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When the old crooks gather at one of their dwindling hangouts, they still talk about the days when the Irish were major players in the underworld.

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They’ll take a thoughtful sip of Jameson’s and weep for the old days, old friends and the old country.

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Oh, once it was much different.

There was Dion O’Bannion and Bugs Moran with their North Side Gang battling Al Capone in Chicago, the Winter Hill Gang in Boston, the West End Gang in Montreal and most famously, the Westies in New York. Just about everywhere you turned, Irish racketeers were big players.

And then, like a lot of diasporas, we moved up the socio-economic ladder and got honest.

Yet there was a point in the 1980s when the Westies from their redoubt in Hells Kitchen came up with a plan so audacious that it was only derailed by a few too many glasses of Irish Whiskey. Former mob busting prosecutor and later Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called them “the most savage organization in the long history of New York.”

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‘These guys are … crazy’

In 1977 an ambitious young thug named Jimmy Coonan arranged for Gambino crime family maniac Roy Demeo to punch the ticket of primo Irish mobster Mickey Spillane (really) outside his Queens apartment. Jacked on whiskey and cocaine, the main weapon in Coonan’s arsenal was a psychotic Vietnam vet named Mickey Featherstone.

The Westies had always been a relatively small outfit, maybe 20 to 60 members. In addition to bookmaking and loansharking, the gang controlled unions at Madison Square Garden, the New York Coliseum and the west side docks. Plus, they were freelance hitters for the mob.

Big Paulie wasn’t a street guy

“These guys are f—ing crazy,” one Gambino wiseguy was heard saying on police wiretaps. High praise indeed!

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Gambino chieftain and the man widely considered the most powerful mobster in America, Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano, was all about the construction rackets. He wasn’t a street guy, so a bunch of Irish hoodlums killing everyone in sight was unwelcome.

In 1978, Big Paulie asked for Coonan to meet him at an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. The Westies boss brought nutty Featherstone, which was ironic because Castellano wanted to reel in the gang.

Jimmy Coonan did not trust the Italians. That’s why Featherstone was there.

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Planned a massacre

But there was much more in store for the Gambinos.

Coonan had assembled a large hit team of Westies nearby, armed with machine guns and grenades. If Coonan and Featherstone didn’t emerge in two hours, the hitters were to go into the restaurant and kill everyone in sight.

Apparently, the sitdown got off to a rocky start. The Gambinos asked Coonan if he knew anything about missing loan shark Ruby Stein who was found murdered. Chopped to bits, in fact.

Us? Ho! Ho! Not a chance, Coonan lied and Castellano swallowed the whopper hook, line and sinker and suggested that the Irish come under Italian protection.

Big Paulie scolded: “You guys got to stop acting like cowboys – acting wild. You’re going to be with us now. If anyone is going to get killed, you have to clear it with us.”

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And then they all settled in for a nice dinner. Pasta, veal, and copious amounts of wine.

Irish Whiskey saved Big Paulie

Coonan was reportedly having such a jolly time that he suddenly looked at his watch and realized the deadline for his hit squad to unleash the bloodbath had passed. The diminutive mobster excused himself.

Instead of finding his killers coiled and ready to spring, he found them pounding back Irish Whiskey. His hitters told Coonan that all agreed that the sensible way forward was to sit back, be patient and have another whiskey for the road.

The problem for all involved was that the landscape was changing rapidly in the underworld of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The beginning of the end came courtesy of Mickey Featherstone.

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In a New York City courtroom, he laid bare the bloody reign of the Westies and their numerous killings, schemes, history and horrors. Fearing for his life, he sang an Irish lullaby and sank the century-old criminal syndicate.

The Irish (mostly) went legit

It was the end of Mother Machree, James Cagney and other cultural hokum associated with the Irish in the Americas. And it was just so.

As for Big Paulie, he got taken off the board at Christmas 1985 on a Manhattan street packed with shoppers. The RICO laws took care of the rest as one gangster after another kicked Omerta to the curb.

The Irish found their new power base in the police and fire departments, civil service and politics. So they controlled the municipal government, then the statehouse and finally, in 1960, the presidency.

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Prosperity ended the Irish mob

Whitey Bulger never got the memo. He was the last Irish crime boss of any significance in the U.S.

Bulger, 89, was beaten to death with a padlock stuffed in a sock a few hours after being transferred to USP Hazleton on Oct. 30, 2018.

But deadlier to Irish – and Italian – criminals has been prosperity and middle class propriety. That chapter is now closed, as dead as James Cagney’s psycho Cody Jarrett in White Heat.

St. Patrick’s Day is Tuesday, so if you see me at the pub, remember the wise words of Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) in Goodfellas.

“Give us a drink. And give some to those Irish hoodlums down there,” Batts said.

That was just before Batts was beaten to death.

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun

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