The Irish Gang So Brutal Even The Mafia Feared Them HT

They are the only secret criminal brotherhood, the mafia. Only an Italian can belong. It is the key to their takeover of organized crime. There is a rule in organized crime so fundamental, so baked into the DNA of the American mafia that breaking it is basically a death sentence.

You do not, under any circumstances, dismember a body and leave pieces of it scattered across Manhattan like some kind of deranged scavenger hunt. The mafia had rules. The mafia had structure. The mafia had dignity. Or at least it told itself that. And then there were the Westies, a gang of Irish killers out of Hell’s Kitchen, so savage, so reckless, so genuinely unhinged that the most powerful crime families in New York City decided it was easier to cut them a deal than to go to war with them.

Hi, my name is Lucas and this is Chicago Mob Stories. Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood that made monsters. To understand the Westies, you have to understand Hell’s Kitchen. And to understand Hell’s Kitchen, you have to forget everything you think you know about New York City. Forget the Broadway shows. Forget the tourists.

Well, forget the glass towers that sit there today. In the 1950s, 1960s, and well into the 1970s, Hell’s Kitchen was a narrow strip of tenementss and slaughter houses running along the west side of Manhattan, roughly from 34th Street up to 59th, pressed between 8th Avenue and the Hudson River.

The slaughter houses are important. When you grow up smelling blood every morning, it stops bothering you. This was Irish immigrant territory and had been for over a century. The long shoremen who worked the docks, the sanitation workers, the beat cops. A lot of them came from the same five or six blocks, went to the same churches, drank at the same bars.

It was a closed world with its own economy, its own justice system, and its own ideas about what a man was supposed to be. The neighborhood produced legitimate people, too. To be fair, the actor James Kagny grew up there. And in the there is something almost poetic about the fact that the man who played the most famous movie gangsters in history came out of the same streets that produced the real thing.

Although Kagny probably had better table manners. What Hell’s Kitchen did not produce in any great abundance was opportunity. So when young men from the neighborhood wanted power, wanted money, wanted respect, they took the path that was already pay for them. They ran numbers. They shook down bars. They broke fingers and collected debts.

And eventually the toughest and most ruthless among them organized themselves into something with a name. The Westies, Mickey Spilain, the last gentleman gangster. The man who built the Westies into a recognized criminal organization was a soft-spoken Irishman named Mickey Spelain.

Not the crime novelist, different Mickey Spelain, same general business. Mickey ran Hell’s Kitchen from the early 1960s through the mid 1970s. And by the standards of what came after him, he was almost reasonable. He controlled the neighborhood’s lone sharking, bookmaking, and labor rackets. He kept the peace, more or less.

He had a rule against killing civilians. He was, by the twisted logic of organized crime, a professional. The Italian families in New York respected him, which in that world means they left him alone. Mickey had an arrangement with the Chambino family. The kitchen was his.

Business flowed in certain agreed upon directions. Nobody got greedy. Nobody started a war that didn’t need starting. Mickey Spelain was in the language of the streets a standup guy. A throwback. The kind of criminal that old-timers point to when they say the mob used to have a code. And like most things associated with codes and honor and organized crime, it didn’t last.

In April 1977, Mickey Spelain was shot and killed in the Woodside neighborhood of Queens. He had walked into an ambush and the man behind it was someone he had trusted. Someone from inside the kitchen itself, a younger, hungrier, and considerably more unbalanced operator named Jimmy [ __ ] Mickey Spelain was 53 years old. He never saw it coming.

The Westies were about to become something else entirely. Jimmy Counan, the devil takes Hell’s Kitchen. Jimmy [ __ ] was born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen, which under normal circumstances would just be a biographical detail. With Jimmy, it reads more like a warning label. [ __ ] was lean, blue-eyed, charming when he wanted to be, and capable of extraordinary violence without what most people would recognize as remorse.

He had been committing crimes since he was a teenager, and he had spent enough time around Mickey Spelain’s operation to understand exactly how it worked and exactly what he would do differently once he was in charge. What he would do differently, it turned out, was remove the part about not killing people indiscriminately.

Kunan took over Hell’s Kitchen in his late 20s and almost immediately began redefining what the Westies were. Under Mickey Spelain, they were a neighborhood crime outfit with rules. Under Jimmy Counan, they became something closer to a murder syndicate that also happened to run Lone Sharks. The body count climbed. Rivals disappeared.

Men who owed money and couldn’t pay had a way of turning up dead and sometimes not turning up at all, which was actually the preferred outcome from Coon’s perspective. We will get to why in a moment. [ __ ] was not stupid. He was calculating in his violence, using it as a management tool the same way a legitimate CEO might use a performance review, except instead of a written warning, you got shot, he inspired genuine terror in the people around him, which was entirely intentional.

