The Westies: The Irish Mobster Who Dismembered Bodies and Terrified the Mafia ht
November 17th, 1988. Federal Courthouse, Foley Square, Manhattan, 2 p.m. James Counan stood at the defense table in a cheap gray suit, hands folded in front of him like a man at mass. The judge read the sentence, “60 years.” Then another 15 stacked on top. 75 years in federal prison. No parole.
Kunan didn’t flinch. He didn’t cry. He just nodded once like a butcher accepting an order. In the gallery, his wife Edna pressed a tissue to her mouth. Outside, a cold rain was falling on Center Street. By nightfall, Jimmy Counan was on a bus headed to a maximum security holding facility. The King of Hell’s Kitchen was gone. He has never come back.
This is the story of how a kid from 10th Avenue murdered the old boss, carved up the competition, and forced the most powerful mafia family in America to sit down and deal with him as an equal. This is how the Westies were born. And this is how Jimmy Kunan outranked the mafia, by being more willing to do what the Italians wouldn’t.
But here’s what the history books rarely tell you. Kunan didn’t rise by being the toughest guy in the room. He rose by being the most patient. For 11 years, he waited. He planned. He learned from the Italians. And when he finally moved, he didn’t just kill his enemy. He erased him. And then he did it again and again, 16 documented times.
To understand Jimmy Kunan, you have to understand Hell’s Kitchen. Before the Disney stores and the luxury highrises, this was a neighborhood the police didn’t enter without backup. 10 blocks wide, 20 blocks long, running along the Hudson River from the peers up to the Port Authority bus terminal. Tenement buildings, long shoremen, teamsters, bartenders who’d crack your skull for asking the wrong question.
An Irish Catholic neighborhood where the priest knew who was connected and pretended he didn’t. James Michael Kunan was born December 21st, 1946, fifth of six kids. His father, John Kunan, was an accountant, respectable, church on Sundays. The kind of man who did his taxes right and stayed out of trouble. The family lived on the west side when the west side was a war zone.
Young Jimmy went to Power Memorial Academy for a stretch. smart kid, good with numbers like his father. But he was also small for his age, wiry, blonde hair, blue eyes, a baby face that made older guys underestimate him. That was the first thing everybody got wrong about Jimmy Kunan.
The moment that made him happened in 1966. Kunan was 19 years old. His father, John, owed money. Not a lot, a few hundred in a neighborhood dispute. But in Hell’s Kitchen back then, there was only one man who collected. Mickey Spalain. Spalain was the boss. 42 years old at the time, tall, polite, the kind of gangster who kissed babies and bought turkeys for poor families at Christmas.
People called him the gentleman gangster. He was also a kidnapper and a killer. Spelain’s men grabbed John Counan off the street. They dragged him to a basement. They beat him. They pistolhipped him until his face didn’t look like a face anymore. Then they threw him out on the sidewalk and told him to come up with the money.
John Counan survived barely. But something in his son Jimmy broke that day. Or maybe it woke up because from that moment on, Jimmy Kunan had one goal in life. Not money, not power, not respect. He wanted Mickey Spelain dead. And he wanted it to take a long time. Jimmy started small. He did B and E jobs, burglaries.
He ran with a kid named Eddie Kamuski, an older guy who was already a hitman. Kamaskki was the one who taught Kunan the trick that would define his career. Kamaskki had worked in a meat locker. He knew how to use a butcher’s saw. He told young Jimmy something that stuck with him for the rest of his life. No body, no case.
The cops can’t charge you with murder if they can’t find the victim. The detectives need a corpse. A corpse gives them fingerprints, ballistics, time of death, cause of death. Take away the corpse, and you take away the entire prosecution. Jimmy Counan listened. Jimmy Counan remembered. In 1966, the same year his father was beaten, Kunan made his first real move.
He and a partner kidnapped one of Spolain’s lieutenants, a man named Charles Canavino. They tied him up in an apartment. They held a gun to his head. They demanded money. Kunan was 19 years old and he was already kidnapping made men. Canavino survived. Kunan went to prison for a stretch at Elmyra. He came out harder, smarter, and hungrier.
