The Westies: The Irish Mob That Defeated the Mafia… Then Destroyed Itself – HT

 

 

 

November 18th, 1978. 5:30 in the afternoon. The Sun Bright Bar, 736 10th Avenue, Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. Mickey Spillane was walking to his car in Woodside, Queens, when a man stepped out from behind a parked sedan and opened fire. Four rounds, point-blank range. Spillane dropped on the sidewalk outside his apartment building, bleeding out in front of neighbors who pretended they didn’t see anything.

By the time the ambulance arrived, the king of Hell’s Kitchen was already gone. The shooter walked calmly to a waiting car and disappeared into the Queens night. This wasn’t just another mob hit. Mickey Spillane wasn’t some street-level thug. He was the gentleman gangster, the guy who sent turkeys to widows at Thanksgiving, who kissed babies at Irish weddings, who ran Hell’s Kitchen for almost two decades with a code of honor that belonged to another century.

 He was the last of the old-school Irish bosses. And the man who ordered his execution was a 32-year-old psychopath named James Coonan, who had spent half his life plotting this exact moment. This is the story of how a pack of Irish street kids from the West Side of Manhattan built the most violent crew in New York City history, how they humiliated the Italian Mafia, how they cut bodies into pieces and fed them to the Hudson River, how they became so brutal that the Gambino crime family, the most powerful organization

in America, decided partnership was safer than war. And how that same brutality, the thing that made them feared, eventually ate them alive from the inside. But here’s what the history books don’t tell you. The Westies weren’t destroyed by the FBI. They weren’t destroyed by the Gambinos.

 They weren’t destroyed by rival gangs. They were destroyed by one man who got tired of the killing. One man who finally said, “Enough.” One man whose name the crew never should have underestimated. His name was Mickey Featherstone. And when he turned, he took the whole thing down in 14 months. To understand how it got to that bloody afternoon in Queens, you have to understand Hell’s Kitchen itself.

In the 1960s, the neighborhood ran roughly from 30th Street up to 59th Street, from 8th Avenue West to the Hudson River. It was Irish, deeply, almost tribally Irish. The families had been there for generations, working the docks, the slaughterhouses, the railyards. The piers along the Hudson moved cargo worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and the longshoremen who worked those docks paid kickbacks to whoever controlled the neighborhood.

For most of the 1960s and early ’70s, that man was Michael J. Spillane. Spillane was born in Hell’s Kitchen in 1933. Tall, good-looking, married into the politically connected McManus family, he ran the classic Irish rackets, bookmaking, loan sharking, labor shakedowns on the West Side piers. He kept the neighborhood quiet.

 Cops knew him, priests knew him, politicians owed him favors. He was the kind of gangster who genuinely believed in Robin Hood. He’d loan a widow money for her husband’s funeral. He’d pay a family’s rent when the father was out of work. He was beloved, and that love, in his mind, made him untouchable.

 But there was a kid watching him, a kid with a long memory and a grudge that would not quit. His name was Jimmy Coonan, born in 1946, the son of a Hell’s Kitchen accountant. When Coonan was 16 years old, Spillane’s crew kidnapped his father. They held the old man for ransom. They roughed him up. They humiliated him in front of the neighborhood. The Coonan family paid.

The father came home. But something cracked inside young Jimmy that never healed. From that moment, he had one goal in life. He was going to kill Mickey Spillane. He was going to take everything Spillane had. And he wasn’t going to stop until every man who touched his father was dead. That’s the fuel that built the Westies, not money, not power, revenge. Coonan came up fast.

By 1966, at 20 years old, he was already a feared street fighter. He partnered with a kid named Edward Cumiskey, known as the butcher, a man who worked part-time at a meatpacking plant and understood, with unsettling clarity, how to disassemble a human body. Cumiskey taught Coonan what would become the Westies signature.

 You don’t just kill a man, you make him disappear. Without a body, there is no murder case. Without a murder case, there is no prosecution. The technique they developed was called doing the Houdini. When a Westie target was killed, the body was moved to a specific apartment on West 43rd Street. There, in a bathtub, using knives from the meatpacking district, the crew would dismember the corpse.

