May of 1977, the back room of a bar on West 49th Street, Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, >> [clears throat] >> night. Ruby Stein was a loan shark. He had been one of the most active money lenders in Hell’s Kitchen for years, the man people came to when they needed cash and could not go to a bank. He had a book full of clients.
He had outstanding loans across the neighborhood. He had been using Jimmy Coonan as his collection enforcer for years. He also had the misfortune of being owed money by Jimmy Coonan himself. The debt was substantial. Coonan did not intend to pay it. He had a more efficient solution. He invited Stein to the back of the bar.
Members of the Westies were waiting. They murdered Stein where he stood. Then, because this was the Westies, and the Westies had a specific and documented approach to the problem of bodies generating evidence, they dismembered him in a barroom with available tools. The pieces went into the Hudson River.
A few days later, Stein’s torso washed up on the Manhattan shoreline. A member of the gang was overheard remarking that they should have cut his lungs open. That way, he would not have floated. A loan shark murdered and dismembered in a bar so a debt could be canceled. Anatomical problem-solving afterward. 12 to 20 Irish-American men from the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen who had done this kind of thing so consistently and so fearlessly across 15 years that by the late 1970s, every significant organized crime organization in New York City, including
the five Italian families who collectively ran the most powerful criminal apparatus in American history, treated them with a specific and documented caution. John Gotti, who did not treat many people with caution, chose to work with the Westies rather than against them. The calculation was straightforward.
The Westies were not people you tried to control. They were people you reached an accommodation with. Between 1968 and 1986, the NYPD Organized Crime Squad and the FBI attributed between 60 and 100 murders to the Westies. Between 60 and 100 from a gang that never exceeded 20 members. This is their story. To understand the Westies, you have to understand Hell’s Kitchen.
Hell’s Kitchen is the neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan, roughly between 34th and 59th Streets from 8th Avenue to the Hudson River. The name has uncertain origins. Some attribute it to a 19th century policeman who observed a riot there and remarked that the neighborhood was hell itself. Whatever the etymology, the name stuck because it was accurate.
For over a century, it was one of the most densely populated and most economically precarious neighborhoods in New York City. Irish immigration from the famine years had established the community’s ethnic character. The waterfront, the piers of the Hudson River shipping trade, had provided employment.
The neighborhood had its own economy, its own culture, its own hierarchy of community institutions from the Catholic Church to the political clubs to the criminal organizations that had operated there since before the Civil War. The Gopher Gang in the late 19th and early 20th century, Owney the Killer Madden during Prohibition, a succession of Irish organized crime figures who ran Hell’s Kitchen through the first half of the 20th century with varying degrees of discipline and institutional coherence.
By the 1960s, the man running Hell’s Kitchen was Mickey Spillane, not the crime novelist, but an Irish-American mob boss who had built a stable and relatively controlled criminal operation across the neighborhood. Spillane was old school in the specific way that mob historians mean when they use that phrase.
He maintained relationships with the Italian families, paid appropriate tribute, avoided unnecessary violence that attracted law enforcement attention, and ran his operation with the measured hand of someone who understood that longevity in organized crime required a certain discipline. He was also, by the standards of what was coming, a gentleman, and Hell’s Kitchen in the late 1960s was producing a new generation of men who had no interest in the discipline and the measured hand and the tribute relationships. They had grown up in
poverty and violence. Several of them had come back from Vietnam carrying what one could charitably call altered perspectives on the acceptable applications of force. They were angry in ways that previous generations of Hell’s Kitchen criminals had not been angry. And they had a specific and important quality that distinguished them from almost every other criminal organization in New York at the time.
They genuinely did not care what happened to them. James Jimmy Coonan was born December 21st, 1946 into a middle-class Irish-American family in Hell’s Kitchen. His father was an accountant who ran a tax office on West 50th Street. He was not, in the biographical sense, a product of the most desperate poverty of the neighborhood.
He came from the more settled working-class portion of it. The families that had been in Hell’s Kitchen long enough to establish themselves above subsistence. He dropped out of school. He became a boxer. He became a street fighter. He developed the specific kind of reputation that Hell’s Kitchen in the 1960s generated for young men with his combination of qualities: stocky, broad-shouldered, unafraid of pain, and genuinely indifferent to consequences.
By his early 20s, he was in the orbit of Mickey Spillane’s organization. He was running errands, collecting debts, doing the street-level work of a neighborhood criminal enterprise that had been in place since before he was born. He was also quietly and systematically building towards something different. He wanted to run Hell’s Kitchen himself, and he was patient enough, and smart enough, and violent enough to wait for the right moment and the right ally.
