The Real Frankie Flannery Was FAR Worse Than the Film

October 3rd, 1978. Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan. The 596 Club on 10th Avenue. It’s past midnight when the door opens and a man named Paddy Dugan stumbles in. Drunk, laughing, completely unaware that he’s about to be cut into seven pieces. Within 90 minutes, Paddy’s head will be in a brown paper bag, his hands will be soaking in a bucket of cold water to lift the fingerprints clean, and his torso will be floating somewhere between 12th Avenue and the New Jersey shoreline. The man holding the knife is Jimmy Coonan. The man holding the saw is Mickey Featherstone. And the bar’s owner is busy mopping blood off the linoleum like he’s closing up after a busy Friday night. This wasn’t a movie. This wasn’t fiction. This was Tuesday in Hell’s Kitchen. 12 years later, Hollywood would try to tell this story. They’d hire Sean Penn,

Gary Oldman, and Ed Harris. They’d call it State of Grace. They’d change the names, soften the violence, and add a love story with Robin Wright. The film would earn praise for its grit. Critics would call it brutal. Audiences would walk out shaken. But here’s the truth nobody told the moviegoers in 1990.

The real story was so much worse that the studio’s own writers were ordered to cut entire sequences. Paddy Dugan never made it on screen. Ruby Stein never made it on screen. The meat hook never made it on screen. Because if they’d shown what really happened in those 10th Avenue saloons, no one would have believed it.

This is the story of the Westies, the most savage Irish-American gang in the history of New York. A crew so violent the Italian Mafia hired them to do the killings even Cosa Nostra wouldn’t touch. This is how Frankie Flannery on screen became Jimmy Coonan in real life. How Jackie Flannery’s drunken charm masked Mickey Featherstone’s combat-haunted rage.

And this is the body count Hollywood couldn’t show you. Not because they didn’t know, but because they did. To understand the Westies, you have to understand Hell’s Kitchen. 42nd Street to 59th Street. 8th Avenue to the Hudson River. In the 1960s and 70s, this was the most Irish neighborhood left in Manhattan.

Tenement buildings, longshoremen, stevedores, bartenders who knew everyone’s business and told no one. The cops walking the beat had grandfathers who’d walked the same blocks. Everybody knew everybody. And everybody kept their mouths shut. Jimmy Coonan grew up at 498 West 43rd Street.

His father, John Coonan, was a respected accountant. The family was middle-class by Hell’s Kitchen standards. Jimmy could have gone to college. He could have worn a suit and ridden the train to a desk job in midtown. Instead, when Jimmy was 15 years old, a local tough named Mickey Spillane, no relation to the writer, kidnapped Jimmy’s father, beat him bloody, and demanded a ransom.

The Coonan family paid. John Coonan came home with broken ribs and a face that didn’t look like his face anymore. And young Jimmy made a promise to himself in the hallway of that tenement. He was going to kill Mickey Spillane. He was going to take everything Spillane had, and he was going to rule Hell’s Kitchen like a king.

Mickey Featherstone was different. Born in 1949, Featherstone was a small kid with red hair, freckles, and eyes that never sat still. By the time he was 17, he was in Vietnam, attached to a long-range reconnaissance unit, doing things in the jungle that nobody back home wanted to hear about. He came back in 1969 wired wrong, diagnosed with what we now call PTSD.

But back then, they just called him crazy. Featherstone drank to quiet the noise. He couldn’t. He started killing strangers in bar fights. By 1970, he’d shot a man named Linwood Willis in a tavern on 10th Avenue for nothing. For looking at him. For breathing. The judge sent him to Matteawan State Hospital instead of prison.

They said he was insane. He probably was. But insanity in Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t a disqualification. It was a resume. When Featherstone got out, he met Jimmy Coonan. The two men recognized something in each other. Coonan had ambition without restraint. Featherstone had violence without conscience. Together, they made a complete predator.

Coonan would point, Featherstone would pull the trigger, and the man they were both pointing at was Mickey Spillane. Spillane had run Hell’s Kitchen since the early 1960s. He was old-school Irish. He kidnapped union officials for ransom. He ran loan sharking out of the saloons on 10th Avenue. He didn’t deal drugs because drugs were beneath him.

He gave turkeys to widows on Thanksgiving. He paid for kids’ communions. He was, in the language of the neighborhood, a gentleman. And he had no idea that the kid whose father he’d beaten in 1966 was now a grown man with an army and a plan. The war started slowly. In 1975, two of Spillane’s top lieutenants, Tom Devaney and Eddie Comiskey, were murdered.

