The Real Westies Weren’t Like the Movies — They Were Worse – HT
The year is 1978. The place is a steakhouse in Brooklyn, backroom, closed to the public. Three men sit at a table covered in white linen. One is a butcher. One is a killer with dead eyes. One is Irish, 29 years old, his hands still rough from a decade of waterfront work and from cutting up men in a bathtub on West 46th Street.
The butcher at the head of the table is Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino crime family, the most powerful man in American organized crime. He’s wearing a silk tie. He’s eating veal. And he’s about to do something no Mafia boss had done in 50 years. He’s about to put an Irish gang on the family payroll. That Irish gang was called the Westies.
The kid across the table was Jimmy Coonan. And within [clears throat] an hour, the bloodiest neighborhood in New York City would belong, on paper and in practice, to the Italians. This is the story of the sit-down that changed the map of organized crime in America. The meeting that married Hell’s Kitchen to Staten Island.
The deal that turned a gang of Irish psychopaths into the personal off-the-books hit squad of the most feared Mafia family in the country. It happened quietly. It happened over dinner. And it turned Manhattan’s West Side into a killing ground for the next decade. But here’s what the movies never tell you. The Italians didn’t just absorb the Westies. They used them.
They weaponized them. And they sent them into war zones the Italians themselves were too smart to enter. Because you have to understand something. When the Mafia wants a body to disappear, they call each other. When they want a body to disappear and never be found, not the bones, not the teeth, not the fingerprints, they call Jimmy Coonan.
And nobody, not the FBI, not the NYPD, not the rival families, was ready for what that partnership was about to unleash. To understand how this sit-down happened, you have to go back to Hell’s Kitchen in the 1960s. This was Manhattan’s West Side, the bloody patch, as the Irish called it. 42nd [snorts] Street up to 57th, 8th Avenue to the Hudson River, docks, tenements, longshoremen, priests, cops, and Irish gangsters who’d been running the neighborhood since before prohibition.
The old king was a man named Mickey Spillane. Not the writer. This Mickey Spillane was a gentleman gangster, polite, well-dressed, 50 years old in 1970. He ran the Hell’s Kitchen rackets the old way, loan-sharking, bookmaking, union kickbacks from the piers. He kissed babies. He paid for funerals. He gave turkeys to widows at Christmas.
The neighborhood loved him. And that love was exactly why he had to die. Because across the neighborhood, in a railroad apartment on 10th Avenue, a kid named Jimmy Coonan was growing up hating Mickey Spillane. You have to understand who Coonan was. Born in 1946, altar boy at Sacred Heart, choir singer, quiet kid, small for his age, looked like a bank teller, talked like a bank teller.
But something in him was wrong from the beginning. When Jimmy was 11 years old, his father, John Coonan, got on the wrong side of Mickey Spillane over a gambling debt. Spillane’s men grabbed John Coonan on 10th Avenue. They tied him to a chair. They beat him bloody. Then they made Jimmy watch.
An 11-year-old boy watching his father get tortured. That memory sat in Jimmy Coonan like a bullet that never got removed. And he spent the next 20 years planning to get it out. By 1966, Coonan was running with a crew of neighborhood kids who wanted what he wanted, to kill Mickey Spillane, to take over Hell’s Kitchen, to run it their way, meaner, faster, more violent than anything the old Irish had ever done.
His partner in this was a man who’d become legend, Mickey Featherstone. Small, wiry Vietnam veteran with two tours in the jungle and a head full of combat flashbacks, Featherstone was the muscle, Coonan was the brain. Featherstone killed because he had nothing left inside. Coonan killed because it was business.
By the early 1970s, Coonan and Featherstone were at war with Spillane. A real war. Bodies in the Hudson, bodies in car trunks, bodies that just vanished. This is where the Westies story gets dark. Because Coonan, the altar boy from Sacred Heart, figured something out. If you kill a man and hide the body well enough, the police can never charge you with murder. No corpse, no case.
