On October 6, 1977, at 1:30 in the afternoon, Danny Greene walked out of a dentist’s office in Lyndhurst, Ohio. He was still under the influence of medication after having a tooth removed. A cotton wad sat in his jaw. The autumn sun reflected off the suburban parking lot. He never reached his Lincoln.
A blue Chevy Nova parked next to him exploded. The blast tore Greene’s left arm from his body and threw it forty feet across the asphalt. His severed limb landed on the hood of another car. A gold Celtic cross was still tangled between his fingers. The rest of his body was found on the pavement, smoking and barely recognizable. Investigators estimated the blast radius at over one hundred feet. Windows shattered across three city blocks. Time of death: 1:23 p.m. The Irishman was finally dead.
This was not just another mob hit. Daniel John Patrick Greene was the man who declared war on the entire Cosa Nostra and nearly won. A former dockworker, union boss turned gangster, and Celtic warrior who wore green every day. He hung the Irish flag over his fortress and dared the Italian mob to come and kill him. They tried again and again. They bombed his home. They shot at him in the street. They planted bombs under his car. Nothing worked.
Danny Greene believed God was protecting him. The Cleveland Mafia began to believe it too. This is the story of how one stubborn Irishman turned a single American city into a war zone. How thirty-six bombs exploded in Cuyahoga County in 1976 alone. How an embarrassing, chaotic, and impossible-to-ignore regional turf war finally forced the federal government to unleash a weapon that would dismantle the entire American Mafia.
The film *Kill the Irishman* gave you the romantic side. It gave you the legend. But it did not give you the truth. The real Cleveland war was not just a conflict between two men. It was the moment the FBI realized the old rules no longer worked. When it was over, the playbook for the RICO Act—the law that would bring down the bosses of the Five Families in New York—had been written in Cleveland blood.
To understand how bad things got, you have to go back to May 22, 1976. The Cleveland Mafia had just lost its longtime boss, John Scalish, on an operating table during heart surgery. Scalish was old school. Quiet money. Teamsters pension funds. Las Vegas skim. He ran the family for thirty-two years without a single public scandal. He died without naming a successor. He had not even properly inducted new members. The Cleveland family, once one of the most powerful in America, had become a retirement home for old men.
His replacement was James Licavoli, seventy-two years old. Hunchbacked, bald, cheap. A man who clipped grocery coupons and drove a beat-up Chevy despite having millions hidden away. The family called him Jack White, sometimes Blackie. He was a cousin of the Licavoli family in Detroit and had worked as a soldier in Cleveland for half a century. He did not want to be boss. He accepted the job because there was no one else. The first thing waiting on his desk was a problem named Danny Greene.
Greene was born on November 14, 1933. His mother abandoned him at birth in a Cleveland hospital. He grew up in a Catholic orphanage on the east side of the city. By age ten, he was fighting Italian kids in Collinwood for the right to walk certain streets. He joined the Marines at seventeen. He came out a heavyweight boxing champion. By the early 1960s, he was president of Local 1317, the shipping union on the Cleveland docks. He bled the union dry, embezzled dues, and sold no-show jobs. The *Plain Dealer* published a series of exposés. In 1964, he was indicted and removed from the union. But he never served real time because by then he was on the FBI payroll as an informant.
This is the part the movie did not make clear. Greene turned on rival mob figures in the mid-1960s. The Bureau gave him cover. He used that cover to build his own gang. He called them the Celtic Club. Hungry young Irish kids from Collinwood. Keith Ritson, the enforcer. Brian O’Donnell and Kevin McTaggart. Plus an unstable, brilliant bomb maker from the west side named Art Snepger, whom Greene eventually killed when he suspected him of cooperating.
Greene ran his operations from a trailer parked at 4601 Waterloo Road in the heart of Collinwood, the Italian neighborhood, right under the mob’s nose. He flew the Irish flag over it. He blasted Irish folk music through loudspeakers. He hung a sign that read “Future Home of the Celtic Club.” It was a blatant challenge in the middle of Mafia territory. Every member of the Cleveland gang drove past it every day.
