The rain had stopped over midtown Manhattan, but the asphalt on East 46th Street still gleamed under the sodium vapor lights when Paul Castellano’s black Lincoln Continental pulled to the curb outside Sparks Steak House. The time was 5:47 p. m.
on December 16th, 1985, and the boss of the Gambino crime family had exactly eight seconds left to live. As he stepped out onto the wet pavement, two men in white trench coats and black Russian fur hats emerged from the shadows. Six bullets tore through his chest and head before his body even settled against the car door.
His underboss, Tommy Bilotti, dropped beside him, his freshly shined shoes catching the light as blood pooled beneath the streetlamps. By 6:00 p. m.
, John Gotti had become the most powerful man in American organized crime. By 6:05, he had inherited a problem that no amount of silk suits or courtroom acquittals could ever solve. The Westies, an Irish-American crew from the rotting tenements of Hell’s Kitchen, were about to become his personal nightmare, a force so volatile, so addicted to blood that even the Italians who employed them kept their distance.
They cut bodies apart in bathtubs. They killed for fifty dollars. They sat at breakfast tables with severed hands wrapped in newspaper beside their coffee cups.
And under a secret pact cut years earlier with the slain Castellano, sixty percent of every dollar they stole flowed directly into the Gambino family’s coffers. Gotti now owned that pipeline. He also now owned the psychopaths attached to it.
This is the story of how the Dapper Don, the most photographed mobster in American history, the man who beat three federal cases and earned the nickname Teflon Don, ran headfirst into a crew of Irish killers he could not control, could not intimidate, and ultimately could not contain. This is the story of the Gambino-Westies pact, the unprecedented 60/40 split that fed Manhattan’s underworld for a decade, and the murder of a small-time hustler named Vincent Leone, a hit so reckless, so defiant, so openly contemptuous of Gotti’s authority that it proved once and for all that even the most powerful boss in America could not put a leash on Hell’s Kitchen. Here is what the history books and the Hollywood scripts leave out.
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 that wet December night, you have to go back further than Sparks Steak House.
You have to go back to a dying neighborhood west of Eighth Avenue, between 34th and 59th Streets, where the tenements smelled of cabbage and coal smoke, and the docks along the Hudson River employed thousands of Irish longshoremen who worked brutal shifts for pennies. In the 1960s and 1970s, Hell’s Kitchen was a world unto itself, a place where the Italian families of Brooklyn held no sway and the law was something that happened in other boroughs. The neighborhood 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 to an earlier era of gangsterism. He kidnapped wealthy men for ransom, he robbed cargo from the Hudson Piers, he ran loan sharking operations out of the local bars.
But he did not deal drugs. He did not 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 children. He did not dismember bodies.
By the standards of his violent trade, he was almost gentle, almost honorable, almost beloved. Then came Jimmy Coonan. Born in 1947 into the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, Coonan was a baby-faced kid with sandy hair and dead blue eyes that never seemed to blink.
When Coonan was a teenager, Spillane’s men had grabbed his father over a gambling debt, beaten him savagely, and held him hostage in a basement for days. Coonan never forgot. He never forgave.
He swore that one day he would 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Mickey Spillane and take Hell’s Kitchen for himself. He spent the next fifteen years doing exactly that, with a cold, methodical patience that terrified even his own allies. Coonan partnered with a man named Mickey Featherstone, a Vietnam War veteran who had come home with jittery nerves, paranoid delusions, and a hair-trigger temper that made him dangerous to everyone around him, including himself.
Together, between 1975 and 1978, they systematically dismantled Spillane’s organization piece by piece. They killed his lieutenants one by one, each murder more brazen than the last. Tom Devaney was gunned down outside a social club.
Tom Kapatos was shot in the back of the head in a bar on Tenth Avenue. Eddie Comiskey took four bullets in the chest while walking his dog. Spillane, realizing the walls were closing in, fled to Woodside, Queens, thinking distance would save him.
On May 13th, 1977, he stepped out of his apartment building and four bullets tore through his body. He died on the sidewalk, his blood mixing with the dust of the borough he had tried to escape. The hit was contracted out to a Gambino soldier named Roy DeMeo, a Brooklyn butcher who ran his own crew of killers.
Coonan did not even pull the trigger on his greatest enemy. He used Italian muscle, and that detail matters more than anyone realized at the time. Because 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 Italians had the unions. The Italians had the political connections that could turn a ten thousand dollar score into a ten million dollar enterprise. So, Coonan went to see Paul Castellano.
