Between the Federal and state charges, law enforcement officials hope to make the Westies the latest casualty of their war on organized crime.Īlready, detectives triumphantly report, the gang has virtually ceased to exist on the streets of the West Side. The Federal indictments, coming on the heels of the state's charges, marshalled a staggering variety of criminal acts under the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act - the same law used so successfully earlier this year in the so-called Mafia Commission case. The gang's leader and its principal members were charged with murder or attempted murder. Working with information provided by Featherstone, the District Attorney's office has indicted members of the gang on charges of killing Holly. Suddenly, however, the Westies appear to be collapsing under the weight of a series of fratricides and the bitterness of Mickey Featherstone. During that time, officials charge, gang members performed executions at the behest of the Gambinos, and shared in profits from the mob's traditional control over New York's docks. Over the last decade, the Westies cemented an alliance with the far more sophisticated, far more powerful Gambino family of the Mafia. But in recent years they have attracted increasing scrutiny from law enforcement officials. ''This is the most violent gang we've seen,'' says Michael Cherkasky, the head of the Rackets Bureau of the Manhattan District Attorney's office.īecause the gang, until recently, has largely terrorized the insular world of Manhattan's West Side docks, living off extortion from bookmakers and loan sharks, the Westies never gained the notoriety of the Mafia. New York law enforcement officials hold the Westies responsible for more than 30 murders during the last 15 years. But if the Westies seem like ghosts, they are harrowingly real. That mythic era of Irish street glory appeared to end with the opening of Manhattan's dark, secretive slums to the forces of development and homogenization. THERE IS SOMETHING ALMOST QUAINT IN the image of Irish organized crime, something that calls to mind old movies with Jimmy Cagney lording over a troop of saucy wharf rats. In the spring of 1986, suddenly facing 25 years in prison, he approached the District Attorney's office with an astounding offer: not only would he lead the prosecutors to Michael Holly's real killers, but he would expose the criminal activities of a gang that they had failed again and again to put behind bars. Mickey Featherstone, a short, slight 38-year-old with a blond mop and an almost-adolescent expression, had been charged with at least three other murders during the previous 17 years, but he was innocent of this one. Federal and state prosecutors had already been investigating the gang - also known to the police as the Irish Mafia - when Featherstone, the Westies' fearsome enforcer, was convicted of the 1985 gangland-style execution of Michael Holly, a construction worker. The Westies began to unravel exactly one year ago, when Francis T. The group stands accused of a criminal enterprise involving eight murders and dozens of other cases of attempted murder, kidnapping, loan-sharking, extortion, gambling and drug dealing. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, had announced the indictment of 10 members of the Westies, a gang long known to law enforcement officials, if not to the public, as one of the most savage organizations in the long history of New York gangs. Giuliani, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Robert M. '' 'Westies - R.I.P.' Make it as big as you can!''Ĭolangelo had just come from a crowded press conference at which Rudolph W. ''Let's put up a sign,'' shouted a jubilant Colangelo. ON THE AFTERNOON OF MARCH 26, Robert Colangelo, chief of detectives of the New York City Police Department, was in his office, posing for a celebratory photograph with a detachment of his men.
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