Danny Green survived a bomb thrown through his apartment window at 3:50 in the morning. A refrigerator fell sideways and shielded him from the collapsing ceiling. He walked out in his underwear and told reporters the luck of the Irish was with him. He survived a car bomb that should have killed him in 1968. He found another bomb wired to his car in 1975, disassembled it himself, and handd delivered the pieces to a Cleveland police lieutenant.
The Italian mob tried to kill him for two straight years. They imported a hitman from Eerie, Pennsylvania because their own people kept failing. When that hitman finally got him, the hitman said it felt like having a glass of wine. Kill the Irishman shows you a tough guy. It leaves out the man who made Cleveland the bomb capital of America.
The movie does what movies do. Ray Stevenson plays a square jawed neighborhood hero in a green sweater. Christopher Walkan plays Shondor Burns as a tragic elder statesman. Vincent Denafhrio plays John Nardy as a loyal lieutenant. Val Kilmer plays a sympathetic cop who narrates the whole thing in voice over.
The first three were real men the film softened beyond recognition. The cop did not exist at all. He is a screenwriter’s invention. The real cop the movie should have built around was a federal agent named Marty McCann and the studio cut him. Green was an FBI informant cenamed Mr. Patrick. That was top echelon, the highest classification the bureau assigned.
The movie does not mention this once. 30 years before the refrigerator, before the bombs, before the green letters and the green ink, Danny Green was a six-year-old in a Parma orphanage who nobody visited. His mother had died 3 days after he was born. His father gave him up to the Parmadale Catholic Children’s Home and did not come back.
Green came out at 6 to a stepmother he hated and a father who did not want him there. He ran away. He kept running. Every choice he made after that ran on the same engine. Be the man. no one can throw away. The Marines took him in 1951. He came out a corporal. He went to the Cleveland docks.
He ran for union president of the Long Shoreman and won. He raised the dues 25% and fired more than 50 members who would not do free labor for him. In 1964, a federal grand jury indicted him for embezzling $11,542.38 from his own union local. A man who would later run a private war started his criminal career stealing $11,000 from people who unloaded ships.
That should have been the end of him. It was the beginning. His conviction was overturned on appeal in 1968. He pled to a lesser count of falsifying records, a $10,000 fine, and a suspended sentence. A small-time labor crook, walked back into the street with no time served. The reason he walked is the part of the story, the movie Scrubs.
An FBI agent named Marty McCann, organized crime division, recruited him as a top echelon informant under the code name Mr. Patrick. pride in his Irish heritage, said the file. Green fed the bureau information on the Italians he was simultaneously fighting. He fed only what suited him. The Italians he wanted gone got investigated.
The Italians he needed alive stayed alive. The Cleveland Robin Hood was federally subsidized. Every time Green was not prosecuted hard, every time a charge dropped, every time a labor case got softened, it was because the FBI was protecting an asset. The Celtic Club legend, the green sweater, the workingclass hero in Colinwood.
That costume was paid for in part with federal forbearance. I would argue the Robin Hood reputation only survived as long as it did because the bureau was quietly carrying half of it. The movie has no FBI subplot. Marty McCann does not appear. The man who shaped Green’s last decade got cut for runtime. Halloween night 1971, Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights.
A 31-year-old man named Arthur Sniper crouched under a parked car at Swan’s Auto Service taping a bomb to the chassis. The car belonged to Mike Fra, a rival rubbish hauler Green wanted dead. Froto was inside playing cards across the street. The bomb went off early. Snappers died under it. Cleveland police arrived. Green was watching from a car a block away.
He held what looked like a transistor radio. Snapper had been Green’s own bomb maker, his enforcer, his friend. The month before Halloween, he had gone soft on the Froto job and warned Froto about it. Soon after, he started feeding intelligence to a Cleveland police sergeant named Edward Kovichic. The intelligence included one detail.
Green could not survive. That Green was an FBI informant. You hand the cops your handler, you die first. The official cause was an accidental detonation. The Cleveland intelligence consensus has been the same since 1971. Green pressed the button early. He killed his own bomb maker on Halloween to protect a federal arrangement that nobody outside the bureau knew existed.
