The Most Dangerous Westies Killer Was Trained In Vietnam – HT

 

 

 

October 16th, 1971, 2:00 a.m. The Sunbrite Bar, 10th Avenue and 46th Street, Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. A 22-year-old kid named Linwood Willis is leaning against the jukebox, half drunk, running his mouth at a skinny Irish kid in a field jacket. Willis says six words, just six. “You think you’re a tough guy.

” The skinny kid pulls a .45 caliber pistol from his waistband. He doesn’t say anything back. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t warn him. He fires once. The bullet enters Willis under the chin and exits through the top of his skull. Willis drops. The jukebox keeps playing. The bartender freezes. Patrons scatter. The shooter walks out onto 10th Avenue like he’s leaving a movie theater.

 He lights a cigarette. He keeps walking. Linwood Willis is dead before the song ends. The shooter’s name is Francis Thomas Featherstone. Everybody calls him Mickey. He’s 19 years old. He weighs maybe 130 lb soaking wet. He has freckles. He looks like an altar boy who got lost on his way to confession. And 18 months earlier, he was crawling through elephant grass in the Central Highlands of Vietnam with the 101st Airborne, killing men he never met for reasons he never understood.

He came home with a duffel bag, a discharge paper, and something missing behind his eyes. The army called it combat fatigue. The newspapers would later call it homicidal psychosis. The streets of Hell’s Kitchen would call it Mickey’s gift. This is the story of how the United States Army took a malnourished Irish kid from West 49th Street, taught him 47 different ways to kill a human being, and then dropped him back on the same corner he came from with no job, no therapy, no warning This is how Vietnam came home to 10th

Avenue. This is how a war that officially ended in 1975 kept killing people in Manhattan for the next 20 years. But here’s what the history books skipped. Mickey Featherstone wasn’t born a killer. He was manufactured. And the moment he stepped off that troop transport in 1970, the most violent crew in New York City history had its trigger man. They just didn’t know it yet.

You have to understand who Mickey was before the war. Born in 1949, raised in a tenement on West 49th Street between 9th and 10th Avenue. Father was an alcoholic Irish longshoreman who beat his mother. Mother was a hairdresser who held the family together with rosaries and rage. Mickey was the runt. Skinny, quiet.

 The kid who got picked on. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade. He drifted. He stole car radios. He drank Rheingold beer on stoops. By 17, he was going nowhere fast. So when the draft notice came, his mother cried. Mickey shrugged. Vietnam couldn’t be worse than Hell’s Kitchen. That’s what he thought. He was wrong.

He enlisted in the army in 1966, 17 years old. He needed his mother to sign the consent form. She signed it. She’d later say she thought the discipline would save him. Instead, the army made him into something his mother wouldn’t recognize. Basic training at Fort Dix, then jump school at Fort Benning, then Vietnam.

Two tours. The 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles. He served in the A Shau Valley. He served near Hue during Tet. He came home with a Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, and according to his own later testimony, a body count he stopped trying to remember somewhere around the dozen mark. He was 20 years old.

 The man who walked off that plane at McGuire Air Force Base in the spring of 1970 was not the same kid who’d left. The Army knew it. They diagnosed him with what they called severe combat-related neuropsychiatric disorder. Today, we’d call it post-traumatic stress disorder, but the term didn’t exist yet.

 PTSD wouldn’t enter the official diagnostic manual until 1980. So, in 1970, the Army handed Mickey Featherstone a discharge, a partial disability check of around $200 a month, and a one-way bus ticket back to Port Authority. No follow-up. No therapy. No mandated psychiatric care. Nothing. They just sent him home. He came back to Hell’s Kitchen and he couldn’t sleep.

 He couldn’t sit with his back to a door. He couldn’t hear a car backfire without diving for cover. He drank. He drank in the morning. He drank at night. He carried a .45 caliber pistol in his waistband everywhere he went, including to mass at Sacred Heart of Jesus on West 51st Street. He’d sit in the pew with his hand on the grip. The neighborhood guys noticed.

Some kept their distance. Others, the wrong ones, took notice for different reasons. Hell’s Kitchen in 1970 was not the gentrified brunching neighborhood you know today. It was a war zone of its own. Irish longshoremen, dockworkers, a network of tenements stacked between 8th Avenue and the Hudson River. The Westies, the Irish-American gang that would soon make the neighborhood synonymous with 1970s brutality, were just forming.

