The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (14 page)

It was Evseroff’s handling of the government psychiatrist in that case that most interested Larry Hochheiser. Ever since he’d begun working on the Linwood Willis murder case, Hochheiser had been trying to pin Evseroff down, hoping to glean some of his wisdom. As a relative newcomer to the criminal defense game, Hochheiser didn’t know shit about psychiatry. Evseroff had promised he would give him some pointers on how to cross-examine a psychiatrist. But whenever Hochheiser approached his busy senior associate, he was told, “Not now, not now.”

In September of ’72, as jury selection began and the trial date approached, Hochheiser felt he could wait no longer. The government had let it be known that they were going to call Dr. Stanley Portnow, a psychiatrist who’d examined Featherstone at Bellevue Hospital. Hochheiser knew that Portnow would be used to refute claims made by other psychiatric witnesses that Featherstone was insane. His cross-examination of Portnow, Hochheiser felt, might be the single most important event of the trial.

Late one evening, after nearly everyone else had left the normally hectic offices of Evseroff, Newman, and Sonenshine, Hochheiser stopped by Jack Evseroff’s office. Evseroff was seated at his desk, feet up, schmoozing with his girlfriend on the telephone. In the two or three years Hochheiser had known Evseroff, the forty-four-year-old attorney had been through two wives. He always seemed to be in the process of finalizing a divorce while at the same time grooming his latest flame for marriage.

Hochheiser sat down quietly in a sunken green leather couch across from Evseroff’s desk. As he waited patiently, Evseroff continued whispering sweet nothings into the phone. Finally, Hochheiser loudly cleared his throat. Evseroff looked up, as if noticing Hochheiser for the first time, then put his hand over the receiver.

“What is it, boobie?” he asked. Evseroff called everyone he knew “boobie.”

“Jack,” pleaded Hochheiser. “You told me some time ago that you were gonna teach me how to cross-examine a psychiatrist. Now weeks have gone by and I’m gonna have to do this in a matter of days. There really isn’t any more time. I was hoping we could go over this tonight.”

Evseroff looked mildly annoyed. “Okay, boobie.” Speaking into the mouthpiece, he told his girlfriend, “Honey, can you hold on just a minute?”

With his hand again over the receiver, Evseroff turned his attention back to Hochheiser. “Alright, boobie, so you wanna know how to cross-examine a psychiatrist.”

“Right. Exactly.”

“Alright, you ready?”

Hochheiser fumbled to get a pen and notepad out of his coat jacket. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

Evseroff furrowed his brow. “Okay, this is it. Listen carefully …

“Don’t ask him nothin’ about psychiatry.”

Hochheiser sat in silence for a good four or five seconds, his pen still poised.

“That’s it, boobie,” said Evseroff, looking at the junior attorney as if he couldn’t understand why he was still there.

“Uh,” stammered Hochheiser, “I mean … you mean, that’s all?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Goodnight boobie.” Then Evseroff went back to schmoozing with his girlfriend.

All that night and into the next day Hochheiser pondered Evseroff’s words as if they’d been delivered by some guru on a mountaintop. “Don’t ask him nothin’ about psychiatry,” Hochheiser kept mumbling to himself over and over. He thought it might just be the most brilliant thing he’d ever heard, but he wasn’t sure.

Eventually, he stored it away in the back of his mind. As with much of the advice Evseroff had given him in recent months, it was one of those statements the meaning of which remained elusive, until it finally made perfect sense weeks later in court, usually in the heat of battle.

Thoughout 1972, as Hochheiser readied himself for the Linwood Willis murder trial, events outside the courthouse provided an emotional undercurrent to the case. Antiwar protests raged throughout the country that spring and summer. In New York City, on April 30th, twelve Catholic nuns, some wearing white sheets with the legend “One more person dead in Indochina,” lay down in the aisles of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during Sunday mass.

As the presidential election campaigns heated up in October, President Richard M. Nixon promised that “peace with honor” was imminent. Hoping that Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, were onto something, American voters were about to resoundingly reject the Democratic challenger, George McGovern. But even with Nixon’s reelection a certainty, the American public had made it clear in the streets and in poll after poll throughout ’72 that the war in Vietnam was never more unpopular.

