The Hell’s Kitchen Psychopaths That Hollywood Had to Tone Down HT
March 26th, 1987. Lower Manhattan. A packed press conference. Federal prosecutors, city detectives, hot lights, camera shutters, all of it aimed at one announcement. 10 alleged members of the Westies had just been hit with a RICO case built on eight murders, attempted murders, kidnapping, loan sharking, extortion, gambling, and drug dealing.
Upstairs, according to the New York Times, the chief of detectives was so thrilled he yelled for a sign that read, “Westies RIP.” That was the official ending. Not with a last stand in some Irish bar, not with a glorious gunfight, with microphones, indictments, and one insider deciding the crew was finished.
This was not some giant Mafia family with a formal hierarchy and a commission seat. That’s what makes them memorable. The Westies were small. Estimates ran from roughly 20 to 60 men. But they were so savage that even people used to organized crime talked about them like they were something separate, worse.
In the court record and in later reporting, what stands out is not just murder, it’s the way they used murder as branding, dismemberment, bodies dumped in the East River, a reputation built on making sure everyone understood these men were not pretending. They were willing to do what other crews preferred not to look at.
This is the story of how a ragged Irish crew from Hell’s Kitchen pushed out the old boss, partnered with the Gambinos, and turned a neighborhood gang into one of the most feared hit squads in New York City. It’s also the story of how Hollywood, when it made State of Grace, had to split the truth into safer pieces.
One character for the boss, one for the mad dog, one for the guilty conscience. Real life was messier than that. Real life was meaner. And here’s the part the movie can’t fully tell you. The man most viewers want to map onto Terry Noonan was not really an undercover cop at all. The real betrayal that cracked this world open came from inside the crew, from Mickey Featherstone, a real killer, a real insider, a man the Westies trusted until they framed him for a murder he didn’t commit.
To understand why this mattered, you have to understand Hell’s Kitchen before Jimmy Coonan became a legend in his own neighborhood. In the 1960s, the dominant Irish rackets boss on the West Side was Mickey Spillane, not the novelist, the mobster. Spillane controlled bookmaking, loan sharking, unions at Madison Square Garden, the New York Coliseum, and the docks.
He represented the old neighborhood version of organized crime. Brutal, yes, but rooted, territorial. He was the kind of man who understood that power in Hell’s Kitchen came from knowing every bartender, every union hanger-on, every debt, every grudge, every back room where cash changed hands. Then a younger generation came up behind him and decided rooted wasn’t enough.
They wanted fear. They wanted expansion. They wanted to be treated like the Italians. Jimmy Coonan was the engine of that change. He had the neighborhood pedigree. He had the nerve. More important, he had ambition that looked almost theatrical. Around him gathered men who gave that ambition teeth. None mattered more than Francis Mickey Featherstone.
Featherstone was born on West 43rd Street into a big working-class Irish family. Later accounts describe him as small, blond, almost boyish-looking, the kind of face people underestimated for about 5 seconds. He had served briefly in the army, came home damaged, drank hard, and built a reputation for sudden violence in neighborhood bars.
By the mid-1970s, according to the appellate record, he had become Coonan’s right-hand man and the crew’s second in command. That pairing mattered. Coonan brought the strategic hunger. Featherstone brought a frightening willingness to act on it. The first clear sign that the old order was cracking came on August 20th, 1976.
Spillane’s main enforcer, Eddie Cummiskey, was shot and killed at the Sunbrite Bar. That was not just another neighborhood homicide. It was a signal. Spillane’s loss was Coonan’s opening. After Cummiskey’s death, Spillane started retreating from some of his rackets, and Coonan began stepping into the vacuum.
He also tightened his relationship with Mickey Featherstone. One generation was fading. The next one was not asking permission. Then came May of 1977. This is where the takeover stops being a rumor and becomes a blood-soaked business plan. First, there was Charles Ruby Stein, a loan shark who was owed $50,000 by Coonan.
Billy Beattie later testified that Stein was lured to McCoy’s Bar, known in testimony as the 596, where Danny Grillo came out of the kitchen and shot him in the chest. Beattie said Coonan then made him put a round in the body, too, just to make everyone complicit. After that, according to the same testimony, Stein was dragged to the back and dismembered.
