Free The Westies: Inside New York's Irish Mob by T. J. English

business.
    Mickey Spillane, for one, never liked Sullivan. Not only was he not from Hell’s Kitchen, but he was a drunk and a troublemaker who seemed to have designs on the neighborhood rackets. One time, in the back of the White House Bar, Spillane and his brother even had to give Sullivan a beating just so he’d stop coming around the neighborhood.
    To young Jimmy Coonan, Sullivan was useful. For one thing, ever since the Spillane brothers smacked him around, Sullivan had been saying he was going to make a move on Mickey Spillane whether Coonan was with him or not. Jimmy knew Sullivan was crazy enough to do it, and that if he used Sullivan properly, Coonan would be the prime beneficiary.
    The other thing was that Sullivan had a lot of criminal contacts from his many years in prison. If Coonan was going to make a serious move on Spillane, he knew he’d need an arsenal and a few helping hands. At the moment, it was only himself, Sullivan, and his twenty-two-year-old brother, Jackie, against the Spillane twins and at least a dozen other guys who’d come to Spillane’s defense.
    It was Sullivan who reached out to Bobby Huggard, who he’d once done stickups with. That’s how they’d all wound up at Tony’s Bar on West 72nd Street this sunny March afternoon. They were a ragtag collection of criminal misfits, an unlikely crew to take on someone as powerful and well-liked as Mickey Spillane. But with Sullivan’s know-how, Huggard’s brawn, and, most of all, Jimmy Coonan’s desire, they were determined to follow this thing through to its logical—or even illogical—conclusion.
    Within days of the meeting at Tony’s Bar, developments on the West Side were threatening to overtake Coonan, Sullivan, and their makeshift crew. For one thing, the Bobby Lagville killing went down. Lagville was the guy who was sent by Spillane to kill Eddie Sullivan. But Lagville had been found out by Coonan & Company, taken out to Long Island City, and turned into a receptacle for an assortment of large-caliber bullets.
    Detectives from the 108th Precinct in Queens were asking questions up and down 10th Avenue trying to find out who might have had a motive for killing Little Bobby Lagville, a known Hell’s Kitchen gangster. In keeping with the West Side Code, nobody knew nothin’.
    One person the cops questioned was Julius “Dutch” Grote, a strapping ex-con and neighborhood gambler who worked behind the bar at Pearlie’s, a saloon on 9th Avenue between 48th and 49th streets. Grote told the police he knew Lagville because they’d worked together in the Metal Lathers union. But that was all he had to say.
    What he didn’t tell the cops was that on March 22, 1966, the night Lagville disappeared, he’d stopped by Pearlie’s for a drink. Lagville told Grote he’d been called to a meeting with Sullivan, Jimmy and Jackie Coonan. Grote had been with Spillane and Tommy Collins when Jimmy Coonan sprayed them with machine-gun fire from a West 46th Street rooftop. So he knew there was a gang war going on. He asked Lagville, “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
    “I got no choice, Dutch,” Bobby replied. “They called me, I gotta go.”
    Now the cops were telling Grote that Bobby Lagville had been shot seven or eight times, stabbed repeatedly, then run over by a car.
    Only the car was an exaggeration.
    Not long after the Lagville murder, Jimmy, Jackie, and Eddie Sullivan stumbled into Pearlie’s. They looked demented, as if they’d been up for weeks without sleep. Dutch Grote knew they’d been hunting around the neighborhood for Mickey Spillane the last few days, and that Spillane had gone into hiding.
    Sullivan, his thick features frozen in some permanent, sinister expression of paranoia, had a long gray overcoat on. Underneath the coat he was holding a glistening chrome-colored submachine gun.
    “Where the fuck’s Spillane?” Sullivan asked Dutch Grote.
    Like a lot of people in Hell’s Kitchen at the time, Dutch had been trying