ON THE AFTERNOON OF MARCH 26, Robert Colangelo, chief of detectives of the New York City Police Department, was in his office, posing for a celebratory photograph with a detachment of his men. ''Let's put up a sign,'' shouted a jubilant Colangelo. '' 'Westies - R.I.P.' Make it as big as you can!''
Colangelo had just come from a crowded press conference at which Rudolph W. Giuliani, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, had announced the indictment of 10 members of the Westies, a gang long known to law enforcement officials, if not to the public, as one of the most savage organizations in the long history of New York gangs. The group stands accused of a criminal enterprise involving eight murders and dozens of other cases of attempted murder, kidnapping, loan-sharking, extortion, gambling and drug dealing.
The Westies began to unravel exactly one year ago, when Francis T. (Mickey) Featherstone decided to sing. Federal and state prosecutors had already been investigating the gang - also known to the police as the Irish Mafia - when Featherstone, the Westies' fearsome enforcer, was convicted of the 1985 gangland-style execution of Michael Holly, a construction worker.
Mickey Featherstone, a short, slight 38-year-old with a blond mop and an almost-adolescent expression, had been charged with at least three other murders during the previous 17 years, but he was innocent of this one.
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In the spring of 1986, suddenly facing 25 years in prison, he approached the District Attorney's office with an astounding offer: not only would he lead the prosecutors to Michael Holly's real killers, but he would expose the criminal activities of a gang that they had failed again and again to put behind bars.
THERE IS SOMETHING ALMOST QUAINT IN the image of Irish organized crime, something that calls to mind old movies with Jimmy Cagney lording over a troop of saucy wharf rats. That mythic era of Irish street glory appeared to end with the opening of Manhattan's dark, secretive slums to the forces of development and homogenization. But if the Westies seem like ghosts, they are harrowingly real.
New York law enforcement officials hold the Westies responsible for more than 30 murders during the last 15 years. ''This is the most violent gang we've seen,'' says Michael Cherkasky, the head of the Rackets Bureau of the Manhattan District Attorney's office.
Because the gang, until recently, has largely terrorized the insular world of Manhattan's West Side docks, living off extortion from bookmakers and loan sharks, the Westies never gained the notoriety of the Mafia. But in recent years they have attracted increasing scrutiny from law enforcement officials. Over the last decade, the Westies cemented an alliance with the far more sophisticated, far more powerful Gambino family of the Mafia. During that time, officials charge, gang members performed executions at the behest of the Gambinos, and shared in profits from the mob's traditional control over New York's docks.
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Suddenly, however, the Westies appear to be collapsing under the weight of a series of fratricides and the bitterness of Mickey Featherstone. Working with information provided by Featherstone, the District Attorney's office has indicted members of the gang on charges of killing Holly. The gang's leader and its principal members were charged with murder or attempted murder.
The Federal indictments, coming on the heels of the state's charges, marshalled a staggering variety of criminal acts under the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act - the same law used so successfully earlier this year in the so-called Mafia Commission case. Between the Federal and state charges, law enforcement officials hope to make the Westies the latest casualty of their war on organized crime.
Already, detectives triumphantly report, the gang has virtually ceased to exist on the streets of the West Side.
''Law enforcement,'' says Joseph Coffey, a former police detective who is now the principal investigator with New York State's Organized Crime Task Force, ''has pretty much taken the heart out of the Westies.''
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THERE IS NO HELL'S Kitchen anymore; the area bounded by 42d and 59th Streets, Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River now goes by the genteel name of Clinton. The Irish bars are rapidly being replaced by French bistros; the tenements are going co-op.
Beneath the gentrified surface, however, lie generations of criminal violence. By the early part of the century, when the el spread soot along the rat-infested tenements of Ninth Avenue and the New York Central rattled up and down the median of 11th, Irish gangs were firmly entrenched in Hell's Kitchen.
In those dim days, the neighborhood was in the grip of the Gophers, a misbegotten army of 500 toughs who hid out in basements and emerged to raid freight cars and crack the skulls of an occasional foolhardy policeman and rival gang members. They were broken up by the authorities in 1910.
West Side crime regrouped during Prohibition when, it was said, there were more speakeasies than children on many blocks of the neighborhood. By World War II, when the crime of choice was the theft of weapons from battleships moored on the West Side, the gangsters of Hell's Kitchen were known collectively as the Arsenal Gang.
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The Irish gangs never had the formal structure or initiation rites of the Mafia. ''The Italians had rules because they wanted to set up a major business,'' explains Ronald Goldstock, director of the Organized Crime Task Force. ''The Irish never got to that level of organization or sophistication.'' Each generation's leader was the bravest or craftiest member of the gang; a member was simply a young man from the neighborhood who chose to pursue a life of crime.
