The Westies: How Irish Psychos Out Killed the Italian Mafia – ht

 

 

 

July 22nd, 1979, 3:15 in the afternoon. The 727 Lounge, West 47th Street, Hell’s Kitchen. Ruby Stein walked in expecting to collect debts. Stein was Jewish, 61 years old, and he ran the biggest Lone Shark book in New York. Over $6 million on the street. He had books. He had names. He had the power to ruin a thousand lives with a phone call.

 Jimmy Counan smiled at him from behind the bar, poured him a drink. Then Mickey Featherstone stepped out from the back room and put a bullet behind Stein’s left ear. Stein collapsed onto the barroom floor. Kunan walked over calm as a priest and started going through his pockets for that little black book. He never found it.

 What he did next became legend in Hell’s Kitchen. They dragged Ruby Stein into the back. They bled him into the bathtub. And then Jimmy Counan taught his crew the trade that would define the Westies forever. He cut Ruby Stein into pieces. Small enough to fit in plastic bags. Small enough to disappear into the Hudson River.

 The torso washed up two weeks later off Jamaica Bay. The head was never found. This wasn’t just another gangland hit. This was the moment a small Irish crew from a few square blocks of Manhattan announced themselves to the entire American underworld. They had just murdered the biggest lone shark in New York City. They had done it in broad daylight and they had done it without permission from the Italians.

 The Gambino family, the most powerful mafia clan in America, took notice, not with anger, with interest. Because Jimmy Kunan had just proven something the Italians had suspected for years. The Irish kids from Hell’s Kitchen were useful, controllable, and absolutely terrifyingly insane. This is the story of how a neighborhood became a killing ground.

How Irish immigrants who came over with nothing built the most violent crew in New York history. From the Gopher gang running the rail yards in 1905 to the Westies dismembering bodies in tenement bathtubs 80 years later. This is the history of Hell’s Kitchen and the men who made it the bloodiest 40 square blocks in America.

 But here’s what most people don’t know. The Westies were never supposed to exist. By the late 1960s, every expert said Irish organized crime was dead in New York. The Italians had taken everything. The docks, the unions, the rackets, the gambling. Irish mobsters were supposed to be a memory, like gas lights and horsedrawn carriages.

 Jimmy Kunan didn’t get the memo. And what he built in the shadow of Time Square would haunt the NYPD, the FBI, and five mafia families for the next 20 years. To understand Hell’s Kitchen, you have to understand the geography. We’re talking about the west side of Manhattan from 34th Street up to 59th Street from 8th Avenue west to the Hudson River roughly 40 square blocks.

In 1850 this was farmland and slaughter houses. By 1880 it was tenementss. Irish immigrants came off the boats at Castle Garden. They followed the jobs. The jobs were on the docks in the rail yards in the factories that lined the west side. The men worked the waterfront. The women did peace work and took in laundry.

 And the kids, the kids ran wild in streets so dangerous the cops refused to patrol them without four men minimum. The name itself came from this violence. There’s a legend, and it may even be true that two cops were watching a riot near 39th Street around 1881. The rookie said, “This place is hell.” The veteran said, “Hell’s a mild climate. This is Hell’s Kitchen.

” Whether it happened exactly that way doesn’t matter. The name stuck because it fit. By the 1890s, Hell’s Kitchen had the highest murder rate of any neighborhood in the United States. The first real power in those streets was a crew called the Gophers. They took their name from where they hid, in sellers, in basement, in the underground tunnels beneath the tenementss.

 By 1905, the Gophers numbered over 500 members. Their leader was a man named One Lung Curran. He got the nickname because he’d taken a bullet to the chest and lost half his breathing capacity. Didn’t slow him down. Curran’s specialty was stealing policeman’s overcoats and giving them to his girlfriend as trophies. His girlfriend became a minor celebrity in the neighborhood for her collection of stolen NYPD uniforms.

 But the real boss of the Gophers was Aie Madden. Remember that name. He becomes important in a few minutes. Madden was born in Leeds, England in 1891. He came to New York at age 11. His father died on the boat over. By 14, he was running with the Gophers. By 17, he was their enforcer. By 19, he was their boss. They called him Aie the Killer. He’d earned it.

