The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (16 page)

While Featherstone was in Sing Sing, he heard about Paddy’s demise. The thing that pissed him off the most was that Billy Beattie, who was supposed to be Paddy Dugan’s good friend, was the person who set him up to be killed—or at least that’s what Featherstone had heard.

On the day of his release from Sing Sing—a chilly afternoon in early December 1975—Featherstone made a beeline for the 596 Club.

“Hey, Billy,” he said, walking in the front door, “let’s go for a stroll.”

Billy Beattie was tending bar at the time. He seemed surprised to see Featherstone. “Mickey. I didn’t even know you was back.”

“Never mind that. We got some talkin’ to do.”

“I’m kinda busy right now.”

“So take a break.”

Beattie nodded and threw down his bar towel.

Once outside, they headed west on 43rd Street past the tenement where Featherstone had grown up; past the old New York Central Railroad tracks; past Engine Company 2, the red-brick firehouse where Mickey used to play as a kid. It was so cold that steam came from their mouths as they spoke.

“Billy, I heard somethin’ I gotta ask you. Why’d you sell Paddy out?”

“Mickey, wait a minute …”

“I wanna know why you sold your fuckin’ partner down the river.”

“I had no choice, Mickey. Had no fuckin’ choice. They caught me when I was takin’ a shower, man. Put guns to my fuckin’ head and forced me to call him, forced me to set him up.”

“Who’s they? Who the fuck is they?”

“Jimmy and Eddie.”

As Featherstone and Beattie spoke, Jimmy Coonan came up the block behind them.

“Hey, Mickey, don’t blame Billy,” said Coonan. “Ain’t his fault. We forced him to do it, okay? He had no choice.”

Mickey was upset. “Why Paddy, man? What’d he do to you?”

“Mickey, that little cocksucker kidnapped my bartender; he kidnapped Charlie Krueger. Then he calls me on my home phone,
my home fuckin’ phone
and tells me he’s holdin’ him for ransom. In my bar. Holdin’ him in my fuckin’ bar!”

“Paddy did that?”

“Yeah, Paddy did that. Fuckin’ junkie. He was outta control, man. Had it comin’. And that’s not even mentioning the Denis Curley thing.”

Mickey let out a deep sigh and looked at Billy, who shrugged and stared down at his feet to avoid eye contact.

“Mickey,” said Coonan, “c’mon back to the bar. It’s friggin’ freezin’ out here. C’mon. I’ll tell you all about it.”

Back at the 596 Club, Coonan and Featherstone sat in the rear, and Jimmy explained what happened with Paddy Dugan. He’d been home that night with his family, he said, and Paddy kept calling him to say he was going to kill Charlie Krueger. Jimmy would hang up and Paddy would call again ten minutes later. It got very annoying. So Jimmy drove into town and got hold of Eddie Cummiskey, who he knew was after Dugan for the Denis Curley thing. Coonan and Cummiskey went to Billy Beattie’s apartment and forced him to lure Paddy there. That’s when Cummiskey nailed him with a .32.

It was an old apartment, with the bathtub in the kitchen. So they dragged Dugan’s dead body in there and threw it in the tub. Then they went through Dugan’s clothes and took all his money. After that, they stripped the body naked and Eddie and Jimmy began cutting it up.

“You did what?” asked Featherstone.

“We got rid of the body.”

“What the fuck for?”

Coonan shrugged. “It’s the only way to go, my man. No corpus delicti, no investigation.”

After they finished dicing up the body, they put Paddy’s head in a plastic garbage bag and went up to the rooftop of 452 West 50th. They made their way through the moonlit night, over the rooftops of three tenement buildings, until they came to 442 West 50th, Coonan’s sister-in-law’s building. It was on the way down to the boiler room to incinerate Paddy’s head that they ran into Jimmy’s niece.

Featherstone, of course, had heard about Cummiskey’s dismemberment routine before. But he didn’t know Coonan was into it. It was Cummiskey who had trained to be a butcher at Attica. Mickey figured Cummiskey must have passed his skills along to Jimmy.

Coonan went on to explain to Mickey all that had been happening in the nearly five years he’d been away from the neighborhood. In that time, said Jimmy, he’d learned the loansharking business from Tony Lucich and hooked up with Ruby Stein. He was now pushing more money than anybody on the West Side, including Spillane.

“Spillane’s a punk,” he said. “A small-timer. His days are over.”