 They’d cut off the hands. They’d cut off the head. The hands went in one bag. The head went in another. The torso and limbs were packaged in trash bags, driven to different boroughs, and dumped in rivers, landfills, and construction sites. Nobody, no case. By the early 1970s, Coonan had gathered a small army of violent Irish kids around him.

 There was Richie Ryan, a stone-cold killer who’d murdered his first man at 16. There was Tommy Hess. There was Billy Beaty. There was Kevin Kelly and Kenny Shannon. But the most dangerous of them all was a young Vietnam veteran named Francis Thomas Featherstone, known to everyone as Mickey. Featherstone was born in 1949 on West 46th Street.

 He was small, thin, and quiet. He looked like a choir boy. He had nightmares from the war. He heard voices. Some days he couldn’t leave his apartment. But put a gun in his hand, and he became something else entirely. By the time he was 22, Featherstone had killed at least four men in Hell’s Kitchen bars. He’d walk into a room, shoot the target, walk out, and sit on a stoop smoking a cigarette while the ambulance pulled up.

He’d been tried for murder. He’d beaten the case with an insanity defense. Jimmy Coonan looked at Mickey Featherstone and saw the perfect weapon. Their first move was economic. In 1972, Coonan started shaking down the same bartenders and bookmakers that Spillane had been protecting for years. The message was clear.

 There’s a new name on the street, and the old king is finished. Spillane’s crew started disappearing. Tommy Devaney, one of Spillane’s lieutenants, gone. Tommy Capetola, another Spillane man, gone. Each time, the body was never found. Each time, everyone in the neighborhood knew who was responsible. Nobody talked. Here’s where it gets interesting, because while Coonan was dismantling Spillane’s crew one by one, something bigger was happening downtown.

The Gambino crime family, headed by Paul Castellano since 1976, had a problem. The West Side piers and the Javits Convention Center project were prime territory. Billions of dollars in potential extortion. But the Italians couldn’t operate there directly. Hell’s Kitchen was Irish turf, and the Irish would rather die than take orders from Italians.

The Gambinos needed a translator. They needed a partner. They needed someone who could control the neighborhood and deliver the contracts. Coonan saw the opportunity and moved. In late 1977, he arranged a meeting with Roy DeMeo, the Gambino family’s most notorious hitman. DeMeo ran a crew out of the Gemini Lounge in Flatlands, Brooklyn, and by that point had personally killed or arranged the killings of at least 75 men.

 DeMeo and Coonan understood each other immediately. Both of them were butchers, literally. Both of them specialized in making bodies disappear. The meeting was set up through a labor racketeer named Danny Marino. The terms were straightforward. Coonan would get the Gambino family’s blessing to take over Hell’s Kitchen. In exchange, Coonan would kick up 10% of all his earnings to Paul Castellano.

The Westies would serve as contract killers for the Gambinos when Italian hitmen couldn’t be used. They’d enforce Gambino interests on the West Side piers, at the Javits Center, and at the Jacob Javits construction sites. In return, the Gambinos would protect them from other New York families and help them expand.

 Paul Castellano personally approved the deal. According to FBI wiretaps later played in court, Castellano told his underboss, “These Irish guys are crazy, but they get things done. We put them in a room. Whoever we want dead comes out in garbage bags. It’s clean.” There was one condition. Coonan had to remove Mickey Spillane first.

 Castellano would not sanction a partnership with a pretender. He wanted a boss, and a boss controls his territory absolutely. For 13 months, Coonan planned it. He knew Spillane had left Hell’s Kitchen and moved to Woodside, Queens, to escape the rising violence. He knew Spillane’s routine, when he walked his dog, when he left for the Sun Bright, when he came home, when he visited his mother-in-law.

Coonan subcontracted the hit itself to a Genovese family associate named Roy DeMeo, returning the favor. An outside shooter meant no Westies fingerprints. When the gunman stepped out from behind that parked car on November 18th, 1978, he was fulfilling a contract that had been 15 years in the making.

 Ever since a teenage Jimmy Coonan watched his father come home bruised and broken. With Spillane dead, everything belonged to the Westies. The piers, the conventions, the unions, the bars, the bookies, the loan shark roots. Every dollar that moved through Hell’s Kitchen now passed through Jimmy Coonan’s hands first. And this is where you have to understand how the money actually worked.

