The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (17 page)

Featherstone tried to lead some semblance of a normal life, but it wasn’t easy. For one thing, he was still drinking constantly, sometimes a quart of whiskey over the course of a day. He’d also gotten into smoking hash and marijuana. Whatever it took to deaden the senses, to get him to a place where he felt no pain—that was Featherstone’s daily goal. Increasingly, his habits were leading to a need for more cash.

Undaunted by the state parole board, who’d warned him and Jackie Coonan not to consort with one another, Mickey and Jackie opened an after-hours club on 44th Street between 9th and 10th avenues. Ostensibly, it was supposed to make Mickey and Jackie a few bucks and serve as a place where the neighborhood crowd could drink peaceably without being hassled. A nice idea. But given the company Mickey and Jackie kept, there was never much chance it would work out that way.

One night, Mickey was there with Eddie Cummiskey, Jimmy Coonan, and a group of Puerto Ricans from Brooklyn. There was a card game going on, but Mickey was hardly paying attention. He’d been drinking most of the day, and then later that night somebody brought in some Thai stick. Mickey smoked a few joints and was flying high. Everything was a blur. He moved slowly past the card game, past the pool table, into a back room to lie down.

The music was loud. Something in the back room was glowing in the dark, somewhere. Mickey closed his eyes and his head started to spin. He heard shouting and arguing in the distance. Maybe I should help, he thought to himself. Maybe they need me.

The next afternoon, he woke up in the same spot he’d crashed the night before. As he walked into the front room, his head was throbbing. The place looked like a tornado had hit it—chairs and ashtrays were turned over, glasses were broken, debris was scattered all around. It stank of stale whiskey and cheap cigars.

Standing by the pool table were Jimmy Coonan and Eddie Cummiskey. They looked haggard, as if they’d been up all night without sleep. Featherstone strained to see through his swollen, bloodshot eyes. He noticed that the smooth felt covering on the pool table was soiled with some dark liquid that looked like blood.

“What the fuck?” he asked, staring in disbelief. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?” asked Cummiskey, a devious twinkle in his eyes. “You knifed a fuckin’ spic hustler last night. Cut the shit outta him. Killed the fucker.”

Featherstone was skeptical. “Naaah. Where’s the body then?”

Cummiskey smiled that twisted smile of his. “We made it do the Houdini act.”

Mickey stared at Eddie and Jimmy, who were now laughing, then at the blood-stained pool table. He had no recollection of killing anybody that night, but anything was possible.

His head felt like shit and so did his stomach. “You guys are full of it,” said Mickey, as he made for the toilet, his stomach beginning to heave.

Eddie and Jimmy just kept laughing. Mickey went into the bathroom and threw up in the sink.

A few days later, in January 1976, Mickey was to witness “the Houdini act” in living color. This time the victim was a neighborhood guy known as Ugly Walter, and once again the perpetrators were Eddie and Jimmy.

Seeing Ugly Walter disappear piece by piece was a memory Mickey would spend the next ten years of his life trying to forget.

At the same time bodies began to disappear in Hell’s Kitchen, Police Officer Richie Egan was assigned to the Syndicated Crime Unit of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. In 1974, he’d worked on OPERATION UNCOVER, a major narcotics investigation set in his old post in Spanish Harlem. After that, in ’75, he’d tracked a big-time cocaine dealer named James Austin, a bogus M.D. who’d set up a distribution ring in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

While working on these cases, Egan was acquiring expertise on organized crime in general. Part of his job was to update files on some of the biggest mobsters in New York, including Fat Tony Salerno, Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, and Carlo Gambino, then boss of the powerful Gambino crime family. Much of his workday was spent following gangsters on their daily routines. In time, Egan came to know their habits: where they conducted business, how they communicated, where they buried the bodies.

He didn’t know it yet, but his expertise would soon lead him to the most hazardous investigation of his career, one that would require he spend most of his waking hours in the diners, bars, and backalleys of the bloody and volatile West Side.

7

DOIN’ BUSINESS

I
n the summer of 1976, Hell’s Kitchen played an integral role in one of the most spectacular celebrations the city of New York had ever seen. On the Bicentennial, July 4th, an armada of sixteen tall ships from around the world and a parade of more than 225 sailing vessels made its way up the Hudson. A twenty-two-nation fleet of fifty-three naval units lined the river. The host ship of the review, the 79,000-ton aircraft carrier
Forrestal
, was moored at the West 46th Street pier. Among the 3,000 distinguished guests on board was President Gerald Ford, who reviewed the proceedings from a grandstand on the ship’s flight deck.