They were running loan sharking, hijacking trucks off the West Side piers, and breaking knees for the Italian families uptown. They needed muscle. They needed a guy who wasn’t afraid of dying. Because the kind of work they were getting into, fearlessness was the only qualification that mattered. Then, on October 16th, 1971, Mickey shot Linwood Willis in the Sunbrite Bar.

Now, here’s where the story gets strange. Mickey didn’t run. He didn’t hide. He went home, slept it off, and was arrested the next morning. The case looked airtight. Multiple witnesses, the murder weapon, a confession. The District Attorney’s office in Manhattan thought it was a slam dunk. They charged him with second-degree murder. They expected 15 years to life.

What they got instead was a defense strategy that would change the entire trajectory of Mickey Featherstone’s life, and by extension, the next decade of organized crime in New York City. His attorney argued insanity. Specifically, combat-induced psychosis. The defense brought in Army psychiatrists.

 They brought in records from Vietnam. They brought in witnesses who described Mickey waking up screaming, crawling under tables when fireworks went off on the 4th of July, holding conversations with dead soldiers from his unit. The jury heard about the A Shau Valley. They heard about Tet. They heard a 20-year-old kid testify that when Linwood Willis said the words “tough guy”, something in his head clicked back to a moment in the jungle, and he wasn’t standing in the Sunbrite Bar anymore.

He was somewhere else entirely. The jury acquitted him on grounds of insanity, but acquittal didn’t mean freedom. The court committed Mickey to Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center, a state facility for the criminally insane in Orange County, New York. He was supposed to stay there until doctors determined he was no longer a danger.

The doctors at Mid-Hudson took one look at him and knew they were in over their heads. Mickey escaped twice. Once in 1972, once in 1973. The first time, he walked out during a transport. He made it back to Hell’s Kitchen, drank for 3 days, and was picked up. The second time, he simply walked off the grounds and hitchhiked into Manhattan.

 Each time, he was returned to custody. Each time, he was evaluated. And each time, the evaluations got more disturbing. Doctors described him as, {quote} “Presenting a profound dissociation between affect and action.” {end quote} Translation: He could kill a man and feel nothing. He could discuss the killing afterward with the same emotional register a normal person used to discuss the weather.

 The doctors recommended long-term institutionalization. The legal system, overwhelmed and underfunded, did the opposite. By 1975, Mickey Featherstone was back on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. The Army’s most efficient export had been returned to sender, and the Westies were waiting. You have to understand the dynamics here.

The crew running Hell’s Kitchen at that point was led by a man named Jimmy Coonan. Coonan was the same age as Mickey, give or take. They’d grown up six blocks apart. Coonan had a personal vendetta of his own. His father had been beaten and humiliated years earlier by a local loan shark named Mickey Spillane, and Coonan had spent his entire adolescence planning revenge.

By the mid-1970s, Coonan was making moves. He needed a triggerman. He needed someone who would pull the trigger without flinching, without questioning, without leaving a paper trail of hesitation. He found [clears throat] Mickey at a bar on 10th Avenue. The relationship between Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone became one of the most lethal partnerships in New York criminal history.

 Coonan was the planner. Cold, calculating, polite to widows. Mickey was the executioner. Erratic, volatile, a walking psychiatric emergency with combat training. Together, they would commit, by federal indictment estimates, between 60 and 100 murders in the span of about 8 years. The exact number was never confirmed because the Westies developed a signature method.

 They didn’t just kill people, they dismembered them. They cut bodies into pieces small enough to fit into garbage bags and dumped them off the West Side piers into the Hudson River. They called it doing the Houdini. The bodies disappeared. So did the murder convictions. For nearly a decade, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office couldn’t make a case stick.

 They knew the Westies were killing. They just couldn’t find the evidence. Because Mickey Featherstone had taken what the army taught him in Vietnam and applied it to West Side Manhattan. [clears throat] Here’s how a typical Westies job worked, broken down step by step. The opportunity came from Coonan’s connections. He built a relationship with the Gambino crime family uptown, specifically with Paul Castellano’s people.

