The Irish Gang So Violent, Even the Italian Mafia Was Terrified – ht
November 15th, 1986, 2:45 in the afternoon, a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan. Mickey Featherstone raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth, and sat down across from the man who had tried to have him buried in concrete. Jimmy Coonan didn’t blink. He just stared at his best friend. The man who had stood next to him at his wedding, the man he’d shared blood oaths with in the back of Irish bars on 10th Avenue.
And Featherstone, calm as a priest, opened his mouth and began to list the names of the dead. Seven of them. Then eight. Then 10. Everybody Coonan had ever dumped in the Hudson River. Every limb they had sawed off in a bathtub on 9th Avenue. Every envelope of cash Coonan had kicked up to Paul Castellano. Featherstone gave them everything.
The whole empire, brick by bloody brick. You have to understand who these two men were. Jimmy Coonan wasn’t just another gangster. He was the Irish kid from Hell’s Kitchen who did what no one thought possible. He took a neighborhood of longshoremen, bartenders, and petty thieves, and turned it into a criminal enterprise that earned the respect of the Gambino family.
He made the Italians come to him. And Mickey Featherstone, a Vietnam veteran, a decorated soldier with a steel plate in his head and demons in his eyes, the most feared shooter on the West Side of Manhattan. Together, they ran the Westies. And for almost 15 years, they were untouchable. This is the story of how paranoia, jealousy, and one framed murder brought down the most violent Irish-American gang in American history.
This is how the code of silence died on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. This is the ultimate betrayal. But here’s what most people don’t know. Featherstone didn’t flip because he got caught. He flipped because his best friend tried to put him in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. And the moment Jimmy Coonan made that decision, he signed the death warrant for everything he’d ever built.
Let’s rewind. To understand how it all fell apart, you have to understand how tight these two men were. Jimmy Coonan was born on December 21st, 1946. Middle-class Irish family. His father, John, was an accountant. That’s right. An accountant. The father of the most sadistic Irish gangster in New York history balanced ledgers for a living.
Jimmy grew up on West 43rd Street. Quiet kid, thin, always watching. He had three siblings and a chip on his shoulder the size of the Empire State Building. Because when Jimmy was 12 years old, a neighborhood tough named Mickey Spillane kidnapped his father, beat him, and held him for ransom. 12 years old. And Jimmy Coonan spent every waking moment from that day forward planning how he was going to kill Mickey Spillane.
That’s who Coonan was, a grudge with a pulse. Mickey Featherstone was different. Born September 2nd, 1948. Two years younger than Coonan. Grew up rougher, poorer, meaner. His father died when he was a kid. His mother struggled. Featherstone joined the army at 17, went to Vietnam. Came back with a Bronze Star, a head injury, and a case of PTSD so severe the VA doctors put him on enough medication to sedate a horse.
He was 5’7, maybe 140 lb soaking wet. But when his eyes went flat and his voice dropped low, grown men crossed the street. Because Mickey Featherstone would kill you. Not for money, not for respect. He’d kill you because he was already somewhere else in his head, and you had just wandered into the wrong memory.
The two of them met in the early 1970s. Hell’s Kitchen was a war zone. Irish crews fighting Irish crews over loan sharking, hijackings, and the lucrative Javits Center construction payoffs that hadn’t even started yet. Coonan recruited Featherstone. He saw something in him. A weapon he could aim. >> [snorts] >> Featherstone saw something in Coonan, too. A brother, a leader.
Someone who made sense of the chaos in his head. They became inseparable, and they started killing. In 1975, they murdered a man named Paddy Dugan. Then they took his body to an apartment on 10th Avenue. And here’s where Coonan’s darkness came out. He pulled out a boning knife. He started cutting. Featherstone later testified that Coonan told him, quote, “The cops can’t prove murder without a body.
” Coonan didn’t just kill people, he disappeared them. He dismembered them in bathtubs. He packed the pieces in duffel bags. He drove them to the piers and dropped them into the Hudson. He turned Hell’s Kitchen into a graveyard nobody could find. By 1977, Jimmy Coonan had gotten his revenge. Mickey Spillane, the man who had kidnapped his father 15 years earlier, was gunned down outside his apartment in Woodside, Queens.
The hit was arranged through the Gambino family, specifically through a sadistic butcher named Roy DeMeo. Coonan had made a deal. The Italians would kill Spillane. In return, Coonan would kick up tribute to Paul Castellano. He would work for the Gambinos. The Westies would become the Gambinos’ Irish muscle on the West Side.