So Coonan started cutting them up. He’d take the body to a tenement on West 46th Street. He’d put it in the bathtub. He’d drain the blood. Then he’d use a butcher’s knife to dismember it. Hands first, because hands had fingerprints. Then the head, because the head had teeth, dental records. Then the rest into garbage bags, into the river, into the trunk of a car headed for a New Jersey swamp.
They called it doing a Houdini, making a man disappear completely forever. And it became Jimmy Coonan’s signature. But here’s the thing nobody saw coming. While Coonan was cutting up Spillane’s men on the West Side, 100 blocks south, the Italian Mafia was watching. They were watching and they were taking notes.
Because the Italians had a problem, a big one. Paul Castellano became boss of the Gambino crime family in October of 1976 when Carlo Gambino died of natural causes. Castellano was 61 years old. He lived in a 17-room mansion on Staten Island that the crews called the White House. He dressed like a banker. He talked like a banker. He hated violence. He hated attention.
Castellano wanted the Gambinos to become what he called a white-collar family, construction, concrete, garbage, trucking, unions, boring businesses that made boring money, hundreds of millions of dollars a year in boring money. But Castellano had a problem. His name was Roy DeMeo. You have to understand who Roy DeMeo was, because without him, the Westies deal never happens.
DeMeo was a Gambino soldier, officially a loan shark, unofficially the most prolific serial killer in the history of the American Mafia. DeMeo ran a crew out of the Gemini Lounge, a bar at the corner of Flatlands Avenue and East 57th Street in Brooklyn. Above the bar was an apartment. In the apartment was a method, the DeMeo method.
A man walks in, someone shoots him in the head with a silenced pistol. Someone else wraps a towel around the head to catch the blood. Then the body is dragged to the bathroom, stripped, drained, and cut up with a kitchen knife into manageable pieces. Then the pieces go into garbage bags and then into a dumpster behind a commercial laundry.
By morning, the dumpster is emptied. The body is gone. Sound familiar? It should. Because Roy DeMeo and Jimmy Coonan, working independently, 100 city blocks apart, had developed almost exactly the same system for making men vanish. Two butchers, two bathtubs, two neighborhoods, one method. DeMeo’s crew was estimated to have killed between 75 and 200 people between 1973 and 1983.
Nobody knows the real number. Nobody ever will. Because Roy DeMeo was very, very good at his job. But Roy DeMeo was also Paul Castellano’s problem. Because DeMeo was everything Castellano didn’t want the Gambino family to be. He was loud. He was violent. He was sloppy in ways that smart bosses noticed.
And by 1977, Castellano knew the FBI was starting to notice, too. Castellano needed a buffer. He needed killers who weren’t his. He needed bodies that couldn’t be traced back to the Gambino button men. He needed hit men who lived in a different universe from his family tree. Meanwhile, on the West Side, Jimmy Coonan had another problem.
In May of 1977, Mickey Spillane was shot four times in front of his apartment building in Woodside, Queens, 5:15 in the evening, grocery bag in his hand. He died on the sidewalk. The shooter was never officially identified, but everyone in Hell’s Kitchen knew Coonan was king. But being king of Hell’s Kitchen in 1977 meant something different than it did in 1967.
The neighborhood was changing. The docks were dying. The longshoremen rackets were drying up. The real money in New York was moving uptown into construction, into the Javits Center project, a billion-dollar convention center being built on the West Side, into the union locals that controlled concrete and carpentry.
Coonan wanted in on that money. But Coonan couldn’t get in on that money, because the Italians already owned it. Every construction site in Manhattan, every load of concrete, every drywall delivery, every truck that rolled into the Javits site, all of it was controlled by the five families. And if Jimmy Coonan tried to muscle in, he’d end up in a Jersey swamp, cut up by Roy DeMeo the same way Kunen was cutting up his own enemies.
He knew it, the Italians knew it, everyone knew it. So, Kunen made a choice. The choice that would define the rest of his life, the life of everyone who worked for him, and the shape of organized crime in New York for the next decade. He decided to go to the Italians, not as an enemy, not as a rival, as a partner. The go-between was a man named Danny Marino.
