On the night of May 13, 1977, Mickey Spillane was walking home from a neighborhood bar in Woodside, Queens, when five bullets tore through his chest and neck. The 43-year-old, known as the gentleman gangster of Hell's Kitchen, collapsed on the sidewalk about 200 feet from his apartment. His wife heard the shots from inside. By the time she reached him, he was gone. The hit took 18 seconds.
Spillane had controlled Hell's Kitchen for 15 years through old-school respect and carefully managed violence. He protected his neighborhood and kept order. He made sure the worst never happened to civilians. But someone had decided the old rules no longer applied. Someone wanted to run Hell's Kitchen through terror, through dismemberment, through body counts that would make the Italian Mafia look civilized.
That someone was Jimmy Coonan. With the Vietnam veteran Mickey Featherstone at his side, Coonan turned Hell's Kitchen into America's most violent square mile. The gang they built, the Westies, did not just terrorize their neighborhood. They became essential partners to the Gambino crime family, moved millions in construction contracts, and ran protection rackets from 34th Street to 59th. They left a trail of bodies so horrific that forensic teams were still finding pieces years later.
Francis Thomas Featherstone was born September 2, 1948, in the tenements of Hell's Kitchen. He grew up on West 43rd Street, the second of four children in a working-class Irish Catholic family. His father was a city employee and his mother kept house. It was a hard neighborhood, but not hopeless. Kids played stickball in the streets, families knew each other, and people looked out for their own.
Mickey was not like other kids. He was small for his age, pale, with nervous energy that never quit. He got into fights constantly. Teachers noticed something off. He was too quick to rage and too comfortable with violence. By 14, he was running with local street toughs. By 16, he had dropped out of school entirely.
In 1966, Mickey lied about his age and joined the army. He was 17. He was sent to the 101st Airborne Division and, according to some accounts, later served with the Green Berets. What happened there shaped everything that came after. He saw combat. He killed men. He came home colder and more willing to do what needed doing without hesitation.
When Mickey returned to Hell's Kitchen in 1967, the neighborhood was changing. Old Irish families were moving out. Puerto Ricans and blacks were moving in. Real estate developers were circling the waterfront. The criminal economy was shifting from gambling and loan sharking to construction, labor unions, and multi-million dollar projects that needed muscle.
Mickey drifted. He worked odd jobs, drank, and got into bar fights that ended with broken bones and emergency room visits. People noticed his eyes during those fights. They were blank, as if he was not even there, as if he was back in the jungle doing what he had been trained to do.
In 1970, Mickey met Jimmy Coonan, and everything accelerated. James Michael Coonan was born December 21, 1946, in Hell's Kitchen. Where Mickey was small and wired, Jimmy was stocky, charismatic, and calculating. He had sandy hair, a boy's smile, and dead eyes that never matched a grin. His father was an accountant who died young, and his mother remarried.
Jimmy grew up watching men like Mickey Spillane run the neighborhood with quiet authority. But Jimmy did not want to be quiet. He wanted to rule. By his early 20s, he was already making noise, running with a crew that did burglaries, hijackings, and small-time scores. He studied how Spillane operated and understood that Hell's Kitchen sat on a gold mine: the West Side waterfront, the Jacob Javits Convention Center going up, and billions in construction contracts.
The Italian Mafia was taking most of it. Spillane got a taste because he kept the peace. Jimmy wanted the whole meal. In 1966, when Jimmy was 20, he tried to muscle in on Spillane's operation. Spillane responded by putting a beating on Coonan that hospitalized him for two weeks. Message sent.
Jimmy went away for a few years on kidnapping and murder charges. He pleaded down, served light time, and got out in 1971. But he had not forgotten. He had learned patience, and he had learned that you could not beat Mickey Spillane by playing by Mickey Spillane's rules. You had to rewrite the rules entirely.
Jimmy assembled his crew carefully. Mickey Featherstone became his enforcer, the Vietnam vet who did not flinch. Billy Beattie was a hulking brute who enjoyed the work. Kevin Kelly was younger and ambitious. Eddie Comiskey and Jackie Coonan, Jimmy's own brother, rounded out the group. These were not sophisticated criminals. They were working-class Irish kids who discovered they had a talent for violence in a neighborhood that paid for it.
Their headquarters became the 596 Club, a dive bar on 10th Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets. Dark wood paneling, a jukebox in the corner, a pool table in back. It looked like a hundred other Hell's Kitchen bars. But in the back room, terrible things happened.
