The Westies: Hell’s Kitchen’s Irish Murderers for Hire – HT

 

 

 

January 18th, 1978, just after midnight, the Sunbright Bar on 46th Street and 10th Avenue, Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. A small time hood named Harold Whitehead, was leaning against the bar, drunk, running his mouth about Jimmy Kunan. He’d been warned twice. He didn’t listen. Eddie Kamusky, a 40-year-old former Singh inmate with thick forearms and dead eyes, walked in carrying a brown paper bag.

 Inside the bag was a meat cleaver from the butcher shop where he’d once worked. Whitehead never saw it coming. Kamisky buried the cleaver into the side of his neck. Then again, then again. The bartender locked the door. Mickey Featherstone, a Vietnam veteran with a thousandy stare, helped drag the body into the back.

 By 3:00 in the morning, Harold Whitehead no longer existed. His head was in one bag, his hands were in another. His torso was floating somewhere in the Hudson River. The cops would never find enough of him to file a proper homicide report. This wasn’t the Italian mafia. This wasn’t Brooklyn or Benenhurst. This was a 40 block stretch of tenement buildings on Manhattan’s west side run by a crew of Irish street kids who terrified even the Gambino family.

 They called themselves nothing. The press called them the Westies. And for 15 years, they made Hell’s Kitchen the most dangerous square mile in America. This is the story of how a handful of broken Irish boys from one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York built a murder for higher empire so brutal, so unpredictable, and so willing to dismember their victims that the most powerful crime family in America decided it was safer to be their partners than their enemies.

This is the rise and the bloody fall of the Westies. But here’s what most documentaries get wrong. The Westies weren’t just killers. They were the last gasp of an Irish criminal tradition that had ruled Hell’s Kitchen for over a century. And when they fell, they took an entire piece of New York history down with them.

 To understand the Westies, you have to understand Hell’s Kitchen. The neighborhood ran from 30th Street up to 59th between 8th Avenue and the Hudson River. In the 1960s and 70s, it was a wasteland of crumbling tenementss, long shoreman bars, and Catholic churches where the priests knew every family by their first arrest. The men worked the docks, the women worked the rectories, and the kids learned three things before they learned to read.

 You don’t talk to cops. You don’t cross the Irish and you never ever forget who hurt your family. Jimmy Kunan was born into this world on December 7th, 1946. His father, John Kunan, was an accountant, respectable, quiet, the kind of man who paid his taxes. But in 1966, when Jimmy was 19 years old, a local gangster named Mickey Spelain kidnapped John Kunan, beat him for two days, and held him for ransom over a debt that wasn’t even his. The family paid.

 John came home broken. And Jimmy made a promise to himself that became the engine of his entire life. He was going to kill Mickey Spelain. And he was going to take everything Spelain owned. Mickey Spelain, no relation to the novelist, was the reigning king of Hell’s Kitchen, a throwback, old school Irish.

 He ran lone sharking, bookmaking, and the Union Shapeups on the Westside Piers. He gave turkeys to widows at Christmas. He kissed babies. He never used a gun if he could help it. He was, by the standards of 1966, a gentleman gangster. He had no idea what was coming. Kunan started small, sticking up card games, robbing bookmakers who paid tribute to Spalain.

Each robbery was a message. By the time he was 21, Jimmy had done his first serious prison stretch. And inside Auburn Correctional Facility, he met the man who would change everything, Eddie Kamuski. Eddie was a meat cutter by trade. He’d actually worked the killing floor at a slaughter house on 12th Avenue.

 He knew exactly how to take a body apart. Bone by bone, joint by joint. And he taught Jimmy something that would become the Westy’s signature. If you cut up the body, the cops couldn’t prove murder. Nobody, no case, just a missing person. Just another ghost in the New York night. When Jimmy got out in 1971, he had a plan. He started killing Spalain’s men one by one. Tommy Deainy disappeared.

 Tom the Greek Capitos was shot dead on 10th Avenue in March 1975. Jackie Kunan, no relation, vanished. Each victim was younger than the last, more loyal to Spelain than the last, and each disappearance pulled another stone from the wall of Spelain’s kingdom. Then on May 13th, 1977, Mickey Spelain walked out of his apartment building in Woodside, Queens, where he’d moved to escape the chaos in his old neighborhood. Three men were waiting.