With these events as a backdrop, the Willis trial got underway on October 6th, two years and seven days after the shooting actually occurred. The trial took place in the courtroom of Judge John M. Murtaugh in the criminal courts building at 100 Centre Street in lower Manhattan.

By the time Hochheiser came forward to present his case, the events surrounding the death of Willis had been thoroughly outlined by the prosecution. Witnesses had been called; charts of the Leprechaun Bar had been displayed; ballistics evidence had been presented. Since Hochheiser was not denying that Featherstone had in fact shot and killed Linwood Willis, he was free to mount a totally separate defense—one that focused not on the act itself, but on whether or not his client, as he would say time and time again, had the capacity to “know and appreciate the nature and quality of his actions.”

Hochheiser called a number of psychiatrists, including Dr. Stephen Teich, who was in charge of the tenth floor Mental Observation Unit at the Tombs. Among other things, Teich described an incident where Featherstone was found with his wrists cut in what appeared to be a suicide attempt. When Teich talked to Mickey about this, Featherstone told him he’d been hearing voices and having Vietnam flashbacks. “These events have played a major role in his illness,” said the doctor, in reference to Featherstone’s war experiences. “And when these memories come up, or when something brings up the emotions connected with them, his ability to reason and operate in a rational manner is destroyed.”

After Teich and the other psychiatrists, it was time for Featherstone’s family to take the stand. As he watched from the defense table, Mickey couldn’t help but feel nervous and uncomfortable. All these doctors talking about how crazy he was had been disturbing enough, but now he would have to sit through his own family’s digging up events from his past. His brother Henry and his father were up first. Then came his mother.

Over the years, Mickey had developed strong, conflicting emotions about his mother. In his many talks with psychiatrists leading up to the trial, he’d been quick to blame her for his problems. One of the things that bothered him the most was how she never told him about his name. He’d been raised thinking his first name was Matthew, which is how he got the nickname Mickey. But when he went to get his birth certificate to join the service, he found out that his legal name was Francis. Mickey hated Francis; he thought it was a sissy name. When he asked his mother about it, she acted strange and said she didn’t know anything. The hospital must have made a mistake, she said.

First it was his last name, which was really Boyle, not Featherstone. Now his first name, which was really Francis, not Matthew. Sometimes Mickey felt his mother must have
wanted
him to have an identity problem.

There were other things, too—the beatings she gave him as a kid and the fact she always blamed him for her ailments. Mickey could hardly look at her without getting knots in his stomach.

The courtroom was silent as Dorothy Boyle took the stand. A small, frail woman with an equally frail voice, she described Mickey as a happy, pleasant child. Then he came back from Vietnam and the nightmares started. He would toss and turn and scream out in his sleep.

“When you say ‘nightmares,’” Hochheiser interjected, “can you describe what you observed with regard to Mickey having an apparent nightmare?”

“Can I give you an example of one?”

“Please do.”

“I had to buy a second television set because Mickey would sit up all night and watch television after he’d come home, because he couldn’t sleep at night. So I bought a portable television and I put it in the kitchen. So Mickey was sleeping in the day, and it was, I’ll say, about six o’clock …”

“Six o’clock
P.M.
?”

“Yes, sir. So I had the news on, and my dog, he went ‘Woo-woooo,’ you know, whining like. I looked in the room and the dog was backing up, and then when he came out further I seen my son was on his stomach crawling like a snake. The dog’s hair was up on his back. I run to the sink and I threw the towel in the sink and got water on it. I threw it at Mickey and run out of the house. And then I heard the dog bark, and Mickey was laughing. I went in the house, and he had the wet towel and he was playing with the dog, and he …”

Mrs. Boyle’s voice had been rising steadily. Now it began to crack. There were tears in her eyes.

“Mrs. Boyle, just relax for a moment,” said Hochheiser in a soothing tone.

Still sobbing, she continued. “And he said to me, ‘Momma, what happened?’ And I told him. I said, ‘You come out of your room like this …’”

“Indicating moving the elbows as in crawling.”

“Yes, on his stomach. Then he looked at me like he didn’t even see me. He was looking right … right through me. So he said to me, ‘Momma, I didn’t hurt you, did I?’ I said, ‘No, you didn’t hurt me.’”

“So I put him back into bed and he cried for over two hours. Then he … then he went to sleep.”