Jimmy's wife, Edna Coonan, was not just along for the ride. When Jimmy was sent upstate on various charges, Edna managed a loan sharking operation. She collected debts and delivered messages. She was the connective tissue that kept the operation running when Jimmy was behind bars. Short, stout, and formidable, Edna did not participate in the violence. She enabled it.
By 1975, Jimmy's crew was bringing in serious money. They ran loan sharking throughout Hell's Kitchen, always with juice that compounded weekly. Miss a payment, they break your hand. Miss three payments, you disappear. They extorted local businesses. Bars paid 500 a month for protection. Restaurants paid more. Refuse to pay, and your place burned down. Simple economics.
But Mickey Spillane still controlled the neighborhood. He had the respect, the connections, and the legitimacy with the Italian families. Jimmy needed him gone. So Jimmy made a deal with the devil, Roy DeMeo.
Roy DeMeo was a Gambino family soldier operating out of Brooklyn. He ran a crew that specialized in murder as an assembly line. The DeMeo crew would eventually kill over 100 people using what became known as the Gemini method. A victim would be lured to the Gemini Lounge, shot in the head as soon as they walked in, drained in the bathroom, dismembered, packed in boxes, and scattered across landfills in five states.
Jimmy approached Roy in early 1977. The pitch was simple. Kill Spillane, and Jimmy would give the Gambinos access to Hell's Kitchen rackets. They would work together and split the profits. Roy agreed. On May 13, 1977, he executed the contract personally. Five shots at Spillane as he walked home. Quick, professional, done. The message was unmistakable. The gentleman gangster era was over. The age of terror had begun.
Within weeks, Jimmy Coonan was running Hell's Kitchen. But he faced immediate problems. Spillane's old crew wanted revenge. Gambino family brass, particularly Paul Castellano, needed convincing that this Irish kid could deliver. And Jimmy owed Roy DeMeo a favor that would come due in blood.
The first test came quickly. Charles Ruby Stein, 50, was a loan shark who financed operations throughout the city. He had money and connections. Jimmy Coonan owed him over 50,000 dollars from various loans used to finance his takeover. Ruby wanted his money and started making threats. He told people Jimmy was an unreliable junkie who could not be trusted.
On May 13, the same day Spillane died, Ruby Stein was drinking at the Market Diner, a 24-hour spot on 11th Avenue that catered to truckers and criminals. Jimmy Coonan walked in around 11:00 p.m., friendly and smiling. He told Ruby they needed to talk about the debt. He suggested they walk to the 596 Club, have a drink, and settle things properly. Ruby agreed. Why wouldn't he? This was business.
They walked three blocks to the 596 Club. Jimmy held the door open. Ruby stepped inside. The bar was empty except for Billy Beattie and another associate named Danny Grillo. Ruby never got his drink. Danny came up behind him, wrapped a rope around his neck, and strangled him. It took four minutes. Ruby thrashed and tried to fight, but Danny held on.
When Ruby finally went limp, they dragged his 180-pound body into the back room. Now came the part that would define the Westies. Jimmy Coonan ordered the body dismembered, not out of necessity, but as a message. He wanted people to know that crossing the Westies meant you did not just die. You ceased to exist. Your family would not even have a body to bury.
They laid plastic sheets across the back room floor. Billy Beattie brought knives and a saw from the kitchen. Over the next three hours, they systematically cut Ruby Stein into pieces. Arms severed at the shoulders, legs at the hips, head removed, torso sectioned, hands cut off. They wrapped each piece in separate garbage bags.
Mickey Featherstone arrived later. He walked into the back room and saw what they had done. He later testified he was horrified, but he helped clean up. That was what you did.
Over the next week, they scattered Ruby Stein across the Tri-State area. An arm in a dumpster in Queens, a leg in New Jersey, the head in a landfill on Staten Island. Other pieces simply disappeared. Investigators eventually found seven separate body parts. They never recovered the complete corpse.
Ruby Stein's disappearance sent shock waves through the criminal underworld. People knew Jimmy Coonan was behind it, but there was no evidence, no witnesses, just rumors about what happened at the 596 Club. That was exactly what Jimmy wanted. Reputation through terror.
The Gambino family took notice. Paul Castellano, who had recently become boss after Carlo Gambino's death, summoned Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone to a sit-down in late 1977. They met at a restaurant in Brooklyn. Castellano sat at the head of the table, flanked by capos. Roy DeMeo was there. This was an audition.