That deal is what made Jimmy Coonan a legend. And that deal is what eventually destroyed him. Because Mickey Featherstone hated it. He hated the Italians. He hated taking orders. He hated watching the money his crew earned flow uptown to Howard Beach. Featherstone was a street kid from Hell’s Kitchen.
He believed the neighborhood was sacred. Coonan had just sold it. But for a while, the money was too good to argue about. Let me break down how the Westies actually made their money. Because this wasn’t a bunch of drunks swinging pool cues. This was a sophisticated operation. Here’s how the construction shakedowns worked.
The Javits Convention Center was being built on the West Side starting in 1979. Billions of dollars in contracts. Every union local on that site was either controlled by or paying tribute to organized crime. The Westies got their piece through a man named John Cody, boss of Teamsters Local 282. Cody controlled the concrete trucks. No concrete, no building.
The Westies provided muscle. They intimidated contractors. They threatened foremen. They made sure every no-show job on the site went to a Westy or a Westy relative. Coonan took a piece. Featherstone took a piece. They kicked 15% up to the Gambinos. On a good month, the Westies pulled in $100,000 from the Javits site alone.
And the construction guys were terrified because everybody on the West Side knew what happened to people who said no to Jimmy Coonan. They ended up in duffel bags. Then there was the loan sharking. The Westies loaned money at what was called 5 for 6. You borrowed 500, you paid back 600 in a week.
That’s 20% interest per week. Miss a payment, the interest doubled. Miss two payments, somebody showed up at your house with a baseball bat. And the Westies had hundreds of customers, dock workers, gamblers, cocaine addicts, small business owners on 9th Avenue who needed to make payroll. The loan sharking alone generated over $200,000 a year in pure profit.
Then came the hijackings. The piers on the West Side were still active in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Containers came in. Trucks rolled out. The Westies had inside men at three different shipping companies. When a truckload of televisions or liquor or cigarettes was about to leave a pier, a phone call was made.
The truck got intercepted at a stoplight on 12th Avenue. The driver got pulled out. Sometimes he got paid off. Sometimes he got beaten. The truck disappeared into a warehouse on West 47th Street. Within 6 hours, the cargo was sold wholesale for 40 cents on the dollar. A single hijacking could net $50,000 in cash.
They were doing two or three a month. And underneath all of that was the pure violence. Contract killings. The Westies became the go-to Irish hit squad for the Gambinos. If John Gotti or Paul Castellano needed somebody taken out, and they didn’t want Italian fingerprints on it, they called Jimmy Coonan. Coonan charged $25,000 per body. Featherstone and a shooter named Jimmy McElroy handled the actual work.
They were paid 10,000 each per hit. The rest stayed with Coonan. For 7 years, this was the rhythm. Shakedown, hijack, loan, kill, collect, repeat. And nobody could touch them. The NYPD had tried. The FBI had tried. The District Attorney’s office had tried. Every single case fell apart. Why? Because the Westies followed the code. Nobody talked. Nobody cooperated.
And every potential witness ended up at the bottom of the Hudson River before the grand jury ever subpoenaed them. But here’s where it gets interesting. Because while the Westies were unstoppable on the outside, something was rotting on the inside. Jimmy Coonan was changing. The power was doing something to him.
The money was doing something to him. And his relationship with Mickey Featherstone, the brother he’d sworn loyalty to, was starting to crack. You see, by 1984, Coonan had become paranoid, deeply, pathologically paranoid. He trusted almost no one. He suspected everyone. And the more successful the Westies became, the worse it got.
He started carrying a gun inside his own home. He had three different apartments around Manhattan and rotated between them randomly. He interrogated his own crew members about conversations they’d had at bars weeks earlier. He was convinced somebody was going to flip. Somebody was going to go to the FBI. And the person he suspected most, the person he watched the hardest, was his closest friend, Mickey Featherstone.
Why Featherstone? Two reasons. First, Featherstone’s mental state was deteriorating. The PTSD from Vietnam was getting worse. He was drinking heavily. He was on lithium. He would have violent mood swings in public, screaming at strangers in diners, threatening bartenders over nothing.
Coonan was worried that one day Featherstone was going to snap, get arrested, and start talking to save himself. Second, and this was the bigger reason, Featherstone was openly critical of Coonan’s alliance with the Italians. He thought it made them weak. He thought Coonan was taking orders like a servant. And he wasn’t shy about saying so, to other members of the crew, in public, at bars.