 The Italians had work they couldn’t have traced back to themselves. Loan shark debtors who needed to disappear, witnesses who needed silencing, competitors in the union rackets at the Javits Center construction site, they’d subcontract the wet work to the Westies. The fee ran between $5,000 and $25,000 per body, depending on difficulty.

 The execution itself was always the same. The target would be invited to a meeting, usually at the 46th Street townhouse owned by a Westies associate. Sometimes at a bar called the 366 on 10th Avenue, the target would walk in expecting a conversation. Mickey would be waiting. One shot to the head with a .22 caliber pistol.

The small caliber was deliberate. Less noise, less mess. The bullet would enter the skull and bounce around inside instead of exiting. After the shot, the dismemberment crew came in. They worked in the bathtub. Standard tools, hacksaw, butcher knives, plastic sheeting. The body was sectioned in roughly 2 hours.

 The pieces went into double thickness contractor garbage bags. The bags went into the trunk of a car. The car drove to the West Side piers between 42nd and 59th streets. The bags went into the Hudson at low tide. The current carried them out to sea. The money worked like this. A standard contract paid $15,000 cash. Kunen took 5,000 off the top. Mickey got 5,000.

The dismemberment crew split the remaining 5,000 three ways. Net profit per murder after expenses was about $13,000. They were doing at peak two to three contracts a month. That’s roughly 36 killings a year at the height of operations. The Westies annual revenue from contract murders alone, not counting loan sharking, hijacking, and union extortion, was estimated at between $400,000 and $600,000 in 1978 money.

 That translates to roughly $2.5 million in current value. But here’s the part that gets you. Mickey Featherstone didn’t do it for the money. The federal informants who eventually flipped on the Westies all said the same thing. Mickey didn’t care about cash. He gave most of his share to his mother. He didn’t drive a flashy car.

 He didn’t wear jewelry. He lived in a small apartment on West 43rd Street with his wife, [ __ ] a neighborhood girl he married in 1976. He drove a beat-up Buick. He spent his nights drinking at the same bars he’d drank at as a teenager. The killing wasn’t a job for Mickey. It was something deeper.

 It was the only thing that made the noise in his head go quiet. He told a federal prosecutor years later, in a moment of unusual candor, that he never felt as calm as he did in the seconds right after pulling the trigger. The same dissociation the doctors at Mid-Hudson had documented in 1972 had calcified into a way of life. You have to humanize this for a second, because if you don’t, you miss the tragedy.

 Mickey Featherstone took his daughter to school every morning, walked her to PS 111 on West 53rd Street, held her hand at the crosswalk, made her lunch, read her bedtime stories. He coached a kids’ baseball team in DeWitt Clinton Park on weekends. Neighbors who knew him casually described him as quiet, polite, devoted to his family. Then at night, he’d put on the field jacket, kiss his wife on the forehead, walk six blocks to a townhouse on 46th Street, and dismember a human being in a bathtub.

He’d come home before sunrise. He’d shower. He’d sleep 2 hours. He’d walk his daughter to school again. This is what the Vietnam War had done. It had created a man who could occupy two completely separate moral universes without the seams ever showing. The doctors had a name for it by then, compartmentalization.

The army had drilled it into him for survival in the jungle. The streets had monetized it. By 1980, the Westies were untouchable. The FBI had a task force on them. The Manhattan District Attorney had a dedicated unit. Nobody could make a case. Witnesses recanted. Witnesses disappeared. Witnesses refused to testify.

 The crew that had a fortified compound of silence, cousins and uncles and brothers-in-law, all watching each other, all from the same six blocks. You couldn’t infiltrate Hell’s Kitchen with an undercover. They’d know within 24 hours. So, the federal government did the only thing left. They waited for the Westies to make a mistake. The mistake came in 1985.

A loan shark named William Walker owed money to the wrong people. Coonan ordered him killed. Mickey did the job. But this time, instead of dumping the body in the Hudson, the dismembered remains were stored temporarily in a freezer at a warehouse on 12th Avenue. The freezer broke down. The smell drew complaints.

