The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (35 page)

The name had been bouncing around for some time. Ever since Sergeant Joe Coffey had used it last fall during his televised press conference at the site of the railyard diggings, there had been occasional references in the media to a “loose confederation of West Side gangsters known as the Westies.” Though Coffey was the first to use the term publicly, he later claimed he’d gotten it from the cops in the Midtown North precinct. Whatever its origins, reporters liked the name. It fit nicely into a headline and evoked memories of previous Hell’s Kitchen gangs.

Since Coonan and Featherstone’s arrest for the Whitehead murder, the
New York Post
and the
Daily News
had written dozens of articles on the Westies, usually with unnamed cops as their sources. One of the first was an article in the
Post
that claimed, with little substantiation, that “New York’s notorious Irish mob, known as the Westies,” were responsible for, among other things, the gangland slayings of Carmine Galante, Anthony Russo, and Angelo Bruno from the Philadelphia mob. This was followed by a number of other articles connecting the Westies to a staggering array of mob hits.

Another
Post
article linked the late Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey, “the notorious Irish mobster,” with “at least 30 murders.” The article was typical of many that appeared around the time of the Whitehead trial. Cummiskey’s real casualty total was more like ten or twelve, but apparently that wasn’t outrageous enough for the tabloids.

Perhaps the most widely read article of all was by
Daily News
writer Jimmy Breslin. In a column dated April 26, 1979, Breslin, already at the height of his fame, related the “tortured tale” of Mickey Featherstone. Written in Breslin’s inimitable style, it was largely a sympathetic piece presenting Mickey as a victim of war.

“Mickey Featherstone,” it began, “discharged from the Army after serving as a Green Beret in Vietnam, stared at his sister. His face was the wall of a funeral parlor and his eyes were looking at a log fire that was something else.”

Breslin’s article didn’t mention the Westies by name; it didn’t have to. That had been done elsewhere. What Breslin did by identifying Featherstone, at least symbolically, as
the
representative member of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob, was catapult the Westies into the city’s consciousness, where the idea of an old-style Irish mob turned ugly by the horrors of Vietnam would take seed and eventually flower during the Whitehead murder trial.

As for Coonan, Featherstone, and the other West Side gangsters, they viewed the name with some amusement—at least initially. Although reactions varied from person to person, some gang members took pride in the notoriety they had achieved. But then the Westies began to get linked with mob hits they didn’t have anything to do with, and the gangsters cried foul. Many blamed “Publicity Joe” Coffey, who they felt was trying to advance his career by pinning a bunch of unsolved murders on the West Side Irish.

By the time of the Whitehead trial in December ’79, Coonan and Featherstone’s official position was to disassociate themselves from the name. The Westies, their lawyers complained to the press, was a media creation, an attempt by the cops and the newspapers to smear the God-fearing, taxpaying people of Hell’s Kitchen. But the more they decried the name, the harder it seemed to stick, until many West Siders began secretly using it among themselves.

Later, after the Whitehead trial, the name would reach its apotheosis when a number of strange bumper stickers began to appear around the New York area. Mostly they were affixed to the rear bumper of cars with license plates from New Jersey, home of Jimmy Coonan. Modeled after the “I Love New York” bumper stickers that used a red heart in place of the word “Love,” these stickers read: “I ♥ Westies.”

To some citizens of New York, the stickers might have held no special meaning. If they’d noticed them at all, they might have thought they were a reference to some country-western bar in Passaic. But to most cops, prosecutors, criminal defense lawyers, gangsters—and to those people in the city of New York who read their newspapers assiduously—there was another explanation.

As the cops and the press trumpeted the existence of the Westies, labeling them, among other things, “the new Murder Inc.,” they catapulted Coonan’s crew beyond the headlines into the mythology of the city.

Larry Hochheiser stood as close to John Crowell as he could; another two feet and he would have been sitting in the witness’s lap.

“Sir,” he commanded. “It is your claim, isn’t it, that Mr. Coonan, who you claim shot Mr. Whitehead, it is your claim that he put the pistol to his head, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” replied Crowell. “He put the gun to his head.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just that it was pointed towards the head, and it was fired.”