There was utter silence in the courtroom. Many of the jurors had tears in their eyes, and Hochheiser thought he’d even seen a touch of moisture in the eyes of crusty old Judge Murtaugh. After Dorothy Boyle there would be other witnesses. Dr. Stanley Portnow, the government psychiatrist, was finally called as part of the prosecution’s rebuttal. In keeping with Jack Evseroff’s advice, Hochheiser didn’t ask him nothin’ about psychiatry. He asked him about his fees, his practice, when he had time to read the background material on Featherstone. Certain that his expertise was being trivialized, Portnow became unglued. As Evzeroff put it to Hochheiser later, “You left him for dead, boobie.”

But the real clincher had been the sight of Mickey’s mother, broken and distraught. For all intents and purposes, the trial was over right there.

On October 28th, the jury delivered its verdict. Featherstone was convicted of possession of an unregistered weapon but found not guilty of murder by reason of “mental defect.”

Mickey’s family was ecstatic, and so was Hochheiser.

As for Featherstone, after his mother cried some more and he’d wished his father well, he was led back to the Tombs, where he stared at the blank walls of his cell. At the moment, it was hard for him to feel much joy. He still had to be sentenced on the gun possession charge; then there were his other cases. With all this still ahead, Featherstone figured it was a hollow, short-term victory.

Neither he nor Hochheiser had any idea that what had just gone down in Manhattan criminal court would later be seen by the city’s cops, judges, journalists, and lawyers as the genesis of the Featherstone legend.

At the same time Mickey Featherstone was scoring his first courtroom victory, a young, inexperienced cop was making his bones on the streets of New York. His name was Richard Egan, though everyone knew him as Richie. Born in 1946—the same year as Jimmy Coonan—Egan stood five-foot-eight, weighed 160 pounds dripping wet, and had a boyish smile and charm. He looked a bit like the comic book character Dennis the Menace, which was funny, since Egan was a menace to no one. To most cops who knew him, Richie was Mr. Nice Guy.

Like many of the gangsters in Hell’s Kitchen, Egan was Irish-American. He’d grown up in Elmhurst, Queens, at that time a relatively placid working-class neighborhood, mainly Irish, German, and Italian. Unlike most of the gangsters in Hell’s Kitchen, Egan came from a stable family background. His parents were both Irish-born, and Richie was their only child. By the time Egan’s father retired in the mid-Seventies, he’d worked forty-five years as a subway motorman.

When Egan graduated from Archbishop Molloy High School in 1962, like many Catholic working-class boys in the city, he saw himself as having three choices. He could go into the service; he could join the priesthood; or he could take a shot at the police training program. Ever since he could remember, Richie had dreamed of being a New York City cop. He took the entrance exam and wound up among the first 100 who were picked.

He joined the force in 1968 and spent the next four years on the streets of Spanish Harlem in upper Manhattan. In ’72, just months before Mickey Featherstone’s acquittal at the Linwood Willis murder trial, the twenty-six-year-old Egan was offered a chance to join the Intelligence Division.

Even as a young cop, Egan had a passion for information—gathering it, evaluating it, and following wherever it might lead. Making arrests interested him a lot less than formulating investigations. The Intelligence Division was perfect. Here, he was certain, he would find his calling—so he jumped at the chance to join.

It was a choice that would prove prophetic for Officer Egan, though he didn’t know it at the time.

In the following months, as Egan learned the basics of intelligence work, Mickey Featherstone would take up residence at Matteawan State Hospital for the criminally insane. Jimmy Coonan was establishing a name for himself in local criminal circles. And Hell’s Kitchen remained a product of its history—a history that would continue to be written in blood.

PART II

6

NO CORPUS DELICTI, NO INVESTIGATION

I
n the summer of 1975, Patrick “Paddy” Dugan murdered his best friend Denis Curley and the whole neighborhood got depressed about it.

It started as a barroom joke at the 596 Club, Jimmy Coonan’s saloon, the site two months earlier of the Vanderbilt Evans shooting. With a bunch of people watching, Curley aimed an unloaded pistol at Dugan. But Dugan didn’t know it was unloaded. “You pointed a fuckin’ gun at me!?” he asked his friend incredulously. The next thing people knew Dugan was going over the table, trying to get at Curley. A couple of guys held him back, but it only got worse after that.