Title: Westies - Wikipedia
Headings: Westies
Westies
Contents
History
Spillane years
Irish–Italian war of the 1970s
Spillane–Coonan wars
Trouble with the Genovese family
Coonan and Featherstone
The Yugo era
See also
References
Further reading

Content: Shortly afterward, federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani announced a devastating RICO indictment against Coonan and others for criminal activities going back twenty years. Featherstone testified in open court for four weeks in the trial that began in September 1987 and concluded with major convictions in 1988. Coonan was sentenced to sixty years in prison on assorted charges. Other leading gang members were also sentenced to long prison terms, including McElroy, who was sentenced to 60 years, and Richard "Mugsy" Ritter, a career criminal sentenced to 40 years on loan-sharking and drug related charges. The Yugo era
By the early 1990s, the old demographic of the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood was disappearing. The blue-collar Irish-American community was being displaced by a more affluent and ethnically diverse group of residents. With this change came a decrease in street crime and a change in leadership. Bosko Radonjich, an American-Serbian nationalist and onetime anti-communist started his Westies affiliation as a low-level associate of Jimmy Coonan in 1983. He became the boss of the Westies when Kelly went on the lam and was instrumental in the "fixing" of John Gotti's 1986 racketeering trial. Around 1992, Radonjich fled the country to avoid jury tampering charges.