Big Paul, the Pope, the boss of the Gambino crime family, a man who lived in a white-columned mansion on Staten Island modeled after the White House, complete with a fountain in the driveway. The meeting happened in 1978, and 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.
Labor union intimidation at the Javits Center construction site, where millions of dollars in concrete contracts were being decided. In exchange, the Italians would feed them work, give them protection, and lend them the weight of the Gambino name. And on every score the Westies pulled, sixty percent went to the Gambinos.
Forty percent stayed on the West Side. Sixty forty. Write that number down, because that ratio was unprecedented in the history of American organized crime.
Italian crews kept eighty five percent of their own scores. Tribute up the chain was usually fifteen, maybe twenty percent. Castellano took sixty.
He took it 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. They got the union jobs. They got the protection from prosecution that only the Italians could provide.
And 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 of insulation.
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 perfectly.
They both ran murder operations that disposed of bodies through dismemberment. DeMeo’s crew used a meat hook in the back room of the Gemeni Lounge, a Brooklyn social club where victims were hung and butchered like livestock. Coonan’s crew used a bathtub in an apartment on Tenth Avenue, where they drained bodies, cut them into pieces, and packed them into garbage bags.
The two men sometimes shared techniques. They sometimes shared corpses. They sometimes shared the same disposal sites in New Jersey, where landfills accepted anything for the right price.
Then on December 16th, 1985, John Gotti walked into Sparks Steak House and changed the entire structure of the American Mafia in eight seconds. 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.
And in one wet evening, Gotti took the throne of the most powerful crime family in America. But Gotti was not Castellano. Gotti was Howard Beach, Queens.
Gotti was a street guy who came up running hijacking crews at Kennedy Airport, stealing cargo off trucks and selling it to fences. 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, 247 Mulberry Street in Little Italy, Gotti’s command post, where he held court like a king. Coonan walked in with Featherstone at his side, both of them dressed in cheap suits that smelled of cigarette smoke and gun oil. Gotti sat at the head of the table in a two thousand dollar suit, his hair perfectly coiffed, his hands folded in front of him.
He did not stand. He did not shake hands. He told Coonan three things, his voice calm but ice cold.
One, the sixty forty split stayed. Castellano’s deal was now Gotti’s deal, and it was non-negotiable. Two, no more freelance murders.
Every Westies hit had to be cleared through the Gambino administration first, no exceptions, no excuses. Three, no more bodies in bathtubs. The dismemberment thing 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. He smiled even, a thin, humorless smile.
And the moment he walked out of the Ravenite, he disregarded all three. You have to understand who Jimmy Coonan was at this point in his life. Thirty eight years old, married with two children, lived in a modest house in Hazlet, New Jersey, drove a station wagon, took his kids to Catholic school every Sunday.
He was a devoted father, a good neighbor, a man who mowed his lawn and waved at his neighbors. And he ran a murder for hire operation that had killed somewhere between thirty and sixty 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 that the Westies used to store remains until they could be disposed of. Coonan believed something deeply, almost religiously, almost philosophically.
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 and packed them into garbage bags and drove them to disposal sites at three in the morning, always taking different routes, always wearing gloves, always making sure the bags were weighted down with rocks before dumping them in the river.
To Coonan, this was not psychopathy. It was professional caution. It was due diligence.
It was the smartest way to commit murder in the modern era. To Gotti, it was insane. Gotti’s crew killed people, too.
Everybody killed people. That was the business. But Gotti’s crew left bodies on streets, in trunks, on restaurant floors, where they would be found the next morning, making headlines, sending messages.
The point of a mob hit was the message. Make it public. Make it loud.
Make it scary. Make it so that everyone in the underworld knew exactly what had happened and why. Koonan’s invisible disposal method defeated the entire purpose.
What good was a hit nobody could prove had happened? What message did a missing person send? What fear did a vanished body inspire when nobody even knew for sure that the victim was dead?
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 forty thousand dollars.
He stopped paying. He moved between apartments to avoid collection, always one step ahead of the enforcers. The Gambinos eventually wrote off the debt as uncollectible, a cost of doing business.
Leone, however, had also borrowed from the Westies. He owed Coonan personally somewhere around twenty thousand. And he had, according to Coonan, been mouthing off in bars about how the Irish were soft and could be ducked, how they had gone soft under the Italians, how they were nothing but errand boys for the Gambinos.
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.
