The 1977 War That Let the Irish Take Over Hell’s Kitchen from the Gambinos HT
It started with a single phone call. A man decided he wanted out. He was tired, probably scared, and the federal agents who had been building a case against the crew he ran with made him a promise. “Cooperate,” they said. “Tell us what you know. We’ll take care of the rest.” He believed them.
2 weeks after that call, his mother stopped answering her phone. His brother was gone from his apartment. His kids couldn’t be found at their school, and the house his sister had been renting on the other side of the burough had been emptied overnight, windows dark, door left unlocked. He hadn’t been touched. Not yet.
That was the message. To understand why this happened and why it was almost inevitable the moment he made that call, you have to understand what kind of organization he decided to testify against. Not just what they did, but where they came from and what they believed about loyalty, silence, and the people who broke both.
This is the story of the Jamaican poses in Flatbush, Brooklyn. What they built on those streets, how they enforced their code, and what happened to the men and families caught between the gang and the government. Flatbush is a neighborhood that has been many things to many people over the decades.
In the 1970s and 1980s, as Caribbean immigration to New York exploded, large portions of Flatbush and East Flatbush became home to one of the largest Jamaican communities in the United States. Church Avenue, Nostrand Avenue, Flatbush Avenue itself lined with West Indian bakeries, record shops and social clubs where men from Kingston and Spanish Town and Montego Bay gathered and felt something close to home.
But something else came over with the community, something that had roots in the same Kingston slums these men had fled. The possesses Jamaican organized crime gangs known as possesses had their origins in the garrison communities of West Kingston in the 1960s and 1970s. They began as political enforcers hired muscle for the two major Jamaican political parties who needed men willing to intimidate voters and control neighborhoods.
By the time the 1980 Jamaican general election came around, these gangs had murdered approximately 800 people in the course of the political violence alone. 800 people over an election. When that political structure shifted and many of the gunmen associated with the losing faction needed to run, they ran to New York. They ran to Miami.
And when they arrived, they brought the same organizational model they had operated under in Jamaica, applied it to the drug trade, and built something that American law enforcement was completely unprepared for. By 1989, federal estimates put the number of PAR members and associates in the United States at somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000.
operating across 40 gangs in 15 major cities. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms attributed roughly 1,000 murders to these groups between 1985 and 1989 alone. four years, 1,000 murders in New York, Flatbush, and East Flatbush became primary territory. The blocks off Church Avenue and into the avenues below became a corridor that Jamaican crews controlled through marijuana distribution, crack sales, and a level of violence that made even hardened NYPD veterans take note. One federal official who worked organized crime cases in Brooklyn during the late 1980s said the
posies reminded him of something out of a war zone, not organized crime in the traditional sense, [snorts] something raw, something that didn’t negotiate first. If you’re finding this kind of street history compelling, hit subscribe. We cover stories like this every week and it costs you nothing to stay connected.
The most important thing to understand about Jamaican posy culture, the thing that explains what happened to that man’s family in Flatbush, is the code around informants. Other organized crime groups had rules about snitching. The Italian mafia had OMAr. Street gangs had their own versions of the same principle.
But Jamaican pizzazz took it further, much further. The poses had a documented practice called jointing. When a member of a gang was discovered to have cooperated with police or federal authorities, the punishment wasn’t simply death. It was dismemberment at the joints using a hacksaw.
And the body parts weren’t just discarded. They were sent to the informants family as a message, as a demonstration of what the code costs when you break it. This wasn’t unique to one crew. It was documented across multiple posi investigations by the FBI, DEA, and international law enforcement as a standard enforcement mechanism.
Not a rare act of rage, but standard procedure. And here’s the part that matters for the story we’re telling. The family wasn’t collateral damage in this framework. The family was the point. Targeting those closest to an informant served two purposes. First, it punished the person who had broken the code in the most personal way possible.
Second, it sent a message to every other member of the organization watching. This is what cooperation costs, not just your life, everyone connected to yours. The poses understood something that federal witness protection programs are still struggling to fully address decades later.
that for people embedded in these communities, the threat to family is often more effective than any threat to the individual. Men who would face their own death with something approaching calm would fall apart over their children, their mothers, their brothers. So when a man inside a flatbush connected crew decided to cooperate with federal agents, he wasn’t just putting himself in danger.
