May 22nd, 1977. A garage on the west side of Manhattan. A lone shark named Ruby Stein walks in expecting to talk business the same way he has talked business in this neighborhood for years. He is not a small player. Stein has financed lone sharking operations that stretch across the city with mob money behind him and a reputation that usually buys a man’s safety. Tonight, none of that matters.
Within hours, Ruby Stein will be dead. His body broken down piece by piece, so that almost nothing of him is ever found. The man who gave the order is not in the room when it happens. He rarely was. His name was Jimmy Kunan, and the killing of Ruby Stein was not an explosion of rage. It was a business decision executed the way the Westies executed all of their business decisions.
There is one more name worth holding on to from this same period, even though it will not matter yet. A young, volatile Vietnam veteran named Mickey Featherstone is already inside Kunan’s circle by this point, already trusted with violence most men in the crew would not be trusted with. Remember him? Years from now, the same loyalty that makes him useful tonight is the thing that ends up destroying everyone in this story. Kunan included.
When State of Grace went into production, it carried a different title first. The studio and the filmmakers originally called it Westies, the same name The Real Gang carried on police blatters and federal indictments for two decades. By the time it reached theaters in 1990, the title had changed, the names had changed.
Jimmy Kunan had become Frankie Flannry and Mickey Featherstone had become a fictional younger brother named Jackie. The studio softened almost everything else along with the names. Years later, audiences watching that finished film would see Ed Harris play a controlled, ambitious Irish gangster, quietly running a crew from a house in New Jersey, while a more unstable partner did the loud, visible violence on the street back in the old neighborhood. It is a good film.
Critics liked it. But most people who eventually heard the name Frankie Flannry assumed they were watching an exaggerated piece of fiction. They weren’t. They were watching a careful retelling of two real men who ran the Westside docks, bars, and lone sharking rackets of Hell’s Kitchen for almost 20 years.
Men whose actual business required the kind of violence a 1990 theatrical release could not put on screen and still get distributed. This is not the story of one body in a garage. It is the story of how violence itself became a line item in a balance sheet. How an Irish street gang turned fear into a product the Italian mafia was willing to pay for.
And how the one man Kunan trusted with the dirtiest work eventually became the one man who could not be trusted at all. You have to understand Hell’s Kitchen first. Because the neighborhood is part of this crime, not just the backdrop for it. In the 1960s and 70s, this was not the gentrified strip of restaurants people now walk through near Manhattan’s theater district.
It was tenementss, long shoremen, union halls, and corner bars that never closed, full of families who had lived on the same blocks for three generations. The docks brought freight in and out of the city, and freight meant cash, and cash meant opportunity for men willing to take it by force. Police struggled here for one simple reason. Nobody talked.
Silence wasn’t fear of a single gangster. It was a neighborhoodwide survival instinct. passed down like a family trade. James Kunan was not born a legend. He grew up in a respectable workingclass Hell’s Kitchen home with a father who held down steady work and expected his son to do the same.
But Kunan carried a wound that never closed. As a teenager, he watched men working for the neighborhood’s reigning boss, Mickey Spelain, beat his father badly in a dispute. Kunan did not respond like a frightened kid. He responded like someone calculating a return years in advance. By the time he was in his 20s, he was no longer thinking about getting even.
Advertisements
He was thinking about taking Spalain’s entire operation and running it better, harder, and more profitably than Spalain ever had. His partner in that ambition, the man the film turned into the unstable younger brother Jackie, was Mickey Featherstone. Featherstone came home from Vietnam carrying damage that nobody in Hell’s Kitchen had the language to describe yet.
Today, it would be called posttraumatic stress. Back then, the neighborhood just called him crazy. And in that world, crazy was not a warning sign. It was a qualification. Featherstone became the Westy’s most reliable instrument of violence, capable of acting fast and without hesitation when Kunan needed something handled. Here is where the film and the truth start pulling apart.
And here is the detail to hold on to for the rest of this story. One man wanted control. The other wanted purpose. One built the machine piece by piece with patience and calculation. The other became the part of the machine that did the loudest, most necessary work whenever patients ran out. The two of them needed each other completely in the 1970s.
By the 1980s, that need had quietly turned into something closer to a liability. Kunan was no longer willing to carry. By the mid 1970s, the power struggle inside Hell’s Kitchen had become a genuine war. Spellelain still controlled the rackets tied to construction at the new Jacob Javitz Convention Center and he refused to let the Italian mafia anywhere near it.
That refusal frustrated the Genevese family led on the west side by Anthony Serno badly enough that they hired an outside hitman, Joseph Sullivan, to start eliminating Spelain’s top lieutenants one by one. Three of Spelain’s closest men were killed in this stretch. Spelain’s hold on the neighborhood began to collapse and Kunan saw the opening he had been waiting for since he was a teenager.
This is where it is worth breaking the operation down step by step because the film compresses years of calculated business into a single dramatic power struggle. In reality, this was closer to a merger between two organizations that did not trust each other but needed each other anyway. The opportunity was control of Hell’s Kitchen’s rackets, especially the construction money tied to the Javit Center.
The inside connection was Solerno himself, a high-ranking Genevese Kappo who understood the Italians could never openly take over an Irish neighborhood without starting a war nobody wanted. The execution was straightforward. Serno offered Kunan a deal. Help remove Spelain, become the new boss of the west side. And in exchange, the Genevese family would take a cut of the construction rackets while ran the neighborhood underneath their protection.