Castellano's pitch was straightforward. The Gambinos controlled construction unions throughout New York. Millions in no-show jobs, inflated contracts, bid-rigging. But they had a problem. They were too high-profile, too Italian. Law enforcement watched them constantly. They needed a crew that could handle the violent enforcement, the beatings, the intimidation, and the occasional murder that kept union officials in line.
Jimmy Coonan could have that job. In return, the Westies got 10 percent of the construction rackets they protected. Plus, they kept everything they earned in Hell's Kitchen. Loan sharking, extortion, gambling, drugs, all theirs. The Gambinos just wanted a taste and a partnership. Jimmy agreed immediately. This was the legitimacy he needed. The Westies were now a Gambino family asset.
The money started flowing immediately. The Jacob Javits Convention Center was under construction, a 375 million dollar project and the largest convention center in the country. The Westies controlled access to several unions working the site: carpenters, electricians, concrete workers. If you wanted labor peace, you paid the tribute. By 1980, the Westies were pulling in an estimated 100,000 dollars per month just from construction rackets.
They also ran sophisticated loan-sharking operations. They would front money to Gambino family members at 1 percent weekly interest. The Gambinos would then loan that money to their own customers at 3 to 5 percent weekly. Everyone made money. If someone did not pay, the Westies handled collection. They were efficient, but the violence continued, because that is what Jimmy Coonan understood. Fear was a product. Murder was the advertising.
In 1978, a union official named John Bokun got greedy. He was skimming from the Westies' cut of the Javits project. 20,000 dollars disappeared from payments he was supposed to kick up. Jimmy, who was in prison at the time on a weapons charge, sent word through his wife, Edna: kill Bokun's brother as a warning. On January 20, 1978, John Bokun's younger brother was shot six times outside a bar in Hell's Kitchen. He survived, but he got the message. John Bokun started paying properly.
Mickey Featherstone was becoming the face of Westies enforcement. He was not the boss. That was always Jimmy. But Mickey was the one who showed up at your business, the one who delivered the threats, the one who, if necessary, pulled the trigger.
Mickey had married his girlfriend and they had kids. He lived in a modest apartment on West 46th Street. Neighbors saw him coaching Little League and taking his kids to school. He looked like a regular working dad. But at night, Mickey would meet Jimmy at the 596 Club, and terrible things would happen.
There is a psychological term for what Mickey experienced: compartmentalization. He could separate the violence from the domestic life. He could be a father in the afternoon and a killer at night. Vietnam had taught him that. The Westies perfected it.
By 1980, law enforcement knew the Westies existed. NYPD organized crime units had files on Jimmy Coonan, Mickey Featherstone, and Billy Beattie. They knew about Ruby Stein. They suspected the Westies in at least 30 unsolved murders, but they could not make cases. No witnesses, no physical evidence. Bodies kept disappearing.
The Westies had refined Ruby Stein's dismemberment into a system. When they needed to kill someone, they would lure them to the 596 Club or an apartment they controlled. A quick shot to the head, body into the bathtub. Dismemberment took about two hours if you knew what you were doing. They learned to drain the blood first for less mess. They learned which joints were easier to sever. They learned that heavy-duty garbage bags, double-wrapped, held the pieces without leaking. One crew member later testified they kept plastic sheets, saws, knives, and bleach stored in the 596 Club specifically for this purpose. Murder as logistics.
The Italian mobsters who partnered with the Westies found this disturbing. The Mafia had rules about murder. You killed for business reasons. You showed respect. You buried bodies properly. The Westies killed impulsively. They cut people up. They scattered remains like garbage. Roy DeMeo, who had killed over 100 people himself, reportedly told associates the Westies made him uncomfortable. That is how extreme they were. But the money kept flowing, and Castellano wanted that construction racket protected. So the partnership continued.
The Westies started attracting younger members who saw murder as status. Kevin Kelly, who joined the crew in the late 1970s, became one of the most enthusiastic killers. He was in his early 20s and had grown up idolizing Jimmy Coonan. He wanted to prove himself, so he volunteered for hits. He participated in dismemberments. He talked openly about body counts.
This created a problem. Older members like Jimmy and Mickey understood restraint. You killed when necessary. You did not advertise. But the younger guys treated it like a competition. Who had killed more? Who had been more brutal? Who had scared more people? One informant later told investigators there was an informal hierarchy based on murders. If you killed five people, you had status. Ten, you were feared. More than that, you were untouchable. This incentive structure turned the Westies into serial killers hiding in plain sight.