 By 1910, Madden had personally murdered at least five rival gang members, including a pair of brothers named Freeman, who made the mistake of courting the same girl he was seeing. Madden shot them both on a street car in front of 20 witnesses. Nobody testified. That was the rule in Hell’s Kitchen. You saw nothing, you heard nothing.

 You walked home, and you kept your mouth shut. The Gophers ran three main rackets. The first was the Westside Railards. The New York Central Railroad terminated at 30th Street. Every day, hundreds of freight cars sat in those yards loaded with goods destined for Manhattan warehouses. Silk, tobacco, liquor before prohibition, meat from the Midwest.

 The gophers stole it. All of it. They had men inside the railroad who marked the valuable cars. They had fences in every burough who moved the goods within hours. The New York Central Railroad hired its own private police force of 200 men just to fight the gophers. The railroad cops lost most of those fights. By 1911, the railroad was losing an estimated half a million dollars a year to theft.

 That’s in 1911 money adjusted for inflation close to $16 million today. The second racket was the docks. This is where the Hell’s Kitchen story really begins. Because the Hudson River peers were the single most lucrative target for organized theft in North America. Every ship that docked carried cargo worth tens of thousands of dollars.

 The long shoremen who unloaded those ships were almost entirely Irish. And the men who controlled which long shoremen got hired, the hiring bosses, the shapeup men were all connected to the gophers. If you wanted to work the docks, you paid a kickback. If you wanted to steal from the docks, you paid a bigger kickback.

 And if you resisted, you ended up in the river. The third racket was political. Tamony Hall, the Democratic machine that ran New York City, needed muscle. They needed men to protect polling places, intimidate voters, break up rival political meetings, and deliver the Irish vote on election day. The Gophers provided that muscle.

 In return, Tamony protected the Gophers from serious prosecution. Cops who tried to make cases against them got transferred to Staten Island. Prosecutors who pushed too hard lost their jobs. This arrangement lasted for 40 years. Ani Madden got caught eventually. In 1912, he shot an Italian kid named Little Paty Doyle over a woman named Freda her.

 Madden pulled the trigger in a dance hall on 52nd Street in front of 70 witnesses. He was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years at Sing Singh. He served nine. When he walked out of prison in 1923, prohibition was the law of the land and Ai Madden was about to become one of the richest gangsters in America.

 This is the turning point for Hell’s Kitchen because prohibition changed everything. Suddenly, every neighborhood in New York was worth fighting over. You needed warehouses to store the booze. You needed docks to land it. You needed trucks to move it. Hell’s Kitchen had all three. Madden partnered with a bootleger named Big Bill Dwire, and together they built the largest illegal liquor operation on the East Coast.

Madden’s signature product was a cheap mass-roduced beer called Madden’s Number One. He brewed it in a plant on 10th Avenue. He sold it to every speak easy from Harlem to Coney Island. At his peak in 1929, Madden was earning $3 million a year. In $129, he bought nightclubs. He bought the Cotton Club in Harlem.

 He bought heavyweight champion Primo Carera. He bought judges, cops, and half the city council. But the thing about Madden, and this is what separates him from almost every other gangster of the era, he knew when to quit. In 1935, with Prohibition over and Lucky Luciano consolidating the Italian mafia into the five families, Madden looked at the landscape and made a decision. He left.

 He moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas. He married the postmaster’s daughter. He became a respectable citizen. He died in his bed in 1965 of natural causes at age 73. The only Hell’s Kitchen gang boss who ever got out clean. The Italians took over the docks after Madden left. The Genevese family in particular locked down the westside waterfront through a labor boss named Mickey Bowers.

 For 30 years from the mid 1930s through the mid 1960s, Irish organized crime in Hell’s Kitchen was essentially a subsidiary of the Italian mafia. Irish crews did the dirty work. Irish muscle broke strikes and collected debts. But the real money flowed to Malberry Street. The Italians considered the Irish useful idiots, good with their fists, bad with their heads, expendable.

 That attitude is what created the Westies. Here’s where we meet Jimmy Kunan. Born 1946, raised at 434 West 43rd Street. His father, John Kunan, was a respected accountant in Hell’s Kitchen. Did the books for half the neighborhood, but John Kunan owed money to a local lone shark named Mickey Spelain, not the writer, a different Mickey Spelain.

