Just past midnight on October 13, 1978, Paddy Dugan was drinking Irish whiskey at the 596 Club, a basement bar at 10th Avenue and 43rd Street in Hell's Kitchen. Jimmy Coonan walked in carrying a paper grocery bag. Inside was a .38 caliber revolver.
Coonan pulled the gun, stepped behind Dugan, and put two rounds into the back of his head. Dugan slumped forward into his glass. The bartender did not move. The two other men in the bar did not move.
Everyone in Hell's Kitchen already knew what came next. They knew about the bathtub in the back, the meat hooks, and the butcher knives Coonan kept in a leather roll under the bar. By sunrise, Paddy Dugan would not exist as a body, as evidence, or as anything a coroner could identify.
This was not a movie. This was a night in Manhattan.
Frankie and Jackie Flannery, the brothers played by Ed Harris and Gary Oldman in the 1990 film State of Grace, were Hollywood inventions, sanitized and softened for a paying audience. The real men were Jimmy Coonan and Francis Thomas Featherstone, known as Mickey.
What they did inside a 40-block stretch of Manhattan's West Side between 1966 and 1986 made the screenplay look like a children's book. The studio cut entire sequences from State of Grace because the real history was too graphic to film.
Body parts in the Hudson River. Heads in dumpsters. A loan shark cut into pieces small enough to fit in airline luggage. This is the story of the Westies, the most savage Irish-American crew in New York history, the crew the Gambino family hired when it needed work that even its own button men would not touch.
It is also the story of how a Vietnam Green Beret named Mickey Featherstone came home from the war hallucinating, joined a butcher named Jimmy Coonan, and helped commit at least 30 murders in the heart of Manhattan before flipping in 1986 and ending more than a century of Irish organized crime.
But the film did not tell the whole story. The Westies were not just a gang. They were a corporation, with a payroll, a hierarchy, a contract murder service, and a meat hook disposal system that made bodies vanish completely for over a decade. And the FBI did not catch them. Mickey Featherstone's wife did.
To understand Mickey, you have to understand Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s. West 42nd Street beyond 9th Avenue meant tenement walk-ups, longshoreman bars, and the smell of the Hudson at low tide. Irish kids grew up there whose grandfathers worked the docks and whose fathers drank themselves to death.
Mickey Featherstone was born in 1949 on West 43rd Street, four blocks from where Paddy Dugan would later die. His father was a longshoreman. His mother was a devout woman who said the rosary every night. Mickey was small, baby-faced, and quiet, the kind of kid you would walk past on the street and never remember.
In 1966, at 17 years old, Mickey lied about his age and enlisted in the army. He told the recruiter he was 19. They did not check. Within a year he was in the special forces, the Green Berets. He served two tours in Vietnam.
What happened to him there is documented in his Veterans Administration file and in the testimony he gave at his 1971 murder trial. He saw things. He did things. He came back to Hell's Kitchen in 1969 with a Bronze Star, a head full of ghosts, and what military psychiatrists at the time called combat fatigue.
Today it would be called post-traumatic stress disorder. Mickey called it the voices. He heard them at night. He saw shapes that were not there. He drank to make them stop. Drinking did not make them stop.
On April 2, 1971, Mickey walked into a bar called the Sunbrite Saloon on 10th Avenue. He had been drinking. A man named Linwood Willis said something to him. Mickey pulled out a .45 and shot him dead in front of 14 witnesses.
He walked back to his mother's apartment, sat on the couch, and waited for the police. At trial, his lawyer entered an insanity plea based on his Vietnam record. The jury acquitted him. Mickey Featherstone, 22 years old, was a free man with a confirmed kill on the streets of New York and a legal record that said he was not responsible for it.
Every gangster in Hell's Kitchen now knew his name. That is when Jimmy Coonan came looking for him.
Jimmy Coonan was 25, blond, handsome, and from a respectable Irish family on West 48th Street. His father was an accountant. Jimmy could have gone to college. Instead, he went to war with Mickey Spillane, the old-school Irish boss who ran the Hell's Kitchen rackets, gambling, loan sharking, dock theft, and union shakedowns.
Jimmy hated Spillane. In 1966, Spillane had kidnapped Jimmy's father and held him for ransom. Jimmy was 16 years old when his father came home beaten. He swore he would kill Spillane for it. He spent the next 11 years figuring out how.
Coonan and Featherstone met in 1970. Mickey was the muscle. Jimmy was the brain. Mickey was the trigger. Jimmy was the strategy. They started small, loan sharking out of bars on 9th and 10th Avenue, hijacking trucks on the West Side piers, and beating up bookmakers who had not paid tribute.
By 1975, they had a crew of about 12 men and a problem. Mickey Spillane was still alive, still running Hell's Kitchen, and still standing between them and real money. The opportunity came from Brooklyn, specifically from a Genovese soldier named Tony Lucic, who told Jimmy Coonan that the Italians had no use for Spillane and would not object if Spillane were to disappear.
