The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (22 page)

But like many of Coffey’s more outlandish efforts, it had its residual value. High-profile activities sometimes brought about high-profile reactions. Already the diggings had attracted a wide spectrum of interested observers, including neighborhood people and, according to a telephone call the boys from Intell received from Coffey that morning, some rather ominous-looking black sedans driven by well-dressed Italians from Brooklyn.

Intell had been hearing a lot lately about Jimmy Coonan’s Italian connections. The word was out that since Spillane’s murder, Coonan had established contact with either the Genovese family, based on Pleasant Avenue in Spanish Harlem, or the Gambino family, located primarily in the Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst sections of Brooklyn. Intell stepped up its surveillance schedule—there were now four two-man teams working around the clock—but they hadn’t been able to land any solid intelligence on the alleged Mafia connection. The diggings could be the break they needed.

When they arrived at the site, Egan and his partner for the night, Detective James Tedaldi, could hardly believe their eyes. Not only were a dozen cops from the Emergency Service Unit, a half-dozen plainclothes detectives, and about twenty neighborhood onlookers there, but so was a local television crew. It was late at night, and there were mounted klieg lights all over the place, making the site look like a movie location. Dressed in a dashing trenchcoat, Coffey was holding a press conference, supposedly to downplay some of the more outrageous claims that had been appearing in the papers since the diggings began. (One
Daily News
report quoted a source “close to the investigation” as saying there were “60, 70, maybe 80” bodies buried near the railroad tracks.)

Egan listened as Coffey explained to the press that “there might be at least two bodies or parts of bodies” buried in the soil near the railroad tracks. He said that the remains they were looking for belonged to two recent murder victims of a Hell’s Kitchen gang known as “the Westies.”

Egan did a double take when he heard that. The Westies? It was a new one on him.

For days afterwards, the West Side diggings were an ongoing item in the New York press. The notion of a Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob proved to be an irresistible angle, evoking as it did innumerable gangster movies from the 1930s. One TV report used footage from Prohibition days as the lead-in to their story.

What finally brought the festivities to a halt were the police lab reports, which came in a few days after the bone fragments were unearthed from behind the Skyline Motor Inn. It seemed that the remains were not those of a human being at all. They were dog bones.

Some of the cops connected with WEST SIDE STORY found the whole episode embarrassing. Why call the press in when you’ve got a lead that might turn out to prove absolutely nothing? But Richie Egan defended Coffey’s actions. “After all,” he said to the other Intelligence cops as they gathered for drinks at Ronell’s, their favorite lower Manhattan watering-hole, “Joe had a tip from two different sources that there were human remains buried near the tunnel. Whaddya want him to do? Ignore it?” As for the press, said Egan, chances are they found out about it on their own and Coffey was only doing his best to control the situation.

The only thing that bothered Egan and McCabe was that the diggings hadn’t yielded any intelligence on the Italian connection. Recently McCabe had become obsessed with the idea that Coonan had hooked up with the Italians. The forces at play were still somewhat confusing, but he believed, at least initially, that the tie was probably with Fat Tony Salerno’s Genovese family. It was Fat Tony, after all, who supposedly eliminated Devaney, Cummiskey, and Kapatos. The cops didn’t know yet who killed Spillane, but it seemed possible that was also Fat Tony’s handiwork. If so, Coonan would now be in debt to Salerno.

This theory was complicated somewhat by the fact they figured it was Coonan who’d killed Fat Tony’s main man, Ruby Stein. In that case, Fat Tony would be mad at Coonan, and Jimmy would be forced to establish ties with the Gambinos out in Brooklyn.

It was a tangled web, no doubt about that. And there were already enough bodies in the morgue to set some kind of record for an SCU investigation. Even so, McCabe was convinced the main event was yet to come.

“Mark my words,” he said to Egan, Tedaldi, and anyone else who would listen. “This guy Coonan is up to somethin’.”

9

LINGUINI AND CLAM SAUCE

I
need some shoes,” yelled Alberta Sachs, looking down at her dirty white sneakers. “I can’t wear these shoes with this dress.”

It was late February 1978, several months before Joe Coffey’s highly publicized railyard diggings. Alberta was standing in the bedroom of Mickey and Sissy Featherstone’s apartment. Sissy had just lent her a colorful two-piece outfit. Now she needed the appropriate footwear. She and Sissy wore the same size and had similar tastes, so Alberta figured Sissy could deliver. Something in dark brown, perhaps, or a pair of black pumps.