He had made a decision on behalf of every person who shared his blood, his address, history, or his name, whether they knew it or not. By the time the ’90s crew, a Brooklyn-based street gang with Jamaican roots, was operating out of Flatbush and Canazi in the 2000s and early 2010s. The neighborhood had decades of established gang infrastructure beneath it.
The crew operated marijuana trafficking networks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, ran multiple stash houses across the borrowers, and maintained armed control over their territory the way these organizations always do. through reputation, through fear, and through the willingness to act when either of those two things was challenged.
Federal and DEA investigations into Flatbush connected crews repeatedly ran in K to the same obstacle. The communities these gangs operated inside were tight. People didn’t talk, not because they supported the gangs in every case, but because they understood exactly what talking cost. You lived two blocks from these men. You saw their cars every morning.
Your kids went to the same schools as their kids. Calling the feds wasn’t just a moral decision. It was a calculation about survival. And the math almost never worked out in favor of cooperation. When DEA agents began building a case against one Flatbush connected crew and tapped a phone line, what they heard wasn’t unusual.
A suspected informant inside the drug network had been identified. Within days of the identification, the call went out. The conversation was brief. The price to have the man killed was agreed upon quickly. $5,000. That number should make you pause. $5,000 for a human life for someone’s son, someone’s father.
That’s what the calculus and code looked like inside these organizations. Not because life was cheap in some abstract sense, but because the code treated informants as something outside the category of person that normal protections applied to. Someone who had crossed that line had, in the logic of the street forfeited the usual considerations.
Federal agents identified the target in time. In that specific case, the murder was stopped. But the case revealed something that investigators already knew and was still struggling to fully prosecute. The decision to kill had been made immediately, reflexively, without hesitation.
There was no debate, no consideration. The moment cooperation was suspected, the elimination was the response. That is the world the man in Flatbush was dealing with when he picked up the phone and called the agents. What happened to his family in the weeks after his cooperation became known followed a pattern that federal prosecutors and victim advocates working in Brooklyn had documented across multiple cases.
The first moves are never the most violent. The first moves are designed to communicate. A sister’s address gets visited. Not a shooting. Just men standing outside making sure she sees them see her. A mother’s phone starts receiving calls at odd hour hours. Silence on the other end. Then a hang-up.
A brother finds his car has been damaged in a way that could have been random. But both he and the people who did it know it wasn’t. This is the language and it is remarkably effective because the person who cooperated understands every message perfectly. They know what comes after the language. They’ve seen it.
They’ve been part of the world that sends these messages. They know that the silence on the phone and the men outside the building aren’t a warning that might not be followed through. They’re a countdown. In the case of the shower posy informant who cooperated in the federal prosecution of Christopher Dudus Ko, one of the most powerful Jamaican gang leaders ever prosecuted in the United States.
The aftermath was documented in court filings that read like a war casualty report. After the man’s testimony, his sister’s house was burned down. The home of his children’s mother was bombed. Six of his cousins were murdered. His father was forced to flee the country. And when immigration authorities initially ordered the informant himself back to Jamaica, his attorney argued in court that he would be killed the moment he stepped off the plane.
A judge agreed and called it not speculation given what had already happened to the people around him. Six cousins murdered for one man’s decision to cooperate with federal law enforcement. That is not collateral damage. That is doctrine. If you’ve made it this far into this story and you want to see more videos like it, subscribe right now.
We drop new content weekly and every video goes this deep. Don’t miss the next one. The federal government has spent decades attempting to address the threat that witness retaliation poses to the entire system of law enforcement. Witness protection programs, relocation services, new identities, all of it exists because investigators understood early that no one would cooperate if cooperation meant death for everyone they loved.
But the programs have limitations that the posies and organizations like them have always understood better than anyone. You can relocate a man. You cannot always relocate his mother who doesn’t want to leave. You cannot always relocate his children’s mother who has her own family and her own life. You cannot erase every connection in a world where everyone on the block knows everyone.
Where community ties run decades deep. Where a new name doesn’t mean anything if the people who knew you before can still find the people who knew you. Ronald Williams, a leader of the ’90s crew in East Flatbush, was convicted in 2018 of conspiracy to commit murder for hire, conspiracy to obstruct justice through murder and marijuana trafficking, among other charges.
