharged from the hospital with the bullet still embedded near his left elbow.

Featherstone was small but not stupid; he quickly learned from these and other scuffles that it didn’t make much sense to hang out in Hell’s Kitchen without some kind of protection. In most street battles where it was one-on-one, Mickey was able to hold his own, even though he was almost always smaller and lighter than his opponent. But since few neighborhood fights were one-on-one (there were usually friends or relatives involved), an “equalizer” was often called for.

The first time Featherstone used a gun in a neighborhood altercation was on the night of September 26, 1968. He had been drinking at the Market Diner on 43rd Street and 11th Avenue, just down the block from his parents’ apartment building. A kid from New Jersey named John Riley, his brother Jimmy Riley, and a friend of theirs came into the bar section of the diner.

“Got a cigarette?” John Riley asked Featherstone.

Mickey had seen the Riley brothers around the neighborhood before. They were big, muscular guys who were always trying to intimidate people. He hated their swagger and their loud Jersey accents.

“Nah,” replied Mickey. “Not for you.”

“Whaddya call those?” said Riley, pointing towards a pack of Kools Mickey had resting on the bar.

“Those is New York cigarettes,” shrugged Mickey, “not Jersey cigarettes.”

A few neighborhood onlookers laughed. Riley reached over and slapped Featherstone across the face.

Mickey’s brother Henry and a neighborhood kid named Tommy McElroy—Jimmy Mac’s cousin—were also in the bar. When the fight began, they helped move it outside to the parking lot, where it was now going to be the Riley brothers and their friend against the Featherstone brothers and Tommy McElroy. Just as the rumble got started, the cops arrived and broke things up. They escorted the Riley brothers to the Lincoln Tunnel, where they were told to take their white Cadillac home to New Jersey.

Thirty minutes later the Rileys returned to the Market Diner and the whole scene was replayed. This time, as the cops led them to their Caddy, John Riley told Featherstone they were going to be back again—with weapons.

Everyone told Mickey to go home. As a U.S. soldier out on a weekend pass, he had the most to lose if someone got arrested.

Featherstone lay on the couch at his parents’ apartment and wondered if he’d done the right thing. There was probably going to be a fight, he thought, and it would be disgraceful if people knew he’d walked away from it. Plus, it was the Riley brothers, who had been bullying people in his neighborhood for months.

His head was spinning from the booze he’d drunk that night and from all of the bad thoughts that kept passing through his mind, causing the usual agitation and paranoia. Then the phone rang.

“Mickey,” said a voice on the line. “The Rileys are back with a tire iron, an ax, and every fuckin’ thing.”

Featherstone grabbed a hunting rifle that his father had in a closet, headed out the door and down West 43rd Street.

When he got to the diner, he hid in a grassy area that straddled the parking lot. There was an old-fashioned Western showdown going on. He saw Tommy McElroy, his brother Henry, and his half-brother Bobby. In front of them was John Riley holding a tire jack, standing under a streetlight. The other Riley, Jimmy, was holding the jack handle. Another guy was standing behind him with an ax handle.

Mickey fired once and hit the Rileys’ car. He fired a second time and hit John Riley in the arm.

With his rifle pointed at the New Jersey boys, Featherstone rose from the ground and approached. He walked over to John Riley, who had been hit but was still standing, and smacked him across the face with the butt of the rifle. After Riley went down, Tommy McElroy picked up the tire jack and started hitting Riley on the head with it. Henry walked over to the other Riley and punched him in the face. “Don’t ever fuck with a Featherstone,” he said.

McElroy was still whacking away at John Riley, like the jack was a golf club and Riley’s head the ball. Bobby Featherstone had to come over and punch McElroy in the face just to keep him from murdering the guy.

By the time the cops arrived a sizable crowd had gathered and Riley was covered with blood. Mickey and his brother Henry were handcuffed to a No Parking sign.

The next day, September 27, 1968, Mickey and Tommy McElroy were charged with aggravated assault. They were held at Rikers Island for a week until they were able to secure bail. The same day they were released, John Riley was discharged from the hospital. On his way out the door, he dropped dead from the head injury. The charge against Featherstone and McElroy was upgraded to manslaughter.

