On May 13th, 1977, at 9:42 p. m. , five bullets ripped through Mickey Spillane’s chest and neck as he walked home along 43rd Avenue in Woodside, Queens. The 43-year-old, known as the gentleman gangster of Hell’s Kitchen, collapsed on the sidewalk two hundred feet from his apartment, blood pooling beneath the streetlight.

His wife heard the shots from inside and reached him moments later, but he was already gone. The entire hit took eighteen seconds. Spillane had controlled Hell’s Kitchen for fifteen years through old-school respect and carefully managed violence. He protected his neighborhood, kept order, and made sure civilians never got caught in the crossfire.

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, and the instrument he built was the Westies, an Irish gang so savage that they horrified the very mobsters who partnered with them. The story begins with a small, nervous boy named Francis Thomas Featherstone, born September 2nd, 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 worked for the city; his mother kept house. It was a hard neighborhood, but not hopeless. Kids played stickball in the streets, families knew each other, and you looked out for your own.

But Mickey wasn’t like the other kids. Small for his age, pale, with nervous energy that never quit, he got into fights constantly. Teachers noticed something off about him, a quickness to rage, a comfort with violence that seemed beyond his years. By fourteen he was running with local street toughs.

By sixteen he had dropped out of school entirely. Then came Vietnam. In 1966, Featherstone lied about his age and joined the army at seventeen. They sent him to the 101st Airborne Division, and later, according to some accounts, he served with the Green Berets.

What happened there shaped everything that followed. He saw combat. He killed men. He came home different, colder, more willing to do what needed doing without hesitation.

When Mickey returned to Hell’s Kitchen in 1967, the neighborhood was changing. The old Irish families were moving out. Puerto Ricans and blacks were moving in. Real estate developers were circling, waiting for the right moment to remake the waterfront.

And the criminal economy was shifting from gambling and loan sharking to something more lucrative: construction, labor unions, multi-million-dollar projects that needed muscle. Mickey drifted. He worked odd jobs. He drank.

He got into bar fights that ended with broken bones and emergency room visits. People noticed his eyes during these fights, blank, like he wasn’t even there, like he was back in the jungle doing what he’d been trained to do. In 1970, Mickey met Jimmy Coonan, and everything accelerated. James Michael Coonan was born December 21st, 1946, in Hell’s Kitchen, same neighborhood, different wiring.

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 his grin. His father, an accountant, died young. His mother remarried.

Jimmy grew up watching men like Mickey Spillane run the neighborhood with quiet authority. But Jimmy didn’t want to be quiet. He wanted to rule. By his early twenties, Coonan was already making noise, running with a crew that did burglaries, hijackings, small-time scores.

But he had bigger ambitions. He studied how Spillane operated. He understood that Hell’s Kitchen sat on a gold mine: the West Side waterfront, the Jacob Javits Convention Center going up, 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 twenty, 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, pleaded down, served light time, and got out in 1971. But he hadn’t forgotten. He’d learned patience, and he’d learned that you couldn’t beat Mickey Spillane 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 didn’t flinch. Billy Beattie, a hulking brute who enjoyed the work.

Kevin Kelly, younger and ambitious. Eddie Comiskey. Jackie Coonan, Jimmy’s own brother. They weren’t sophisticated criminals; they were working-class Irish kids who’d discovered 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, wasn’t just along for the ride. When Jimmy got sent upstate on various charges, Edna managed a loan sharking operation. She collected debts. She delivered messages.

Short, stout, formidable, Edna didn’t 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, lending five thousand here, ten thousand there, always with juice that compounded weekly.

Miss a payment, they broke your hand. Miss three payments, you disappeared. They extorted local businesses. Bars paid five hundred 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, the legitimacy with the Italian families. Jimmy needed him gone. So Jimmy made a deal with the devil: Roy DeMeo. DeMeo was a Gambino family soldier operating out of Brooklyn, running a crew that specialized in murder, not individual hits but murder as an assembly line.

The DeMeo crew would eventually kill over one hundred people using what became known as the Gemini method: the victim gets lured to the Gemini Lounge, shot in the head as soon as they walk in, the body immediately 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.

In return, Jimmy would give the Gambinos access to Hell’s Kitchen rackets. They’d work together, split the profits. Everyone gets rich. Roy agreed.

On May 13th, 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 actually deliver. And Jimmy owed Roy DeMeo a favor that would come due in blood. The first test came quickly.

Charles Ruby Stein, fifty, was a loan shark who financed operations throughout the city. He had money, connections, and Jimmy Coonan owed him over fifty thousand dollars from various loans financing his takeover. Ruby wanted his money. He started making threats, telling people Jimmy was an unreliable junkie who couldn’t be trusted.