Alberta, now sixteen, was so excited she could hardly stand still. Just forty-five minutes earlier she and her boyfriend, Raymond Steen, who lived in the apartment right next door to Mickey and Sissy, got a call to come over. When they arrived, Alberta’s uncle Jimmy Coonan was there, along with Mickey, Sissy, Richie Ryan, Billy Beattie, Dick Maher, a neighborhood kid, and Jimmy’s brother Jackie Coonan. Jimmy, Mickey, and Dick Maher wore suits—definitely not their usual attire—and everyone seemed to be in a serious mood. Alberta didn’t have a clue what was up until her Uncle Jimmy explained that he and Featherstone had been called to a sit-down out in Brooklyn at the behest of Paul Castellano. The name didn’t mean anything to her at first, but when they showed her a picture and told her who he was, Alberta thought she might just have a heart attack.

Castellano was the head of the Gambino crime family, the largest of New York City’s five Mafia families. As the nephew of the legendary Carlo Gambino, he took over the family business in 1976 after the seventy-four-year-old Gambino died of a heart attack. For all intents and purposes, “Big Paulie” was now king of the underworld, the
capo di tutti capi
, godfather of all godfathers. Getting called to meet with Paul Castellano and his people could be either extremely good or extremely bad, depending entirely on how Paul Castellano looked at it.

This was the moment Jimmy Coonan had been working towards for the last ten years, but under the circumstances he didn’t know whether to be excited or wary. He knew that Castellano and the heads of the other four New York families were concerned about the death of Ruby Stein. Jimmy considered it very possible that the Mafia intended to exact retribution.

So Jimmy and Mickey had devised a plan, sort of. They would send a scout team ahead to Tommaso’s Restaurant in Bay Ridge, where the meeting was scheduled to take place. In the event that anything looked even the least bit suspicious, the scout team would telephone back to Featherstone’s apartment, where the rest of the group would be on call.

It was decided that Alberta and eighteen-year-old Dick Maher would be the scout team, since they were young and looked the least suspicious. They were told they had to be nicely dressed, since Tommaso’s was a respectable joint. All they had to do was go to the restaurant, order a big meal, and keep their eyes and ears open.

In the bedroom, while Alberta experimented with various ensembles, the two women expressed somewhat different emotions about the meeting at Tommaso’s. Sissy was worried sick. As her husband spent more and more time with Jimmy Coonan, she began to suspect he was being used. Whenever she brought it up, Mickey told her she was wrong. He said Jimmy was like a brother, that he was the only one who had ever looked out for his welfare.

But Sissy wasn’t buying it. She looked at Jimmy and Edna Coonan and saw a couple who had risen above their station. They were in a whole different social and economic class now. They’d just had a new home custom-built in Hazlet, New Jersey—a palatial, ranch-style house with a huge yard, a gymnasium, a game room, and a state-of-the-art security system. They both drove nice cars. And the Coonan children attended the best schools.

Mickey, on the other hand, never seemed to have any money at all. Sissy even had to work as an usherette at Madison Square Garden to help support their new baby. Not that she minded—she enjoyed working. But it seemed to her that Coonan was using Mickey’s name and reputation and not giving him a fair share of the profits.

Now, on top of everything else, here was Mickey being dragged out to Brooklyn, where he might get killed! What kind of shit was that?

Alberta had an entirely different take. Ever since she’d seen Eddie Cummiskey and her Uncle Jimmy carrying Paddy Dugan’s head down the stairs of her mother’s apartment building roughly three years earlier, she’d become perversely enthralled by the world of Jimmy Coonan. To her, it was more exciting than any movie, more exotic and macabre than any story she might read in a book. Sometimes it was almost dreamlike. Like the previous Christmas, when she was over at Jimmy and Edna’s house in New Jersey. She went into the bedroom and saw her aunt’s and uncle’s beautiful new king-size bed. But she couldn’t figure out why the mattress was all tilted. Why would such a beautiful bed have such a lumpy mattress? She went over to the bed, lifted up the mattress and looked underneath.

Alberta’s young eyes opened wide as could be. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of $10, $20, and $50 bills. Some of them were bound together, but most were loosely tossed about, forming a huge pile on top of the box spring. She would never forget the sight of all that money; for years, it would be her own little secret.