After the Riley shooting, Mickey’s mom was hysterical. On top of everything else, she’d heard that weeks earlier Mickey had applied for another tour of duty in Vietnam. She immediately contacted Fort Dix and told Mickey’s commanding officer that there was no way her son should be allowed to go overseas again.

No need to worry, she was told, the military didn’t want him. As part of Mickey’s request, he’d had to agree to a psychosocial evaluation by a staff psychiatrist. After a few days of interviews and tests, Featherstone was diagnosed as suffering from a nervous condition which manifested itself in severe nightmares, heavy drinking, an inability to sleep, and withdrawal from the outside world. The report concluded “… the assigning of EM [emergency medical] back to a combat area will probably bring back the difficulties that it previously created and probably with much more intensification. The experiences the young man went through while serving his one year appear to be too traumatic for even a mature, well-adjusted individual to cope with.”

Featherstone’s request for another tour of duty was denied. While he was out on bail, what remained of his three-year military commitment was completed at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where he served as a driver and a mail clerk. On May 13, 1969, he was given an honorable discharge.

At the same time Mickey Featherstone was finishing his military career, the neighborhood rackets had begun to stagnate. Jimmy Coonan was currently in Sing Sing, serving time for the Canelstein/Morales shooting. Many other young gangsters were either doing time in prison or in Vietnam. Mickey Spillane was still out and about, but, in general, it was not a particularly lucrative time for Hell’s Kitchen’s criminal element. Compared to the years of the Coonan/Spillane Wars, it was relatively calm—except, of course, for the presence of Featherstone, who was fast becoming a one-man crime wave.

In July 1969, just two months after his official discharge from the service, Mickey married a young girl from the neighborhood named Juanita Arturo. Nobody came to their wedding because just about everyone thought the marriage was a bad idea. Some of Mickey’s family didn’t like the idea of his marrying a Puerto Rican. Some thought he was too volatile and immature for marriage. Others felt Juanita wasn’t the right girl, she was too “square,” too sedentary.

Juanita was a strict Catholic who went to church every Sunday. Since Mickey was also Catholic, it was her hope that she could get him to pay more attention to his faith. This annoyed Featherstone, and it quickly became a source of contention.

There were other difficulties, not the least of which were Juanita’s sexual hang-ups, which had been a problem since the day they were married. It was on their honeymoon that Featherstone first called his half-sister, Joan, to tell her that his new bride was terrified at the thought of having sex with him.

“Sis,” said Mickey, “I don’t ever want you to tell anyone about this, but please get on the phone with Juanita. She’s afraid.”

Joan was flabbergasted. The idea of someone calling from a honeymoon asking for sexual advice seemed pretty damned strange. She heard Mickey in the background talking to Juanita. “Go ahead,” he was saying, “my sister will talk to you. Don’t be embarrassed.” Then Mickey got back on the line, giggling nervously. “She really needs your help, Sis.”

Joan did what she could. But it was obvious from talking to Juanita that she was scared to death.

It all came crashing down just a few months after the wedding. On one of those rare occasions when Mickey came home to spend the night, he awoke from a terrible nightmare and tried to strangle Juanita in their bed. She moved out the next day, taking most of the furniture with her. Later, Mickey told doctors he’d been having a bad dream about the war, and he awoke thinking the person in bed next to him was a Vietnamese agent.

After Juanita left him in the fall of ’69, Featherstone, now twenty-one, became increasingly despondent. He moved back in with his parents. Whatever money he had came from Charlie Boyle, his father, and most of that was spent on whiskey. Mostly, he hung out in places where he could drink for free—places like the American Legion post on West 43rd Street, which was run by his father and his brother Henry. Mickey could be found there almost any night getting sloshed while watching TV. His favorites were old horror movies like
Frankenstein
and
Dracula.

No doubt his life would have continued this way were it not for a quirk of fate. Not long after Juanita left him, Mickey developed an abscess on his neck. He’d tried numerous home remedies, but they only made things worse. So he went for treatment to the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital on Kingsbridge Road, the same hospital where his father now worked as supervisor of security.

