Eddie Cummiskey: The Westies Butcher Who Vanished Bodies – HT

 

 

 

August 20th, 1976. Late afternoon, Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. The Sunbrite Bar on 10th Avenue and 50th Street. Eddie Kamaskki was sitting at the bar nursing a whiskey, his back turned to the door when a freelance hitman named Joseph Sullivan walked in, raised a pistol to the back of his head, and pulled the trigger at point blank range.

 Kamisky died face down on the bar he’d been drinking at for 15 years. No struggle, no last words. 42 years old. The man who’ taught the Westies how to make corpses disappear had himself disappeared in under 3 seconds. This wasn’t just another Hell’s Kitchen barroom hit. Eddie Kamusky was the most important teacher in the history of the Irish American mob.

 A boxer turned burglar turned convict turned union meat cutter who came home from prison with a skill set that would terrify even the Italian families. They called him the butcher of hell’s kitchen. And while he was alive, he taught his young proteéé Jimmy Kunan a technique so brutal, so coldly practical that Kunan and the Westies turned it into their signature.

They called it doing the Houdini. Make a man vanish, not kill him, erase him. Nobody, no witnesses, no case. This is the story of the forgotten Irish enforcer who served his prison sentence as a meat cutter at Sing Singh, came home to Hell’s Kitchen, and rewrote the rules of how the New York mob disposed of its dead.

 From a workingclass childhood in the tenementss of West 43rd Street to a quiet death on a bar stool, this is the rise and eraser of Eddie the Butcher Kamuski. But here’s what most accounts get wrong. Kamaskki didn’t invent dismemberment. He industrialized it. He took a panicked, sloppy, blood soaked solution and turned it into a procedure.

 A uniontrained sing perfected procedure. And the man who watched him do it, the man who took notes was a quiet kid from West 50th Street named Jimmy Kunan. After Kamaskki was gone, Kunan would use that procedure on so many bodies the FBI eventually stopped counting. Eddie Kamaskki was born in 1934 in Hell’s Kitchen, the westside Irish enclave that ran from 34th Street to 59th Street west of 8th Avenue.

 His father, Edward Kamusky, Senior, and his mother, Mary Hindus, raised eight children in a tenement walkup. Eight kids, two parents, three rooms. The Great Depression was tearing families apart, and the Kuskies held on by the kind of grim Irish stubbornness that defined the neighborhood. Eddie was the second oldest.

 He played hockey at Hell’s Kitchen Park, the rough-edged playground on 48th Street and 10th Avenue. He boxed at the local boys and girls club. He had curly black hair, piercing blue eyes, and what the writer TJ English would later describe as the cockiness of a banttom rooster. You have to understand what Hell’s Kitchen was in those years.

 It wasn’t a tourist neighborhood. It wasn’t gentrified. It was tenement stacked on top of slaughterhouses, long shoreman bars, freight yards, and the westside peers where everything that came into Manhattan came through. The Irish ran the docks. The Irish ran the unions. And the Irish ran their own crews separate from the Italian families.

 They had their own code, their own funerals, their own kind of violence. Eddie dropped out of high school like most of the kids on his block. By his late teens, he was burglarizing commercial buildings on the Lower East Side and lifting cargo off trucks parked overnight on the west side. He was good at it.

 Quick hands, quiet feet, no panic. He could pop a lock in under a minute. He could move a 150lb crate by himself. He didn’t drink on the job. He didn’t talk on the job. The older guys noticed. By the early 1960s, Kamisky was running with a Hell’s Kitchen crew, loyal to Mickey Spelain. Spalain was the reigning Irish boss of the West Side.

Old school, gentlemanly, he gave turkeys to widows at Christmas and kissed babies at St. Raymond Cemetery. He ran lone sharking, bookmaking, hijacking, and labor union shakedowns out of a social club on West 46th Street. And Eddie Kamusky was one of his heaviest hitters. But Eddie had a problem. He had a temper.

