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

establishing an impressive power base through legitimate as well as criminal connections.
    But Mickey Spillane hadn’t acquired his reputation overnight. As with earlier neighborhood gangsters, he’d had to build it slowly through assorted extortions. With Spillane, the extortion of choice had always been kidnapping. His modus operandi was simple enough. A wellconnected neighborhood merchant might be shoved into the backseat of a car as he left his place of business at the end of the day. From there, he would be taken to an apartment or maybe to the rear of Spillane’s own White House bar at 45th Street and 10th Avenue. Phone calls would be made to the person’s business partner or some other associate demanding ransom. Sometimes there might even be violence involved.
    To an outside observer, this might have seemed like a high-risk proposition, given that most of the victims were people who knew Spillane. In some cases, they might even have lived down the block or around the corner from Spillane’s own West 50th Street apartment. These people could easily have ratted to the police.
    But Spillane knew that was unlikely. He was relying on something called the West Side Code, a tradition so sacred that even noncriminal types saw that it was adhered to. Simply stated, it went something like this: Under no circumstances does anyone talk to the cops. To do so would mean certain castigation within the community. It might also mean something very bad could happen to a member of your family.
    The West Side Code wasn’t based on any criminal impulse, per se. It was more a sign of solidarity against outside forces; a way to show loyalty and “build character.” But over the years the gangsters were able to make the Code their own, and people like Mickey Spillane always knew they could bank on it.
    Spillane never really liked the kidnap-for-ransom racket, unless it involved other mobsters. That was good business. But to kidnap somebody’s uncle or cousin and hold him at gunpoint was uncivilized. As soon as he was in a position to give it up, he did so, and put out the word to all his underlings that kidnapping neighborhood people was now forbidden.
    But Mickey Spillane could not rewrite his past. Like all the prominent Hell’s Kitchen gangsters who had preceded him, he’d had to do some pretty nasty things to get where he was. And some people just weren’t going to let him forget about it.…
    It had been a kidnapping not unlike all the others. Years before the Canelstein/Morales shooting, John Coonan, a neighborhood accountant who ran a tax office on West 50th Street, was snatched late one night and taken to the White House Bar. He was held there and pistol-whipped by Spillane and a few others. After a couple hours, a payment was made and he was let go.
    After the kidnapping, Coonan was willing to let things slide. But his son Jimmy was not. For years, Jimmy would remember the humiliation his father had suffered at the hands of Mickey Spillane. It would fester inside like an illness, and he would swear time and time again that he would never be a victim like his father was. Never.
    Given Coonan’s strong feelings on the matter, it was a testament to his patience that he was, for the most part, willing to lie in wait. Oh, there were daily harassments, like machine gun fire from rooftops and occasional shootouts in the street. But that was just to prove he couldn’t be pushed around. Coonan knew Spillane could not be removed overnight. He was too popular, too well-connected. If he removed Spillane now, no one would see him as the natural successor. He was much too young. What he had to do was make a name for himself first; muscle in on as much of Spillane’s territory as he could; establish important alliances of his own, possibly with the Italians.
    Coonan knew this would take time. But he was willing to build slowly to achieve his larger ambitions.
    In the meantime, the plan was to fuck with Mike Spillane as much as