Gambino associate, connected to the Westies through neighborhood ties. Marino brought Kunen’s request to Roy DeMeo. DeMeo brought it to his captain, Nino Gaggi. Gaggi brought it to Paul Castellano. And Castellano, sitting in his White House on Todt Hill, looked at the proposal and saw something beautiful. A gang of Irish psychopaths in Manhattan, who knew how to make bodies disappear, who had no blood ties to any of the five families, who could be pointed at a problem and unleashed.
And who, in exchange for tribute and protection, would never be allowed to rise above the rank of useful tool. Castellano said yes. And he scheduled a sit-down. The meeting happened in the back room of a Brooklyn restaurant in late 1978. The exact date has never been officially confirmed.
Law enforcement reconstructed it years later from informant testimony. The court attendees, according to multiple cooperating witnesses, were Paul Castellano, Roy DeMeo, Nino Gaggi, Jimmy Kunen, and Mickey Featherstone. Five men, one deal, two worlds about to collide. Castellano laid down the rules. And you have to understand the weight of what he said, because every word was a new law for Hell’s Kitchen.
Rule one, from this moment forward, the Westies worked for the Gambino crime family. Not with them, for them. Rule two, every significant score the Westies made, loan sharking, shylocking, union extortion, construction shake-downs, bookmaking, the Gambinos got 10% off the top, tribute, non-negotiable. Rule three, the Westies couldn’t kill anybody without clearing it first.
No freelance hits, no personal grudges, everybody had to be approved. Rule four, in exchange, the Westies got Gambino protection. Nobody could touch them, not other Irish crews, not Puerto Rican gangs, not black gangsters moving down from Harlem. If anybody tried, the Gambinos would handle it. And rule five, the big one, the one that made the whole deal worth it for Paul Castellano.
When the Gambinos needed a hit done that couldn’t be traced back to an Italian, they’d call Jimmy Kunen. And Jimmy Kunen would do it. No questions asked, no records kept, nobody’s found, because that was his specialty, the Houdini. Jimmy Kunen, 29 years old, Irish kid from 10th Avenue, agreed to every term.
He shook Paul Castellano’s hand. He shook Roy DeMeo’s hand. And he walked out of that restaurant the most dangerous Irishman in America, because he now had the full protection of the Gambino crime family behind him. And he had a customer, a very big customer, who needed very specific services that Jimmy Kunen was uniquely qualified to provide.
Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Because the Westies deal with the Gambinos wasn’t just about murder for hire. That was the dark side of it. But the daylight side of the deal, the side that made millions of dollars, was about something much more boring and much more profitable, construction. Let me break down how this actually worked.
The Javits Convention Center project broke ground in 1979. $375 million in public money. Biggest construction project in New York City. Every five family had a piece. Gambinos got the drywall and the carpentry locals. Genovese got concrete. Lucchese got trucking. But here’s the thing about construction in New York in 1979. You couldn’t just show up with a drywall crew and start working. You had to pay.
You paid the union delegates. You paid the general contractor. You paid the supply yards. You paid the neighborhood. And in Hell’s Kitchen, paying the neighborhood meant paying Jimmy Kunen. Because the Javits site sat right on the edge of the Westies territory. And the Westies controlled the labor pools that fed that site.
So, here’s how the scheme worked. Step one, a construction company wins a subcontract on the Javits job. Drywall, let’s say drywall. Step two, the company needs workers. Non-union or low-skilled labor to move materials, sweep, haul debris. Those workers come from a pool controlled by the Westies. Step three, every worker on that pool had to kick back a piece of his daily wages.
$5 a day, $10 a day. It added up. Hundreds of workers times dollars per head times six days a week. Step four, the general contractor himself paid a quote no-show fee end quote to specific Westies members. Guys who were on the payroll but never showed up to work. That fee alone ran between $5,000 and $10,000 per month per man.
