The Movie Got Jackie Flannery’s Death Wrong — The Real Ending Is Worse – HT

 

 

 

October 6th, 1984. A cold autumn night in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. Jackie Kunan, the older brother of Westy’s boss, Jimmy Counan, walked out of the Skyline Motor Inn on 10th Avenue. He’d been drinking. He’d been talking. He’d been running his mouth to the wrong people for months. A car pulled up. Two men inside.

 Four shots cracked through the night air, tearing into Jackie’s chest and head. He hit the pavement face down, blood pooling under the street light. Time of death, 11:30 p.m. He was 34 years old. The killers drove off. Nobody saw a thing. Nobody ever does in Hell’s Kitchen. Now, here’s the part that matters.

 If you’ve seen the 1990 film State of Grace with Shaun Penn, Gary Oldman, and Ed Harris, you think you already know this story. You think you watched Jackie Flannry die in a hail of bullets at the end, going out like some doomed Irish poet, betrayed by his best friend, dying for a code nobody else respected. You think you saw the truth.

You didn’t. You saw a lie. A beautiful lie. A lie Hollywood needed to tell because the real ending was uglier than any audience would accept. This is the story of Jackie Kunan, the real man behind Jackie Fenery. The story of how the Westies actually operated on the west side of Manhattan. The story of Mickey Featherstone, the Vietnam veteran with the thousand-y stair who became the most feared enforcer in Hell’s Kitchen.

And the story of why State of Grace had to rewrite history. Because the real Mickey Featherstone didn’t die in a doorway like a tragic hero. He did something far worse in the eyes of every wise guy in New York. He flipped. He talked. He became a rat and that ending audiences would have hated it. So Hollywood killed him on screen instead.

But here’s what the movie won’t tell you. The real story is more brutal, more strategic, and more revealing about how organized crime actually ends. Not in a blaze of glory, in a witness chair, with a microphone and a federal prosecutor smiling across the room. To understand why State of Grace got it so wrong, you have to understand who these men actually were.

 Not the characters, the men. Hell’s Kitchen in the 1970s was a different country. 40 square blocks on the west side of Manhattan, bordered by 34th Street to the south, 59th Street to the north, 8th Avenue to the east, and the Hudson River to the west. Irish working class, tenementss, long shoreman bars, Catholic churches on every other corner, and running through the middle of it like a vein of poison, [clears throat] the Westside Irish mob.

The crew, the newspapers would later call the Westies. James Kunan, born in 1946, grew up on West 43rd Street. Frankie Flannry in the movie. In real life, Jimmy Kunan, charming when he wanted to be, religious, went to mass on Sundays, coached his kids little league team, and underneath it all, a sociopath with a meat hook for a soul.

 Then there was Mickey Featherstone, born Francis Thomas Featherstone in 1949, the youngest of seven kids, raised on West 56th Street. scrawny kid, skinny, nervous, the runt of the block. He enlisted in the army at 17, lying about his age. He came home in 1970 with a purple heart, a bronze star, and a head full of demons that would never quiet down.

 Featherstone came back to Hell’s Kitchen and immediately started killing people. The first one was in 1970. A bartender named Lynwood Willis at the Sunbrite Bar on 48th Street and 10th Avenue. Mickey thought the man had insulted him. He pulled a 45 and shot him in the face. He was 19 years old. He beat the case on an insanity defense.

 The Vietnam thing, the shell shock. The doctor said he wasn’t responsible. He walked out of Belleview 18 months later and went right back to the neighborhood. That’s the man Shaun Penn played in State of Grace, reimagined as Jackie Flannry, the volatile, loyal, doomed enforcer with one foot in the old neighborhood and one foot in the grave.

 But here’s what the movie hid. The real Mickey Featherstone didn’t die. He survived. And what he did to survive is the part Hollywood couldn’t film. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. The real Jackie, not the character, the actual man. Jackie Kunan, Jimmy’s older brother. He wasn’t a sympathetic figure. He wasn’t a tragic hero.

 He was a screw-up, a drunk, a guy who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. While Jimmy was building the Westies into a feared crew that earned millions through extortion, lone sharking, hijacking, and murder for hire, Jackie was getting drunk in the landmark tavern on 11th Avenue and 46th Street, telling stories he had no business telling.

 By the early 1980s, the Westies were running Hell’s Kitchen like a private kingdom. They were earning serious money. Estimates from federal investigators put their annual take at over $5 million by 1983. Lone sharking alone brought in $200,000 a month. They controlled the unions on the peers. They controlled the construction sites.

 They controlled the bars. And they had a working alliance with the Gambino crime family. Paul Castellano himself had blessed the relationship. The Westies provided muscle, contract killings, and what Castellano called specialty work. In return, the Italians gave them protection and a piece of bigger scores. The arrangement worked like this.

 The Gambinos would identify a target, maybe a businessman who owed money, maybe a rival they couldn’t openly hit. They’d hand the contract to Jimmy Kunan. The Westies would take the job. The standard fee was $25,000 per hit. The body would disappear forever. Because the Westies had a method nobody else used, they cut the bodies up in bathtubs, dismembered them with butcher knives and meat saws, drained the blood, wrapped the parts in plastic, distributed them across the five burrows in different garbage bags on different nights. No body, no case.

