Who were the Westies?
The Westies were an Irish-American organized crime gang based in Hell's Kitchen, on the West Side of Manhattan. A federal appeals court dated their start to the mid-1960s and listed their other names: Coonan's Crew, the Westside Guys and the Westside Irish Mob.
Witnesses told the court the gang's business was murder, loansharking, extortion and drug dealing. It was never large. Crime writer T.J. English put it at 12 to 20 members at any one time, depending on who was in jail. Wikipedia's history of the gang, citing the NYPD and FBI, ties it to 60 to 100 murders between 1968 and 1986.
Mickey Spillane's West Side
In the 1960s the Irish rackets in Hell's Kitchen belonged to Mickey Spillane, a neighborhood man and no relation to the crime novelist of the same name. He ran bookmaking and loansharking, and he kidnapped local businessmen for ransom. He also sent flowers to neighbors in the hospital and turkeys to needy families at Thanksgiving.
Jimmy Coonan grew up on West 49th Street, the son of an accountant. According to T.J. English, the feud started when Spillane's people kidnapped and pistol-whipped Coonan's father. In 1966 Coonan fired a machine gun from a tenement roof at Spillane and his men. Nobody was hit.
How Coonan took over
By 1976 Coonan and Francis "Mickey" Featherstone were moving on Spillane's territory. Three of Spillane's top men were killed in late 1976 and January 1977. Spillane himself was shot dead outside his home in Woodside, Queens, in 1977. Featherstone stood trial for the killing and was acquitted. Later accounts name Roy DeMeo of the Gambino family as the gunman.
The deal with the Gambinos
In the late 1970s the Westies allied with the Gambino crime family. The appeals court described the terms: the Gambinos financed the gang's loansharking, and the Westies paid them ten percent of their illegal proceeds.
How it ended
In 1986 Featherstone was convicted of a murder he said he had not committed, and he believed his own crew had framed him. He and his wife, Sissy, began cooperating with the government and helped make recordings. That September the prosecutor told the judge the investigation had cleared Featherstone of that murder, and the verdict was overturned.
Coonan and other Westies were arrested. U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani's office then brought a federal racketeering case covering twenty years of crimes. The trial opened in September 1987, Featherstone testified for four weeks, and the convictions came in 1988. Coonan was sentenced to 75 years.
The Irish News reported in July 2026 that Coonan was still serving that sentence at a federal prison in Pennsylvania. The same report covers The Westies, a new MGM+ series from Narcos producer Chris Brancato.
The Westies in Occupation: Gangster
Occupation: Gangster is a novel, not a history. The book's opening note calls it a work of fiction, inspired by real events and by figures tied to the Westies and Hell's Kitchen. Brendan Kelly came to the story from the door of the bars themselves: a young Irish boxer working Manhattan clubs in the 1980s, where he met Jimmy Coonan.