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Review:  Published for the first time in the UK, this best-selling true-crime classic has been revised and updated, providing 'where are they now' snapshots of the men and women in the Westies, and of those who brought them down.
Author: T J English
Paperback: 528 pages
Publisher: Bantam Books Ltd (14 Jul 2008)
ISBN-13: 978-0553819564
RRP: £6.99
Even among the Mob, the Westies were feared. Out of a partnership between two sadistic thugs - James Coonan and Mickey Featherstone - the gang dominated the decaying slice of New York City's West Side known as Hell's Kitchen in the 1970s and '80s. Excelling in extortion, numbers running, loansharking and drug-peddling, they became the most notorious gang in the history of organized crime. The then prosecutor Rudolf Giuliani called them 'the most savage organisation in the long history of New York street gangs'. Upping the ante on brutality and depravity, their speciality when it came to punishment and killings was dismemberment. Their reign lasted almost twenty - their end would come as their own violent natures got the best of them and precipitated a downfall as infamous as their rise.
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