The gangsters, as neighborhood veterans recall, were a Hell's Kitchen cultural institution: they protected the neighborhood and recognized unspoken rules. They were extortionists and bookies, but they were not, in general, hired killers.
By the mid-1970's, the stable Hell's Kitchen in which the gangs had flourished had ceased to exist. Many of the Irish families had fled to Long Island or New Jersey; Hell's Kitchen was now a polyglot wilderness, a slum. A number of the older gang members had left the fold -moved away or taken legitimate jobs. Those who remained were open to challenge from a younger generation, which, perhaps reflecting the decay of the neighborhood, were an exceptionally unstable and violent group.
FEW MEN COULD have been more vicious and less self-controlled than Mickey Featherstone. Born into a working-class family on West 43d Street immediately after World War II, he looks, oddly enough, like a cherub. ''If you saw this guy, you'd swear that butter wouldn't melt in his mouth,'' says an acquaintance of his. ''But you'd hear the most horrible stories.''
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In 1971, for example, a man named Linwood Willis made the mistake of saying to the baby-faced Featherstone, ''You think you're a tough guy.'' The two stepped outside the Leprechaun Bar on 10th Avenue. Featherstone drew a gun and killed Willis. Hours later, the police found him wandering in a stupor, clutching his gun. He was later found not guilty by reason of insanity.
On the street, Featherstone was known as a ''jungle killer.'' He was a Vietnam veteran with a haunted mien. At age 17, he had lied his way into the Green Berets and was sent off to war. ''It's a very emotional thing for him,'' says Jeffrey Schlanger, an assistant district attorney, who has spent hours interrogating Featherstone since last April. Schlanger says he is not sure Featherstone ever went into battle, although ''he talks about seeing people killed.''
Featherstone left the Army with a medical discharge in 1967, suffering from hallucinations and disorientation. For the next eight years he was in and out of mental hospitals. In between stays, he killed people.
''He'd do wild things,'' says Joe Coffey, a boyhood acquaintance of many of the Westies. ''Like he'd walk into a gin mill on the West Side and spray the place with machine-gun fire.'' Mickey Featherstone was a weapon waiting to be grasped by someone shrewder than himself.
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That man turned out to be James Coonan, now 40. Coonan, who was blond, chubby and, like Featherstone, as innocent-looking as a choirboy, was known and feared on the West Side as a murderer and kidnapper, as well as the bodyguard and apprentice of Charles (Ruby) Stein, a powerful loan shark. Coonan wanted to set himself up as the lord of West Side crime. Several neighborhood thugs had already begun to gather around him. Mickey Featherstone, Coonan believed, was just the sort of strong-armed lieutenant who could help him muscle his way to the top.
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BY THE MID-1970'S, CONTROL over Hell's Kitchen crime had passed to the mythically named Michael (Mickey) Spillane. A bookmaker, loan shark and murderer, Spillane was one of the last of the old-fashioned gangsters, handing out turkeys at Thanksgiving and paying visits to the elderly.
In 1976, Coonan and his group began killing their way toward Spillane. Three of the gang leader's lieutenants were murdered. On the evening of May 13, 1977, he was summoned to speak with someone in a dark sedan parked outside his home in Woodside, Queens. Stepping out to the street, he was stitched by a string of bullets. The police arrested Featherstone for Spillane's murder. He was acquitted.
At about the same time Spillane was killed, Ruby Stein disappeared. Several weeks later, his torso floated to the surface of Jamaica Bay. Law enforcement officials now say that both the Spillane and Stein murders are the first signs of collaboration between the Westies - as the police came to call Coonan's gang - and the Gambino family.
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Near the time of the killings, Paul (Big Paul) Castellano, head of the Gambino faction, let it be known that he wanted to meet with Featherstone and Coonan. A session was set for Tommaso's, a restaurant favored by mobsters in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn.
Castellano offered the two a deal they couldn't refuse. The Gambinos ''wanted to have some say in who was killed and who was not killed'' on the West Side, ''and they were willing to pay for this,'' says Jeffrey Schlanger.
The deal they allegedly struck was that the gang would become an appendage of the Gambino family, carrying out approved killings and kicking back a percentage of earnings from their bookmaking and loan sharking. In return, the Westies would enjoy Castellano's protection and some sharing in West Side mob activity. The Westies became, as Schlanger puts it, the Gambino family's ''Coonan crew.''
Every Wednesday, according to Gambino informers, Coonan's group met with Roy DeMeo, a Gambino lieutenant, to parcel out profits from the week. Castellano essentially handed over control of several low-level organized-crime figures to the wild young Irishmen.
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For example, Castellano allegedly ''gave'' the Westies Vincent Leone, a loan shark and bookmaker and the secretary-treasurer of Local 1909 of the International Longshoremen's Association, a union with longstanding links to organized crime. Leone's local controlled employment at the U.S.S. Intrepid, an aircraft carrier converted into a museum and moored at West 46th Street. Profits from no-show jobs and skimmings from ticket revenue were allegedly kicked backed to Coonan.
