“You think this has something to do with Brian?” Mercer asked me. “Your father?”
“I do.”
“I know there was a shooting, Mike. I know someone died. If you tell me who it was, maybe we can figure a connection to Lonigan,” Mercer said. “We can get Peterson on the hunt to see if there’s a link.”
“Thirty years is a long time to wait for revenge.”
“Give me a lead.”
“Mickey Spillane stepped into the mobster role in the late sixties, when there was a power vacuum in Hell’s Kitchen. Sort of a gentleman gangster—bookmaking, policy—and then a slow buildup to loan-sharking. Bought turkeys for the needy on Thanksgiving,” I said, shaking my head at the idea, “but began to break legs as he gained control.
“Spillane made a big mistake when he pistol-whipped a local accountant named Coonan for not paying his dues. The guy had an eighteen-year-old son known in the hood as Jimmy C—the kind of kid your mother was always praying you didn’t grow up to be.”
“Yeah.”
“Jimmy C went up to the rooftop of a tenement on West 48th Street with an automatic rifle and just began to fire down at the street, fire at everyone he saw.”
“Not at Spillane?”
“Spillane was nowhere around. Jimmy C just did it to show he was mad about the whipping his old man took, and that he was moving into the turf. The rise of the Westies.”
“Where did Mickey Featherstone come in?” Mercer asked.
“Up from the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, just like Jimmy C. Got noticed because he had a thing for killing people. He liked his hardware.”
“Jail time?”
“A few short stints. Then the army. Then psycho’d out of there. Back to the hood. Featherstone was Jimmy C’s right-hand man for years,” I said. “But their major falling-out happened when Coonan decided to go big-time and join forces with the Gambino family.”
“Featherstone got ruffled because that wasn’t loyal to the Irish?”
“You nailed it,” I said. “Coonan became John Gotti’s guy. He put the Westies to work as contract killers for the Gambinos.”
“Now, that’s a high-stakes business.”
“The highest. Ironically, Featherstone’s the one who got convicted for murder—for one of the few murders he didn’t commit.”
“Served time?”
“Not before he turned snitch, Mercer.”
“Featherstone was actually a rat? A big mobster like him?”
“Mickey Featherstone and his wife both agreed to be wired in order to get evidence against Coonan—that’s how bitter the internal Westies feud had become. Rudy Giuliani indicted Coonan with Featherstone’s information—one of the first big RICO cases. Racketeering going back two decades.”
“So one Westie boss winds up in jail,” Mercer said, “and one in Witness Protection.”
“Giuliani declared the Westies dead, but that’s just when all the wannabes began to crawl out of the woodwork,” I said. “There were Shannons and Kellys and McGraths and Cains looking to lead the parade by then, get a piece of the action. It’s like someone had lifted names off headstones in a Dublin cemetery.”
“Didn’t Coonan have an heir apparent?”
“An unlikely one. He wanted the Yugo to step in for him, over all his Irish boys.”
“The Yugo?”
“Bosko ‘the Yugo’ Radonjic,” I said. “He was a Serbian nationalist and for some reason Coonan took a liking to him. Started as a low-level associate—a parking lot attendant in a local garage turned gangster—but he was rewarded early for his efforts. That’s when the next turf war for Hell’s Kitchen began, in the late eighties.”
I swallowed hard and started biting the inside of my cheek again. It was an event that had ripped my family apart, the night I questioned whether my father was really the hero I’d thought him to be.
“My father was working homicide then. Hated the Westies for what they’d done, as Irish, to the Irish.”
“Had he known Featherstone and Coonan?”
“Sure he did. Not drinking buddies, but we all had relatives in Hell’s Kitchen. Ate in the same pubs, went to the same churches, worked in the same unions and shops,” I said. “Just earlier today I was telling Jimmy about playing as a kid in Bennett Park, about exploring Fort Washington just a stone’s throw from the George Washington Bridge.”
“Yeah.”
“Half the kids I hung out with had fathers who were cops and firemen,” I said. “The other half came from the wrong side of the proverbial tracks. Westies and thugs of all varieties. I wasn’t choosy when I was out on the street.”
