Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (57 page)

But all that meant nothing at the moment; what Mickey needed right now was a gun, no questions asked, and that’s how he put it to Coonan.

With no hesitation at all, Jimmy produced a handgun, a .25-caliber semiautomatic, which he kept in his belt in the small of his back, covered by his jacket.

“Mickey, you need any help?” asked Jimmy.

“No,” replied Featherstone. “This is somethin’ I gotta take care of myself.”

With that, Featherstone headed back out into the night. At the Leprechaun Bar, he confronted his nemesis, a loud bully with a Southern accent who was nearly twice Mickey’s size. He lured the guy outside, and, on the sidewalk in front of the bar, shot the man twice—once in the chest and once between the eyes.

Mickey Featherstone was arrested and taken to the Mental Observation Unit at Rikers Island. It was his third kill in the less than two years since he’d returned from Vietnam. None of the shootings had anything to do with business or organized crime; it was merely Featherstone’s damaged psyche acting out on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. His troubled history fit the legal definition of “mitigating circumstances.” Mickey was put on trial for this most recent shooting and found not guilty by reason of insanity.

He wound up serving three years at the Mattaewan State Prison for the Criminally Insane on gun possession and assault charges stemming from the previous killings. Through it all, Mickey clung to one positive note, one noble gesture of friendship: Jimmy Coonan providing him with a weapon, no questions asked. This single act would develop into an alliance that would drag the Irish Mob into a whole new era of barbarism.

Mad Dog Redux

While Coonan and Featherstone were charting divergent criminal paths that seemed destined to intersect, the boss of Hell’s Kitchen, Mickey Spillane, was still dealing with his Italian problem. In fact, Spillane’s rivalry with Cosa Nostra was about to take a decidedly homicidal turn, due in part to a major new construction project on the West Side of Manhattan that was being discussed.

Ground had net yet been broken for what would eventually be called the Jacob Javitz Convention Center. The New York State Urban Development Corporation was still battling with various governmental licensing committees over whether or not such a major project was viable, but it looked like it was going to happen. In typical New York fashion, the project would take years to work its way through the city bureaucracy, but the mobsters and their various construction and union affiliates were already licking their chops at the prospect.

What was being proposed was the largest single convention center in U.S. history, a building that would cost $375 million to construct, with 1.8 million square feet of floor space, to be erected on a plot of land bounded by Thirty-eighth Street, Eleventh Avenue, Thirty-fourth Street, and Twelfth Avenue—the outskirts of Mickey Spillane’s Hell’s Kitchen territory.

At a time when the city of New York was famously headed toward bankruptcy, construction projects of this scope were few and far between. The Genovese crime family, which had for years battled with Spillane’s Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob over control of the Coliseum and Madison Square Garden, had no intention of going through a similar struggle over this new convention center. The stakes were too high. The cement contract alone might net $30 million, not to mention carpentry, wiring, food concessions to feed a workforce of 12,000 workers, and the attendant loan-sharking, gambling, and policy proceeds that went along with any major construction project.

Fat Tony Salerno, boss of the Genovese family, was a crude, rotund, cigar-chomping mafioso from the old school. The man had ordered dozens, if not hundreds, of mob hits over the years. From his headquarters on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem, he opined about the best way to neutralize the Irish Mob. It was determined that rather than kill Spillane outright, leading, perhaps, to an unruly shooting war with the West Side Irish, it would be better to take Spillane down piecemeal by first eliminating his closest associates. That way, Spillane would be forced to step aside, leaving the convention center to its rightful overlord, the Genovese crime family.

Taking out Spillane’s people was not as easy as it sounded. The idea was not only to “whack” the Hell’s Kitchen mob boss’s three top associates systematically, but also to do it in such a way that it would be unclear who was behind the killings, creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and paranoia. For this, the Mafia would need to use a non-Italian outsider, a professional assassin who could move in and out of the insular Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood without being identified as a Mafia hitman. Fat Tony found his man through an Irish American union official who served as the Genovese family’s point man at the New York Coliseum. The union official was well-connected in the underworld and had no trouble identifying the right man for the job.

