Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (61 page)

“Baby Greene” hadn’t even been named yet. It wasn’t until after the funeral and burial of his wife that John Greene decided to name his son Daniel, after the boy’s paternal grandfather.

In the wake of his wife’s sudden and shocking death, John Greene sought solace in the bottle. His heavy drinking cost him his job as a traveling salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. With no source of income and the landlord banging at his door, Greene had no choice but to place his son Danny in the Palmdale Catholic Orphanage in suburban Cleveland.

In 1939, at the age of six, Danny left the nuns and priests at the orphanage and moved back in with his father, who had recently wed for the second time. The boy didn’t settle in well. He was troubled by the death of a mother he never knew and uncomfortable around his new stepmother. Several times he ran away from home and was once found hiding under a neighbor’s porch. John Greene lost patience with the young boy and turned him over to his grandfather, a widower who lived in a modest wood-shingle house on East 147th Street in the heart of Collinwood.

Danny Greene’s grandfather worked nights as a pressman at the printing factory of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
and slept during the day. Young Danny was left unsupervised most of the time. He attended Catholic grade school, where he was well-liked by the teachers but was an indifferent student and frequently got into trouble. He was in the Boy Scouts for three weeks but was kicked out for giving the scout master a hot foot during a troupe meeting.

Danny fared better on the streets than he did in school or other mainstream pursuits. Although average in height and weight, he was not afraid to defend himself. In Collinwood, the Irish kids were frequently targeted by corner crews comprised of Italian and Slovenian boys. Danny’s lack of fear and his refusal to knuckle under to the dominant Italian ruffians would prove to be a foreshadowing of his life in the Cleveland underworld. “He was a tough kid, likeable but reckless,” remembered a Collinwood native who knew Danny as a youngster and was quoted years later in
Cleveland Magazine
. “You could have guessed his life was not going to follow the straight and narrow.”

In 1951, at the age of eighteen, Greene dropped out of high school and joined the Marine Corp. He served his three years with the Fleet Marine Force Division at Camp Lejune, North Carolina. He gained respect there more for his abilities in the boxing ring than as a soldier. As in school, discipline was a problem for the blue-eyed, blond-haired Irish kid whose penchant for pranks often crossed the line between humor and cruelty. He was frequently transferred from one camp to another for disciplinary reasons.

In 1953, Greene was honorably discharged from the marines and returned to Cleveland. He soon found work in a typically Irish area of employment as a longshoreman. At this time, the city’s waterfront was booming. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 added nearly 9,000 miles of sea coast to the United States and Canada, making the Great Lakes region a relatively new and bustling port. The number of shipping vessels carting iron ore, grain, automobiles, and general merchandise tripled over a ten year period, with the number of longshoremen in the local ILA office doubling during that same period.

Although Danny Greene was apparently a lazy worker who once got fired for sleeping on duty in the hold of a ship, he was a popular figure among his fellow dock wallopers. He had a charismatic personality and exhibited leadership traits, mostly through his fearless nature. As a result, in 1961, he was easily elected president of ILA Local 1317, which covered the Cleveland waterfront. A year later, he was also elected district vice president of the Great Lakes Office of the ILA.

As a union organizer, Danny achieved a level of maturity and discipline that had been lacking throughout his youth. He took great pride in his job. The first order of business was turning the local office into a presentable front for various union-related ventures. He started by totally refurbishing the ILA headquarters, painting the interior walls of the office kelly green in honor of his Irish heritage (he also used green ink pens, had the union bylaws reprinted in green ink, and drove a green Cadillac). He began hosting popular parties at union headquarters before and after Cleveland Browns games—parties that were attended by a Who’s Who of local movers and shakers, including judges, cops, mobsters, and councilmen.

“Before I got here, union headquarters was a packing crate and a light-bulb on a cord,” Greene jokingly told a reporter.