That was Jimmy Counan’s philosophy. He’d say it openly. Nobody, no homicide. The cops can’t charge what they can’t find. Featherstone was the trigger. Kunan was the planner. And between 1975 and 1984, federal investigators believe the Westies were responsible for somewhere between 30 and 60 murders.

 The exact number will never be known because most of those bodies are still missing. 40 years later, still missing. So, what happened to Jackie? The real Jackie. In State of Grace, Frankie Flannry, played by Ed Harris, kills his own brother, Jackie, because Jackie is a liability. The character of Jackie has become a drunk, a loose cannon, a guy who’s drawing heat from the Italians.

 So, Frankie does the cold calculation. Family or business, he chooses business. He has Jackie killed. That part the movie kind of got right, sort of. But the killer wasn’t Jimmy Counan and it wasn’t Mickey Featherstone. The hit on Jackie [ __ ] in October 1984 was actually carried out by outsiders.

 Some accounts say it was retaliation from a rival faction. Some say it was personal, over a debt, over a woman, over something Jackie had said in a bar 3 weeks earlier. What’s documented is this. Jackie Kunan was shot to death outside the Skyline Motor Inn on October 6th, 1984. The case was never solved. Nobody was ever charged.

 And Jimmy Counan, his own brother, didn’t seem particularly upset about it. Some say Jimmy ordered it himself. Some say he simply didn’t object when others wanted it done. The accounts vary on this. What’s known is that Jackie’s death was convenient for Jimmy. It removed a liability. And in the world of the Westies, convenient deaths weren’t accidents.

 Now, here’s where the real story diverges from the movie in a way Hollywood couldn’t show. Because Mickey Featherstone, the real man, started cracking long before any of this. He’d been arrested again in 1979 for the murder of a man named Mickey Spelain, the old boss. Then again in 1980 for an attempted murder.

 He beat both cases. He kept killing, but the pressure was building. Featherstone was using cocaine heavily. By 1984, he was paranoid, erratic, drinking himself into blackouts. His wife, [ __ ] a tough Hell’s Kitchen woman who’d grown up on the same blocks, watched him deteriorate. They had two kids. He loved those kids.

 He’d come home from a hit and play with them on the floor of their apartment on 46th Street like nothing had happened. That was the contradiction at the heart of Mickey Featherstone. He was a stone cold killer who genuinely loved his children. Then came the betrayal that changed everything. In 1985, Featherstone was charged with the murder of a man named Michael Holly, killed at 43rd Street and 10th Avenue.

The problem was Mickey didn’t do it. He had an alibi. He was somewhere else. But the witnesses identified him. They picked him out of a lineup. They testified against him in court. And Mickey Featherstone, sitting in that courtroom, listening to neighbors he’d known his whole life lie under oath, putting him away for a murder he didn’t commit, came to a terrible realization.

Jimmy Counan had set him up. Jimmy had arranged for the witnesses to finger Mickey because Mickey was becoming a problem. Mickey was unstable. Mickey knew too much. Mickey was the only man in the Westies with the standing and the ruthlessness to challenge Jimmy himself. So Jimmy decided to take him off the board.

 Featherstone was convicted in 1986, sentenced to 25 years to life, sent to Attica. And there, in a cinder block cell, he made the decision that would destroy the Westies forever. He flipped. He reached out to the FBI through his wife, [ __ ] He told them everything, every body, every hit, every payoff, every Gambino connection.

 He named Jimmy Counan as the boss. He named Kevin Kelly. He named Kenny Shannon. He named Edna Kunan, Jimmy’s wife, who’d been laundering money through the family bar. He gave them names. He gave them dates. He gave them locations of bodies. Some they found, some they never did. And here’s the part that would have ruined State of Grace as a movie.

 Mickey Featherstone, the man Shaun Penn made into a tragic hero on screen, became one of the most effective government witnesses in the history of organized crime in New York. Bigger than Henry Hill in some ways. He testified at the Westies RICO trial in 1988. He sat on that stand for weeks. He looked Jimmy Kunan in the eye and described in detail how they cut up bodies in bathtubs.

How they killed Ruby Stein, the Lone Shark in 1977 and dismembered him. How they killed Patty Dugan and put his head in a freezer. How they killed Vincent Leon. How they killed and they killed and they killed. The trial lasted four months. Jimmy Counan was convicted on March 16th, 1988. He got 75 years.

 Kevin Kelly got 60 years. Kenny Shannon got 40 years. Edna Kunan got 15. The Westies as an organization ceased to exist that day. The crew that had ruled Hell’s Kitchen for 15 years was wiped off the map by the testimony of one man, Mickey Featherstone. And then Mickey disappeared. Witness protection.

 New name, new city, new life. He’s still alive today somewhere in America. An old man in his 70s, living quietly, watching his grandchildren grow up. The man who killed at least eight people that the FBI knows about, probably more. The man who became the most feared enforcer in Hell’s Kitchen. The man whose memoir written with TJ English in 1990 would become the basis for State of Grace, never living long enough to see the movie betray his actual story.

