Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (58 page)

To Mickey, it all sounded rather twisted. He chalked it up to the machinations of the neighborhood’s gangsters, of which he had only a passing knowledge. Featherstone had killed people and done time for his own personal reasons, not because he had designs on any of the neighborhood’s traditional rackets. If the mobsters in Hell’s Kitchen wanted to kill people and cut up bodies, it was none of his business. But it became his business in late 1976, when Jimmy Coonan asked to meet with Mickey at the bar of the Skyline Hotel on Tenth Avenue, where Coonan had been holding court and doing business ever since Spillane moved out of the neighborhood.

Jimmy had done well for himself over the last year or two. He had taken over the numbers racket and all loan-sharking in Hell’s Kitchen, which provided a steady weekly income. He’d bought a bar at 596 Tenth Avenue called, appropriately enough, the 596 Club, which had become a primary hangout for a new generation of gangsters loyal to Coonan. He was also working as a bodyguard for a major underworld figure in New York named Charles “Ruby” Stein. Known as “the loan shark to the stars,” Ruby Stein was an old-time racketeer and owner of an exclusive gambling club on the Upper West Side. A dapper Jewish hood in his sixties, Stein was tied-in with Fat Tony Salerno and just about every other big-time mafiosi in town.

Despite everything he had working in his favor, Jimmy Coonan was not a happy man. He was concerned about the recent spate of gangland killings, especially the murder of Eddie Cummiskey, who had been in the process of switching his allegiance from Spillane to Coonan. “It’s probably got nothing to do with me,” Jimmy told Mickey Featherstone, “but you can never be sure. The bottom line is this: I need somebody to watch my back. I want you to come in with me.”

Mickey thought about it. His sense of allegiance to Coonan had run deep ever since Jimmy passed him a gun no questions asked back in 1970. He owed it to Jimmy. There was also the lure of being paid $150 a week to accompany Coonan on his weekly rounds, with the promise of much more down the road.

“Jimmy,” Featherstone told his new boss, “you can count on me.”

News of the alliance between Jimmy and Mickey spread through Hell’s Kitchen like wildfire. Coonan, the ambitious young mobster, and Featherstone, the crazy Vietnam vet who had killed numerous people and gotten off easy with an insanity plea, were now the dynamic duo who were taking over the neighborhood rackets. Hell’s Kitchen would never be the same.

Meanwhile, the city was in the throes of its worst financial crisis of the century, the Vietnam War had ended in disgrace, and drugs and random violence were rampant all over town. On the West Side, the days of the friendly neighborhood racketeer were a thing of the past. Coonan and Featherstone made their rounds with guns tucked in their belts. If a loan shark customer was late with a payment, he took a beating from Featherstone. The neighborhood ILA office, Local 1909, which had once been loyal to Spillane, was told that weekly extortion payments and no-show jobs were now under the purview of Jimmy Coonan. When the president of the local balked, he was told to meet Coonan and Featherstone at the Landmark Tavern, one of the neighborhood’s more upscale saloons, at Forty-sixth Street and Eleventh Avenue. There Jimmy Coonan informed the local’s president and business agent that if the bogus payroll checks didn’t arrive in one week, he would blow their brains out. The checks arrived.

A group of young neighborhood toughs and older guys formerly loyal to Spillane began to coalesce around the Coonan-Featherstone duo. Jimmy McElroy, Billy Beattie, Richie Ryan, Mugsy Ritter, Tommy Collins, and others became regulars at the 596 Club. Booze and cocaine flowed freely, although Coonan, who took his role as leader seriously, rarely indulged. Featherstone did, but his relationship with Jimmy also motivated him to clean up his act. In his post-Vietnam years, he rarely wore anything other than jeans and a T-shirt, but now he dressed in a sports coat and slacks, his hair longish but neat, with a neatly trimmed beard.

The alliance also had a maturing effect on Featherstone’s personality. Now that he was a professional racketeer, he was less prone to volatile mood swings and counterproductive acts of mayhem. His violent tendencies were reigned in and directed toward a purpose—the purpose of brute capitalism and a modus operandi of fear and retribution that would come to characterize this new generation of Hell’s Kitchen gangsters.

By early 1977, Coonan controlled all the neighborhood rackets, but he was still worried about Spillane’s old enemies in the Genovese crime family. His strategy for dealing with the problem was at once diabolical and brilliant: He simply reached out to another branch of Cosa Nostra—the Gambino crime family, based in Brooklyn.