Through the late 60s and early 70s, Kunan built a crew. Not a gang, a crew. There’s a difference. A gang is a bunch of guys who drink together and get into trouble. A crew is a business. Kunan’s business was fear. He ran lone sharking out of westside bars. He ran numbers. He muscled into union locals on the peers.
And slowly, one by one, Mickey Spelain’s guys started to disappear. A body in the river, a body in a trunk, a body that was never found at all. Then came the partnership that changed everything. In 1970, Kunan met Francis Mickey Featherstone. Featherstone was 21 years old, a Vietnam veteran, special forces.
He’d come home from the war with a head full of nightmares and a nervous system that couldn’t tell the difference between a car backfire and an enemy ambush. Featherstone was 5’8, 140 lb soaking wet. He had a pencil mustache. He drank too much. And he was without question the most dangerous man in hell’s kitchen.
Featherstone killed people because Featherstone couldn’t stop killing people. He’d already done time for manslaughter. He was a walking weapon. And Jimmy Counan pointed him like a gun. The Kunan and Featherstone Alliance was the foundation of the Westies. Kunan was the brain, cold, patient, a planner who could work numbers in his head and see three moves ahead. Featherstone was the muscle.
Unpredictable, explosive, loyal to a fault. If Kunan said kill, Featherstone killed. No questions, no delays. For 15 years, that partnership ran Hell’s Kitchen. And then it destroyed itself. By 1973, Kunan had enough money and enough bodies to plant a flag. He opened a bar, 596 Club, on the corner of West 43rd Street and 10th Avenue.
59610th Avenue, right in the heart of the neighborhood. On paper, it was a dive. Sawdust on the floor, a pool table in the back, a jukebox that played Sinatra and Clancy Brothers songs. In reality, it was a command post. Every morning, Kunan sat at the end of the bar with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. Guys came to him with envelopes, tribute, Shillock payments, union kickbacks.
The phone behind the bar rang all day with business. 596 was the Westy’s Pentagon. Meanwhile, Mickey Spelain was making mistakes. The old boss had moved out of Hell’s Kitchen. He was living in Woodside, Queens, trying to go semi-legitimate. Real estate, bar ownership. He let his grip on the neighborhood loosen.
Worse, he picked a fight with the Italians, specifically with the Genevese family, which wanted a piece of the construction trades on the west side. Spain refused to pay tribute. He refused to share. He thought his Irish pedigree would protect him. It didn’t. 1977 was the year the old order died. On May 13th, 1977, Mickey Spelain walked to his apartment building on 46th Street in Woodside.
It was around 10:00 at night. The street was quiet. A car pulled up. The window rolled down. A shooter put four bullets into Spalain on the sidewalk. He died there. Blood running into the storm drain. Spelain was 53 years old. Here’s where the official story and the street story diverge.
The official story says the hit was a Genevese job ordered because Spelain wouldn’t pay. The street story, the one that every old-timer in Hell’s Kitchen will tell you after three drinks, is that the shooter was Roy Deo. Deo was a Gambino soldier, a butcher by trade, and the most prolific killer in New York City at that moment.
The street story says Deo killed Spalain as a personal favor to Jimmy Kunan. The two had become friends. They shared an interest, let’s say, in a specific technical problem. The problem of how to make a body disappear. What’s documented is this. Within weeks of Spalain’s death, Jimmy Counan was the boss of Hell’s Kitchen. No vote, no sit down.
He just was. With Spelain dead, Kunan turned on the remaining opposition, the old Spelain loyalists. One by one, they were invited to meetings that never ended the way they expected. Tom Deainy, Tom Capettos. Eddie the Butcher, Kamuski himself, Kunan’s old mentor, was shot to death in a bar on 11th Avenue because he knew too much and talked too much.
