The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (9 page)

For a few months in early ’71, Coonan worked as a carpet installer in lower Manhattan. But the rigors of a nine to five job were not only boring, they were a time-consuming impediment to his criminal aspirations. Before long, Coonan was back on the streets hijacking warehouses, sticking up liquor stores and—taking a page from Mickey Spillane—kidnapping local merchants.

His most ambitious crime during this period was the kidnapping of a taxi broker from Staten Island who was supposed to be “mobbed up.” But that job took a sudden and disastrous turn when the kidnapee escaped from the back of a car he was being transported in. With his hands still in cuffs, the guy fled on foot through Times Square until he found a cop. Coonan had to go into hiding for a few months to escape arrest.

When he returned to the neighborhood, Jimmy was immediately charged with the kidnapping. In February of 1972, there were grand jury proceedings. But the district attorney’s office in Richmond County had trouble finding witnesses. Even the victim was now reluctant to take the stand. Eventually the case was dismissed on “speedy-trial” grounds.

Coonan had gotten lucky with that one, and he knew it. He also knew his luck wasn’t going to last forever. Here he was, just twenty-five years old and already he’d chalked up one homicide the authorities hadn’t gotten him on and one they had. He’d spent four years of his young life in prison and six or seven months on the lam. Now, he’d just barely missed a kidnapping indictment.

It was definitely time to lead a more careful existence.

In early 1973, a venture came Coonan’s way that was to give him some breathing room and lay the foundation for all that would come later. Using what little capital he’d been able to muster, he bought into a saloon once known as McCoy’s, now known as the 596 Club because of its location at 596 10th Avenue. Since Coonan was a convicted felon and prohibited from owning an establishment where liquor was sold, the ownership was in his brother-in-law’s name. But everyone knew it was Jimmy’s bar, and it quickly became his base of operation.

With its old brick facade and two tiny front windows covered by cast-iron bars, from the outside the 596 Club looked like a World War I bunker. On the inside, it looked like a typical Hell’s Kitchen gin mill. As you entered, the bar was to the left, running about twenty feet back towards a doorway that led into a small kitchen. To the right of that was an elevated area that looked like a small stage. Beyond that was a doorway leading to the restrooms.

In the early 1970s, the younger neighborhood criminals started hanging out at the 596 Club. On any given night of the week you might find Patrick “Paddy” Dugan, Denis Curley, Richie Ryan, Tommy Hess, James “Jimmy Mac” McElroy and a dozen others drinking into the early hours of the morning. Many of these guys had known each other since they were kids. They’d played hockey together at Hell’s Kitchen park just up the Avenue, or maybe they’d boxed together on the local Boys Club boxing team. Eventually, they had gone into crime together, pulling burglaries in the commercial buildings to the east and stealing cargo from the warehouses to the west.

They were high school dropouts, mostly, known more for their nerve than their brains. Their existence seemed predicated on three simple maxims: You don’t rat, you don’t kill a cop, and you don’t smack your woman—at least not in public. At the time, there was little indication that they would eventually form the nucleus of the wild and fearsome Westies, who prosecutors called “the most savage organization in the long history of New York City gangs.”

Before long the 596 Club was seen as a rival headquarters to Spillane’s White House Bar, which was located only two blocks north. That was where the older generation held court and the gangsters loyal to Spillane cursed the recklessness of this new breed. The kids seemed motivated only by a desire for profit, not by any fidelity or respect for the neighborhood where they’d grown up.

One local tough guy who moved easily between the two saloons was Edward “Eddie” Cummiskey. With his curly black hair, piercing blue eyes, and the cockiness of a bantam rooster, Cummiskey looked and sounded like a gangster from the 1920s. At thirty-nine, he’d already done a long stretch in Attica on an assault and robbery conviction and was there during the infamous Attica riot of 1971. He’d also once spent the better part of a year on the lam after hopping an ILA freighter to Brazil in order to avoid a murder rap. Even by Hell’s Kitchen standards, Cummiskey’s life as a gangster had been an unusually eventful one.