“Tell this jury what your sworn testimony is today. Demonstrate on me, if you will, please, what you mean by putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. Would you like to step down? Assuming I am Mr. Whitehead, show what you meant by that.”

John Crowell was flustered. In fact, he’d been flustered ever since he first took the witness stand the day before, on December 13, 1979. Just like the time he appeared before the grand jury months ago, Crowell was overcome with fear. As the entire courtroom watched silently, Judge Greenfield asked him to give his name and place of birth, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t speak at all.

A recess was called and Crowell was taken into a back room. After the jury filed out of the courtroom, Crowell’s voice could be heard from behind the closed door.

“I don’t wanna get killed! I got a family! They’re gonna kill them!”

Hochheiser, Aronson, and all the other attorneys and spectators listened. In the back row of the gallery, Crowell’s girlfriend, Victoria Karl, wept openly.

Two hours later Crowell was brought back into the courtroom and put on the stand. Tentatively, in a voice barely audible even with a microphone, he began to give his version of what happened on November 22, 1978, in the basement of the Opera Hotel. He remembered going downstairs to the men’s room to smoke a joint with his old prison buddies, Bobby Huggard, Billy Comas, and Whitey Whitehead. They were standing in a circle getting high. Then Jimmy Coonan came in. A few seconds later, Coonan stepped forward and shot Whitehead in the back of the head.

“What happened to Whitehead when you heard the shot?” the prosecutor asked.

“What happened to Whitehead?”

“Yes.”

“Whitehead’s face went blank.”

“What did his face look like before he was shot?”

“Well, everybody was more or less in good spirits and laughing.”

“And then after? Describe what you mean by ‘blank’.”

Crowell squirmed. “Just went lifeless.”

“Can you show?”

“It was, pow, just dead.”

Crowell’s description of the Whitehead murder and its aftermath had the ring of truth. Yet it presented the jury with a dilemma. Already they had heard Ray Steen say it was Mickey Featherstone who planned to kill Whitehead and then bragged about it afterwards. Following Steen, the prosecution called another witness, Robert Bruno, to back him up. Bruno claimed that he, Featherstone, and Mugsy Ritter—the guy Whitehead called a fag on the night in question—got together shortly after the killing went down. Again, Featherstone supposedly bragged that he was the one who had shot Whitey.

Now here was Crowell, who had actually seen the murder take place. But if the jury was to believe Crowell, then the testimony of Steen and Bruno was contradictory at best, and at worst, just plain untruthful.

For the better part of a day, Hochheiser, and then Coonan’s attorney, Gus Newman, banged away at Crowell. Of particular interest to the defense lawyers was an incident in 1972 when Crowell had slit a guy’s throat in the backseat of a taxi when a methadone deal he was making went bad. There were other arrests for assault and drug use. Even Crowell’s personal life was portrayed as being outside the bounds of normal behavior. At one point Hochheiser asked him, “By the way, your girlfriend, Victoria, does she carry a whip?”

“Yeah, she had a whip.”

“What was her business or occupation?”

“From what I know, it’s dominatrix.”

“I was just curious.”

As he had with Steen and Bruno, Hochheiser wanted to show the jury that Crowell was a witness “of the lowest possible character.” Yet he also knew that Crowell’s version of the murder may have raised the specter of reasonable doubt, which was alright with him. The jury had been hearing for days that Mickey Featherstone was the killer. Now Crowell was saying in no uncertain terms that it was Coonan. Hochheiser used this turn of events not only to bolster Mickey’s position as a “maligned innocent,” but to characterize the government’s case as “specious” and the prosecutor as totally incompetent.

The jury, apparently, was buying it, and during the second week of testimony they took matters into their own hands. They were being asked to choose between the Steen/Bruno version and the Crowell version of the murder, but there was another person they kept hearing about. A person who all of the witnesses claimed had been in the bathroom when Whitey Whitehead got shot.

The day after Crowell’s testimony, the jury foreman passed a note to the clerk, who passed it to the judge. It contained three simple words: “Where is Huggard?”

Currently, Bobby Huggard was being held at Rikers Island. He’d been called before the grand jury to testify on the Whitehead shooting and had given a version of the facts that didn’t quite square with the other testimony. Subsequently, the grand jury had indicted him for perjury.

