On November 15, 1986, in a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan, Mickey Featherstone raised his right hand, swore to tell the truth, and sat down across from the man who had tried to bury him. Jimmy Coonan didn’t blink. He just stared at his closest friend, the man who stood beside him at his wedding, who shared blood oaths with him in the back of Irish bars on Tenth Avenue.
Quietly, like a priest, Featherstone opened his mouth and began reciting the names of the dead. Seven. Then eight. Then ten. Every body Coonan had thrown into the Hudson River. Every limb they had severed in a bathtub on Ninth Avenue. Every envelope of cash Coonan had paid as tribute to Paul Castellano. Featherstone revealed everything. The entire empire, brick by bloodstained brick.
To understand what happened, you have to understand who these two men were. Jimmy Coonan wasn’t just another gangster. He was the Irish kid from Hell’s Kitchen who did what no one thought possible. He turned a neighborhood of dockworkers, bartenders, and small-time thieves into a criminal enterprise that earned the respect of the Gambino family. He made the Italians come to him.
Mickey Featherstone was a Vietnam veteran, a decorated soldier with a metal plate in his head and demons in his eyes. He was the most feared killer on the West Side of Manhattan. Together, they ran the Westies. For nearly 15 years, they were untouchable.
This is the story of how paranoia, jealousy, and a framed murder brought down the most violent Irish-American gang in American history. This is how the code of silence died in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen.
But here’s what most people don’t know. Featherstone didn’t flip because he got caught. He flipped because his closest friend tried to send him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. The moment Jimmy Coonan made that decision, he signed the death warrant for everything he had ever built.
Let’s go back in time. To understand how it all collapsed, you need to understand how powerful the bond between these two men was.
Jimmy Coonan was born on December 21, 1946, into an Irish middle-class family. His father, John, was an accountant. Yes, an accountant. The father of the most sadistic Irish gangster in New York history balanced ledgers for a living. Jimmy grew up on West 43rd Street. He was a quiet kid, skinny, always watching.
When Jimmy was 12 years old, a neighborhood thug named Mickey Spillane kidnapped him, beat him, and held him for ransom. Jimmy Coonan spent every waking moment from that day planning how to kill Mickey Spillane. That was Coonan. A grudge walking on two legs.
Mickey Featherstone was different. Born September 2, 1948, two years younger than Coonan, he grew up in harsher, poorer, more violent conditions. His father died when he was a child. His mother struggled. Featherstone joined the army at 17. He went to Vietnam and came back with a Bronze Star, a head injury, and PTSD so severe that VA doctors gave him enough medication to sedate a horse.
He was 5’7” and barely 140 pounds. But when his eyes went flat and his voice dropped, tough men changed their path. Mickey Featherstone was ready to kill you. Not for money. Not for respect. He would kill you because he was already somewhere else in his mind, and you had just walked into the wrong memory.
The two met in the early 1970s. Hell’s Kitchen was a war zone. Irish gangs fought other Irish gangs over loan sharking, robberies, and the lucrative construction kickbacks from the Javits Center that hadn’t even started yet. Coonan recruited Featherstone. He saw a weapon he could aim. Featherstone saw something in Coonan too. A brother. A leader. Someone who gave meaning to the chaos in his head.
They became inseparable and started killing. In 1975, they killed a man named Paddy Dugan. Then they moved the body to an apartment on Tenth Avenue. Coonan’s dark side emerged. He pulled out a bone saw and started cutting. Featherstone later testified that Coonan told him, “The cops can’t prove a murder without a body.”
Coonan didn’t just kill people. He erased them. He dismembered them in bathtubs. He put the pieces in gym bags. He drove to the piers and dumped them in the Hudson River. He turned Hell’s Kitchen into a graveyard no one could find.
By 1977, Jimmy Coonan had his revenge. Mickey Spillane, the man who had kidnapped him 15 years earlier, was shot dead outside his apartment in Woodside, Queens. The hit was arranged through the Gambino family, specifically through a sadistic butcher named Roy DeMeo. Coonan made a deal. The Italians would kill Spillane. In return, Coonan would pay tribute to Paul Castellano. He would work for the Gambino family. The Westies would become the Gambinos’ enforcement arm on the West Side.
