The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (40 page)

Kelly and McElroy agreed.

The next day Maher agreed to meet them near the baseball fields on 11th Avenue at 52nd Street. They found him sitting in the shade, sipping on a beer and watching a softball game.

Featherstone had known Bull Maher all his life, as had Kelly and McElroy. Mickey always liked Bull. They had been in a bar softball league together and played often at this very park. When Mickey saw Bull sitting there watching a bunch of kids playing ball, it reminded him of how he and Bull had practically grown up together.

“Let me talk to him alone,” Mickey said to the others.

Maher was over thirty years old, but he looked like a helpless child as Mickey walked over and sat down next to him. Featherstone rested his hands on his knees and spoke firmly. “You know what this is all about, I’m sure, Bull?”

“Yeah, Mickey.”

“We all know about you pullin’ in your loans to recoup your money, and I’m tellin’ ya, if you don’t own up thirty grand, plus your shylock book, you’re gonna get killed, man.”

“You want thirty grand plus my book?”

“That’s it.”

“Man, Mickey, you know that’s gonna wipe me out. I’m in a bit of a situation here.”

“Hey, Bull, I may be the only friend you got. Since I get back from prison, everybody in the neighborhood’s been tellin’ me they want you dead. Coonan. His fuckin’ wife. Kevin and Jimmy Mac. Believe me when I say it—this is the best deal you’re gonna get.”

Bull’s eyes began to well up with tears.

“Hey,” said Mickey, “it ain’t so bad. We’ll get you a job with the Teamsters.”

The next day Maher forked over thirty grand, along with his list of shylock customers and what they owed. There was around forty grand or so in outstanding loans, which, once collected, was to be split between Mickey, Jimmy Mac, Kevin Kelly, and Kenny Shannon.

Everybody was pleased with the score, except Mickey. Sure, the money was great. The problem was seeing Bull Maher sitting there crying like a baby. It reminded him of all those times, years ago, when he’d gone with Coonan on his shylock runs and seen the neighborhood people reduced to tears. At one time he got off on it. But times had changed.

Mickey was making about $4,000 a week now, more money than he’d ever made in his life. But he’d become something he did not want to be, something he had promised himself and his wife he would never become.

He had become just like Jimmy Coonan.

And yet, unlike Coonan, Mickey was not able to reconcile his life as a gangster with his new suburban home life. With the money he’d been making through his illegal activities, he was able to buy his and Sissy’s dream house in Teaneck. Each night, after running the various neighborhood extortions, he would drive home to his family. Sissy had given birth to another baby boy, Danny, in early ’84, and they’d just learned she was pregnant again. It was all supposed to make Mickey proud—the wife, the kids, the nice house.

But the old dreams had started up again. Dreams of horror and violence.

Around this time, in November of ’84, Mickey spoke to Charlie Boyle, his father, on the phone. Boyle, now a U.S. Customs agent, had been hearing stories about how his son was back on the West Side. Mickey and his dad had never really been close. Since his parents moved to the Bronx way back in the early ’70s, Mickey had hardly ever spoken to them.

Charlie Boyle sensed Mickey’s agitation and despair. He had a feeling that now that Mickey was living the gangster’s life again, he was sure to wind up in prison—or dead.

“The cemetery’s fulla tough guys,” he told his son. “What about your family? What are they gonna do when you disappear one day?”

“Whaddya want from me?” Mickey snapped back. “There ain’t no way outta this, you know that.”

Boyle suggested that Mickey offer to make a deal with the government.

“You mean be a rat?”

“Let me at least look into it, Mickey. Let me check it out. You don’t gotta do a thing.”

Much to Charlie Boyle’s surprise, Mickey did not get upset at the suggestion. “Look,” Mickey replied, “I ain’t callin’ no government people, okay? You do what you gotta do.”

Boyle took this to mean that maybe, just maybe, Mickey was willing to come in from the cold.

The very next day he called the New York office of the FBI. Without mentioning Mickey Featherstone by name, he said he was Charlie Boyle and he had a son who was looking to give information on New York organized crime figures. The person on the phone took his name and number and said an agent would get back to him.

The FBI, perhaps unaware that Charlie Boyle was the father of Mickey Featherstone, never returned the call.

Meanwhile, Mickey continued to get himself in deeper and deeper. In less than a month, Jimmy Coonan would be returning home from prison. When he did, Mickey knew that a lot of old wounds would be reopened. He knew that he’d now be seen as a threat to his old friend and might just wind up dead.

