Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (56 page)

A week later, detectives from the 108th Precinct in Queens tracked down Coonan, Sullivan, and the others at a flophouse apartment where they had been hiding out. All four gangsters were arrested and held on various charges, including murder in the first degree. Thirty-seven days later, they were brought shackled into Queens County Courthouse. The man who had survived the shooting was wheeled into the courtroom on a gurney. Before a grand jury, he identified Eddie Sullivan as the shooter and Jimmy Coonan and the others as his accomplices. What the witness remembered most vividly was the noise that his assailants made after he was filled with lead and left to die in the lot across from Calvary Cemetery.

“I heard footsteps going back to the car,” he said. “I heard the doors shut, and I heard a hysterical kind of laughter. It wasn’t like somebody told a joke; it was almost an animalistic kind of laughter coming from the car.”

All four men were indicted. Eddie Sullivan, a three-time loser, was convicted and given a life sentence. Jimmy Coonan plea-bargained and wound up getting five to ten for felonious assault. He served his time quietly at an assortment of prisons, including Sing Sing, where he was reunited with his brother Jackie.

Four years later, having finagled an early release, Coonan was back on the street, older but not necessarily wiser. He worked for a time as a carpet installer, which was nothing more than a ruse to satisfy his parole officer. Within months, he was up to his old tricks—hijacking warehouses, sticking up liquor stores, and (taking a page from Mickey Spillane) kidnapping local merchants.

In early 1971, just five months after his release from prison, Coonan and two accomplices kidnapped a taxi broker from Staten Island who was supposed to be mobbed up. The snatch job took a sudden turn for the worse when the kidnapee escaped from the trunk of the car he was being transported in, and, with his hands still in cuffs, fled on foot through Times Square until he found a cop. Jimmy had to go into hiding for a few months. He was eventually arrested on a kidnapping charge, but the case was dropped when the victim refused to testify in court.

Coonan dodged a bullet on that one, and he knew it. He also knew his luck wasn’t going to last forever. At the age of twenty-five, he began to sense that he needed a right-hand man, someone who was at least as violent as he was, but maybe not as ambitious or conniving. In the underworld, it was a sign of stature to have underlings, people willing to do the dirty work and, more importantly, take the fall when criminal schemes went haywire. In Hell’s Kitchen, there was no shortage of wayward youths willing to fill the role. In time, Coonan would find his young hooligan, a troubled soul who would prove to be a more-than-worthy bodyguard, but also, ultimately, Jimmy’s undoing. The kid’s name was Francis “Mickey” Featherstone.

Back from Vietnam

To many Americans, it may come as an unpleasant fact that a sizable number of gangsters throughout history were either created or seasoned in the cauldron of war. The GI Bill may have offered a path out for many young men from tough neighborhoods, but it could also be a road to nowhere, an emotional and psychological cul-de-sac that left some men staring into a world of darkness. In the military, men are taught how to kill, and some even get to practice the craft. Some come home scarred by the experience. In the post–Civil War years, gangs like the Whyos drew many of its members from the ranks of the Union Army—veterans who had taken part in battles of incomparable brutality. World War I produced Wild Bill Lovett, one of the most decorated soldiers in the war, who came home to establish a new identity as a homicidal enforcer along the Brooklyn waterfront. The Mullin Gang in Boston was created by World War II veterans, named after a prominent war veteran, and recharged every few years by the ranks of soldiers coming home from other conflicts such as the Korean and Vietnam wars.

For at least 150 years, service in the military has been an especially proud tradition among Irish Americans, many of whom first overcame discrimination in the United States by proving their loyalty on the battlefield. The Fighting 69th Regiment, an Irish unit originally comprised of men mostly from Hell’s Kitchen, was established during the Civil War and reconstituted in World War I. The unit’s exploits were turned into a popular Hollywood movie,
The Fighting 69th
, starring none other than Jimmy Cagney. The neighborhood’s proud tradition of service continued in World War II with the 165th Infantry, another regiment made up mostly of Hell’s Kitchen natives.

