Mickey Featherstone: The Rat Who Destroyed The Hell’s Kitchen’s The Westies HT

September 14th, 1987. Foley Square, Lower Manhattan. [clears throat] The federal courthouse at 500 Pearl Street. Mickey Featherstone walked into that courtroom wearing a suit instead of a leather jacket, and every wise guy in New York knew the world had just shifted on its axis. He was 38 years old, Vietnam veteran, former enforcer, the man Jimmy Coonan trusted more than his own brother.

And on that morning, under oath, he opened his mouth and started naming names. Murders, bodies, body parts. The dismemberments in the 43rd Street apartment, the bags dumped in the Hudson. He talked for days. By the time he was finished, the Westies were finished, too. This wasn’t just another rat flipping for a deal.

Featherstone was the heart of the crew, the shooter, the believer, the Irish kid from the tenements who’d killed for Coonan, bled for Coonan, gone to prison for Coonan. And now he was the federal government’s star witness in a RICO case so big it would erase 100 years of Hell’s Kitchen gangland history in a single courtroom.

This is the story of how the bloodiest Irish gang in American history got dismantled. How a young Manhattan prosecutor named Rudolph Giuliani used the same statute that broke the five families to break the Westies. How a wife’s instinct saved her husband’s soul. And how the neighborhood they terrorized for 30 years became the most expensive zip code in the United States.

But here’s what most people don’t understand. The Westies didn’t fall because of the FBI. They didn’t fall because of informants in the traditional sense. They fell because Jimmy Coonan tried to frame the one man who would never forgive him for it. And that mistake cost him everything. To understand the trial, you have to understand what before it.

By 1986, the Westies had been operating out of Hell’s Kitchen for the better part of 20 years. Jimmy Coonan was the boss. 40-year-old, blonde, baby-faced, from a respectable Irish family that had owned a butcher shop on 10th Avenue. He’d taken over from Mickey Spillane in ’77 after Spillane was shot dead in front of his Queens apartment.

Coonan had partnered with Roy DeMeo of the Gambino family to make that hit happen. And that partnership defined everything that came after. The Westies became contractors for Paul Castellano, hitmen for hire, the Italian mob’s Irish problem solvers. Featherstone was the muscle. Francis T. Featherstone, born in 1949, raised on West 46th Street.

He’d come back from Vietnam wired wrong. Two tours, decorated. He’d killed for his country, and when he came home he kept killing just for different reasons. He had a wife named [ __ ] two kids, a bad temper, a worse drinking problem, and a loyalty to Jimmy Coonan that bordered on religious. Together, they ran Hell’s Kitchen, loan sharking on 11th Avenue, shylocking at the Javits Center construction site, extortion of every union local in the West Side, hijacking trucks on the docks, bookmaking, murder for hire. The going rate was $25,000 a body, half up front, half on delivery. They did contract work for the Gambinos, the Genoveses, anyone with a problem and cash to solve it. By the mid-80s, the crew was clearing somewhere between 3 million and 5

million dollars a year in cash. Most of it went up their noses or across the bar at the Market Diner on 11th Avenue and 43rd. But the thing that made the Westies different, the thing that made cops afraid of them, was the dismembering. Kooning had a theory, no body, no murder, no murder, no case. So when somebody had to disappear, they really disappeared.

The bodies went to a basement apartment on West 43rd Street. They were cut into pieces with electric knives and butcher saws. The pieces went into trash bags. The trash bags went into the Hudson River weighted with cinder blocks. The Westies called it doing the Houdini. They made at least 30 people vanish that way over the 10-year period.

Some federal investigators put the number closer to 60. You have to understand what kind of psychological pressure that creates. When you can’t find a body, when you can’t even prove someone’s dead, the neighborhood lived in terror. People who owed money paid. People who saw things forgot. People who talked to cops disappeared.

For most of the late ’70s and early ’80s, Hell’s Kitchen was effectively a no-go zone for law enforcement. Witnesses wouldn’t testify. Juries wouldn’t convict. The Westies operated in plain sight because nobody was crazy enough to challenge them. Then in 1986, Jimmy Coonan made the mistake that ended the entire operation.

There was a teamster’s official named Michael Holly. He’d been shot dead on the Upper West Side on April 25th, 1986. The hit was a Westies contract. Kooning had ordered it. But Kooning was getting paranoid. He’d been the boss for almost 10 years and he was starting to see ghosts. Featherstone had been getting too much attention, too much respect on the street.

Kooning started worrying that Mickey was positioning to take over. So, when the Holly murder came back to the crew, Kunen made a decision. He decided to pin it on Featherstone. The setup was crude. Kunen and his people made sure two witnesses identified Featherstone as the shooter. Featherstone was arrested, charged with murder, held without bail.