And every time he said it, it got back to Coonan. And every time it got back to Coonan, the paranoia grew. Then in 1985, something happened that changed everything. On April 25th, 1985, a West Side construction foreman named Michael Holly was shot and killed. Holly was gunned down on 35th Street in Manhattan. Four shots. He was dead before he hit the pavement.
Time of death, approximately 10:30 in the morning. Holly’s murder was a revenge killing, a personal beef between Holly and a Westie associate named Billy Bokun. Bokun blamed Holly for the death of his brother years earlier. The hit had nothing to do with Featherstone. Featherstone wasn’t there. He was nowhere near 35th Street that morning. He had an alibi.
But here’s where Coonan did something you can only explain through paranoia and cold calculation. He decided to use the Holly murder to get rid of Featherstone. Here’s how the frame-up worked. Bokun was the actual shooter, but Bokun and Featherstone looked vaguely similar. Both white, both around the same height, both with mustaches.
On the day of the hit, Bokun wore a disguise, a wig, sunglasses, a fake mustache made to look like Featherstone’s. Eyewitnesses on the street described the shooter as a man who looked like Mickey Featherstone. The cops pulled Featherstone’s picture. They put together a photo array. Witnesses picked him out.
And just like that, Featherstone was charged with murder. Featherstone went on trial in March of 1986. He pleaded not guilty. He had alibis. He had witnesses. But the eyewitness identifications were strong, and the prosecution pushed hard. And in March 1986, despite being innocent of this particular murder, Mickey Featherstone was convicted, sentenced to 25 years to life.
And that’s when Featherstone figured it out. He was sitting in a cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. He had almost 25 years in front of him. And he started putting the pieces together. The disguise, the similar build, the witnesses who conveniently picked him out of a lineup, the fact that Bokun was still walking around free on 10th Avenue, and it hit him.
Jimmy Coonan had set him up. His best friend had framed him for murder. You have to understand what this meant to Featherstone. The Westies weren’t just a gang to him. They were family. Coonan wasn’t just his boss. Coonan was the man he’d trusted with his life for more than 10 years. Featherstone had killed for Coonan.
Featherstone had taken risks for Coonan. And Coonan had repaid him by sending him to prison for the rest of his life. The decision didn’t come easy. The code of Hell’s Kitchen said you die before you talk. Featherstone’s own father-in-law had been a union guy who lived by that rule. Featherstone himself had preached it for years. But something had broken.
Something Coonan had broken the moment he chose self-preservation over brotherhood. So Featherstone made a call to his wife, [ __ ] [ __ ] Featherstone was a tough woman, West Side Irish, fierce, loyal. She believed her husband was innocent because he was innocent. And she started working the phones. She started talking to lawyers.
She started talking to investigators at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. And she made contact with a federal organized crime task force that had been trying to crack the Westies for years. The task force had a name they’d been hearing for months, Rudy Giuliani, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
And Giuliani had a weapon they had never used on the Irish before, RICO. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act had been passed in 1970. For years it sat mostly unused. Then Giuliani, starting around 1983, began wielding it like a hammer. He used it against the Colombo family. He used it against the Bonannos. Most famously, he used it in the Mafia Commission trial that ended in November 1986, convicting the bosses of four of the five families on a single indictment.
Giuliani had figured out something nobody else had figured out. RICO didn’t require you to prove a single specific crime. It required you to prove that a criminal enterprise existed and that the defendants participated in it. You could string together 20 years of crimes into one case.
You could lock up an entire organization in one trial. And now Giuliani was looking at the Westies. In the summer of 1986, federal investigators met with Mickey and [ __ ] Featherstone. The conversations were careful, quiet, and legally complicated. Featherstone had one demand. He wanted his Holly conviction overturned.
He wanted his name cleared of a murder he did not commit. In exchange, he would do something no West Side Irish gangster had ever done. He would testify against the Westies, all of them, including Jimmy Coonan. The feds agreed. The deal was made. And in the fall of 1986, the federal government filed a sweeping RICO indictment against the Westies’ 10 defendants.
14 murders, loan sharking, extortion, hijacking, contract killing. Everything the Westies had done for a decade was in the indictment. And the star witness was the man Jimmy Coonan had called his brother. The trial began in September 1987 in federal [clears throat] court in Manhattan. The prosecutors were Mary Lee Warren and David Brodsky, working under Giuliani’s direction.