Devaney was shot in a bar at 44th Street and 10th Avenue. Comiskey was shot in another bar 12 blocks south. Both killings had the same fingerprint. Close range, multiple shots, no witnesses. The cops knew exactly who’d done it. They couldn’t prove it. Because in Hell’s Kitchen, there were never witnesses. By 1977, Spillane had lost too many men.

He fled to Woodside, Queens, hoping the change of address would buy him time. It didn’t. On May 13th, 1977, four men ambushed Mickey Spillane in front of his apartment building. He was shot four times in the head and chest. He died on the sidewalk. The shooter was a man named Roy DeMeo, a Gambino crime family associate, a man with no Irish blood at all.

Because by 1977, Jimmy Coonan had already done something no Irish boss had ever done before. He’d allied himself with the Italians. Here’s how that alliance worked. Paul Castellano was the boss of the Gambino family. Castellano controlled construction, garbage hauling, and most importantly, the meat industry on the West Side.

Castellano had a problem. He needed people killed. People he couldn’t kill himself because the bodies would lead back to him. Coonan offered a solution. The Westies would do the murders. They’d dispose of the bodies. They’d make the victims disappear so completely that no one would ever find them. In exchange, Coonan got the Gambino blessing to run Hell’s Kitchen, plus a cut of construction shakedowns, plus protection from any other Italian family who might want to muscle in.

Castellano agreed. And that’s when the meat hooks came out. You have to understand what Coonan and Featherstone were doing with the bodies. The Italian families had a problem with disposal. They’d shoot a guy, then they’d have to drive him to a landfill, bury him in the pine barrens, sink him in concrete. It was complicated.

It left evidence. The Westies solved this problem by doing something nobody in organized crime had ever done at scale. They cut the bodies into pieces. They removed the heads. They removed the hands. They scattered the parts across multiple boroughs and waterways, so even if a piece was found, it could never be matched to the rest.

The head went one place. The hands went another. The torso went into the Hudson. The legs went into a dumpster behind a restaurant in Yonkers. By the time anything washed up, the medical examiner couldn’t even confirm the body was male. This is what Hollywood couldn’t show you in State of Grace. Sean Penn’s character, Terry Noonan, walks into bars and watches gangsters drink.

He doesn’t watch them dismember a man on a butcher’s block. Gary Oldman’s Jackie Flannery is a wild loose cannon who shoots people in the street. He doesn’t soak hands in buckets to lift the fingerprints. Ed Harris’s Frankie Flannery is a ruthless schemer in a leather coat. He doesn’t run a body disposal service for the Gambino crime family.

The film softened everything, and even softened, it earned an R rating for extreme violence. Now we get to Paddy Dugan. Paddy Dugan was a Westies associate, a drinker, a talker, a man who couldn’t keep his mouth shut. In the summer of 1978, Paddy got into a beef with another Westy named Dennis Curley. The argument escalated.

Paddy shot Dennis Curley dead in a bar. This was a problem. Curley had been a friend of Coonan’s. The neighborhood demanded justice. Coonan had to act. And he had to act in a way that sent a message to anyone else who might think about killing one of his own. On the night of October 13th, 1978, Coonan and Featherstone lured Paddy Dugan to the 566 Club on 10th Avenue.

The bar was owned by a man named Tony Lucchese, who was also a Westies associate. The bar was empty. The doors were locked. Paddy walked in expecting a drink. He got a bullet behind the ear. He was dead before he hit the floor. What happened next is what the studio refused to show.

Featherstone, drawing on what he’d done in Vietnam, took out a butcher’s knife and a hacksaw. He cut off Paddy’s head first. He put it in a paper bag. He cut off both hands at the wrist. He put them in a metal bucket. He soaked the hands in cold water for 3 hours. The cold water made the skin loose. After 3 hours, Featherstone peeled the skin off Paddy’s fingers like he was peeling a glove.

He flushed the skin down the toilet. He dried the fingerless hands and wrapped them in newspaper. Then he and Coonan started on the torso. They cut Paddy in half at the waist. They cut the legs off at the hips. By 3:00 in the morning, Paddy Dugan was seven pieces plus a head plus two skinned hands.

The blood was hosed off the basement floor. The pieces were distributed. The head went into the East River weighted with cinder blocks. The hands went into the Hudson. The torso went into a dumpster in the meatpacking district. The legs were never found. Paddy Dugan was officially listed as missing. His family put up flyers.

His mother called the police every week for 3 years. Paddy was never seen again. Not one piece of him was ever recovered. And this became the Westies’ signature. From 1978 forward, anyone who crossed Coonan didn’t just die. They disappeared completely as if they’d never existed. Now we come to Ruby Stein.