 This one was the current boss of Hell’s Kitchen Irish rackets. And in 1966, when Jimmy Kunan was 20 years old, Mickey Spelain’s crew kidnapped his father, tied him to a chair in the back of a bar, beat him, stripped him naked, humiliated him, sent him home with a warning about late payments. Jimmy Counan never forgot that day.

 He would spend the next decade planning Mickey Spelain’s murder. Every decision he made, every alliance, every hit, every dollar he earned, it was all aimed at one target. Kill Spellelain. Take his crown. Become the boss of Hell’s Kitchen. Kunan was different from the older generation of Irish mobsters. He was educated. He was calculating.

 He read about the Italian mafia the way other kids read sports pages. He understood that the old Irish model, gang of drunks who punched hard, was a losing strategy against organized Italian crews with disciplined hierarchies. So Kunan built something new, a small crew, 15 guys, 20 at the most, extremely violent, extremely loyal, and critically willing to partner with the Italians as junior equals rather than fight them as stubborn losers.

 His right hand was a man named Francis Mickey Featherstone. Born 1949, Vietnam veteran. Came back from the war with what we’d now call severe PTSD. Featherstone had been a green beret. He’d killed in combat. He’d seen friends blown apart. When he came home to Hell’s Kitchen in 1971, he couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t stop drinking.

But he could kill. He could kill without hesitation, without remorse, without planning. Mickey Featherstone was the most dangerous man in New York, and he worked for Jimmy Counan for the price of a bar tab. Their first big move came in 1966. A local bartender named Charles Kennelstein had beaten up Jimmy’s brother.

 Kunan and an associate named Eddie Kamusky kidnapped Kennelstein, drove him to a garage, shot him in the chest, and left him for dead. Kennelstein survived. He identified Kunan. Kunan went to prison for attempted murder. When he came out in 1971, he was a different man, harder, colder, more focused, and ready for war. The war started quietly.

 Kunan built his crew piece by piece through the early 1970s. He ran lone sharking out of a bar called The Leprechaun on 9th Avenue. He ran numbers, bookmaking, and extortion on the peers. He started musling his way into construction rackets. Every dollar he earned, he used to hire more soldiers to buy more guns to prepare for the day he’d take down Mickey’s Spalain.

 And then came the Ruby Stein murder, which brings us back to where this story started. But the Ruby Stein hit wasn’t just about money. It was about proving something to the Gambino family. Because Kunan had been in negotiations with Carlo Gambino’s people for over a year. The Italians wanted access to Hell’s Kitchen.

 They wanted the Westside peers back. They wanted to tax the construction unions, the parking garages, the union locals. Mickey Spelain was blocking them. Spelain was old school. He hated the Italians. He refused to cooperate with them. He wouldn’t share the neighborhood, wouldn’t split the rackets, wouldn’t bend the knee.

 So, the Gambinos needed a replacement, a more reasonable Irish boss. And Jimmy Counan was auditioning for the job. The audition ended on May 13th, 1977. Mickey Spelain, the reigning king of Hell’s Kitchen Irish rackets, walked out of his apartment building in Woodside, Queens. Three men were waiting. They shot him five times in the chest and face.

 He was dead before he hit the sidewalk. The NYPD knew immediately who ordered it. They knew [ __ ] had finally made his move, but they couldn’t prove it. There were no witnesses, no weapon, no forensics. Mickey Spelain’s murder went officially unsolved for 20 years. Kunan was now the boss of Hell’s Kitchen.

 And the Gambino family through their capo Roy Deo and eventually Paul Castellano himself had a direct line into every racket west of 8th Avenue. This is where the Westies truly become the Westies. The name came from the NYPD. A detective named Tom McCabe started calling Kunan’s crew the Westies because they operated on the West Side. The name stuck.

 And under that name, the Westies committed some of the most brutal murders in New York history. Here’s how their operation worked. And this is the part that made them terrifying even to harden mafia veterans. Kunan developed a technique he called a body disappearance package. Here’s the five-step breakdown. Step one, the opportunity.

