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| Danny Greene |
Last time out, I talked about Newport, Kentucky as the epicenter of Cincinnati's organized crime. I also mentioned the local mob was beholden to both Chicago's Outfit and the Cleveland Mafia. While Newport had been a prototype for Las Vegas, benefiting from the backing of the likes of Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, Ohio's main Mafia operated out of Cleveland. And like New York City, Cleveland not only had more than one crime family, it had an Irish mob.
Or rather, a man named Danny Greene built an Irish mob from scratch. Greene, as Irish as it gets in the mid-century Irish immigrant communities. He was a second-generation American who grew up in the city's rough-and-tumble Collinwood neighborhood, where he tangled with Italian kids. Hence both his association with La Cosa Nostra and his rivalry with it.
Greene was one of the city's more colorful characters in a town that included a mayor whose hair caught fire not long after the Cuyahoga River did in 1969. As a youth, Greene ran loan-sharking operations, much to the annoyance of the two crime families. He joined the Marines for a time before returning to Cleveland to work at the port. There, he rose to become head of the longshoreman's union. Already, Greene was branding. Everything about him was Celtic. He even wore green suits and painted his office green. (The name Greene didn't hurt, either.) Unions were rife with mob involvement. Future Teamsters president and mob turncoat Jackie Presser operated out of Cleveland, and Greene became friends with the most infamous mob union leader, Detroit's Jimmy Hoffa. While Greene was never tied to Hoffa's disappearance, it's a sure bet he knew what happened.
After leaving the union, Greene returned to what he knew best: loan sharking, adding numbers rackets to his list of services. He soon built a mob from Irish toughs, Blacks shut out of organized crime, and disaffected Mafiosi. Soon, Danny Greene rivaled the two Cosa Nostra families in Cleveland. And one of them invited him to take sides in their turf war.
And why wouldn't they. Greene supplied muscle for the Mafia even as they plotted to undermine him. As the turf wars of the early 1970s heated up, he developed a specialty: Car bombs. Actually, just bombs. But cars were his most frequent means of spreading targets' presence...and body parts...over a given city block.
Yet Greene used his campaign of terror to expand his own territory. Mayfield Road and Little Italy might have been off-limits, but if Greene saw a territory elsewhere in the city or beyond, he helped himself, muscling out whatever crew held that neighborhood. As one can imagine, that did not go over well. Greene was no fool, though. He often changed cars and his schedule to throw of would-be assassins. However, Greene would be done in by a visit to a dentist in the suburb of Lyndhurst.
One of the mob families found out Greene had an appointment. So did they rig his car to explode? No. Instead, they rigged the car next to his to blow up by remote control. Greene came out of his appointment and headed for his car. As he passed the other car, it and Danny exploded. I recall coming home from school that day and sitting down to watch Eyewitness News that evening in 1977 when Ted Henry led off with Greene's murder. You'd have thought Elvis had died (and he did that year. Also huge news that summer.)
Over the years, I ran into people who knew Greene and did business with him, some who probably would not care for me writing this. But I'm not naming names. I forgot half of them anyway. One old gent I did know had met Greene in the longshoreman's union. He said Greene always bugged him to go to another bar with him, which he refused to do. The fatal bomb was not the first time someone tried to blow up Danny Greene, and my friend, an old codger who hung out at my uncle's gas station, did not want to get into any car driven by Greene. He recalled turning down one such invitation only for Greene to die by car blast the next day. You never know.
The Cleveland Mafia ceased to be in the 1990s. Between RICO and the loss of support from their patrons, the Genovese of New York, they were no longer sustainable. The remnants moved to the dead city of Youngstown, where they huddled with refugees of Pittsburgh's mob. What's there is a shell of the mob from the 1930s through the 1990s. One scion of one of the crime families made an attempt to revive it, but like Vegas, they've been squeezed out by corporations and major league sports. The last vestiges operated in the village of Brook Park near the former Ford Engine Plant. That neighborhood is about to become home to the Cleveland Browns' new domed stadium.