He was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison. His codefendant Leon Campbell received 9 years for his role in the murder for hire conspiracy against the suspected informant in their network. The murder in that case had not been carried out. Federal agents had moved fast enough to prevent it.
But the lesson that investigators took from that case and from every case like it was not that the threat had been defeated. It was that they had gotten lucky. The infrastructure that makes witness retaliation possible. The network of eyes in the neighborhood. The communication systems between jailed members and those still on the street.
It’s the evening of May 13th, 1977 in Woodside, Queens. Mickey Spillane is sitting at home watching television with his three sons when his phone rings. He answers, listens for a moment, then tells the boys he needs to step outside. He walks out the front door of his apartment building toward a car idling at the curb.
Shots ring out across the quiet residential street. Mickey Spillane, the boss of Hell’s Kitchen, the man who had kept the Italian mob out of his neighborhood for 15 years, is killed right there on the pavement in front of his own home. He never made it back inside. What followed wasn’t chaos. It wasn’t grief. It was business.
Within weeks, Jimmy Coonan, a young Irish gangster, had claimed Hell’s Kitchen for himself, struck a deal with the most powerful crime family in New York, and transformed a scrappy neighborhood gang into what Rudy Giuliani would later call the most savage organization in the long history of New York City.
This is the story of how a personal grudge, an Italian power play, and one assassination in Queens in 1977 handed Hell’s Kitchen to the Westies, and why the Gambino family didn’t just allow it. They helped make it happen. Before we get into it, if you’re new here and you want more stories like this about American organized crime, go ahead and hit subscribe right now.
We cover these stories every week, and there’s a lot more where this came from. Hell’s Kitchen in the 1960s wasn’t the neighborhood full of wine bars and rooftop restaurants it is today. It was a dense, working-class Irish-American enclave on the west side of Manhattan, running from roughly 34th Street up to 59th, bordered by 8th Avenue and the Hudson River.
The streets were cramped, the tenements were old, and the money that moved through the neighborhood moved through crime. Loan sharking, gambling, union shakedowns, waterfront rackets along the Hudson piers. This was the economy of Hell’s Kitchen, and the man who ran it was Mickey Spillane. Spillane was unlike most mob bosses you’ve probably heard about.
He didn’t dress in tracksuits. He was movie star handsome, well-read, smart enough to have skipped two grades in school before dropping out to support his widowed mother. He married Maureen McManus, whose family had run the local Democratic political club since 1905, which gave him serious political cover.
He was known as the gentleman gangster. He ran his rackets with a certain discipline. He kidnapped Italian mobsters and held them for ransom, which was audacious, but he kept the neighborhood in order and kept the Italians largely out. By the early 1970s, Spillane had built something real. His organization controlled Hell’s Kitchen, had tentacles into Madison Square Garden, the Hudson River waterfront unions, and was positioned to control the construction of the Jacob K.
Javits Convention Center, a massive new building going up right in his backyard on the west side. The amount of money that project was going to generate from construction contracts, union labor, and kickbacks was enormous. Spillane would have been powerful enough to challenge the Italian families for control of entire sections of the city.
The Genovese crime family saw this clearly, and they were not going to let it happen. The Italians demanded a piece of the Javits construction rackets. Spillane said no. And so the Genovese family, led by powerful figure Anthony Fat Tony Salerno, went to war with a guy who had maybe 20 men against one of the largest organized crime organizations in American history.
And here’s the thing that should embarrass the Genovese family to this day. Spillane win. The Italians, with all their numbers and all their firepower, could not dislodge Mickey Spillane from Hell’s Kitchen. That embarrassment would cost Spillane his life. But to understand what happened next, we need to go back even further to 1966 because the war that ended Spillane wasn’t just about construction money.
It was also about a kid with a machine gun on a rooftop and a grudge that had been burning for nearly a decade. Jimmy Coonan grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, same as Spillane. He was 18 years old when Spillane’s men kidnapped his father and pistol-whipped him in the street over some neighborhood dispute.