Featherstone had heard most of what Jimmy had to say before, but he let him go on anyway. He liked hearing about the Coonan/Spillane Wars and about how Jimmy had been making a name for himself. Sure, he’d been mad at Coonan about the Paddy Dugan murder, but he didn’t know Paddy had kidnapped Krueger and held him for ransom. That was wrong, thought Mickey. And stupid. It put everything in a new light.

“You know, Mickey,” said Coonan, “there ain’t no reason with all that’s goin’ on here why you shouldn’t be in on this.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean, you been to prison for crazy stuff, stuff you don’t make no money on. You come in with me, you make money. This way, you ever go back to the joint, least you went there tryin’ to make a buck. Right?”

Featherstone could see the logic in what Coonan was saying. In fact, he’d thought of it himself before. Ever since Coonan had given him that gun years ago when he needed it to shoot Linwood Willis outside the Leprechaun Bar, Featherstone had felt a debt of gratitude to Jimmy. If Coonan ever needed him, he’d told himself many times, he’d be there. But Coonan seemed to be doing fine at the moment. He didn’t really need Mickey. It was just an offer, an offer from one friend to another.

Featherstone told Coonan thanks, but no thanks. He’d just gotten back from prison and he wasn’t ready yet for any big-time shit. “But if you ever need me, Jimmy, for anything, you know I’ll be there.”

Jimmy said thanks, he appreciated it, and that’s where they left it.

Over the months that followed, Featherstone thought about Coonan’s offer every now and then. The only money he had coming in were his $150-a-week veteran’s benefits (he’d been declared 100 percent disabled) and social security. At the moment, he was living with his half-brother Bobby and not paying rent, so he didn’t have many expenses. But he knew he was going to need some steady bread somewhere along the line. A straight job was out of the question, of course, even if he had been able to get one with his prison record, which was doubtful. He’d tried a few quick-cash schemes, but nothing seemed to add up to much. All roads kept leading back to Jimmy Coonan’s offer.…

One thing was sure: If Mickey Featherstone wanted to get involved in organized crime, he wouldn’t have to spend much time establishing a reputation. Since beating his murder rap on an insanity plea, he’d served just under five years (including his pre-trial incarceration) for possession of an unregistered weapon in the Willis shooting. After being sentenced in early ’73, he’d bounced from facility to facility. First it was the Bronx State Hospital for eight months, then Sing Sing for a month, then Comstock for nine months, Matteawan for two months, Great Meadow for eight months, Attica for a few weeks, then back to Matteawan for the remainder of his “bit.”

Unlike Coonan, who’d done his time for the Canelstein/Morales shooting without incident, Featherstone’s five years had been a horror show. He kept getting relocated from psychiatric wings to general population, where he’d get into fights and be sent back to the nuthouse.

When he was finally released in May of 1975, his attorney, Larry Hochheiser, plea-bargained on the remaining charges. Manhattan district Judge Harold Rothwax gave Featherstone five years’ probation for both the John Riley homicide and possession of a weapon in the shooting death of Emilio “Mio” Rattagliatti. Soon he was back on the West Side.

When he returned, those who knew Featherstone detected a slight difference. He seemed somewhat less agitated than before and a little more outgoing. His years in prison had helped bring his anger into focus, making him less wantonly dangerous, though harder and more calculating. Before prison, Mickey didn’t have a concrete identity. Now, emboldened by his experiences, he saw himself as a survivor. He’d never allow himself to be “victimized” again like those years after ’Nam.

Despite the personality changes, as he settled back into the neighborhood the end result was largely the same: Mickey found trouble at every turn. Along with the police, who he was sure were out to get him, there were the folks in the neighborhood saloons. With his Vietnam background, numerous homicides, dozens of barroom brawls, and ex-con status, he was already a legend in Hell’s Kitchen. When people met him, they were often surprised by how small and unassuming he looked. Some fools figured it would enhance their reputation if they kicked his ass, just so they could tell their friends they’d made a punk out of Mickey Featherstone.

On one such occasion Mickey was drinking in the 596 Club in the middle of the afternoon. A guy who wasn’t even from the neighborhood was there with his girlfriend giving Mickey a hard time. He was bragging about being some kind of karate expert. After numerous insults were hurled back and forth, the guy asked, “You think you’re a motherfuckin’ war hero? Is that it? You think you got balls? Well, I got more balls than the balls you got.”

