The Westies: The Only Crew Even John Gotti Couldn’t Control – HT

 

 

 

December 16th, 1985. 5:47 p.m. Sparks Steakhouse, 210 East 46th Street, Manhattan. Paul Castellano, stepped out of his black Lincoln, and never made it to the curb. Six bullets, two shooters in white trench coats and black Russian fur hats. His under boss, Tommy Balotti, dropped beside him on the wet asphalt, shoes still shined, blood pooling under the street lights.

 The whole hit took 8 seconds. By 6:00 p.m., John Gotti was the most powerful man in American organized crime. And by 6:05, he had inherited a problem nobody warned him about. The Westies, an Irish American crew from Hell’s Kitchen, so unstable, so addicted to violence, that even the Italians who used them were afraid to be in the same room with them.

They cut up bodies in bathtubs. They killed for $50. They ate breakfast next to severed hands wrapped in newspaper. And under a deal cut years earlier with Castellano, 60% of every score they made flowed straight into the Gambino crime family. Gotti now owned that pipeline. He also now owned the men attached to it.

 This is the story of how the dapper Don, the most photographed mobster in American history, the boss who beat three federal cases and earned the nickname Teflon Dawn, ran head first into a crew of Irish killers he could not control. This is the story of the Gambino Westies Pact, the 6040 split that fed Manhattan’s underworld for a decade, and the murder of a man named Vincent Leon.

 A hit so reckless it proved that even John Gotti with all his power could not put a leash on Hell’s Kitchen. Here is what the books leave out. Gotti did not just inherit the Westies. He inherited a war he did not start, a crew he did not trust, and a leader named Jimmy Counan who answered to no one but the ghosts in his own head.

 To understand what Gotti walked into, you have to go back. Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, west of 8th Avenue between 34th and 59th. In the 1960s and 70s, it was a dying neighborhood of Irish dock workers, long shoremen, and tenement families. The Italians had Brooklyn, the Jews had the garment district, but Hell’s Kitchen belonged to the Irish.

 And the Irish belonged to a man named Mickey Spellelain. Tall, soft-spoken, generous with turkeys at Christmas. Spellelain was a throwback. He kidnapped rich men for ransom. He robbed cargo at the Hudson Piers. He didn’t deal drugs and he didn’t kill children. By the standards of his trade, he was almost gentle. Then came Jimmy Kunan, born Westies of 1947, a babyfaced kid with sandy hair and dead blue eyes.

When Kunan was a teenager, Spelain’s men had grabbed his father, beaten him, and held him over a debt. Kunan never forgot. He swore that one day he would kill Mickey Spelain and take Hell’s Kitchen for himself. He spent the next 15 years doing exactly that. Kunan partnered with a man named Mickey Featherstone.

 Featherstone was a Vietnam veteran, jittery, paranoid, prone to blackouts. Together, between 1975 and 1978, they systematically dismantled Spain’s organization. They killed his lieutenants one by one. Tom Deainy, Tom Capetis, Eddie Kamaskki gunned down in a bar on 10th Avenue with a 38 in his back. Mickey Spelain fled to Woodside, Queens, thinking distance would save him.

 On May 13th, 1977, he stepped out of his apartment building, four bullets. He died on the sidewalk. The hit was contracted out to a Gambino soldier named Roy Deo. Kunan didn’t even pull the trigger on his greatest enemy. He used Italian muscle. And that detail matters because that one favor, that one transaction, that one bullet purchased through the Italians became the foundation of everything that followed.

Kunan understood something the old Irish never had. He could not run Hell’s Kitchen alone. The Italians had the courts. The Italians had the unions. The Italians had the connections that turned $10,000 scores into $10 million scores. So Kunan went to see Paul Castellano, big Paul, the Pope, the boss of the Gambino crime family.

 A man who lived in a mansion on Staten Island, modeled after the White House. The meeting happened in 1978. The terms were brutal and simple. The Westies would become a satellite crew under the Gambino umbrella. They would handle the violence the Italians did not want their fingerprints on. Murder for hire, lone shark enforcement, labor union intimidation at the Javit Center construction site.

 In exchange, the Italians would feed them work. And on every score the Westies pulled, 60% went to the Gambinos. 40% stayed on the west side. 6040. Write that number down. Because that ratio was unprecedented in mob history, Italian crews kept 85% of their own scores. Tribute up the chain was usually 15, maybe 20%.

 Castellano took 60. He took it because he knew Kunan needed protection more than he needed money. He took it because the Westies would kill anyone for any reason at any time, and that kind of asset was worth a discount. The Westies in effect sold themselves into a kind of indentured servitude. They got the Gambino name. They got the union jobs.