Kunan didn’t care who taught him the trade. Loyalty flowed one direction toward Jimmy, never away from him. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Because Kunan didn’t just kill his rivals. He did something no Irish mobster had ever done before. He industrialized the disposal. This is the insider knowledge the documentaries gloss over.
Let me break it down for you. The Kunan method worked like this. Step one, the victim was lured to a controlled location. Usually a bar, the Westies owned, the 596 Club, the Sunbrite, the Landmark Tavern up the block, places where the bartender was on the payroll and the customers knew when to leave. Step two, the victim was killed quickly.
One shot to the back of the head, usually with a 22 caliber pistol, small caliber, subsonic, no exit wound. Cleanup was minimal. Step three, and this is what made the Westies different. The body was moved to a basement or a back room. It was placed in a bathtub and then it was taken apart. Kamaskki had taught Kunan the mechanics. You bleed the body first.
You drain it into the tub. Then you remove the hands, then the head. Both go into separate bags, separate locations, separate rivers. Hands because of fingerprints. head because of dental records. Without those two identifiers, a corpse becomes a John Doe and a John Doe becomes a cold case and a cold case becomes a file in a drawer.
Then the torso is cut into sections small enough to fit in a trash bag. Those bags are weighted with bricks or pieces of scrap metal. They go into the Hudson River off the peers at the end of 54th Street in the dead hours between 3 and 4 in the morning when the river is a black mirror and nobody is watching.
The Westies called it doing the Houdini, making someone disappear and they were very, very good at it. At the eventual trial, prosecutors would link Kunan and his crew to at least 16 murders. Only a handful of bodies were ever recovered. The rest are somewhere in the silt at the bottom of the Hudson or in the landfills on the New Jersey side or in the foundations of buildings that went up in Midtown during the construction boom.
One murder in particular put Kunan on the map. In 1975, a Westy’s associate named Patty Dugan got drunk and shot a friend named Dennis Curley in a bar fight. Curley was a popular kid. His death created a problem. Spellelain, still alive at that point, wanted Dugan dead to keep the peace. Kunan volunteered. He and Eddie Kamusky lured Dugan to a Hell’s Kitchen apartment.
They killed him. Then Kamisky took out a butcher saw and went to work for hours. The story the Westies told for years afterward was that Kunan took Patty Dugan’s severed head to the Sunbrite Bar on 10th Avenue. He put it on the pool table. He walked around with it. He held it up and asked the customers, quote, “Does anyone want to buy a drink for my friend Patty?” The head was passed around the bar. Some guys kissed it.
Some guys poured beer on it. Some guys threw up. By the end of the night, it was a ghost story that terrified every rival in the neighborhood. The severed head of Patty Dugan became a legend. And legends in the criminal world are a form of advertising. But that’s not the craziest part of Kunan’s operation.
The craziest part came in 1977, a few months after Spellain’s murder. A man named Ruby Stein walked into the landmark tavern. Ruby Stein was not a small time hood. Ruby Stein was one of the biggest lone sharks in New York City. A Jewish numbers genius who had over $6 million in outstanding loans on the street at the time of his death.
Stein worked with the Gambinos. He was protected. He was a king in his own world. He was also about $40,000 into Jimmy Counan’s pocket, and Kunan had decided that the best way to erase a debt was to erase the debtor. The Westies took Stein in the back of the bar. They shot him in the head. Then, according to testimony at the trial years later, they made a critical error.
They cut him up the way they always did, hands in one bag, head in another, torso in pieces. But when they dumped the torso off the pier, one of the bags didn’t sink. A piece of ruby stein washed up on a beach in Brooklyn a few weeks later. And when the cops fingerprinted what was left, they knew exactly who it was. That mistake, as much as anything else, was the beginning of the end.
Because once the NYPD and the FBI knew that Ruby Stein had been killed on the west side, and once they started connecting the dots, they realized they were dealing with something new. Not a gang, not a crew. An organization, an Irish organization operating in the middle of Manhattan with body counts that rivaled anything the Italians were doing.
