October 6th, 1977. 3:12 in the afternoon, a Lincoln Continental sits parked outside the Brainer Place Medical Building in Lindhurst, Ohio. Inside the car, Danny Green is dead. Half his torso is gone. His left arm has been blown across the parking lot and is lying near a Volkswagen Beetle 30 ft away.
The bomb that killed him was packed into the door panel of a Chevy Nova parked next to his Lincoln, detonated by remote control the moment he opened his driver’s side door. The blast shattered windows in apartments 200 yards away. Patients inside the dental office where he just had a cleaning thought a plane had crashed.
Investigators arriving on scene would later describe the smell. Burnt hair, cordite, and something else they couldn’t name. This wasn’t just another mob hit. Danny Green was the Irish kid from Cullenwood who told the entire Cleveland mafia to their faces that he didn’t recognize their authority. He survived seven professional assassination attempts.
He wore green to his own meetings. He answered the door with a 38 in his waistband and a smile on his face. He worked as a top echelon informant for the FBI while running a violent extortion crew that taxed every mob bookmaker in northern Ohio. And the bomb that finally killed him would trigger a federal investigation producing 22 organized crime convictions and effectively erasing the Cleveland crime family from American history.
This is the story of how one Irish street fighter born in an orphanage became the only man in 20th century America to publicly humiliate Lacosa Nostra and live long enough to make them pay for it. Not the Hollywood version, the documented one, the one with the FBI files, the wiretapped transcripts, and the body count.
But here’s what the film didn’t tell you. The hit that killed Danny Green was never supposed to happen at that dentist’s office. The Cleveland mob had been trying to kill this man for over a year. Bombs in his car, bombs under his porch, snipers, contract killers flown in from out of state. Every single attempt failed. And the reason it finally worked on October 6th was because of one mistake Green made that morning.
A mistake so small, so human that it cost him everything. You have to understand who Danny Green was before he was Danny Green. He was born November 14th, 1933 in Cleveland, Ohio. His mother died bringing him into the world. His father drowning in grief and alcohol gave him up. Dany spent his first years in Paradale Orphanage on the west side, a Catholic institution run by nuns who beat the Irish out of the Irish boys.
By the time his father remarried and brought him home, Dany was already what the streets would later call him a loner, a fighter, a kid who didn’t flinch. He grew up in Colinwood, East Side, a neighborhood split between Italians who’d come over from Sicily and Calabria and Irish who’d come up from the steel mills. The two groups didn’t mix. They fought.
They fought over girls. They fought over corners. They fought because that’s what kids from Collwood did. And Danny Green, 6 feet tall by 15, blonde hair and blue eyes and fists like cinder blocks, won every single one of those fights. He joined the Marines at 17, served in the early 1950s, came back with a discipline most street kids never developed.
He could plan, he could wait, he could disappear. He worked the docks, the International Long Shoreman’s Association, Local 1063. By 1961, he was the Union President. He got there the only way you got there on the Cleveland waterfront in those years. Through fear, fists, and an absolute refusal to lose, Danny shook down ship captains. He muscled out rivals.
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He arranged labor at premium rates and pocketed the difference. The members loved him because he got results. The shipping companies hated him because he was costing them millions. And somewhere in those early years, federal investigators started watching. In 1964, Danny Green was indicted for embezzling members dues. The case was thin.
The evidence was circumstantial. But here’s where the story takes its first dark turn. To save himself from a federal conviction, Danny Green cut a deal. He became an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, top echelon, the highest classification the bureau had at the time. reserved for sources with direct access to organized crime leadership.
From 1964 onward, Danny Green was working both sides, running with criminals, reporting to agents, living a double life that would have killed a lesser man inside of 6 months. He survived because he was useful. To the FBI, he was a window into the Italian organization that had controlled Cleveland since Prohibition. to the mob. He was an Irish enforcer who could do the kind of wet work the maid guys preferred to outsource.
He worked for John Nardy, an outlaw teamster official with connections to the Cleveland family. He worked for Shandor Burns, the legendary Jewish numbers boss who’d ruled Cleveland’s underworld for 40 years. Burns took a liking to Dany, treated him like a son, loaned him money, introduced him around. That relationship would end with a car bomb.
By the early 1970s, Cleveland’s organized crime landscape was a mess. The old boss, John Scalish, had run things quietly since 1944. He never made new members. He kept the family small, disciplined, and almost invisible to law enforcement. But Scalish died on the operating table during heart surgery in May 1976.
His replacement, James Lavolei, known on the street as Jack White, inherited a family that hadn’t initiated new soldiers in 32 years. They were old. They were tired, and they were about to face a problem they were completely unequipped to handle. That problem was Danny Green. Green had spent the early 70s building something the Cleveland mob hadn’t seen coming.