“Is there some way we can accommodate the jury?” Judge Greenfield asked the lawyers.

Mullady had no intention of calling Bobby Huggard. He already had his hands full with Steen, Bruno, and Crowell. Even with immunity, he knew, chances were that Huggard would stick with his original testimony. In fact, Mullady had asked Huggard after his grand jury appearance whether he was going to “straighten up and fly right” in time for the trial. Huggard had answered, “I got a cock. I got balls. Know what I mean? I’m a man. You do what you gotta do.”

As for Hochheiser and Newman, it was obviously to their advantage to have Huggard take the stand and give his version of the facts. Except for one thing: They had based their entire defense on denigrating the government’s witnesses as “scumbags” and “lowlifes.” They couldn’t very well call Huggard, who had a criminal record even more unsavory than the others, and say to the jury, “Now listen to
my
scumbag; he’s telling the truth.”

After both the defense and the prosecution made it clear that they would not call Huggard, Judge Greenfield came up with a shocking alternative.
He
would call Huggard.
He
would ask the questions. Then the prosecution and the defense would have a chance to cross-examine.

Greenfield waited until both the prosection and defense had rested their cases to call Bobby Huggard to the stand. As Featherstone and Coonan had predicted, Huggard “did the right thing”—and then some. He testified that he had been in the Plaka Bar on the night in question. He’d had a few drinks with Whitey Whitehead at the bar, then left. At no time did he see Mickey Featherstone, Jimmy Coonan, or John Crowell. Furthermore, he claimed to have had a discussion with Billy Comas a few weeks after Whitehead was murdered in which Comas had said that he, Comas, was the one who did the killing.

The jury was stunned. This was the first time anyone—the defense, the prosecution or the judge—had heard of this alleged meeting between Comas and Huggard.

“Exactly what was said?” asked Judge Greenfield. “Tell us how the conversation began, how the subject was raised.”

“Yes, Your Honor. Mr. Comas said that he had information that I was going around getting drunk, talking in bars about the Whitehead incident.”

“What did you say?”

“I denied it.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Well, you know, I took care of him and if there is any more conversations the same thing will happen to you.’”

By the time Mullady got up to cross-examine Huggard, viciously attacking his credibility, the damage was already done. Huggard had fingered a dead man. And the jury had yet another possible scenario to contend with.

As the jury deliberated, Featherstone, Coonan, and their counsel waited anxiously. Throughout the trial Featherstone and Coonan had sat next to each other, Mickey usually dressed in his blue suit, Coonan in brown. At times they acted like brothers; one would have his arm around the other. They seemed to have grown even closer as the trial wore on.

No one could be certain what the verdict would be. But just in case, Aronson thought he’d better prepare his client.

“You know, Mickey,” he said one afternoon. “It could happen that the jury might come through with an acquittal for you but a conviction for Jimmy. That’s very possible.”

Featherstone had paid close attention to the proceedings. Ever since he and Jimmy had been arrested for the murder, Mickey had felt guilty as hell. Yes, he had been pissed off at Coonan before. He had gone ahead and sold the counterfeit notes even though Jimmy told him it was too risky, even though he knew Ray Steen was dealing with an undercover cop. But he had never expected Steen to flip. That had touched off a series of arrests and a lot of “innocent” people had been dragged into this mess. Mickey never wanted it to turn out this way. If Coonan were convicted and he wasn’t, he’d never be able to show his face in the neighborhood—or in prison—again. In criminal circles, he’d be seen as a classic fuck-up.

“No,” he told Aronson, emphatically. “That’s no good, Kenny. That can’t be.”

On the evening of December 21st, after nearly six hours of deliberation, the jury filed back into the courtroom. As Hochheiser waited, he could feel the tension mounting. He wanted an acquittal in this case more than any he had ever tried. He felt he owed it to Gus Newman, his friend and former associate, who had agreed to represent Coonan as a favor to him. Also, throughout the trial Hochheiser’s dislike for the prosecutor, Mullady, had grown. As far as he was concerned, the constant gibes had gotten personal. At one point during a recess Mullady had even suggested that Hochheiser was being paid by the Brooklyn Mafia to represent the Westies. Hochheiser had to laugh at that; he would be lucky to get any money out of his client at all.