When Cleveland Blew Up the Mob

By John Matuszak

This year marks the 45th anniversary of an event ending a bloody chapter of Northeast Ohio history. Here’s how it happened.

On Oct. 6, 1977, Cleveland gangster Danny Greene took a break from his career of murder and mayhem for a dental appointment.

The Irish-American from the Collinwood neighborhood was at war with the Mayfield Road mafia over control of the city’s organized crime. He had survived several assassination attempts but had no reason to think that this errand would be his last.

A Loud & Bloody End
Rivals tapped Greene’s phone and knew of his comings and goings. They planted a car bomb next to his vehicle, with hitmen nearby to throw the switch. Their planning and persistence paid off. The explosion not only killed Danny Greene, but it also had the unintended consequence of toppling mob control across the country. 

“That’s when the dominoes started falling,” says  Rick Porrello, an authority on Cleveland’s mobsters and author of “To Kill the Irishman.”

Throughout the 1970s, Cleveland’s bad guys were blowing each other up all over the place, earning the town the nickname, “Bomb City USA.”

At the height of the mob wars there were bombings, shootings, beatings and disappearances all over town, says local historian Dennis Sutcliffe, who features these conflicts as part of his “Lost Cleveland Memories” program series about Northeast Ohio’s gangsters.

From 1976 to 1977, Cuyahoga County had 37 bombings, including 21 within Cleveland city limits. There were so many bombings that the federal government’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tripled its forces here.

Wide Appeal
Mobsters weren’t limited to those with Italian backgrounds. Crime was an equal-ethnic employer that included not only Italians but also Jews, Blacks and Irish Americans.

One Cleveland figure who bridged all of these factions was Alex “Shondor” Birns, whose exploits Porrello chronicles in “Bombs, Bullets & Bribes.”

Birns, who was Jewish, was part of organized crime from the 1920s into the ‘70s, dabbling in everything from prostitution to numbers to theft, working with every element of the criminal world and violently protecting his interests.

In the 1960s, Birns hired Greene, an up-and-coming hood, as his driver and enforcer. While Birns served a prison sentence, Greene handled his nefarious activities. 

The two men had a falling out when Birns arranged a loan through the New York Gambino family for Greene to set up a clip joint (nightclub). The courier used the $75,000 to buy cocaine and was busted by the police. Birns and the Gambinos insisted that Greene repay the loan. He refused. The war was on.

Short Fuses
Before the bomb that killed him, Greene had found an unexploded bomb underneath his car. Suspecting Birns, he took the device to the police and declared, “I’m going to send this back to the old bastard who sent it to me.”

On the Saturday before Easter in 1975, Shondor Birns left Christy’s Lounge, a strip club owned by his girlfriend, and headed for his car at West 25th Street and Detroit Avenue. The blast from a bomb sent parts of his car flying into the air, and pieces of Birns’ body splattered on the pavement.

Birns’ Italian mob associates were incensed. A change of leadership that brought James Licavoli to the head of the Mayfield mob further heated up the war, when he was opposed by Greene ally John Nardi.

The carnage continued. Nardi was killed by a remote-controlled bomb in May 1977. Greene’s house on Waterloo Road was blasted, but he and a girlfriend escaped injury when the bomb failed to explode.

The mob took one more shot at Greene. Along with the car bomb, a backup team with a high-powered rifle stood by in case their first plot fizzled. This time Greene’s Irish luck ran out, and the bomb went off. 

Aftershocks
Ray Ferritto, who had the contract to kill Greene, was soon apprehended when a suspicious motorist gave the license number of the getaway car to police.

Following his arrest, Ferritto learned that the mob had plans to kill him, too. He decided to rat on his colleagues, as did his L.A. mob associate and Cleveland native Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno.

Licavoli was among the first to fall. He was convicted of racketeering in 1982 and died in prison three years later. Additional high-level defections led to more convictions here and throughout the country’s mob world.

“This virtually eliminated the Cleveland mob,” Sutcliffe told his audience at a talk at Mentor Library earlier this year during one of his popular presentations.

There hasn’t been a hit on a mob boss in the United States since 1985.

People continue to be fascinated by this culture of crime, judging by the crowds that show up at Sutcliffe’s programs and those that buy Porrello’s  books, one of which was made into the movie, “Kill the Irishman.”

If he could talk to Danny Greene or Shondor Birns, Porrello says he’d ask about the untold and unsolved murders they committed during their crime-filled careers.

Says Porrella, “I’d be a cold-case investigator.”