Joseph Sullivan was a hardened contract killer who, in May 1976, had only recently been released from prison after serving ten years on a second-degree manslaughter charge. Sullivan was a well-known figure in the New York underworld. Born in the neighborhood of Woodside, Queens, he was a virtual product of the state who had spent twenty-five of his thirty-six years on Earth incarcerated in various penal institutions. He became famous in April 1971 when he escaped from Attica Correctional Facility in Upstate New York. At the time, no one had ever escaped from the maximum-security prison in its forty-year history. Sullivan did so by hiding himself beneath some grain and feed sacks piled aboard a truck that left the prison in broad daylight. He was captured five weeks later strolling down a street in Greenwich Village.

Even Sullivan was surprised when he was paroled by the state of New York just four years later. He was aided greatly by the fact that he had a powerful lawyer, Ramsey Clark, the former attorney general of the United States during the Johnson administration and a family friend. Upon his release, Sullivan resettled back in the borough of his birth. Before long, he was circulating in the underworld looking for work.

On a warm, mid-May afternoon, Sullivan walked into the Coliseum Restaurant, located on Fifty-nineth Street and Columbus Circle, across from the Coliseum. There he met up with a man he knew only as J. J., whom he had first met in prison. J. J. was now a corrupt union official affiliated with Fat Tony Salerno. The two men sat at a booth, sipped bottles of beer, and talked about old times. Eventually, Joe Sullivan said, “Okay, enough small talk. What I wanna know is, can you use me or not?”

“Yeah, I can use you,” said J. J. “In fact…,” he pointed toward a man sitting at a table near the door, “see that guy, the guy sitting over there?”

Sullivan looked. “Yeah. What about him?”

“Ever seen him before?”

“No. Never.”

“Well, would it bother you terribly if I passed you a piece beneath the table and asked you to blow his brains out before we walked out the door?”

Sullivan laughed. “Just like that, huh?”

“Yeah, pal, just like that.”

“Damn. Is he the butcher, baker, candlestick maker, or somebody like us?”

“Does it matter to you who or what he is, Joe?”

“No, J. J., it doesn’t really matter. It doesn’t matter at all.” J. J. explained that the man’s name was Devaney, Tom Devaney, right-hand man of Mickey Spillane. He told Sullivan that Spillane and the West Side Irish Mob were on the outs with Fat Tony, who was looking to position himself as the Godfather of the Javitz Convention Center. Sullivan asked few questions. He left the diner that day without killing Devaney, but the contract was now his; over the following months, he would do the bidding of the Italians and send a ripple of fear through the Irish American underworld.

The concept of Cosa Nostra turning to an Irish hitman to do the dirty work was not new. As far back as Vincent Coll, who’d been hired by the Maranzano family to bump off Lucky Luciano in the late 1920s, the tactic had been firmly established. In the 1940s and 1950s, Elmer “Trigger” Burke was another well-known Irish subcontractor frequently used by the Italians. Throughout history, men like Coll and Burke were used to bump off an array of underworld victims—including other mafiosi—but the arrangement undoubtedly had added appeal to
la famiglia
when it involved one Paddy being whacked by another.

By the 1970s, many Irish American gangsters looking to hire themselves out as freelance gunmen had little choice but to turn to the Mafia for work. After decades of incarceration, prosecution, political reform, and assimilation, the Irish Mob barely existed outside of Hell’s Kitchen and a few neighborhoods in Boston, and they already had their own supply of hitmen. A guy like Joe Sullivan, a cold-blooded mercenary who seemed to enjoy killing, was constantly on the lookout for gainful employment; in true capitalist fashion, he sold his services to the highest bidder, or, in most cases, the only bidder. His willingness to take on murder contracts involving fellow Irishmen earned him the nickname “Mad Dog,” a tip of the cap to Vincent Coll, perhaps, but also a catchall moniker for a certain type of gangster with no scruples whatsoever.

Eight weeks after agreeing to murder Tom Devaney, Mad Dog Sullivan walked into a bar-and-grill in Midtown Manhattan, where Mickey Spillane’s right-hand man was having a drink with a few friends. Sullivan was in disguise, with an afro wig and darkened skin that made him appear vaguely Hispanic or Middle Eastern. He ordered a beer and observed Tom Devaney for a while until he was ready to make his move. After draining the last of his drink, he walked over to the man, pulled out a gun, and calmly did the deed.

From inside a prison cell, years later Sullivan wrote an autobiography that was never published. In it, he described the Devaney shooting.

