The Real Mickey Featherstone Was the Most Dangerous Man Behind ‘State of Grace’ Movie 

 

 

 

April 25th, 1985, just after 3:00 in the afternoon, West 35th Street near 9th Avenue, the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. Michael Holly, a small-time gambler with a long memory, was walking home in broad daylight when a man in a brown wig stepped off the curb behind him. Five shots, point-blank, into the back. Holly went down on the sidewalk, blood spreading across the cement, while pedestrians screamed and the shooter walked calmly to a parked car and drove away.

The car was traced within hours. It belonged to the trucking company where Mickey Featherstone worked. Two eyewitnesses, looking at the blond hair, the small frame, the boyish face under the wig, identified the killer as Mickey Featherstone himself. There was just one problem. Mickey Featherstone didn’t do it.

This wasn’t just another Hell’s Kitchen hit. Featherstone was the most feared killer on the West Side of Manhattan, a Green Beret reject, a Vietnam-era ghost, a man whose own crew called him the deadliest hitman in New York City. He was second in command of the Westies, the Irish-American crew that ran Hell’s Kitchen for over a decade, generated an estimated one and a half billion dollars in loan sharking, extortion, labor racketeering, and contract killings, and worked as the official enforcement arm of the Gambino crime

family under Paul Castellano. Featherstone had killed men in bars in front of witnesses and walked. He’d been arrested for the murder of the previous Irish boss of Hell’s Kitchen and walked. The cops couldn’t touch him. The D.A. couldn’t break him. The Italians were afraid of him. This is the story of how the most violent Irishman in New York got buried alive by his own gang.

 How a frame job for a hit he didn’t pull broke the Westies forever. And how the deadliest hit man in 1980s Manhattan became the rat. >> What was it that made you go to the police? >> It was uh I felt my only way out of this life. >> Who put 75 years on his best friend and ended the Irish mob in Hell’s Kitchen. But here’s what the Sean Penn movie never told you.

 The real Mickey Featherstone was darker, smaller, sicker, and more dangerous than anything Hollywood put on screen. State of Grace gave you a romantic tragedy. The truth was a slaughterhouse. You have to understand who Mickey Featherstone was before any of this happened. Francis Thomas Featherstone, born September 2nd, 1948 on West 43rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen.

The youngest of nine kids. His father was a US Customs officer. His mother volunteered with the Veterans of Foreign Wars. By all accounts, a respectable working-class Irish-American household. Mickey had pale blue eyes, shaggy blonde hair, and a face people called baby-faced into his 30s. He stood 5’7. He looked like a kid.

 That was the trick. That was what got people killed. In 1966, at age 17, he lied about his age and joined the army. He wanted the Green Berets, Special Forces, the hard stuff. He passed the training. He earned the tab. And then they made him a stock clerk. While other recruits shipped to Vietnam and saw combat, Mickey counted boxes and got drunk on the base.

 He started drinking heavily. He started having what he called hallucinations. He’d act out. He’d fight. He’d black out. After a year in uniform, in 1967, the army gave him a medical discharge for psychiatric reasons. He was 19 years old and already broken. He came back to Hell’s Kitchen a different man. Paranoid, volatile, drunk before noon, carrying a war he never actually fought inside his head.

In 1970, a group of brothers from New Jersey named the Rileys started causing trouble in the neighborhood. Mickey went and got a rifle. He shot John Riley in the arm. He caught a probation. That was the warm-up. The real start came 1 year later, 1971. Featherstone, drunk again, got into an argument outside a bar with a man named Linwood Willis.

He’d borrowed a pistol from a young up-and-coming neighborhood hood named Jimmy Coonan. He used it. He shot Linwood Willis dead on a Hell’s Kitchen sidewalk. Witnesses watched it happen. The case looked airtight. Mickey’s lawyer played the only card he had, the psychiatric discharge from the army, the hallucinations, the Thorazine, the breakdowns.

The jury bought it, not guilty by reason of insanity. That verdict changed everything. Because now Mickey Featherstone had a get-out-of-jail-free card stamped on his forehead. The neighborhood watched him kill in public and walk into a hospital instead of a prison. He spent 4 years in a series of psychiatric institutions getting strapped to beds and pumped full of Thorazine. He was released in 1975.

He came out angrier, sicker, and bonded for life to the only person who’d visited him, Jimmy Coonan. Now you need to know about Jimmy Coonan. Jimmy was born December 21st, 1946, son of a Hell’s Kitchen accountant who ran a small tax office on West 50th Street. 5 ft 7, stocky, thick-necked, amateur boxer, and carrying a grudge that defined his entire life.