This was May 1977, just days after Spillane’s murder. On May 13th, the same day Spillane died, Ruby Stein was drinking at the Market Diner, a twenty-four-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, business talk. He suggested they walk to the 596 Club, have a drink, 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 didn’t just die. You ceased to exist. Your family wouldn’t 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, and 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’d done. He later testified he was horrified, but he helped clean up. That’s 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 shockwaves 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. And that was exactly what Jimmy wanted: reputation through terror.

The Gambino family took notice. Paul Castellano, who’d 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, the occasional murder that kept union officials in line. Jimmy Coonan could have that job.

In return, the Westies got ten 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 project, 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, five thousand here, ten thousand there. By 1980, the Westies were pulling in an estimated one hundred thousand dollars per month just from construction rackets. They also ran sophisticated loan-sharking operations, fronting money to Gambino family members at one percent weekly interest. The Gambinos would then loan that money to their own customers at three to five percent weekly.

Everyone made money. If someone didn’t pay, the Westies handled collection. They were efficient, but the violence continued, because that’s 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, and twenty thousand 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 20th, 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 wasn’t the boss; that was always Jimmy. But Mickey was the one who showed up at your business, delivered the threats, and, 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, 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’s a psychological term for what Mickey experienced: compartmentalization.

He could separate the violence from the domestic life, 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, Billy Beattie. They knew about Ruby Stein. They suspected the Westies in at least thirty unsolved murders, but they couldn’t 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’d lure them to the 596 Club or an apartment they controlled. Quick shot to the head, body into the bathtub.

Dismemberment took about two hours if you knew what you were doing. They’d learned to drain the blood first, less mess. They’d learned which joints were easier to sever. They’d 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’d killed over one hundred people himself, reportedly told associates the Westies made him uncomfortable. That’s how extreme they were.

But the money kept flowing, and Castellano wanted that construction racket protected. So the partnership continued. Here’s where it gets interesting. 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 twenties. He’d 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. The older members like Jimmy and Mickey understood restraint.

You killed when necessary. You didn’t advertise. But the younger guys treated it like a competition. Who’d killed more?

Who’d been more brutal? Who’d 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’d 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 didn’t 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 25th, 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 didn’t 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, desperate. The problem: Mickey Featherstone wasn’t there. He was home with his wife. But within twenty-four hours, the NYPD arrested Mickey and charged him with Michael Holly’s murder.

Mickey knew immediately what had happened. He’d 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 didn’t commit than lose him in a neighborhood where he might cooperate. Mickey’s trial began in early 1986.

Prosecutors had circumstantial evidence: witnesses who placed Mickey in the neighborhood, testimony from Westies members who claimed Mickey bragged about the hit. But they didn’t have physical evidence, because Mickey hadn’t done it. In March 1986, Mickey Featherstone was convicted of Michael Holly’s murder. He faced twenty-five years to life.

He was thirty-seven years old. He’d already served time for other crimes. This sentence would end his life as he knew it. But Mickey wasn’t going quietly.

While awaiting sentencing, he and his wife started making calls to the FBI and 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 thirty 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 6th, 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 didn’t 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: life in prison. The trial began 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’d 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, witnesses. He explained how the Gambino partnership worked, how much money flowed, who gave orders, who carried them out. Defense attorneys tried to discredit him.

They pointed out his mental health hospitalizations, his history of violence, his previous perjury convictions. But Mickey had dates, locations, corroborating details that only someone who was there would know. On February 25th, 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 27th, 1988.

Jimmy Coonan: sixty years in federal prison. Kevin Kelly: fifty years. Billy Beattie: forty years. Multiple other members received sentences ranging from fifteen to thirty 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, identified as a Westies victim.

Leg bones 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, bought tenements for cheap, converted them to luxury condos, 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 one hundred thousand 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’s seventy-eight years old and has been denied parole multiple times.

His most recent appeal, filed in 2023, argued that his sixty-year sentence was excessive and that he’d become a model prisoner. The appeal was denied in July 2025. He will likely die in prison. Kevin Kelly, in his sixties, is also still incarcerated.

He’s 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’s eighty years old and 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’s never given another major interview.

His 1996 60 Minutes appearance, where he sat nervously and explained what he’d 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 weren’t sophisticated. They didn’t run elaborate schemes.

They didn’t 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 can’t 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 twenty 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’re suspected in at least sixty 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 couldn’t. It erased their world entirely.

Walk through Hell’s Kitchen today, and you’ll 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, 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 wasn’t a tool of last resort. It was the point. That’s 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 twenty 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 didn’t, 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 twenty-five years to life for a murder he didn’t commit and said enough.