The courtroom was packed. Reporters, FBI agents, family members of the victims. And sitting at the defense table, Jimmy Coonan, his cousin Kevin Kelly, his shooter Jimmy McElroy, Billy Bokun, and the rest of the Westies’ leadership. They watched the door open. They watched a federal marshal walk in. And behind the marshal came Mickey Featherstone.
Featherstone took the stand on November 10th, 1987. He was calm, composed. His voice was flat. He looked Jimmy Coonan in the eye, and he began to talk. He talked for days. He told them about Paddy Dugan’s dismemberment in 1975. He described the sound of the bone saw. He told them about the murder of a gambler named Ricky Testa Yello in a bar on 10th Avenue.
He told them about the body parts dumped in the Hudson. He named the victims. He named the killers. He named the dates. He named the bars where the deals were made, the apartments where the bodies were cut up, and the docks where the duffel bags went into the water. And then he did something that sent shockwaves through organized crime in New York.
He linked the Westies to the Gambinos, directly, on the record. He testified that Jimmy Coonan and Jimmy McElroy had volunteered to shoot a labor official for John Gotti at Frank DeCicco’s funeral. He laid out the kickback structure. He explained how Paul Castellano had blessed the Spilaine hit. He gave federal investigators a road map into the heart of the five families.
The defense tried everything. They attacked Featherstone’s credibility. They pointed to his mental illness, his Vietnam PTSD, his lithium prescriptions, his history of violence. They called him a killer trying to save himself. And all of that was true. But the prosecution had something the defense couldn’t touch, corroboration.
Because once Featherstone started talking, the FBI went back and found the evidence. Surveillance photos, wiretaps they had collected years earlier but couldn’t use without context, phone records, business records, cooperating witnesses who had been too scared to talk before but who felt safer now that Featherstone had broken the ice.
The government’s case wasn’t just Featherstone’s word. It was Featherstone’s word backed up by 15 years of accumulated evidence that suddenly made sense. The trial lasted 3 months. The jury deliberated for 8 days and on March 6th, 1988, the verdicts came in. Jimmy Coonan, guilty on racketeering, guilty on multiple murders, guilty on loan sharking, guilty on extortion, sentenced to 75 years in federal prison.
Kevin Kelly, guilty. 60 years. Jimmy McElroy, guilty. 60 years. Billy Bokun, guilty. 50 years. Down the line, every single defendant convicted. The Westies as an organization, as a criminal entity, as a presence in Hell’s Kitchen, destroyed in one trial. Giuliani called it one of the most important organized crime prosecutions in American history. He was right.
Because the Westies had been considered the last gang in New York City that the federal government could not touch. They had no mafia structure, no initiation ceremonies, no recorded conversations. They operated on pure ethnic loyalty in a 20-block neighborhood where everyone knew everyone and nobody talked.
RICO and one broken friendship had brought the whole thing down. Let me explain what happened to the key players after that verdict because the ripple effects are what complete the story. Jimmy Coonan went to federal prison to serve his 75 years. He was initially sent to a high-security facility. He would file appeals for years.
Every appeal was denied. He is still in federal custody as of the most recent public records. He will likely die in prison. He never once expressed public remorse for any of the murders. He never once admitted he had framed Mickey Featherstone for the Holly killing. The man who built the Irish mob in Hell’s Kitchen took his secrets with him behind the bars of a federal cell.
Mickey Featherstone’s Holly murder conviction was eventually overturned. Federal investigators confirmed, on the record, that Featherstone had not been the shooter. Billy Bokun was the actual killer. The New York state conviction was vacated. Featherstone was placed in the federal witness protection program.
He and [ __ ] and their children were relocated. He was given a new name, a new identity, a new life somewhere far from the West Side of Manhattan. His story was later told in a landmark book by journalist T.J. English titled The Westies, published in 1990, which became the definitive account of the gang’s rise and fall.
Billy Bokun, the actual shooter of Michael Holly, was convicted at the RICO trial of racketeering charges that included the Holly murder. He served decades in federal prison. Rudy Giuliani used the Westies case as another stepping stone. He had already made his name with the commission trial. He added the Westies to his resume.
In 1989, he ran for mayor of New York City and narrowly lost. In 1993, he ran again and won. He would become the mayor who presided over 1994 through 2001. And for the next 30 years, his name would be synonymous with RICO prosecutions, organized crime takedowns, and eventually, in a twist none of the Westies could have seen coming, his own indictment under the very same racketeering statute he had used to destroy them.
