The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (43 page)

He was not a kid anymore. At forty-four, Hochheiser’s once wild mane of brown hair was now speckled with gray. After fifteen years as Featherstone’s attorney, he was finally beginning to think maybe Mickey was more trouble than he was worth.

“Well,” said Hochheiser, asking the question he knew was on both their minds. “So who do we tell about this?”

Aronson didn’t look pleased. He knew they were trolling in murky legal waters. Already he’d checked the Canon of Ethics. There were no provisions that directly addressed their dilemma.

“The way I see it,” said Kenny, “we don’t tell anyone. If Bokun wants to turn himself in, that’s his business. But the confession itself is privileged.”

With that, the matter was closed. They agreed they would proceed with the case regardless of what Bokun intended to do, based on the evidence that was at their disposal. In the meantime, they would tell Mickey about the confession, but no one else—not the judge, not the prosecution, and certainly not the press.

But news of Billy Bokun’s confession to Aronson spread through Hell’s Kitchen like wildfire. Sissy Featherstone, for one, couldn’t believe that the attorneys weren’t going to make Bokun turn himself in. In June, a few weeks after Bokun’s wedding, she confronted Ken Aronson in a Chinese restaurant near the courthouse in lower Manhattan. They’d spent the morning in court during one of Mickey’s pre-trial hearings, and Sissy was uptight.

“I told you Mickey was innocent,” she said to Aronson.

“No,” replied the attorney, “Bokun didn’t say
innocent
. He just said Mickey didn’t pull the trigger. He knew, Sissy. It was his fault he went to Erie. He shouldn’t have been so nosey. He should have stayed away.”

“Wait a minute. Mickey wasn’t being nosey. He was told by Kevin and Kenny to meet them at the Skyline.”

“He should have had an alibi, Sissy. He shouldn’t have been anywhere near Erie.”

As the conversation continued, Aronson found himself getting more and more upset. He could see how he had boxed himself into a corner. All these years he spent getting close to the West Side community was backfiring on him. All the weddings, engagement parties, and funerals he’d attended had led people to think of him almost as a member of the gang. It had all seemed so exotic to him at the time. But now Mickey and Sissy were expecting him to “do the right thing,” to do whatever he had to in order to make sure Mickey didn’t take the fall.

“So Billy confessed,” said Sissy. “What’re you gonna do about it? He wants to turn himself in.”

Aronson pursed his lips. “Sissy, that’s entirely up to him. I don’t know what he intends to do. Frankly, I wouldn’t hold my breath. This is real life, you know, this isn’t Perry Mason.”

In the many months leading up to his trial, Mickey Featherstone sat in Block C-95 at Rikers Island, his mind working overtime trying to untangle all the sinister forces that had landed him where he was. The stress was wearing him down. In July of ’85 Sissy gave birth to a baby girl, Gillian, her and Mickey’s third child. But with all that was going on, Featherstone hardly noticed. Through the summer, fall, and into the winter, he was constantly on the phone with his lawyers and fellow gangsters from the neighborhood, especially Kevin Kelly and Billy Bokun.

At first, Mickey couldn’t understand how or why these eyewitnesses had fingered him. He knew that Bokun, who had dark-brown hair and a chunky physique, had been the shooter. How could anyone think Bokun looked like him? Then Mickey talked with Billy Bokun on the phone, and Billy told him he’d worn a disguise that day. Along with the makeup he normally wore over the large red birthmark on his face, he’d worn a sandy-blond wig, a painter’s cap, sunglasses, and he’d darkened his normally wispy mustache with brown eyeliner. All of which made it conceivable that an eyewitness might later identify Mickey Featherstone as the assailant.

“Why?” Mickey had demanded. “Why’d you wear this fucking disguise?”

“It was Kevin,” said Bokun. “Kevin planned the whole fuckin’ thing. He had Kenny drive the car. He had me wear the goddamn wig, the mustache, everything.”

But when Mickey talked to Kevin Kelly about it, he denied that Bokun had worn any kind of disguise at all.

“You want my opinion?” Kelly said. “That’s just somethin’ the cops is makin’ up to turn everybody against each other.”

Mickey was shocked at first. Sure, he’d sometimes felt Kevin was a conniving bastard who couldn’t be trusted with his own mother. But he didn’t want to believe he’d deliberately set him up. Still, nothing else fit the facts.