 Because the Westies weren’t just killers. They were a sophisticated criminal enterprise that by 1980 was generating an estimated $8 million a year in cash. And that’s just what the federal government could document later. The core rackets worked like this. First, loan sharking. A Hell’s Kitchen longshoreman who needed $500 fast would go to a Westies lender.

The loan came at six for five, meaning you borrow five, you pay back six. That’s 20% vig per week. Miss a payment, the vig compounds. Miss three payments, your legs get broken. Miss five, you disappear. The Westies had roughly 400 active loans on the street at any given time, generating close to $40,000 a week in pure vig.

Second, labor racketeering. The International Longshoremen’s Association Local 824 controlled hiring on the West Side piers. Coonan had the local in his pocket. Any stevedoring company that wanted to load or unload cargo on those docks paid a kickback. Any worker who wanted a shift paid a kickback. The Javits Center, which was under construction from 1979 through 1986, was worth an estimated $2 million a year in labor payoffs alone.

 Third, and this was the Gambino contribution, contract murder. When Paul Castellano wanted someone killed outside of New York, or someone whose death couldn’t be traced back to the Italian families, the contract went to Coonan. Price per head ranged from $10,000 to $100,000, depending on the target. Between 1978 and 1985, the Westies are believed to have executed at least 20 contract killings on behalf of the Gambino family.

 The bodies, as always, were never found. By 1980, Jimmy Coonan had achieved everything. Money, territory, a mafia partnership, the respect, or at least the fear, of every major crime boss in New York. He moved to a comfortable home in Hazlet, New Jersey. He drove a Cadillac. He wore tailored suits and took his wife Edna to expensive Italian restaurants where the Gambino captains knew his name.

 He was 40 years old and he was, by every measure, a success. But that’s where the story changes. Because the same thing that got Coonan to the top was the exact thing that would destroy him. The violence wasn’t a tool anymore. It was the whole personality. The first sign came in 1978 when Coonan and his crew murdered a small-time hustler named Ricky Tassiello over a $70,000 loan shark debt.

Tassiello was lured to Coonan’s apartment on 56th Street. When he arrived, Coonan shot him in the head. Then, according to later testimony, Coonan, Richie Ryan, and Mickey Featherstone spent the next several hours dismembering the body in the bathtub. Featherstone, already unstable, was said to have become physically sick.

 He walked out of the apartment that night covered in blood and shaking. Something in him broke that he would never recover from. The paranoia set in deep after that. Coonan started seeing enemies everywhere. He ordered murders over minor disputes. A Hell’s Kitchen bartender named Harold Whitehead, hit over a personal beef in 1978, disappeared.

A young neighborhood kid named Vincent Leone, killed because Coonan suspected him of being an informant, disappeared. Crew members who asked the wrong questions started turning up dead, or not turning up at all. Then came the cocaine. Starting around 1982, cheap high-grade cocaine flooded Manhattan and the Westies consumed it like fuel.

Coonan’s number two, Kevin Kelly, was a heavy user. Kenny Shannon was a heavy user. Crew members who had been disciplined killers became erratic, paranoid, unreliable. Tempers that used to be controlled now exploded over nothing. The old rule about not talking in front of outsiders broke down.

 Westies started bragging in bars about killings. They started arguing in public. They started threatening each other. Mickey Featherstone saw it all. And Featherstone by this point was sober. He’d stopped drinking in 1979 after a drunken shootout nearly killed him. He was married to a woman named [ __ ] the love of his life, and they had two young children.

The voices from Vietnam had quieted. He’d found something like peace. And now he watched his crew, the men he’d killed for, losing their minds on cocaine and paranoia. The trap closed around Featherstone in May of 1985. A Hell’s Kitchen teamster named Michael Holly was shot to death on West 35th Street in a dispute over a car dealership.

Witnesses identified the shooter as a short, thin, white man in his 30s. The description fit Featherstone exactly. He was arrested, tried, and in a state courtroom in 1986 convicted of murder and sentenced to 25 years to life. There was just one problem. Featherstone didn’t do it. Here’s what actually happened, and it’s the kind of thing that only comes out in a courtroom full of cooperators.