The cash found on him, about $1,000, was split on the bar. Two days later, when part of the body turned up, the crew understood what the mistake had been. They had not done enough to keep the river from giving him back. And while that was happening, Mickey Spillane himself was finished. Some accounts vary on exactly who pulled the trigger.
What’s documented is that Coonan orchestrated the move against him. The Mob Museum, citing T.J. English, notes that Roy DeMeo may have killed Spillane as a gift to Coonan. Whether you treat that as settled fact or underworld lore, the outcome is clear. Spillane was out. Coonan was in. Hell’s Kitchen had gone from an old-style Irish rackets regime to something more volatile and more openly homicidal.
This is where the movie comparison gets interesting. In State of Grace, Ed Harris plays Frankie Flannery as the icy older brother, the calculating boss with big plans and bigger resentments. That is the cleanest screen echo of Jimmy Coonan. Critics and genre writers have pointed out that Frankie is plainly built from Coonan’s ambition, his hunger to professionalize a local crew, and his willingness to sell the neighborhood out to a larger criminal order if it buys him power.
But Terry Noonan is trickier. He is not a literal Mickey Featherstone. He is Hollywood’s moral translator. The film gives Terry the inside access, the neighborhood intimacy, and the final betrayal that in real life belonged to Featherstone, while giving the visible psychotic energy of Featherstone to Gary Oldman’s Jackie.
In other words, the movie had to split one real-world problem into two men. One to carry the madness, one to carry the guilt. But that’s not the crazy part. The crazy part is how quickly Coonan grasped the lesson every successful New York gangster eventually learns. Neighborhood terror gets you a corner, an alliance gets you a city.
By the late 1970s, the Westies entered an arrangement with the Gambino family. The appellate record is blunt. The Gambinos financed the Westies loan sharking operation, let them use the Gambino name and reputation, and in exchange took 10% of the proceeds. That is the scheme in five steps. First, the opportunity.
The West Side was full of gamblers, dockworkers, bar owners, and union people who needed quick money and hated going to banks. Second, the inside connection. The Gambinos supplied capital and institutional menace. Third, the execution. Westies pushed loans, collected with violence, and used their local reach to enforce debts block by block. Fourth, the money.
Tribute flowed upward, 10% off the top to the Gambinos. Fifth, the problem. Once you enter that arrangement, you are richer, but you are no longer independent. You are now expected to perform, and what the Westies performed best was violence. Remember this name, Richard Tassiello. He becomes important because his murder shows you exactly what the Westies thought fear was for.
On January 18th, 1978, according to later accounts and trial testimony, Coonan and Featherstone picked Tassiello up after spotting him around Tom’s Pub, 854 9th Avenue, and got him to Anton Lucchese’s apartment. Tassiello owed Coonan $10,000. That should have made this a routine collection problem. It didn’t. Billy Beattie testified that Tassiello was killed not just over money, but because Coonan wanted bodies.
His words, as repeated in court, were chilling. The more bodies you had, the more monstrous you looked. That was status. That was branding. That was how you impressed bigger people. The murder itself was pure Westies. Lucchese later told the jury that when he returned to the apartment, Tassiello was in the bathtub with a knife in his chest and blood coming from his head.
He said Coonan talked openly about why bodies were cut up, not just to hinder identification, to keep the torso from floating. Disembowel it. Let the gas out. Dump it in Hell Gate, the treacherous section of the Upper East River the crew called the burial grounds. Then came the detail that sounds too grotesque for a mainstream studio script, but is in the reporting anyway.
According to Lucchese, Kunen ordered Tessiello’s hands put in the freezer so the fingerprints could later be impressed on a murder weapon in some future hit. In one courtroom exchange that became infamous, Lucchese was asked how he knew the corpse was being cut apart if he claimed not to watch. His answer was, “Every time I looked in the bathtub, he was getting shorter.
” People laughed in court. Imagine how sickening a room has to be for that line to get a laugh. You start to see why State of Grace had to soften this world. A mainstream crime movie can show menace. It can show arson, extortion, alley executions, men with guns in leather jackets. What it struggles to show is the banality of butchery.
The coffee and sandwiches in the middle of dismemberment. The freezer logic. The way these men talked like mechanics about a body coming back up through bad river work. Hollywood can stage evil. Real crews normalized it. At the same time, the Westies were not living only from murder. Murder was the billboard.