For anyone else, that would have been a terrifying warning. For Coonan, it was a declaration of war. He climbed to the roof of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement building with a machine gun and opened fire on Spillane and his associates below. He wounded nobody, but Spillane took it seriously enough to go personally to Coonan’s father, slap him around, and tell him to control his son.
That response only made things worse. Coonan was arrested in 1967 on homicide and kidnapping charges, eventually pleaded down to manslaughter, and spent years in prison. When he got out in 1971, he came back to the same streets and started the same war, recruiting a crew of younger, hungrier Irish men who had no patience for the older generation’s way of doing things.
One of those recruits was a Vietnam veteran named Mickey Featherstone. Featherstone was small and unremarkable-looking, which confused people right up until the moment they understood exactly why everyone in Hell’s Kitchen was terrified of him. Now, here’s where the story gets interesting because these two conflicts, the Genovese family’s war with Spillane over the Javits Center, and Coonan’s personal war against Spillane, were about to merge.
Anthony Salerno of the Genovese family figured out something the Italian mob rarely admitted out loud. Sometimes the best weapon against an Irishman is another Irishman. He reached out to Coonan with a proposal. If Coonan could become boss of Hell’s Kitchen, Salerno would take control of the Javits construction rackets and cut Coonan in for a share of the proceeds.
All Coonan had to do was finish what he’d started. The deal was struck. Salerno then hired Joseph “Mad Dog” Sullivan, a freelance hitman with Buffalo crime family connections, to systematically eliminate Spillane’s top lieutenants. In late 1976, Tom Devaney and Eddie “The Butcher” Kaminsky were killed. In January 1977, Tom “The Greek” Kapatos was shot dead.
If you’re enjoying this story, take 2 seconds and hit that subscribe button. This channel is built on stories exactly like this one, and we put out new content every week. It costs you nothing, and it helps us keep going. Three of Spillane’s most trusted men were now dead. Spillane himself had already moved his family out of Hell’s Kitchen to Woodside, Queens a couple of years earlier because threats against his children had gotten too serious.
With his lieutenants gone and his physical distance from the neighborhood, his grip on Hell’s Kitchen was slipping fast. But slipping wasn’t the same as finished. Fat Tony Salerno decided it was time to close the account permanently. Roy DeMeo was a Gambino crime family soldier from Brooklyn, and he was already connected to Coonan.
The two had met when Coonan murdered loan sharking financier Ruby Stein, a man who owed money to multiple people, including DeMeo’s network. They had common interests. DeMeo agreed to do the job as a favor, and on the evening of May 13th, 1977, as Mickey Spillane walked toward that idling car in Woodside, Queens, that favor was delivered.
Spillane was shot multiple times and died on the street outside his apartment. The man called the last of the gentleman gangsters was 43 years old. Jimmy Coonan was now the undisputed boss of Hell’s Kitchen. And the Gambino family, through Roy DeMeo, had just done him the largest favor in the history of the neighborhood.
That created a debt. And in organized crime, debts get paid one way or another. In 1978, Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino crime family, summoned Coonan and Featherstone to a meeting in a restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Castellano sat with his captains. The Westies sat across from them.
And a deal was worked out that would shape organized crime on the west side of Manhattan for the next decade. The terms were straightforward. The Westies would pay 10% of their earnings as tribute to the Gambinos. In return, they would fall under Gambino protection. They could invoke the Gambino name in business dealings, and they would share in construction profits from the Javits Center and other projects.
They would also carry out contract killings for the family when needed. That last part is worth sitting with for a moment. The Gambino crime family, one of the most powerful organized crime organizations in the world, hired the Westies as their murder subcontractors. Because the Westies were willing to do things that even hardened Italian mobsters found excessive.
They didn’t just kill people. They dismembered them piece by piece and scattered the remains in the Hudson River. It was a disposal technique partly learned from DeMeo himself. And it served a practical purpose. Nobody makes prosecution nearly impossible. In police wiretaps from the period, Gambino family members were overheard talking about the Westies.
The quote that got repeated most often in law enforcement circles was some variation of “These guys are crazy.” Coming from the Gambinos, that was not a criticism. That was a job description. Coonan’s crew was never large, never more than 12 to 20 members at any given time, depending on who was in or out of jail.
