The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob (49 page)

“No, no. You never had fuckin’ problems.”

“Well, you remember. Fuckin’ Jimmy was lookin’ to shoot me.”

“Well, I told Jimmy that day, ‘Jimmy, we ain’t doin’ shit.’ He wanted me to do the killing. I said, ‘Are you fuckin’ crazy!?’”

Beattie shook his head. “Man, I did nothin’ but earn money for that motherfucker. You know what it was? I know what it was. It was his fuckin’ wife.”

“That’s what I think. That’s why none of us wanted it. We all disagreed with Jimmy. You know why? It ain’t him.”

“Yeah, it was his wife.”

“It was her, that cunt. ’Cause he don’t know the situation. We do. Me and Mickey. I told him, ‘Look, forget it. She was in love with Billy. She hates Billy now because he refuses her.’”

Beattie smiled. “I thought you was fuckin’ her, you know, at one time.”

“Me? Nah.”

“Yeah. I said this prick ever fucks her, she’s gonna try to get him killed, man.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go near her. She don’t attract me.… Fuckin’ douche bag, that’s what she is. A fuckin’ drunk.”

“Yeah.”

“Now she lives high and mighty. That’s what I always think.”

McElroy paused. It had been a long time since he’d sat at a bar and shot the breeze with an old friend from the gang. It felt good. There had been so much tension lately, so much treachery and paranoia. If you blocked everything else out, this was just like old times—sitting and having a beer with someone you’d known your whole life. Someone you could trust.

It wasn’t long, though, before the conversation turned to the topic that was uppermost in everyone’s mind—Mickey Featherstone.

“The cocksucker,” said McElroy, shaking his head in disbelief every time Mickey’s name was mentioned. “If I was gonna do … if they asked me, if they said they’d let me out if I’d rat, I’d spit at ’em. If I was gonna do twenty-five years in the hole. Fuck it.”

“I hear ya.”

“Sure, alright. He’s crazy and shit. I betcha he comes around.”

“I’m sure. You know he’s a fuckin’ nut. He’ll be back.”

“I told Kevin, ‘You know he’s still fuckin’ bad. So don’t think ’cause he’s a rat that he’s not bad.’”

Beattie quickly changed the subject. “Listen, Jimmy. You need any help collectin’ any money or anything? ’Cause I’m fuckin’ strapped.”

“I ain’t collectin’, Billy. Fuck it! I’m not collectin’ for nobody. I’m gonna get my own money out there.”

“Yeah? The fuck. You ain’t got nothin’, you prick.”

“I’ll get it.”

Beattie started laughing. “You’re in the same boat I’m in.”

“No, but I’m gonna get it. I wanna go partners, me and you. I need a partner anyway.”

Beattie was still laughing when his friend Ron returned. “Hey, Ronnie,” he said.

“I can’t hang out anymore,” replied Ron, looking annoyed.

“I was gonna give you them pink pills,” offered McElroy, trying not to sound too desperate.

“Maybe a day or two. I got somethin’ I gotta do.”

Beattie seemed flustered. “Jimmy … Ron. Well, listen, we’ll definitely handle it by next week.”

“How ’bout over the weekend?” asked McElroy. “Tomorrow?”

“Maybe,” said Ron. “I’ll give you a call. I gotta take care of this.”

“Alright,” yelled Beattie as Ron headed for the front door. “Get in touch with me, okay?”

McElroy slumped down on his barstool. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I’m sorry.”

“He’s that kind of guy, man. I tell ya, he can’t stand still. ’Cause he’s got a pocket full of fuckin’ money.”

“Yeah. He don’t need us.”

Beattie and McElroy stood in stunned silence for a few seconds.

“So,” said Jimmy Mac, trying to sound conciliatory. “What a bummer, huh? We coulda had this money. Both of us. We coulda gone out.”

“Jimmy, I was … look what I’m goin’ home with!” Billy tossed a five and four singles up on the bar. “That’s what I got! That’s my bankroll! I gotta, I’ve fuckin’ six kids in my house. I’m lookin’ to feed ’em, man.”

“I know.”

“That’s fuckin’ depressing.”

“We’ll do it with him tomorrow.”

“I had that money spent, Jimmy.”

“Me too.”

“My fucking refrigerator is empty, man.”

Outside the restaurant’s large plate-glass windows, the street lights had come on and the rush-hour traffic had begun to thin out. It was early evening, and the setting sun cast a pinkish glow in the sky to the west. Beattie glanced nervously around the bar and then at McElroy. “Alright, look. I know some people not too far from here. I might catch ’em in their store. If I do, I’ll get some bread. This way I can get a couple hundred. I’ll give you a hundred, I’ll take a hundred.”