If you are wondering how that is even legal, so is everyone else. The film leaves out the entire scene. 26 days later, Mike Froto got his chance back. November 26th, 1971. Green was running his two German Shepherds at White City Park. Froto pulled up and opened fire from his car. Green drew the pistol he carried while walking his dogs in a public park in a Cleveland fall.
He put a round through Frootto’s windshield. Self-defense. Ruled the jury. He walked. Read that one back. He carried a sidearm to walk the dogs. By that point, he was already a man who had survived one car bomb. March of 1968, his convertible exploded in his own driveway. The blast destroyed the car and damaged his hearing permanently.
For the last 9 years of his life, the Irishman, who told reporters, “The luck of the Irish was with him, was partially deaf in both ears.” The movie’s tough guy walks through bomb scenes like a man who can hear them coming. The real one could not. By 1974, he had built a headquarters on Waterlue Road in Colinwood, 15,85 Waterlue. A trailer.
He flew an Irish tricolor over it with a Celtic cross. At the top of the pole, he put a handpainted sign on the side that read, “Future home of the Celtic Club. The building behind it had been bombed once already. He raised the flag over the rubble. He drove only green cars. He decorated his apartment in green. He signed his letters in green ink.
He handed out green pens like business cards. He told the reporter on the record, “I am an Irish Catholic. I believe the guy upstairs pulls the strings and you are not going to go till he says so.” He believed God personally was protecting him. He said so. He wore the costume. He named the costume after a flag.
In early 1975, an old Jewish rakateeer named Shondor Burns put a $25,000 bounty on Green’s head. The money traced back through Burns to a Gambino loan that Green had stiffed after a numbers operator named Billy Cox burned the cash on a drug buy. The cops seized the escalation ladder ran through New York. Uh, the movie compresses it into a barroom feud.
The first bomb arrived first. A device wired to Green’s car at a Colinwood service station. The wiring was faulty. Green found it himself, disassembled it himself, kept the dynamite, and walked the rest of the package down to Lieutenant Edward Kovichic at Cleveland Police Department Intelligence. Same Kovichic, same Lieutenant Snerger had been feeding before he died.
Green handed a live bomb to a man who had effectively gotten his last bomb maker killed, and nobody in the room mentioned it. Holy Saturday, March 29th, 1975, just before 8 in the evening, Shandor Burns turned the key on a Lincoln Continental outside Christy’s Go-Go Lounge on West 25th Street. The C4 under his driver’s seat blew him through the roof of the car.
Pieces of him came down across the street on the steps of St. Malachi Church, where parishioners were arriving for the Easter Vigil. The first thing the priest saw on Easter Saturday was a piece of a Jewish gangster on the sidewalk in front of his cathedral. The movie shows Green pressing the button. Green was never charged.
Uh, a Green crew member named Kevin McTagert later told the FBI that Green contracted a Hell’s Angels member named Enus Krennic to plant the bomb for $7,500. And Green benefited. Green paid. Green did not push it. The film picks the cinematic option. I think Green contracted it out specifically because the Easter Saturday spectacle was too useful to hand to chance. Hit subscribe.
I cover stories like this every week. By 1976, Cleveland was a different city. 37 bombs went off in Kyhoga County that year. 21 inside the city limits, 16 in the suburbs. The FBI later estimated that operations connected to Green accounted for three of every four. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms tripled its Northeast Ohio staffing and stood up a regional office.
National Wire Copy gave the city a nickname that stuck, Bomb City, USA. The same year, the Cleveland boss, John Scalish, died. His successor, James Lavoli, demanded a street tax on Green’s operations. Green refused. Then he did something stranger. He started sending Lavoli handwritten letters. Green inc. Green letterhead signed the Celtic Warrior.
He named names. He used home addresses. He told Lavoli on paper that he was coming. On the wire taps, it gets worse. Cleveland family lines were tapped through 1977. Green knew. He kept calling. On one intercept, he told the listener, knowing perfectly well the bureau was recording that the yellow maggots could not kill him if they tried for 10 years.
