The Only Gang in New York the Five Families Never Touched – HT

 

 

 

It’s 1980 in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. A man has just been shot dead inside a bar on West 43rd Street. His body will not be found whole. Parts of him will turn up in the Hudson River days later. Parts of him will never be found at all. The men who did this are not grieving. They are already back at the bar drinking.

The New York City mob had five families. Five carefully structured, deeply connected crime dynasties that divided this city like a pie and fought bloody wars over every slice. The Gambinos, the Genoveses, the Luccheses, the Colombos, the Bonannos. Together, they controlled everything from the docks to the garbage routes, from construction contracts to the courts themselves.

If you operated crime in New York, you paid tribute to one of them or you got hurt. But there was one gang they never fully touched. 20 men, maybe fewer at any given time, all Irish, all from the same 15-block stretch of Manhattan’s West Side. They had no sitting boss on the commission, no representation at the table, no diplomatic protection,    no formal charter.

By every rule of the New York underworld, they should have been absorbed, taxed into submission, or simply killed. But they weren’t. And the reason why tells you everything about what fear actually looks at the top of organized crime. This is the story of the Westies. And before this video is over, you’re going to understand exactly why even the most powerful crime families in American history decided some men were not worth the trouble.

If you’ve been watching this channel for a while, you already know we go deep on stories like this. If you’re new here, hit subscribe right now. We cover organized crime, gang history, and the stories most channels won’t touch. Now, let’s get into it. Hell’s Kitchen did not get its name  by accident.

 The neighborhood running along Manhattan’s West Side,    roughly from 34th Street up to 59th, had been a working-class Irish enclave since the mid-1800s. It was dense. It was poor. And it was violent. By the mid-20th century, it was also controlled by a rotating cast of Irish mob bosses who ran numbers, loan sharks, and dock  rackets while keeping an uneasy peace with the Italian families who surrounded them on every other side.

The man in charge for most of the 1960s and early 70s was Mickey Spillane. Not the detective novelist. This Spillane was a calculating Irish gang leader who had actually maintained a functional détente with the five families for years. He wasn’t looking to expand. He controlled his turf, paid where he had to pay, and kept Hell’s Kitchen quiet enough that nobody came looking.

The The respected that. It was a business arrangement, not a friendship, but Spillane had an enemy he didn’t fully account for. A teenager named Jimmy Coonan, who had grown up on West 49th Street watching Spillane’s men operate. And who had decided  at a very young age that he wanted what Spillane had. The thing that radicalized Coonan happened when he was still a young man.

Spillane’s crew kidnapped his father, pistol-whipped him, and left him as a message. Coonan was not the kind of person who received messages and moved on. In 1966, he climbed to the rooftop of a Hell’s  Kitchen tenement and opened fire on Spillane and his associates below with a machine gun. He hit no one.

But Spillane understood immediately that he now had a  problem. What followed was a slow and brutal war for Hell’s Kitchen that would last over a decade. Coonan recruited a circle of young Irish men from the neighborhood, including Mickey Featherstone, a Vietnam veteran with documented psychological instability who had talked his way into the Green Berets at 17, been discharged with hallucinations, spent years in and out of mental institutions, and by the mid-1970s was sitting in a bar on West 43rd Street

   looking for something to do with his rage. Coonan gave him a purpose. Featherstone gave Coonan something far more valuable, a reputation. Mickey Featherstone, with his wide blue eyes and soft boyish face, looked like someone’s kid brother. People who knew him crossed the street  when they saw him coming.

He had beaten charges for multiple killings in front of witnesses. He had killed men in bars, in parking lots, in the street. Not because he was ordered to, because someone had said the wrong thing, or because he had been drinking, or sometimes for reasons that witnesses could never quite articulate. Even among a crew of violent men, Featherstone was different.

 And people in Hell’s Kitchen understood  the difference. By 1977, Koonan had Spillane eliminated.  Roy DeMeo, the Gambino family’s most prolific hitman, shot Mickey Spillane outside his  apartment in Woodside, Queens. It was a favor. Koonan was now the undisputed boss of Hell’s Kitchen. And here is where the story gets interesting.

Because the moment Koonan took over, he made a move that confused his own crew and alarmed the old Irish neighborhood around him.    He went to the Italians. Paul Castellano, the godfather of the Gambino crime family, arranged a sit-down with Koonan at an Italian restaurant. The Gambinos wanted to talk about a murdered loan shark.

They wanted to understand who they were now dealing with on the West Side. Koonan denied any involvement, even though he was responsible. Castellano, apparently satisfied, made a proposal. The Westies would come under Gambino protection.    In exchange, they would hand over a percentage of their earnings and be available for contract work when needed.

Koonan accepted. From the outside, this looked like submission. The Westies becoming a Gambino subcontractor. And that’s how some in the Irish community saw it, including Featherstone, who viewed the whole arrangement as a betrayal of their roots. But what Koonan understood and what the five families had figured out very quickly was that the Westies were not a gang you absorb.

They were a gang you pointed. The reason the other families left them alone was not mercy. It was math. The Westies at their peak numbered around 20 active members. The five  families combined had thousands. There was no world in which the Irish outnumbered the Italians. But the Westies had made themselves so genuinely dangerous, so unpredictably violent that the cost of moving against them outweighed any benefit.

Federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani would later call them the most savage organization in the long history of New York organized crime. On law enforcement wiretaps, Mafia bosses were overheard describing the Westies as and this is a direct quote, “These guys are crazy.” In gangland, that was not an insult. That was a risk assessment.