But the fear they generated was completely out of proportion to their size. Witnesses refused to testify. Murder cases collapsed. Between 1968 and 1986, the NYPD and FBI attributed somewhere between 60 and 100 murders to the Westies. The exact number is uncertain, partly because the bodies were so difficult to find.
There’s a detail from this period that captures what the Westies were. After Coonan and Castellano struck their deal in that Brooklyn restaurant in 1978, they settled in for dinner. What Castellano didn’t know was that Coonan had a hit squad assembled nearby with guns and grenades ready to walk in and massacre the entire table.
Coonan had gone to that meeting ready to kill everyone in it if things went wrong. At some point during dinner, he looked at his watch and realized his crew was overdue. He excused himself, walked out, and found his men calmly drinking whiskey. Having decided to wait a few more minutes before moving in.
The Gambino family came within one glass of Irish whiskey of being wiped out at a dinner table in Brooklyn. Castellano never knew how close it was. Before we wrap up, if you want to see more videos like this one, the single biggest thing you can do is subscribe to the channel.
We’re building something here, and every subscriber matters. Hit the bell, too, so you don’t miss the next one. The alliance between the Westies and the Gambinos held through the late 1970s and into the ’80s. Coonan proved to be a smart operator, consolidating control over Hell’s Kitchen’s union rackets, loan sharking networks, and gambling operations.
The crew kept feeding the Gambinos murders for hire, and the Gambinos kept providing cover and connections. But the thing about a gang built on extreme violence is that the violence doesn’t stay pointed outward forever. The Westies began to fracture from the inside. Mickey Featherstone, the Vietnam veteran who had been Coonan’s enforcer and most feared weapon, grew increasingly unstable.
He cycled in and out of mental hospitals. He believed Coonan was selling out the neighborhood’s Irish identity by subordinating everything to the Gambinos. Then, in 1985, Coonan, worried about a power grab, set Featherstone up to take a murder charge. Featherstone was convicted. And from inside his prison cell, he decided that if Coonan wanted to deal with the Italians, then Featherstone would deal with the FBI.
He flipped. His wife, [ __ ] wore wires. Together, they provided testimony and recordings that became the foundation of a federal RICO case that finally dismantled the Westies. In 1988, Jimmy Coonan was convicted of racketeering and murder charges and sentenced to 75 years in federal prison. Kevin Kelly, one of the key enforcers, received 50 years without parole.
The gang that had held Hell’s Kitchen in a grip of terror for 20 years was finished. Featherstone’s conviction was overturned after his cooperation proved he had been framed. He entered witness protection. Coonan remains behind bars to this day. His projected release date sitting somewhere around 2030, which would make him well into his 80s.
Hell’s Kitchen is unrecognizable now. The tenements have been converted to condominiums. The waterfront piers are parks. The neighborhood that was once the birthplace of the Irish mob is now one of the more desirable addresses in Manhattan. But for roughly two decades, from that night in Woodside, Queens, in May 1977, when Mickey Spillane walked out his front door and never came back, it was the Westies territory.
Owned through a murder, maintained through fear, and eventually lost to the one thing they never saw coming. One of their own. If this video gave you something you didn’t know before, subscribe to the channel before you close out. We cover American organized crime, gang history, and the stories that don’t make it into the mainstream.
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The doctrine that treats informants and their families as legitimate targets. All of that remained intact. The conviction of one leader didn’t dismantle what had been built over 40 years on those blocks. The man who made the phone call in Flatbush eventually had to leave Brooklyn. He didn’t have a choice. His family was scattered.
Some by the gang’s pressure, some by the federal agents who were trying belatedly to protect people who hadn’t asked to be involved in any of this. He cooperated. He testified. The case moved forward. And somewhere in Flatbush, on one of those blocks of Church Avenue, where this whole world operates, things kept moving. New faces on the same corners.
The same code enforced by people who had watched what happened to the last man who broke it and understood the lesson perfectly. This is not a story with a clean ending. Most stories from these streets aren’t. The machine outlasts the individuals. The code survives the arrests.
And the families of the men who talked are still in some cases living with the consequences of a decision they had no part in making. The only question the man in Flatbush probably asks himself now is whether the federal agents who told him they take care of the rest ever thought about what the rest actually meant.
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