The irony, of course, was that even as New York celebrated the nation’s 200th birthday in high style, the city itself was dying. An economic crisis had put New York on a crash course with bankruptcy. For months, Mayor Abraham Beame had been imposing severe austerity measures, cutting back on all manner of city services. Poor and working-class neighborhoods were hit the hardest. Development ceased. The streets went unswept. The police patrolled in smaller and smaller numbers.

In Hell’s Kitchen, the terrain began to look a lot like the South Bronx, the city’s most notorious ghetto. Residents and small-shop owners pulled the gates down on their stores, locked them, and left in droves. Even in the best of times, the neighborhood often had a ramshackle, derelict air. But now, as the city’s finances worsened, it seemed perched on the edge of total neglect.

On August 20, 1976, roughly six weeks after the Bicentennial, Eddie Cummiskey was drinking in the Sunbrite Bar at 1:30 in the afternoon. A car pulled up to the bar and double-parked. A lone man got out, went into the bar and put a gun to the back of Cummiskcy’s head. He fired one shot. The bullet entered Eddie’s skull on the right side just below the ear, then lacerated upward through the right and left lobe until it finally lodged itself in the upper left hemisphere of the brain. Bleeding profusely, Cummiskey slumped over on the bar and immediately lapsed into a coma from which he never recovered.

The gunman calmly left the bar, got back in his car, and drove off.

A small crowd soon gathered in front of the bar, drawn by the wailing sirens from the ambulance and the police cars rushing up 10th Avenue. Mickey Featherstone was there. So was Tony Lucich. As Cummiskey’s body was brought out on a stretcher, a nearby patrolman asked Lucich, “That’s Eddie Cummiskey, right?”

“Yep,” said Lucich. “That
was
Eddie Cummiskey.”

Lucich remembered seeing Eddie just a few weeks earlier, on the 4th of July. They’d had a couple of drinks together, and when Eddie got up to leave he slapped Lucich on the back and said, “Well Tony, we’ll have to do it again next centennial.”

That was the way Lucich was always going to remember Eddie Cummiskey.

After Cummiskey’s death, Featherstone met with Jimmy Coonan in the bar of the Skyline Motor Inn, just across the avenue from the Sunbrite. Ever since it was first built in 1959, the Skyline had been a frequent gathering place for the neighborhood’s criminal element. On Sunday mornings, Mickey Spillane and his crowd used to gather in the dining area so they could be seen by the dozens of neighborhood well-wishers who inevitably came by to pay their respects. Coonan preferred to do his business in the bar, where it was darker and less populated.

Jimmy was worried about the Eddie Cummiskey hit. Moments after Cummiskey was shot, Jackie Coonan had run over to his apartment and gotten an old photograph taken at Sing Sing Prison in 1969. In the picture were Jackie, Jimmy, and a few other people, including Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan. Jackie had shown the photograph to the bartender at the Sunbrite, who was still in a state of shock from just having seen Cummiskey get half his head blown off. But he was able to identify Mad Dog Sullivan as the triggerman.

Joe Sullivan (no relation to Eddie Sullivan, Coonan’s partner from the late Sixties) was a well-known free-lance assassin from way back. His claim to fame was a prison break he’d made from the Attica Correctional Facility in April of ’71. At the time, no one had ever escaped from Attica—a maximum-security, upstate New York prison—in its forty-year history. Sullivan, then thirty-two years old, had done so by hiding himself beneath some grain and feed sacks piled aboard a truck that left the prison in broad daylight. He was captured five weeks later strolling down a street in Greenwich Village.

Both in and out of prison, Sullivan was known as a trigger-happy gunman, frequently employed by
La Cosa Nostra
. In fact, it was long rumored in Hell’s Kitchen that Sullivan, along with Anthony Provenzano and a few others, was behind the disappearance of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa.

If Mad Dog Sullivan was the one who killed Cummiskey, then chances were it was a Mafia hit. And if it was a Mafia hit, Jimmy Coonan suspected something serious was going down, something he was not privy to.

Just a few weeks earlier, on July 20, 1976, Thomas Devaney, another neighborhood Irishman, had been gunned down in a similar fashion in a bar-and-grill on Lexington Avenue. Like Cummiskey, Devaney had been tight with Mickey Spillane. So it was possible, surmised Coonan, that these killings were somehow leading towards Spillane.