As a labor leader, Greene was a fierce advocate for his men. He was constantly at war with the stevedoring companies, who wanted to choose their own anchor men during the loading and unloading of vessels. To enforce his will, Greene formed an inner circle of ex-boxers and gangsters who threatened, muscled, beat, or bombed the opposition into submission. His victims could be stevedoring companies, or business agents, or even fellow dock workers who were not sufficiently acquiescent.

Years later, while being questioned by detectives, a member of Greene’s inner circle explained the arrangement: “If someone complained, they’d get a beating. If someone went to the police, they’d get a beating. Even if one of them just said something bad about Danny, we’d rough him up.”

“Was there a name for this group?” asked the police interrogator.

“Yeah. The grievance committee.”

Danny Greene’s stature as a union official elevated him to new levels of a power within Cleveland’s tough-as-nails intersecting worlds of politics, labor, and crime. He began to hang out at some of the city’s most well-known underworld night spots on Short Vincent Avenue, the city’s entertainment district during the 1960s. One of his favorite spots was the Theatrical Bar & Grille; it was here that he first met Alex “Shonder” Birns, a Jew of Austrian-Hungarian extraction who was a local mobster legend. Birns had been around since the days of Prohibition, when he ran corn sugar into Cleveland from across the Canadian border. He still presided over a thriving loan-sharking and numbers operation and was believed to have numerous lawyers, judges, and policeman on his payroll.

While frequenting the nightclubs, restaurants, and strip joints along Short Vincent Avenue, Greene developed a taste for the nightlife that would eventually sully his reputation as a union official. Although his annual ILA salary came to a grand total of $6,000, Danny lived a life of conspicuous consumption; he spread money around the clubs, arrived for work in his green Cadillac, and seemed to have plenty left over for his wife and two young kids, not to mention the occasional mistress. His lifestyle—lavish by Cleveland standards—caught the attention of an enterprising reporter for the
Plain Dealer
. The paper began an investigation of the district office of the ILA that uncovered a secret building fund, which was controlled by Greene. As it turned out, the union president was fleecing his own local, forcing workers to put in overtime hours for which they were never paid. Instead, the money went into Greene’s pocket.

The exposé in the
Plain Dealer
touched off an FBI investigation that led to Greene being indicted for embezzlement and falsifying union records. In 1966, he was convicted and given a five-year sentence, but he avoided jail time by resigning from his post as ILA president and being barred from further union-related activities.

The scandal may have ended Greene’s career as a union official, but it did little to damage his standing in local criminal circles. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he became a behind-the-scenes figure in the city’s garbage carting wars, which involved rival Mafia factions. Greene was put to work as strong-arm man for the Cleveland Solid Waste Trade Guild. He explained his duties thus: “If others don’t join [the guild], we will follow their trucks and take away their stops. We’ll offer to pick up for less and take away their business at the cheapest price—and knock them out of the box…. There are a lot of ways we can do this, and then we’ll split up the stops and give them to guild members…”

The carting wars resulted in death and destruction. When Michael Frato, a garbage hauler, pulled out of Greene’s guild, he was marked for death. An underling of Greene’s was sent to attach a remote-control explosive to Frato’s car. While carrying the bomb to Frato’s car, the underling was prematurely blown to pieces. On the surface, it looked like a freak accident, but local cops would come to believe that Greene himself had detonated the bomb, deliberately blowing up his underling, who he believed was leaking information to Frato. It was the opening salvo in a war that would continue for years and claim many lives.

While Greene pursued a career in waste management, he also began an association with the granddaddy of organized crime in Cleveland, sixty-nine-year-old Shonder Birns.

The long tradition in the American underworld of Jewish bookmakers and loan sharks employing Irish “muscle” went back to the days of Arnold Rothstein, whose bodyguards included Fatty Walsh and Jack “Legs” Diamond. Since Irishmen had a reputation for being physically capable and could never be a member of the Mafia, they were available to the older, more experienced bookies, who were not generally men of violence. It was often a paternalistic relationship; the older, smarter man schooled the young tough in matters of points and percentages, in exchange for protection. Sometimes, the student turned out to be an ingrate or worse. In New York, Ruby Stein had employed the tough Hell’s Kitchen hood Jimmy Coonan, taught him the ways of the world, and then wound up getting killed, cut up, and dumped in the river.