By 1976, Greene was running bookmaking operations, shaking down contractors, and aligning with a union official named John Nardi. Nardi was the nephew of a former Cleveland boss. He was out of the family’s good graces. He thought Jack White was weak. He thought the old guard was finished. He thought he and Greene could take the city together. Maybe they were right. The Cleveland family by then had about twenty official members. Half were over seventy. The other half were under indictment.
Nardi made the first move. He reached out to a Cleveland soldier named Leo Moceri. Moceri was sixty-eight, a longtime underboss and old-school enforcer who had done time for murder in the 1930s. Nardi asked him to come to a meeting at the Italian-American Brotherhood Club. Moceri drove up from Akron on August 22, 1976. He checked into a hotel near the meeting site. He left that evening. He never returned. His Mercury Marquis was found three days later in a Howard Johnson parking lot. Blood in the trunk. No body. To this day, no one knows where Leo Moceri is buried. Some say a quarry in Pennsylvania. Others say the foundation of a building in Cleveland. What is documented is this: he disappeared. And the war began the next morning.
Jack White called his captains to a meeting. The mood was murderous. Moceri was a friend. He was family. You cannot make an underboss disappear and get away with it. Licavoli issued a contract on both Greene and Nardi that same week. The price was fifteen thousand dollars per head. A low number even for 1976. Because Jack White was cheap. And because he assumed any soldier in Cleveland could handle the job.
Here is the truth about the attempts on Danny Greene’s life. No one in Cleveland knew how to do it. The first attempt came in October 1976. Two soldiers, Enos Kirnic and Eugene Sassano, were assigned the job. They knew Greene parked his Lincoln behind his apartment at 1225 Shore Center Drive. They attached a bomb to the ignition. But they wired it wrong. Greene started the car. Nothing happened. The bomb fell from under the engine block onto his driveway. Intact. Greene picked it up, put it in a coffee can, and called his FBI handler. Then he held a press conference.
He stood on the grass in front of his fortified home. He smiled. He said, “The Italians are trying to kill me. They can’t even make a bomb that works.” That was the lead story on the six o’clock news. That was Danny Greene. He did not hide. He showed off. He answered his phone saying, “Danny Greene, the Irishman here.” He drove his green Lincoln around Cleveland. He wore green pants, green shirts, green socks. He wore a gold Celtic cross. He told reporters openly that the Mafia was afraid of him. Because in 1976, they were.
Now you understand why Cleveland became Bomb City, U.S.A. In 1976 alone, thirty-six bombs exploded in Cuyahoga County. Twenty-one of them went off inside Cleveland city limits. The ATF tripled its staff in northeast Ohio. The Cleveland police bomb squad worked seven days a week. The targets were not just Greene. They were Nardi’s partners, rival contractors, restaurants suspected of disloyalty, and cars belonging to gang soldiers on the wrong side of internal disputes. The Italian faction became so paranoid they started bombing each other. A soldier named John Key was killed when a bomb meant for someone else exploded in the trunk of his car on Mayfield Road. Another low-level associate, Joseph Giamo, lost both legs when he opened the wrong package.
The newspapers tracked the count like baseball scores. Bombs in July. Bombs in August. Cleveland was in financial default by 1978, the first major American city to go bankrupt since the Depression. The bombings were one reason businesses fled downtown. Hotels emptied. Conventions were canceled. It was the killing of a city, slowly and by dynamite.
Nardi’s hit came first. May 17, 1977. John Nardi walked out of the Teamsters Local 410 office on Bagley Road. He got into his Oldsmobile. The car parked next to him exploded. Nardi was killed instantly. The bombers used a remote detonator from across the street. It was the first time the Cleveland family showed they had finally learned how to do things properly. The reason they learned was that they brought in outside help.
Jack White finally admitted he could not kill Danny Greene with local talent. So he called Los Angeles. He called a soldier named Ray Ferritto. Ferritto was fifty-eight. Thin, bald, born in Erie, Pennsylvania, with gang connections stretching to the Pittsburgh and Los Angeles families. He was a professional hitman. He had committed twelve murders over thirty years. He had an ulcer. He chewed antacids like candy. He smoked marijuana to calm his nerves before contracts. He was tired. He wanted to retire. Licavoli offered him seventy-five thousand dollars and a piece of Cleveland’s action to come east and finish Greene. Ferritto took the job because he needed the money.
