If the story told in this historical novel is true (and it's largely based on fact, as I am led to believe), this proves the ethos espoused by the mythical Keyser Soze in the movie, The Usual Suspects. You don't need money, guns or even numbers, you just need the will to do what the other guy won't.
The infamous Westies (a name the media and police gave a gang of west Manhattan Hell's Kitchen Irish crooks) never comprised of more than twelve members at any one time and yet, their reputation and influence was staggering and the sheer amount of fear they were able to generate was astounding. Beginning with a fledgling ambitious psychopath named Jimmy Coonan and a reckless, unstable, highly volatile Vietnam vet, Mickey Featherstone, the gang held the west side in an unshakable grip of fear that reached so far and wide, the biggest of the Italian Five Families, The Gambinos, sat up and took notice of them.
T.J English has crafted a fascinating document to those times. With an infinite amount of detail and paced beautifully, the book drew me in from page one. I've read other reviews that damned English for an overly dramatised prose yet I easily forgave this, making what could have been a rote-by-numbers chronological account of crimes, dates, facts and figures truly come alive. If artistic license has been taken, so be it. (Doesn't the author even explain and apologise for this at the very beginning?)
This is a powerful and riveting book, one I will return to in time.
(For fans of this material, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND the movie, State Of Grace, starring Gary Oldman, Sean Penn and Ed Harris, which was oh so loosely inspired by these reported events).
T.J. English Quick: what ethnic group do you think of when you think organized crime?
Probably the Italians, whether fictional like Don Corleone or the Sopranos; or real ones like Al Capone, John Gotti, Sammy The Bull Gravano, etc. Maybe a follow-up thought would be Jews -- whether as organizers for the Italian mob, or in their own organizations like Murder, Inc.
You probably didn't think of the Irish.
But maybe you should.
The book takes us inside the Hell's Kitchen gang that the press dubbed The Westies, focusing in particular on Mickey Featherstone, one of the central members, who eventually turned into an informant.
But none of that explains the appeal of the book. The crime details are disturbing and specific, the dialog is blunt and not -ing printable, and the cast of characters (so to speak) includes the hoods, cops, lawyers, politicians, and just folks from the neighborhood.
On a personal note, I knew that Hell's Kitchen used to be very violent, but I didn't realize a lot of the violence was in the '70s and '80s when I was growing up (in a different part of Manhattan).
T.J. English My previous publishing job was headquartered just east of Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, a midtown neighborhood west of Times Square, running all the way to the Hudson River. I often walked home from work, and my route took me through this storied location. It’s gentrifying, slowly, now, but it used to be legendarily rough. The Westies tells a crime story set in the area during its last gasp as a scary place. During the 1970s and 1980s, Hell’s Kitchen was the home of a murderous, drug-dealing, loansharking, armed-robbing, kidnapping, and racketeering gang called the Westies, its members mostly Irish-American. They were beyond brutal. They gained strength when they joined forces with the Gambino crime family. After a ton of mayhem, double-crossing, dismembering, and more, the Westies were finally broken up and faced justice. T.J. English tells the whole amazing story. There’s so much terrorizing in this book, I’m glad I didn’t read it during my days walking through the neighborhood. Even though the gang was long gone, I think I might have still been watching my back! —Phil (https://www.bookish.com/articles/frid...) T.J. English The Westies was the name given by the press and the police to a group of Irish mobsters working out of Hell's Kitchen from the late 60s to the late 80s. Led by Jimmy Coonan, this violent gang of psychopaths terrorized their small section of New York City, leaving a trail of bodies behind. Coonan started out by wanting revenge against gang leader Mickey Spillane (not that Spillane!), who had pistol-whipped Coonan's father. The gang was responsible for an estimated 60-100 murders.
It's easy to give the Westies more credit than they deserve. For the most part, they were more brawn than brain, inclined to kill people at the drop of a hat for no real reason. They were often laughably incompetent. Their repeated attempts to kill Danny Grillo are a good example of this. Roy DeMeo, a Gambino crime family soldier, disposed of Grillo almost as an afterthought, much to the Westies' embarrassment.
This is a fascinating, though horrifying read. The Westies placed no value on any human lives other than their own, and the number of brutal murders in the book is mind-numbing. It is said that truth is stranger than fiction, but it can also be much darker. No fictional horror story can match this real-life one, simply because it is real.