Maybe it was because Coonan knew that Cummiskey was Spillane’s “muscle.” Or maybe it was just Cummiskey’s “innate charms.” But in the months following his takeover of the 596 Club, Coonan spent a good deal of time cultivating a friendship with the elder gangster. They were often seen together sitting in the back of the bar, drinking and discussing business. Sometimes Cummiskey would come forward to tell the other kids stories from his violent past, stories that usually left everybody in stitches.

One of Eddie’s most infamous homicides had taken place just up the street at the Sunbrite Bar, located at 736 10th Avenue. As Cummiskey would tell it, he’d been walking by the bar one afternoon when a young neighborhood woman came out the front door in tears. Cummiskey asked her what was wrong. She told him the bartender inside had insulted her.

Eddie knew the bartender, so he walked inside and confronted him. When the bartender told him he had indeed insulted the woman and it was none of Cummiskey’s business, Eddie hauled off and belted him. The bartender was quite a bit huskier than the diminutive Cummiskey, so the punch barely fazed him.

“You punch like a little girl,” snarled the bartender.

Cummiskey pulled a .38 from inside his jacket, pointed it at the bartender.

“Oh yeah?” he asked. “Well do I shoot like a little girl?” He pulled the trigger twice, striking the barman in the chest and the head. Then he climbed over the bar and shot him again.

There was another murder Cummiskey was telling people he’d done that the cops didn’t even know about. In 1971, Mike “the Yugo” Yelovich disappeared from the neighborhood, never to be seen again. Cummiskey was claiming he’d had to kill Mike the Yugo for accidentally shooting him in the shinbone with a rifle. After he’d dispatched Mike, Cummiskey said, he cut up the body and put it in plastic bags. When he was loading the bags into the trunk of his car, one of the legs fell out just as a police car was driving by. Cummiskey figured the cops must have thought it was a mannequin’s leg, because they just smiled, waved, and kept on driving.

Cummiskey used to laugh like hell when he told these stories, so people never knew quite what to make of them. But it was known that while at Attica, Cummiskey had trained to be a butcher. So that’s what they nicknamed him—Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey.

Another gangster from Spillane’s generation that Coonan was beginning to be seen with a lot was Anton “Tony” Lucich. Born in 1919, Lucich was now a retiree with a reputation as a shrewd businessman. At five-feet-nine-inches tall, with a barrel chest and a broad midriff, Lucich looked like somebody who might have been a tough guy years ago. In fact, he never was. Unlike Eddie Cummiskey, Tony was the kind of guy who always let somebody else pull the trigger. That, he felt, was the secret of his longevity.

Back when he had lived in an apartment on West 47th Street, Lucich was a well-known loanshark in Hell’s Kitchen. In the years following World War II, loansharking was a relatively common way for a neighborhood kid to supplement his income. Lucich had begun lending out money while he was working the docks as a shipfitter’s helper, then as a welder, and later when he became an asbestos installer.

The first time he ever shylocked was when a fellow dockworker suggested that if he lent him twenty bucks, he would pay him back twenty-four the following week. Something clicked; Lucich saw it as the easiest four bucks he’d ever made. After that, he started lending out small amounts to bartenders, cabbies, neighborhood shop-owners, and gas station attendants. He even started lending to an elderly woman on 10th Avenue who would hang a towel from her tenement window if she needed money that week. Unlike most customers, she always paid her debt off in one lump sum.

Along with loansharking, Lucich became adept at the various other low-level rackets that flourished in Hell’s Kitchen throughout the early 1950s. A man of temperate habits, he was able to parlay his modest criminal enterprises into a substantial savings, which allowed him to put down a mortgage on a home in Valley Stream, Long Island. But the rackets in Valley Stream were not quite as lucrative as those in Hell’s Kitchen. So before long, Lucich was sniffing around the old neighborhood looking for an investment.

That’s where Jimmy Coonan came in. Lucich knew that in the early 1970s, the kindly neighborhood loanshark was a thing of the past. Lucich was fifty-three, with a heart condition. He was a threat to no one. What he needed now was a strong-arm man, someone a lot younger than himself. Someone like Coonan, whose well-deserved reputation for violence would make collecting outstanding debts a hell of a lot easier.

So one afternoon, sometime in late ’73 or ’74, Lucich said to Coonan, “Jimmy, you’re a good kid; a smart kid. This cowboy shit is beneath you. Why don’t you go in with me? Partners. We front the same amount. I teach you the ropes, share my wisdom. All you gotta do is provide the protection.”