The task force started in 1977. It would take 11 years to finish. Here’s where it gets interesting. Because Ruby Stein’s murder created a second problem. Stein owed money, too. Big money. He was into the Gambinos for over $100,000. And when Stein disappeared, the Gambinos came looking for his notebook. The book that listed every debt, every vig, every payment schedule. Kunan had the book.
The Gambinos wanted it. This is where Jimmy Counan made the move that transformed him from a neighborhood Irish boss into a major player in American organized crime. In early 1978, Kunan agreed to a sitdown. The location was a restaurant in Brooklyn. Neutral ground 1978. Present were Kunan Featherstone, Roy Deo, and the boss himself, Paul Castellano.
Big Paul, the head of the Gambino family, the most powerful man in New York, organized crime. The meeting that followed was one of the most important in the history of the Irish mob. Castellano did not threaten Kunan. He didn’t have to. Both men understood the power dynamic. The Gambinos had hundreds of soldiers. Kunan had maybe two dozen guys.
A war would end one way. But Castellano saw something in Kunan. He saw utility. The Italians had a problem. They had hits that needed doing, bodies that needed hiding, debts that needed collecting with extreme prejudice. And Italian names drew Italian attention from the FBI. An Irish gang that answered the Gambinos could do work that couldn’t be traced back.
The deal they struck was simple. Kunan would kick up 10% of all Westy’s earnings to the Gambinos. In return, the Westies got the Gambino name. They got protection. They got the right to use Gambino muscle when they needed it. And most importantly, they got contracts, hit contracts, Italian on Italian work, where the Italians didn’t want their own fingerprints on the job.
At the trial years later, witnesses called it the franchise. The Westies became, in effect, a subsidiary of the Gambino Crime Family, a subsidiary that specialized in murder and disposal. For Kunan, this was the top of the mountain. An Irish kid from 10th Avenue, sitting across from the most powerful mafia boss in America, cutting a deal as equals.
The Spellelain regime never got near this kind of relationship. Spain had refused to deal with the Italians. He’d called them grease balls and told them to stay out of his neighborhood, and Spalain had ended up face down on a sidewalk in Queens. Kunan had chosen the other path, the smart path. the path that would make him rich.
From 1978 through 1985, the Westies were untouchable. They controlled the peers. They controlled the Javitz Convention Center construction site where they shook down contractors for no show jobs worth millions. They controlled the concession stands at Madison Square Garden. They ran a protection racket on every bar, restaurant, and after hours club west of 8th Avenue.
Kunan personally was pulling down, by FBI estimates, over a million dollars a year in cash, tax-free, untraceable. He bought a house in New Jersey. He married his wife, Edna. He tried to live a double life, suburban dad on the weekends, mob boss during the week. But the kill count kept climbing. In 1978, a bartender named Harold Whitehead got on Coon’s bad side.
Whitehead disappeared in 1978. Also, a man named Vincent Leon, a Westies member who was becoming a problem, was eliminated. Through the late 70s and into the early 80s, the bodies piled up. Ricky Tessiello, John Bokun, Tommy Hess, each one a business decision, each one a message, each one a step closer to the line that Kunan didn’t realize he was crossing.
Here’s the thing about running a crew of killers. The men who make you powerful are also the men who know exactly how to destroy you. And Jimmy Kunan had a problem inside his own organization. His name was Mickey Featherstone. Featherstone had been loyal for 15 years. He’d killed on command. He’d done time on command. He’d kept his mouth shut.
But Featherstone was also the second most famous man in the Westies. And that was a problem in a gang where there could only be one king. The split between Kunan and Featherstone happened slowly. Kunan started cutting Featherstone out of bigger scores. Featherstone, who drank heavily and whose Vietnam trauma made him volatile, started complaining.
In 1985, the pressure finally broke something. A Westy’s associate named Michael Holly was gunned down in front of a Hell’s Kitchen apartment building on April 25th, 1985. Holly had been a low-level guy who crossed Kunan. The shooter, according to witnesses, was a blonde man in his 30s wearing a jean jacket. Mickey Featherstone was arrested and charged with the murder.