When Jimmy was a teenager, the boss of Hell’s Kitchen, an old-school Irish gangster named Mickey Spillane, kidnapped Jimmy’s father John, pistol-whipped him, and beat him almost to death over a ransom. Jimmy never forgave it. From that day forward, Jimmy Coonan had one mission: take Hell’s Kitchen away from Mickey Spillane and burn it down behind him.

By 1976, Coonan had a crew, about 15 guys total, all Irish-American, mostly from the same five-block radius. And his number two was Mickey Featherstone, fresh out of the mental ward, looking for a war. Coonan was the brain, Featherstone was the gun. Together, they were a perfect machine. Here’s how they took Hell’s Kitchen.

Spillane’s old-school operation was built on kidnap-for-ransom and bookmaking. Coonan saw the future, and the future was loan sharking. The neighborhood was full of dock workers, longshoremen, gamblers, bartenders, junkies, and people who could not get a loan from a bank. The Westies stepped in.

 The math was simple and brutal. Lend $2,000, get back $2,400 in 1 week. That’s vig of 20% every week. 20% weekly compounded. A man who borrowed $5,000 and couldn’t pay it back inside a month owed 9,000 by the end of week four. Inside 3 months, the loan had quadrupled. Inside 6 months, the borrower owed his life. Multiply that by hundreds of borrowers across Hell’s Kitchen, the docks, the construction sites, the Javits Center, the Jacob Javits Convention Center, which was being built right in their backyard.

Federal prosecutors would later put the Westies total gross at over 1 and 1/2 billion dollars across loan sharking, extortion, no-show jobs, union shake downs, and contract murder fees. One and a half billion from 15 guys, but you couldn’t have that empire while Mickey Spillane was still breathing. So, Kunen did something almost unthinkable for an Irish street guy in 1977.

He went to the Italians. He sat down with the Gambino crime family. He made a deal. The Gambinos wanted Spillane gone, too, because Spillane refused to cooperate with the Italians on the West Side. Kunen got an introduction to a Gambino soldier from Brooklyn named Roy DeMeo. DeMeo ran a crew out of the Gemini Lounge in Flatlands that was, by federal estimate, responsible for somewhere between 75 and 200 murders.

 DeMeo handled bodies the way a butcher handled meat, literally. They dismembered them in a bathtub. On May 13th, 1977, Mickey Spillane stepped out of a car in front of his apartment in Woodside, Queens. Three men were waiting. Five shots. Spillane went down. The old Irish gangster bled out on the sidewalk in front of his own home.

 The police arrested Mickey Featherstone for the murder. They had no case. Featherstone walked. Hell’s Kitchen now belonged to Jimmy Kunen and Mickey Featherstone. And that’s when the bodies really started. The same month Spillane died, Kunen had a problem. He owed money to a Gambino-connected loan shark named Ruby Stein, who carried a black book listing every borrower in Manhattan.

 The book was worth a fortune. So, Kunen invited Ruby Stein to a back room at the Westies’ main hangout, a saloon called the Three Sevens at 347 West 44th Street. He put a bullet in Ruby Stein’s head. And then, according to testimony later given by Westies member William Beattie at the 1987 federal trial, they cut him into pieces in a bathtub.

 Koonan took the head. Some of the body parts they wrapped and dumped in the Hudson River. When Stein’s torso washed up days later on a Brooklyn beach, partially intact, one of the Westies was overheard saying, “We should have cut the lungs open because lungs filled with air. Lungs floated.” That was the moment the Westies stopped being a street crew and became something else entirely.

The dismemberment became their signature. The cops called them the Westies. The neighborhood called them ghouls. Here’s where it gets interesting. Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino crime family, sat in his Staten Island mansion called the White House and heard about the Westies. He didn’t like them. He thought they were psychopaths.

But he also recognized leverage. In 1978, Castellano summoned Koonan and Featherstone to a sit-down at a restaurant in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He laid down the terms. The Westies would pay 10% of every dollar they earned to the Gambinos. In return, they could use the Gambino name on the street.

 The Gambinos would finance their loan sharking, and the Westies would handle any wet work the Italians didn’t want traced back to themselves. The Westies became the Gambino family’s executioners. They were the Irish butchers on call for the most powerful crime family in America. Featherstone hated the arrangement.

 He thought it was a betrayal of every Irish-American in Hell’s Kitchen. The whole point, in his mind, was that the West Side belonged to the Irish and the Italians stayed out. Koonan saw money. Featherstone saw surrender. [clears throat] That crack between them was small in 1978. By 1985, it would be wide enough to drive a coffin through.

