On this day in 1976 the New York mobster Edward Cummiskey who served as a mentor to Jimmy Coonan, was shot and killed at point blank range by Joe Sullivan while drinking at a bar. The hit was ordered by Genovese acting boss Fat Tony Salerno who was looking to take out high ranking members of Mickey Spillane’s crew in Hell’s Kitchen.

Cummiskey is also reputed to have shown Jimmy Coonan how to dismember and dispose of murder victims by scattering their remains into New York’s waterfronts, notably in the Hudson River.

On this day in 1976, Edward Cummiskey, a seasoned Irish-American mobster operating in the rough-and-tumble underworld of Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan, met a violent end that had been a long time coming. Cummiskey was shot dead at point-blank range whilst drinking at a bar, the trigger pulled by professional hitman Joe Sullivan in what amounted to a surgical strike against one of the neighbourhood's most dangerous criminal figures. He was not simply a casualty of random street violence — his death was the product of calculated mob politics at the very highest levels.

The killing had been ordered by Fat Tony Salerno, the formidable acting boss of the Genovese crime family, one of New York's legendary Five Families. Salerno had set his sights on dismantling the power base of Mickey Spillane, the Irish mob kingpin who had long controlled Hell's Kitchen and its lucrative rackets. Cummiskey was a senior figure within Spillane's crew, and eliminating him was part of a deliberate campaign to weaken Irish organised crime in the neighbourhood and assert Italian mob dominance over the West Side. The Genovese family had historically clashed with independent Irish gangs who refused to operate strictly under Italian mob authority, and by the mid-1970s, Salerno was determined to settle the matter permanently.

Beyond his role in Spillane's operation, Cummiskey holds a particularly grim place in the history of New York organised crime as a mentor to the young and extraordinarily violent Jimmy Coonan. Coonan would go on to found the Westies, the Irish gang that became notorious throughout the city for a level of brutality that even hardened Italian mobsters found disturbing. It was Cummiskey who allegedly schooled Coonan in one of the most macabre practices associated with the Westies — the dismemberment of murder victims and the scattering of their remains along New York's waterfront, particularly into the Hudson River. This gruesome technique was designed to frustrate police investigations by making it nearly impossible to recover complete bodies or establish cause of death.

The murder of Edward Cummiskey on 20th August 1976 was therefore far more than the elimination of a single gangster. It represented a pivotal moment in the violent reshaping of Hell's Kitchen's criminal landscape, one that would ultimately clear the way for the Westies to emerge as the neighbourhood's dominant force. His legacy, however unwilling, lives on in the savage methods he passed down to a generation of criminals who would terrorise New York for years to come.