Unless he acted first.

14

BETRAYAL

O
n a grim, drizzly Thursday morning in April 1985, Michael Holly spent the last few minutes of his life strolling along West 35th Street, heading towards Clarke’s Bar on 10th Avenue. A laborer currently working on the nearly completed Jacob Javits Convention Center, Holly, aged forty, had received his weekly paycheck earlier that morning. It was now 11:45
A.M.
, lunch-break time; he hoped to cash his check at Clarke’s and maybe get a cold beer. He was dressed in his usual construction attire—blue jeans, a T-shirt, a lightweight jacket, and a white plastic hard hat.

A one-time bar owner from the West Side of Manhattan, Holly used to be a well-known face in the saloons and diners along 9th and 10th avenues. Then, one night in 1977, there was a shooting in his bar. John Bokun, a neighborhood gangster, was gunned down by an off-duty transit cop. But a lot of John Bokun’s friends held Michael Holly responsible; they felt Holly had set John Bokun up. After numerous threats on his life, Holly was forced to close his bar and leave the neighborhood. He was lucky enough to land a union job as an ironworker, and even luckier still to be placed at the Convention Center, a long-term construction project if ever there was one.

Holly stopped to buy a hot dog from a street vendor across from the Convention Center, then continued east on 35th Street, past the old brick warehouses that lined the block. He paid little attention as a beige station wagon with New Jersey plates approached, headed in the opposite direction. The station wagon passed him, then came to an abrupt halt, forcing a van that was behind it to slam on the brakes.

Seconds later, in a flickering moment of intense clarity, Holly heard what sounded like a muffled gunshot and felt an excruciating pain in his upper back, near his right shoulder. Then, in rapid succession, he heard another shot, another, another, and another. The pain exploded throughout his body before his mind had a chance to register what was happening. All but one of the bullets hit home, piercing his flesh and puncturing his right lung and his aorta. One of the bullets passed all the way through his body. Another grazed his temple, sending his hard hat flying.

Riddled with bullets, his body contorted but still upright, Holly was able to turn and face his attacker. He caught a glimpse of a man standing roughly ten feet away, holding a gun with a silencer attached still pointed straight at him. As the life rushed from Holly’s body, there was a glimmer of recognition.

“Aaaargh …” he gasped, his knees beginning to buckle. “You dirty motherfucker!”

In the middle of West 35th Street, Michael Holly collapsed to the damp pavement.

The assailant quickly ducked back into the beige station wagon on the passenger side. Before the door was even closed, the car speeded west on 35th Street towards 11th Avenue.

By the time an ambulance arrived, siren wailing, a pool of blood had already formed underneath Holly’s body. A small gathering of onlookers stood in the drizzle and watched as one of the paramedics checked Holly’s vital signs. There was no blood pressure, no pulse, no sign of breathing.

Before they had even loaded him into the ambulance, Michael Holly, the former bar owner from Hell’s Kitchen, was a dead man.

*    *    *

Early on the morning of the Michael Holly shooting, Mickey Featherstone was home in bed when he got a call from his friend and neighbor, Pat Hogan. Like Mickey, Hogan was a West Sider who now lived in Jersey and worked at Erie Transfer. That morning, Hogan was calling to see if Mickey was going in to shape up for work. If so, Hogan wanted to hitch a ride.

“Nah,” Mickey mumbled into the phone. “I feel like shit.”

It had been a few days since Mickey had been to work. In fact, it had been a few days since Mickey had done much of anything except get high. Since Monday of that week, he’d been on a serious cocaine bender. Finally, after two or three sleepless days and nights, he’d vomited a few times and crashed. Now, here he was in bed with his pregnant wife, Sissy, barely able to see straight, with some guy asking
him
for a ride to work.

A few minutes later, with Mickey still in a semiconscious state, the phone rang again. This time it was either Kevin Kelly or his gofer, Kenny Shannon—Mickey wasn’t sure which. Whoever it was, the person told Mickey about a meeting they were supposed to have that day at the Skyline Motor Inn. Mickey mumbled something incoherent into the phone and hung up.

A few minutes later, the phone rang again.

“Goddammit,” Mickey growled, fumbling for the receiver.

