The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob Read Online Free PDF Page A

farewell.
    Never mind that Jerry Morales, a small-time burglar who’d once done a long stretch in San Quentin Prison, was from Los Angeles, not Texas. Whatever Morales had said to Eddie Sullivan at the Pussycat Lounge was enough to make Sullivan think he and Canelstein were hitmen from Texas.
    Since Spillane and Coonan had gone public with their feud, there had been lots of threats and accusations. One rumor was that Spillane had called hit men in from Boston. Another had him cutting a deal with Little Bobby Lagville, a neighborhood kid, to kill just Eddie Sullivan. That rumor was taken seriously enough that Bobby Lagville disappeared from the neighborhood one evening. Later he was found dead out in Queens with six bullet holes in his body.
    Coonan knew Spillane had boxed himself into a corner as far as violence was concerned. Dark and drop-dead handsome, with a courtly manner, Spillane was an oldtime gentleman gangster with a much admired sense of loyalty to the neighborhood. He could not be seen to be condoning violence against a person from Hell’s Kitchen or it would make him look bad in the eyes of his “legitimate” friends. That’s why Spillane had taken a contract out on Eddie Sullivan instead of Jimmy Coonan. Sullivan was from the East Side. He was fair game.
    Little Bobby Lagville had been asked to do the killing because he was a close friend of Coonan’s. “Get rid of Sullivan,” Spillane supposedly told Lagville, “then we can call a truce. Otherwise, your friend Coonan’s gonna be history real soon.” When Jimmy Coonan and his buddies heard about this, they thought it meant Lagville was on Spillane’s side. So they gave him a ride to 5th Street between 47th and 48th avenues, just across the East River in Long Island City. That’s exactly where the police found the body, lying in a river of blood in the middle of the street at 4:30 A.M. on March 23, 1966.
    Usually, that’s how the Coonan/Spillane Wars were waged—in the quiet of the night on some dark street or in some back alley where there were few witnesses.
    Sometimes, however, emotions boiled over. One popular story in the saloons and gambling dens of Hell’s Kitchen had it that one afternoon Spillane and Coonan were seen exchanging words right on 10th Avenue. They both pulled guns and traded fire, just like an old-fashioned Western shoot-out.
    Another time, it was reported, Spillane was headed to a late-night crap game on 46th Street between 11th and 12th avenues. He was with a group of seven or eight neighborhood buddies, including a young Tommy Collins and Julius “Dutch” Grote. Suddenly somebody opened fire from the roof up above. They all ducked for cover as bullets sprayed down like rain.
    “Holy shit!” somebody shouted, “Who the fuck is that?”
    They squeezed into the entryway of a tenement, pinned against the glass doors as the bullets hit the street and ricocheted off a nearby warehouse wall.
    Spillane leaned forward, peering up towards the roof. “It’s that bug Coonan. He’s got a machine gun!”
    They had to stay like that for a while until Coonan disappeared. Then they scampered off to their dice game.
    Most folks in Hell’s Kitchen figured it was all about business. Spillane not only controlled the neighborhood policy games, but he was the area’s primary bookmaker. Any neighborhood bets on sporting events or anything else of interest went through him. He also had influence with the unions, where various kickback rackets flourished, and all the neighborhood dice and card games. Plus, there was loansharking and his thriving robbery and hijacking operations. All in all, he was a well-rounded guy.
    In the old days, the neighborhood rackets sprang out of one centralized scam like the illicit liquor trade or the waterfront. Now it was more of a hustle, and anyone who hoped to maintain control over a sprawling empire of gambling, loansharking and more would either have to do it through intimidation or, like Spillane, by