The FBI agents who spent their careers investigating New York’s Mafia would later say the Westies were something different. Something worse. In the 1970s and 1980s, this crew of Irish-American gangsters from Hell’s Kitchen built a reputation so savage that the city’s most powerful crime families chose to partner with them rather than fight them. What made the Westies different was their method of body disposal.
When they killed someone, they dismembered the body and scattered the pieces across Manhattan. The practice was so routine that investigators coined a phrase for it: the Westy way. Detectives who processed those scenes said even hardened homicide veterans found the cases uniquely disturbing. To understand the Westies, you have to understand Hell’s Kitchen.
In the 1950s through the 1970s, it was a narrow strip of tenements and slaughterhouses along Manhattan’s west side, roughly from 34th to 59th Street. It had been Irish immigrant territory for over a century. The longshoremen, sanitation workers, and beat cops came from the same few blocks, attended the same churches, and drank at the same bars. The neighborhood produced legitimate figures, including actor James Cagney.
But opportunity was scarce. Young men who wanted power and money took the path already paved for them: running numbers, shaking down bars, breaking fingers, and collecting debts. Eventually, the toughest organized themselves into a crew called the Westies. The man who built the Westies into a recognized criminal organization was Mickey Spillane, a soft-spoken Irishman who ran Hell’s Kitchen from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s.
By the standards of what came after, he was almost reasonable. He controlled loan sharking, bookmaking, and labor rackets, and he had a rule against killing civilians. He held an arrangement with the Gambino family, and business flowed in agreed directions. On April 1977, Spillane was shot and killed in an ambush in the Woodside neighborhood of Queens.
The man behind it was someone he had trusted: a younger, hungrier operator named Jimmy Coonan. Spillane was 53 years old. Jimmy Coonan was born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen. He was lean, blue-eyed, charming when he wanted to be, and capable of extraordinary violence without recognizable remorse.
He had been committing crimes since his teenage years and had studied Spillane’s operation closely. Once in charge, he removed the part about not killing people indiscriminately. Coonan took over in his late 20s and redefined the Westies. What had been a neighborhood crime outfit became a murder syndicate that also ran loan sharks.
Rivals disappeared. Men who could not pay their debts turned up dead, or in many cases, never turned up at all. Coonan used violence as a management tool. He inspired genuine terror, and that was intentional.
His right-hand man was Mickey Featherstone, a Vietnam veteran with diagnosed psychiatric problems and a hair trigger that made Coonan look restrained by comparison. Together, the two ran Hell’s Kitchen like a private country under martial law. Coonan had solved a problem every criminal organization faces: what to do with bodies. The Mafia used weighted trunks in the river or shallow graves in New Jersey, but those methods were imperfect because bodies had a habit of being found.
Coonan’s solution was dismemberment. When the Westies killed someone, they took the body apart and distributed pieces across multiple locations: dumpsters, the Hudson River, vacant lots across several boroughs. The logic was simple. A complete body can be identified.
Scattered pieces are just evidence of something terrible, not necessarily attached to any particular crime or person. Federal investigators later found this was not occasional but routine. For years, the clearance rate on Westy murders was almost nonexistent. The Mafia recognized something in the Westies.
Instead of being disgusted, they were impressed. By the late 1970s, the five families of New York watched Hell’s Kitchen the way you watch a stray dog that has already bitten three neighbors. The traditional Mafia structure had no category for what the Westies were. The families were hierarchical organizations with rules about who could be killed and with whose permission.
The Westies were a loose collection of men from a ten-block neighborhood who had grown up together, gone to prison together, and would commit violence on no notice and with no documentation. The Gambino family, under Paul Castellano, made a calculation. Going to war with the Westies would be expensive, bloody, and bad for business. So Castellano and Coonan met, and they came to an understanding.
The Westies would serve, in practical terms, as an enforcement arm for the Gambino family on specific jobs. In return, the Gambinos provided protection, political cover, legal connections, and an implicit message to anyone considering moving on Hell’s Kitchen: they would be fighting two organizations instead of one. The alliance gave Coonan’s crew reach beyond a neighborhood gang’s normal scope. They enforced labor racketeering on the West Side docks, represented Hell’s Kitchen contractors on construction projects, and handled Gambino operations that required physical persuasion.
Roy DeMeo, the notoriously violent Gambino associate who ran his own murder operation in Brooklyn, reportedly expressed admiration for Westie methods. For a few years in the early 1980s, the Westies were at the peak of their influence: feared by rivals, useful to allies, protected by Gambino muscle. But criminal organizations at their peak are also where the cracks start showing. The Westies were a collection of violent, paranoid, frequently intoxicated men who had built their reputation on chaos.
Chaos is useful until it turns inward, and it always turns inward. The beginning of the end was a decision made by Mickey Featherstone. In 1986, Featherstone was convicted of a murder he insisted he did not commit. He believed he had been set up by members of his own crew, men he had trusted, men whose victims’ remains he had helped dispose of.
That realization, combined with a federal RICO investigation closing in, pushed him to an unthinkable decision. He flipped. Featherstone entered the federal witness protection program and began talking to prosecutors. He provided not just details of specific crimes but the entire architecture of the Westie operation: the murders, the labor racketeering, the loan sharking, the alliance with the Gambinos, the body disposal methods.
He wore a wire, recorded conversations, and documented crimes going back years. In 1988, Jimmy Coonan was convicted of racketeering and murder under the federal RICO statute and sentenced to 75 years in prison. He remains there. Numerous other Westie members received substantial sentences.
Coonan’s wife, Edna, was also convicted of racketeering. The alliance with the Gambinos became a liability, adding charges, exposure, and witnesses. The organization that had once forced the Gambino family to negotiate was gone within a few years of Featherstone’s cooperation. Mickey Featherstone received a reduced sentence and entered witness protection under a new identity.
His current whereabouts are not publicly known. Hell’s Kitchen changed too. The slaughterhouses closed. The longshoremen were replaced by real estate developers.
The economic base that had sustained Irish organized crime in that corner of Manhattan for a century disappeared, replaced by restaurants, theater districts, and a Hudson Yards development costing more per square foot than most cities. The Westies remain a footnote in most histories of American organized crime. They were not sophisticated. They were not businessmen.
But the FBI offices that worked organized crime in New York through the 1970s and 1980s remember them distinctly, for the specific flavor of violence they brought to their work and for what they proved. Sometimes chaos works. The five families had rules because rules protected the organization. The Westies had no rules, and for about a decade, that protected them just as well.
You cannot build a RICO case easily against men who leave no bodies. You cannot flip witnesses in a crew where everyone is equally compromised and equally afraid. You cannot negotiate from strength with people who have nothing to lose. The Mafia feared the Westies not because they were smarter or better organized, but because they operated on a different frequency entirely.
Jimmy Coonan built his empire on terror and held it together with violence. In the end, it was the trust he broke among his own people that destroyed him: not the FBI, not the Gambinos, but his own crew.