He was facing 25 to life on a hit he hadn’t pulled. He’d been at home with his wife [ __ ] that afternoon. He had an alibi. But the witnesses, paid off and pressured, said it was him. You know what saved Mickey Featherstone? His wife. [ __ ] Featherstone was 32 years old in 1986. Hell’s Kitchen born and raised.

She’d grown up in the same neighborhood as the men who were now framing her husband. And she did something nobody in that world had done in a generation. She started talking to the federal government. She walked into the office of the Manhattan District Attorney. Then the Southern District of New York.

She told them what she knew. She told them her husband had been set up. She told them where the bodies were. She told them about the apartment on West 43rd Street. She told them about the saws. She told them about the Hudson River. And she told them that if they got her husband out, he would tell them everything else.

Federal prosecutors had been trying to build a RICO case against the Westies for 3 years and couldn’t get a witness to talk. Now suddenly the wife of the second-in-command was offering them the keys to the kingdom. They moved fast. By March 1987, Featherstone had been cleared of the Holly murder when investigators proved the eyewitnesses had been coached.

He walked out of Rikers Island a free man. And then he walked directly into a federal safe house and started making the deal that would dismantle the gang he’d helped build. The lead prosecutor was Rudolph Giuliani, 42 years old, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Already famous for the Mafia Commission trial that had taken down the bosses of the five families just months earlier, Giuliani saw the Westies case for exactly what it was, the next domino.

He assigned two of his sharpest assistants to it, Mary Lee Warren and David Brodsky. The investigation went on for eight months. Featherstone debriefed the FBI for hundreds of hours. He drew maps. He named names. He explained the entire structure of the gang. He gave them everything.

On March 7th, 1987, the indictment came down. 10 defendants, Jimmy Coonan, his brother Jackie Coonan, Kevin Kelly, Kenny Shannon, Tommy Collins, Mugsy Ritter, Floyd Demayo, Richie Ryan, Johnny Halo, and Billy Boku. The charges were RICO conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, extortion, loan sharking, and counterfeiting.

The murders charged in the indictment included Harold Whitehead, Mickey Spillane, Ricky Testa Verde, Vincent Leone, William Walker, John Bokun, and several others. 16 homicides total in the bill of particulars. The investigators believe the actual number was at least twice that. The trial started in September 1987 >> [clears throat] >> in the courtroom of Judge Whitman Knapp at the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square. It ran for almost five months.

Featherstone was the centerpiece witness. He spent 14 days on the stand. The transcript runs almost 2,000 pages. He described every murder. He described how Paddy Dugan’s head had been cut off and used as a trophy at McCoy’s bar in 1975. He described how Ricky Testa Verde had been shot in the head over a $1,300 gambling debt and dismembered in the 43rd Street apartment.

He described how Kunen had laughed while feeding pieces of bodies into a meat grinder. The defense attorneys, led by Larry Hockheiser representing Kunen, attacked Featherstone for everything he was: a killer, a drunk, a liar, a government creation. They put him through the worst cross-examination of his life. He admitted to eight murders.

He admitted to dozens of beatings. He admitted to robbery and extortion and counterfeiting. He sat there in his cheap government suit and admitted to being everything they accused him of being. And then he kept going. Because once he started telling the truth, he couldn’t stop. Jimmy Kunen never took the stand.

He sat at the defense table in a dark blue suit, his blond hair going gray, watching his entire empire dissolve in real time. His wife, Edna, sat behind him every day. His brothers visited on weekends. He was 41 years old and he was watching the rest of his life disappear one witness at a time.

The jury came back on March 15th, 1988, guilty on almost every count. Kunen got 60 years in federal prison. He was sent to the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, the supermax, where they sent the worst of the worst. He would serve every day of that sentence. He never saw the streets of Hell’s Kitchen again as a free man.

He died in federal custody on November 24th, 2017, at the age of 71. He was buried in a small Catholic cemetery in upstate New York. His funeral was attended by a handful of family members. No old crew. No old soldiers. No flowers from Manhattan. Kevin Kelly got 50 years. Kenny Shannon got 40. Tommy Collins got 35.

Mugsy Ritter got 30. The sentences ran consecutively, not concurrently, which meant most of these men would die in prison, and most of them did. Mickey Featherstone got the deal of his life. After his testimony, he and [ __ ] were placed in the federal witness protection program. New name, new city, new lives.

He spent some time in custody on his own admitted murders, served his sentence, and then disappeared into rural America. He’s been spotted occasionally over the years. A few writers have tracked him down. He gave interviews to the journalist T.J. English, whose book The Westies remains the definitive account of the gang.

As of the most recent reporting, Featherstone is in his mid-70s living in an undisclosed location somewhere in the American interior, drawing a social security check under a name nobody from his old life would recognize. He has grandchildren. He goes to church. The Vietnam veteran who used to dismember bodies in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement now lives, by all accounts, an extraordinarily quiet life.

