Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (62 page)

This most recent exchange of homemade explosive devices in Cleveland had its roots in an earlier attempt on Danny Greene’s life. On the morning of November 26, 1971, Greene was jogging along White City Beach when Mike Frato, his carting business rival, drove up in a car and opened fire. Greene pulled out a gun and returned fire. Frato’s car was later found a block away with the fleshy, 250-pound wiseguy slumped over the steering wheel, a bullet hole in his head. A few hours later, Greene turned himself into the police and gave the following statement:

About 10:30 in the morning I drove my three dogs to White City Beach like I do almost every day. I was there jogging and exercising my dogs when a car started driving slowly at me. The passenger shouted, “I’ve got you now you sonavabitch” and pointed a revolver at me. I recognized him as Mike Frato. He was about fifteen feet away and shot at me two times. I pulled out my gun and fired once then the car sped away. I didn’t think I killed him. I thought that I hit him in the shoulder…

Although a number of witnesses corroborated Greene’s account, the police charged him with homicide and held him in jail for a few days. The charges were soon thrown out of court. “The evidence indicates that Frato was attempting to assassinate Danny Greene…in a struggle for control of the rubbish hauling business,” determined a judge. The incident was ruled a “justifiable homicide,” and Greene was released from custody.

A few months later, there was another attempt on Danny’s life, at the same location. Greene was jogging along the beach when a sniper, concealed in some bushes, fired several shots at the Irishman. The shooter probably believed that Greene would be an easy target, out in the open with no cover. But instead of ducking to the ground, Greene pulled out his revolver and started shooting while running straight at the would-be assassin. The tactic worked; the gunman turned, ran for his life, and was never positively identified.

Clearly, somebody wanted Danny Greene dead, and that person wasn’t likely to stop until he got it done right. Greene had acquired many enemies in his years as a labor organizer, gangster, and resident underworld wild card, but he had a pretty good idea who was behind these latest attempts on his life: the old Jew, Shonder Birns.

Greene’s relationship with his former mentor had soured one year earlier when the former ILA boss borrowed $75,000 from the aging mobster to open a cheat spot—an after-hours drinking and gambling spot on the East Side. Unbeknownst to Greene, Birns had gotten the investment money from friends of his in the Mafia, specifically the Genovese crime family in New York. Problems ensued when Birns insisted that Greene hire a local African American hood to handle some of the business at the club. The man turned out to be a drug dealer who skimmed some of the $75,000 investment money to finance his own drug deals on the side. Police had the man under investigation, and the club was raided a few days before it had even opened.

Birns and Greene blamed each other for the loss.

“You owe me that seventy grand,” the aged bookmaker told Greene.

“Sorry, old man. You’re the one made me hire that bastard,” said Danny.

When Birns told Greene that the money had come from a source in Cosa Nostra, Danny laughed.

“Fuck ’em,” he said. “Tell ’em it was a gift.”

While Shonder Birns was likely at the stage in life where he placed his teeth in a glass before going to bed at night, he was not about to take such an insult lying down. He immediately put out a $25,000 murder contract on Greene, which resulted in the attempted bombing of Danny’s car and various bungled assassinations.

The old Jew may not have known it, but by trying to have Greene whacked, he was playing right into the Irishman’s newfound identity as a Celtic warrior. The more Danny was under siege, the more he drew on his ethnic heritage, particularly aspects of that heritage relating to Celtic mythology. The noble warrior of the ancient clans took pride in his impetuous nature, and, more importantly, he wasn’t afraid to die. Weaned on the legend of Cuchulain and other gods of the north, the Celtic warrior believed that, through death, he could achieve immortality. The more you tried to kill him, the more audacious he became.

On a typically cold night in March 1975, Shonder Birns walked out of Christie’s Lounge, a go-go club down the block from St. Malachi’s Catholic Church. Although past his prime, Birns always looked sporty, like a high-roller just back from Vegas. Dressed in maroon pants, a white turtleneck sweater, and a sports coat, he complained to a doorman at the club of a cold he’d been unable to shake. “Maybe the warm weather in Miami will help,” said Birns. “Yeah, I think this will be my last month in the rackets.”

Birns strolled to the curb and reached out to unlock the driver’s side door of his aqua-blue El Dorado. The explosion was so loud that it rocked the city blocks away. Birns was blown in half, his legs separated from his upper torso by more than fifty feet. The rest of his body was sprayed against a nearby chain-link fence.

The amount of C-4 explosive used in the car bomb suggested that Greene did not just want to kill Shonder Birns; he wanted to deliver a message to the old-time mobster’s Mafia benefactors:
You play with me, and you’re playing with fire.
The war was on.

Two months later, in May, Danny’s entire apartment went up in a ball of smoke. Greene was in bed at the time, with his girlfriend. The explosion hurled Greene into a refrigerator and cracked a few of his ribs. His girlfriend was unhurt. The entire second floor of the building caved in. Danny and his girlfriend made their way through the rubble to his car and left the area.

When the police bomb squad arrived, they found a second more powerful bomb—a block of tetrytol, a military-style explosive, strapped to a three-gallon can of gasoline—affixed to Greene’s back door. The bomb had been wired to go off along with the first bomb, but its fuse had been improperly placed. Had the two bombs gone off together, said the police, the blast might have turned Greene’s entire Collinwood neighborhood into flaming rubble.

If the Mafia believed that by devising such a devastating attack—one with the potential to kill far beyond Greene’s place of residence—they could turn the neighborhood against the Irishman, they were sadly mistaken. Collinwood was a tough, hard-scrabble environment, and the area’s residents rallied around Danny Greene as one of their own.