 Hell’s Kitchen had hundreds of old tenement buildings with cast iron bathtubs. These tubs could hold a body, could drain blood, could be scrubbed clean with bleach. Step two, the inside connection. Kunan had a network of tenement supers and landlords on his payroll. For $50, they’d forget a Westy spent the night in an empty apartment on the fifth floor.

 Step three, the execution. The victim would be lured to the apartment. Shot once, usually in the head, the body would be placed in the bathtub, drained of blood for 12 hours. Then Kunan, using butcher’s tools he’d purchased at a wholesaliled supply house on West 14th Street, would dismember the body, hands and fingers removed first to prevent fingerprint identification.

 Teeth removed with pliers, head separated last. Step four, the money. This wasn’t just about hiding evidence. Kunan charged a fee for body disposal, $5,000 per body, paid by whoever ordered the hit. By the early 1980s, the Westies were disposing of bodies for the Gambino family, the Genevvesi family, and two Colombian cocaine crews.

 Step five, the problem. The bodies didn’t always stay disappeared. Ruby Stein’s torso surfaced. Other pieces washed up on Staten Island in Jamaica Bay off the Brooklyn waterfront. Each body part that surfaced was another piece of evidence, another chance for the FBI to build a case. The Westies killed at least 30 people between 1975 and 1986.

 The real number is probably closer to 60. Their victims included lone sharks, gamblers, bartenders who witnessed the wrong thing, wives of informants, and rival Irish gangsters from the Bronx. They killed a man named Patty Dugan in 1975 after Dugan murdered one of their own. Kunan personally cut off Dugan’s head and carried it into a bar on 10th Avenue to show the regulars what happened to men who crossed him.

 He set the head on the bar, ordered a beer, told jokes. That story is not apocryphal. Multiple witnesses testified to it under oath. And the money, the money kept coming. By 1982, the Westies were earning an estimated $3 million a year from lone sharking alone. They had locked down the Jacob Javitz Convention Center under construction on the west side through a no-show job scheme that paid 15 of their guys full union wages for work they never performed.

 They took a cut of every construction contract on the west side from 34th Street to 59th Street. They were taxing the ticket sculpers at Madison Square Garden. They had their hooks into the Teamster’s local 882, the local that controlled the peers. Jimmy Kunan was worth, by the best FBI estimates, somewhere between8 and 12 million.

Not bad for a kid from 434 West 43rd Street. But the pressure was building. Mickey Featherstone had always been unstable. The war had broken something in him. By 1984, he was drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels a day. He was paranoid. He was seeing threats everywhere. And he was starting to think Kunan was going to kill him.

 He wasn’t wrong to think that. Kunan and Featherstone had been best friends for 15 years. But the friendship had curdled. Kunan resented Featherstone’s craziness. Featherstone resented that Kunan was getting rich while he was getting sicker. The moment of final betrayal came in 1986. A Westy associate named Michael Holly was murdered in Hell’s Kitchen.

 The shooting was done by a crew member named Billy Boun, but Boon wore a disguise. He wore a wig and glasses designed to make him look like Mickey Featherstone. The NYPD arrested Featherstone. Witnesses identified him. He was charged with a murder he did not commit. And when he called Jimmy Counan from jail asking for help, Kunan told him to plead guilty and do his time, that he’d take care of Featherstone’s family, that everything would work out.

 Featherstone understood in that moment what had happened. [ __ ] had set him up. Kunan had arranged the whole thing to get rid of him. Featherstone was looking at 25 years for a hit he didn’t do. And the man he’d killed for, bled for, hidden bodies for, had just thrown him to the wolves. So Mickey Featherstone did the one thing an Irish gangster was never supposed to do.

He became a government witness. He made a deal with federal prosecutor Mary Lee Warren. He agreed to testify against Jimmy Kunan and every living member of the Westies. In exchange, his murder conviction would be vacated. His family would be placed in witness protection. He’d get a new life, a new name, a new city.

 On March 10th, 1988, the federal indictment came down. 14 members of the Westies were charged under the RICO statute with raketeering, murder, conspiracy, and narcotics trafficking. The specific crimes listed included the murders of Ruby Stein, Patty Dugan, Harold Whitehead, and 12 others. The trial began in September 1988 in the Southern District of New York.