“Yeah. I just wanna get somethin’ to eat tonight.”

“I hear you,” said Beattie, picking up his nine dollars from the bar.

McElroy drained the last of his beer. “Hey, this guy Ron, he want anybody whacked?”

“If he does, I’ll ask him.”

“Yeah! Ask him, you know? I’ll do that.”

“Give me a figure.”

“I don’t know. Whaddya think?”

“I never talked to him on that line.”

“So tell him I’m available.”

“Alright. I’ll tell him you said, like, to keep good faith, you’ll give him a good package on somethin’, if he wants it done.”

With that, Billy Beattie walked out the door of Smoke Stacks Lightning onto Canal Street. By now it was dark outside and there was a sharp winter chill in the air. Beattie glanced inside the restaurant one last time to see his old friend Jimmy Mac sitting alone, ordering another bottle of beer with the last few dollars in his pocket.

Jesus, thought Beattie, walking south on West Broadway. How did it ever come to this? How did it get so fucking pathetic?

He walked around the corner to Lispenard Street, where a black van with black tinted windows was parked. He looked around furtively to make sure no one was watching, then knocked on the side of the van.

The door slid open and Beattie got inside. There, surrounded by surveillance equipment, were three or four New York City detectives, including Ron Stripp, the supposed drug buyer.

“Jesus,” said Ron, reaching over to help Beattie remove the five-by-four-inch Nagra recorder strapped to his abdomen. “You should get an Academy Award. That was some act.”

“Yeah,” answered Beattie, dejectedly, holding up his shirt.

“Don’t worry, Billy,” said another cop. “There’ll be a special place in Heaven for you.”

Beattie raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? Don’t be too sure about that.”

17

WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND

T
he arrests went down in late November and December of 1986. Jimmy Coonan was found in his hideaway in Jersey and peaceably taken in. Edna Coonan was arrested in front of the family Christmas tree in their home in Hazlet. Others, including Billy Bokun, Mugsy Ritter, Johnny Halo, and Florence Collins, were arrested in and around Hell’s Kitchen. Florence Collins’s husband, Tommy Collins, was already incarcerated on a narcotics rap at the time. He too was handcuffed, taken to central booking, and charged with being a member of the Westies.

Jimmy McElroy, after learning that his good friend Billy Beattie had been cooperating with the government, went on the run. But McElroy was a creature of habit. And the NYPD knew of a place in Mesa, Arizona, where he’d gone on the lam before. He was arrested there by federal authorities.

Kevin Kelly and Kenny Shannon could not be found, despite a combined local and federal multistate manhunt. In the few remaining working-class bars in Hell’s Kitchen, rumors circulated that they were either dead or hiding out in Ireland.

Over the next few months a succession of state murder indictments were returned against various members of the gang, with a litany of victims’ names sounding like a casting call for a 1930s gangster movie: Paddy Dugan, Ruby Stein, Rickey Tassiello, Whitey Whitehead, Vinnie Leone, Michael Holly.

The murder charges, all of which were brought by the office of Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau, made it possible for a steady stream of cops and assistant D.A.s to claim credit for having brought the dreaded Westies to justice. After all the career-enhancing press conferences had been held and the state indictments announced, the federal government moved in.

On March 26th, Rudolph Giuliani, the highly ambitious U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced an indictment that was to supersede all others. Ten people—including those already hit with the state indictments—were being charged on fourteen counts with having taken part in a “racketeering conspiracy.” The charges dated back some twenty years and included sixteen murders, attempted murders, and conspiracies to commit murder. These charges, assured Giuliani, would finally bring about an end to what he termed—with his usual penchant for dramatics—“the most savage organization in the long history of New York City gangs.”

Giuliani’s strong rhetoric underscored what had, for the Southern District, become something of a religious calling in recent years. Since his appointment in 1983 to head the most prestigious District in the United States, Giuliani had made the pursuit of organized crime groups his number one priority. Not since the days of Estes Kefauver and New York Governor Thomas Dewey’s Waterfront Commission had the Mob suffered such a relentless legal assault. Earlier in 1987, Giuliani’s office had imprisoned, among others, cigar-chomping Fat Tony Salerno, onetime nemesis of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob, who was sentenced to 100 years for his role as leader of the Mafia’s ruling commission. Then came the “Pizza Connection” case, the longest-running trial ever to be held in federal court, in which fifteen defendants were found guilty of an elaborate international narcotics and racketeering conspiracy.