He arrived in Cleveland in early summer 1977. He was paired with a local soldier, Ronald Carabbia, nicknamed “Ronnie the Crab,” who knew Greene’s movements. They tried to plant a bomb in May. Greene moved his car. They tried again in July. Greene changed his routine. They tried again in August. Greene never showed. Greene was lucky. Greene was careful. Greene was, by his own account, blessed.
But Ferritto had something the others did not. He had patience. And he had critical intelligence the FBI would not learn until later. The Cleveland family had a source inside the phone company. They were getting Greene’s incoming calls in real time. When Greene made a dentist appointment for October 6 at Brainard Place, the killers knew before the dentist did.
The day before, October 5, Ferritto and Carabbia drove a stolen blue Chevy Nova into the parking lot. They parked it near where Greene’s Lincoln was expected to be. The Nova contained a magnetic bomb on the passenger door packed with C4 and steel balls. The trigger was a remote control operated from across the lot. They waited. Greene arrived at 12:45 p.m. He was relaxed. He had taken a sedative at the dentist. He came out around 1:20. He stopped to talk to another patient in the lot for a moment. He walked toward his Lincoln. Ferritto pressed the button. The Nova exploded. Greene died instantly. He was forty-three years old. The Celtic cross was found seventy feet from his body, still on its chain.
Here is where the war should have ended. Greene was dead. Nardi was dead. The Italians had won. Jack White was supposed to be the victor. Instead, the murder of Danny Greene was the beginning of the end for the Cleveland family. Because Ferritto and Carabbia had been seen. A woman named Debbie Smith was sitting in the parking lot waiting for her own doctor’s appointment. She noticed the two men. She noticed the Nova. She wrote down the license plate. She gave it to Lyndhurst police that evening.
Within seventy-two hours, the FBI had identified Ferritto. Within thirty days, he was in federal custody. Within ninety days, Ray Ferritto did the one thing every Mafioso swears he will never do. He flipped. He sat with federal agents and told them everything. He named Licavoli. He named Carabbia. He named the underboss, Angelo Lonardo, known as “Big Ange,” who personally approved the hit. He named Tony Liberatore, a Cleveland soldier involved in the planning. He explained how the contract worked. He explained the seventy-five-thousand-dollar details. He explained the radio detonator mechanism. He explained the phone company source. He gave the federal government a road map to the entire Cleveland family.
And here the story stops being about Cleveland and starts being about the entire American Mafia. In spring 1978, the local Cuyahoga County prosecutor took the case to state court. Jack White and his men were tried for the murder of Danny Greene. They were acquitted. The jury did not believe Ferritto. They did not trust the witnesses. They did not want to convict. It was the third major Mafia trial in Cleveland that decade to end in acquittal. The state had failed.
The state’s failure was always inevitable. Gang trials in gang cities rarely went the prosecution’s way. But the federal government had a new weapon, passed in 1970, that had sat unused in American law for about eight years. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO, drafted by Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakey. It allowed prosecutors to indict an entire criminal enterprise, not just individual crimes. It allowed them to use murders, even those acquitted at the state level, as predicate acts in a federal pattern of racketeering. It allowed twenty-year sentences per count. It allowed forfeiture of all assets.
No one had used RICO against the Mafia before. Federal prosecutors did not believe in it. They thought it was too complex, too risky, untested. They preferred the old traditional cases. Tax evasion, robbery, loan sharking, one man at a time. Then they looked at Cleveland. They had Ferritto, a hitman willing to testify. They had Carabbia, the getaway driver, willing to cooperate after a state murder conviction. They had years of documented bombings to charge as racketeering acts. They had Lonardo, the underboss, who would eventually flip and become the highest-ranking Mafioso to cooperate with the government up to that time. They had a city turned into a war zone. The American public was watching. The pressure was political. The case made itself.