 And in 1966, that temper got him into the worst trouble of his life. He was drinking with a man named Mike Yelovich, a Yugoslav Long Shoreman. Everybody called Mike the Yugo. They got into an argument. Yelovich had a rifle. The accounts vary on what happened next, but what’s documented is that the rifle went off and a bullet shattered Kamaskky’s shinbone. Kamaskki was down for weeks.

He came back walking with a slight limp. And when he came back, Mike the Yugo went missing. Kamisky allegedly told friends he had no choice. The man had shot him. The neighborhood had to know what happened to people who shot Eddie Kamaskki. The murder charge came down. Kamuski didn’t wait for trial.

 He paid an international long shoreman’s association contact, climbed into the cargo hold of a freighter bound for South America, and stowed away to Ituay, a port city outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He stayed in Brazil for nearly a year. The FBI put his name on the 10 most wanted fugitives list. He drank cheap rum on the beaches of Rio while New York looked for him.

 He came back to New York eventually. He didn’t beat the murder charge, but he beat the death penalty. And he caught a sentence to Adekica Correctional Facility. He was inside Attica on September 9th, 1971, when the riot erupted. 1,280 inmates seized control of the prison. 43 men died in the 4-day siege, including 10 guards. Kamaskki survived.

 He kept his head down. He watched. And here’s where the story gets interesting. Some accounts place his butcher training at Attica. Other accounts place it at Sing Singh Correctional Facility upstate. What’s documented is that during his prison time, Eddie Kamusky learned the trade of butchery. He earned a card with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union.

 He learned how to break down a side of beef in under an hour. He learned which knives cut tendon. He learned which bones snapped clean and which ones needed a saw. He learned how a body comes apart. Most men learn a trade in prison to start over when they get out. Eddie Kamaskky learned a trade so he could perfect a new murder method.

 He came home to Hell’s Kitchen in the early 1970s. Mickey Spelain was still the boss. Spelain welcomed him back. Eddie was a Spellelain man, or he was supposed to be. But the neighborhood had changed while Eddie was inside. There was a new generation of Irish kids on the block. Younger, hungrier, crazier, and they had a leader.

 A skinny kid from West 50th Street named Jimmy Kunan. Jimmy Kunan was born December 21st, 1946. 12 years younger than Kamaskki. He’d grown up watching Spalain’s crew shake down the neighborhood, and he had a personal grudge. When Kunan was 17, Spelain’s men had kidnapped his father over a debt and roughed him up. Jimmy Kunan promised himself he’d one day kill Mickey Spelain and take the Westside for himself.

 He was already running with a small crew of younger Irish hoods. He was already feared. But he was missing something. He was missing a teacher. Kamisky watched Kunan. He saw something in him. discipline, patience, the willingness to do what older guys couldn’t bring themselves to do. Kunan, for his part, looked at Kamaskki and saw a Hell’s Kitchen legend, a man who’d done time.

 A man who’d killed and made it disappear. A man with a union card and a butcher’s knowledge. Kunan needed Kamaskki. So, he made his move. He sent a Hell’s Kitchen hood named Patrick Dugan, known on the block as Patty, to befriend Kamaskki. Buy him drinks. Bring him into the younger crews orbit.

 By 1973, Eddie Kamusky was sitting at the back tables of the Sunbrite Bar with Jimmy Kunan drinking Bushmills and quietly switching sides. Spelain noticed. Spelain was furious, but he didn’t move on Kamaskki. The accounts vary on why, but what’s documented is that Spelain couldn’t afford to lose his heaviest hitter. Not yet.

 So he swallowed his anger and waited. That was Spelain’s mistake because what Kamaskki was teaching Kunan in the back of the sunbrite would soon make Kunan untouchable. Here’s how the technique worked. This is the Kamaskki method broken down step by step the way it would later be described in federal court testimony. Step one, the opportunity.