In 1981, Roy DeMeo was murdered by the Gambino family. He had become too high-profile, too much heat. Castellano ordered the hit to protect the family. Jimmy Coonan's direct connection was now dead. His new handler became Daniel Marino, a Gambino capo out of Brooklyn. Marino was more hands-off. As long as the money flowed, he did not care how the Westies operated. This gave Jimmy more autonomy, but it also meant less protection. The NYPD and FBI were building cases. They had wiretaps and surveillance. They were waiting for someone to break.
On April 25, 1985, everything began to collapse. A low-level associate named Michael Holly got into an argument with members of the Westies at a Hell's Kitchen bar. Holly was connected to the Bokun brothers, and there was bad blood. Someone mentioned Holly had been talking to police. Whether that was true did not matter. Perception became reality.
That night, Kevin Kelly and another associate named Kenneth Shannon tracked down Michael Holly. They found him at 35th Street between 10th and 11th Avenue. Kelly, wearing a disguise, walked up to Holly and shot him three times. Holly died on the sidewalk. It was a public hit, sloppy and desperate.
The problem was that Mickey Featherstone was not there. He was home with his wife. But within 24 hours, the NYPD arrested Mickey and charged him with Michael Holly's murder. Mickey knew immediately what had happened. He had been set up. Kevin Kelly had killed Holly and planned to pin it on Mickey. Why? Because Mickey had been talking about getting out, about going straight. In the Westies, that kind of talk made you a liability. Better to have Mickey in prison for a murder he did not commit than lose him in a neighborhood where he might cooperate.
Mickey's trial began in early 1986. Prosecutors had circumstantial evidence. They had witnesses who placed Mickey in the neighborhood. They had testimony from Westies members who claimed Mickey bragged about the hit. But they did not have physical evidence, because Mickey had not done it. In March 1986, Mickey Featherstone was convicted of Michael Holly's murder. He faced 25 years to life. He was 37 years old. He had already served time for other crimes. This sentence would end his life as he knew it.
But Mickey was not going quietly. While awaiting sentencing, he and his wife started making calls to the FBI and to prosecutors. They had a proposal. Mickey would testify against everyone: Jimmy Coonan, Kevin Kelly, Billy Beattie, the entire Westies organization. He detailed murders, dismemberments, rackets, the Gambino connection, everything. In return, he wanted his Holly conviction overturned and witness protection for his family.
The FBI was skeptical. Mickey Featherstone was a career criminal with mental health issues and a history of violence. Could they trust him? Would a jury believe him? But Mickey had something they desperately needed: details, dates, bodies. He could connect 30 unsolved murders to specific Westies members. He could explain how the construction rackets worked. He could testify about the Gambino partnership. He could put Jimmy Coonan away forever.
On September 6, 1986, Mickey's Holly conviction was overturned. Prosecutors revealed they believed Kevin Kelly and Kenneth Shannon had committed the murder. Mickey was released from prison and immediately entered witness protection with his family. The Westies did not know what hit them.
In November 1986, federal prosecutors filed RICO charges against Jimmy Coonan, Kevin Kelly, Billy Beattie, Edna Coonan, and four other members. The indictment listed eight murders, multiple attempted murders, kidnapping, extortion, loan sharking, drug trafficking, and labor racketeering. The maximum exposure was life in prison.
The trial began in September 1987 in Manhattan federal court. Mickey Featherstone testified for four weeks. He sat on the witness stand, pale and nervous, and methodically destroyed the organization he had helped build. He described Ruby Stein's murder and dismemberment in horrific detail: the rope, the strangling, the cutting, where they dumped the pieces. He testified about murders of union officials, rival gang members, and witnesses. He explained how the Gambino partnership worked, how much money flowed, who gave orders, and who carried them out.
Defense attorneys tried to discredit him. They pointed out his mental health hospitalizations, his history of violence, and his previous perjury convictions. But Mickey had dates, locations, and corroborating details that only someone who was there would know.
On February 25, 1988, the jury convicted seven of the eight defendants. Jimmy Coonan was found guilty on the racketeering charge that included seven murders. Kevin Kelly was convicted on multiple counts. Billy Beattie, guilty. Edna Coonan was acquitted on some charges but convicted on others. Judge Robert Sweet delivered the sentences on April 27, 1988. Jimmy Coonan received 60 years in federal prison. Kevin Kelly received 50 years. Billy Beattie received 40 years. Multiple other members received sentences ranging from 15 to 30 years.
The Westies organization ceased to exist that day, but the legacy continued. Over the next decade, bodies kept turning up. A skull in a Brooklyn landfill in 1992 was identified as a Westies victim. Leg bones were found in Queens in 1995. Forensic investigators believe there are still undiscovered remains scattered across the Tri-State area.