That deal made Jimmy Coonan a legend. And that deal eventually destroyed him, because Mickey Featherstone hated it. He hated the Italians. He hated taking orders. He hated watching the money his gang earned flow into Howard Beach. Featherstone was a street kid from Hell’s Kitchen. He believed the neighborhood was sacred. Coonan had just sold it.
But for a while, the money was too good to argue with.
Let me explain how the Westies actually made their money. These weren’t just a bunch of drunks waving pool cues. It was a sophisticated operation.
The Javits Convention Center was being built on the West Side starting in 1979. Billions of dollars in contracts. Every union at that site was either controlled by organized crime or paying tribute to it. The Westies got their cut through a man named John Cody, head of Teamsters Local 282. Cody controlled the concrete trucks. No concrete, no construction.
The Westies provided the muscle. They terrorized contractors. They threatened foremen. They made sure every no-show job at the site went to a Westie or a relative. Coonan took his cut. Featherstone took his. They paid 15% to the Gambino family. In a good month, the Westies cleared $100,000 from the Javits site alone. Construction workers were terrified because everyone on the West Side knew what happened to anyone who said no to Jimmy Coonan. They ended up in suitcases.
Then there was loan sharking. The Westies lent money at what they called “5-4-6.” Borrow 500, pay back 600 in a week. That’s 20% interest per week. Miss a payment, the interest doubles. Miss two payments, someone shows up at your door with a baseball bat. The Westies had hundreds of customers. Dockworkers, gamblers, cocaine addicts, small shop owners on Ninth Avenue who needed payroll. Loan sharking alone brought in over $200,000 a year in net profit.
Then came the hijackings. The West Side piers were still active in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Containers arrived. Trucks rolled out. The Westies had men inside three different shipping companies. When a truck loaded with televisions, liquor, or cigarettes was about to leave the pier, a phone call was made. The truck was intercepted at a traffic light on Twelfth Avenue. The driver was pulled out. Sometimes bribed. Sometimes beaten. The truck disappeared into a warehouse on West 47th Street. Within six hours, the goods were sold wholesale at 40 cents on the dollar. A single hijacking could net $50,000 in cash. They ran two or three a month.
And underneath it all was pure violence. Contract killings. The Westies became the Gambino family’s preferred Irish hit squad. If John Gotti or Paul Castellano needed someone eliminated and didn’t want Italian fingerprints on it, they called Jimmy Coonan. Coonan charged $25,000 per body. Featherstone and a killer named Jimmy McElroy did the actual work. They got $10,000 each per hit. The rest went to Coonan.
For seven years, this was the rhythm. Extortion, hijacking, loan sharking, murder, collection, repeat. And no one could touch them. The NYPD tried. The FBI tried. The District Attorney’s office tried. Every case collapsed. Why? Because the Westies had their own code. No one talked. No one cooperated. Every potential witness ended up at the bottom of the Hudson River before a grand jury could subpoena them.
But here’s the twist. While the Westies were invincible on the outside, something was rotting on the inside. Jimmy Coonan was changing. Power was doing something to him. Money was doing something to him. And his relationship with Mickey Featherstone, the brother he swore loyalty to, was cracking.
By 1984, Coonan was paranoid. Deep, pathological paranoia. He trusted almost no one. He suspected everyone. The more successful the Westies became, the worse it got. He carried a gun inside his own home. He had three different apartments in Manhattan and moved between them randomly. He interrogated his own crew about conversations they’d had in bars weeks earlier. He was convinced someone was going to flip. Someone was going to the FBI.
And the person he suspected most, the one he watched most closely, was his best friend, Mickey Featherstone.
Why Featherstone? Two reasons. First, Featherstone’s mental state was deteriorating. His PTSD from Vietnam was getting worse. He was drinking heavily. He was on lithium. He had violent mood swings in public, screaming at strangers in restaurants, threatening waiters over trivial things. Coonan was afraid Featherstone would lose it one day, get arrested, and start talking to save himself.
Second, and more importantly, Featherstone was openly critical of Coonan’s alliance with the Italians. He thought it made them weak. He thought Coonan was taking orders like a servant. He wasn’t shy about saying it to other gang members in bars. Every time he did, word got back to Coonan. And every time word got back, the paranoia grew.