He called it the Celtic Club. On paper, it was an Irish heritage organization. In reality, it was a criminal enterprise. Green recruited Irish kids from Colinwood, Westside Long Shoreman, ex-marines, anybody with a grudge against the Italians and a willingness to use violence. He set up shop above a bar he owned at 1505 Waterlue Road.
He flew a green flag. He answered his phone with the words top of the morning and he started taxing the mob. Here’s how the scheme worked. Cleveland had a thriving illegal gambling industry, numbers operations, sports books, card games. Most of it was run by independents who paid tribute to the Italian family for protection.
Green approached these bookmakers one by one and made them an offer. Pay him a percentage. Not the mob, him. In exchange, he’d guarantee their operations against muscle from any direction, including the Italians. The bookmakers, looking at this six-foot Irish enforcer with a reputation for violence and a crew of loyal Celtic warriors behind him, did the math.
They paid. By 1975, Danny Green was reportedly collecting between $8,000 and $15,000 a week in tribute, tax-free, untraceable, and every dollar of it was coming directly out of the Cleveland mob’s pocket. Lavali was furious. But he had a problem. Going to war with Danny Green meant going to war with a man who had FBI protection, federal informant status, and a crew of Marines who’d already proven they could kill.
The Cleveland family hadn’t fought a real street war in decades. They didn’t have the manpower. They didn’t have the killers. So, Lavoi did what made guys always do when they have a problem they can’t solve internally. He reached out. He reached out to Tony Solerno in New York, to the Genevese family, asking permission to import contract killers.
He reached out to the Gambinos. He reached out to anyone who’d listen. And the response from New York was telling. The five families looked at Cleveland, looked at this Danny Green situation and essentially said, “You handle it.” Cleveland was beneath their notice. A small market family with old leadership and bigger problems.
They were on their own. The first attempt on Danny Green’s life came on May 12th, 1975. Shandor Burns, the Jewish numbers boss who’d once mentored Dany, had finally had enough of his protege ambitions. Burns had loaned Green $75,000 to invest in a cheat sheet gambling operation. Green took the money. The operation collapsed. Burns wanted his money back.
Green refused. Burns put out a contract. Green found out about it. On March 29th, 1975, a holy Saturday, Shondor Burns walked out of Christy’s lounge on West 25th Street, got into his Lincoln Continental, turned the key, and the explosion blew his torso through the roof of the car. Pieces of Shandor Burns landed across three city blocks.
Green was never charged, but on the street, everybody knew the Irishman had killed the legend. 44 days later, on May 12th, the mob hit back. Green was leaving his apartment at 1160 East146th Street when a bomb went off in the entryway. The blast threw him across the parking lot. He landed on his feet, walked back to the wreckage, picked up his rosary from the rubble, held it up to the gathering reporters, and said, “The McGears are with me. Nobody can hurt me.
” >> That moment, more than any other, defined Danny Green’s mythology. The cameras were rolling. The papers ran the photo. Cleveland watched an Irishman survive a mob bomb and walk away, making the sign of the cross. The Italian organization was humiliated, national, and the war was on. Over the next 29 months, the Cleveland mafia tried to kill Danny Green seven times.
They put a bomb under his car. It failed to detonate. They tried a sniper outside his apartment. The shooter missed. They sent a contract killer named Enus Krennic to ambush him in the parking lot of a tennis club. Green saw him coming. Drew first and Krennic fled the state. They tried again and again. And every single attempt failed.
There were reasons for this. Danny Green was a Marine. He varied his routines obsessively. He swept his cars for bombs every single morning. He kept a loaded 38 on his nightstand and a shotgun by his front door. He read mail in his bathtub because he believed water would absorb the blast from a letter bomb. He never ate at the same restaurant twice in a week.
He had loyal Celtic Club members watching his apartment 24 hours a day. But the bigger reason was the Cleveland mob itself. Lavi’s crew was old, out of practice. The bomb makers they were using were sloppy. The shooters they hired were freelancers, not professionals. Every attempt revealed how degraded the family had become.
In May 1977, John Nardy, Green’s old Teamster ally turned enemy, was killed by a car bomb outside the Teamster’s local 410 office on East 22nd Street. Nardy had been Green’s partner in musling the Italians. Now he was dead. The message was clear. The mob was getting closer. Then came October 6th. Danny Green had a dental appointment that morning, Dr.
Phyllis Klein’s office on the second floor of the Brainer Place Medical Building in Lindhurst. He’d been getting work done for weeks, a crown, a cleaning routine. He’d told too many people about it. He’d kept the appointment on his calendar. He’d driven the same route to the dentist multiple times.