Throughout the early years of the Vietnam War, young men in the neighborhood continued the tradition and volunteered in large numbers. All they had to do was walk a few blocks east to the Times Square army recruitment center and sign on the dotted line. One of the many young men to make this walk was Mickey Featherstone, a scrawny, tousled-haired kid from West Forty-third Street. Featherstone would spend twelve months in Indochina and return with a penchant for violence that outstripped even Jimmy Coonan’s. Mickey’s damaged psyche and hair-trigger reactions to all slights perceived or otherwise would come to define a new generation of Irish American gangsters in the post-Vietnam era.

Long before he was a troubled war vet, Featherstone was a street urchin, the last of nine kids from a Hell’s Kitchen family that had been in the neighborhood for a couple generations. His mother, Dorothy “Dottie” Boyle, first married a man named Charlie Featherstone in the late 1930s and started having babies right away. By most accounts, the elder Featherstone, who sometimes worked as a longshoreman on the West Side docks, was a drunk and a louse who beat his wife regularly. Eventually, he deserted Dottie, leaving her with little or no money and six kids to raise. Dottie then struck up a relationship with Charlie Boyle, a military man. They were unable to find Featherstone, who was still her legal husband, so proper divorce papers were never filed. Dottie and Charlie Boyle entered into a common-law marriage and had three children of their own, the youngest being Francis Thomas, whom everyone referred to as “Mickey.”

Young Featherstone had some minor disciplinary problems in school, but mostly he was a shy boy who steered clear of physical confrontations. It wasn’t until his teen years that Mickey started to manifest a need to prove his manhood. His father had been a proud soldier in Korea; two of his brothers had already enlisted and been shipped off to Nam. Mickey had every reason to believe he would establish his own identity as a warrior through military service. In April 1966, he lied about his age so that he could enlist in the army at the age of seventeen. After going through basic training, he was assigned to the Natrang headquarters of Special Forces, the elite commando unit commonly known as the Green Berets.

For the most part, Featherstone’s time in the service was a bust. Although he took some pride in being assigned to a Special Forces unit, he was an ordnance supply clerk who rarely saw combat and was generally regarded by his fellow soldiers as “ash and trash.” With his diminutive size and New York accent, he was a frequent target of ridicule. The kid from Hell’s Kitchen suffered from a severe sense of displacement in the jungles of Southeast Asia and took to spending much of his time drinking at the local Playboy Club in town. One night, while boozing with a couple army medics, he got so drunk that he passed out. When he woke up, he found that his penis was wrapped in gauze. Apparently, while he lay comatose, the medics had performed an impromptu circumcision on Private Featherstone, leaving him scarred for life.

The botched circumcision was a good metaphor for Mickey’s entire tour of duty. He returned stateside in 1968 with some pathologically unresolved manhood issues and a severe alcohol problem. He began hanging out in neighborhood bars and engaging in almost daily physical confrontations, many of which ended in bloodshed.

His first stateside kill took place in September 1968, when he shot a kid from New Jersey during a rumble outside the Market Diner on Eleventh Avenue. Mickey was held on manslaughter charges but released on bail, pending trial. Against the wishes of his mother and everyone else who knew him, he then requested another tour of duty in Vietnam. His request was denied after a psychological evaluation by an army doctor concluded that he was suffering from a nervous condition—including severe nightmares, heavy drinking, insomnia, and withdrawal from the outside world. The doctor wrote in his report: “The assigning of EM [emergency medical] back to a combat area will probably bring back the difficulties that it previously created and probably with much more intensification…. The experiences the young man went through while serving his one year appear to be too traumatic for even a mature, well-adjusted individual to cope with.” Featherstone fulfilled the remaining fifteen months of his military commitment as a driver and mail clerk at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn.

The fact that he had been declared “unfit for combat” left Featherstone with much to prove. He continued his routine of drinking, smoking dope, and seeing “enemies” around every corner. Inexplicably, in the midst of this downward spiral, he married a Puerto Rican girl from the neighborhood. A few months into the marriage, Mickey awoke from a nightmare and attempted to strangle his wife in bed. When he snapped out of his rage, he apologized, but it was too late. His wife fled their home and never returned.

To Mickey, the failed marriage was one more example of a life out of synch; whenever he caught his reflection in a mirror, young Featherstone hated what he saw. He withdrew deeper into himself. Whatever money he had came from his father, Charlie Boyle, and most of that was spent on whiskey and beer. Mostly, he hung out where he could drink free, places like the American Legion Post on West Forty-third Street, which was run by his father and his older brother. Mickey could be found there most nights getting stewed and watching old horror movies on TV. On those rare occasions when he roused himself and tried to mix with other people, it often ended in disaster.