They got the protection. And in return, more than half of every dollar they touched flowed across the river to Staten Island. For seven years, it worked. Castellano ran the Westies the way he ran everything else, through layers. He never spoke to Kunan directly. The buffer was a Gambino cappo named Danny Marino.

 and above him a soldier named Roy Deo who had his own crew of psychopaths in Brooklyn. Deo and Kunan understood each other. They both ran murder operations that disposed of bodies through dismemberment. Deo’s crew used a meat hook in the back of the Gmany Lounge. Kunan’s crew used a bathtub in an apartment on 10th Avenue. The two men sometimes shared techniques.

They sometimes shared corpses. Then on December 16th, 1985, John Gotti walked into Spark Steakhouse and changed the entire structure of the American mafia. He had Castellano killed because the old man was about to indict half the family on a stolen car ring. He had Bellotti killed because Bilotti would have come for revenge.

 And in one wet evening, Gotti took the throne. But Gotti was not Castellano. Gotti was Howard Beachch. Gotti was Queens. Gotti was a street guy who came up running hijacking crews at Kennedy airport. He liked his soldiers loud, loyal, and Italian. He did not like the Westies. He did not understand them.

 And he did not trust an Irish crew that had operated independently for almost a decade and had killed more people than any single Gambino Kappo. Within weeks of taking power, Goti called Kunan to a meeting. The location by most accounts was the Ravenite Social Club, 247 Malbury Street in Little Italy. This was Gotti’s command post. Kunan walked in with Featherstone at his side.

 Gotti sat at the head of the table in a $2,000 suit. He did not stand. He did not shake hands. He told Kunan three things. One, the 6040 split stayed. Castellano’s deal was now Gotti’s deal. Two, no more freelance murders. Every Westy’s hit had to be cleared through the Gambino administration first. Three, no more bodies in bathtubs. The dismemberment thing had to stop.

 It drew heat. It made the New York Times. It embarrassed the family. Kunan nodded at all three. He agreed to all three. And the moment he walked out of the Ravenite, he disregarded all three. You have to understand who Jimmy Kunan was at this point. 38 years old, married with two children, lived in a modest house in Hazlet, New Jersey, drove a station wagon, took his kids to Catholic school, and ran a murder for hire operation that had killed somewhere between 30 and 60 people, depending on who you ask. The number is disputed. The

bodies are not. They were spread across landfills in New Jersey, the Hudson River, the East River, and at least one industrial freezer in Hell’s Kitchen. Kunan believed something deeply, almost religiously. He believed that as long as there was no body, there was no case, no corpus delti, no prosecution.

 So the Westies dismembered everyone, every single victim. They removed teeth to prevent dental identification. They removed fingertips. They cut bodies into manageable pieces and packed them into garbage bags and drove them to disposal sites at 3:00 in the morning. To Kunan, this was not psychopathy.

 It was professional caution. It was due diligence. To Gotti, it was insane. Gotti’s crew killed people, too. Everybody killed people. But Gotti’s crew left bodies on streets, in trunks, on restaurant floors. The point of a mob hit was the message. Make it public. Make it loud. Make it scary. Kunan’s invisible disposal method defeated the entire purpose.

 What good was a hit nobody could prove had happened. The first real test of Gotti’s authority came in 1986. A small-time hustler named Vincent Leon, also known as Jimmy Sinatra because he sang in lounge clubs and did a passable old blue eyes impression, had borrowed money from a Gambino lone shark. He owed $40,000. He stopped paying.

 He moved between apartments to avoid collection. The Gambinos eventually wrote off the debt as uncollectible. Leon, however, had also borrowed from the Westies. He owed Kunan personally somewhere around 20,000. And he had, according to Kunan, been mouththing off in bars about how the Irish were soft and could be ducked. That was the reason given.

 The real reason, according to Mickey Featherstone’s later testimony to federal prosecutors, was simpler. Kunan wanted to send a signal to his own crew. He wanted to remind them that nothing had changed under Gotti, that he was still in charge, that the new Italian boss did not run Hell’s Kitchen. On a night in the spring of 1986, Vincent Jimmy Sinatra Leon was lured to an apartment on 10th Avenue under the pretext of working out a payment plan.

Two Westies enforcers were waiting. The first shot hit him in the back of the head. Leone went down on the kitchen lenolium. The second man stepped over the body and put two more rounds into the skull to make sure. Then they did what the Westies always did. They dragged the body into the bathtub. They drained it. They dismembered it.

 They removed the teeth. They packed the pieces into plastic bags and drove them in shifts across the George Washington Bridge. Vincent Leon was never seen again. His mother filed a missing person’s report. The NYPD opened a file. The case went nowhere because there was no body, no witness, and no apparent motive that detectives could connect.

But here is the part that mattered. Kunan had not cleared the hit with Gotti. He had not even informed Danny Marino, his Gambino liaison. He had simply done it on his own authority against direct orders. Less than 6 months after Gotti had taken the throne, and looked him in the eye, and told him those days were over.

 When Gotti found out, he was furious. The Ravenite was put on lockdown. Marino was summoned. Kunan was summoned. The story Mickey Featherstone later told the FBI is that Gotti screamed at Kunan for 30 minutes straight. Cursed him, threatened him, told him that the next unauthorized hit would be Kunan’s own. Kunan listened. Kunan apologized.