Ruby Stein was a Jewish loan shark who operated out of Manhattan in the 1970s. He was 62 years old. He weighed 300 lb. He had a black book. That black book contained the names, addresses, and outstanding debts of every borrower he had on the street totaling somewhere around $3 million in active loans.

Ruby Stein was by some accounts the most successful loan shark in New York. He was also a man who’d loan money to Jimmy Coonan and Coonan had decided he didn’t want to pay it back. On May 4th, 1977, Coonan invited Ruby Stein to a meeting at the 566 Club. Stein came alone. He shouldn’t have. The moment he walked in, Coonan shot him in the back of the head.

Featherstone was already waiting in the basement with the knives. They went through Stein’s pockets first. They took the black book. Coonan was now the owner of $3 million in outstanding street debts. Then they cut Stein into pieces. Same procedure as Dugan. Same disposal. The torso went into a body bag and got dumped in the Hudson River near Pier 49.

But here’s where Coonan made his first mistake. The body bag floated. It washed up 2 days later on the New Jersey shore. Police found Ruby Stein’s torso bloated and decomposing but with enough identifying marks including surgical scars to make a positive identification. The head and hands were missing. They’ve never been found.

But the torso was enough. The cops now had a body. They had a victim and they had a name to start asking questions about. Ruby Stein’s murder was the first crack in the Westies’ armor. It was also the first time the FBI started taking the gang seriously. Before 1977, the Westies had been a local NYPD problem.

After Ruby Stein, they became a federal target. Special agents were assigned. Wiretaps were authorized. Informants were cultivated. The investigation that would eventually destroy the Westies began the day that body bag washed up on the Jersey shoreline. While all this was happening, Jimmy Coonan was buying respectability.

He bought a house in Hazlet, New Jersey. He drove a Lincoln. He wore tailored suits. He took his wife Edna to dinner at Manhattan steak houses. He sent his kids to Catholic school. By 1980, he was making by some federal estimates around a million dollars a year from extortion, loan sharking, construction shake downs, and contract murders. He was a wealthy man.

He was a respectable man and he was a butcher who kept a hacksaw in the basement of a saloon on 10th Avenue. Featherstone was unraveling. The Vietnam never left him. The drinking got worse. The killings got more random. By the early ’80s, Featherstone was murdering people for personal slights. A bartender who shorted him on change.

A street guy who looked at him wrong. The body count climbed past 20. Coonan tried to manage him. Coonan tried to talk him down. But Featherstone was beyond management. He was beyond reason. And in 1986, Featherstone was arrested for the murder of a man named Michael Holly. Holly had been shot in front of witnesses.

The case looked airtight. Featherstone faced 25 years to life. Here’s where the story turns. Featherstone hadn’t killed Michael Holly. The shooter had been another Westie named Billy Bokun who looked enough like Featherstone to fool eyewitnesses. Coonan had arranged the entire setup. Coonan wanted Featherstone in prison because Featherstone knew too much, drank too much, and was becoming a liability.

Coonan figured Featherstone would go away for life and the Westies would survive. Coonan figured wrong. Featherstone, sitting in a federal holding cell, did the math. He realized his oldest friend, the man he’d killed for, had betrayed him. He realized Jimmy Coonan was willing to let him rot in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

And on November 12th, 1986, Mickey Featherstone made a decision that ended the Westies. He flipped. He became a federal witness. He told the FBI everything. Everything. Paddy Dugan. Ruby Stein. The bodies in the Hudson. The hands in the buckets. The deal with Castellano. The contract murders for the Gambinos. The construction shake downs. The names.

The dates. The locations. Featherstone gave the feds a road map to 20 years of Hell’s Kitchen homicide. And the feds, who’d been chasing Coonan since 1977, finally had everything they needed. On March 10th, 1987, federal agents arrested Jimmy Coonan, his brother Jackie Coonan, and seven other Westies on RICO charges.

The indictment ran 64 pages. It listed 16 murders. It listed extortion, loan sharking, narcotics trafficking, and labor racketeering. Coonan was charged as the boss of a criminal enterprise that had operated for over a decade and earned tens of millions of dollars through systematic violence.

The trial began in September of 1987. Featherstone testified for 11 days. He described the dismemberment of Paddy Dugan in clinical detail. He described the murder of Ruby Stein and the body bag in the Hudson. He described meat hooks in basement freezers used to hang bodies during disassembly. He described conversations with Coonan about which body parts to keep and which to discard.

The jurors listened in stunned silence. Two of them needed counseling after the trial ended. On March 6th, 1988, Jimmy Coonan was convicted on all counts. He was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison. He was sent to a maximum security facility in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He has never been released. As of this recording, he’s serving out the rest of his life behind concrete walls.

