Thousands of families visit the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center each year for events such as the Westminster dog show, Comic Con and International Auto Show.
Very few of them realize the blood shed, the extortion extracted and the dead bodies associated with the exhibition space, as it rose from the ashes of former railway yards to host such jazzy gatherings.
During construction between 1979 and 1986 and in the early years of operation, the rapidly growing center on the west side of 34e Street was a cash cow for New York’s criminal elite.
It also limited the rise and fall of a violent Irish gang from Hell’s Kitchen, the Westies. Those gangsters and the Javits Center play a key role in a new crime series, “The Westies,” premiering July 12. MGM+.
“The Westies felt like they owned the neighborhood where the Javits Center was,” series co-creator Chris Brancato, who specializes in historically inspired crime dramas, told The Post.
“There were officers on the sidewalk [payroll] and the Westies felt a sense of freedom to do whatever they wanted, whether it was legal or not,” such as bookmaking, loan sharking, drug dealing and contract killings.
Bargain opportunities abounded in New York City’s landmark 1980s construction project, which required the use of workers from a host of unions that had already been robbed of their coffers by mobsters.
“Everyone understood that the Javits Center was going to be an unprecedented criminal racket,” TJ English, author of the definitive book on the gang, “The Westies” (not part of the series, which is more of a “historical fiction,” according to Brancato) told The Post.
Back then, English explained, no source of kickbacks or extortion was too trivial to milk: “That included food carts for the workers, laying cement, painting,” and even porta-potties.
“Everything from soup to nuts [and bolts] in construction. There were several unions controlled by different players in the organized crime universe.”
Money flowed from the project to the unions and to the gangsters. “That,” English said, “was the way things were done in New York in the 1970s and 1980s.”
The Westies emerged in the early 1960s, originally under Irish-American gangster Mickey Spillane (not to be confused with the writer of the same name) who controlled Hell’s Kitchen.
They used a familiar playbook on the west side of Manhattan. By the time the Javits Center moved onto their property, they had cut their teeth operating the Madison Square Garden building at Eighth Avenue and 54.e Street (it would later be moved twenty blocks downtown), the New York Coliseum, currently home to the Time Warner Center, and any Broadway show that required set or costume construction.
While various gangs generally kept to their turf, the construction of the Javits Center – which occupies a 20-hectare plot of land – immediately attracted the attention of the Italian mafia, especially the Gambino crime family, led at the time by Paul Castellano, who wanted to wet their beaks.
That was problematic for Spillane and led to what became known as the Irish-Italian War of the 1970s.
“A rivalry developed, which was basically a low-level war,” English said, explaining that Spillane was dead set against working with the Italians.
“The Gambino family hired a notorious Irish hit man named Joseph ‘Mad Dog’ Sullivan, and they began associating themselves with underlings related to Spillane. They cut Mickey’s organization out from under him. They actually wanted to get into his group [their own] so they could move in [on Javits]. This was all a business decision.”
Spillane, known as the “Gentleman Gangster,” was shot in front of the Queens apartment complex where he and his family lived.
Whether ‘Mad Dog’ killed him or not is unclear, although he was a suspect and reportedly left two of Spillane’s accomplices out in the cold.
No one was found guilty of Spillane’s murder, but it left a power gap in the underworld of Hell’s Kitchen. Local privateer Jimmy Coonan and his Westies right-hand man Mickey Featherstone were in control. Coonan proved to be a volatile boss, while Featherstone, a former Green Beret, was characterized as the child-faced enforcer.
As the 1980s dawned, the Westies joined the Italians and money flowed to the gangsters, usually at the expense of legitimate workers.
“For the first time in history, the Gambinos formed an alliance with the West Side Irish,” English said. “They wanted to bring the Westies under their domain so they could have access to all the West Side rackets.”
The Westies were prone to excessive violence. Although the gang was relatively small, with only twenty members believed by the English, by 1986 they had been linked to thirty unsolved murders a year. news reports from that time.
Even Italian crime family boss Fat Tony Salerno of Genoa – himself ultimately charged with multiple murders – described Featherstone and his company as ‘crazy’.
They proved it one night at the Sunbrite bar, a Westies hangout on 10th Avenue, when one of the gang’s lieutenants showed up with a milk carton containing the genitals of a recent murder victim. There were even rumors that a man’s missing head was brought to the Sunbrite and placed on the bar, ready to be served cold.
The violent representative of the Westies was further polished by Eddie ‘the Butcher’ Cummiskey, a man who reportedly learned the butcher’s trade while in Attica. After his release, he, along with the Westies, used his skills to dispose of ‘evidence’, dismantling human bodies as if they were cows or pigs.
In addition to murder, the gang was big on extortion, gambling and counterfeiting. Featherstone was busted for passing false bills after a massage parlor prostitute helped identify him, correctly mentioning that his name, “Mickey,” was tattooed on his arm.
To illustrate how wild and brutal the Westies became, Brancato recalled: “Mickey Featherstone committed a murder, out in the street, in daylight. A man insulted Featherstone in a bar. He left and borrowed a gun from Coonan. Then he went back and shot the man, just outside the bar.”
As the 1980s progressed, the difference in approach between the Italian and Irish gangs became apparent.
“The Italians were organized crime and the Westies were unorganized crime,” Brancato joked. “The Westies were heavy drinkers, had a willingness to take on contract killing jobs that common criminals might not want to do, and they had a penchant for making bodies disappear.
“By that I mean they would kill someone and literally grind the body into dust. No body, no arrest. That was the theory.”
However, it didn’t always work that way. In 1985, just as construction was beginning to wrap up on the Javits Center, Michael Holly, a construction worker, was shot and killed at the main entrance, a murder subsequently linked to The Westies.
Featherstone – who had by then fallen out with Coonan, feeling he had betrayed his Irish roots by joining the Italians – was charged, imprisoned and then convicted. He had not actually committed the murder and the conviction was later overturned, but by then it was too late, he started singing like a proverbial canary.
Featherstone’s betrayal of his former gang buddies was noticed by a hungry young prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani, who had put together a Westies task force with the NYPD.
Gang members began to fall and the gang itself was dismantled. Coonan was arrested for racketeering and sentenced to 75 years in prison.
When he was convicted in 1988, the judge described the boss as a “man with no redeeming qualities” and the perpetrator of “unspeakable cruelty.” His request for a reduced sentence was rejected last year.
Meanwhile, Featherstone eventually found himself in witness protection, while Giuliani took the template he created for the Westies and applied it to the Italian mafia, which also became their downfall.
As for the Javits Center cash cow, it also stopped flowing when authorities cracked down.
“The Javits Center was the ultimate criminal racket: a construction project that would involve almost every union in the city,” English said.
“It became a fueling frenzy and, almost unsurprisingly, it was the thing that brought down the Westies. When you have violent criminals from different organizations all working towards the same thing, people get killed. It was almost too good to be true.”