While he was there, the doctors noticed Featherstone’s extreme nervousness and agitation. They treated his abscess and referred him to the psychiatric division, where he was described as anxious and hallucinatory with “suicidal and homicidal ideations.” They suggested he stick around.

Mickey knew he was fucked up, so his parents didn’t have too much trouble convincing him that the hospital was the best place for him to be. Also, as long as he was in a psychiatric facility his homicide indictment for the Riley shooting would be kept “off calendar,” meaning a court date could not be set.

At the Bronx V.A. hospital Featherstone was diagnosed as a “paranoid schizophrenic” with an alcohol addiction and something they called Traumatic War Neurosis. They kept him on the psychiatric ward and tranquilized him daily. Charlie Boyle often came by to see how his son was doing. Usually, Mickey was under heavy sedation and totally incapable of conversation.

Although numerous tests and interviews were done to determine the extent of Featherstone’s illness, there was very little done to actually treat his condition. Doctors listened carefully as Mickey enumerated the nightmares from his past. He’d had to execute Cambodian spies in the war, he said, and this had caused him to resent authority. He’d witnessed other atrocities as well—soldiers being decapitated, friends being killed, prisoners tortured. Of course, there was nothing in Mickey’s military record to suggest any of this was true. But as he told these stories over and over, after a while it hardly mattered. In Mickey’s own mind they
became
true. The delusions became his reality.

Physician after physician listened to these stories and filed remarkably similar reports. Certainly Mickey Featherstone was ill, they wrote. Certainly he was paranoid. Then they’d prescribe a daily dosage of antipsychotic tranquilizers—known in the trade as a “liquid straitjacket”—and suggest the patient be kept under observation. The idea was to shuffle him along to the next doctor and keep him off the street.

In April 1970, however, a few months after his admission, Featherstone was declared healthy enough to be given an indefinite furlough. A steady diet of drugs had deadened his senses, and it was hoped his paranoid and aggressive tendencies had abated. After all, he’d conducted himself admirably while confined to his hospital room. He hadn’t attacked anyone at all.

Unfortunately, Hell’s Kitchen was a long way from the V.A. hospital. Two weeks after his discharge, on April 23rd, Featherstone walked into a bar on 10th Avenue and killed again.

This time he hardly knew what was going on, even as it unfolded right before his eyes. It was at the Sunbrite Saloon at 736 10th Avenue. The place was packed, the music loud. Mickey had been drinking for hours. Suddenly there was a lot of commotion. A gun was being passed around the bar, over everybody’s head.

The next thing Featherstone knew it was in his hand. Or it looked like his hand. Was it his hand? The music blared, people were shouting. In front of Mickey was a guy he recognized named Emilio Rettagliatta, although he knew him as Mio. It was Mio’s gun, they said. Mio had pulled a gun on someone in the bar. Shoot Mio! they said. Mio made a move for the gun and Mickey fired, hitting him in the stomach. He looked in Mio’s eyes. He knew that look. It meant Mio was dead.

At the sound of gunfire, everyone stampeded for the door. The body was taken outside and dumped in the street so the bar wouldn’t be held accountable. Mickey was hustled into the back seat of somebody’s car and taken to 414 West 46th Street, Johnny Diaz’s place. “Sit tight,” a voice commanded. “Don’t fuckin’ move. Just wait till things blow over.”

But Mickey couldn’t wait. He’d heard in the car on the way over that the guy he’d shot was Mickey Spillane’s numbers runner. It didn’t take a genius to know that meant trouble. Mickey knew Spillane—everybody in the neighborhood did. He’d never had any beefs with him or his people. But this was different. Mickey knew what he had to do. He had to get Spillane before Spillane got him.

Featherstone grabbed a .22-caliber pistol he knew Johnny Diaz kept stashed away in his closet. He stuck the gun in his pants and headed into the night, running south on 9th Avenue and west on 45th Street until he came to the White House Bar. It was now around 4
A.M.
It looked like the bar was closed. Mickey peered in the front window and saw Spillane seated with a few other guys at a table. He knocked on the window and motioned for Spillane to come out.