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Thousands of families visit the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center every year for events like the Westminster dog show, Comic Con and International Auto Show.
Very few of them realize the blood spilled, extortion extracted and dead bodies connected with the exhibition space, as it rose from the ashes of former rail-yards to host such jazzy gatherings.
During construction between 1979 through 1986 and in the early years of operation, the burgeoning Center on the very West end of 34th Street was a cash cow for New York’s criminal elite.
It also limned the rise and fall of a violent Hell’s Kitchen-based Irish gang, the Westies. Those gangsters and the Javits Center play key roles in a new scripted crime series, “The Westies,” premiering July 12 on 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.
“Cops were on the pad [payroll] and the Westies felt a sense of freedom to do what they wanted, whether it was legal or not,” such as bookmaking, loan sharking, drug dealing and contract killings.
Underhand opportunities abounded at the New York City signature construction project of the ‘80s, which required the use of workers from a wide swath of unions, who already had mobsters rifling their coffers.
“Everyone understood that the Javits Center was going to be an unprecedented bounty of criminal rackets,” T.J. English, author of the definitive book on the gang, “The Westies” (not part of the series, which is more a “historical fiction,” according to Brancato) told The Post.
At the time, English explained, no source of kickback or extortion was too trivial for milking: “That included food carts for the workers, the laying of cement, painting,” even porta-potties.
“Everything from soup to nuts [and bolts] in the construction. There were different unions that were controlled by different players in the universe of organized crime.”
Money flowed from the project to the unions to the mobsters. “That,” said English, “was how things were done in New York during the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
The Westies formed in the early 60s, originally under Irish-American mobster Mickey Spillane (not to be confused with the writer of the same name) who controlled Hell’s Kitchen.
They used a familiar playbook across the west side of Manhattan. By the time the Javits Center went up on their turf, they had cut their teeth by exploiting the building of Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue and 54th Street (it would later move 20 blocks downtown), the New York Coliseum, where the Time Warner Center currently sits, and every Broadway show that required set building or costume making.
While different mobs generally kept to their turf, the construction of the Javits Center — occupying a 20-acre plot of land — immediately attracted the attention of the Italian mafia, particularly the Gambino crime family, then led 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 70s.
“In came a rivalry, which was actually a low-grade war,” said English, explaining Spillane was adamantly against working with the Italians.
“The Gambino family hired a notorious Irish hitman named Joseph ‘Mad Dog’ Sullivan and they started associating with underlings related to Spillane. They cut Mickey’s organization out from under him. They basically wanted his group inside [their own] so they could move in [on Javits]. This was all a business decision.”
Known as the “Gentleman Gangster,” Spillane was shot down in front of the Queens apartment building where he and his family lived.
Whether or not “Mad Dog” killed him is unclear, although he was a suspect and reportedly iced two of Spillane’s henchmen.
No one was found guilty of Spillane’s murder, but it did create a power gap in the Hell’s Kitchen underworld. Local hood Jimmy Coonan and his Westies right-hand-man Mickey Featherstone muscled control. Coonan proved to be a volatile boss, while Featherstone, a former Green Beret, was characterized as the baby-faced enforcer.
As the 80s dawned, The Westies aligned with the Italians and money flowed to the gangsters, generally at the expense of legitimate workers.
“For the first time in history, the Gambinos formed an alliance with the West Side Irish,” said English. “They wanted to bring the Westies under their domain so that they could have access to all of the West Side rackets.”
The Westies were prone to over-the-top violence. Although the gang was relatively small, with only up to 20 members according to English, by 1986 they were linked to 30 unsolved killings, per news reports of the time.
Even the Italian Genovese crime family boss Fat Tony Salerno – himself eventually charged with multiple murders – described Featherstone and company as “crazy.”
They proved it one night in the Sunbrite bar, a Westies hangout on 10th Avenue, when one of the gang’s lieutenants showed up carrying a milk carton containing the genitalia of a recent murder victim. There were even rumors about a man’s missing head being brought to the Sunbrite and set down on the bar, ready to be served a cold one.
The Westies violent rep was further burnished by Eddie “the Butcher” Cummiskey, a man reputed to have learned the butchering trade while doing time in Attica. Upon his release, running with the Westies, he used his skills to dispose of ‘evidence’, breaking down human bodies as if they were cows or pigs.
Besides murder, the gang was big on extortion, gambling and counterfeiting. Featherstone got busted for passing bogus bills after a prostitute in a massage parlor helped ID him, correctly pointing out his name, “Mickey,” was tattooed on his arm.
Illustrating how wild and brazen the Westies became, Brancato recalled: “Mickey Featherstone committed a murder, out on the open street, in daylight. A guy insulted Featherstone in a bar. He left and borrowed a weapon from Coonan. Then he went back and shot the guy, right outside the bar.”
As the 1980s wore on, the difference in approach between the Italian and Irish gangs became apparent.
“The Italians were organized crime and the Westies were disorganized crime,” quipped Brancato. “The Westies were heavy drinkers, had a willingness to take on contract-killing jobs ordinary criminals might not be willing 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 like that. In 1985, just as construction began wrapping up on the Javits Center, Michael Holly, a construction worker, was shot dead near the front entrance, a killing which was then tied to The Westies.
Featherstone — who by then had fallen out with Coonan, feeling he had betrayed his Irish roots by cozying up to the Italians — was charged and jailed, then convicted. He hadn’t, in fact, committed the murder and the conviction was later overturned, but by that time it was too late, he’d begun singing like a proverbial canary.
Featherstone’s snitching on his former gang pals was noticed by a hungry young prosecutor by the name of Rudy Giuliani, who put together a Westies task force with the NYPD.
Gang members started to fall and the gang itself was dismantled. Coonan was busted for racketeering and received 75 years in prison.
When he was sentenced in 1988, the judge described the boss as a “a man without any redeeming features” and the perpetrator of “unspeakable cruelty.” His appeal for shortened sentence was rejected last year.
Meanwhile, Featherstone eventually entered witness protection, while Giuliani took the template he devised for the Westies and applied it to the Italian mob, which became their downfall too.
As for the Javits Center cash-cow, it also stopped bleeding money when authorities cracked down.
“The Javits Center was the ultimate criminal racket: A construction project that was going to use almost every union in the city,” said English.
“It became a feeding frenzy and, almost unsurprisingly, it was the thing that brought the Westies down. When you have violent criminals from different organizations, all working on the same thing, people get killed. It was almost too good to be true.”
English (US)