On May 13, 1977, Mickey Spillane was shot to death in the lobby of his apartment building in Woodside, Queens. Four bullets, close range. The shooter was identified by a tenant as a young blonde man matching Jimmy Coonan's description. No one was ever charged.
Within a week, Coonan controlled every Irish racket from 42nd Street to 59th Street. He was 27 years old.
Coonan did not want to be Spillane. Spillane had been an old-school Irish boss who hated the Italians and refused to do business with them. Coonan thought that was why Spillane lost. So in late 1977, Jimmy Coonan went to Brooklyn and asked for a meeting with Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino crime family.
Castellano agreed. The sit-down took place in early 1978 at the Veterans and Friends Social Club. The deal was simple. The Westies would pay the Gambinos 10 percent of their gross. In exchange, the Gambinos would back the Westies in any beef with another family.
And whenever the Gambinos needed a piece of work done that they could not trace back to Italians, the Westies would do it for a fee. No questions asked. Castellano agreed. Just like that, a crew of Irish kids from Hell's Kitchen became the Gambino family's contract murder service.
The first big job came that summer. A Gambino associate named Charlie had been skimming. The Italians wanted him gone but could not afford the heat. Mickey Featherstone and a Westie named Billy Beaty picked him up in a car on a Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday morning, he was in the East River in seven separate plastic bags.
The Gambinos paid the Westies $25,000 cash. The Westies kept $10,000 for the crew and sent $15,000 up the chain to Coonan. By 1979, they were doing one to two contract hits a month at prices ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 per body, depending on difficulty and disposal.
That brings the story to the meat hooks. Most contract killings get solved because of the body. The body is the evidence. No body, no case. So Coonan developed a system.
The Westies operated out of two Hell's Kitchen bars, the 596 Club at 10th Avenue and 43rd Street, and the Skyline Motor Inn bar at 49th and 10th. Both had basements. Both basements had meat hooks installed in the ceiling joists, ostensibly for hanging restaurant supplies. They were not for restaurant supplies.
The procedure was this. Victim shot in the head. Body bled into a tub. Once drained, the body was hung from the meat hook. Joints were disarticulated with a butcher's saw. Coonan, whose family had owned a butcher's shop, did most of the cutting.
The pieces were placed in plastic garbage bags. The bags were distributed across multiple disposal sites, the Hudson River, the East River, dumpsters in New Jersey, and construction sites in the outer boroughs. Hands and heads were treated separately. The hands often went into a meat grinder. The teeth were pulled out and discarded individually. By the time the pieces were found, if they were ever found, identification was almost impossible.
This was Coonan's signature. And Mickey Featherstone, the Green Beret who had come home from Vietnam hearing voices, was usually the man holding the saw.
Between 1975 and 1985, law enforcement believed the Westies were responsible for at least 30 murders. Of those 30, only seven bodies were ever recovered intact. The rest simply ceased to exist.
But every system has a flaw. In May 1977, a few months before Spillane was killed, the Westies took a contract on a man named Ruby Stein. Stein was a Jewish loan shark from the Upper West Side, 62 years old, who carried in his head a list of every gambler in New York who owed serious money. The list was rumored to be worth millions.
The contract had come from the Genovese family, who wanted Stein dead and his loan book confiscated. The Westies took Stein into the basement of the 596 Club. Mickey was there. Jimmy was there. A Westie named Eddie Cumiskey did most of the work.
Stein was shot, drained, dismembered, and bagged according to the standard procedure. The bags went into the Hudson. But Cumiskey, who had just been released from prison and was not yet familiar with the protocol, made a mistake. He did not puncture the torso bag. Air remained inside. The bag floated.
Six days later, on the New Jersey shoreline near Atlantic Highlands, two fishermen pulled a black plastic garbage bag out of the surf. Inside was the headless, handless torso of Ruby Stein. Fingerprints were impossible. The head was gone.
But Stein had a distinctive surgical scar from a gallbladder operation. The medical examiner identified him within 48 hours. The FBI organized crime task force in Manhattan, run by a methodical agent named Joseph Coffey, opened a file. The file was labeled Westies. It would stay open for nine years.
Through 1979, 1980, and 1981, the killings continued. Tom Devaney, a Westie who had talked to the wrong people, vanished. Eddie Cumiskey himself, the man who had botched the Stein disposal, was shot to death in a bar on 10th Avenue in 1979.
Jimmy McElroy, John Bokun, and Billy Bokun were names that meant nothing to Manhattan but everything in Hell's Kitchen. All of them moved in and out of the Westies inner circle. All of them killed on contract. The crew earned an estimated $8 million to $12 million across its peak years.
And Mickey Featherstone, somewhere in there, started to crack. The Vietnam voices got worse. The drinking got worse. He married a woman named Sissy Houlihan, a tough Hell's Kitchen Irish girl with two kids from a previous relationship. Sissy was the only person in the world Mickey loved without reservation.