 The Westies had a problem every crew has. When you kill a man, the body talks. A body is evidence. A body has fingerprints, dental records, identifying scars. A body lets the police build a case. The Italian families would weight bodies and dump them in the bay. But bodies float. Bodies wash up. So the question Kamaskki put to Kunan was simple.

 What if there was no body? Not a hidden body, no body at all. Step two, the location. The killing had to happen somewhere controlled. A barback room, a basement, a garage, somewhere with a drain, a tile floor, and access to running water. The Sunbrite back room worked. So did the basement of certain tenementss off 43rd Street.

 So did a meat warehouse on 12th Avenue where Kamusky had a contact. Step three, the kill. Quick, close-range pistol or strangulation. No knives at this stage. Knives were for what came after. Step four, the breakdown. This was Kamusky’s specialty. After death, the body was stripped, laid out on plastic sheeting, and broken down using the same techniques he’d learned in the amalgamated meat cutters apprenticeship.

Joints separated cleanly. Saws for the long bones, the torso broken into manageable sections, the head removed last. Blood went into buckets, drained, and disposed of with bleach. Total breakdown time in skilled hands under two hours. Step five, the disposal. The pieces were packed in plastic bags. The bags were packed in coolers with ice.

The coolers were driven to multiple locations and dumped at staggered intervals. Some pieces went into the East River. Some went into the Hudson. Some went near the sewage treatment plants at Randles and Wards Islands where the currents and the tides and the scavenger fish would take care of what was left.

 Identifying parts, hands, teeth, anything traceable were disposed of separately and farthest from the kill site. Kunan called it doing the Houdini, make the man vanish. Nobody, no murder charge. The case wasn’t a missing person’s case. It was nothing. The first major test of the Kamusky method came on November 17th, 1975. The target was Patty Dugan, the same Patty Dugan who had originally lured Kamaskki into Kunan’s orbit.

 Dugan had become a problem. He’d murdered a Westy’s associate named Dennis Curley, known as the Rhinestone Cowboy, in a drunken dispute. He was a loose cannon. He was talking too much. He had to go. Kunan and Kamisky called Dugan in for what they told him was a planned hit on a Spalain crew member. They needed Dugan as the Wheelman. Dugan showed up.

 He was killed in the back room. And then with Kunan watching and learning, Kamaskki broke him down. Kunan’s niece, Alberta Saxs, reportedly provided the knives and helped clean up the basement. The next day is one of the most infamous scenes in Hell’s Kitchen mob history. Kunan Kamaskki and a Westies associate named Billy Bey went out for a drink at the Sunbrite Bar.

 Some accounts say they brought Patty Dugan’s severed head with them in a bag. They allegedly placed it on a bar stool, ordered Dugan’s favorite whiskey, lit one of his cigarettes, and put it in his mouth. They reportedly toasted him. “He [ __ ] up,” they said, but he was still a good Irishman. Then Bey was sent to Dugan’s apartment to retrieve a milk carton from the refrigerator.

 The carton, according to lore documented in TJ English’s book, The Westies, contained a body part that was later said to have been preserved in a pickled jar in a Hell’s Kitchen apartment refrigerator. You read those details and you think the story can’t be real. But three different witnesses would later testify to versions of it under oath.

 Whatever the exact truth, this much was clear. Patty Dugan was gone. Nobody was ever found. No charges were ever filed. The technique worked. Word traveled fast through Hell’s Kitchen. The younger Irish kids talked about Kunan and Kamusky and low voices. The older Spelain crew started looking over their shoulders. And the Italian families across town, the Genevvises and the Gambinos started taking notice.

Because in the world of organized crime, a crew that can make a body disappear without a trace is a crew you do business with carefully or not at all. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. The neighborhood was changing for reasons that had nothing to do with the Irish mob. New York City had announced plans to build the Jacob Javitz Convention Center on the west side.