They opened fire from a parked car. Spelain was hit five times in the chest and fell dead in the street, his hat rolling into the gutter. The official record names a Genevvisi hitman named Roy Deo as the shooter hired through Kunan’s new Italian connections. The accounts vary on this. What’s documented is that Mickey Spelain died on the sidewalk and within 48 hours Jimmy Kunan controlled every lone shark, every bookmaker, every union shape up and every after hours club in Hell’s Kitchen. He was 30 years old. But Kunan

was smart enough to know he couldn’t run a neighborhood alone. He needed soldiers, real ones. And the man he wanted most was already a legend on the street. Francis Mickey Featherstone, born June 18th, 1949. 5’7, 140 lb. A face like an alter boy and the eyes of a man who’d already seen the worst thing he was ever going to see.

Featherstone enlisted in the army at 17 and served in Vietnam with a special forces unit. He came home with a headful of trauma, a discharge that listed psychiatric problems, and a reputation that preceded him into every bar he walked into. By the time he was 20, Mickey had killed at least four people on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen.

 The first was a man named Lynwood Willis, shot dead in a bar fight on West 40th Street in 1970. Mickey beat the case on a temporary insanity defense. He came home convinced of two things. He could not be killed and the law could not touch him. When Kunan came to recruit him in 1975, Mickey was working as a bartender, drinking heavily and waking up most nights screaming.

 Jimmy offered him family, money, purpose, a war to fight. Mickey said yes before Jimmy finished the sentence. The third pillar was Billy Boken. They called him the Indian because his mother was Native American and his face had a hard hawkish set to it. Billy was the wheelman, the planner, the cool head. Where Mickey was hottemper and combat instinct, Billy was patient. He’d sit on a target for weeks.

He’d memorize routines. He once shot a man named Mickey Spelain, loyalist named Harold Whitehead. No, that was Kamusky. Billy’s specialty was the moving hit. the driveby, the ambush at a red light. He killed at least six men for the Westies between 1976 and 1984. And then there was Eddie the Butcher Kamiski, the teacher, the cleaver man, the one who’d shown Jimmy how to make bodies disappear.

 Eddie didn’t want to be a boss. He wanted to be useful. He’d cut up at least a dozen victims in the back rooms of Hell’s Kitchen bars before his own end came. And his end came fast. On April 6th, 1977, Eddie Kamuski was sitting at the bar of the Sunbrite when a man named Jimmy Mroy walked in and shot him twice in the head.

 The killing was an inside job. A reminder that in this crew, loyalty had a shelf life. By 1978, Kunan had a problem. He had the territory. He had the soldiers, but he didn’t have the protection. The Italians ran New York and a free agent Irish crew running murders on the west side was a problem the five families could not ignore for long.

 [ __ ] understood something his predecessors never did. The old Irish gangsters had hated the Italians. Spelain had refused to deal with them. He’d called them grease balls to their faces. Kunan called them business partners. In the late summer of 1978, Kunan walked into a meeting with Paul Castellano. Big Paul, the boss of the Gambino family, the most powerful mafia chief in America.

 Castellano was 63 years old, ran his empire from a white column mansion on Staten Island, they called the White House, and didn’t bother with street guys. He almost didn’t take the meeting. But Kunan brought a proposition that interested Big Paul very much. Kunan said in effect, “Give us the Westside. Let us run it as your subsidiary.

 We’ll give you 10% of everything we earn. And in return, when you have a problem you can’t be connected to, you call us. We make the problem disappear permanently, and there will never be a body to find. Castellano said yes. And in that moment, the Westies stopped being a street crew and became something New York had never seen before.

 A wholly Irish murder squad operating under the protection and direction of the Gambino crime family. Hitman on retainer to the mafia. Roy Deo, Castellano’s main enforcer, became the liaison. The phone calls came at all hours. A union official who was talking to the feds, a bookmaker who was holding back, a maid guy from another family who’d insulted Big Paul at a wedding.

The Westies handled it quick, quiet, nobody. The money started rolling in. Loan sharking on the Westside Pierce brought in around $40,000 a week. Bookmaking operations cleared 200,000 a month. They controlled the Javitz convention center construction labor rackets, skimming an estimated $2 million from one project alone in 1980.

They ran the no-show jobs at the docks. 40 workers on the books, maybe 12 actually showed up. The rest split paychecks with the Westies. Add it all up and Jimmy Kunan was personally clearing somewhere between1 and $2 million a year by 1981. Tax-free cash only. Here’s how the no-show racket actually worked.

 Step one, the opportunity. The International Long Shoreman’s Association, local on the Hudson Piers, controlled the hiring hall. Step two, the inside connection. The locals’s president was a man named Tommy Ryan, an old Hell’s Kitchen drunk who owed Kunan $30,000 in gambling debts. Step three, the execution. Every Monday morning at the shape up, Ryan would call out 40 names from a list Kunan had given him the night before.

