On October 6, 1977, in the Cleveland suburb of Lyndhurst, Ohio, a 42-year-old man walked out of a dentist's office just after 3:00 in the afternoon and crossed the parking lot toward his Lincoln. He wore an open shirt and was in no particular hurry.
A Chevrolet Nova was parked beside his car. Inside its passenger door was a bomb. From across the road, a man watching pressed a button.
The man walking to his car was killed instantly. The explosion was heard for a considerable distance, and people came out of the surrounding buildings to look.
His name was Danny Greene, and for two years he had been the most talked-about man in Cleveland.
Greene had survived attempts on his life that had become almost a local joke. A bomb in his own car failed to go off. A bomb in the flat below his took out the building and left him alive. A man with a rifle missed.
He gave interviews. He handed out food in his neighborhood. He told reporters, in public and with his name attached, that the Italians could not kill him. On October 6, they killed him.
What makes the story remarkable is the man who did it. He was not from Cleveland. He had no history in the city, no crew there, no grudge against Danny Greene, and nobody in Cleveland knew his face. He had been brought in from 100 miles away for that specific purpose.
His name was Raymond Ferritto, and everybody called him Ray.
Ferritto was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1929. Erie is a lake city about 100 miles east of Cleveland, and it is not a Mafia town. It has never had a family of its own.
What Erie had was proximity. Cleveland on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, Buffalo up the shore, and men from Erie could be useful to all three precisely because they belonged to none of them.
For most of his working life, Ferritto was a thief. There is a version of these stories in which every man is a soldier in an organization, sworn in, ranked, taking orders down a chain. That is not what most of the people in this world actually were.
A great many of them were independent operators who did specific work for whoever needed it, and who belonged to nobody in particular. That is what made them useful, and it is also what made them disposable.
Ferritto was a burglar and a jewel thief, and he was very good at it. Being good at it meant one particular skill above all others: he was not memorable.
Think about what that trade requires. You have to sit in a car outside a building for six hours and have nobody notice you. You have to walk past a doorman and have him not describe you afterward. Everything about the work rewards a man who is ordinary to look at, calm, and forgettable.
That skill was exactly what the Cleveland crime family would eventually need, and it is why they sent for him.
Consider the problem from their side. By 1977, every man in the Cleveland organization was known. Their faces were in police files, their cars were logged, and the man they wanted to kill had spent two years studying exactly who they were.
Sending any of them was pointless. What they needed was a face that meant nothing to anybody in the city.
But something Ferritto did in 1969, eight years before Lyndhurst, explains how they knew his name in the first place.
In January of that year, in a parking lot near the airport in Los Angeles, a man named Julius Petro was shot in the head while sitting in a car. Petro was from Cleveland.
He was a violent and unpredictable man with a long record, and by the late 1960s he had made himself a problem to enough people that somebody decided he was finished. His reputation in that city went back to the 1940s, and he had been in and out of courtrooms for most of it.
He was the sort of man about whom people said, in the careful phrasing of the period, that he was not controlled by anybody. In that world, being uncontrolled is not a description of a personality. It is a status, and it is a temporary one.
Ray Ferritto shot him. He admitted it years later under oath.
Nobody was charged with the Petro killing for nine years. It sat as an open case in Los Angeles while the man who did it went home to Erie and carried on with his life.
That is worth pausing on, because it tells you what kind of asset Ferritto was to the people who used him. He had killed a man in a major American city and gone home, and for nearly a decade there was not so much as an interview.
Now come forward to the middle of the 1970s and to what was happening in Cleveland.
The boss of the Cleveland crime family, John Scalish, had run the city quietly for more than 30 years. He died in May 1976 after heart surgery, and he had made no arrangement whatsoever for what came next.
That is an extraordinary failure for a man in that position. There was no named successor and no agreed order.
Into that gap stepped James Licavoli, who everybody called Jack White, an old-school figure who had been around the organization his whole life. Against him stood two men who did not accept the arrangement at all.
One was John Nardi, a Teamsters official with his own long quarrel with the family. The other was Danny Greene.
What followed was not really a war between two organizations. It was a bombing campaign.
Cleveland in those years had so many car bombings that the national press had started calling it Bomb City. There were 37 of them in the county in a single year. People genuinely stood at their windows in the morning and watched their neighbors start their cars.
On May 17, 1977, John Nardi was killed by a bomb in a car parked beside his own outside the Teamsters office where he worked.
He was not a man who had been hiding. He went to the same office at roughly the same hours in the same car for years, because that is what a union official does. It is very hard to run an organization and be unpredictable at the same time. In the end, Nardi was killed by his own appointments diary.
That left Danny Greene on his own. It had also demonstrated the method: a bomb in the vehicle next to the target, detonated by somebody watching from a distance. You do not have to get near the man. You do not have to touch his car at all.