 The construction zone ran from West 34th Street to West 39th Street between 11th and 12th Avenues. Hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts, concrete, steel, labor, cement deliveries, and every cent of it was about to flow through Mickey Spelain’s territory. Anthony Solerno, the front boss of the Genevese crime family, known as Fat Tony Solerno, did not like that arrangement.

The Genevvis’s wanted the Javit center money. They wanted the labor unions. They wanted the cement contracts. And the only thing standing in their way was Mickey Spelain and his veteran Hell’s Kitchen crew. Solerno’s solution was a freelance Irish hitman from Queens named Joseph Sullivan.

 They called him Mad Dog. Sullivan was a contract killer who would work for any family that paid. He had a quiet voice, a Catholic upbringing, and a body count nobody could verify because most of his victims had simply vanished. Sullivan was given a list. Spelain’s top men, the veterans, the shooters, the earners. Solerno wanted them dead.

 Eddie Kamusky’s name was on that list. This is the part that’s debated. Kamusky had been drifting toward Kunan for 2 years. He was no longer a Spellelain loyalist in any meaningful sense, but on the street he was still seen as a Spalain veteran. To Sullivan, to Serno, to the Genevese hierarchy, Eddie Kamusky was a Spellelain name on a Spalain list.

 The politics of the Westside were too tangled. Kamusky’s relationship with Kunan didn’t save him. It might have killed him. Some Hell’s Kitchen accounts insist that Kunan himself signed off on Kamaskky’s death. That Kunan had learned everything he needed to learn. That the teacher had become a liability. A witness to too many bodies.

 A man who knew where every piece of every Westy victim had been dumped. That [ __ ] made a quiet phone call to a Genevvisi contact and gave Sullivan the green light. Other accounts, including the version Kunan’s defense lawyers told in court years later, insist Kunan had nothing to do with it.

 That Kusky’s death was purely a Genevese ordered hit, and Kunan grieved his mentor like a son grieving a father. What’s documented is what happened on August 20th, 1976. Eddie Kamusky walked into the Sunbrite bar in the late afternoon. The Sunbrite was his second home, 10th Avenue and 50th Street. dim lighting, sticky floors, a jukebox that played the same 15 Sinatra and Tony Bennett songs on a loop. Kamisky ordered a drink.

 He sat at the bar with his back to the door, which is something a man with his reputation should never have done. Some say he was distracted. Some say he was drunk. Some say he simply trusted the neighborhood too much. Joseph Sullivan walked in behind him. He didn’t speak. He didn’t hesitate.

 He raised a pistol to the back of Kamaskky’s head and fired. Kamusky was dead before his face hit the bar. Sullivan walked out. The bartender saw nothing. The patrons saw nothing. The Sunbrite was that kind of bar. Eddie Kamusky’s wake was held 3 days later at the Buckley Funeral Home at 445 West 43rd Street, the same funeral home that had handled Hell’s Kitchen Irish wakes for decades.

 His funeral mass was at Holy Cross Church. He was buried at St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. 42 years old. Wife Shirley, three children, Tamianne, Clifford, and Terrence. It should be noted that some Westy’s oral histories told over the years tell a different version of this killing. In those accounts, Kamaskki was not shot at the Sunbrite by Joseph Sullivan, but in the bathroom of the 596 Club, the small dive bar at 596 West 43rd Street and 10th Avenue that served as the Westies headquarters.

 In those accounts, the shooter was not Sullivan, but a young Westies enforcer named Jimmy Mroy, known as Jimmy Mack, an ex-boxer who had grown up boxing alongside Kamiski at the Boys and Girls Club. The court documented record names Sullivan at the Sunbrite. The whispered Hell’s Kitchen version names Mroy at the 596 Club.

 The street and the official record have never agreed on this killing. What both versions agree on is the result. The butcher of Hell’s Kitchen was dead and Jimmy Kunan was now alone at the top. Within 12 months, Mickey Spelain was dead, too. Shot down outside his apartment in Woodside, Queens on May 13th, 1977. The hit was carried out by a Westies linked crew.