 But, the killing didn’t stop. Featherstone was the gun. The neighborhood started disappearing people. Harold Whitehead, killed in 1978, the case for which Kunen was tried and acquitted in ’79. Whitehead was shot in the back of the head in a Hell’s Kitchen bar called the Sun Bright Saloon. The kind of place where you didn’t see the shooter even when you were looking right at him.

 The federal indictment would later attribute at least 30 unsolved murders to the Westies through the late ’70s and early ’80s. Bodies in the Hudson. Bodies in the rivers around the city. Bodies that simply never came home. Featherstone himself was building a body count that became legend. He’d kill in bars. He’d kill in cars.

 He’d kill over a bar tab. He’d kill over a look. In December 1979, he and Kunen stood trial together for the murder of a bartender. One witness shot himself dead before testifying. Another witness took the stand and suddenly couldn’t remember anything. The jury acquitted both men. By 1980, prosecutors in Manhattan were openly admitting they could not get a Hell’s Kitchen jury to convict a Westie because witnesses kept ending up dead or terrified into silence.

 In February 1982, the law finally got him on something stupid. Featherstone passed counterfeit $20 bills at a Times Square massage parlor. The woman who took the bills remembered him because he had his own first name tattooed on his forearm. Mickey. In big block letters. The deadliest hitman in New York City was caught because he tattooed his name on his arm.

 He got 6 years federal. He did most of it on the psychiatric ward at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. Witnesses there described him picking lint off of perfectly made bunk every morning and starting fights with other inmates for not polishing the brass on their doors.

 The staff kept him in protective work assignments because they were genuinely afraid the other prisoners would kill him. He was 33 years old, married to a woman named [ __ ] and he was unraveling. He came back to Hell’s Kitchen in 1984. He came back to a different gang. Kunen had moved out of the neighborhood entirely. He was living in a quiet middle-class house in Hazlet, New Jersey with his wife Edna. He drove in for meetings.

 He let other guys handle the day-to-day. He was getting tight with Gambino captains and skimming construction profits from the Javits Center deal. To Featherstone, walking the same Hell’s Kitchen sidewalks his father had walked, watching the neighborhood gentrify and his crew get rich off Italian money, Kunen looked like a traitor.

 He started talking. Maybe too loud. Maybe in the wrong saloons. Word got back to Kunen that Mickey Featherstone was unhappy. Word got back that Featherstone might be thinking about making a move. And Jimmy Kunen, who had spent his entire adult life planning the murder of Mickey Spillane and watching it pay off, new exactly what to do with a number two who was thinking about being number one.

You have to remember a name. John Bokun. Westie soldier. Killed in 1977 during an argument with a Hell’s Kitchen civilian named Michael Holly. Bokun pulled a gun on Holly. The cops intervened, and Bokun got shot dead by a responding officer. Kunen held Holly responsible for the death of John Bokun. He’d been promising John’s younger brother Billy Bokun for 8 years that the family debt would be paid in blood.

 8 years he sat on it. And then, in early 1985, Kunen realized he could pay the debt and solve his Featherstone problem in a single afternoon. Here’s the frame, exactly as it unfolded. April 25th, 1985, mid-afternoon. Billy Bokun, who had a noticeable birthmark on his face, put on a brown wig styled to look like Mickey Featherstone’s shaggy blonde hair.

The wig made the birthmark hard to spot at a glance. Bokun was the same height as Featherstone, same general build. Then Bokun got into a car that belonged to the trucking company where Featherstone worked. He drove to West 35th Street. He found Michael Holly walking on the sidewalk. He stepped out.

 He shot Holly five times in the back in front of multiple witnesses. He got back in the car. He drove away. The car was registered traceable to Featherstone’s employer. Two eyewitnesses gave descriptions consistent with Featherstone. The cops arrested Mickey Featherstone the next day. The trial ran in March 1986. Featherstone took the stand.

 He insisted he wasn’t there. He had no good alibi. The eyewitness identification was strong. The car was strong. The jury convicted him in April 1986. The judge sentenced him to 25 years to life. Sitting in his cell, Mickey Featherstone did the math. He had killed at least a half dozen men in his career. Some say more. Some say a lot more.

 He had walked on Spillane. He had walked on Linwood Willis. He had walked on the bartender. He had walked on Whitehead. He had walked on every charge that ever mattered. And now he was going to die in prison for the one murder he genuinely didn’t commit. Why? Because his own crew, his own best friend Jimmy Coonan, had set him up to take a fall designed to look exactly like a Mickey Featherstone hit.

The realization broke him. Not the prison time, the betrayal. He called his wife, [ __ ] She started meeting with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. They wired her up. She walked into a Hell’s Kitchen apartment with a hidden recorder and got Billy Bokun on tape. Bokun, drunk and proud, told her in detail how he’d worn the wig, driven the car, gunned Holly down, and let Mickey take the weight.