FOR THE MOST PART, the Westies bore little resemblance to their new partners. Unlike the Mafia, they have never had the sophistication or manpower to run legitimate businesses. The core of the gang rarely numbered more than a dozen men. Most gang members and associates hold union cards, either from one of the construction trades unions, or one of the theatrical unions, especially the stagehands or the theatrical truckers, members of Teamsters Local 817. (Thomas O'Donnell, head of the local, says there is no systematic involvement by the gang in 817's affairs, adding that, to his knowledge, only two Westies are members.) The Westies served as a hit squad for the Gambino family. Several of the dozens of murders they allegedly committed were planned executions. As recently as last May, a Westie member, Kevin Kelly, was sent to kill a carpenters union official who had heavily damaged a restaurant frequented by Gambino associates. Kelly was indicted last August for the botched murder attempt.
But at the same time the Westies were cementing their relationship with the Gambinos and tightening their control over the West Side, they were becoming more and more chaotic, brutal and self-destructive. In 1975, Patrick (Paddy) Dugan, a gang member, killed his best friend, Dennis Curley, after a fistfight. Coonan and Edward Cuminsky, a non-Irish member of the gang, killed Dugan out of revenge. Cuminsky, according to police officials, then paraded through the neighborhood holding Dugan's severed head aloft. (While in prison, Cuminsky had learned to be a butcher, a skill he later practiced on human corpses.) A year later, Cuminsky was dead -hit in the back by a volley of bullets while sitting in his favorite bar.
The Westies' savagery permitted them to murder with virtual impunity - no one would testify against them. In 1978, Coonan and Featherstone were accused of killing Harold Whitehead - for calling a friend of theirs ''a fag'' - in the middle of a crowded bar. One witness committed suicide just prior to testifying before a grand jury in the Whitehead case, and another went completely mute on the witness stand.
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THE PROSECUTORS' inability to make murder indictments against the Westies stick was a source of tremendous frustration for them. In 1979, Featherstone was charged with the Spillane murder, and then acquitted. Then there was the unsuccessful prosecution for the Whitehead murder. In the bitterest loss of all, Jimmy McElroy, who had publicly boasted about murdering his own best friend, Billy Walker, was found not guilty.
But the United States Attorney succeeded where the District Attorney's office had failed. Featherstone and Coonan had tipped two girls in a massage parlor with counterfeit $100 bills. One of the girls had seen ''Mickey'' tattooed on Featherstone's arm, and the fake money was traced to him. It was also determined that the two men had been together in Coonan's car, which had been impounded as a result of a traffic violation. In the trunk of the car the police found a gun with a silencer, and a bulletproof vest. In 1979, Coonan pleaded guilty to a gun charge, and Featherstone to counterfeiting. Both went to prison.
Coonan continued to run the Westies from his jail cell. According to an indictment handed up last December (based on information provided by Featherstone), Coonan ordered three other Westies to kill Vincent Leone, the gang's Gambino associate; Coonan felt Leone had cheated him out of $30,000 in bookmaking profits. On Feb. 11, 1984, two Westies drove Leone to New Jersey, pulled over to offer him a hit of cocaine, and shot him in the head. Investigators assume the killing had Gambino approval.
When he was paroled, in September 1984, Coonan apparently realized that the Westies' days as a territorial gang were numbered. Coonan, Featherstone and other gang members had already moved to northern New Jersey. The old life was over.
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''Gentrification may have more to do with the demise of the Westies than anything law enforcement can do, because it cuts off the base of supply of manpower,'' observes Michael Cherkasky, the head of the District Attorney's Rackets Bureau. ''Without these poor, tough boys from the gutter, with that anger and desire, you don't have these kinds of violent people.''
Taking a page from the book of Mafia tactics, Coonan attempted to expand into legitimate businesses. Prosecutors say that he laundered his sizable income by investing in a construction company called Marine Contractors, in Tarrytown, N.Y., a company that is now the object of a joint Federal-state-city investigation into the Westies. (Repeated calls to company officers were not returned.) Robert Morgenthau says that his office is also investigating Westie links to a real estate concern with holdings in New York and New Jersey. Morgenthau declines to identify the concern.
PERHAPS NOTHING would have stopped the Westies had Michael Holly not been murdered. It was yet another Westie revenge killing. The gang held Holly responsible for the 1977 shooting death of one of its members, John Bokun. Fearing for his life, Holly left Manhattan for two years, but returned and found a job as an ironworker at the site of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. On April 25, 1985, as Holly was walking down 35th Street near 11th Avenue, a man stepped out of a brown station wagon, screwed a silencer onto a gun and fired five shots at him.