That the Westies answered to Jimmy Coonan and nobody else, not even the Dapper Don himself. On a night in the spring of 1986, Vincent Jimmy Sinatra Leone was lured to an apartment on Tenth Avenue under the pretext of working out a payment plan. He walked in expecting to negotiate.
He walked in expecting to leave alive. Two Westies enforcers were waiting for him. The first shot hit him in the back of the head, a single bullet that dropped him instantly onto the kitchen linoleum.
The second man stepped over the body and put two more rounds into the skull to make sure, the sounds muffled by a silencer that the Westies had acquired through their Gambino contacts. 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, each man taking a different route, each man disposing of his load in a different location. Vincent Leone was never seen again. His mother filed a missing person’s report with the NYPD.
The police opened a file. Detectives interviewed his friends, his associates, his family. The case went nowhere because there was no body, no witness, and no apparent motive that detectives could connect to anyone.
But here is the part that mattered, the part that would eventually bring down the entire Westies organization. Coonan had not cleared the hit with Gotti. He had not even informed Danny Marino, his Gambino liaison, the man who was supposed to be the conduit between the Irish crew and the Italian family.
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 thirty minutes straight, cursed him, threatened him, told him that the next unauthorized hit would be Coonan’s own.
He told him that he was not Castellano, that he would not tolerate insubordination, that he would burn Hell’s Kitchen to the ground if he had to. Coonan listened. Coonan apologized.
Coonan paid an additional thirty thousand dollars tribute to the Gambino family as a gesture of contrition, a peace offering, a way to smooth over the insult. And then Coonan walked back to Hell’s Kitchen and continued doing exactly what he had always done, exactly what he had promised Gotti he would stop doing. Because here was the truth Gotti could not face, the truth that would eventually destroy him.
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 Ninth and Tenth 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 with mortgages and families to worry about. They had Hell’s Kitchen tenements and a willingness to die in them, a willingness to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 anyone who threatened them.
Gotti understood the math. He was a street guy, he knew how to count. He swallowed the Leone insult.
He kept the sixty forty 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, was making him look weak, was undermining the very authority he had seized with six bullets outside a steak house. Things began to unravel in 1987.
The crack was internal, not external. 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, to get rid of a man who had become too unstable, too paranoid, too dangerous to keep around.
Featherstone was convicted in May of 1986 and sentenced to twenty five years to life. Sitting in a federal cell, Featherstone did the math. His wife visited him every week.
She told him the rumor on the street that Coonan had framed him to take him off the board permanently, to silence him before he could become a liability. Featherstone, the Vietnam veteran, the man who had killed for Coonan a dozen times, the man who had dismembered bodies in bathtubs and dumped them in rivers, made a decision that ended the Westies forever. He called the FBI.
He flipped. For thirteen months, Featherstone and his wife wore wires. They captured conversations with Coonan, with Westies enforcers, with Gambino soldiers.
They documented the sixty forty split in detail, naming names, giving dates, providing amounts. They documented the Leone hit. They documented at least seven other murders, the loan sharking, the union extortion, the labor racketeering at the Javits Center.
They documented Coonan’s complete disregard for Gotti’s authority, his open contempt for the Italian boss, his belief that he answered to no one. On March 10th, 1988, federal agents arrested ten 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 from the doorway, his daughter crying, his son staring in disbelief.
The indictment ran fourteen 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, through Featherstone’s recordings, painting a picture of a criminal enterprise that had operated with impunity for a decade.
The trial lasted four months. The jury deliberated for six days. On October 14th, 1988, Jimmy Coonan was convicted on all counts.
He was sentenced to seventy five 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, 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 sixty forty pipeline collapsed.
The West Side cash flow dried up. The Javits Center muscle was dispersed, replaced by non-union workers who did not answer to anyone. 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, testify against him, destroy him, send him to prison for life.
Here is what the Westies story reveals about the nature of power in the American underworld. 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, held together by the understanding that everyone had something the other needed.
When Castellano cut the sixty forty deal, he turned a tribe of Irish killers into a Gambino weapon, a blunt instrument he could wield from afar. When Gotti inherited that deal, he inherited a weapon he could not aim, a blade that cut both ways, a force that was as dangerous to its owner as to its targets. The Dapper Don, with his thousand dollar 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, unrecoverable, unidentifiable, gone forever.
His mother died in 1994, still waiting for word on her son, still calling the NYPD every year on the anniversary of his disappearance, still hoping against hope that he might walk through her door. 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 Tenth 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. That is the story of the Westies.
That is the story of the sixty forty deal. That is the story of the only crew in New York that even John Gotti could not tame.