The DA’s office had everything they needed. In September 1986, Judge Alvin Schlesinger threw out Featherstone’s conviction. He walked out of prison after roughly 5 months on a murder conviction designed to bury him for life. And then he did the thing nobody in Hell’s Kitchen ever thought possible. Mickey Featherstone, the deadliest hitman on the West Side, the guy who’d buried federal witnesses and bartenders and gangsters in the Hudson River, became a federal cooperator.

The trial of the Westies opened in October 1987 in Manhattan Federal Court. Coonan and seven co-defendants faced racketeering charges under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Featherstone took the stand and talked for weeks. He named names. He gave dates.

 He described murders the FBI didn’t even know had occurred. He explained the Ruby Stein dismemberment. He explained the Gambino tribute payments. He explained how Coonan ran the loan-sharking books and how the 10% flowed up to Castellano’s people. He gave them everything. On May 11th, 1988, the verdicts came down.

 Jimmy Coonan was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 75 years in federal prison with a judicial recommendation against parole. Seven other Westies got terms ranging from up to 75 years a piece. The number two of the gang, Kevin Kelly, James McElroy, Kenneth Shannon, William Bokun, who had pulled the trigger on Holly, John Halo, all of them got hammered.

Koonan’s wife, Edna Koonan, who had handled some of the money laundering, also got time. Mickey Featherstone pleaded guilty to a single racketeering count. Because of his cooperation, Judge Robert W. Sweet sentenced him to five years probation suspended. He walked free in December 1988 and went into the federal witness protection program. He was 38 years old.

 The man who had killed for Hell’s Kitchen was now hiding from it. The Westies, as a coherent organization, ceased to exist. A Yugoslavian gangster named Boško Radonjić tried to step into Koonan’s vacuum and run what was left, but the empire was gone. The Gambino family lost its Irish murder arm.

 The construction rackets reshuffled. The Javits Center money flowed elsewhere. Hell’s Kitchen itself began its long transformation from a violent immigrant neighborhood into the gentrified theater district neighborhood it is today. And then, two and a half years after Featherstone’s testimony ended, in September 1990, Sean Penn and Gary Oldman walked into theaters in a movie called State of Grace.

The film told a fictionalized version of the Westies story. It romanticized the bond between Penn’s character and Oldman’s character. It gave them poetry. It gave them honor. It gave them tragedy. It made them look like fallen angels. Almost nobody saw it. It came out the same week as Goodfellas and got crushed at the box office.

But here’s what the movie left on the cutting room floor. The real Mickey Featherstone wasn’t poetic. He was a Thorazine survivor with a tattoo of his own name on his arm who killed bartenders over insults. The real Jimmy Coonan wasn’t a tragic Irish prince. He was a man who watched his crew chop up a loan shark in a bathtub and complain about the lungs.

 The real Westies weren’t fallen angels. They generated over 1 and 1/2 billion dollars in criminal proceeds, butchered an estimated 30-plus people, served as the on-call hit team for the Gambino family, and ended when one of their own decided he’d rather destroy them than die for them. Jimmy Coonan is still alive at the time of this telling.

 He sits in Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkill in Pennsylvania. He’s in his late 70s now. He’s lost his teeth. He’s deaf in one ear. He’s filed for compassionate release multiple times citing his wife’s failing health and his own age. The Federal Bureau of Prisons lists his full term release date as November 17th, 2061.

He will almost certainly die in prison. The kid who watched Mickey Spillane beat his father half to death finally got his revenge. He also got everything Spillane had, and then he lost it the same way. Mickey Featherstone, the man who buried the Westies, has lived under a different name in a different town for over 30 years. Nobody talks about where he is.

Nobody knows what he looks like now. He’d be in his late 70s, too. Possibly still alive. Possibly already gone. That’s the real story State of Grace couldn’t show you. Not because Hollywood didn’t have the budget, because Hollywood didn’t have the stomach. The Irish mob in Hell’s Kitchen didn’t fall to the FBI.

 It didn’t fall to the Italians. It didn’t fall to a heroic cop. It fell because one broken Green Beret reject with a tattoo on his forearm and a wife with a tape recorder decided that the only thing worse than going to prison was going to prison for a murder he didn’t get to commit. The deadliest hitman in New York City wasn’t taken down. He was set up.

 And when his own people buried him alive, he dug his way out and brought the whole cathedral down on top of them. That’s not a movie. That’s just what happens when you frame the wrong Irishman in Hell’s Kitchen in 1985 with a wig and a borrowed car.