The right ally came in the form of Roy DeMeo. DeMeo, the Gambino family soldier whose junkyard operation in East New York, and whose acid barrel disposal method we covered in a previous episode, had his own uses for a man like Coonan. They struck a deal. DeMeo would arrange the murder of Mickey Spillane in exchange for an ongoing criminal partnership.
In August of 1977, Mickey Spillane was shot five times outside his apartment in Woodside, Queens. DeMeo had arranged it. Coonan was now the undisputed boss of Hell’s Kitchen. The second figure, the one without whom the Westies story is incomplete, was Mickey Featherstone. Michael Featherstone was born in 1948, the sixth of 10 children, in a tenement on West 49th Street in Hell’s Kitchen.
His father was a longshoreman. The family’s circumstances were substantially more precarious than Kunen’s. He was raised in the dense, crowded poverty of a Hell’s Kitchen walk-up apartment with nine brothers and sisters in a neighborhood where the street was the primary social institution. He went to Vietnam. He came back different.
The specific nature of what Vietnam did to Mickey Featherstone is documented in the court and medical records that accumulated around him for the next 15 years. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia. He was treated with Thorazine, the heavy antipsychotic medication that was standard psychiatric practice in institutions of that era.
He committed murders after returning from combat, killing a man named Linwood Willis in a bar confrontation in 1971. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He spent time in a series of mental hospitals, being restrained and injected with Thorazine when he acted out before being released in 1975. He was 5 ft 7.
He had wide blue eyes and shaggy blond hair and a boyish face that people frequently underestimated. Those people learned quickly that the underestimation was a mistake. Featherstone was known in Hell’s Kitchen as the Jungle Killer, a nickname that communicated both his willingness to kill anywhere, including in crowded public places, and the specific quality of violence that he brought to encounters that most men would have managed with a raised voice or a shoved shoulder.
He had killed men in neighborhood bars in front of witnesses multiple times. he had beaten the charges. Because no witness in Hell’s Kitchen who had seen Mickey Featherstone do something violent was going to testify about it in court. The calculation was simple and rational. Mickey Featherstone was not going to spend the rest of his life in prison.
The people he had killed in bars were not going to come back to life. The witness who testified against Mickey Featherstone, however, was going to spend the rest of their life worried about the specific and documented consequences of being someone who testified against Mickey Featherstone. Nobody testified.
Coonan recognized what Featherstone was and recruited him as second in command of the Westies in 1976. The combination of Coonan’s organizational intelligence and Featherstone’s specific and fully operational willingness to kill without hesitation, remorse, or the kind of restraint that limited most criminals, that combination produced something that Hell’s Kitchen had not seen before and that the entire New York organized crime ecosystem had not encountered in the form it was about to take.
The Westies, between 12 and 20 members at any given time, all Irish-American, all from Hell’s Kitchen or its immediate surroundings. All operating with the specific philosophy that there was no problem, territorial dispute, debt collection challenge, or enforcement situation that could not be addressed through immediate and overwhelming violence, and that the consequences of that violence would be managed through the specific methodology Jimmy Coonan called doing the Houdini.
The Houdini meant making the body disappear, not hiding it, disappearing it. The Westies became, alongside Roy DeMeo’s operation in Brooklyn, the most consistently practiced dismemberment crew in the history of New York organized crime. They murdered people and then cut them into pieces and distributed those pieces in the Hudson River or through whatever disposal mechanism was available.
They cut lungs to prevent floating. They learned from mistakes like the Ruby Stein torso. They refined the methodology. The most notorious individual example of this methodology involved a loan shark and collector named Paddy Dugan who had killed a man that Eddie Cummiskey, a Westie associate, counted as his best friend.
Koonan and Cummiskey lured Dugan to a location, killed him, and dismembered him. Then Koonan took Dugan’s head to a bar in the neighborhood and placed it on the bar while he drank. He was sending a message to the specific and limited audience of people in Hell’s Kitchen who needed to receive it.
The message was received. The beheading of a man to avenge a killing, followed by the display of the severed head in a neighborhood bar, is not a tactic that appears frequently in the operational history of American organized crime. It is not a tactic that requires explanation to anyone within the neighborhood where it occurs.
It communicates everything it needs to communicate in the most direct possible format. Word traveled. The Westies reputation expanded beyond Hell’s Kitchen into the broader New York criminal world. The Italian families who had been operating in Hell’s Kitchen through various mechanisms and who had previously managed or attempted to manage the neighborhood’s Irish mob through traditional organized crime political relationships began to recalibrate their assessment of the situation.
