On December 16, 1985, at 5:47 p.m., Paul Castellano stepped out of his black Lincoln outside Sparks Steak House at 210 East 46th Street in Manhattan and never made it to the curb. Six bullets from two shooters in white trench coats and black Russian fur hats ended the boss of the Gambino crime family on the wet asphalt. His underboss, Tommy Bilotti, dropped beside him. The whole hit took eight seconds.
By 6:00 p.m., John Gotti was the most powerful man in American organized crime. By 6:05, he had inherited a problem nobody had warned him about.
The Westies were an Irish-American crew from Hell's Kitchen, so unstable and so addicted to violence that even the Italians who used them were afraid to be in the same room with them. They cut up bodies in bathtubs. They killed for $50. They ate breakfast next to severed hands wrapped in newspaper. Under a deal cut years earlier with Castellano, 60 percent of every score they made flowed straight into the Gambino crime family.
Gotti now owned that pipeline. He also owned the men attached to it.
This is the story of how the Dapper Don, the most photographed mobster in American history, ran headfirst into a crew of Irish killers he could not control. It is the story of the Gambino-Westies pact, the 60/40 split that fed Manhattan's underworld for a decade, and the murder of a man named Vincent Leone, a hit so reckless it proved that even John Gotti could not put a leash on Hell's Kitchen.
Gotti did not just inherit the Westies. He inherited a war he did not start, a crew he did not trust, and a leader named Jimmy Coonan who answered to no one but the ghosts in his own head.
To understand what Gotti walked into, you have to go back.
Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, west of 8th Avenue between 34th and 59th Streets, was in the 1960s and '70s a dying neighborhood of Irish dock workers, longshoremen, and tenement families. The Italians had Brooklyn. The Jews had the Garment District. But Hell's Kitchen belonged to the Irish, and the Irish belonged to a man named Mickey Spillane.
Tall, soft-spoken, generous with turkeys at Christmas, Spillane was a throwback. He kidnapped rich men for ransom. He robbed cargo at the Hudson Piers. He didn't deal drugs, and he didn't kill children. By the standards of his trade, he was almost gentle.
Then came Jimmy Coonan, born in 1947, a baby-faced kid with sandy hair and dead blue eyes. When Coonan was a teenager, Spillane's men had grabbed his father, beaten him, and held him over a debt. Coonan never forgot. He swore that one day he would kill Mickey Spillane and take Hell's Kitchen for himself. He spent the next 15 years doing exactly that.
Coonan partnered with a man named Mickey Featherstone, a Vietnam veteran who was jittery, paranoid, and prone to blackouts. Together, between 1975 and 1978, they systematically dismantled Spillane's organization. They killed his lieutenants one by one. Tom Devaney, Tom Kapatos, and Eddie Comiskey were gunned down in a bar on 10th Avenue, one with a .38 in his back.
Mickey Spillane fled to Woodside, Queens, thinking distance would save him. On May 13, 1977, he stepped out of his apartment building and was hit with four bullets. He died on the sidewalk. The hit was contracted out to a Gambino soldier named Roy DeMeo. Coonan didn't even pull the trigger on his greatest enemy. He used Italian muscle, and that detail matters.
That one favor, that one transaction, that one bullet purchased through the Italians, became the foundation of everything that followed. Coonan understood something the old Irish never had. He could not run Hell's Kitchen alone. The Italians had the courts, the unions, and the connections that turned $10,000 scores into $10 million scores.
So Coonan went to see Paul Castellano. Big Paul, the Pope, the boss of the Gambino crime family, lived in a mansion on Staten Island modeled after the White House. The meeting happened in 1978. The terms were brutal and simple.
The Westies would become a satellite crew under the Gambino umbrella. They would handle the violence the Italians did not want their fingerprints on: murder for hire, loan shark enforcement, and labor union intimidation at the Javits Center construction site. In exchange, the Italians would feed them work. On every score the Westies pulled, 60 percent went to the Gambinos. Forty percent stayed on the West Side.
That 60/40 ratio was unprecedented in mob history. Italian crews kept 85 percent of their own scores. Tribute up the chain was usually 15, maybe 20 percent. Castellano took 60 because he knew Coonan needed protection more than he needed money. He took it because the Westies would kill anyone for any reason at any time, and that kind of asset was worth a discount.
The Westies, in effect, sold themselves into a kind of indentured servitude. They got the Gambino name, the union jobs, and the protection. In return, more than half of every dollar they touched flowed across the river to Staten Island.
For seven years, it worked. Castellano ran the Westies the way he ran everything else, through layers. He never spoke to Coonan directly. The buffer was a Gambino capo named Danny Marino, and above him a soldier named Roy DeMeo, who had his own crew of psychopaths in Brooklyn.