Greene, of course, had foreseen a time when his inevitable showdown with the city’s mafia would involve the neighborhood, and so he cultivated the image of a Robin Hood figure, doling out cash from his criminal scams in the form of extravagant tips and picking up the tab at local restaurants and diners for long-time neighborhood residents. Like an old-style Irish ward boss, he purchased turkeys during the holidays for families in need and once paid the entire four-year tuition at Villa Angela Academy, a Catholic girls’ school in Collinwood, for a local waitress he favored. In return, the neighborhood became Danny’s eyes and ears, tipping him off when suspicious characters or FBI agents were snooping around the area.

The day after Greene’s apartment building was bombed, he was back in the neighborhood. In a vacant lot not far from where the explosion occurred, Greene set up two trailers, one as a living quarters, the other an office. In front of the office he posted a sign: “Future Home of the Celtic Club.” A green harp adorned the sign and an Irish tri-color flag fluttered nearby. As a gaggle of journalists and TV news reporters gathered around, Danny looked straight into the camera and fired a shot over the bow.

“I have a message for those yellow maggots,” he said into a microphone. “And that includes the payers and the doers. The doers are the people who carried out the bombing. They have to be eliminated because the people who paid them can’t afford to have them remain alive. And the payers are going to feel great heat from the FBI and the local authorities…. And let me clear something else up. I didn’t run away from the explosion. Someone said they saw me running away. I walked away.”

When a reporter suggested to Danny that he had nine lives, he responded, “I’m an Irish Catholic. I believe that the Guy upstairs pulls the strings, and you’re not going to go until He says so. It just wasn’t my time yet.”

A few days later, Greene was approached by John Nardi, a local union official and Mafia associate he’d known for years. Nardi was on the outs with the Mafia’s current leadership in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. There had been a few near-miss attempts on his life, which Nardi viewed as part of a Sicilian-style vendetta that could not go unanswered. He told Danny Greene, “You got a good thing going here, pal, but your flank is wide open. Why don’t we form a partnership? Your enemies are my enemies. Let’s fight them together.”

The arrangement made sense to Greene, especially since Nardi had access to traditional crime rackets well beyond anything Danny could cobble together on his own. In a city where there was no such thing as an Irish Mob, Greene had little choice but to form alliances whenever it was in his best interest. “You got a deal,” he told Nardi.

What followed was the sort of volatile underworld eruption that harked back to the worst days of Chicago during the gangland wars of the 1920s, with mobsters killing mobsters on a weekly basis, and innocent bystanders running for cover. In 1977 alone there were thirty-seven bombings in Cuyahoga County, twenty-one of those in Cleveland, which was dubbed “the bombing capital of America.” Mobsters were bombed in their cars, in restaurants, and in their homes. Widows cried, priests and rabbis prayed, and children wondered why. The Cleveland Mafia Wars touched off such concern within the ranks of the ruling Commission in New York that Fat Tony Salerno, boss of the Genovese family, authorized the immediate induction of ten new
soldatos
just to deal with the bastard Irishman and his renegade Italian partner who were believed to be at the heart of the bloodletting. With dozens of Mafia hit teams arriving in Cleveland that spring, the town began to look like a Sicilian resort.

In May 1977, the Mafia got John Nardi with a car bomb. Nardi and Greene had a sweet deal in the works at the time, a union-related meat distribution scam based in Texas that they estimated could net $6 million over a five year period. To facilitate the deal, Greene was actually thinking of closing down his Cleveland operation and moving to Texas—all of which went up in a blaze of shrapnel and body parts in the parking lot outside the Teamsters headquarters, where Nardi had an office.

Although his only major partner was now dead, the Irishman remained typically defiant. Outside his Celtic Club headquarters, Danny stood shirtless with a Celtic cross pendant around his neck. With his golden locks (he’d recently undergone a hair transplant procedure), full mustache, and well-toned physique, he looked more like a Celtic warrior than ever before. Flanked by several of his club underlings, he answered questions from an on camera TV news reporter.

REPORTER BILL MCKAY:
Rumor has it, Danny, that the word was out on the street back in March that John Nardi was a target. Did you talk to John Nardi at all about this?

GREENE:
I haven’t seen John in about three and a half months, Bill, but I did send him a message very recently. “John,” I said, “be careful. It’s out here very, very strong on the streets that somebody’s out to get you.”

REPORTER:
Word has it, Danny, that you are also a target in this so-called gangland war for control. What’s your answer to that?

GREENE:
In the world of the streets, I happen to have a very enviable position to many people because I’m in between both worlds, the square world and the street world. And I think I have trust in both sides. I have no ax to grind, but if these maggots in the so-called Mafia want to come after me, I’m over here at the Celtic Club. I’m not hard to find.

With his reckless bravado and growing cadre of adoring followers, Greene was becoming a legend in his own time. But there was an undeniable air of doom surrounding Danny Greene and his people. Everyone knew the Irishman’s day was near, which only added to his warrior-like mystique. One of his young followers even wrote a poem entitled “The Ballad of Danny Greene.”

Among the Crow, the story says

A man was judged by fiercest foe,

Many scalps a brave Chief took

Who fought his way to fame,

Often he outwitted death

Ere history prized his name.

A modern warrior known as Greene

Was very quick and smart and mean,

He scrambled hard and fought like hell

And led a charmed existence,

They shot him down and blew him up

With most regular persistence.

Through guile and luck and skill