The NYPD got a tip. They found pieces of William Walker. They found fingerprints. They found enough to start asking questions. But here’s where it gets darker. By the time the federal RICO indictment came down in 1986, Mickey had already started having doubts. Not moral ones, tactical ones. He believed Jimmy Coonan was preparing to kill him.

 He believed his old friend, the man he’d partnered with on every contract for a decade, was setting him up to take the fall. He had reasons to think this. Coonan had been distancing himself. Meetings were happening that Mickey wasn’t invited to. There was talk that Mickey was too unstable, too unpredictable, that the Vietnam thing was finally catching up to him.

So, when the FBI approached him in late 1986 and offered him a deal in exchange for testifying against the entire Westies organization, Mickey did something nobody in Hell’s Kitchen had ever done. He flipped. The trial began in 1988. Mickey Featherstone took the stand against Jimmy Coonan, against his cousins, against the men he’d grown up with.

 He testified for 11 straight days. He described every murder, every dismemberment, every payment, every body dropped into the Hudson. He gave the federal prosecutor names, dates, dollar amounts. He explained the contracts with the Gambino family. He explained the bathtub procedure. He explained how a small caliber bullet was preferable to a large one.

 He did all of this in the same flat, affectless voice the doctors at Mid-Hudson had documented 16 years earlier. The dissociation was still there. He’d just turned it on a different target. Jimmy Coonan was convicted on multiple counts of murder, racketeering, and conspiracy. He received 75 years in federal prison. He died there in 2017.

The rest of the Westies hierarchy went with him. The crew was dismantled. The neighborhood, already changing under the pressure of 1980s Manhattan real estate, would never recover its underworld identity. By the early 1990s, Hell’s Kitchen was being rebranded as Clinton. The bars where Mickey had drunk were becoming wine bars.

The townhouse on 46th Street where dozens of men had been killed was sold to a publishing executive. Mickey Featherstone went into the federal witness protection program. He was given a new name, a new social security number, and relocated to a part of the country that has never been publicly disclosed.

 As of the most recent confirmable reporting, he is believed to be alive. He’d be in his mid-70s now. Whether the noise in his head ever went quiet, nobody knows. The federal prosecutors who debriefed him said he never showed remorse. He never showed pride. He never showed much of anything. He’d answer questions. He’d light a cigarette.

 He’d stare at the wall. Here’s what this story reveals. The United States sent 2.7 million Americans to Vietnam. Of those, around 300,000 came home with what we now call PTSD. The Veterans Administration in 1970 was not equipped to handle them. There was no protocol. There was no funding. There was no treatment. There were just bus tickets home and disability checks.

 Some of these men became homeless. Some killed themselves. Some drank themselves into early graves. And a small number, the ones whose neighborhoods happened to be wired into organized crime, became something else entirely. Mickey Featherstone wasn’t an isolated case. He was the most visible example of a pattern.

 The Vietnam combat veteran turned organized crime trigger man. There were others in Boston, in Philadelphia, in Detroit. The mob figured out very quickly that broken combat veterans made the most efficient killers in the world. The army had already done the training. The mob just had to provide the targets. Mickey Featherstone killed somewhere between a dozen and 30 men, depending on whose count you trust.

 He testified against 15 co-defendants. He helped convict the entire leadership of the most violent Irish-American crew in New York history. And he did all of it carrying a war that nobody in his neighborhood had ever fought, processing a trauma that had no name, in a country that had no idea what to do with him.

 The Vietnam War didn’t end in 1975. It came home in field jackets and duffel bags. It came home to 10th Avenue. It came home to the Sunbrite Bar at 2:00 a.m. on October 16th, 1971. Linwood Willis said six words. Mickey Featherstone pulled the trigger. And the war that was supposed to be over kept killing people in Hell’s Kitchen for 15 more years.

That’s the thing about wars. The official end date on the history book is the lie. The real end date is whenever the last veteran finishes processing what he saw. For some men, that takes a decade. For some, it takes a lifetime. For Mickey Featherstone, it took 30 victims and a federal courthouse and the dismantling of an entire crime organization.

And maybe in some witness protection apartment somewhere in middle America, it’s still going on. Maybe the noise in his head still hasn’t gone quiet. Maybe it never will. If you found this story as haunting as we did, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment below.

 What other Vietnam veterans turned mob killers should we cover next? We’re listening.