 Kunan paid an additional $30,000 tribute to the Gambino family as a gesture of contrition. And then Kunan walked back to Hell’s Kitchen and continued doing exactly what he had always done. Because here was the truth. Gotti could not face. He needed the Westies more than the Westies needed him. The Javit Center construction project was pumping millions into Gambino coffers through union kickbacks.

 And the muscle on those job sites was Westy’s muscle, the concrete deals on the west side, the cargo theft at the Hudson Piers, the bookmaking operations along 9th and 10th Avenues. All of it ran through Hell’s Kitchen. All of it depended on Kunan’s crew showing up and breaking heads when contracts needed enforcing. If Goti moved against Kunan, the entire Westside cash flow would collapse overnight.

Worse, the Westies were the only crew in New York crazy enough to go to war with the Gambinos themselves. They had nothing to lose. They had no aging dons to protect, no mansions on Staten Island, no soldiers in suburban houses. They had hell’s kitchen tenementss and a willingness to die in them. Gotti understood the math.

 He swallowed the Leone insult. He kept the 60/40 deal. And for the next two years, he tolerated a relationship that everyone around him could see was costing him control of his own organization. Things began to unravel in 1987. The crack was internal. Mickey Featherstone, the trigger man, the partner, the brother in arms, was set up by his own crew on a murder he did not commit.

 The Westies had killed a man named Michael Holly in 1985, and Kunan had quietly let the blame fall on Featherstone to clean up an old debt. Featherstone was convicted in May of 1986 and sentenced to 25 years to life. Sitting in a federal cell, Featherstone did the math. His wife, [ __ ] visited him. She told him the rumor on the street that Kunan had framed him to take him off the board permanently.

Featherstone, the Vietnam veteran, the man who had killed Fort Kunan a dozen times, made a decision that ended the Westies forever. He called the FBI. He flipped. For 13 months, Featherstone and his wife wore wires. They captured conversations with Kunan, with Westy’s enforcers, with Gambino soldiers. They documented the 6040 split in detail.

They documented the Leone hit. They documented at least seven other murders. The lone sharking, the union extortion, the labor racketeering at the Javit Center. On March 10th, 1988, federal agents arrested 10 members of the Westies in pre-dawn raids across Manhattan, Queens, and New Jersey. Jimmy Counan was taken from his Hasslid home in handcuffs while his wife and children watched.

 The indictment ran 14 counts under the RICO statute. murder, conspiracy, extortion, lone sharking, narcotics. Prosecutors connected the Westies directly to the Gambino family through Kunan’s testimony, through wiretaps, through Featherston’s recordings. The trial lasted 4 months. The jury deliberated for 6 days. On October 14th, 1988, Jimmy Counan was convicted on all counts.

 He was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison. He has never been released. As of his most recent parole denial, he was still serving his time in a medium security facility, a forgotten man, a relic of an era when Hell’s Kitchen still belonged to the Irish. Goti watched at all from the Ravenite. He was not indicted in the Westy’s case.

 The Featherstone tapes did not catch him directly. Marino, his middleman, took a separate fall, but the damage was done. The 6040 pipeline collapsed. The westside cash flow dried up. The Javit center muscle was dispersed. And within three years, Gotti himself would be sitting in a federal courtroom listening to his own underboss, Sammy the Bull Gravano, do to him exactly what Featherstone had done to Kunan.

 Here is what the Westy’s story reveals. The mafia was never the monolith the movie sold. It was a confederation of crews, alliances, and uneasy partnerships held together by money and fear. When Castellano cut the 6040 deal, he turned a tribe of Irish killers into a Gambino weapon. When Gotti inherited that deal, he inherited a weapon he could not aim.

The Deepperdon with his thousand suits and his television smile sat at the top of the most powerful crime family in America and could not get a Hell’s Kitchen Irishman to stop dumping bodies in the Hudson. That is the real lesson. Power in the underworld was always conditional. You held it as long as the men below you agreed to let you hold it.

The minute they decided otherwise, all the suits and all the social clubs and all the press coverage in the world could not save you. Leone has never been found. His remains are somewhere in a New Jersey landfill or at the bottom of the Hudson or scattered across three states.

 His mother died in 1994, still waiting for word on her son. The NYPD case file remains open. Technically, in the eyes of the law, Leone is still missing. But everyone who needs to know knows he was killed in a tenement kitchen on 10th Avenue. He was killed because Jimmy Counan wanted to send a message. And he was killed because John Gotti, the most feared boss in America, could not stop it.

 Hell’s Kitchen never belonged to the Italians. It never belonged to Gotti. It belonged to itself. And by the time that Dapperdon figured that out, Mickey Featherstone was already wearing a wire and the entire arrangement was about to disappear into a federal courtroom forever. That is the story of the Westies.

 That is the story of the 6040 deal. That is the story of the only crew in New York that even John Gotti could not tame. 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