DeMeo and Coonan understood each other. They both ran murder operations that disposed of bodies through dismemberment. DeMeo's crew used a meat hook in the back of the Gemeni Lounge. Coonan's crew used a bathtub in an apartment on 10th Avenue. The two men sometimes shared techniques. They sometimes shared corpses.
Then on December 16, 1985, John Gotti changed the entire structure of the American Mafia. He had Castellano killed because the old man was about to indict half the family on a stolen car ring. He had Bilotti killed because Bilotti would have come for revenge. In one wet evening, Gotti took the throne.
But Gotti was not Castellano. Gotti was Howard Beach. Gotti was Queens. Gotti was a street guy who came up running hijacking crews at Kennedy Airport. He liked his soldiers loud, loyal, and Italian. He did not like the Westies. He did not understand them. And he did not trust an Irish crew that had operated independently for almost a decade and had killed more people than any single Gambino capo.
Within weeks of taking power, Gotti called Coonan to a meeting. The location, by most accounts, was the Ravenite Social Club at 247 Mulberry Street in Little Italy, Gotti's command post. Coonan walked in with Featherstone at his side. Gotti sat at the head of the table in a $2,000 suit. He did not stand. He did not shake hands.
He told Coonan three things. One, the 60/40 split stayed. Castellano's deal was now Gotti's deal. Two, no more freelance murders. Every Westies hit had to be cleared through the Gambino administration first. Three, no more bodies in bathtubs. The dismemberment had to stop. It drew heat. It made the New York Times. It embarrassed the family.
Coonan nodded at all three. He agreed to all three. And the moment he walked out of the Ravenite, he disregarded all three.
You have to understand who Jimmy Coonan was at this point. He was 38 years old, married with two children, living in a modest house in Hazlet, New Jersey. He drove a station wagon and took his kids to Catholic school. He also ran a murder-for-hire operation that had killed somewhere between 30 and 60 people, depending on who you ask. The number is disputed. The bodies are not. They were spread across landfills in New Jersey, the Hudson River, the East River, and at least one industrial freezer in Hell's Kitchen.
Coonan believed something deeply, almost religiously. He believed that as long as there was no body, there was no case, no corpus delicti, no prosecution. So the Westies dismembered everyone. Every single victim. They removed teeth to prevent dental identification. They removed fingertips. They cut bodies into manageable pieces, packed them into garbage bags, and drove them to disposal sites at 3:00 in the morning.
To Coonan, this was not psychopathy. It was professional caution. It was due diligence. To Gotti, it was insane.
Gotti's crew killed people, too. Everybody killed people. But Gotti's crew left bodies on streets, in trunks, on restaurant floors. The point of a mob hit was the message. Make it public. Make it loud. Make it scary. Coonan's invisible disposal method defeated the entire purpose. What good was a hit nobody could prove had happened?
The first real test of Gotti's authority came in 1986. A small-time hustler named Vincent Leone, also known as Jimmy Sinatra because he sang in lounge clubs and did a passable Old Blue Eyes impression, had borrowed money from a Gambino loan shark. He owed $40,000. He stopped paying. He moved between apartments to avoid collection. The Gambinos eventually wrote off the debt as uncollectible.
Leone, however, had also borrowed from the Westies. He owed Coonan personally somewhere around $20,000. And he had, according to Coonan, been mouthing off in bars about how the Irish were soft and could be ducked. That was the reason given. The real reason, according to Mickey Featherstone's later testimony to federal prosecutors, was simpler. Coonan wanted to send a signal to his own crew. He wanted to remind them that nothing had changed under Gotti. That he was still in charge. That the new Italian boss did not run Hell's Kitchen.
On a night in the spring of 1986, Vincent Leone was lured to an apartment on 10th Avenue under the pretext of working out a payment plan. Two Westies enforcers were waiting. The first shot hit him in the back of the head. Leone went down on the kitchen linoleum. The second man stepped over the body and put two more rounds into the skull to make sure.
Then they did what the Westies always did. They dragged the body into the bathtub. They drained it. They dismembered it. They removed the teeth. They packed the pieces into plastic bags and drove them in shifts across the George Washington Bridge. Vincent Leone was never seen again.
His mother filed a missing person's report. The NYPD opened a file. The case went nowhere because there was no body, no witness, and no apparent motive that detectives could connect.
But here is the part that mattered. Coonan had not cleared the hit with Gotti. He had not even informed Danny Marino, his Gambino liaison. He had simply done it on his own authority, against direct orders, less than six months after Gotti had taken the throne and looked him in the eye and told him those days were over.
When Gotti found out, he was furious. The Ravenite was put on lockdown. Marino was summoned. Coonan was summoned. The story Mickey Featherstone later told the FBI is that Gotti screamed at Coonan for 30 minutes straight, cursed him, threatened him, and told him that the next unauthorized hit would be Coonan's own.