The money came from systems, loan sharking, cocaine, union extortion, waterfront control. And one racket in particular tells you how organized crime actually survives. Not through wild shootouts every night, but through payroll fraud and ticket stubs. When the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum opened at Pier 86 in June and August of 1982, it sat right inside Westies territory.
The museum used workers connected to ILA Local 1909. That union was under Westies influence through Vincent Leone. Featherstone’s wife, [ __ ] worked as a ticket seller. The opportunity was obvious. Thousands of visitors, reusable paper tickets, weak oversight. Here is how that scheme worked. Step one, save previously used tickets instead of destroying them.
Step two, resell those same tickets to new visitors and pocket the cash. Step three, place loyal people in jobs that required little scrutiny. Step four, expand into no-show jobs so money came out of payroll whether anyone worked or not. The article notes that Bobby Huggard got one such no-show position paying $227 a week.
The museum’s executive director later said the combined theft and racketeering cost the institution between $100,000 and $120,000 every year. And when the Intrepid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July 1985, listing $16.5 million in assets against $28.4 million in debt, the financial investigations helped expose how deeply the crew had wormed into the place.
That’s organized crime in real life, not glamorous, parasitic. Meanwhile, prison never really shut this crew down. According to the DOJ brief, during Kunen’s incarceration in the ’60s and ’70s, his wife, Edna, helped manage the loan sharking operation and relayed instructions. That detail matters because it shows the Westies were not just random barroom lunatics.
They were building continuity, a structure, a way to keep money moving even when key men were locked up or committed or hiding. The same record describes James McElroy as a chief enforcer, William Bokun as both killer and cocaine operator, and Richard Ritter as another major narcotics and loan sharking figure. These were not isolated psychos running around freelance.
This was an enterprise. Then the pressure started coming from inside. One major fault line was Vincent Leone, the Gambino-connected labor union figure who helped oversee waterfront business. On February 11th, 1984, Leone was killed. Later reporting said the motive involved skimming $30,000 in sports betting proceeds from both the Westies and the Gambinos.
That’s the sort of thing that sounds minor until you understand mob math. Skimming is not just theft. It’s disrespect. It suggests you think the system is too weak to punish you. The Westies answered with murder because murder was how they kept the system credible. Here’s where it gets interesting. The man most feared on the street was now becoming a problem for the boss.
Featherstone had helped build the Westies legend, but by the mid-1980s, he was unstable, resentful, and increasingly suspicious that Kunen had sold the neighborhood out to the Italians while insulating himself in New Jersey. That kind of tension is fatal in a small crew. Too many secrets, too much shared blood.
Too many men who know where the bodies really went. So when an old grievance resurfaced, Kunen allegedly found a way to solve two problems at once. The grievance centered on Michael Holly, a Hell’s Kitchen construction worker. had long been associated in Westies lore with the death of John Bokun. On April 25th, 1985, Holly was gunned down outside the Javits Convention Center.
The DOJ brief states that on May 18th, 1986, William Bokun confessed to [ __ ] Featherstone that he had killed Holly, describing the disguise he wore and how he shot Holly five times in the back. Later accounts expanded that story saying Bokun dressed to resemble Featherstone. That is the scheme. First, the opportunity.
A crowded street, old revenge motive, a target with predictable movement. Second, the inside connection. The crew knew Holly’s history and knew Featherstone’s image. Third, the execution. Bokun kills Holly in public and leaves behind the outline of a Featherstone hit. Fourth, the money and power logic. If Featherstone takes the case, Kunen removes a dangerous subordinate without directly killing him.
Fifth, the problem. Framing a man who has committed real murders only works if he still believes the boss would never sacrifice him. Featherstone stopped believing. Featherstone was convicted in the spring of 1986 for Holly’s murder and suddenly found himself facing 25 years in prison for one killing he had not actually done.
That irony is almost too perfect for fiction. A man with multiple bodies tied to his name deciding he had finally been pushed too far because this time he was innocent. The New York Times reported that he approached prosecutors with an astounding offer. He would identify Holly’s real killers and expose the Westies from the inside.