In all his ruminations, Mickey tried not to think about his own screw-ups. Yes, he’d heard that the Michael Holly shooting was likely to take place that day. But he didn’t really give it much thought. Billy Bokun had spent so much time over the years bragging about how he was going to kill Holly that Mickey didn’t really believe it was going to happen. He was stoned the day before the shooting when Kelly and Shannon told him to meet them at the Skyline Motor Inn. And he was burned out from four straight days of debauchery on the morning of the shooting.

Maybe I was wrong for not having an alibi, thought Mickey, but does that mean I should get pinned with a murder I didn’t do?

For months, Mickey’s paranoia seethed. In time, an elaborate conspiracy theory began to take shape in his mind. From his conversations with Bokun, he didn’t think Billy had been in on the setup. Billy was a bit like Raymond Steen—a not-too-bright kid who’d do almost anything to endear himself with the neighborhood’s gangster element. Chances were, figured Mickey, Kelly and Shannon had used Bokun.

As for the larger conspiracy, the moving force behind the whole thing—that was easy. There was no doubt in Mickey’s mind. It had to be Jimmy Coonan.

Maybe Coonan had found out about the plot against his life, and he’d told Kelly, Shannon, McElroy, and Godknows-who-else that if they got rid of Featherstone he’d forget about their disloyalty. Or maybe Coonan was just getting his revenge for Mickey’s having refused to murder Vinnie Leone and the others. Or maybe it was the goddamned Italians. Maybe they’d told Coonan if he really wanted to be one of them he’d have to get rid of Featherstone, his crazy Irish partner.

By the early months of 1986 Mickey’s conspiracy theory had expanded to incorporate yet another person—his one-time friend and lawyer, Kenny Aronson.

Again, it was a phone call with Billy Bokun that got him thinking. Tearfully, Bokun had told Mickey there was no way he was going to let him go down. He’d turn himself in if he had to. Mickey had suggested that if he were going to do that, he’d better not go to the cops. They couldn’t be trusted. Mickey wanted him to turn himself in to Jimmy Breslin or Michael Daly, two journalists who’d written about him in the past.

But Bokun said he had a better idea. He’d wait till the trial was underway, then he’d walk right in the door, right in the fucking door with the same disguise on that he’d worn when he shot Michael Holly.

Mickey liked that idea; it had a certain style. But when he asked Bokun about it a few days later, Bokun said Ken Aronson had told him not to do it.

Now Mickey was certain Aronson was in on it. First Bokun confesses and Aronson says they can’t tell anybody about it. Then Billy says he wants to turn himself in and Kenny says no. Sometimes Mickey thought it was all a bad dream. Here was his own attorney knowing who really whacked Holly, and he was still going to let this fucking thing go to trial!?

There could be only one explanation, figured Mickey. Jimmy Coonan must have gotten to Aronson, too.

By the time the trial got underway, Mickey was so strung out he could hardly focus on what was happening. He’d been getting high almost every day, using coke and marijuana Sissy had smuggled in to him at Rikers Island. She would wrap the illegal substance in a tiny rubber balloon, then when she kissed Mickey in the prison visiting room, pass the balloon from her mouth to his. Mickey would swallow it, retrieve it later when he defecated, and snort or smoke whatever Sissy had been able to get her hands on.

For three straight weeks in March of 1986, Mickey watched in a semistupor as his life went up in flames. In the criminal courts building in lower Manhattan—familiar terrain for Mickey Featherstone—three eyewitnesses took the stand and identified him as the person they’d seen shoot Michael Holly. The last one, a black construction worker who just happened to be on West 35th Street on the day of the shooting, was terrified when he took the stand. Larry Hochheiser asked him, “So, as you sit here now you are one hundred percent positive that you were correct in your identification [on the day of the lineup], right?”

“Yes,” the construction worker answered, hesitantly.

“Heaven and earth wouldn’t change that view now, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Are you absolutely certain?”

“Yes.”

It was an old Hochheiser ploy, one he’d used successfully in 1980 when he savaged Jack Paulstein—the main witness at the William Walker murder trial—by making him seem
too
certain to be telling the truth. But it wasn’t working here. The more he pressed the construction worker, the more confident he became, until it started to sound like Hochheiser was part of the prosecution.