The problem I have with this book is English's handling of Francis Mickey Featherstone, one of the Westies' chief killers. Featherstone is portrayed in a surprisingly sympathetic light. A Vietnam vet with paranoid schizophrenia and possibly PTSD, Featherstone comes across as pathetic and sad. Uhm, no. He's not. He's a violent criminal who brutally murdered several people. Detective Jim Coffey, who caught Featherstone, said, You wouldn't want to get into an argument with him over a parking space. It's almost as if English thought he had to have a sympathetic character somewhere in this story, and he figured Featherstone - who copped a plea and testified against his fellow gangsters - fit the bill.
T.J. English Probably the largest cast of characters I've ever had to wade through in a true crime book to get to the main event (more names and maps than Lord of the Rings up in this piece), but luckily they start killing each other and whittle down the roster relatively quickly. Also probably the most gruesome gang I've ever read about. Boy, do these boys love to chop up bodies! Some of this hickory-smoked, charnel house flavor did carry over into the (very loose) film adaptation State of Grace, like where a psychotic Gary Oldman playfully tried to tickle undercover cop Sean Penn with a pair of severed hands his was keeping in his freezer. He even made a dad joke when Penn pulled his gun to make him stop: Hands up! And dads would definitely appreciate the shenanigans here (a body probably gets chopped up in a bar called Shenanigans, I can't remember), but in spite of some obvious liberties taken with what these goons would have been thinking at the time, I give it at least three stars for the fuck-ups on parade and, more importantly, the most energetic tutorials on mutilating corpses since Be Your Own Undertaker. T.J. English
FREE READ Ë WWW.TEXASBEERGUIDE.COM ò T.J. English
A chilling true story of murder and betrayal on Manhattan’s gritty West Side
It’s men like Jimmy Coonan and Mickey Featherstone who gave Hell’s Kitchen its name. In the mid-1970s, these two longtime friends take the reins of New York’s Irish mob, using brute force to give it hitherto unthinkable power. Jimmy, a charismatic sociopath, is the leader. Mickey, whose memories of Vietnam torture him daily, is his enforcer. Together they make brutality their trademark, butchering bodies or hurling them out the window. Under their reign, Hell’s Kitchen becomes a place where death literally rains from the sky. But when Mickey goes down for a murder he didn’t commit, he suspects his friend has sold him out. He returns the favor, breaking the underworld’s code of silence and testifying against his gang in open court.
From one of the creators of NYPD Blue and Homicide: Life on the Street comes an incredible true story of what it means to survive in the world of organized crime, where murder is commonplace. The Westies: Inside New Yorks Irish Mob
New York Hell's Kitchen Irish Mob: murder, mayhem, extortion, drug abuse, sociopaths, and body dismemberment - what's not to like? T.J. English Regardless of what some of the reviewers have written I found this to be a thoroughly riveting book, putting into good honest prose something which has in the past been sensationalised on celluloid and pulp type detective novels. Nowhere do we find the kind compassionate killer who cold bloodedly shoots his victim cleanly then puts his gloves on and calmly walks away. Rather we find a desperate ruthlessness born of the environment of disadvantaged childhoods in an urban setting characterised by violence, honour, and misguided loyalties. Some were cold blooded enough to kill and dispose of their victims in a particularly ghoulish way, but some were caught in that endless cycle of kill or be killed. Never has the term He who hesitates is lost been so aptly demonstrated or applied. The mental torment suffered by those imprisoned in this lifestyle attempting to break free is brilliantly told by the author. Some licence has been used in the record of the actual conversations but it must be remembered that reconstructions have been made by using several disparate viewpoints and after an interval of several years can you remember exactly what was said regarding a mundane event in your life? And again what I really like to see in non fiction books, the endpieces, are well presented. An interesting read I recommend to all interested in the American criminal underworld. T.J. English I first became interested in The Westies when I saw a program called True Crime on the History Channel. That particular episode was about the Westies and I was somewhat glued to my television (which is very rare ... usually I don't even turn the thing on any more). But this particular episode's story was so intriguing that I felt I had to know more so I bought the book. The Westies was gang that had as its home New York's Hell's Kitchen, home to many Irish-American immigrants and also controlled by a series of Irish organized crime gangs. Traditionally, these gangs followed certain codes of respect and deference, but as the author notes, it seems that after Vietnam, with the rise of a new generation, the old ways sort of went out the door and violence was the rule of the day. Enter young Jimmie Coonan -- a local boy, hotheaded and dangerous, with vengeful ambitions to take out the current head of the Irish mob in Hell's Kitchen, Mickey Spillane (not the author). His idea of killing was not only to do the deed, but then to do the Houdini -- meaning making the body disappear by dismemberment. Then add Mickey Featherstone, another local boy who had some serious mental issues & tended to solve his problems with knee-jerk violence. With other people working for them, they began a long reign of violence, extortion, murder, you name it. But Coonan decided that for them to get anywhere, they needed to hook up with the Italian mob. I won't go through the entire story but as it turns out, eventually a betrayal of trust leads one member down the path to become an informer. However, the criminal story is not 100 per cent of this book..English traces the attempts made by law enforcement agencies to take down these guys. I do have to also remark on the sad state of the justice system at the time as portrayed in this novel...Featherstone does several murders and walks?