The man who once walked 10th Avenue like he owned it now walks a 15-ft prison yard for 1 hour a day. Mickey Featherstone went into the witness protection program. He was relocated to an undisclosed state. He was given a new name. His wife and children went with him. He’s still alive somewhere in America. An old man now drinking coffee in some diner in some town where nobody knows what he did.

He’s never given an interview that wasn’t tightly controlled by the federal government. He published a memoir written with journalist T.J. English called The Westies. Read it if you want the full account. It’s the only first-hand record of what happened in those basements. The 566 Club is gone.

The building still stands at 566 10th Avenue, but the bar closed in the late ’80s. The basement was sealed. The neighborhood gentrified. Today, there’s a coffee shop on the corner where men once cut other men into pieces. The customers ordering oat milk lattes have no idea what happened beneath their feet. Hell’s Kitchen itself is unrecognizable now.

The tenements where Coonan grew up have been replaced with luxury condominiums. A two-bedroom apartment on West 43rd Street rents for $6,000 a month. The longshoremen are gone. The Irish are gone. The accent that defined the neighborhood for 100 years has faded out almost completely. You can stand on the corner where Mickey Spillane was murdered in 1977 and the only thing you’ll see is a Whole Foods and a yoga studio.

Now back to State of Grace. The film came out on September 14th, 1990. It earned mixed reviews and disappointed at the box office. It’s been reappraised since then as a forgotten classic of the gangster genre. Sean Penn’s performance as Terry Noonan is restrained and haunted. Gary Oldman’s Jackie Flannery is a tornado of charm and self-destruction.

>> [snorts] >> Ed Harris’s Frankie Flannery is cold, calculating, and terrifying. The film is good. It’s just not true. The screenwriter, Dennis McIntyre, knew the real story. He’d researched the Westies. He’d talked to people in Hell’s Kitchen. He’d read the federal indictments. He knew about Paddy Dugan.

He knew about Ruby Stein. He knew about the meat hooks and the body bags. And the studio told him to soften it. Cut the dismemberments. Cut the disposal scenes. Audiences won’t sit through it. We can’t get the rating we need. We can’t sell tickets to a movie about men who skin hands in buckets. So, McIntyre softened it.

He gave Frankie Flannery a sympathetic edge. He gave Jackie Flannery a tragic charm. He invented a love story between Terry Noonan and Frankie’s sister, Kathleen, played by Robin Wright. He turned a story about systematic dismemberment into a story about loyalty, betrayal, and the death of old neighborhoods. The film works.

It’s beautifully made, but it’s not the Westies. It’s the Westies after the studio’s lawyers and marketing department got finished with them. What does the real story tell us? It tells us something about American organized crime that Hollywood has always been afraid to confront.

The Italian Mafia, for all its violence, operated under rules. There was a chain of command. There were boundaries. There were certain things you didn’t do. The Westies had no rules. The Westies were what happened when violence detached itself from any code at all. They were a glimpse of what organized crime looks like when the only organizing principle is profit and the only enforcement mechanism is dismemberment.

It also tells us something about the relationship between the Italians and the Irish in 1970s New York. Castellano didn’t hire the Westies because he respected them. He hired them because he needed killers who would do work he wouldn’t ask his own men to do. The Westies, in turn, accepted because they had no choice.

Without the Gambino alliance, they were just another street gang. With it, they became kings of Hell’s Kitchen for a decade. Both sides used each other. Both sides knew it. And both sides eventually paid for it. Castellano was murdered outside Sparks Steak House on December 16th, 1985. Coonan was indicted 15 months later.

The alliance that had built the Westies died the same year the Gambino dynasty fell. There’s a symmetry there. A historical inevitability. When the boss who protected you is gone, you don’t last long. Jimmy Coonan is now in his 80s. He sits in a federal prison cell. He has time to think about everything he built and everything he lost.

The empire on 10th Avenue. The house in Hazlet. The respect of his neighborhood. The fear of every man who ever crossed his path. He had it all. And he traded it all for a hacksaw, a body bag, and the certainty that violence without limits eventually consumes the man who wields it. Mickey Featherstone is somewhere in America. An old man with a new name.

He survived. He paid no real price beyond his identity. The man who personally murdered more than a dozen people walks free because he was useful to the federal government. That’s the real moral of the story. In the world of organized crime, the only sin that gets punished is loyalty. Betrayal is rewarded.

Silence is punished. And the truth, when it finally comes out, is always worse than the movie. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment. What Mafia figure should we cover next?