This is why Terry Noonan exists as a fantasy of conscience in State of Grace. Real life did not give the audience a clean undercover cop. It gave them a genuinely violent insider whose moral line appeared only when the machine turned on him. Once Featherstone flipped, the whole mythology started collapsing into paperwork.
The case that followed described a gang that had controlled criminal activity in Hell’s Kitchen for roughly 20 years, terrorizing the neighborhood through murders, kidnapping, extortion, loan sharking, gambling, and drug distribution. Prosecutors said some victims had been dismembered and dumped in the East River.
Trial testimony brought all the hidden tradecraft into open court. Beady on Ruby Stein. Lucchese on Tessiello. [ __ ] Featherstone on Bokun’s confession. Undercover discussions on January 15th, 1987, about amphetamine sales and even contract murder. The point was not just to prove individual crimes. It was to show pattern. Enterprise, repetition, method.
The result was devastating. In February 1988, Jimmy Kunen and several others were found guilty. The DOJ brief later laid out the punishments in brutal federal language. Kunen got 75 years in prison and a $1 million fine. Edna Kunen got 15 years and a $200,000 fine. James McElroy got 60 years. Richard Ritter got 40 years.
William Bokun got 50 years. Kevin Kelly, in the related case, got 50 years. The men who had built their mystique on being untouchable were now reduced to sentence lengths and docket numbers. That’s always the ending. Not romance, inventory. Two years later, in September 1990, State of Grace arrived and transformed this history into noir tragedy.
The New York Times review said the film took inspiration from journalistic accounts of the Westies, the Irish gang better known for savagery than style. The review also noted that the movie focuses on the mixed marriage that began when the Westies collaborated with their Italian-American counterparts. That’s the real Kunen story right there.
Frankie Flannery wants scale. He wants legitimacy through the Italians. He wants to move beyond local thuggery. That is Jimmy Kunen with the edges sanded into prestige drama. Terry Noonan, by contrast, is the way Hollywood makes betrayal emotionally acceptable. A returning son. A damaged friend. A lawman with a soul.
But the actual force that destroyed the Westies was uglier and far more useful to prosecutors. It was Mickey Featherstone, a real participant in the crew’s rise, deciding that if he was going down, everybody was going with him. And that is why Hollywood had to tone them down. Not because the screen couldn’t handle violence. It always can.
It had to tone them down because the real story is morally filthy in a way most audiences hate admitting. These were not tragic princes. They were not elegant masterminds. They were extortionists who forced bars to buy liquor, loan sharks backed by Italian capital, waterfront parasites skimming ticket booths at a museum, and killers who discussed river buoyancy like plumbers discussing drain pressure.
The movie gives you doomed friendships and a beautiful score. The record gives you freezers, severed hands, and a no-show job paying $227 a week while a museum bleeds out. What happened to everybody else tells the same story. Featherstone disappeared into witness protection. The Westies, as a functioning power, faded in the late 1980s.
Hell’s Kitchen itself changed, too. By the time State of Grace was shot in the summer of 1989, the real neighborhood was already being eaten by gentrification. The Daily News put it bluntly. The real-life Westies had fizzled out as informants sank the syndicate. The old bars, the tenements, the block-by-block Irish identity, all of it was becoming memory and real estate.
So, what does this story reveal about the Mafia and about organized crime more broadly? It reveals that violence is rarely the whole business. Violence is advertising. The real business is control. Control of labor. Control of debt. Control of docks. Control of who gets paid for not working. Control of which corpse becomes an example.
The Westies looked uniquely monstrous because they were uniquely eager to make the advertising unforgettable. But underneath that, they were running the same old criminal formula: fear plus cash flow plus corruption. That formula still matters today, even when the neighborhoods and accents change. Jimmy Coonan wanted whatever any ambitious mobster wants: more territory, more respect, a seat at a bigger table.
Mickey Featherstone wanted what men like him usually want but can never name correctly. Fear mistaken for significance. Mickey Spillane wanted to hold a neighborhood that no longer belonged to his style of gangster. In the end, Hollywood could turn that into a story about loyalty and loss.
Real life turned it into indictments, body bags, and long federal sentences. That’s the truth about the Westies. Not that they were too wild for the movies. It’s that the movies had to civilize them just to make them watchable. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. And tell me in the comments, was Jimmy Coonan a strategist who understood the future or just a neighborhood killer who mistook terror for power?