In 1998, Giuliani himself was charged with racketeering in Georgia related to alleged election interference. The man who invented the modern RICO prosecution became, decades later, a RICO defendant. History has a sense of humor that organized crime never appreciates. The Westies, as a gang, were finished. Some low-level associates tried to keep things going through the 1990s.
They failed. Hell’s Kitchen itself was changing. The real estate boom of the 1990s and early 2000s transformed the neighborhood. The tenements came down. Luxury high-rises went up. The bars where Coonan and Featherstone had plotted murders became yoga studios and wine bars. Ninth Avenue, once called the Devil’s Kitchen, became a restaurant row for Midtown office workers.
The neighborhood that had produced the most violent Irish-American gang in American history erased every physical trace of them within 20 years. So, what does the Westies story actually tell us? Three things. The first is that loyalty in organized crime is a fiction. It always has been. Every gangster preaches it.
Every gangster violates it. The code of silence exists until somebody is facing the rest of his life in prison and then it evaporates. Jimmy Coonan didn’t think he was violating the code when he framed Featherstone. In his mind, he was protecting the organization. But the moment he put self-interest above brotherhood, he created exactly the informant he had always feared.
Paranoia is prophetic. If you spend enough years terrified that your best friend will betray you, eventually you will do something that forces him to. The second is that the RICO Act changed organized crime in America forever. Before RICO, law enforcement had to prove individual crimes. One murder, one robbery, one shakedown.
A boss could insulate himself with layers of soldiers and never be directly connected to a crime. RICO destroyed that model. It allowed prosecutors to treat the entire enterprise as the crime. Once Giuliani proved it worked against the commission, every organized crime group in America became vulnerable.
The Westies were the test case for ethnic gangs outside the Italian mafia. And they proved that RICO could bring down any criminal organization, regardless of structure, regardless of tradition, regardless of how tightly the neighborhood kept its secrets. The third, and maybe the most uncomfortable truth, is that the romance of the American gangster has always been a lie.
Jimmy Coonan was not a Robin Hood of the West Side. He was a man who dismembered corpses in a bathtub on 10th Avenue. Mickey Featherstone was not a soldier of the street with honor. He was a mentally ill killer who flipped to save his own life the moment it was threatened. The Westies did not protect the neighborhood. They bled it dry.
They charged loan shark interest to the poorest families on Ninth Avenue. They beat union men who refused to pay tribute. They murdered their own friends over grudges that no outsider could even understand. There was no honor in any of it. There was only money, paranoia, and blood. Mickey Featherstone is believed to still be alive somewhere in America, living under an assumed name, a grandfather now, watching old westerns on cable television.
Jimmy Coonan is behind bars where he has been for more than 35 years and where he will almost certainly die. The neighborhood they once ruled has been renamed Clinton on official city maps, though old-timers still call it Hell’s Kitchen. The piers where the duffel bags were dumped are now the Hudson River Park where tourists jog and children play.
The tenement apartment where Paddy Dugan was carved into pieces is long gone. In its place stands a glass-and-steel condominium where a one-bedroom rents for $4,000 a month. Nobody who lives there knows what happened. Nobody who lives there has ever heard the names Jimmy Coonan or Mickey Featherstone. That’s the real ending of the Westies story.
Not the trial, not the verdict, not the 75-year sentence. The real ending is the forgetting. The neighborhood moved on. The city moved on. The only people who remember are a handful of retired detectives, a few aging FBI agents, and the families of the victims who never got their bodies back because those bodies are still somewhere at the bottom of the Hudson.
Jimmy Coonan spent his life building a criminal empire in a 20-block slice of Manhattan. He earned millions. He killed dozens. He made the Gambino family respect him. He outlasted rivals. He outfought police. And for 15 years, he sat on top of the Irish underworld like a king. But he made one mistake. He stopped trusting his best friend.
And his best friend, the man he framed for murder, walked into a federal courtroom in November of 1987 and destroyed every single thing Jimmy Coonan had ever built in 6 days of testimony. That’s the real lesson of the Westies. Not the violence, not the money, not even the RICO Act that brought them down. The lesson is that no criminal empire, no matter how tight, no matter how Irish, no matter how feared, can survive its own boss turning on his best friend.
Betrayal doesn’t come from the outside. It comes from the inside every single time. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week on Iconic Files. Drop a comment below. Who do you think was more responsible for the Westies’ fall? Jimmy Coonan for the frame-up or Mickey Featherstone for breaking the code? We read every comment. Tell us what you think.