 Mickey Featherstone was the star witness. For six weeks, he sat on the stand and described every murder, every scheme, every body in every bathtub. He named names. He gave dates. He described the tools. He explained how the bodies were cut up and where the pieces were dumped. The jury heard testimony that will never be forgotten by anyone who sat in that courtroom.

 They heard about a crew that killed for money, for pride, for boredom, for revenge, and sometimes for no reason at all. Jimmy Kunan was convicted on March 14th, 1989 on charges of raketeering and murder. He was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison, no parole, federal time. He would die in a cell, which he did on April 4th, 2017 at the Federal Medical Center in Devon, Massachusetts. He was 71 years old.

 He had been incarcerated for 29 years. He never admitted to a single murder. He never apologized. He never cooperated. Whatever else you say about Jimmy Counan, he died the way he lived, silent and unrepentant. The other Westies were convicted alongside him. Kevin Kelly, Kenny Shannon, Jimmy Mroy, Richie Ryan all got long federal sentences.

 The crew was for all practical purposes destroyed. A few junior members tried to keep the rackets going into the early 1990s, but without [ __ ] and Featherstone, without the infrastructure of fear they’d built, it was over. By 1995, Irish organized crime in Hell’s Kitchen was effectively extinct. Gone. Done. A memory.

 Mickey Featherstone disappeared into witness protection. He’s still alive as of the latest reporting, living under a new name in an undisclosed location. He gave one extensive interview to author TJ English for the book The Westies, published in 1990. That book is the definitive account of the crew, and it’s the primary source for almost everything we know about what happened in those tenementss and bars.

 Featherstone spoke with remarkable honesty about what he’d done. He didn’t excuse it. He didn’t romanticize it. He told the truth. And the truth was ugly. So what does Hell’s Kitchen mean now? The neighborhood itself has been transformed. Where the 727 lounge once stood, there’s now a luxury condo. The tenementss where bodies were drained have been converted into milliondoll apartments.

 9inth Avenue, once called Death Avenue because of the freight trains that ran down the middle, killing pedestrians, is now lined with French beastro and yoga studios. The docks where the gophers stole silk and the Westies ran no-show jobs are now the Hudson River Park with joggers and dog walkers and kids playing soccer.

 Real estate developers even tried to rename the neighborhood Clinton in the 1990s to scrub the gangster associations off the maps. It didn’t stick. New Yorkers still call it Hell’s Kitchen. The name is too perfect, the history too deep. But here’s what Hell’s Kitchen teaches us. And this is the real lesson of everything we just covered.

Organized crime is never really about the crime. It’s about the spaces that are left alone. The Gophers ruled because the NYPD didn’t patrol the tenementss. The Westies ruled because the FBI, focused on the five families, didn’t take Irish mobsters seriously until it was almost too late. Organized crime fills a vacuum.

 Where the law goes quiet, the street gets loud. And where the street gets loud, men like Oni Madden and Jimmy Kunan rise to power. The Irish mob in Hell’s Kitchen had one more lesson to teach. The old rules, tribal loyalty, never talk, silence above all, those rules only work when there’s something to be loyal to. When Jimmy Kunan set up Mickey Featherstone, when he used his oldest friend as a disposable tool, he broke the code that made the whole system function.

Featherstone’s betrayal of Kunan wasn’t really betrayal. It was a response to betrayal. Kunan lit the match. The Westies burned and with them burned 130 years of Irish organized crime in New York. Audi Madden understood something Jimmy Kunan never did. The game has an expiration date. Every gangster who plays long enough ends up in a grave or a cell. Madden got out. Kunan couldn’t.

And in the distance between those two men, you can see the whole tragic arc of hell’s kitchen. The kid who came over on a boat with nothing and died rich in Arkansas. The kid who dismembered bodies in bathtubs and died alone in a federal hospital. Two Irish boys from the same 40 blocks.

 Two completely different endings. That’s the real story of the Irish mob. Not the violence, not the money, the choice every one of them had to make. Get out or die in. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week on Iconic Files. Drop a comment below. Who should we cover next? The Winter Hill Gang? The Philly Irish? Tell us where you want to