3 months later, he was in pieces on a Lynhurst parking lot. Uh the transcripts do not make him fatalistic. They make him reckless. He told God he was protected and then he told God’s competition out loud. In May of that same 1977, before Green’s own turn came, the Cleveland family killed his Teamster’s ally, John Nardy. Same method, same model.
A car bomb in a Union parking lot detonated by remote from a chase vehicle. Pasquali Sister Nino and Ronnie Karabia handled it. The nardy hit was the dress rehearsal. The Lindhurst job five months later used the same crew, the same script, and the same Carabia finger on the same detonator. Green watched his best friend buried in May and went on with the green ink letters.
Anyway, October 6th, 1977. Brainer Place Office Plaza, Lindhurst, Ohio. A suburban dental office, 3:00 appointment, loose filling. The Cleveland family had tapped Green’s phone and learned the appointment time. Ray Farero drove down from Eerie, Pennsylvania, parked a Chevrolet Nova next to Green’s white Lincoln Continental Mark 5, and walked away.
Ronnie Carabia sat in a chase car with a remote detonator. Green finished the appointment, walked out to the Lincoln, reached for the door handle. Kurabia pressed the button. The blast through Green’s left arm 100 f feet from the body. The Lincoln’s driver door blew 30 feet.
The Nova was reduced to a scorch pattern. Farido, uh, the imported eerie hitman was asked years later how it felt to kill Danny Green. Um, his answer is on the record. Um, to me it was like having a glass of wine. It did not mean a thing to me. Cleveland imported him because their own people had spent two years trying and failing.
The man Cleveland had to import to do what nobody local could do called the murder a beverage. A young woman uh broke the case that afternoon. A girl named Debbie Spoth, a daughter of a Berea police officer was at the plaza. She saw the chase car. She drew Frito’s face from memory. Her father walked the sketch to Cleveland PD intelligence chief Andy Vano and Vano matched the file the same day.
Two years of war, one woman with a pencil. Faro was indicted within weeks. Lavolei put a hit on Ferro from his own jail cell, which is the kind of decision that ends an organization. Ferro flipped. He testified against everyone above him. Then the chain started. Carmen Zaggaria, a Cleveland drug operator inside Green’s Old Orbit, rolled next.
Cleveland under boss Angelo Lonardo was convicted in 1983 of racketeering and drug trafficking. Sentenced to life plus 103 years at Lewisburg. Nobody walks out of a sentence that long. He flipped in 1985. Lonardo’s testimony fed directly into the Mafia Commission trial in New York from 1985 to 1986, United States versus Serno.
Federal prosecutors used what he gave them to put away Anthony Serno of the Genevese family, Anthony Caralo of the Lucay family, and Carmine Persico of the Columbbo family. Three sitting bosses of the five families went to federal prison. A dental appointment in suburban Lindhurst was the first domino. A teenager’s pencil sketch was the second.
A hitman who called it a glass of wine was the third. Cleveland’s under boss looking at 103 years was the fourth. The five families of New York were the fifth. Cleveland killed Danny Green to settle a street tax. They lost the Cleveland family doing it. And then the New York families lost three of their bosses on the same paperwork.
I would say that is the worst trade in the history of American organized crime. The movie ends with the parking lot. It does not show Marty McCann, the FBI handler, whose decadel long arrangement with Green was the engine of the whole story. It does not show Edward Kovichic, the police lieutenant Green used as a one-man bomb disposal courier.
later becoming Cleveland’s chief of police. It does not show Angelo Lonardo dying in witness protection at 95 years old in 2006, outliving the boss who ordered Green’s death by 21 years. It shows you a tough guy in a green sweater. It does not show you what the tough guy actually was.
An orphan who built a public identity nobody could throw away. A federal asset whose Robin Hood legend was partially subsidized by the bureau. a man who killed his own bomb maker on Halloween to protect that arrangement and a corpse in a in a suburban parking lot whose death cracked the American mafia open. The kid in the Parma orphanage who nobody visited got the only ending he wanted.