Not only was the government able to deliver eyewitness testimony, but as the trial unfolded the alleged motive for the shooting was established by none other than Raymond Steen, who’d long since disappeared into the Witness Protection Program. On the stand, Steen told of a time seven years earlier when Mickey Featherstone had given him a bottle of poison—or what he’d been told was poison—to drop in Michael Holly’s beer. Featherstone, Steen related to the jury, believed that Holly was responsible for the death of his friend, John Bokun.

“Mickey explained to me,” said Steen, “that he owed the family of John Bokun this killing of Michael Holly.”

At first, Mickey watched with some amusement as Ray Steen jabbered away on the stand. He knew that for once in his life, Steen was telling the truth. He had, in fact, given Steen a bottle of knockout drops, telling him they were poison. But Steen, Mickey was certain, was a totally unreliable witness. Without corroboration, who in their right mind would believe fast-talking Ray Steen? The prosecution rested.

Days later, to Mickey’s utter astonishment, his own attorneys put Kevin Kelly on the stand. Hochheiser and Aronson explained that since all the eyewitnesses had described the shooter as holding the gun in his right hand, they wanted to use Kevin, who would identify himself as a lifelong friend of Featherstone’s, to establish that Mickey was left-handed.

“But you can’t put a guy like this on the stand,” argued Mickey. “He’s from the street. He’s got rough edges, man. I’m tellin’ ya, this fucker sounds like a hood.”

Hochheiser believed it was better to have a witness who was weak on elocution than one who was liable to wilt under cross-examination. “Look, Mickey,” he explained, “it’s a lot easier to smooth rough edges than it is to grow a pair of balls on a guy.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Mickey,” Larry sighed, “just let us try the case, alright?”

As it turned out, Featherstone was right. When Assistant D.A. Jeffrey Schlanger cross-examined Kelly, he sat on the stand sounding like the tough guy that he was, claiming disingenuously that he’d never even
seen
a gun in his life. Furthermore, the assistant D.A. was able to use Kelly to more or less corroborate Steen’s claim that everyone in the neighborhood, including Mickey Featherstone, blamed Michael Holly for the death of John Bokun back in 1977.

Mickey watched from the defense table as the guy
he knew
had planned the murder of Michael Holly gave damaging testimony against him. Not only that, but the motherfucker had been put on the stand by his own attorneys.

Mickey was stunned as he watched their case slip away. He’d seen Hochheiser work his magic in the courtroom so many times, he’d come to think he was invincible. But this time Hochheiser’s tactics kept backfiring, and his cross-examination seemed shoddy and lackluster.

In his heart, Mickey couldn’t believe that Hochheiser had anything to do with the conspiracy against him. He’d worshiped him his whole adult life; there was no way that Larry would sell him out. But Mickey did believe that somewhere along the line Hochheiser had come to realize that he, Mickey, was being set up. Rather than take sides with Mickey, he’d apparently gone with Coonan, Aronson, and whoever else was behind the conspiracy.

As the trial wound down, Mickey began to rely more and more on Bokun’s promise to walk in the door and give himself up.

“Where’s Bokun?” he kept asking the attorneys. “What’s he gonna do?” Hochheiser and Aronson just shook their heads, as if they didn’t have a clue.

What Mickey didn’t know yet was that Bokun
had
shown up in the courthouse one afternoon. He’d delivered word to Aronson that he wanted to see him in the hallway outside. When Aronson arrived, Billy was distraught and his breath smelled of alcohol. Once again, he asked the attorney what he should do, and Aronson told him basically the same thing he had on the day of the wedding. Bokun left the courthouse that day, and it was the last anyone would see of him until after the verdict.

Later, when Mickey heard of Bokun’s visit, he saw it as further proof that his attorneys had conspired against him. Mickey was angry. Angry and scared.

Along with the stress of watching his life go down the toilet, Featherstone had physical dues to pay during the trial. After each day of testimony, he was tossed into a jam-packed holding pen in the criminal courts building. He’d stand up for three, four, sometimes five hours before he got on a Bureau of Prisons bus back to Rikers. There he was held in another pen. At Rikers, you didn’t dare close your eyes for a second or you risked being groped by another inmate. By the time Mickey got back to his cell it was usually some ungodly hour of the morning. Then they got him up at 6
A.M.
to start the process all over again.

When Mickey arrived in court his attorneys could see he was a complete wreck. He was running on three, maybe four hours’ sleep. Sometimes, as he tried to focus on the testimony—testimony he knew might put him behind bars for the rest of his life—he couldn’t help drifting in and out of consciousness.