Kunan had won the Westside War. He was 29 years old. What followed was the Westies decade. From 1977 to 1986, Jimmy Kunan and his second in command, Mickey Featherstone, ran Hell’s Kitchen with a level of brutality that even the Italian families found excessive. They ran lone sharking, bookmaking, labor extortion, contract murder, and Javit center kickbacks.

 They became partners with the Gambino crime family under Paul Castellano who reportedly told Kunan, “When you have a problem, my problem becomes your problem.” Castellano paid the Westies to handle disposals for the Gambinos. Bodies that Italian crews killed went into Westy’s trunks, Westies coolers, Westies disposal chains. Kamaskky’s technique taught in the back of the Sunbrite Bar in 1973 and 1974 was now being used by the most powerful crime family in America.

 Mickey Featherstone would later testify in detail to federal prosecutors in 1986 about how the Houdini method worked. He would describe specific dismemberments, specific disposal sites, specific dates. Featherstone’s testimony was based on what he had seen Kunan do. And what Kunan did was simply what Kamaskki had taught him.

 On November 17th, 1988, Jimmy Kunan walked into a federal courtroom in Manhattan. The RICO indictment ran to dozens of counts, including murder, kidnapping, and raketeering. Kunan was convicted. He was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison. No parole. James Mroy, the same Jimmy Mack whom street legend named as Kamisky’s killer, was convicted in the same case and sentenced to 60 years.

Mroy died in federal custody in May 2011. Kunan remains in federal prison. Joseph Sullivan, the mad dog, was eventually convicted of unrelated murders and died behind bars in 2017. The Sunbrite Bar is gone. The 596 Club is gone. replaced by a grill called Mr. Bigs at the corner of West 43rd and 10th Avenue.

 Hills Kitchen has been renamed Clinton on city maps. The tenementss are luxury condos. The peers are tourist boardwalks. The neighborhood Eddie Kamusky grew up in does not exist anymore, but the Kamisky method does. Federal investigators who worked organized crime cases in the 1990s and 2000s have testified that the dismemberment and disposal technique pioneered by Kamaskki and refined by Kunan became, in their words, the gold standard for body disposal in American organized crime.

 Crews from Boston to Philadelphia to New Orleans adopted variations of it. The techniques traveled. The teacher was forgotten. That’s the real story of Eddie Kamuski. He never ran a crew. He never had a nickname like Mad Dog or Crazy Joe. He never made a famous quote that ended up in a movie. He worked for 15 years at the edge of two crews.

 Drank Bush Mills at the same bar every afternoon. Taught one young protetéé everything he knew and was killed by a single bullet on a Friday afternoon. He didn’t become a legend. He became a procedure. There’s a particular kind of tragedy in that. Kamaskki learned a trade in prison the way men learn trades in prison to survive to start over to come home with a skill.

 He came home with the skill and he turned the skill into a weapon and the weapon outlived him by 50 years and counting. Eddie the butcher Kamisky spent his life making other men disappear. In the end, the neighborhood that taught him, the bar that fed him, and the protetéé he trained, all watched him do the same thing he’d done to so many others.

 He vanished into a wake at Buckley Funeral Home, into a plot at St. Raymond’s Cemetery, into the footnotes of TJ English’s book, into the testimony of cooperating witnesses, into a procedure with no name. And that’s the real lesson of the Westies. Not the violence, not the money, not the Javit center concrete. The lesson is that in the mafia, the men who teach the technique are always the first to be erased by it.

 Kamaskki taught Kunan how to make people disappear. Kunan made him disappear. Kunan’s proteges testified Kunan into a federal cell. The technique outlasts every man who learns it. The body bag is the only inheritance. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment. What forgotten mafia figure should we cover next?