Witnesses described the killer as short and slight, with light-colored hair. The car was quickly traced to Erie Transfer, the theatrical trucking company where Featherstone, who was making something of an effort to live a normal life, occasionally worked. When the police arrived at Erie several hours later, they found the car, its engine still warm. As they were interviewing employees, Mickey Featherstone sauntered right into their midst - short, slight and light-haired. The evidence seemed overwhelming, and the next day Featherstone was booked.
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For once there were witnesses. The driver of a dry-cleaning van described the sequence of events, and identified Featherstone as the killer. In March 1986, Featherstone was found guilty, and faced a sentence of 25 years to life.
He was shocked. His lawyers, Lawrence Hochheiser and his partner Kenneth Aronson, had always brought home either a verdict of not guilty or a comparatively short sentence, even when Featherstone had committed a crime. This time, he was innocent. What's more, he knew the guilty party: the night before the murder, he was told by Kevin Kelly, a gang member, that Holly was going to be killed. So Featherstone fully expected to get off. ''He had this naive belief that the system really works, in a sense,'' says Hochheiser.
Featherstone concluded that he had been framed by the gang and betrayed by his lawyers. He learned that John Bokun's brother Billy had confessed the crime to the attorney, Aronson, who represented both Bokun and Featherstone. Yet Bokun was never called to the stand. Hochheiser and Aronson contend that the attorney-client privilege prevented them from putting Bokun on the stand.
A week after his conviction, Featherstone called the prosecutors to claim that he had been framed, and he fingered Bokun. With his slight build and a light-colored wig supplied to him by Kevin Kelly, a gang member, Bokun could easily have been mistaken for Featherstone. Once prosecutors conceded that Featherstone might be telling the truth about his innocence, his wife, Sissy, in cooperation with the District Attorney's office, devised a plan to exonerate him.
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Armed with a concealed tape recorder, Sissy Featherstone drew Bokun and others into conversations, sometimes when they came with regular payments for the family - the traditional organized-crime inducement to loyalty.
On one tape, Bokun can be heard enthusiastically re-enacting the hit: ''Boom! I just shot him. One-two-three-four-five. Back in the car. Ten seconds! No more!''
Mrs. Featherstone also got Bokun to state his belief that Kevin Kelly had provided him with the wig in order to frame Mickey, presumably to clear the field of a powerful rival - one of the last moves, perhaps, in the Westies' never-ending internal warfare.
Last September, in an extraordinary event, Jeffrey Schlanger asked Justice Alvin Schlesinger of the New York State Supreme Court to overturn the conviction that Schlanger had been so gleeful about winning; Judge Schlesinger agreed.
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FROM THE POINT OF view of law enforcement agencies, everything changed the moment Mickey Featherstone decided to talk. New York Police detectives had been gathering evidence against the Westies since 1983, and had arrested 14 members on drug charges the following year. But Featherstone provided fresh leads, and helped to tie many investigative threads together. The District Attorney's Rackets Bureau, whose performance in recent years had been disappointing, had just been reorganized under a new chief. The Westies became one of the re-formed bureau's first big cases.
The gang, says Michael Cherkasky, was now ''not just a bunch of thugs killing each other, but an organized group that was self-perpetuating, that had much more impact than we thought; and it was a group that we could break up.'' A Westies task force was organized, bringing together Federal and state prosecutors, as well as New York Police detectives and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Working with information provided by Featherstone, another gang member, Anton Lucich, and others, the task force began to gather the physical evidence needed to make solid charges against members of the gang. Featherstone, for example, described to prosecutors the 1978 murder of a loan shark customer, Ricky Tassiello, in Lucich's 10th Avenue apartment. Investigators discovered bullets embedded in the apartment's walls and found dried blood that had seeped between the floor boards.
By December, the Manhattan District Attorney had enough information to obtain indictments against six Westies and their confederates, including the gang's leader, Jimmy Coonan, who was arrested for the 1975 murder of Paddy Dugan. And last month, the District Attorney obtained indictments against four other gang members and associates. Those few Westies, including Kevin Kelly, who are not in jail, are fugitives from justice. Their contacts on the West Side are said to have vanished.
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With the March 26 Federal indictment, the Westies seem poised on the brink of extinction - a supremely satisfying success story for law enforcement officials. But Cherkasky, the head of the Rackets Bureau, for one, is not ready to congratulate himself. In December, he notes, a group of teen-agers, several of them blood relatives of Westie members, were arrested for murdering a homeless man - he was stabbed 19 times - in a Hell's Kitchen park.
Cherkasky worries that the forces that created the Westies have not yet played themselves out; a new generation may take over from the old. West Side Irish crime, he says, ''has been going for the last 60 or 70 years. Hopefully, we'll send a message by putting people in jail for long stretches of time. But we're not naive about it.''