On one such occasion, Featherstone was having a drink at the Sunbrite Saloon, a popular neighborhood bar on Tenth Avenue. Being a Saturday night, the Sunbrite was crowded, and the juke box was loud. Mickey had been drinking for a couple hours and was feeling no pain when a commotion broke out in the bar. A gun was being passed around, over everybody’s head. The next thing Featherstone knew, the gun was in his hand. Was it his hand? It looked like his hand. A menacing figure came toward him, a guy he recognized named Mio.

“Gimme the gun,” barked Mio.

Mickey heard a swirl of voices in his head: “Watch out!” “Pull the trigger!” “He’s gonna kill you!”

Before he even knew what was happening, Mickey shot the guy dead.

Everyone stampeded from the bar. Featherstone was rushed out a back door and driven to an apartment, where he was told to hide out. After he’d been there a while, Mickey began to think it might be a setup. He fled the apartment and laid low at a friend’s place in the Bronx for a few days. When he called an acquaintance in Hell’s Kitchen, he was told, “Mickey, the fuckin’ neighborhood’s crawlin’ with cops. They know you was the shooter.”

Featherstone saw the writing on the wall. He took the subway back to Hell’s Kitchen and turned himself in at the local precinct. Everything after that was a blur. He remembered being sent to the Manhattan Correctional Center, the downtown prison also known as the Tombs. Then he was dragged in front of a grand jury. Although the Sunbrite saloon had been packed on the night of the shooting, everyone adhered to the neighborhood code:
Whatever you say, say nothin’
. The grand jury wound up calling it a “justifiable homicide.” They wouldn’t indict for murder, only for possession of an unregistered weapon.

Given Featherstone’s barely coherent state, both during the shooting and in the weeks that followed, it was determined that the kid was in serious need of psychiatric evaluation. He was shipped to a VA hospital in the Bronx, where he was officially diagnosed for the first time. “Traumatic War Neurosis,” read the report. “A paranoid schizophrenic with suicidal and homicidal ideations.” In layman’s terms, Featherstone was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.

They pumped the patient full of various antipsychotic medication—mostly thorazine, known in the trade as a liquid straight jacket. It didn’t seem to help much. Mickey was more paranoid and unruly than ever. There was some concern that he might try to escape, so he was transferred to another veterans’ hospital in Montrose, New York, that was known for its tight security.

Four days later, Mickey was considered well enough to receive visitors. His soon-to-be ex-wife came by with a psychiatrist. She was filing for divorce, she said, citing “extreme cruelty,” and she’d brought the doctor along to offer his diagnosis. Mickey paid little attention. The only time he spoke was to ask if he could borrow some money. When his wife and the doctor had left, he escaped by walking past the guards and out the front door. Still dressed in his lime-green hospital garb, he hitchhiked to a local train station and used the money he’d borrowed to buy a one-way ticket to New York City. A week later, he was ready to kill again.

This time, it all started at the Leprechaun Bar, where he got into another drunken altercation. Featherstone was unarmed, so he dashed from the bar and headed out into the night in search of a gun. The Hell’s Kitchen Irish were a tight-knit community; the locals usually defended one another, especially when under siege from outsiders. Mickey had good reason to hope someone would help him out in his hour of need, which is exactly what happened when he rushed into Sonny’s Café on Ninth Avenue and came face to face with Jimmy Coonan.

Coonan didn’t usually spend his nights drinking late in neighborhood saloons, so Mickey was surprised to spot him sitting in a booth near the back. He was with a few people Featherstone didn’t recognize, so Mickey nodded for Jimmy to come into the men’s room. Coonan and Featherstone had known each other on a casual basis almost all their lives. Mickey knew about the Coonan-Spillane Wars, which had landed Jimmy a four-year stretch in the pen. Coonan, of course, was more of an aspiring racketeer than Featherstone, a lost soul whose craziness and gun-blazing ways were becoming part of the neighborhood lore. Featherstone had always sort of admired Coonan and figured, one day, if things worked out, they might even be able to make some money together.