Then, in 1985, something happened that changed everything. On April 25, 1985, Michael Holly, a supervisor at West Side Construction, was shot dead. Holly was gunned down on 35th Street in Manhattan. Four shots. He was dead before he hit the sidewalk. The time of death was around 10:30 in the morning.
The Holly murder was a revenge hit, stemming from a personal dispute between Holly and a Westie named Billy Bokun. Bokun blamed Holly for the death of his brother years earlier. The murder had nothing to do with Featherstone. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere near 35th Street that morning. He had a solid alibi.
But Coonan did something that can only be explained by paranoia and cold calculation. He decided to use the Holly murder to get rid of Featherstone.
Here’s how the frame-up worked. Bokun was the actual shooter. But Bokun and Featherstone looked somewhat similar. Both white. Both roughly the same height. Both had mustaches. On the day of the murder, Bokun wore a disguise. A wig, sunglasses, and a fake mustache to resemble Featherstone’s. Eyewitnesses on the street described the shooter as a man resembling Mickey Featherstone. Police pulled Featherstone’s photo. They made a photo array. Witnesses picked him out. Just like that, Featherstone was charged with murder.
Featherstone’s trial began in March 1986. He pleaded not guilty. He had alibis. He had witnesses. But the eyewitness testimony was strong, and the prosecution pushed hard. In March 1986, despite his innocence of this specific crime, Mickey Featherstone was convicted. He was sentenced to 25 years to life.
And that’s when Featherstone figured it out. He was sitting in a cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. He was facing nearly 25 years in prison. He started putting the pieces together. The disguise. The similar build. The witnesses who picked him out of the lineup so easily. The fact that Bokun was still walking around Tenth Avenue. He understood. Jimmy Coonan had set him up. His best friend had framed him for murder.
You have to understand what this meant to Featherstone. The Westies weren’t just a gang to him. They were his family. Coonan wasn’t just his boss. Coonan was the man he had trusted with his life for over 10 years. Featherstone had killed for Coonan. Featherstone had taken risks for Coonan. And Coonan repaid him by sending him to prison for the rest of his life.
The decision wasn’t easy. The code of Hell’s Kitchen said, “Die before you talk.” Featherstone’s own father-in-law was a union man who lived by that rule. Featherstone himself had preached it for years. But something had broken. Something Coonan broke the moment he chose self-preservation over brotherhood.
So Featherstone made a call to his wife, CeCe. CeCe Featherstone was a strong woman. West Side Irish, fierce and loyal. She believed her husband was innocent because he was innocent. She started making phone calls. She started talking to lawyers. She started talking to investigators at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. She got in touch with a federal organized crime task force that had been trying to bring down the Westies for years.
The task force had a name they’d been hearing for months. Rudy Giuliani, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. And Giuliani had a weapon they’d never used against the Irish before. RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970.
For years, RICO had gone mostly unused. Then Giuliani, starting around 1983, began using it like a hammer. He used it against the Colombo family. He used it against the Bonanno family. Most famously, he used it in the Mafia Commission trial that ended in November 1986, convicting the heads of four of the five families in a single indictment.
Giuliani had figured out something no one else had. RICO didn’t require you to prove a single specific crime. It required you to prove the existence of a criminal enterprise and that the defendants participated in it. You could tie 20 years of crimes into one case. You could lock up an entire organization in one trial. Now Giuliani was turning his attention to the Westies.
In the summer of 1986, federal investigators met with Mickey and CeCe Featherstone. The conversations were cautious, quiet, and legally complex. Featherstone had one request. He wanted his Holly conviction overturned. He wanted his name cleared of a murder he didn’t commit. In return, he would do something no West Side Irish gangster had ever done. He would testify against the Westies. All of them. Including Jimmy Coonan.
The feds agreed. The deal was made. In the fall of 1986, the federal government filed a sweeping RICO indictment against 10 members of the Westies. Fourteen murders, loan sharking, extortion, hijacking, contract killing. Everything the Westies had done for a decade was in the indictment. And the star witness was the man Jimmy Coonan had called his brother.
The trial began in September 1987 in federal court in Manhattan. The prosecutors were Mary Lee Warren and David Brodsky, working under Giuliani. The courtroom was packed. Reporters, FBI agents, family members of victims. At the defense table sat Jimmy Coonan, his cousin Kevin Kelly, his killer Jimmy McElroy, Billy Bokun, and the rest of the Westies leadership.