In 1982, Jack White Licavoli, Angelo Lonardo, John Calandra, and other Cleveland men and associates were convicted under RICO of running a criminal enterprise. Licavoli was sentenced to seventeen years. Lonardo was sentenced to life. The Cleveland family ceased to exist as a functioning Cosa Nostra organization.
But the real significance was not in the convictions. It was in proving the concept. Federal organized crime task forces in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Kansas City were watching the Cleveland trial. They saw the model. They saw how informants could be used. They saw how predicate acts could be stacked. They saw how a hitman like Ferritto could bring down an entire family. They took notes.
Within four years, every major Mafia family in America was facing RICO indictments. The Commission Case in New York in 1986, the trial that brought down the heads of the Genovese, Lucchese, and Colombo families simultaneously, was modeled directly on the Cleveland scenario. G. Robert Blakey, the law’s author, consulted on the Commission Case. Rudy Giuliani, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, described the Cleveland trial as, quote, proof that RICO worked. End quote.
By 1992, every boss of the Five Families in New York was in federal prison. So were the bosses of Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Kansas City. It started in a parking lot in Lyndhurst. It started with a magnetic bomb on a blue Chevy Nova. It started with a stubborn Irishman who refused to die quietly, and an old Mafia boss who finally killed him, only to pay for it with the collapse of his entire organization.
Ray Ferritto lived under the Witness Protection Program until 2004. He died of natural causes in Erie, Pennsylvania, in a modest house, owing no one anything. He told a reporter near the end of his life, quote, “I killed a lot of people. Greene was just one of them. To me, it was just a job.” End quote. He never showed any remorse. He was buried under his real name.
Angelo Lonardo, the underboss who approved the Greene hit, was sentenced to one hundred and three years. He flipped on his own gang in 1983. He testified against Cleveland, against the Genovese family, and against the Commission. He entered the Witness Protection Program. He died in 2006, having outlived nearly every man he betrayed.
Jack White Licavoli died in federal prison in 1985 at age eighty-one. He showed no remorse either. He never paid a cent in restitution. His estate was valued at less than ten thousand dollars. He spent his whole life chasing a fortune he never enjoyed.
Cleveland never regained its status as a Mafia city. The remaining members died or aged out. Racketeering moved to street gangs, motorcycle clubs, and Russian outfits. Today, no Cosa Nostra family operates in Cleveland. The FBI’s organized crime squad in Cleveland was disbanded in the mid-2000s. There was nothing left to investigate.
As for Danny Greene, he is buried in St. John’s Cemetery in Cleveland under a simple Celtic cross. His grave is still visited today. People leave four-leaf clovers. They leave Irish flags. They leave bottles of whiskey. He has become, in a strange way, a folk hero. The Irishman who stood up to the Mafia and forced them to bring in an outsider to kill him. The man who turned an entire city into a battlefield and lost his life, but won his legend.
But that is the romance. That is Hollywood. The real story is harsher. Danny Greene was not a hero. He was an FBI informant who used federal protection to build a criminal empire. He extorted contractors. He murdered one of his own partners, Art Snepger, in cold blood. He fed agents information while running illegal operations they pretended not to see. He was, like Jack White, like Ray Ferritto, like every man in this story, calculating his own profits. He was just better at the math.
What the Cleveland war actually proved was this. The American Mafia was already dying by 1976. The old code was gone. Discipline had faded. The top earners were aging. The young men could no longer be trusted. One Irishman with a press agent and a tape recorder managed to humiliate one of America’s oldest crime families for eighteen months before they could kill him. And when they killed him, they did it so recklessly that they handed the federal government the case that would dismantle every Cosa Nostra family in the country.
Cleveland was not a sideshow. Cleveland was an autopsy. Everything that came later—the Commission Case, the Pizza Connection, the Gotti trials, the destruction of the Chicago Outfit—all of it traces back to the lessons learned in a Lyndhurst parking lot on a sunny October afternoon, when the Irishman’s luck finally ran out. The mob killed Danny Greene to save itself. Instead, they killed themselves. That is the real ending. Not glory. Not honor. Not revenge. Just the slow, steady stupidity of men who did not realize the world had changed, and that the bombs they planted under each other’s cars were actually being planted under their own organization.