Step five, the Westies took their cut, and 10% went up to the Gambinos as tribute. On a good month, the Javits scheme alone generated $40,000 in cash, clean money, labor money, boring money. The kind of money Paul Castellano loved. But the labor rackets were just one piece. The real Westies specialty, the thing Paul Castellano actually bought at that sit-down, was the murder for hire service.
And it’s here that the partnership started producing bodies that the Italians couldn’t or wouldn’t produce themselves. The first big test came in 1979. A Gambino associate named Ruby Stein. Ruby was a legendary Jewish loan shark, 50 years old, 6 ft 2, operated out of a restaurant on 7th Avenue. Stein was owed an estimated $6 million on the street.
That’s 1979 money, millions of dollars loaned out at vig rates of 3% per week. Stein had a book, a ledger. Every name, every debt, every amount. And Stein was getting nervous. Because Stein had started talking to federal investigators about his Gambino connections, or so the Gambinos believed.
Castellano wanted Ruby Stein gone. But Ruby Stein was Jewish, old school, well-connected to both Italian and Irish crews all over the city. A traditional Gambino hit would be traced back. So, Castellano made a call. The call went to Nino Gaggi. Gaggi called Danny Marino. Marino called Jimmy Kunen. And on May 4th, 1977, Ruby Stein walked into the Sunbrite Bar at 9th Avenue and 45th Street.
He was meeting what he thought was a sit-down with Jimmy Kunen over a debt collection. He sat down, he ordered a drink, and Jimmy Kunen shot him in the head. What happened next is why Paul Castellano had wanted the Westies in the first place. They dragged Ruby Stein’s body into the back.
They laid him out on a tarp. They removed his clothing. They removed his wallet, his watch, his ring, any identifying items. Then they went to work with knives. By 3:00 in the morning, Ruby Stein was in six garbage bags. By 4:00, those bags were in the trunk of a stolen car. By 5:00, they were scattered across three boroughs. Ruby Stein’s hands ended up in one river.
His head ended up somewhere that has never been found. The rest of him washed up piece by piece over the following weeks. His torso surfaced in Jamaica Bay. Investigators identified him only because of a surgical scar. And here’s the detail that made Jimmy Kunen a legend inside the Gambino family. Ruby Stein’s ledger, the $6 million book. It disappeared with him, never recovered.
And every man who owed Ruby Stein money, including a lot of Gambino associates, suddenly owed nothing. Because the book was gone. Ruby was gone. The debt was gone. That was a very, very valuable side effect for a lot of important people. Paul Castellano was pleased. Over the next five years, between 1979 and 1984, the Westies performed an estimated 30 to 60 murders for the Gambino crime family and its associates.
The exact number, nobody knows. Because the whole point of calling Jimmy Kunen was that there were never any bodies. That was the deal. That was the service. That was what Paul Castellano was paying for. You wanted a man gone and erased, you called Hell’s Kitchen. But here’s the part where it gets complicated, because the relationship between the Westies and the Gambinos was never what Jimmy Kunen thought it was.
Kunen believed, in his own mind, that he was a partner, that he and Castellano were equals of a kind, that Hell’s Kitchen was its own fiefdom operating alongside the Italians. He was wrong. To the Gambinos, the Westies were tools, useful tools, profitable tools, but tools. And tools get used up. Tools get replaced.
Tools don’t get to sit at the big table. The first crack in the partnership came in 1980. Mickey Featherstone, the Vietnam veteran muscle of the Westies, was picked up by the NYPD for a murder. A guy named Mickey Spillane, associate named Whitehead. Featherstone beat the rap, but it spooked Coonan. Because Featherstone, for all his loyalty, had a head full of combat trauma and a mouth that wouldn’t always stay closed. He drank. He talked.
He melted down in public. And if Mickey Featherstone ever decided to cooperate with the government, he could put Jimmy Coonan in a federal cell for the rest of his life. He could also put a lot of Gambinos in federal cells, including Roy DeMeo. Castellano didn’t like loose ends, and Roy DeMeo really didn’t like loose ends.