But it was also true that both Cummiskey and Devaney recently had been shifting their allegiances to Coonan. Cummiskey, in particular, had been spreading his time evenly between Spillane and Coonan, acting as a strongarm man for both. So it was equally possible that these hits were, in fact, leading toward Jimmy.

Coonan wasn’t sure just what the hell was going on, he told Featherstone at the Skyline Motor Inn, but he didn’t like the looks of it. “I don’t know, Mick,” he said, “with Cummiskey outta the picture, I’m gonna need somebody to watch my back.” Once again, Jimmy asked Mickey if he’d be willing to come in on his loanshark operation. This time he emphasized his need for “protection,” telling Mickey his primary role would be as a bodyguard.

Featherstone interpreted it as an appeal for help, and he couldn’t say no. Jimmy had been his friend. Now it was time to return that friendship. Of course, there was also the matter of $150 a week Coonan was willing to pay, plus the promise of a lot more down the line.

“Okay,” said Mickey. “You can count on me.”

After that, they established a routine. Coonan would drive in from New Jersey on Wednesday afternoons, usually around one or two o’clock. He’d pick Mickey up at his place on West 56th Street and they’d go over to Tony Lucich’s new apartment at 747 10th Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd. Lucich would be there, along with Andy Wheeler, a neighborhood racketeer who acted as their controller. Wheeler was another of the older breed who’d been slowly shifting his support from Spillane to Coonan. After the death of Cummiskey, Wheeler jumped ship entirely.

Sometimes Coonan liked to kid Wheeler about his previous affiliations. Once, in front of Featherstone and Lucich, he reminded Wheeler about a time when he and a few others had kidnapped Wheeler and held him for ransom. Coonan had strapped him to a chair and called Spillane. “We got your controller,” he told Spillane. “You don’t come up with five grand we’re gonna put air conditioning in this motherfucker’s head.”

“Oh yeah?” said Spillane. “Do what you gotta do.” Then he hung up.

Coonan would laugh his ass off when he told this story, and so did Featherstone and Lucich when they heard it. “There’s your fuckin’ buddy Mickey Spillane,” Coonan used to say to Wheeler, who always got red in the face with embarrassment.

In the apartment, Lucich would pass along a number of envelopes to Jimmy. “This is my portion of the shylocking money,” he’d say. “This is the numbers money. This is the pier money.” The loansharking and gambling money was always in cash. The money from the piers often came in the form of payroll checks from the International Longshoremen’s Association.

Coonan and Lucich had been fanning out money to other neighborhood shylocks for years now. But it was only recently that Coonan had taken over the lucrative numbers racket. Up until Cummiskey’s death, it had been run by Spillane, Cummiskey, Lucich, and Wheeler. But when Cummiskey got whacked, Spillane got scared and wanted out.

“No problem,” Lucich told Spillane. “You ain’t shit without Cummiskey anyway.”

By that time, a principal of $10,000 had accrued. Lucich gave Spillane $2,500 and said good-bye. Coonan stepped in immediately.

As for the money from the piers, that was a little something Coonan had cooked up himself. At the time, the piers were not exactly booming with business. But Local 1909 of the ILA, whose headquarters were located at 48th Street and 12th Avenue, still had a sizable payroll. Through Walter Curich, another old-timer from Spillane’s generation, Coonan had been able to extort a weekly tribute.

After picking up the envelopes at Lucich’s apartment, Coonan and Featherstone would continue making the rounds collecting Jimmy’s debts. If Coonan had driven into town, they’d use his car. If he had taken the bus in, they’d make their rounds on foot. The Market Diner, the 596 Club and the Sunbrite were all regular stops. So was Donald Mallay’s candy store at 55th and 10th Avenue, William “Whoopi” Meyers’s auto garage on 46th Street between 11th and 12th Avenue, and one of Carl Mazzella’s many produce stands around the neighborhood.

Usually an envelope was waiting for Coonan, filled with neat green currency. But sometimes there were problems. That’s why he and Mickey both carried .25-caliber automatics everywhere they went.

Featherstone knew full well what his role was supposed to be in the event Coonan had to get rough with a customer. He’d gotten a crash course a few months earlier when he accompanied Jimmy, along with Tom Devaney and Tommy Hess, to a bar called Polly’s Cage on 57th Street near 8th Avenue. There was a construction worker there who was looking to borrow money from Coonan. But Jimmy had been tipped off that the guy was a “beat artist,” a person who borrows from shylocks and never pays his loans. So Jimmy had a message he wanted to deliver.