Eventually he and Featherstone faced each other down. When the so-called karate expert went into his kung fu stance, Mickey, without even putting his drink down, belted him once in the face. The karate expert fell to the floor, whereupon Mickey grabbed a barstool and set it on the floor over the guy, pinning him helplessly to the ground. Then he made the guy’s overweight girlfriend sit on the stool and have a drink.

“But I don’t want no drink,” she said.

“So what,” said Featherstone. “You’re gonna sit there on that stool till you finish the drink, whether you like it or not.”

Sometimes it was so crazy Mickey just had to laugh. He’d gone from Hell’s Kitchen to ’Nam to nuthouses to prisons. Now he was back in the environment he knew best. But he was beginning to think maybe this was the worst of all, and it was getting worse every day.

In December 1975, just days after his conversation with Billy Beattie and Jimmy Coonan about Paddy Dugan’s demise, Featherstone’s life took an unexpected turn. Once again, it began in a bar—this time in Amy’s Pub, one of the neighborhood’s more respectable saloons, located on 9th Avenue between 55th and 56th streets. Much of Amy’s clientele came from the television and recording studios on West 57th Street, one of midtown Manhattan’s busiest crosstown thoroughfares. The bar had a large picture window that overlooked 9th Avenue. The inside was always well lit and thick with plants and hanging ferns. They even had tablecloths at Amy’s, an amenity unheard of at most of the places Featherstone frequented.

One evening, while Mickey was minding his own business, a group of local girls sauntered in and took a table near the back of the bar. He recognized a few of them, particularly a nicely built blonde he’d seen a few times since he got back from prison. He leaned over to the barman, who he knew, and asked about her.

“That’s Sissy,” said the man behind the bar. “Tommy Houlihan’s sister.”

Mickey did a double take. “That’s Tommy Houlihan’s sister? Man, she’s grown.”

Featherstone vaguely remembered Sissy as a nondescript little girl from around the neighborhood. Now nineteen, eight years younger than Mickey, she was five-foot-three, had brown eyes, a sharp, slightly upturned nose, and sandy-blond hair just like his. She also fit nicely, very nicely, into a pair of jeans. He knew a little bit about her past; that her last name was actually Knell and that her mother had remarried. He’d heard something about one of her brothers overdosing and another being beaten and paralyzed for life. Naturally, he was intrigued.

He walked over to her table. “Hey, how ya doin’? I’m Mickey Featherstone.”

“I know who you are,” she said in a tough, unmistakable Hell’s Kitchen accent. “So what?”

Mickey was taken aback. “Hey, listen, I ain’t gettin’ smart with you or nothin’. I know your family and everything, so I was just sayin’ hello.”

“So because you’re Mickey Featherstone I’m supposed to talk to you? Is that it?”

“No. I was just tryin’ to be friendly. Forget about it.”

Featherstone walked back over to the bar. After that, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He could see she was giggling and talking to her friends about him. Later, when there weren’t as many people around, he went over to the table again. She was friendlier this time. He bought her a drink. They got up and danced.

After that, they started seeing each other regularly. They both came from broken families and violent backgrounds, so they had a lot in common. Since Mickey’s first marriage had been such a disaster, he wasn’t anxious to get involved in anything serious. But he and Sissy got along so well he couldn’t believe it. She was pretty and streetwise; he was a tough guy. They fit each other’s needs.

Soon they were hanging out late at night at her mother’s apartment, sometimes making love on the floor by the light of the television. During the day, whenever Sissy got time off from her part-time job as an usherette at the nearby Broadway theaters, they’d go to Central Park. Sissy liked to go ice-skating. Mickey liked to watch her.

For Sissy, the relationship with Mickey brought stability to her life—a pretty good indication of just how screwed up she’d been. When Mickey came along, she was just beginning to get out from under a heroin habit she’d developed at the age of seventeen. That habit had led her to engage in purse snatching and wallet stealing. She’d known she was headed in a bad direction, but it wasn’t until she saw two of her girlfriends reduced to hooking on 10th Avenue that she knew she had to pull herself out of it. Through her stepfather she’d landed a job as an usherette. Tentatively, she’d been putting the pieces back together when Mickey came along. The way she saw it, he was her reward for kicking her junk habit.

Eventually Mickey moved out of his brother Bobby’s apartment and in with Sissy’s family on West 51st Street, near Sacred Heart Church. It was crowded—there were maybe six or seven people living in a five-room flat most of the time—but they got by. Then they moved into their own place, a new apartment at 520 West 56th Street, on the fifteenth floor.