More recently, however, the Southern District’s successes had been tarnished somewhat by yet another highprofile mob case. In the Eastern District of New York, which encompassed Queens, Brooklyn, and Long Island, Gambino boss John Gotti was tried in a racketeering case that dominated newspaper headlines for months. Much to the chagrin of the Justice Department, in March of 1987 the trial ended with Gotti’s acquittal.

Now prosecutors focused on the Westies case, the biggest mob trial in New York since the Gotti fiasco. A conviction would accomplish two things: It would get the government’s pursuit of organized crime squarely back on track, and it would reestablish Giuliani’s Southern District as the area’s preeminent prosecutorial branch, the first to take the Westies off the streets for good.

As it had in virtually every major mob case in recent years, the Southern District would once again be utilizing the RICO law, which seemed especially well suited to the Westies case. Under RICO’s somewhat controversial statutes—which have been attacked in many legal circles for being too far-reaching—the government was able to admit as evidence crimes that the defendants had already been charged, tried, and possibly even done time for. By using these crimes to establish “a pattern of racketeering,” the government was able to assert the existence of an “enterprise,” thereby implicating multiple defendants on a vast array of charges.

It also meant that if the prosecution was able to show that a “relationship” existed between the various defendants, they could use one person’s previous convictions to establish the racketeering charge against another. As a result, in the case against the Westies, some of Jimmy Coonan’s kidnapping and assault convictions from the late Sixties and early Seventies would be used, as would Tommy Collins’s recent narcotics conviction.

Along with these charges, the fourteen counts in the indictment encompassed numerous others for murder, conspiracy to commit murder, gambling, extortion, loansharking, counterfeiting, and, as regards Jimmy and Edna Coonan, income tax evasion. As evidence to support their claims, the prosecution had assembled an assortment of guns, knives, narcotics paraphernalia, bags of amphetamines, gambling and loansharking records, police surveillance photographs and logs, ballistics and autopsy reports, phone records, tax records, and numerous taped conversations from telephone wiretaps, body wires, and recording devices placed in automobiles, restaurants, and prison visiting rooms.

Even more important to the prosecution were the witnesses. There were more than seventy scheduled to testify about crimes that, in some cases, were two decades old. Charles Canelstein, who’d been gunned down near Calvary Cemetery in Queens by nineteen-year-old Jimmy Coonan in April 1966, would be called to testify, as would Paddy Dugan’s sister, Rickey Tassiello’s brother, and Ruby Stein’s mistress. There were loanshark victims like sixty-four-year-old Julius “Dutch” Grote, one-time bartender and friend of Bobby Lagville and Mickey Spillane, who in the late Seventies once hid inside his Hell’s Kitchen apartment for fifteen months for fear of being killed by Coonan.

But the most devastating testimony of all was expected to come from the confidential informants. Just as the West Side criminals had feared, Mickey and Sissy Featherstone’s cooperation had opened the floodgates. Tony Lucich and Billy Beattie had followed, with Beattie circulating in the neighborhood for weeks before it was known he’d flipped. In addition, the old standbys, Alberta Sachs and Raymond Steen, were being called to testify again. And finally, there was the most unlikely stool pigeon of all—Bobby Huggard. The “stand-up guy” who had single-handedly secured an acquittal for Coonan and Featherstone at the Whitehead murder trial by perjuring himself on the witness stand was in prison on an armed robbery conviction when he heard Mickey Featherstone turned stoolie. Knowing that Featherstone had enough on him to have him put away for life, Huggard began singing to the FBI.

It was a staggering collection of evidence on the government’s part, enough to make even the most hardened West Side gangster flinch.

For the prosecutors—assistant U.S. attorneys Mary Lee Warren and David Brodsky—it was an unbelievably strong foundation. And as the proceedings got underway in late September of 1987, they had every reason to feel confident.

In the still, pristine air of Room 506, in the federal courthouse at 60 Centre Street in lower Manhattan, Larry Hochheiser grabbed a seat in the back row of the spectator’s gallery. It was November 12th, a gray, ominous day, and the large, wood-paneled courtroom was packed. Since the Westies trial first began two weeks earlier, Hochheiser had talked many times with the defense attorneys involved in the case. He’d followed the newspaper reports, which had already devoted considerable space to the testimony of Billy Beattie, Alberta Sachs, and Tony Lucich. But Hochheiser had avoided making an appearance in the courtroom for many reasons, the most compelling being that the very existence of this trial had caused him more personal grief than any event in his career as an attorney.