 Part of that reputation came from something the Westies did with their victims that no other New York gang had systematized the way they had. They called it doing the Houdini. Coonan had learned butchering skills in the most literal sense of the word from a crew member named Eddie Kaminsky, who had trained as a butcher in prison.

When the Westies needed to dispose of someone, they dismembered the body completely. They cut the lungs open to prevent floating. They separated limbs and distributed remains across multiple disposal sites. Coonan once kept severed fingers from multiple victims in a bag, which he showed to people when he needed them to understand something important about the consequences of uncooperative behavior.

When Coonan owed a substantial amount to a loan shark named Ruby Stein, he didn’t pay the debt. He had Stein murdered in the back of his own bar, dismembered on the premises, and dumped into the Hudson. When Stein’s torso washed up anyway, a Westie was overheard saying they should have cut the lungs open. They noted it for next time.

 This wasn’t just violence. This was violence as a permanent deterrent. No body meant no evidence, no witnesses, and no one entirely sure of what had happened. The police knew. The FBI knew. But knowing and proving are two different things, and the Westies understood that very well. If this kind of detailed true crime content is what you’re looking for, subscribe to this channel right now.

 We cover stories like this every week. Stories the history books leave out. Hit that subscribe button and you won’t miss any of them. Now, the alliance with the Gambinos made the Westies legitimately dangerous in a new way. They became, in effect, the Gambinos outsourced enforcement arm. When the Italian families needed something done that they didn’t want tied back to their own soldiers, they called Coonan.

The Westies worked contracts. They were paid weekly. They had access to Gambino resources and protection, while the five families got deniability on their messiest jobs. It was around this time that the Westies also extended their reach into union racketeering, running schemes at Madison Square Garden, the New York Coliseum, and eventually the Jacob Javits Convention Center.

They had backstage union influence at Broadway theaters. In the mid-1980s, they ran a ticket skimming operation at the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum so efficiently that it only came to light when the museum filed for bankruptcy for unrelated reasons and investigators started looking at the books. The five families took their cut, but they did not move against the Westies.

50 to 1 by manpower, and still they shared. But inside the gang, a different kind of war was beginning. Featherstone had never been comfortable with the Italian  alliance. He saw Coonan drifting away from Hell’s Kitchen, literally and figuratively. Coonan had moved to New Jersey. He only came to the West Side when he had to.

   He had started talking differently, dressing differently. Featherstone, for all his documented instability, had a genuine identity tied to the neighborhood, to the Irish community, to the idea of what the Westies were supposed to be. Coonan, in Featherstone’s view, had become something else. Then,    in 1985, a man named Michael Holly was shot dead  on a New York street.

Witnesses described the shooter as matching  Featherstone’s description. The car used was traced to Featherstone’s employer. He was arrested, tried, and convicted. Sentenced to 25 years to life. Featherstone was stunned because he was innocent. He had beaten murder charges before, including for killings he had actually committed.

  Being convicted for one he hadn’t was a different experience entirely. And the more he thought about it, the more certain he became. His own crew had set him up. Billy Bokun, whose brother John had been killed in the Holly dispute years earlier, had put on a long-haired wig, driven a car identical to Featherstone’s, and shot Holly in front of witnesses.

   The Westies had then tipped the police that Featherstone was their man. Coonan, who had once been the closest thing Featherstone had    to a brother, had signed off on it. Featherstone contacted prosecutors.    His wife, [ __ ] began making recordings. She wore a wire into conversations with gang  members, including Bokun.

 The evidence accumulated. In September 1986, a judge overturned Featherstone’s conviction. And from that moment on, Mickey Featherstone was the most dangerous man in Hell’s Kitchen. Not because he was violent, but because he was talking. He testified for 4 weeks in open court. He laid  out 20 years of Westie operations.

The murders, the contracts, the dismemberments, the union schemes, the arrangement with the Gambinos. All of it in detail from someone who had been present for most of it. Federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani brought a RICO indictment    that covered 20 years of criminal activity. Coonan was sentenced to 75 years.

James McElroy    got 60. Richard Ritter got 40. The men who had for two decades made New York’s most powerful crime families calculate whether they were worth the trouble    were gone. Nearly all at once. Betrayed not by any of the five families, not by a rival gang, not by law enforcement working alone.

They were betrayed by the one man they misjudged. Coonan, who has spent the last three plus decades at a federal facility in Pennsylvania, filed for parole in 2023. Court papers from that hearing noted that he had lost all his teeth, suffered partial deafness, obesity, high blood pressure,    and a form of skin cancer.

He has a mandatory release date in 2030.    He will be in his early 80s. Fetherston and his wife entered witness protection. Hell’s Kitchen itself, the neighborhood that had shaped all of them, gentrified rapidly through the 1990s and 2000s. The tenement bars, where the Westies drank, argued, and occasionally disposed of problems, are now converted into upscale restaurants.

The city even tried to officially rename the neighborhood Clinton. It didn’t stick. People still call it Hell’s Kitchen. There is a reason why the five families, with all their power,    chose to work alongside the Westies, rather than over them. It was not respect in the sentimental sense. It was the recognition that some men cost more to fight than they are worth to fight.

 The Westies were never  powerful enough to threaten the commission. They were small, Irish, territorial, and relentlessly violent. But they understood something that took a lot of bigger organizations decades to learn. If the cost of coming after you is high enough, most people will find a way to work around you instead. That logic held for nearly 20 years.

It fell apart the moment they turned it inward. The story of the Westies is not really about being uncatchable. It’s about what happens when you build a gang on the foundation of fear and violence, and then forget that the most dangerous person in any room is always the one with the least left to lose. That’s where we’ll leave it.

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