Through the late Eddie Cummiskey, who’d once worked at a sewage treatment plant on Ward’s Island, Coonan had gotten to know Danny Grillo, a coworker of Cummiskey’s and a
soldato
(or soldier) in the powerful Gambino family. Grillo was connected with a notoriously violent crew based in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn that was headed by a squat, bullnecked capo named Roy DeMeo.

In the early months of 1977, Coonan began to trudge his West Side underlings over to Ward’s Island, a sizable island in the East River that served as a foundation for the massive steel stanchions of the Triborough Bridge. In a small industrial trailer on the island’s eastern flank, Coonan, Featherstone, McElroy, Beattie, and Ryan met a guy named Tony, who was the foreman at the sewage treatment plant. On most occasions, Danny Grillo and Roy DeMeo were there as well. Initially, the meetings had little to do with serious criminal business. Coonan seemed to be testing the waters. More than anything, he wanted to show off his virile young crew in front of the powerful Roy DeMeo and Danny Grillo.

“We can do business,” Jimmy told DeMeo on numerous occasions.

DeMeo nodded. “I got no prejudice against nobody,” he replied, assuring Coonan that the fact he was Irish would not get in the way.

The sewage treatment plant at “Tony’s island” became a nexus point for Coonan’s crew and the Italians. Coonan purchased silencers and weapons there and also used the location as a place to dump the body parts of his murder victims.

Now that he was friendly with a crew that was part of the largest Mafia family in the United States, Coonan was ready to make an audacious move that would alter the balance of power in the New York underworld. Few of Jimmy’s own underlings knew what he had in mind when he told them all to meet the next afternoon, May 5, 1977, at the 596 Club on Tenth Avenue. On his drive in from Keansberg, New Jersey, where he now lived with his wife of three years, Edna, and their two kids, he stopped at a Food Town supermarket where he purchased an assortment of kitchen knives and some jumbo-size plastic garbage bags, then continued on into the city.

At the 596 Club, Coonan met by Danny Grillo, his Italian buddy from Ward’s Island, as well as three members of his own crew: Billy Beattie, Richie Ryan, and Tommy Hess. Coonan and Grillo explained to the others what was about to go down. Coonan was going to pick up Ruby Stein (the legendary loan shark for whom he worked as a driver and bodyguard) and bring him here to the 596 Club. Then they were going to shoot Stein dead, cut up his body, stick the body parts in plastic garbage bags, and dump them in the East River.

The members of Coonan’s crew were all small-time criminals. They looked at one another, startled by the idea that they were about to whack out a major player in the underworld who was connected at the highest levels.

Coonan had his reasons: Both he and Danny Grillo owed Ruby Stein money, $70,000 in Coonan’s case. By killing Stein, they would absolve themselves of that debt, and, even more importantly, they would take over Stein’s business. The ultimate plan was to inherit Ruby’s many debtors as their own.

While the others waited, Coonan picked Stein up at his private gambling parlor on the Upper West Side and drove him down to the 596 Club. When the two men entered the club, all the guys in the bar greeted the dapper, white-haired loan shark, who was dressed in a customary tie and silk suit, with a hankie in the breast pocket.

“Ruby, have a seat,” said Coonan. “Make yourself comfortable.”

When one of Coonan’s crew pulled down the shades and locked to the door behind him, Stein’s life must have flashed before his eyes.

Suddenly Danny Grillo burst out of the kitchen with a .32-caliber automatic aimed straight at him. “Oh my God!” gasped Ruby, just as Grillo fired six shots, hitting him in the chest, arms, and leg. The jolt lifted Ruby an inch or two off the ground and spun him completely around. He collapsed on the floor in the middle of the bar.

It was over just that fast. One of Coonan’s men stepped outside to stand guard. Coonan handed a gun to Billy Beattie and told him to fire a shot into Stein’s body, which he did. Then Jimmy told Richie Ryan to do the same:
boom!
They were all accomplices now in the murder of a man who was a friend of the Mafia. If word got out that they had murdered one of the Mafia’s most renowned loan sharks, there would be hell to pay. All the more reason, deduced Jimmy Coonan, to make the body “do the Houdini.”

Mickey Featherstone was not present for the killing of Ruby Stein, but he arrived at the 596 Club shortly thereafter, as Stein’s body was being prepared for dismemberment. Ruby’s body had been stripped naked and dragged into the men’s room.