They watched the door open. They watched a federal marshal walk in. Behind him came Mickey Featherstone. Featherstone took the witness stand on November 10, 1987. He was calm, composed, his voice flat. He looked Jimmy Coonan in the eye and began to talk.
He talked for days. He told them about the dismemberment of Paddy Dugan in 1975. He described the sound of the bone saw. He told them about the murder of a gambler named Ricky Tashio in a bar on Tenth Avenue. He told them about body parts thrown into the Hudson River. He named the victims. He named the killers. He named the dates. He named the bars where deals were made, the apartments where bodies were cut up, the piers where bags were dumped into the water.
Then he did something that sent shockwaves through New York’s organized crime world. He directly linked the Westies to the Gambino family. He testified that Jimmy Coonan and Jimmy McElroy volunteered to assassinate a union official for John Gotti at Frank DeMeo’s funeral. He revealed the kickback structure. He explained how Paul Castellano had blessed the Spillane hit. He gave federal investigators a road map into the heart of the Five Families.
The defense tried everything. They attacked Featherstone’s credibility. They pointed to his mental illness, his PTSD from Vietnam, his lithium prescriptions, his violent history. They called him a killer trying to save himself. All of that was true. But the prosecution had something the defense couldn’t touch. Corroborating evidence.
Once Featherstone started talking, the FBI went back and found the evidence. Surveillance photos. Wiretaps they’d collected years earlier but couldn’t use without context. Phone records. Business records. Cooperating witnesses who had been too scared to talk before but felt safe now that Featherstone had broken the silence. The government’s case didn’t rest on Featherstone’s word alone. It rested on Featherstone’s word backed by 15 years of accumulated evidence that suddenly made sense.
The trial lasted three months. The jury deliberated for eight days. On March 6, 1988, the verdicts came down. Jimmy Coonan, guilty of racketeering, guilty of multiple murders, guilty of loan sharking, guilty of extortion. Sentenced to 75 years in federal prison. Kevin Kelly, guilty. 60 years. Jimmy McElroy, guilty. 60 years. Billy Bokun, guilty. 50 years. Every single defendant was convicted. The Westies were destroyed as an organization, as a criminal entity, as a physical presence in Hell’s Kitchen, in a single trial.
Giuliani called it one of the most important organized crime prosecutions in American history. He was right. The Westies were considered the last gang in New York City the federal government couldn’t touch. They had no Mafia structure, no induction ceremonies, no recorded conversations. They operated on pure ethnic loyalty in a 20-block neighborhood where everyone knew each other and no one talked. RICO and a broken friendship brought it all down.
Let me explain what happened to the key figures after that verdict, because the aftermath completes the story.
Jimmy Coonan went to federal prison to serve his 75-year sentence. He was initially sent to a high-security facility. He filed appeals for years. Every appeal was denied. He remains in federal custody according to the latest public records. He will likely die in prison. He never expressed public remorse for any of the murders. He never admitted to framing Mickey Featherstone for the Holly murder. The man who built the Irish gang in Hell’s Kitchen took his secrets with him behind the bars of a federal cell.
Mickey Featherstone’s conviction in the Holly murder was eventually overturned. Federal investigators officially confirmed that Featherstone was not the shooter. Billy Bokun was the actual killer. The New York State conviction was dropped. Featherstone was placed in the federal Witness Protection Program. He, CeCe, and their children were relocated. He was given a new name, a new identity, a new life somewhere far from the West Side of Manhattan. His story was later told in a landmark book by journalist T.J. English called “The Westies,” published in 1990, which became the definitive account of the gang’s rise and fall.
Billy Bokun, the actual shooter of Michael Holly, was convicted in the RICO trial on racketeering charges that included the Holly murder. He spent decades in federal prison.
Rudy Giuliani used the Westies case as another step in his career. He had already made his name with the Commission trial. The Westies added to his resume. In 1989, he ran for mayor of New York City and lost narrowly. In 1993, he ran again and won. He served as mayor from 1994 to 2001. Over the next 30 years, his name became synonymous with RICO prosecutions, organized crime takedowns, and eventually, in a twist none of the Westies could have predicted, a RICO indictment of his own.