Throughout the early ’80s, there were rumors, never confirmed, that DeMeo had floated the idea to Coonan of clipping Featherstone, just to be safe, just to eliminate the risk. Coonan refused. Featherstone had been his friend since they were kids. Featherstone had killed for him a dozen times over. Coonan wouldn’t do it.
That refusal, small as it seemed, would come back to destroy him. The second problem was Roy DeMeo himself. By 1982, DeMeo was out of control. His crew was murdering people. Real estate scams, drug deals gone wrong, suspected informants at a rate that made Castellano physically ill. The FBI was closing in. A major federal investigation called the Gambino Task Force was building a case, and Roy DeMeo was at the center of it.
So, Paul Castellano made a decision, a decision he would never be allowed to forget. On January 10th, 1983, Roy DeMeo was found in the trunk of his own Cadillac in a parking lot in Brooklyn, shot multiple times in the head. He’d been killed by his own people. Ordered by Castellano. Because Roy DeMeo had become a liability, and Paul Castellano eliminated liabilities.
Jimmy Coonan heard about Roy DeMeo’s murder the same day everybody else did, and he understood, probably for the first time, what he actually was to Paul Castellano. He was Roy DeMeo’s replacement. He was Roy DeMeo’s successor. And one day, when Jimmy Coonan became a liability, too, Paul Castellano would eliminate him the same way.
Castellano, of course, never got the chance. On December 16th, 1985, at 5:40 in the evening, Paul Castellano stepped out of a Lincoln Town Car in front of Sparks Steak House at 210 East 46th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Three men in trench coats and Russian fur hats walked up behind him. They opened fire. Six shots to Castellano, six shots to his driver, Tommy Bilotti.
Both men dead on the sidewalk. The shooters walked away. A block away, John Gotti, new underboss of nothing yet, watched from a parked car. Within 48 hours, John Gotti was the new boss of the Gambino crime family. And the world that Paul Castellano had built, including the Westies partnership, started to come apart.
Because John Gotti was not Paul Castellano. Gotti was flashy. Gotti was loud. Gotti liked attention. Gotti did not care about quiet, boring white-collar money. Gotti wanted street muscle. And Gotti had his own Irish problem, his own guys, his own agenda. The Westies, under Gotti, started to get less work, less protection, less attention.
And meanwhile, inside the Westies themselves, the cracks were turning into canyons. In 1986, Mickey Featherstone was framed for a murder he didn’t commit, the killing of a mob associate named Michael Holly. Featherstone had been set up by members of his own crew. Why? Nobody’s entirely sure. Some say Coonan was behind it.
Some say other Westies, jealous of Featherstone’s closeness to Coonan, engineered it. Featherstone was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. And in federal custody, Mickey Featherstone finally broke. He’d killed for Jimmy Coonan. He’d bled for Jimmy Coonan. And he believed, rightly or wrongly, that Jimmy Coonan had fed him to the wolves.
So, Mickey Featherstone went to the FBI. He told them everything. The murders, the bodies, the dismemberments, the tenement on West 46th Street, the bathtub, the connection to the Gambinos, the tribute payments, the Ruby Stein hit, the Javits scheme, all of it. On March 10th, 1987, a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted Jimmy Coonan and seven other Westies members on a sprawling federal racketeering indictment, RICO, the whole book.
Murder, conspiracy, extortion, narcotics, kidnapping. The indictment laid out, for the first time in history, the formal criminal partnership between the Hells Kitchen Irish and the Gambino crime family. It named Paul Castellano. It named Roy DeMeo. It named Nino Gaggi. All of them dead by then, but the structure they’d built, the sit-down, the tribute system, the 10%, the murder for hire, all of it laid out in federal court documents.
The Westies trial ran for 3 months in the fall of 1988. Mickey Featherstone was the government’s star witness. He sat on the stand for days. He named every killing. He described every dismemberment. He pointed across the courtroom at Jimmy Coonan and said, “That man ordered it. That man did it.