“This here,” said Coonan, holding up Stein’s black ledger book, “this is gonna make us all rich.” He put the book away in his own coat pocket and then began slicing away at Ruby’s neck. “Come here,” he said to Featherstone. “I want you to feel how fuckin’ heavy this head is. Feel that.”

Mickey took one look at the severed head and began to wretch. “Fuck that,” he said, stepping behind the bar to pour himself a drink. While Featherstone and Beattie sat at the counter, they heard Coonan in the bathroom offering words of advice to Richie Ryan, the youngest of the group. “This here,” said Coonan, “the elbow, this is the toughest part.”

Finally, after about an hour, they were finished. The various severed body parts had been stuffed into six or seven bags. Whatever was left over in the way of excess flesh or gristle was flushed down the toilet. The walls were wiped clean, the floors mopped. They locked up the 596 Club and loaded the bags into a battered red van that Coonan liked to refer to as “the meat wagon.” Then they drove across town to Ward’s Island, where Tony buzzed them through the security gate.

It was dark now, and a cool breeze was rustling the trees on the grounds of the Manhattan Hospital for the Insane, which was also located on the island. They backed the van up to the river, pulled the garbage bags out of the back, and tossed them into the water’s swirling currents. Ruby Stein was no more.

The legendary loan shark’s disappearance was reported in the newspapers a few days later. In the
New York Post
, it was hinted that Stein had been the victim of a group of Hell’s Kitchen gangsters, dubbed the Westies by one local detective because of their base on the West Side of Manhattan. The name stuck. Although no one knew it at the time, over the next decade the Westies would join the Dead Rabbits, Whyos, and Hudson Dusters as a permanent fixture in the city’s underworld lore.

Last of the Gentleman Gangsters

“Hey Pop, there’s somebody at the door for you,” called Bobby Spillane, youngest son of Mickey, the semiretired West Side mob boss who’d moved his family to the middle-class neighborhood of Woodside, Queens.

Mickey Spillane entered the front hall, leaned toward the intercom, and said he would be right down.

“I’ll be right back,” he said to his son. “I gotta talk to somebody.”

“I’m going to bed,” said twelve-year-old Bobby.

“Okay,” said Mickey. “Good night, son.”

It was May 13, 1977, a somewhat chilly evening. Mickey Spillane threw on a brown leather coat and headed outside. There was a car idling on Fifty-ninth Street in front of his apartment building. Spillane walked over to the car and bent down to talk to somebody he recognized. A shot rang out. Then another and another and another and another. Five shots in all hit Spillane in the face, neck, chest, abdomen, and left arm. His body fell to the street, and the car sped away. Spillane was pretty much DOA by the time cops arrived on the scene.

News of his death cast a pall that stretched from Fifty-ninth Street in Woodside all the way over to Hell’s Kitchen, where Mickey Spillane had been revered by many. To the older residents, the saddest fact of all was that the murder seemed totally unnecessary. Spillane was no longer a mover in West Side criminal circles and hadn’t been for months.
²

Three days after the killing, on the afternoon of May 16, mourners gathered on West Forty-seventh Street at the McManus and Ahern Funeral Parlor, which was owned and run by the McMani. Mickey’s widow, Maureen, was there, as was her brother, James McManus, leader of the Midtown Democratic Association. Spillane’s stature in the community had been based largely on his embodiment of the oldest tenet of the Irish American underworld: the cosy relationship between the gangster and the politician. In deference to the McMani, many power brokers from around the city stopped by to pay their respects to a man who would be remembered as the Last of the Gentleman Gangsters.

While the Spillanes, the McMani, and other Hell’s Kitchen friends were mourning the passing of a neighborhood legend, Jimmy Coonan, Mickey Featherstone, and a few others were meeting four blocks away at the Skyline Motor Inn. Roy DeMeo, Coonan’s contact in the Gambino family, had requested a sit-down with Coonan and his people.

“Bet you’re wondering what happened with Spillane,” DeMeo said to Coonan after they’d all settled in at the bar area of the motel.

“I was, kinda,” replied Jimmy.

“Well,” said Roy with a smile. “You got an early birthday present.”

Without mentioning names, DeMeo explained how they lured Spillane from his apartment and shot him in the street. Coonan was thrilled. He embraced DeMeo and told him that, from now on, anything he needed from the West Side crew was his for the asking.