In 2023, Giuliani himself was charged with racketeering in Georgia related to alleged election interference. The man who pioneered RICO for modern prosecution was, decades later, charged under that same law. History has a sense of humor that organized crime never appreciates.
The Westies were finished. Some lower-level members tried to keep things going through the 1990s. They failed. Hell’s Kitchen itself began to change. The real estate boom of the 1990s and 2000s transformed the neighborhood. Old tenements were torn down. Luxury high-rises went up. The bars where Coonan and Featherstone planned murders became yoga studios and wine shops. Ninth Avenue, once called “Devil’s Kitchen,” became a row of restaurants for downtown office workers. The neighborhood that produced the most violent Irish-American gang in American history erased all physical trace of them within 20 years.
So what does the Westies story actually tell us? Three things.
First, loyalty in organized crime is an illusion. It always has been. Every gangster sings about it. Every gangster violates it. The code of silence exists until someone faces life in prison, and then it evaporates. Jimmy Coonan didn’t think he was violating the code when he framed Featherstone. In his mind, he was protecting the organization. But the moment he put his own interests above the brotherhood, he created the informant he had always feared. Paranoia is prophetic. If you spend years afraid your best friend will betray you, you will eventually do something that forces him to.
Second, RICO changed organized crime in America forever. Before RICO, law enforcement had to prove individual crimes. One murder. One robbery. One extortion. A crime boss could insulate himself with layers of soldiers and never be directly linked to a crime. RICO destroyed that model. It allowed prosecutors to treat the entire criminal enterprise as the crime. Once Giuliani proved its effectiveness against the Commission, every organized crime group in America was vulnerable. The Westies were the test case for ethnic gangs outside the Italian Mafia. They proved RICO could take down any criminal organization, regardless of structure, tradition, or how tightly a neighborhood kept its secrets.
Third, and perhaps most uncomfortable, the romance of the American gangster was always a lie. Jimmy Coonan wasn’t the Robin Hood of the West Side. He was a man who cut up bodies in a bathtub on Tenth Avenue. Mickey Featherstone wasn’t an honorable street soldier. He was a mentally disturbed killer who turned on his gang to save his own life once he was threatened. The Westies didn’t protect the neighborhood. They bled it dry. They charged usurious interest rates to the poorest families on Ninth Avenue. They beat union men who refused to pay tribute. They killed their own friends over grudges no outsider could understand. There was no honor in any of it. There was only money, paranoia, and blood.
Mickey Featherstone is believed to still be alive somewhere in America, living under an assumed name, now a grandfather watching old Westerns on TV. Jimmy Coonan is behind bars, where he has been for over 35 years, and where he will certainly die. The neighborhood they once ruled was renamed Clinton on official city maps, though old-timers still call it Hell’s Kitchen. The piers where the bags were dumped are now Hudson River Park, where tourists jog and children play. The tenement apartment where Paddy Dugan was cut to pieces is long gone. In its place stands a luxury glass-and-steel building where a one-bedroom rents for $4,000 a month. No one living there knows what happened. No one living there has ever heard the names Jimmy Coonan or Mickey Featherstone.
That is the real ending of the Westies story. Not the trial. Not the verdict. Not the 75-year sentence. The real ending is oblivion. The neighborhood outgrew them. The city outgrew them. The only people who remember are a handful of retired detectives, a few aging FBI agents, and the families of victims who never recovered their bodies because those bodies are still somewhere at the bottom of the Hudson River.
Jimmy Coonan spent his life building a criminal empire in a 20-block stretch of Manhattan. He made millions. He killed dozens. He earned the respect of the Gambino family. He outmaneuvered his rivals. He outsmarted the police. For 15 years, he sat on top of the Irish criminal world like a king. But he made one mistake. He stopped trusting his closest friend. And his closest friend, the man he framed for murder, walked into a federal courtroom in November 1987 and destroyed everything Jimmy Coonan had built in six days of testimony.
That is the real lesson of the Westies. Not the violence. Not the money. Not even the RICO statute that brought them down. The lesson is that no criminal empire, no matter how tight, no matter how Irish, no matter how feared, can survive if its leader turns on his closest friend. Betrayal never comes from the outside. It always comes from within.