That man made those bodies disappear.” On November 14th, 1988, Jimmy Coonan was convicted on all counts. He was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison, no parole. He went in at 42 years old. He will not come out. Mickey Featherstone entered the federal witness protection program. He lives somewhere in the American heartland under a name that isn’t Mickey Featherstone. He’ll die under that name.
And the Westies, the Irish gang that once terrorized Hells Kitchen, the hit squad that served the most powerful Mafia boss in America, effectively ceased to exist within 18 months of that conviction. So, what’s the story here? What does the sit-down between Paul Castellano and Jimmy Coonan actually mean? It means this.
The most successful thing the American Mafia ever did was admit its own limits. For 50 years before 1978, the five families operated on a simple rule, Italian by blood, Italian by oath. Italian or nothing. Outsiders could associate. Outsiders could work on the edges, but outsiders could never be inside. Paul Castellano broke that rule.
He broke it because he saw an opportunity. He broke it because he had a problem Roy DeMeo couldn’t solve. He broke it because a 29-year-old Irish kid from 10th Avenue was a better butcher than the Italian one he already had. And for a few years, it worked beautifully. Millions of dollars moved. Dozens of bodies disappeared.
The Gambinos got what they needed. The Westies got what they wanted. And Hells Kitchen ran red with a kind of violence New York hadn’t seen since the days of Murder Incorporated. But here’s the thing about deals with the Mafia. The Mafia always wins. Roy DeMeo ended up in a trunk. Paul Castellano ended up on a sidewalk in front of Sparks Steak House.
Jimmy Coonan ended up in a federal cell for the rest of his life. Mickey Featherstone ended up in a place that doesn’t exist on any map. And the neighborhood itself, Hells Kitchen, the bloody patch, got gentrified, torn down, rebuilt, renamed. The tenement on West 46th Street, the one with a bathtub, the one where men went in and garbage bags came out, was demolished sometime in the 1990s.
There’s a condo tower there now. People pay $4,000 a month to live on top of a graveyard. Most of them will never know. When State of Grace came out in 1990, the Sean Penn and Gary Oldman movie about the Westies, people thought it was exaggerated. A Hollywood fantasy about Irish killers and Italian bosses and sit-downs in dark restaurants.
It wasn’t exaggerated. If anything, it was cleaned up for general audiences. Because the real story, the real sit-down, the real partnership between Paul Castellano and Jimmy Coonan, was darker than any screenwriter would dare put on film. Men cut up in bathtubs. $6 million ledgers vanishing with their owners. 10% tribute flowing uptown.
Bodies scattered across three boroughs so they could never be identified. An entire neighborhood turned into a staging ground for the Mafia’s wet work. That wasn’t a movie. That was Monday through Friday on the west side of Manhattan from 1978 until the indictments came down. The meeting in that Brooklyn back room changed organized crime in America.
It proved that the five families could absorb, control, and weaponize an outside crew if the money was right and the butcher was skilled enough. It created a template. Years later, the Gambinos would do the same thing with other ethnic crews, Russian crews, Albanian crews. Outsiders with useful skills and no blood ties.
Jimmy Coonan was the first. Jimmy Coonan was the proof of concept, and Jimmy Coonan is the one still paying for it in a cell somewhere. 60 years of federal time stretching out in front of him. 40 years already served. His name almost forgotten by the city that once feared him. That’s the real lesson of the Westies and the Gambinos.
The Mafia never shares power. It rents power. It borrows power. It weaponizes power. And when it’s finished with you, it throws you away. Paul Castellano understood that. Roy DeMeo understood it too late. Jimmy Coonan didn’t understand it until the federal marshals put him in chains. The sit-down in 1978 wasn’t an alliance.
It was a trap, and it took 10 years to spring. If this story pulled you in, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment below. What Mafia alliance should we break down next? And stay tuned. Because Hell’s Kitchen has more secrets, and we’re just getting started.