The neighborhood changed rapidly. Hell's Kitchen, which had been declining for decades, suddenly became desirable. Real estate developers swooped in. They bought tenements for cheap, converted them to luxury condos, and sold them for millions. Restaurants opened. Theaters expanded. By the mid-1990s, Hell's Kitchen had been rebranded as Clinton or Midtown West. The Irish working-class families that had lived there for generations were priced out.
Today, the median income in Hell's Kitchen is over 100,000 dollars. Apartments sell for a million or more. The 596 Club is gone, replaced by a boutique hotel. The corner where Ruby Stein was lured to his death is now a farm-to-table restaurant. The gentrification that the Westies had profited from ultimately erased them entirely.
Jimmy Coonan remains in federal prison. He has been denied parole multiple times. His most recent appeal, filed in 2023, argued that his 60-year sentence was excessive and that he had become a model prisoner. The appeal was denied in July 2025. He will likely die in prison.
Kevin Kelly is also still incarcerated. He has filed numerous appeals, all denied. He maintains his innocence. Edna Coonan served time for her role in the organization. She was released in the mid-1990s and now lives quietly in New Jersey. She rarely speaks publicly.
Mickey Featherstone disappeared into witness protection after the trial. Occasional reports surface of him living under an assumed name in a small town somewhere in America. He has never given another major interview. His 1996 60 Minutes appearance, where he sat nervously and explained what he had done and why he turned informant, remains one of the most chilling documents of organized crime testimony ever recorded. He showed no pride, just exhaustion.
Billy Beattie served his sentence and was released in the 2000s. He died of natural causes in 2012. Roy DeMeo, the man who killed Mickey Spillane and enabled Jimmy Coonan's rise, was found dead in the trunk of his car in January 1983, shot multiple times. The Gambinos had tired of his recklessness. Paul Castellano, the Gambino boss who partnered with the Westies, was murdered outside Sparks Steak House in December 1985. John Gotti ordered the hit to take over the family. The Westies lost their main protector.
The Westies represent something unique in organized crime history. They were not sophisticated. They did not run elaborate schemes. They did not build criminal empires that lasted generations. They were a neighborhood gang that discovered violence was their comparative advantage. In the economics of organized crime, most groups compete on efficiency: better smuggling routes, cleaner money laundering, more reliable corruption. The Westies competed on terror. They made people so afraid that even the Mafia, an organization built on violence, found them useful.
But that strategy had a shelf life. You cannot build a sustainable organization on fear alone. Someone always gets arrested. Someone always talks. And once the fear evaporates, nothing remains. The Westies lasted roughly 20 years, from the mid-1960s when Mickey Spillane first organized the rackets to 1988 when Jimmy Coonan and his crew went to prison. In that time, they are suspected in at least 60 murders. They moved tens of millions of dollars through construction rackets. They terrified an entire neighborhood into silence. And then gentrification did what law enforcement could not. It erased their world entirely.
Walk through Hell's Kitchen today and you will see no trace of the Westies. The buildings where they grew up are luxury condos. The bars where they planned murders are Starbucks. The streets where bodies were dumped are lined with yoga studios and artisanal bakeries. History has been paved over, renovated, and rebranded.
But for those who were there, who survived that era, the memories remain. The fear, the uncertainty, the knowledge that crossing the wrong person meant you might disappear, cut into pieces, scattered across three states. The understanding that violence was not a tool of last resort. It was the point.
That is the real legacy of the Westies. Not the murders, though there were many. Not the money, though they made millions. But the demonstration that in America's largest city, in the shadow of the United Nations and Broadway, a small gang of working-class Irish kids could turn a neighborhood into a slaughterhouse for 20 years in plain sight.
Mickey Featherstone testified that the Westies motto was simple: the more bodies you have, the more monstrous you look. And the more monstrous you look, the more people fear you. And the more people fear you, the more money you make. That calculus worked until it did not, until someone decided that life in witness protection was better than life in the organization, until the FBI offered immunity in exchange for testimony, until a Vietnam veteran with PTSD and dozens of murders on his conscience looked at 25 years to life for a murder he did not commit and said enough.
The Westies made the Italian Mafia look civilized. They dismembered victims in bathtubs like it was routine maintenance. They scattered bodies across the Tri-State area like trash. They turned Hell's Kitchen into exactly what its name suggested. And then they were gone, sentenced, scattered, disappeared, replaced by luxury apartments and tourists who will never know what happened on these streets.