Westies
The Westies
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In
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Founded
by
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Years
active
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1960s
- present
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Territory
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Hell's
Kitchen and various other neighborhoods over NYC, some parts of New Jersey
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Ethnicity
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Membership
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less
than 20 members
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Criminal
activities
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Allies
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The Westies are a
predominantly Irish American
organized crime
association operating from the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan's West Side
in New York City.[1] According to crime author T.
J. English, "Although never comprised of
more than twelve to twenty members — depending on who was in or out of jail at
any given time — the Westies became synonymous with the last generation of
Irish in the birthplace of the Irish Mob...."[citation needed] According
to the NYPD Organized Crime Squad, and the FBI, the Westies were responsible for between 60-100 murders
from the period of 1968-1986. Most Westies victims were dismembered and in some
cases tortured to death.
History
Spillane
years
In the early 1960s Mickey Spillane stepped into a power vacuum that had existed in Hell's
Kitchen since gang leaders fled the area in the early 1950s to avoid
prosecution. A mobster from Queens named Hughie
Mulligan had been running Hell's Kitchen;
Spillane, a native, was his apprentice until inheriting the throne.
Spillane sent flowers to neighbors
in the hospital and provided turkeys to needy families during Thanksgiving, in addition to running gambling enterprises such as bookmaking and policy, accompanied inevitably by loansharking. Loansharking led to assault, and Spillane had burglary
arrests as well. However, among all his criminal activities, the most audacious
was his "snatch" racket (kidnapping and holding local businessmen and
members of other crime organizations for ransom).
He was able to add to his
neighborhood prominence by marrying Maureen McManus, a daughter of the
prestigious McManus family which had run the Midtown Democratic Club since
1905. The union of political power with criminal activity enhanced the gang's
ability to control union jobs and labor racketeering, moving away from the
declining waterfront and more strongly into construction jobs and service work
at the New York Coliseum, Madison Square Garden, and later the Jacob K. Javits
Convention Center.
Spillane-Coonan
wars
The war began when James
"Jimmy C" Coonan, an
18-year-old Irish hood, swore revenge against Michael "Mickey"
Spillane, the boss of Hell's Kitchen, following the Spillane-initiated
kidnapping and pistol whipping of Coonan's father. In 1966, Coonan fired an
automatic machine gun at Spillane and his associates from atop a Hell's Kitchen
tenement building. Although Coonan wounded no one, Spillane understood that the
younger hoodlum was not to be taken lightly. Coonan was imprisoned for a short
period of time because of murder and kidnapping charges that were pleaded down
to a Class C Manslaughter Felony Charge. He was released in late 1971 and
continued his war with the Westside Gang and his criminal career.
Trouble
with the Genovese Family
Hells Kitchen was no longer safe for
Spillane and his family, and he moved to the Irish working-class neighborhood
of Woodside, Queens.
With Spillane gone, his control of the rackets in Hell's Kitchen began to
deteriorate; Coonan became the neighborhood's boss, although some still viewed
Spillane as boss. On the New York Commission, Spillane was still viewed as the Irish
Mob boss on the Westside, putting the
Javits Convention Center construction site under his control. Anthony
Salerno, a high-ranking member of the Genovese crime family, wanted the center for himself and reached an agreement
with Jimmy Coonan. If Coonan became boss, Salerno would run the construction
site and give Coonan a taste of the proceeds.
Salerno then reached out to Buffalo
Crime Family associate and freelance hitman, Joseph Sullivan, to eliminate the three main Spillane
supporters in Hell's Kitchen, Tom
Devaney, Tom
Kapatos, and Edward
Cummiskey. Cummiskey had apparently switched
sides to the Coonan camp, but Salerno and Sullivan were not aware of the
switch. Devaney and Cummiskey were murdered in late 1976, and Kapatos was
killed in January 1977. Spillane was now out of the picture, and Coonan was the
undisputed boss of Hell's Kitchen. It was felt that Spillane still had to die. Roy
DeMeo, a Gambino crime family soldier, murdered Spillane as a favor to Coonan. Mickey Featherstone
stood trial for the murder and was found not guilty.
Coonan
and Featherstone
During the late 1970s, Coonan
tightened the alliance between the Westies and the Gambinos, then run by Paul
Castellano. Coonan's main contact was Roy
DeMeo. In 1979 both Coonan and Featherstone were acquitted of the murder of a
bartender, Harold Whitehead.
Another Westie, Jimmy McElroy, was acquitted of the murder of a Teamster in 1980.
Even though both Westies leaders
were imprisoned in 1980 — Coonan on gun possession charges, Featherstone on a
federal counterfeiting rap — the gambling, loansharking, and union shakedowns
continued on the West Side. After DeMeo himself was murdered, Coonan's Gambino
connection became Danny Marino, a capo from Brooklyn. Coonan eventually
interacted directly with John
Gotti, who took over the Gambinos after
Castellano's murder in December 1985. From time to time, the Westies worked for
the Gambinos as a contract killer
squad.
Featherstone was convicted of murder
in early 1986 and began cooperating with the government in hopes of getting the
conviction overturned. The information he and his wife Sissy provided, and the
recordings they helped make, achieved this aim. In September 1986 the
prosecutor who oversaw Featherstone's conviction told the presiding judge that
post-conviction investigation had revealed Featherstone was innocent. The judge
immediately overturned the verdict.
At that point the information
provided by the Featherstones resulted in the arrest of Coonan and several
other Westies on state charges of murder and other crimes. Shortly afterward,
federal prosecutor Rudolph
Giuliani announced a devastating RICO indictment against Coonan and others for criminal
activities going back twenty years. Featherstone testified in open court for
four weeks in the trial that began in September 1987 and concluded with major
convictions in 1988. Coonan was sentenced to sixty years in prison on assorted
charges. Other leading gang members were also sentenced to long prison terms,
including James McElroy, a top enforcer who was sentenced to 60 years, and
Richard "Mugsy" Ritter, a career criminal sentenced to 40 years on loan-sharking and drug related charges.
Kevin
Kelly and Kenny Shannon
During the mid-to-late 1980s, while
Jimmy Coonan lived in his luxurious suburban home and Mickey Featherstone
futilely attempted to support his family by legitimate means, Kevin Kelly and
his sidekick, Kenny Shannon, became the most active racketeers on the West
Side. Sports, gambling, and dealing coke to young professionals on the East Side were their primary
rackets. In 1988, after two years on the run for a failed murder attempt, Kelly
and Shannon could no longer take the heat after being featured on Americas Most Wanted and decided to turn themselves in to the authorities.
Giuliani claimed that they were the last ruling body of the Westies, but he was
wrong.
"The
Yugo" and the new era
By the early 1990s, the old
demographic of the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood was disappearing. The blue-collar Irish-American community was being displaced by a more
affluent and ethnically diverse group of residents. With this change came a
decrease in street crime
and a change in leadership. Bosko “The Yugo” Radonjich, a Serbian nationalist and onetime anti-communist started
his Westies affiliation as a low-level associate of Jimmy
Coonan in 1983. He became the boss of the
Westies when Kelly was sent to prison in 1988.
Around 1992, Radonjich fled the
country to avoid jury tampering
charges. He was eventually arrested by U.S.
Customs officials during a stopover in Miami,
Florida in 1999. However, Radonjich was
released when the main witness in the case, Sammy
Gravano, was deemed unreliable. Radonjich
has since returned to his native Serbia.
References
- ^
English, T. J. The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob. St.
Martins Press. 1991.
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