It was the kind of arrangement Coonan had been looking for for years.

Together with Charlie Krueger, a bartender at the 596 Club, they all kicked in $1,000 to get things started. It was agreed they would have their own customers, but once a week, on Friday afternoons, they would meet at the bar and pool their resources. The idea was to keep the cash flowing. Once it came in, it went back out on the street immediately.

Over the next few months, Coonan learned a lot from Tony Lucich. They started out shylocking in increments of $50, $150, or $250. Interest could be anywhere from 2 to 5 points a week, meaning if they lent $100 to somebody, the person had to pay between $102 and $105 the following week. A person could pay back the whole sum, or they could pay just the interest, or “vigorish,” without touching the principal.

If a customer went weeks without paying his debt, the “vig” or “juice” could add up pretty quick, causing the inevitable friction between lender and borrower. With Coonan’s reputation, though, it rarely came to that.

Not long after they started, Charlie Krueger dropped out, but Jimmy and Tony were doing better than ever. Their operation followed the usual progression from street-level gamblers and drinkers to more sophisticated borrowers. Soon neighborhood merchants, union members, and sometimes even other shylocks were seen coming to and from the 596 Club, picking up and dropping off cash. Since neither Lucich nor Coonan were heavy bettors or boozers themselves, they were able to keep it moving without touching their initial outlay. The juice alone was enough to live on.

For Coonan, it was the beginning of what he hoped would be a growing enterprise. He told Lucich he wanted to start up a numbers racket, and after that maybe his own bookmaking operation. Coonan proved to be a good businessman with a nose for the bottom line and expansion opportunities. He’d been lending out money to some of the other guys in the bar who were using it to finance their own racketeering schemes. It was the beginnings of a group, or crew, that was increasingly beholden to Coonan. Slowly but surely, as the debts piled up, they were starting to see him as their “boss.”

In the midst of his burgeoning business ventures, Jimmy Coonan got an unexpected visit from Cupid. He’d been hanging out with a neighborhood woman named Edna Fitzgerald who’d just recently broken up with her boyfriend. Before that she had been married to a cop named Frank Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald had died suddenly of an overdose, leaving her with two children.

Edna was a tough cookie. Born Julia Edna Crotty in 1942, she was orphaned at the age of fourteen and bounced from relative to relative before marrying Fitzgerald in 1962. She was five-foot-three, with dark hair, a plump figure, and her travails as a young widowed mother with little or no means of support had given her a hard, bitter edge. But Jimmy liked her.

Coonan had never been much of a womanizer and wasn’t really one for elaborate courtships. Not long after he started seeing Edna, who was four years his senior, they made plans to get married. But first Jimmy wanted to meet with her old boyfriend, Billy Beattie, to make sure the coast was clear. Through a mutual friend of theirs, he arranged a get-together at Sonny’s Cafe on 9th Avenue.

Coonan and Billy Beattie were roughly the same age and well aware of each other’s reputations, though they’d never been formally introduced. Beattie, who was tall and gangly with curly black hair, had gotten his start with Mickey Spillane. At the age of nineteen, he’d been given a maintenance job at Madison Square Garden, where he began his life of crime by stealing coin change from the pay toilets. After that, he stopped showing up for work altogether—except to pick up his weekly paycheck.

Eventually, Beattie graduated to the art of auto theft. It was his job to steal the cars that Spillane and his crew used for their burglaries and bank heists.

At Sonny’s Cafe, Coonan gave the appearance of being less interested in Beattie’s criminal career than he was in his romantic predilections. He asked Beattie what his current status was with Edna Fitzgerald.

“I ain’t seen her in about a month,” said Billy. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s over and done with.”

“That’s good,” replied Jimmy. “That’s what I was hopin’ to hear. I been hangin’ out with her myself.”

“Hey, knock yourself out. She’s all yours.”

The two of them relaxed, had a few drinks, talked about the neighborhood and other neutral topics. It was a seemingly innocuous conversation, but like so many of Coonan’s liaisons during this period, there was an ulterior motive. Within weeks, he hired Beattie as a bartender at the 596 Club, and Billy became the first of many neighborhood tough guys to openly shift his allegiance from Spillane to Coonan.