[ __ ] Featherstone is with him. Whatever you want to say about the choices they made, the marriage held. They’ve been together more than 50 years. She saved his life by walking into that prosecutor’s office. He’s never forgotten it. The other survivors scattered. Billy Bokun, who’d been acquitted on some counts, eventually died of natural causes.

Phyllis DeMeo, the only female defendant in the case, served a reduced sentence and disappeared from public view. Richie Ryan was murdered before the trial even concluded, shot dead on a Hell’s Kitchen street corner by parties unknown. A final piece of Westies business closed without a courtroom. The peripheral figures, the soldiers and associates who weren’t named in the federal indictment, scattered into other crews, other cities, other lives.

A few went legitimate, a few died young, most just faded. The Italian connections felt the trial, too. Paul Castellano, the Gambino boss who’d contracted with Kunen, was already dead. He’d been shot down outside Sparks Steak House at 210 East 46th Street on December 16th, 1985, on the orders of John Gotti.

Gotti himself would be convicted in 1992 on testimony from Sammy Gravano. The chain of cooperation that started with [ __ ] Featherstone walking into a federal office in 1987 became the chain that broke the five families across the next decade. Giuliani rode that chain all the way to City Hall.

He was elected mayor of New York in 1993. The Westies trial was one of the trophies he ran on. Now, think about the neighborhood. Hell’s Kitchen in 1987 was a war zone. 42% of the buildings on the West Side between 34th and 59th streets were classified as substandard housing. The murder rate was four times the national average.

The crack epidemic was peaking. Every other storefront on 10th Avenue was either boarded up or running numbers. The Westies had owned that neighborhood for 30 years, and the neighborhood looked like it. Then the convictions came down. The crew was gone, and the city moved. In 1990, the Jacob Javits Convention Center, the same Javits Center where the Westies had run their construction extortion racket, expanded its programming and brought hundreds of millions of dollars in convention business into the West Side.

In 1995, the city rezoned huge sections of Hell’s Kitchen for high-rise residential development. In 2005, the Hudson Yards project began moving through the planning stages. By 2019, that single development had become the largest private real estate project in American history with more than $25 billion in construction along the West Side railyards.

The tenements where Mickey Featherstone grew up are gone. The bar where Patty Dugan’s head sat in a paper bag is gone. The basement apartment on West 43rd Street where the bodies were cut up is gone, replaced by a luxury condominium where one-bedroom units sell for $2 million. The Market Diner closed in 2015.

McCoy’s closed decades ago. The Landmark Tavern, where Kunen held court in the ’70s, still stands at 626 11th Avenue, but the customers are tourists and tech workers now, not loan sharks. The neighborhood doesn’t even use the name Hell’s Kitchen in real estate listings anymore. The brokers prefer Clinton or Midtown West or Hudson Yards.

The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in 2026 is approximately $4,500 a month. The Irish working-class population that produced the Westies, the dockworkers and longshoremen and butchers and tenement families is essentially gone, priced out, pushed to the Bronx, to Queens, to New Jersey, to Florida.

What does this story tell us? The Westies are a case study in why the modern mafia fell. Three things killed organized crime in America: cooperating witnesses, the RICO statute, and the federal government’s willingness to use both. [ __ ] Featherstone walked into that office in 1986 because she trusted that the system would protect her family.

The system did. And every conviction after that, every domino that fell from Kunen to Castellano to Gotti to the bosses of every family in America traces back in some way to that pattern. Wives talked, soldiers flipped, bosses went down. The neighborhood that produced these men was stripped of its history and rebuilt as a billion-dollar real estate market.

The men themselves are dead, in prison, or hiding under government-issued names in towns nobody can find on a map. The empire of fear that ran from 34th Street to 59th Street for 30 years was erased so completely that most of the people walking those sidewalks today have never even heard the word Westies.

That’s the real ending. Not the trial, not the sentences, not even Kunen dying alone in a federal medical facility in 2017. The real ending is that nobody remembers. The bodies are still in the river. The brick is still in the buildings, but the names are gone. The fear is gone. The neighborhood is gone.

Mickey Featherstone is in his 70s now, somewhere in the heartland, watching grandchildren who don’t know what he was. Jimmy Coonan is buried under a small headstone with the wrong name on it. The Hudson keeps flowing. The buildings keep going up. And Hell’s Kitchen, the real Hell’s Kitchen, the one that bled and burned and made men like these, exists now only on the pages of a few old books and in the memories of a few old men who don’t talk about it anymore.

That’s how an empire dies. Not in flames, in silence. If you found this story compelling, hit that subscribe button. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment below. What gangland story should we cover next?