The details are amazing and this one another one of those books I had trouble putting down. My problems with this book stem from the fact that it seems somewhat biased in favor of Mickey Featherstone, who by his own admission was a cold-blooded, psychopath who did his share of killing. I find it hard to be sympathetic towards someone like this or to excuse their previous behavior just because he may have been rehabilitated later.
All in all, a fantastic book. I'm looking forward to reading more about the topic and more books by this author. Recommended, for sure. T.J. English I purchased this one on a Kindle daily deal and I think I got burned. My enthusiasm when I started was pretty high and then just a few pages in it began to fall, and continued falling until the very end when I just kind of flipped through the epilogue.
My disappointment sprang from a misunderstanding: I thought this was a work of non-fiction. I was expecting to read some fairly dry but interesting text about the Westies, maybe some good direct quotes brought up during proceedings, etc. Instead I got fictionalized passages, all emotioned-up, stuffed with slang, and filtered through the author's idea of what these people were truly like and who were the true good guys.
A quote:
As his tour of duty wore on, Featherstone's sense of guilt and displacement deepened. He drank almost every day. Sometimes, he would get so fucked up he would have blackouts and hardly remember what had happened the night before.
Another:
Not only were the Italians going to be looking into this Ruby Stein thing, but now there were going to be bulls, or police, all over the neighborhood.
Another:
With three razzle-dazzle courtroom victories in a row, Hochheiser and Aronson became folk heroes in criminal circles on the West Side of Manhattan - and the scourge of the NYPD.
add to those ugly little messes a few others like a vivid description from the point of view of a guy who was getting shot. It noted where he was hit first and how bad it hurt (again, from his point of view) ... and then revealed that this guy died a few minutes later. Right. Got it. I understand the author's desire to add drama to what could otherwise be dry, but this seemed excessive.
It was also obvious that the author had written down various notes that he felt needed to be attached to certain minor characters and then never checked them off the I've used this already list, leaving readers subjected multiple times to passages like:
Mad Dog Sullivan, rumored to have been the one who killed Jimmy Hoffa,
Let me check my notes and make sure that's a different Mad Dog Sullivan than the one you told me is rumored to have killed Jimmy Hoffa.
One last quote which I point out specifically:
[...] it was largely a sympathetic piece presenting Mickey as a victim of war.
When I read that line I had to check to see if the author was talking about his own book or some other published work.
I trudged through to the finish, hoping the description of the trial would somehow miraculously pull this book out of its downward spiral, but no. The whole thing held my interest about as much as some crappy History Channel docu-drama at 3 in the morning, basically not worth the effort required to make it stop, might as well just let it roll until we reach the credits.
p.s. Apparently I don't have a category on my Kindle for fictionalized version of non-fiction events so it just went into read and hopefully will never creep out again.
T.J. English Growing up hearing stories of Coonan and Spillane's conflict and the crazy days of Hell's Kitchen, this was a great book to find some well researched details on the legends I have often heard. It felt like the kind of book it is, a story pulled together from records and court documents, which don't always make for gripping reading. There were quite a few parts that make me smirk or go ahhhh! But not enough to recommend it to anyone who doesn't already have an active interest in the Irish mob in New York. T.J. English