The problem was Greene himself. He was careful in a way that Nardi had not been, and the Cleveland family had already failed to kill him several times and made itself look ridiculous doing it.
So they went outside the city and they sent for Ray Ferritto.
There is a plainness to that decision worth noticing. They did not send a specialist or a stranger from another country. They telephoned a man in Erie whom several of them had known for 20 years and asked him to drive over.
He was brought in with a man from Youngstown named Ronald Carabbia, and the two of them spent weeks on the problem. They did not sit in cars outside Greene's home, which was watched. They worked out the one thing a careful man cannot control: an appointment.
Danny Greene could vary his route and his hours and the cars he used. What he could not change was the fact that he had a dentist, and that his dentist had written the time down in a book.
On October 6, 1977, they knew where he would be and when. They put a bomb in the door of a Chevrolet Nova and parked it beside Greene's car. They waited across the road with a remote trigger, and when he walked out of the building, they used it.
It worked exactly as designed, and then it fell apart within days over something nobody could have planned for.
A witness had seen the Nova, thought it was out of place, and written down what he saw. There was a description of the men in it. There was a partial on a plate. It went into an investigation that was, by that point in 1977, extremely motivated.
Ray Ferritto had spent 30 years being unmemorable, and on the one day it mattered most, somebody remembered him.
He was identified. He was arrested. And then he learned something that changed everything: the people who had brought him in had decided that he was a loose end.
Put yourself in his position for a moment, because it is a genuinely narrow spot. He had done the job he was sent to do. He had done it competently for men who had failed to do it themselves, and the reward for that was that the organization which employed him now considered him a problem to be removed, precisely because he was the one man who could describe how the whole thing had been arranged.
There was no version of loyalty available to him that ended with him alive.
So Ray Ferritto did what almost nobody in these stories does. He went to the government, and he told them everything.
The thing about his testimony is that it was not a rumor or a piece of hearsay. He had been in the car. He had been in the rooms. He could describe who asked, who agreed, who paid, and how much, and he could do it in the first person, which is the only kind of evidence that really frightens an organization like that.
He testified about Danny Greene. He testified about Julius Petro, nine years afterward, in a case that had gone cold in Los Angeles. He testified about the men in Cleveland who had sent for him.
That last part deserves saying slowly. He gave evidence about a murder he had committed himself in another state that nobody had ever charged him with, and that nobody was ever going to solve. He put it on the record voluntarily because the arrangement he had made required all of it.
The result was not clean. It rarely is.
In the state trial over the Greene killing, several of the men he named were acquitted, including Angelo Lonardo, who was one of the most senior figures in the Cleveland organization at the time.
But the case Ferritto opened did not stop there. The federal government came back at Cleveland with racketeering charges that his account had made possible. James Licavoli was convicted and died in prison. The organization he had fought to take over never recovered.
And Angelo Lonardo, the man acquitted in the Greene trial, was convicted in a narcotics case a few years later. Facing the certainty of dying in prison, he made exactly the same calculation Ferritto had made. He became a government witness himself.
At the time, he was the highest-ranking American Mafia figure ever to do so, and what he gave the government went far beyond Cleveland.
So the line runs like this. The Cleveland family decided to kill Danny Greene. To do it, they hired an outsider. The outsider was caught, was marked for death by the people who hired him, and told the government everything. His testimony began the process that put the leadership in prison, and one of that leadership then turned as well. What he gave up damaged families in half a dozen cities.
Killing Danny Greene worked perfectly, and it destroyed them.
As for Ray Ferritto, he did what he had always done. He went home.
He was in the federal witness program for a period, and he did not care for it, and he left it, and returned to Erie, Pennsylvania, and lived there under his own name.
Men leave that program more often than people imagine. It requires a person to give up his town, his name, his family's name, and every person he has ever known in exchange for a life somewhere he has no reason to be. A fair number of them decide that the risk of going home is the smaller price.
That is the detail people find hardest to believe. The man who killed Danny Greene, who testified against the Cleveland crime family, and helped put its boss in prison for life, went back to the town he was born in and stayed there in the open for the rest of his life. Nobody ever came for him.
He gave the occasional interview. By the accounts of people who met him in those years, he was a calm and rather ordinary man to talk to, which was of course the whole basis of his career.
He died in Erie in 2004 at 75, of natural causes, in the town where he was born.
There is a film about Danny Greene. There is a book about Danny Greene. Every year somebody makes a documentary about the Irishman who could not be killed, and in every one of them the last 10 minutes belong to the bomb in the parking lot in Lyndhurst.
The man who pressed the button is a footnote in all of them. He is the only person in this entire story who died old at home of nothing in particular.