 So why did the movie change it? Why did Hollywood kill Mickey Featherstone on screen in a doorway full of bullets going out like a tragic Irish hero? Here’s the truth. Audiences won’t accept a rat as a protagonist. They never have. They never will. Look at every mob movie ever made. The informant is always the villain or the side character.

 The hero either dies fighting or goes to prison defiant. He never sits on a witness stand. He never wears a wire. He never testifies against his brothers. Because the audience needs to believe in the code. The audience needs to believe that loyalty meant something. That these men, however violent and corrupt, at least had honor among themselves.

 That’s the romance of the gangster film. That’s why we keep watching. We want to believe in the code even when we know it’s a lie. State of Grace was made in 1990. The screenwriter Dennis McIntyre, the director Phil Jonu, the studio executives at Orion Pictures. They all knew the real story. They all knew Mickey Featherstone was a government witness.

 They all knew Jimmy Counan was rotting in federal prison because of him. But they couldn’t film that. They couldn’t ask Shaun Penn to play a rat. They couldn’t ask audiences to root for an informant. So they killed him on screen. They gave him the doorway, the bullets, the slow-motion descent, the cinematic dignity of dying for the neighborhood.

 They turned him into the thing he never was. A man who died by the code instead of breaking it. And the real Jackie Kunan, the drunk older brother shot dead outside a motor in in 1984. They turned him into Jackie Flannry, Shaun Penn’s character, the doomed soul of the neighborhood. They merged him with Featherstone. They gave him Featherstone’s death.

 But with Jackie’s name and Jackie’s neighborhood loyalty, it was a Frankenstein creation. Two men stitched together to make a hero who never existed. Jimmy Kunan, played by Gary Oldman as Frankie Flannry, also got rewritten. The movie shows him killing his own brother in a fit of cold pragmatism.

 The real Jimmy never killed Jackie. He may have allowed it. He may have known about it, but he didn’t pull the trigger. The real Jimmy is still alive in his late 70s, still in federal prison, still refusing to cooperate, still nursing a hatred of Mickey Featherstone that has lasted nearly 40 years now. There’s a story that came out years after the trial.

 A story about Jimmy Kunan in his cell watching State of Grace on a contraband VHS tape that someone smuggled into the prison. The other inmate said he watched the whole movie without saying a word. And when it was over, when Shaun Penn died in that doorway, Jimmy Counan reportedly turned to the man next to him and said, “That’s not how it ended.

 That’s not how any of it ended.” He was right. It ended in a federal courtroom. It ended with a microphone and a sworn oath. It ended with Mickey Featherstone, the most feared enforcer in Hell’s Kitchen, calmly telling a jury exactly how many people Jimmy Kunan had ordered killed. It ended with the death of an entire criminal organization.

 Not by police, raid, or rival gang, but by the testimony of one cracked Vietnam vet who decided he’d rather live than die with the secrets. That’s the truth State of Grace couldn’t tell. The real Westies didn’t die in a hail of bullets in some neighborhood bar. They died in the witness room. They died in plea deals. They died in federal indictments stretching across hundreds of pages.

They died the way every American crime family eventually dies. Not by the gun, by the cooperation agreement. What State of Grace got right was the atmosphere, the bars, the accents, the Catholic guilt, the neighborhood code. Phil Joanu shot Hell’s Kitchen with real love and real fear. The performances are stunning.

 Gary Oldman’s Frankie is one of the great mob movie performances ever filmed. Shaun Penn’s Jackie is haunted and beautiful. The movie is a masterpiece of mood. But it’s not history. It’s mythology. It’s the Hell’s Kitchen audiences wanted to believe in, not the one that actually existed. The real Hell’s Kitchen had no honor. It had bathtubs full of dismembered bodies and lone sharks who broke kneecaps over $100 debts.

 It had a crew that murdered its own and called it business. And it had one man, Mickey Featherstone, who looked at all of it and decided he’d rather betray every code he’d ever sworn to than die for a lie. He’s still out there. The real Jackie of the movie, living somewhere in middle America, an old man with grandchildren who probably don’t know what their grandfather did.

 A man who killed without remorse for 15 years and then cooperated without hesitation when his own crew turned on him. He didn’t die in a doorway. He didn’t die for the neighborhood. He gave it all up. The brotherhood, the code, the hell’s kitchen of his childhood. He gave it all up to save himself. And maybe that’s the real lesson of the Westies.

 Maybe that’s why Hollywood couldn’t film the truth. Because the truth is the code never existed. The brotherhood never existed. When the pressure came, they all flipped. They all talked. They all chose themselves over each other. The romance of organized crime is the lie the movies sell. The reality is what Mickey Featherstone did in that federal courtroom in 1988.

 One man, one microphone, one decision, and an entire empire built on blood and silence collapsed in four months. That’s the story of grace wouldn’t tell. That’s the ending the audience would have hated. So, Hollywood killed Mickey Featherstone on screen instead. gave him the doorway, the bullets, the dignity, and let the real man slip into witness protection and live out his days in peace, knowing he’d outsmarted them all, including in the end the movie makers who tried to bury his real story under a beautiful lie. If you found this story

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