His right-hand man was a man named Mickey Featherstone, a Vietnam veteran with diagnosed psychiatric problems and a hair trigger that made [ __ ] look restrained by comparison. Together, the two of them ran Hell’s Kitchen like a private country under martial law. The Italian families in New York, who had been doing business with the neighborhood for years, began paying very close attention.

A disappear a body, a Westy tutorial. Now, here is where the story gets genuinely disturbing. And I want to warn you that what I am about to describe is not for the faint of heart. But it is also why the Westies became legendary in law enforcement circles. NY FBI agents who had spent careers investigating the mafia would later say that the Westies were something different, something worse.

Jimmy Counan had a problem that any criminal organization faces eventually. Bodies, specifically what to do with them. The mafia had its methods. Weighted trunks in the river, shallow graves in New Jersey, the occasional disappearance to a mob connected junkyard. These methods, while effective, were imperfect. Bodies had a habit of being found.

Coon’s solution was, to use the clinical term, dismemberment. When the Westies killed someone, they did not simply dispose of the body. They took it apart. limbs separated from the torso, heads removed, pieces distributed across multiple locations, dumpsters, the Hudson River, vacant lots across multiple burrows.

The logic was brutally simple. A complete body can be identified. Pieces scattered across Manhattan are just evidence of something terrible, not necessarily evidence of any particular crime attached to any particular person. The FBI, when they eventually began building their case against the Westies, discovered that this practice was not occasional. It was routine.

It had become, in the genuinely horrifying phrase used by investigators, the Westy way. Law enforcement officials who processed those scenes later recalled that even hardened detectives, men who had worked homicides for decades, found the Westy cases uniquely disturbing. There is something about the methodical nature of it.

the calculation required that crossed a line that even career criminals recognized. The mafia recognized it too. And rather than being disgusted, they were impressed because what the Westies had figured out, accidentally or not, was that if bodies don’t exist, cases don’t get built. The clearance rate on Westy murders was for years almost non-existent.

You have to hand it to them in a completely horrifying way. The mafia had to respect them, or at least pretend to. By the late 1970s, the five families of New York were watching Hell’s Kitchen the way you watch a stray dog that has already bitten three of your neighbors with a combination of weariness, calculation, and the quiet realization that you probably do not want to be the one who tries to put it down.

The traditional mafia structure had no category for what the Westies were. The five families were hierarchical organizations. There was a boss, an underboss, a concigary, capos, maid members, associates. There were rules about who could be killed and when and with whose permission. There were protocols.

The Westies had Jimmy Kunan and Mickey Featherstone and a loose collection of Irish and Irishamean men from a 10b block neighborhood who had grown up together, went to prison together, and would do violence together on essentially no notice and with essentially no documentation. You cannot negotiate with chaos.

You can only try to point it in a useful direction. The Gambino family, which under Paul Castillano in the late 1970s was the most powerful organization in New York, made a calculation. Going to war with the Westies would be expensive, bloody, and bad for business. The kitchen was not Gambino territory. Never had been.

And frankly, the Westies were generating their own income from their own rackets in ways that did not compete directly with Gambino interests. So Castayano and Kunan did something that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. They met and they came to an understanding. The Westies would be in practical terms an enforcement arm available to the Gambino family for specific jobs, contract work in the language of business.

In return, the Gambinos would provide protection, political cover, legal connections, and the implicit message to anyone thinking of moving on Hell’s Kitchen that they would be picking a fight with two organizations instead of one. For Kunan, this was a legitimization of sorts, a recognition.

For Castayano, it was a management decision. Keep the Westies close enough to be useful. Keep them far enough away that their insanity didn’t contaminate the larger operation. It was by every account an uneasy arrangement like hiring a demolition company to do finished carpentry. They’ll do the job. You just have to be very specific about which walls you want knocked down.

The alliance with the Gambinos. The practical reality of the Westy Gambino Alliance meant that Jimmy Counan’s crew began appearing in places and situations that a purely neighborhood gang had no business being. Labor racketeering on the westside docks, which had been contested territory for decades, suddenly had new enforcers.

Construction projects, which in New York in the 1970s and 1980s basically meant mafia adjacent everything, found that Hell’s Kitchen contractors had very persuasive representation. Certain Gambino operations that required someone to deliver a message in the most physical possible sense had a reliable subcontractor available.

Roy Deo, the notoriously violent Gambino associate who ran his own murder operation out of Brooklyn, reportedly [snorts] expressed admiration for Westy Methods. Coming from Roy Deio, who had his own documented approach to body disposal that I will not detail here because this video would get demonetized.

That is a genuinely unsettling endorsement. The money flowing into Hell’s Kitchen increased. [ __ ] standing within the criminal ecosystem of New York rose. For a few years in the early 1980s, the Westies were at the peak of their influence. Feared by rivals, useful to allies and protected by an umbrella of Gambino muscle that made law enforcement approaches significantly more complicated.