Coonan listened. Coonan apologized. Coonan paid an additional $30,000 tribute to the Gambino family as a gesture of contrition. And then Coonan walked back to Hell's Kitchen and continued doing exactly what he had always done.
Because here was the truth Gotti could not face. He needed the Westies more than the Westies needed him. The Javits Center construction project was pumping millions into Gambino coffers through union kickbacks, and the muscle on those job sites was Westies muscle. The concrete deals on the West Side. The cargo theft at the Hudson Piers. The bookmaking operations along 9th and 10th Avenues. All of it ran through Hell's Kitchen. All of it depended on Coonan's crew showing up and breaking heads when contracts needed enforcing.
If Gotti moved against Coonan, the entire West Side cash flow would collapse overnight. Worse, the Westies were the only crew in New York crazy enough to go to war with the Gambinos themselves. They had nothing to lose. They had no aging dons to protect, no mansions on Staten Island, no soldiers in suburban houses. They had Hell's Kitchen tenements and a willingness to die in them.
Gotti understood the math. He swallowed the Leone insult. He kept the 60/40 deal. And for the next two years, he tolerated a relationship that everyone around him could see was costing him control of his own organization.
Things began to unravel in 1987. The crack was internal. Mickey Featherstone, the trigger man, the partner, the brother-in-arms, was set up by his own crew on a murder he did not commit. The Westies had killed a man named Michael Holly in 1985, and Coonan had quietly let the blame fall on Featherstone to clean up an old debt.
Featherstone was convicted in May of 1986 and sentenced to 25 years to life. Sitting in a federal cell, Featherstone did the math. His wife visited him. She told him the rumor on the street that Coonan had framed him to take him off the board permanently. Featherstone, the Vietnam veteran, the man who had killed for Coonan a dozen times, made a decision that ended the Westies forever. He called the FBI. He flipped.
For 13 months, Featherstone and his wife wore wires. They captured conversations with Coonan, with Westies enforcers, with Gambino soldiers. They documented the 60/40 split in detail. They documented the Leone hit. They documented at least seven other murders, the loan sharking, the union extortion, and the labor racketeering at the Javits Center.
On March 10, 1988, federal agents arrested 10 members of the Westies in pre-dawn raids across Manhattan, Queens, and New Jersey. Jimmy Coonan was taken from his Hazlet home in handcuffs while his wife and children watched. The indictment ran 14 counts under the RICO statute: murder, conspiracy, extortion, loan sharking, narcotics. Prosecutors connected the Westies directly to the Gambino family through Coonan's testimony, through wiretaps, and through Featherstone's recordings.
The trial lasted four months. The jury deliberated for six days. On October 14, 1988, Jimmy Coonan was convicted on all counts. He was sentenced to 75 years in federal prison. He has never been released. As of his most recent parole denial, he was still serving his time in a medium-security facility, a forgotten man and a relic of an era when Hell's Kitchen still belonged to the Irish.
Gotti watched it all from the Ravenite. He was not indicted in the Westies case. The Featherstone tapes did not catch him directly. Marino, his middleman, took a separate fall. But the damage was done. The 60/40 pipeline collapsed. The West Side cash flow dried up. The Javits Center muscle was dispersed. And within three years, Gotti himself would be sitting in a federal courtroom listening to his own underboss, Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, do to him exactly what Featherstone had done to Coonan.
The Westies story reveals that the Mafia was never the monolith the movies sold. It was a confederation of crews, alliances, and uneasy partnerships held together by money and fear. When Castellano cut the 60/40 deal, he turned a tribe of Irish killers into a Gambino weapon. When Gotti inherited that deal, he inherited a weapon he could not aim.
The Dapper Don, with his expensive suits and his television smile, sat at the top of the most powerful crime family in America and could not get a Hell's Kitchen Irishman to stop dumping bodies in the Hudson. That is the real lesson. Power in the underworld was always conditional. You held it as long as the men below you agreed to let you hold it. The minute they decided otherwise, all the suits and all the social clubs and all the press coverage in the world could not save you.
Leone has never been found. His remains are somewhere in a New Jersey landfill, or at the bottom of the Hudson, or scattered across three states. His mother died in 1994, still waiting for word on her son. The NYPD case file remains open. Technically, in the eyes of the law, Leone is still missing.
But everyone who needs to know knows. He was killed in a tenement kitchen on 10th Avenue. He was killed because Jimmy Coonan wanted to send a message. And he was killed because John Gotti, the most feared boss in America, could not stop it.
Hell's Kitchen never belonged to the Italians. It never belonged to Gotti. It belonged to itself. And by the time the Dapper Don figured that out, Mickey Featherstone was already wearing a wire, and the entire arrangement was about to disappear into a federal courtroom forever.