The Westies: Hell's Kitchen's Last Gang War

For most of the twentieth century, the blocks around you were not a safe place to be out after dark. In the early nineteen hundreds this stretch of the West Side belonged to the Gopher Gang, led first by a thug nicknamed One Lung Curran and later by Owney Madden, who ran it before moving on to become one of Prohibition's biggest bootleggers. When that gang faded, a new one took its place.

By the nineteen sixties, an Irish American crew called the Westies controlled Hell's Kitchen, and law enforcement later estimated they were responsible for somewhere between sixty and one hundred murders between nineteen sixty eight and nineteen eighty six, figures still debated today. Rather than fight the much larger Italian American mob for territory, the Westies' leader, Jimmy Coonan, struck a partnership with the Gambino crime family, then run by Paul Castellano, with a mobster named Roy DeMeo acting as the go between. The arrangement let a comparatively small Irish gang punch far above its weight for two decades.

It took a long federal investigation, built partly on the cooperation of a Westies member named Mickey Featherstone after his own murder conviction was overturned, to finally bring the gang down. Prosecutors, including a young Rudy Giuliani, built a racketeering case covering twenty years of crimes. The trial opened in September of nineteen eighty seven, and by nineteen eighty eight, Coonan and the gang's other leaders were convicted, Coonan himself sentenced to sixty years. The Westies' reign over these streets, and the violence that came with it, ended with that verdict. Hell's Kitchen rebuilt itself in the decades since into the restaurant filled neighborhood you are driving through now.