The real shooter was another Westie named Billy Bokun, a man who physically resembled Featherstone. Bokun had been sent to kill Holly over an unrelated beef. Coonan and Kevin Kelly, knowing Featherstone was becoming a liability, knowing he was getting clean and getting uncomfortable with the killings, had arranged for Bokun to wear a disguise that would make witnesses identify Featherstone instead.

 They framed their own guy. They used the justice system to execute him without firing a shot. Sitting in a state prison cell in 1986, Mickey Featherstone finally understood. His own crew, the men he’d bled for, had set him up to die in prison. His wife [ __ ] figured it out first. She started tape-recording conversations with Kevin Kelly, trying to get him to admit the frame-up.

 She took those tapes to the federal government. In February of 1986, Mickey Featherstone signed a cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. He became the first Westie in the crew’s history to turn. And Mickey Featherstone knew everything. Every body, every location, every contract, every kickback, every conversation.

 20 years of crimes, all in one man’s memory. The federal racketeering indictment came down in March of 1987. 10 defendants. James Coonan, Kevin Kelly, Kenny Shannon, Richie Ryan, Jimmy McElroy. Charges included the full weight of the RICO statute. Racketeering conspiracy, multiple counts of murder, kidnapping, extortion, loan sharking. The trial began in September of 1987 in Manhattan federal court, and it was a spectacle.

For 10 weeks, Featherstone sat on the witness stand and walked the jury through every killing, every dismemberment, every payoff, every Gambino meeting. He named Paul Castellano. He named Roy DeMeo. He named Danny Marino. He described the bathtub on West 43rd Street in detail that made jurors physically ill. On March 16th, 1988, the verdict came back.

Guilty. All 10 defendants. Every count. Jimmy Coonan, the boy who had spent his life hunting Mickey Spillane, was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison. Kevin Kelly got 60 years. Kenny Shannon got 40 years. Richie Ryan had already been convicted separately of seven murders and was sentenced to life. The Westies were finished, completely.

By the end of 1988, the crew that had terrorized Manhattan for two decades simply did not exist anymore. The bars they’d extorted were gone. The loan sharking roots had been absorbed by other crews. Hell’s Kitchen itself, as anyone who had known it would recognize it, was disappearing under waves of real estate development that would eventually turn it into a neighborhood of luxury high-rises and chain restaurants.

Mickey Featherstone entered the federal witness protection program in 1988. He and [ __ ] and the kids were given new names and moved to an undisclosed location. He’s never been publicly identified or interviewed again. Jimmy Coonan remained in federal prison for over three decades. He was finally released in January of 2024 at the age of 77, having served nearly 36 years.

His release was quiet. There was no welcome back in Hell’s Kitchen. There was no crew waiting. The neighborhood he grew up in no longer existed. Paul Castellano, the Gambino boss who had sanctioned the Westies partnership, had been murdered himself on December 16th, 1985. Shot down outside Sparks Steakhouse on East 46th Street by John Gotti’s hit team.

 Roy DeMeo, the Gambino hitman who had helped kill Mickey Spillane, had been found dead in the trunk of his own Cadillac on January 10th, 1983. Even the Italians who had profited from the Westies brutality ended up dead or in prison. Here’s what this story actually reveals. The Westies won the war against the Italian Mafia.

 They did something no other non-Italian crew in American history ever accomplished. They forced the Gambinos to treat them as equal partners. They controlled Manhattan’s most valuable real estate. They made millions of dollars. They became folklore, but they couldn’t control themselves. The same unhinged violence that made them feared, the same willingness to dismember bodies in bathtubs, the same culture of paranoia and betrayal meant the crew was always going to eat itself.

It was never a question of if. It was only a question of when. Jimmy Coonan spent his whole life chasing revenge for what happened to his father. He built an empire on that hatred. He killed his enemies. He buried them, literally in pieces. He sat across the table from Paul Castellano as an equal.

 And in the end, the thing that destroyed him wasn’t the FBI or the Italians or a rival crew. It was the man he’d tried to frame. It was Mickey Featherstone, the Vietnam veteran with the haunted eyes, who finally decided he’d rather tell the truth than die in a cell for something he didn’t do. That’s the real story of the Westies.

A neighborhood gang that defeated the Italian Mafia, partnered with the most powerful crime family in America, and then, in the span of just a few years, drowned in its own blood. The Irish mob won the war. They just couldn’t survive the peace. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe.

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