The money moved the way these arrangements always move. Kunan kept Hell’s Kitchen’s lone sharking, gambling, and Union shakedowns flowing to his own crew, while a percentage went up to the Italians for the privilege of operating without interference. The fear came from a documented pattern of violence the Westies used against anyone who didn’t pay, didn’t listen, or got in the way.
And that fear was never random. It was applied selectively, almost surgically, to protect the operation’s bottom line. The flaw, the one neither side saw clearly at the time, was that this whole arrangement depended on a small, loosely organized crew of Irish gangsters keeping their mouths shut for the rest of their lives. They wouldn’t.
Kunan recruited a Gambino soldier named Roy Deo to do work that needed to be done without leaving a trace back to him personally. Deo had a reputation that unsettled even other killers, and investigators later connected him to a documented pattern in which victims were made to disappear so completely that there was nothing left to recover.
In 1977, Deo killed Mickey Spelain outside his own Queen’s home as a favor arranged through Kunan. The details are too graphic to repeat here, but the effect was immediate. The neighborhood understood exactly what had happened and exactly who was now in charge. Kunan was now the undisputed boss of Hell’s Kitchen.
And what he ran was not a loose street gang anymore. Federal prosecutors would later describe it almost exactly this way. Not a collection of tough guys, but a criminal enterprise organized enough to generate real money and disciplined enough to protect it through fear that was used deliberately, not emotionally. That is the part worth slowing down on because it is the part the film never has time to explain properly.
The Westies did not kill out of rage. Ruby Stein was not killed because Kunan hated him. He was eliminated because his death solved a financial and territorial problem cleanly the same way a corporation eliminates a failing division. Violence here was not the exception to business. It was a recurring line item in it budgeted, planned, and assigned to specific people the way any other task would be.
Looney Sharking worked because the legitimate banks said no and the Westies said yes. A man behind on rent, gambling debts, or a failing bar tab could get fast cash with almost no questions asked. The weekly visit from the collector became part of the neighborhood’s rhythm. If the payment was there, the visit was almost friendly.
If it wasn’t, the smile disappeared, and everybody on the block understood what came next without anyone needing to explain it. The loan itself was never really the product. Predictable fear was the product, and fear once established collected itself. Union extortion worked through access, not violence alone. The Westies built relationships with corrupt officials inside several New York unions tied to the docks and to construction, including locals connected to the Javit Center project itself.
jobs, no-show positions, and labor piece could all be bought, and the price went directly to Kunan’s crew. This is the part the film barely touches because it isn’t cinematic. It’s paperwork, payroll, and quiet phone calls, but it generated more steady income than almost anything else the Westies did. And then there was Murder for Hire, which the Westies turned into something closer to a contracting service for Italian families who needed deniable disposable muscle.
The Westies didn’t need explanations for who deserved to die. They needed a price. That arrangement made them valuable specifically to the Gambino family. And it is the reason Kunan tightened his relationship with Paul Castellano’s organization through the late 1970s. With Deo remaining his main point of contact for years, to a man like Castellano, sitting comfortably above all of this, violence was never personal. It was maintenance.
A problem appeared. The problem was removed, and the business continued exactly as it had the day before. Kunan absorbed that same logic completely and eventually he applied it to his own people too. Through the late 70s and into the 80s, the Westies kept winning in court almost as often as they kept committing crimes.
In 1979, both Kunan and Featherstone were acquitted in the murder of a bartender named Harold Whitehead. Another top enforcer, James Mroy, was acquitted of murdering a Teamster member the following year. Featherstone himself stood trial for Spalain’s murder and walked free as well. Every aqu quiddle added to the gang’s reputation and to its arrogance.
And arrogance every single time in this kind of story becomes the crack that eventually breaks the case wide open. That crack started exactly where the opening of this story told you to look. Mickey Featherstone, the man whose loyalty had been useful from the very beginning, became the man Kunan started to see differently as the years went on.
Featherstone’s name kept surfacing in murder investigations. He became more paranoid, more exposed, and increasingly viewed by Kunan not as a loyal piece of the operation, but as a liability that could expose everyone above him if it ever cracked under pressure. Kunan stopped seeing Featherstone as a partner and started seeing him as evidence.
And in organized crime, evidence does not get protected. It gets managed and eventually removed. Featherstone had a wife named Sensing that Kunan was preparing to let her husband take the fall for crimes that protected other men, or worse, preparing to have him eliminated entirely. Featherstone made a decision nobody in Hell’s Kitchen had made in nearly 20 years of organized violence.
She went to the authorities and started talking. And so did Mickey Featherstone himself once he understood exactly how disposable now considered him. Information from the Featherstones gave investigators what they needed to move on state murder and racketeering charges against Kunan and several other top westies.
Federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani building one of the most aggressive RICO cases of the era, then layered on a sweeping federal indictment covering criminal activity stretching back two decades. Featherstone, once trusted with the gang’s most necessary violence, spent four weeks on the witness stand in open court in 1987, describing the inner workings of an organization that had spent two decades convinced its silence was permanent.
The trial concluded with convictions across the board. In 1988, Kunan was sentenced to 60 years in prison. Mroy received the same sentence. Richard Ritter, a career criminal tied to the gang’s lone sharking and drug operations, was sentenced to 40 years. The men who had once made Hell’s Kitchen tremble were gone.
Not in a blaze of cinematic violence, but in federal courtrooms under fluorescent lighting, listening to sentences read off a page.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