But here is the thing about criminal organizations at their peak. The peak is also where the cracks start showing. The Westies were at their core a collection of violent, paranoid, frequently intoxicated men who had built their reputation on chaos. Chaos is useful until it turns inward. And it always turns inward. Rats in the kitchen. The fall of the Westies.

The beginning of the end, as it so often is in these stories, was a wire tap and a man who decided his own survival was worth more than his loyalty. Mickey Featherstone, Coon’s right hand, the Vietnam veteran with the psychiatric history and the hair trigger, had been arrested many times over the course of his criminal career.

He had beaten cases through a combination of legal maneuvering, witness intimidation, and the general reluctance of Hell’s Kitchen residents to testify against anyone connected to the Westies. But in 1986, Featherstone was convicted of a murder he insisted he did not commit. He believed with some justification, as it turned out, that he had been set up by members of his own crew, by men he had trusted, by men whose bodies he had helped dispose of rivals remains to protect.

That realization, combined with a federal RICO investigation that was closing in on the entire Westy operation, pushed Featherstone to a decision that would have been unimaginable 5 years earlier. He flipped. Mickey Featherstone entered the Federal Witness Protection Program and began talking to prosecutors. And what he gave them was not just details about specific crimes.

It was the architecture of the entire Westy operation. The murders, the labor racketeering, the lone sharking, the alliance with the Gambinos, the body disposal methods, all of it in the kind of granular operational detail that only a man who had been present for most of it could provide. Featherstone wore a wire. He recorded conversations.

He documented crimes going back years. In 1988, Jimmy Counan was convicted of raketeering and murder under the federal RICO statute. He was sentenced to 75 years in prison. He is, as of this recording, still there. Numerous other Westy members received substantial sentences. The alliance with the Gambinos, which had seemed like an elevation, became instead a complication.

in additional charges, additional exposure, additional witnesses with additional things to say. The Hell’s Kitchen that the Westies had controlled for a generation changed, too. Though, not only because of the indictments. The neighborhood was gentrifying. The slaughter houses were closing. The Long Shoremen were being replaced by real estate developers.

The economic base that had sustained Irish organized crime in that specific corner of Manhattan for a hundred years was quietly disappearing, replaced by restaurants and theater districts and eventually a Hudson Yards development that costs more per square foot than most cities.

Jimmy Counan’s wife Edna was also convicted of racketeering. The organization that had terrified mafia bosses that had forced the Gambino family to negotiate rather than simply absorb or eliminate them was gone within a few years of Featherstone’s cooperation. Not with a bang, to borrow a phrase, but with a series of federal indictments and a wire recording of men saying things they absolutely should not have said out loud.

Mickey Featherstone received a reduced sentence for his cooperation. He was eventually released and entered witness protection under a new identity. Whether he is quietly living somewhere in middle America or whether the combination of documented violence and psychiatric history has followed him into whatever life came after Hell’s Kitchen is not publicly known.

He is presumably somewhere hopefully not in your neighborhood. The legacy. The Westies are a footnote in most histories of American organized crime. They don’t get the movies that the Gambinos get or the books that the Chicago outfit gets. They were a regional phenomenon rooted in a specific neighborhood that no longer exists in the form that produced them.

But in the FBI field offices that worked organized crime in New York through the 1970s and 80s, the Westies are remembered as something distinct. Not because of their sophistication, they were not sophisticated. Not because of their business acumen. They were not businessmen, but because of the specific flavor of violence they brought to their work, and because they proved something that the mafia, for all its hierarchy and tradition and codes, could not quite bring itself to admit.

Sometimes chaos works. The five families of New York had rules because rules protected the organization. The Westies had no rules, and for about a decade, that protected them just as well. Because you cannot build a RICO case easily against men who leave no bodies. You cannot flip witnesses easily in a crew where everyone is equally compromised and equally afraid.

You cannot negotiate from a position of strength with people who who have genuinely nothing to lose. The mafia feared the Westies not because the Westies were smarter or better organized. They feared them because the Westies were operating on a different frequency entirely, one that the rules of organized crime were not designed to handle.

Jimmy Counan built his empire on terror and held it together with violence. And in the end, it was the trust he broke among his own people that destroyed him. Not the FBI, not the Gambinos, his own crew. Hell’s Kitchen, the neighborhood that made the Westies, is now one of the most expensive zip codes in New York City.

The blood washed out a long time ago. But if you walk those blocks today and you know the history, you can almost still feel it. That’s what I’ve got for you today on Chicago Mob Stories. This is your first time here, hit subscribe. We do this every week. Real stories, real people, real consequences.

And if you’ve got a story you think deserves the deep dive treatment, drop it in the comments. I read every one of them. I’m Lucas. Stay curious, stay safe, and try not to owe money to anyone from Hell’s Kitchen.