[Devaney] had just lifted the beer to his lips when I brought my arm straight up, stopping inches from his ear as I pulled the trigger. The dull roar of the weapon echoed in one part of my mind while the other concentrated on the three men that had been facing him—all now wearing the rictus of fear as the shattered bits of bone and blood sprayed their horrified faces. I hadn’t broken stride on my way to the door, and never took my eyes off them as I stepped outside onto the deserted street, breaking into a slow jog that wouldn’t attract any attention…”
¹

Over the following months, hitman Sullivan eliminated two more of Spillane’s closest associates in similar fashion. The most significant of these hits was the killing of Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey. Cummiskey was a tough West Side gangster who, like Sullivan himself, had done a stretch at Attica prison, where he trained to be a butcher. When he returned to Hell’s Kitchen, Cummiskey plied his new skills by cutting up the bodies of people he murdered, bagging the body parts, and disposing of them in the river. It was believed that Cummiskey had brought about the disappearance of Eli Zicardi, the Genovese family bookie whom Mickey Spillane kidnapped back in the late 1960s. Zicardi’s kidnapping and disappearance had been a catalyst for the current hostilities between the West Side Irish Mob and the Italians.

Eddie the Butcher’s introduction of vivisection into the underworld discourse of Hell’s Kitchen would prove to be a landmark development. For one thing, it ushered in a new era of debauchery. The neighborhood had always been a violent place, but cutting up bodies in the basement of Tenth Avenue tenements was something new. Cummiskey’s grisly proclivities were a harbinger of things to come; before he was shot and killed by Mad Dog Sullivan, the Butcher passed his skills along to Jimmy Coonan, who eventually utilized what he learned in his reign of terror as boss of the Westies.

Eddie the Butcher was taken out by Mad Dog Sullivan at the bar of the Sunbrite Saloon on August 20, 1976. When another of Spillane’s men was gunned down a few months later, people began to get the picture: There was a professional assassin loose in the neighborhood who was systematically eliminating the old-guard leadership of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob. It was probably being engineered by the Italians, but who the hell knew?

One man who had a vested interest in finding out was Spillane himself. He’d spent much of his time in 1976 and 1977 attending funerals and wakes, where he consoled the families of men he’d known since he was a kid. Clearly, there was some sort of major power play taking place; Spillane sensed that these professional hits were leading toward his doorstep. To get to the bottom of things, he traveled to Florida to meet with Eddie McGrath.

The one-time bootlegger for Owney Madden and leg-breaker for Boss Joe Ryan and the ILA was still, at the age of seventy-five, an underworld liaison of sorts who commanded respect from the upper echelons of Cosa Nostra. Spillane met with McGrath in Miami Beach, at the bar of the Thunderbird Hotel on 178th Street. Surrounded by potted palm trees and other tropical vegetation, the beleaguered boss of the Hell’s Kitchen Irish Mob asked McGrath directly if he knew anything about this recent pattern of killings back in New York City. McGrath claimed ignorance.

“Sorry pal,” he said. “I’m retired and out of touch.”

A troubled Mickey Spillane returned home and saw the writing on the wall. He packed up his family and moved from Hell’s Kitchen, where he had lived all his life, to Woodside, Queens, home of his former boss, Hughie Mulligan.

Jimmy Coonan had every reason to be pleased by Spillane’s move out of the neighborhood, except that he, too, was concerned about the Mafia’s violence against the West Side Irish. Coonan was fairly certain it had nothing to do with him, but he wasn’t going to sit around and wait for someone to shove a hot poker up his ass. The time had come for Jimmy to make his move—both to protect himself from outside forces and to seize control of everything that Spillane had left behind, once and for all.

The Wild, Wild Westies

Mickey Featherstone had been out of prison and back in the neighborhood less than a year when he began to hear stories about bodies being cut up and made to “do the Houdini.” These wild rumors on the kite were spreading from bar to bar like a bad case of the clap. In July 1975, a boyhood friend of Mickey’s named Paddy Dugan had disappeared after shooting and killing another neighborhood kid, Denis Curley. Mickey heard a rumor that Paddy Dugan’s severed head had been rolled down the bar at the Sunbrite Saloon. He confronted another neighborhood hoodlum, Billy Beattie, who had supposedly taken part in the killing and dismemberment of Dugan. Beattie admitted his role but said he had been forced into it by Eddie Cummiskey and Jimmy Coonan. Said Beattie, “You shoulda seen it, Mickey. They made me put Paddy’s dick and balls in a milk carton and store it in the refrigerator.”