The Stein-Coonan relationship was similar to Danny Greene’s budding partnership with Shonder Birns. Birns introduced Greene to the longstanding underworld rackets of loan-sharking and numbers. Birns was Cleveland’s kingpin of the numbers racket, which had become especially popular in the city’s growing African American neighborhoods. Birns lack of familiarity with his newfound “colored” clientele may have made him feel he needed a big Irish bodyguard like Danny Greene.

One of Greene’s first assignments as Shonder’s enforcer was to deliver a bomb to the home of a dissident numbers runner who was holding out on paying the appropriate protection money. Greene drove to the man’s house with a home-made explosive device; he parked a block down the street and pulled the igniter. But Greene was unfamiliar with the military-style detonator. The fuse burned faster than he had anticipated. Danny fumbled with the bomb and tried to toss it out the passenger window, but it hit the door frame and fell back into the car. He was able to get the door open and escape just as the bomb exploded and blew the roof off the car.

“The luck of the Irish,” Danny would later remark. The only consequence was a slight injury to his right eardrum that left him hard of hearing for life.

It was around the time of Greene’s budding partnership with Shonder Birns that he began to embrace his Irish heritage even more strongly. He’d always been a proud Irishman, which had manifested itself in his obsession with the color green—green pens, green car, green office, and a green plaid sport’s coat that he wore everywhere he went. More recently, however, Danny had begun to devour books on Celtic and Irish history. He took a special interest in the legend and mystique of the ancient Celtic warrior. The Celts were among the great nomadic tribes of Europe five hundred years before the birth of Christ. Celtic males were tall and fair-skinned, with blond or red hair—impressive physical specimens who were known to have mastered two arts with great success: the art of clever speech and the art of war. Among other things, the Celtics had stood up to and repelled the marauding Roman Empire.

A psychotherapist might have had a field day with Greene’s obsessive fascination with his Celtic roots. Perhaps he was attempting to reunite with his Irish mother, whom he lost at birth. Or maybe his years as an orphan had thrown him into an identity crisis that was compelling him to connect to something larger than himself. Or maybe he was merely overcompensating for the fact that he was virtually all alone in the Cleveland underworld, an Irishman surrounded by Jews, Italians, and African Americans. Whatever the reason, Greene’s strong identification with his Irish roots—and particularly his obsession with the legend and persona of the Celtic warrior—was about to turn the Cleveland underworld on its head. His actions would provoke many mafiosi in town to curse the Irishman, and one in particular to ruminate on an FBI wiretap, “That cocksucker, that fucking Irishman. How the hell did this guy ever come into the picture, anyway?”

Live by the Bomb, Die by the Bomb

The use of explosives in the Cleveland underworld was a tradition going back at least to the city’s labor wars at the turn of the twentieth century. In the city’s infamous streetcar strike of 1899, called by
Motorman and Conductor
“the hardest contested battle ever fought by our people in America,” strikebreaking crews faced the prospect of their cars being dynamited on the tracks. On what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday,” a nitroglycerin bomb that had been placed on the tracks exploded beneath a Euclid Avenue streetcar, badly wounding ten passengers and ripping an ear off a motorman’s head. Nitroglycerin bombs blew up several more streetcars over the next few weeks.

Bombs continued to be used in the city’s labor disputes for decades to come. Danny Greene had himself employed the use of explosives as an ILA organizer and as the president of a new business he called Emerald Industrial Relations, a labor consulting firm. Emerald Industrial Relations provided protection and helped settle labor disputes, sometimes with a bang.

The big bang theory of underworld negotiation was a risky tactic. After all, both sides could play that game, and frequently did; bombing wars were notorious tit-for-tat affairs, with the warring parties trying to out-do one another with bigger and more devastating explosions. After the bombing death of his underling, Greene found a C-4 explosive device affixed underneath his own car. He was able to diffuse the device before it detonated, but he had reason to believe there would be other bombs to follow.