And the Cleveland mob finally had figured out his pattern. The man hired to do the job was Ray Ferrito, a hitman from Erie, Pennsylvania, brought in specifically because the Cleveland crew couldn’t pull it off themselves. Ferto was 48 years old. Career criminal, quiet, methodical. He’d been promised $100,000 and a button.
Full membership in Lacosa Nostra. The job was simple. Pack a bomb into the door panel of a stolen Chevy Nova. Park it next to Green’s Lincoln in the medical building lot. Wait for Green to come out of the dentist’s office, detonate by remote control. At 3:12 in the afternoon, Danny Green walked out of his dental appointment, crossed the parking lot, and reached for the door handle of his Lincoln.
Frito, sitting in a getaway car driven by Ronald Kurabia across the lot, pressed the button. The bomb in the Nova next to Green exploded. Green died instantly. The explosion was so powerful it crushed the side of his Lincoln like an aluminum can. But Ferto and Carabia made a mistake, a small one. As they fled the scene, a witness in a neighboring building wrote down their license plate.
That plate traced to a rental car. The rental car traced to Ray Farrito. Within 72 hours, Frito was in custody. And here is where the story turns again. Because the man hired to kill Danny Green did exactly what Danny Green had been doing for 13 years. He flipped. Ray Farerito looked at the murder one charge in front of him. Looked at the Cleveland family that had promised him a button and was now going to let him take the fall.
And he made the same calculation Danny Green had made. In 1964, he sat down with federal agents. He gave them everything. The names, the dates, the chain of command, the conspiracy. He named James Liavoli. He named Angelo Lonardo the underboss. He named Ronald Kurabia. He named soldiers, associates, and bomb makers stretching from Cleveland to Pennsylvania.
The investigation that followed was the largest organized crime prosecution in Ohio history. Federal grand juries convened. Rico indictments came down. Between 1978 and 1982, prosecutors used Farito’s testimony, combined with the FBI files Danny Green had been generating for over a decade to convict 22 members and associates of the Cleveland crime family.
James Lavolei got life. He died in federal custody in 1985. Angelo Lonardo facing 103 years in prison became the highest ranking maid member to ever turn government witness up to that point. He testified against the commission in New York. He testified against the Genevese family. His cooperation helped Rudolph Giuliani build the case that destroyed the five families.
The Cleveland Mafia, as a functioning criminal organization, ceased to exist by 1983. They’ve never recovered. They’re a footnote now, a historical curiosity. Cleveland today has organized crime, but the family that ran the city from prohibition through the Carter administration is gone permanently. So what does it mean? It means a kid from a Catholic orphanage, raised by nuns, trained by the Marines, with a chip on his shoulder the size of Lake Erie, took on an entire crime family and won.
Not because he was smarter, not because he had more men. He won because he understood something the Italians never did. He understood that the FBI was not the enemy. He understood that information was a weapon. He understood that surviving meant trading something. And Danny Green traded everything. His friends, his allies, his mentor, Shandor Burns.
He gave them all up piece by piece to federal agents who used his information to build cases that would outlive him by decades. Danny Green is remembered now as a folk hero. The Kill the Irishman movie, the books, the documentaries. He’s been mythologized into something pure. The Irish underdog who fought the Waps. The street kid who wouldn’t bend.
The man who walked away from bombs with a rosary in his hand. And there’s truth in that. He did fight. He did survive. He did die because he refused to back down. But the documented truth is more complicated. Danny Green was an FBI informant for 13 years. He participated in the murder of his own mentor. He extorted bookmakers.
He ran his neighborhood like a private kingdom. And the only reason the Cleveland mafia was destroyed wasn’t his courage. It was the federal investigation his death made possible. The mob killed him. And in killing him, they killed themselves. That’s the real story of kill the Irishman.
Not redemption, not justice, just the brutal mathematics of organized crime in America. You can fight the mob. You can humiliate them. You can outlast seven of their bombs and 72 of their threats. But in the end, the only people who win are the ones in suits taking notes. Denny Green died at age 43. He left behind three children.
He left behind a legend. He left behind a crime family in ruins and a federal investigation that would echo for a generation. The man who killed him, Ray Ferto, served less than 5 years and died of natural causes in 2004. The man who ordered the hit, James Lavoi, died in a federal cell. The neighborhood Danny Green loved, Cullenwood, is still standing.
The bar on Waterl Road is gone. The Celtic Club is gone. The flag he flew is gone. What remains is the lesson. In the end, the toughest Irishman in Cleveland died the same way every mob target dies, from a small mistake. A predictable routine, a dentist’s appointment. He should have moved. If you found this story compelling, hit subscribe.