Half those men weren’t even on the docks. Some were in prison. Some were dead. One had moved to Florida in 1972. Step four, the money. Each ghost worker pulled a paycheck of about $600 a week. The actual cash was picked up by a Westy associate every Friday and walked over to a bar on 46th Street where 80% went to Kunan and 20% went to Ryan to pay down his debt. Step five, the problem.

By 1982, the FBI had wire taps on three of those bars. Ryan didn’t know it. Kunan didn’t know it. But every Friday for almost 2 years, federal agents listened to the cash being counted. But the money wasn’t what destroyed the Westies. It was the killing. The killing got out of control. You have to understand something about Mickey Featherstone. The war never left him.

 By 1980, he was drinking a quart of vodka a day, popping pills, and waking up with no memory of where he’d been the night before. He killed because Jimmy told him to kill. He killed because someone looked at him wrong in a bar. He killed because it was Tuesday. In one stretch in 1979, Mickey killed three men in 11 days.

 None of them had done anything to deserve it beyond owing money or talking too loud. Jimmy started to worry that his most loyal soldier had become a liability. And then there was Kunan himself. The fascination with dismemberment. It started with Eddie Kamaskky’s lessons, but it became something else, something darker. Kunan didn’t just want bodies to disappear.

 He wanted the killing to be known. He wanted the street to whisper about what happened in the back rooms. He’d cut a man’s heart out and place it on a barn napkin. He’d freeze pieces of victims and feed them to the East River one bag at a time. There’s a documented FBI report from 1981 describing a Westy murder where the victim’s hands were boiled in a pot to remove fingerprints, then dumped in separate trash cans across three burrows.

 The first big crack came on July 18th, 1979. Ruby Stein, a Jewish lone shark connected to the Genevese family, walked into the 366 bar at 366 West 46th Street to collect a debt from Kunan. Kunan owed Stein $125,000. The math was simple. Pay it or kill him. Kudan chose option two. Mickey Featherstone shot Ruby Stein in the head right there in the bar.

 Kamaskki before his own death had already taught the crew the dismemberment routine. They cut Stein into eight pieces. They put the pieces in plastic bags. They put the bags in the trunk of a Lincoln. And then Billy Boon and another associate named Tony Lucich drove the trunk down to the South Street Piers to dump the bags in the harbor. But they made a mistake.

They didn’t weigh the bags down. 3 days later, Ruby Stein’s torso washed up in Brooklyn. The hands and head were never found, but the torso had a distinctive scar that Stein’s wife identified. The Genevese family wanted answers. Why was their lone shark in Hell’s Kitchen? who had the contract on him. The investigation that followed pulled the FBI’s organized crime task force into Hell’s Kitchen for the first serious look at what these Irish kids were doing.

 By 1984, the body count was officially over 20. Unofficially, it was probably closer to 30. And the man who knew where every single one of them was buried was Mickey Featherstone. On May 10th, 1985, Mickey Featherstone was convicted of murdering a man named Michael Holly in a case of mistaken identity. The thing was, Mickey hadn’t done it.

 The shooter had been Billy Bokun wearing a fake mustache, deliberately trying to frame Mickey because [ __ ] had decided his old friend was finally too unstable to keep around. Bokun pulled the trigger from a stolen car at the corner of 35th Street and 10th Avenue. Witnesses described the shooter as a small white man with a mustache. Mickey had a mustache.

 Mickey was small. Mickey got the bullet, or the cell, anyway. The jury convicted him in less than 4 hours. He was sentenced to 25 years to life. Sitting in his cell at Auburn, the same prison where Kunan had recruited Kamisky almost 20 years earlier, Mickey did the math. His best friend had set him up.

 His best friend had let him take the fall for a hit his best friend had ordered. And his best friend was now telling people on the street that Mickey had always been crazy, that Mickey had probably done it after all, that maybe it was for the best. Mickey Featherstone made a phone call. The number he dialed was the FBI Organized Crime Task Force.

 The agent who answered was named Joseph Coffee. Coffee had been chasing the Westies for 6 years. He’d watched bodies disappear, watched cases collapse, watched witnesses recant, watched grand juries return empty. And now Mickey Featherstone, the most prolific killer in the crew, was on the other end of the phone saying four words that would end the Westies forever. I want to talk.

 For 72 hours over three days in November 1986, Mickey Featherstone sat in an FBI safe house with a tape recorder and a yellow legal pad. He gave them everything. Names, dates, locations, methods, codes. He told them about Ruby Stein. He told them about Harold Whitehead. He told them about the Dock Racket and the Javit Skim and the Gambino contracts.