She begged him to get out. He could not. He was Coonan's right hand. He was the Meat Hook Crew's most reliable shooter. He was making $60,000 a year, tax free. And he was losing his mind.
In 1985, things between Coonan and Featherstone went bad. The accounts vary on exactly why. Some say Coonan suspected Mickey of skimming. Some say Mickey had refused a contract. What is documented is that by the spring of 1986, Jimmy Coonan wanted Mickey Featherstone removed, but Mickey was too dangerous to shoot.
Mickey was the man who had held the saw. Mickey knew where everybody had gone. So Coonan came up with something else. He decided to frame him.
On May 7, 1986, a Gambino associate named Michael Holly was shot to death in front of his car on 55th Street and 10th Avenue, four blocks from Mickey's apartment. Two eyewitnesses described the shooter as a white male in his mid-30s with curly red hair. They picked Mickey Featherstone out of a photo array. Mickey was arrested that night.
The problem was that Mickey had not done it. The shooter had been a Westie named Billy Bokun, wearing a curly red wig provided by Jimmy Coonan, who had selected Bokun specifically because Bokun was the same height and build as Mickey. The frame was elegant. It would put Mickey away for life and solve Coonan's problem without anyone having to face Mickey Featherstone with a gun.
Mickey went to trial in 1986 and was convicted of a murder he did not commit. He was sentenced to 25 years to life. Sissy Featherstone, sitting in the back of the courtroom, knew her husband had not been on 10th Avenue that day. He had been with her. She knew Coonan had set him up.
While every other Westie wife in history would have accepted it, Sissy did not. Sissy went to the FBI.
What followed over the next eight months was the most thorough takedown of an organized crime crew in New York history. Sissy Featherstone agreed to wear a wire. She walked into the Skyline Bar. She walked into the 596 Club. She had drinks with the Bokun brothers.
She got Billy Bokun on tape admitting that he had shot Michael Holly while wearing a wig, and that Jimmy Coonan had ordered the frame. She got other Westies on tape talking about contracts they had done for the Gambinos, bodies they had dismembered, and money they had been paid. She got it all.
In April 1987, the FBI presented the tapes to Mickey Featherstone in his prison cell. He listened to his wife. He listened to the men he had killed for talking about killing him. And then Mickey Featherstone, the Green Beret, the Meat Hook Man, the most feared trigger in Hell's Kitchen, did something no Westie had ever done. He flipped.
Over the next year, Mickey gave the government everything. The Spillane hit, the Castellano sit-down, the Stein dismemberment, the Holly frame, the Charlie contract. The fee schedule the Gambinos had paid. The names of every man on every meat hook.
He testified at the 1988 federal RICO trial against Jimmy Coonan and seven other Westies. The trial lasted 11 weeks. The jury deliberated for four days. On October 15, 1988, all eight defendants were convicted on the full RICO count.
Jimmy Coonan was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison. He would die there in 2017, having never seen the outside again. Mickey Featherstone served four years on his Holly conviction before it was vacated based on the new evidence. He entered the federal witness protection program in 1992.
Sissy went with him. The kids went with him. They moved somewhere in the American Midwest, took new names, and disappeared. Mickey Featherstone is believed to still be alive, living under an assumed identity somewhere in a small town a long way from 10th Avenue.
The Westies never recovered. By the early 1990s, every senior member was either in prison, in witness protection, or dead. The Gambinos lost their off-the-books murder service. Hell's Kitchen, the Irish neighborhood that had produced gangsters for over a century, gentrified within a decade.
Today, the 596 Club is a wine bar. The Skyline Motor Inn is a luxury hotel. The basement where Paddy Dugan was cut into pieces is a fitness center.
Hollywood gave the world State of Grace in 1990. Sean Penn played a fictionalized Mickey. Gary Oldman played a fictionalized Coonan. Critics called the violence shocking. The studio cut sequences it considered too graphic.
They cut the meat hooks. They cut the bathtub. They cut the way Ruby Stein was identified by a gallbladder scar. They cut the wig, because Hollywood understood something the audience did not. The truth was worse. Always worse.
The Westies story reveals something specific. The Mafia did not fall because the FBI caught them. The Mafia fell because their own men pushed far enough and betrayed them.
Ruby Stein's body washed up because of a single air pocket in a single garbage bag. Jimmy Coonan went to prison for 75 years because he tried to frame the wrong man's wife. The whole thing, the contracts, the meat hooks, the empire, was undone by one woman in Hell's Kitchen who refused to let her husband take the fall.
Mickey Featherstone killed for 15 years and walked away. Jimmy Coonan ran an empire and died in a federal cell. That is the real difference between the men in State of Grace and the men in the basement of the 596 Club.
The movie has a hero. The real story has only survivors.