The Genovese family had tried to use a freelance Irish hitman named Joseph Mad Dog Sullivan to eliminate three of Mickey Spillane’s top lieutenants when Spillane refused to let them have the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center business. Sullivan killed two of the three before the situation was resolved. That was what the established mob families knew how to do, hire an outside contractor, manage a limited operation, maintain the institutional distance that the commission’s rules required.
What they did not know how to do was manage men who were genuinely indifferent to the outcome of any confrontation, who would kill anyone in any context with any available implement, and whose response to an institutional effort to control them would be to immediately and comprehensively escalate beyond any level the institution could comfortably match.
You could not fight the Westies the way you fought other organizations. You could fight and probably win. The Italian families had the numbers and the resources and the institutional backing, but the cost would be severe and visible and exactly the kind of war that brought law enforcement attention nobody wanted.
The Westies were 20 men. They might kill 40 of yours before they were done. They would not care about their own casualties in any way that modified their behavior. The accommodation that the Gambino family eventually reached with the Westies and that John Gotti maintained and formalized after taking over the Gambinos in December of 1985 was the rational response to an irrational opponent.
Work with them, use them, pay them, keep them pointed at problems you need solved rather than at problems they might create for you. The Westies became the Gambinos’ contract killing squad for Manhattan. They carried out hits on Gambino family targets. They enforced Gambino family decisions in territories where the Gambino family wanted the work done by people who were not directly traceable back to the organization.
They received weekly payments and access to the Gambino family’s financial rackets. They were, in the specific terms of the arrangement, employees. John Gotti, who was not a man who accepted the authority of organizations above his own easily, understood that trying to impose authority on Mickey Featherstone and Jimmy Coonan directly was not worth what it would cost.
He sent Joe Watts as his liaison instead. That’s how you manage the Westies, not with authority, with a liaison. The unraveling began not with law enforcement pressure, but with the specific quality that had always been the Westies’ greatest operational vulnerability, their own internal violence now turned inward.
Featherstone and Coonan had a falling out rooted in something that was, in its way, more fundamental than a business dispute. Featherstone was Irish. He had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen. The Westies, as he understood them, were a Hell’s Kitchen Irish gang. Their identity, their territory, their reason for existing, all of it, was rooted in the specific community they had come from and the specific people they represented.
Coonan’s alliance with the Gambino family, the deepening integration of the Westies into the Italian mob’s operational structure, felt to Featherstone like a betrayal of that identity. He had not killed men in neighborhood bars and dismembered loan sharks in the back of bar rooms so that Jimmy Coonan could become a subcontractor for Paul Castellano and then John Gotti.
The Irish mob was supposed to be its own thing. Coonan had turned it into a service provider for the Italian families. The specific break came through a murder case. In April of 1985, a construction worker and neighborhood bar owner named Michael Holly was killed on the street after refusing to pay the Westies protection money.
The actual killer was a Westie named Billy Bokun, the brother of John Bokun, who had walked into Holly’s bar and shot him and then been shot and killed himself by an off-duty police officer who was present. Coonan’s organization arranged a frame. Billy Bokun obtained a car identical to Featherstone’s.
He put on a long-haired wig and a fake mustache to resemble Featherstone. He drove up and shot Holly in front of witnesses. The gang then tipped police that Featherstone had killed Holly. In March of 1986, Mickey Featherstone was convicted of the murder of Michael Holly and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
He was innocent of this specific murder. He was not innocent of other murders, but this one he had not committed. The conviction had been arranged by his own organization. He concluded, sitting in his cell, that he had been framed by men he had killed and bled and risked everything alongside for over a decade. He made the call. He cooperated.
His wife [ __ ] wore a wire and recorded conversations with gang members. The recordings confirmed what had happened with Billy Bokun and Michael Holly. In September of 1986, Judge Alvin Schlesinger overturned Featherstone’s conviction. And then, Featherstone testified. For 4 weeks in the fall of 1987, he sat on the witness stand and told a federal jury everything he knew about the Westies and their operations across 15 years of murders and extortions and contract killings for the Gambino family. Jimmy Coonan was convicted in
- He was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison. He remains incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Institution in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania. As of 2023, he had lost all his teeth and suffered from deafness, obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and skin cancer. His full term date is November 17th, 2061.
Other Westy leaders received 40- and 60-year sentences. Mickey Featherstone entered the federal witness security program. He has remained there in the decades since. His location is not publicly known.