This time it was his brother, Henry, who was telling him if he got his ass into Erie by early afternoon there was work to be had. Mickey sure as hell didn’t want to go in to work, but he knew he might be pushing his luck if he didn’t. Besides, Henry was the shop steward at Erie. Mickey figured he owed it to his brother to try to show up at least one day out of the week.

After he showered, shaved, and dressed, Mickey called Sam Beverly of Lifestyle’s Transportation. Lifestyle’s was another West Side rental agency that provided vehicles to the entertainment industry. One of the largest in Manhattan, it had a sizable fleet of Ford compacts, both station wagons and sedans. Mickey had borrowed a beige Ford Tempo wagon a few days earlier, and was calling to let Lifestyle’s know he was bringing it in.

After first running Sissy to the grocery store and back, Mickey drove into Manhattan. As he made his way along Route 9 and onto the George Washington Bridge he had no way of knowing that just moments earlier, on West 35th Street, Michael Holly had been riddled with lead.

Mickey arrived at Erie Transfer on West 52nd Street around 12:30. Before he returned the car to Lifestyle’s, he wanted to clean up some soda he’d spilled on the front seat the day before. One of the workers at Erie put the car in the “barn,” or garage, where Mickey planned to scrub it down. But before he could get to it, a friend of his named Bobby drove up in a van.

“Bobby,” asked Mickey, “can you do me a favor and drive me down to Lifestyle’s? I wanna tell ’em I got their car. Just gotta clean it up first.”

“No sweat,” said Bobby, “but first I gotta run by my Uncle Vinnie’s place.” Bobby’s uncle, Vinnie Russo, was a caterer who provided food to movie and television sets.

On the way to Vinnie’s place on West 50th Street, Bobby and Mickey lit up a joint. Mickey had been feeling a little grim that morning, his nerves still on edge from three solid days of cocaine abuse. The smoke was just what he needed to relax.

When they arrived at Vinnie’s place, Mickey ran into his brother Henry. Henry said he was on his way down to Lifestyle’s himself, so he could give Mickey a ride.

As they were driving south on 9th Avenue, Mickey suddenly remembered the phone call he’d gotten that morning from either Kevin Kelly or Kenny Shannon. He was completely out of it when he got the call, but he remembered something about a meeting at 12:00 or 12:30 at the Skyline Motor Inn. “Hey,” he told Henry, “drop me off at the Skyline, will ya? I’m supposed to meet Kevin and Kenny there, I just remembered. I can walk to Sam’s place from there.”

At the Skyline, Mickey asked Vic, who managed the bar, if Kelly and Shannon had been around that day. Vic said they’d been there earlier and left. So Mickey continued on foot down to Sam Beverly’s garage on West 38th Street.

He was still feeling the effects of the joint he’d smoked when he walked into Lifestyle’s around 2
P.M.
Sam was in his office, and when he spotted Mickey, he furrowed his brow. “Come outside for a minute. I gotta tell you something.”

“Yeah,” said Mickey when they got outside to the sidewalk. “What’s up?”

“Detectives was just here. They was lookin’ for one of our cars. I ain’t even sure which one.”

“They say why?”

“They said a stickup, but I got a feeling …” Sam held his hand in the shape of a gun and pointed it at his head.

Mickey grabbed his brother Henry. They hopped in his Bronco and drove directly to Erie Transfer.

Mickey was still wondering what the hell was going on when he got to Erie. When he saw twenty-six-year-old Billy Bokun walk out of the men’s room, it all came back to him. He remembered how, yesterday, he’d talked to Bokun, Kevin Kelly, and Kenny Shannon about Michael Holly. Even though it had been eight years since the death of Billy Bokun’s older brother, John, they still wanted revenge. Never mind that eyewitness accounts revealed that John Bokun brought about his own death that night in 1977 by first shooting Holly in the shoulder, then firing at an off-duty cop; the Westies were convinced it had all been part of some elaborate arrangement between Holly and the cops to eliminate Bokun.

Just a few days before Mickey talked with Billy Bokun, Kelly, and Shannon, Kelly had spotted Holly down by the Jacob Javits construction site and told Billy about it. For years, Bokun had been bragging that he was going to avenge his brother’s death, but he’d never been able to track Holly down. When he heard where he was now working, Bokun enlisted Kelly and Shannon in a plan to gun him down.

Mickey had been told all about this the day before. In fact, he’d had a drink with Bokun near Erie Transfer.