 He told them about a murder of a man named Vinnie Leon whose body had been cut up and hidden in the freezer of a meat market on 51st Street for 3 days before being moved. He told them that Jimmy Kunan kept a list of his murders in his head and that the list was at least 20 names long. In March 1987, the FBI moved.

 They arrested Jimmy Kunan, Billy Bokan, Jimmy Mroy, Kevin Kelly, Kenny Shannon, and seven other Westy associates. The indictment ran 120 pages. The charges included raketeering, conspiracy, narcotics, extortion, and 10 murders. The trial began in September 1987 in the Southern District of New York.

 Mickey Featherstone testified for nine days. The jury saw photographs of victims. They heard wiretap recordings of Kunan laughing about a hit. They heard a former Westy associate described the meat cleaver in the back room of the Sunbrite. On March 16th, 1988, the jury came back guilty on all counts. Jimmy Kunan was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison.

 He died in custody in April 2017 at the Federal Medical Center in Devons, Massachusetts. age 70. He never saw the streets again. Billy Boon got 60 years. Jimmy Mroy got 60 years. Kevin Kelly and Kenny Shannon got life. The Westies, as a functioning organization, ceased to exist on the morning of that verdict. Mickey Featherstone went into the Federal Witness Protection Program.

 His new name has never been confirmed publicly. He gave interviews from undisclosed locations through the 90s, often with his face in shadow. He wrote with the journalist TJ English, the foundational book on the crew. He has, by all accounts, been sober since the early 1990s. He is, depending on who you ask, either the greatest rat in New York history or the only Westy who ever told the truth about what they did.

 The Gambino family survived. Paul Castellano was murdered outside Spark Steakhouse at 210 East 46th Street on December 16th, 1985, 2 years before the Westy indictments. John Gotti took over and inherited what was left of the Westy Alliance. But there wasn’t much left to inherit. Hell’s Kitchen itself began to change almost immediately after the convictions.

 The old tenementss came down. Broadway producers and yuppies moved in. Real estate developers renamed it Clinton, then Midtown West. The Sunbright Bar closed. The 366 bars closed. The Long Shoreman’s Union Local got cleaned out by federal monitors. By the year 2000, the neighborhood that had produced the most violent Irish criminal organization in American history was charging $4,000 a month for a one-bedroom walkup.

 In 1990, the director Phil Jonal released a film called State of Grace. Shawn Penn played a character based on Mickey Featherstone. Gary Oldman played a Kunan figure as a deadeyed Irish psychotic, and Ed Harris played the older brother caught between worlds. The film was loosely based on the Westies, but disguised the names.

 Roger Eert reviewed it in September 1990 and praised its raw emotional power, but pointed out a problem. the film could not overcome. State of Grace had the misfortune of opening the same week as Martin Scorsese’s Good Fellows. Audiences wanted Italian glamour. They got Irish despair. The film flopped at the box office and disappeared.

 It is now considered one of the great underseen mob films of the era. If you have not watched it, you should. What does the Westies story actually reveal? It tells you that organized crime in New York was never just Italian. It tells you that the Italians, the supposed kings of New York, were willing to outsource their dirtiest work to a group of unstable Irish street kids because it kept the bodies off their doorstep.

 It tells you that the most dangerous criminal organization is not the one with the most soldiers or the most money. It is the one that has nothing left to lose. The Westies came from a neighborhood that the city had already written off. They had no future to protect. And so they killed without the calculus that constrained the Italians.

 And for 15 years, that fearlessness made them untouchable. It also tells you something darker. The Westies were not destroyed by the police. They were not destroyed by the FBI. They were destroyed by themselves, by Coon’s paranoia, by Featherstone’s instability, by the betrayal of a friend who set up another friend to take a fall for a murder that should never have happened.

 The FBI did not break the Westies. The Westies broke the Westies. Jimmy Kunan died alone in a federal prison hospital. An old man surrounded by strangers. Eddie Kamusky died on a bar stool with his drink still half full. Mickey Featherstone is alive somewhere in middle America, an old man with a different name watching the news.

Billy Boon is still in federal custody. The neighborhood they ruled is now full of theaters and luxury condominiums. The bars where they killed are now coffee shops. The peers where they ran the unions are now a park. The Westies built an empire on the promise that they could kill anyone anywhere and make the body disappear.

 They were right about that for almost 20 years. What they got wrong was simpler. They forgot that the most dangerous body in any criminal organization is the one that’s still breathing, sitting in a prison cell doing the math on who set him up. Mickey Featherstone did the math and the Westies disappeared into history. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe.

 We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment. Which forgotten crime crew should we cover