Sometimes, Alberta’s excitement at her Uncle Jimmy’s antics caused problems with Sissy. They got along okay, on the surface. In fact, it was through Sissy’s father that Alberta had gotten a job at Madison Square Garden. They often walked to and from work together. But Alberta knew Sissy’s feelings about Coonan; she knew Sissy resented Jimmy and Edna. So Alberta usually tried to keep her enthusiasm to herself.

Today, however, in the heady excitement of going to Brooklyn to see the Godfather, she couldn’t contain it. She preened and giggled in front of the full-length mirror like she was getting ready for her high school prom.

While Alberta and Sissy were in the bedroom, Coonan spoke to the male members of the group gathered in the front room. “Me and Mickey gonna go to the restaurant,” he said, “just like we’re supposed to. See what these guys gotta say for themselves. But if you don’t hear from us in two hours—
two fuckin
’
hours
—there’s a social club next to Tommaso’s. Vets and Friends, it’s called. You come in there blastin’ with everything we got.”

The group looked at each other without saying a word. There was a tension in the air, a tension made all the more palpably by the determination in Jimmy’s voice. “We got no choice,” he was saying. “We been called. If we don’t go, we’s gonna get whacked. If we do go, we might still get whacked. But I swear to Christ, if we do, I want this to be the biggest fuckin’ slaughter since the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

Coonan picked up a large laundry bag that nineteen-year-old Ray Steen had brought over from his apartment next door. Inside was a staggering arsenal, the product of five years’ worth of steady accumulation. There were .25s, .32s, .38s, and .45s with silencers; there was a 9mm machine gun; there were hand grenades; there were two Japanese machetes; there were ski masks, handcuffs, holsters, bulletproof vests, walkie-talkies.

Jimmy began to spread the contents of the bag out on a coffee table. He handed a .25 and a .38 to Mickey and took two of the same for himself. He explained exactly where Tommaso’s and Vets and Friends was located: straight through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel to the Gowanus Expressway, exit at 86th Street, and take a left. Just a few blocks down, at 1464 86th Street, was the restaurant. The social club was right next door.

“Remember,” he added sternly. “Two goddamn hours.”

Outside, walking towards Jimmy’s car, Coonan turned to Featherstone. “Mickey, you know, I’d perfectly understand if you don’t wanna make this trip. You been with me up till now and that’s somethin’ I appreciate. But you don’t gotta go. I mean, anybody’d understand that.”

Mickey thought about it for a second. In a way, this whole Italian thing was Jimmy’s doing. The guineas were somebody Mickey had never really wanted to deal with. For one thing, they were always sneaky about the way they killed people, so you never really knew who was behind it. Mickey found it hard to respect anybody who didn’t have the balls to at least look a guy in the eye when they killed him. As far as he was concerned, that was the difference between them, the Italians, and us, the Irish.

But he would never back down when Jimmy needed him. That was out of the question. “Nah,” he told Coonan. “I’m with you, man. I mean, if they’re gonna whack you it means they’re gonna whack me too, right? So what’s the fuckin’ difference?”

Jimmy just smiled. He seemed to understand completely.

It was a twenty-five-minute drive through the tunnel and along the expressway to Bay Ridge. As they made the journey, Jimmy and Mickey were mostly silent. For Coonan, it was a time of reflection. Ever since the May 13th death of Mickey Spillane, he had known that the Italians were going to have to do business with him one way or the other. He’d spent years positioning himself for this moment, trying to make it clear that he was not like Spillane, that he could be dealt with. Through his friendship with Roy Demeo he had established all the right contacts. If Castellano was the kind of person everybody said he was—a man of reason and understanding—Jimmy knew this meeting might just be the biggest moment of his life.

Featherstone knew how much the meeting meant to Jimmy, which was why he was going along. But secretly he saw it as the latest in a series of events that stretched his allegiance to Jimmy about as far as it could go.

Just one month earlier, on January 18, 1978, Mickey had been with Coonan when Rickey Tassiello, one of Jimmy’s loanshark customers, was lured up to Tony Lucich’s apartment on 10th Avenue. Featherstone knew that Coonan was having problems with Tassiello. Rickey was a sick gambler who was chronically late with his payments. He was making Jimmy look bad in the neighborhood. Since the amount Rickey owed at the time wasn’t exorbitant, it wouldn’t cost Jimmy much to use Tassiello as an example—which is exactly what happened.