“The shooting?”
“Sure. The shooting,” I said. “So the Yugo thinks he can dance into the Irish mafia, the Irish Sopranos, without a struggle. But the next generation of hoodlums thought otherwise. The demographics were changing and so were the profits, because drugs had come into the mix. Every tough guy seemed to be hungry for drug money.”
“Understood.”
“It was most often a family affair at this point. When Mugsy Renner was running drugs, he put the rest of his relatives into the action. Same for all the guys. Narcotics was following a big shipment of cocaine that was coming in through a mule from South America, bound for a safe house in Hell’s Kitchen. It was Renner’s crew against some of the Shannons—at least the ones who weren’t behind bars.”
“Why was homicide involved?”
“Because the coke had been flown in through JFK. Three airline employees, cargo traffic agents, were supposedly in on the deal and let Renner’s gang and their truck into the hangar for the pickup. The agents were tied up and executed, mob-style—single bullet to the back of the head. Not exactly the cut of the profits they had expected. So narcotics called in homicide for backup when they rushed in to raid Renner’s headquarters on West 51st Street.”
It still made my blood boil to think of Renner setting up my father and his team.
“The cops walked into a trap, of course. The drugs were worth too many millions to sit in a tenement in Hell’s Kitchen,” I said. “There had actually been two dump trucks involved in the sting, and the one with the drugs got away clean. Never been found to this day. Renner parked a truck full of garbage in front of his house. When the narcs burst in on them in the middle of the night with a warrant, there was nothing to be found.”
“No drugs? No money?”
“Nothing. Nothing except Renner’s crazy kid. His oldest son, Emmet, was up on the roof with an automatic rifle. Twenty-two-year-old with a history of mental illness.”
“Against a narcotics squad and homicide?”
“I’m talking certifiably crazy,” I said. “He thought it wasn’t against the law to possess a weapon in his own home, so as the cops were leaving, tempers flaring, Renner starts shooting off rounds, hailing bullets down on the street.”
I paused. I had been back to stare at that building so many times as a young boy that I could see it in front of me today.
“Shooting at people?” Mercer asked. “At the cops?”
“Nope. He was imitating Jimmy C. He was figuring his father could win control of the Westies just the way Coonan had done it when he was eighteen—with a great show of force from the roof of a Hell’s Kitchen tenement.”
“It worked the first time, I guess.”
“Only now it was a street full of cops.”
“And they returned fire,” Mercer said.
“Just some warning shots, to show Renner they were serious,” I said. “But then he shot a cop. Right in the head. The guy bled out on the street before anyone could help him.”
“So Emmet Renner was a dead man.”
“Not exactly. That would have been one thing. But what nobody knew was that his brother was up on the roof with him.”
I gnawed on my cheek again.
“By that time, Emergency Services had burst into the house on their way to the roof. Renner ducked down and the cops thought he was reloading,” I said. “What they couldn’t see was that the crazy bastard thought he’d initiate his brother into the Westies. Handed him the rifle and told him to take his best shot.”
I put myself in my father’s shoes, as I had done thousands of times since that night.
“The gun barrel comes back over the side of the building, only this time Renner stands up. He fires the rifle and wings the guy right next to my father. Got his shoulder, and the blood splashed all over my dad’s face.”
“So he fired back.”
“Damn right, he did. My father shot Renner in the head. One round, direct hit. Of course everyone on the street figured it was Emmet, the crazy one, who’d been shot. They had no reason to think he’d turned the weapon over to his brother. His brother, Charlie.”
“But it was actually Charlie who shot one of the cops, wasn’t it?” Mercer asked. “He shot the guy standing right next to your father.”
“Yeah, that was Charlie Renner all right.”
“And that’s the man your father killed? Charlie Renner?”
“He wasn’t a man, Mercer. He was five years older than I was then. He used to play stickball with me in Hell’s Kitchen. He was an altar boy at St. Ignatius before I was,” I said. “Charlie Renner was thirteen years old the night he died. That’s the stuff that doesn’t quite fit into the Brian Chapman legend, Mercer. My father killed a kid.”