Featherstone didn’t do it. That’s the documented truth. The shooter was a different Westy, a younger guy named Billy Bokun, who bore a physical resemblance to Featherstone. Kunan and his inner circle had set up Featherstone to take the fall. They deliberately dressed the actual killer to look like him. At trial, Featherstone was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit.
He was looking at 25 years to life. That was the mistake. The one that ended everything. Because Mickey Featherstone, sitting in a prison cell for a murder he hadn’t done, realized something. Jimmy Counan had tried to erase him the same way he erased everyone else. Not with a bullet, with a frame. Featherstone had always said he’d die before he became a rat.
Prison changes that calculation. Featherstone picked up the phone. He called the FBI. He said, “I want to talk.” The sitdown happened at a prison in upstate New York in early 1986. Featherstone told federal agents everything. 16 murders, names, dates, locations, the Gambino connection, the Castellano meeting, the body disposal methods, the bars, the money, the 596 club as headquarters.
He gave them a road map of the entire Westies organization going back 20 years. And he agreed to wear a wire. For the next year, Mickey Featherstone walked into Hell’s Kitchen bars with a recording device strapped to his chest. He had conversations with Kunan, with Kevin Kelly, with Kenny Shannon, with Jimmy Mroy.
He got them talking about old murders, about payoffs, about plans for new hits. By late 1986, the FBI had enough tape to bury every major player in the Westies organization. The indictments came down in 1987. Federal prosecutors hit the Westies with a RICO charge. The first time the Rakateeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act had been used against an Irish organized crime group in New York.
The charges included murder, conspiracy, extortion, lone sharking, labor racketeering, and gambling. Kunan was facing the rest of his life. The trial was a spectacle. It ran from September 1987 into March 1988. Featherstone was the star witness. On the stand, he described the dismemberment of Patty Dugan. He described the killing of Ruby Stein.
He described the head on the pool table. He described the butcher’s saw. The jury heard tape after tape, Kunan talking about bodies, about money, about the Gambinos. The defense tried to destroy Featherstone on cross-examination. He admitted he was a killer. He admitted he had lied under oath in the past. He admitted he had psychiatric problems stemming from Vietnam.
None of it mattered. The tapes were the tapes. The bodies were the bodies. On March 6th, 1988, the jury came back guilty on every single count. Kunan and seven codefendants were convicted of running a racketeering enterprise built on murder. On November 17th, 1988, the sentencing came down. 75 years for Jimmy Kunan.
Six consecutive life sentences worth of prison time stacked to make sure he would never walk free. Kevin Kelly got 60 years. Jimmy Mroy got 60 years. The rest of the crew got between 30 and 50. The Westies were finished. Not wounded, finished. In one trial, the federal government had dismantled the most powerful Irish-American criminal organization in New York history.
In the aftermath, things cascaded. Paul Castellano, the man who had made Kunan a franchise, had already been dead for almost 3 years by the time of the sentencing. Castellano was gunned down in front of Spark Steakhouse, 210 East 46th Street in Manhattan on December 16th, 1985. John Gotti had taken the Gambino throne in a coup and by the time the Westy’s trial ended, Gotti himself was under federal investigation.
Roy Deo, the butcher who had allegedly killed Mickey Spelain as a favor to Kunan, had been murdered in January 1983 on orders from his own captain, Anthony Gaji. Deo’s body was found in the trunk of his own car in a Brooklyn parking lot. Mickey Featherstone went into witness protection. He got a new name, a new face, a new life somewhere in middle America.
He is by most accounts still alive. Kunan went to federal prison. First to Levvenworth, then to a series of other facilities. For the past four decades, he has been a model prisoner. No fights, no infractions. He earned his GED. He worked prison jobs. He has applied for parole and compassionate release multiple times. most recently in 2023.
Every time he has been denied. The court records note that Jimmy Counan, now in his late 70s, wants to go home to care for his wife, Edna. The court records also note that he was convicted of ordering 16 murders and dismembering human beings on butcher’s tables. Those facts, the judges have ruled, have not aged.
According to Federal Bureau of Prisons records, Jimmy Counan has a mandatory release date of June 1st, 2030. He is currently held at a federal correctional institution. If he lives that long, he will walk out of prison at age 83, having served 42 years. More likely, he dies inside. What’s the meaning of all this? What does Jimmy Kunan’s story actually tell us? A few things, and they’re worth sitting with.
First, the myth of mafia invincibility is just that, a myth. The Italians ran New York for most of the 20th century because they built a structure that was tight, disciplined, and secretive. Kunan looked at that structure and copied the parts that worked. Territorial control, tribute systems, alliance building.
He proved you didn’t have to be Sicilian to run a crime family. You had to be organized. You had to be ruthless. and you had to be willing to do things the Italians wouldn’t touch. Second, the Westies revealed the dark logic of the corporate merger. When Kunan cut his deal with Castellano in 1978, he wasn’t just buying protection.
He was offering a service. The service was deniable violence. Italian bosses could now order Irish killers to eliminate Italian problems, and the FBI informants inside the five families wouldn’t hear about it. That’s not street crime. That’s outsourcing. That’s supply chain management. Kunan understood business in a way that most of his competitors didn’t.
Third, and this is the one that matters, is that the thing that finally destroyed Jimmy Counan was not the FBI. It wasn’t RICO. It wasn’t the prosecutors. It was Jimmy Counan himself. He was the one who chose to frame Mickey Featherstone for a murder Featherstone didn’t commit. He was the one who decided his oldest partner, the man who had killed for him for 15 years, was expendable.
Every boss in organized crime, eventually reaches a moment where loyalty and paranoia collide, and the boss chooses paranoia. That’s the moment the empire starts to die. Kunan reached his in 1985, and he never recognized it until he was sitting in a courtroom listening to Featherstone recite his sins into a federal microphone.
Hell’s Kitchen today is unrecognizable. Where the 596 Club once stood on the corner of West 43rd Street and 10th Avenue, the bar operates under a different name. Tourists walk past it every day without knowing what happened inside those walls. The peers where the Westies dump their bodies have been converted into parks, bike paths, luxury condos with Hudson River views.
The old tenementss are gone. The Irish working class that produced men like Jimmy Counan is gone. The neighborhood is clean now. It smells like coffee and artisan bread instead of beer and cigarette smoke. But if you walk the side streets late at night, the old-timers will still tell you stories about Eddie the Butcher, about Patty Dugan’s head, about the blonde kid with the baby face who turned a neighborhood gang into a murder franchise, about the day Jimmy Counan walked into a courtroom and vanished into a federal prison system so thoroughly that 40 years
later, his own wife can’t bring him home. Jimmy Counan wanted to be bigger than Mickey Spelain. He wanted to be bigger than the Italians. He wanted his name on the door. He got all of that. He built an empire out of nothing but fear and butcher tools. He made millions. He outranked the mafia.
And then he lost every single thing he’d ever killed for because he couldn’t trust the one man who had never given him a reason to doubt. That’s the real story of the Westies. Not the severed heads on pool tables, not the bodies in the Hudson, not the tribute to Castellano. The real story is that the man who spent his life making other people disappear eventually did the same thing to himself.
He vanished into a federal cell. He has been there in one form or another every day since November 17th, 1988. The neighborhood moved on without him. The mafia moved on without him. His name became a ghost story. And somewhere in some prison yard, an old man with thin blonde hair and pale blue eyes walks in circles thinking about a bar on 10th Avenue and a river full of secrets.
He’s still there and he will be there most likely until the day he dies. If you found this story as dark and fascinating as we did, hit that subscribe button. We drop a new mob documentary every week. deep dives into the men who built and destroyed America’s crime families. Drop a comment below.
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