On October 6, 1977, in Lyndhurst, Ohio, a quiet suburb east of Cleveland, a man walked out of a dentist’s office and crossed the parking lot toward his Lincoln. He was 42 years old, wearing an open shirt, and in no particular hurry. A Chevrolet Nova sat parked next to his car, and a bomb was hidden inside its passenger door.
A man watching from across the road pressed a button. The blast killed the man instantly and was heard for a considerable distance. People came out of surrounding buildings to look.
The victim was Danny Greene. For two years, he had been the most talked-about man in Cleveland. He had survived attempts on his life that had become almost a local joke: a bomb in his own car that failed to go off, a bomb in the flat below his that destroyed the building but left him alive, and a rifleman who missed. He gave interviews, handed out food in his neighborhood, and told reporters publicly that the Italians could not kill him. On October 6, they did.
The man who killed him was not from Cleveland. He had no history in the city, no crew there, and no grudge against Greene. Nobody in Cleveland knew his face. He had been brought in from 100 miles away for that specific purpose.
His name was Raymond Ferritto. 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 was not a mafia town. It never had a family of its own. What it had was proximity: Cleveland on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, Buffalo up the shore. Men from Erie could be useful to all three precisely because they belonged to none.
For most of his working life, Ferritto was a thief. He was a burglar and a jewel thief, and he was very good at it. His most valuable skill was that he was not memorable. He could sit in a car outside a building for six hours and have nobody notice him. He could walk past a doorman and have him unable to describe him afterward. Everything about the work rewarded a man who was ordinary to look at, calm, and forgettable.
That skill is exactly what the Cleveland crime family needed by 1977. Every man in the 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. They needed a face that meant nothing to anybody in the city.
What made Ferritto known to them in the first place was something he did in 1969, eight years before Lyndhurst. 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, a violent and unpredictable man with a long record. By the late 1960s, he had made himself a problem to enough people that somebody decided he was finished. 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. 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. 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 sent for Ray Ferritto.
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. The two of them spent weeks on the problem, not sitting in cars outside Greene’s home, which was watched, but working out the one thing that 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 do was change 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. When he walked out of the building, they used it.
It worked exactly as designed. Then it fell apart within days over something nobody could have planned for. A witness had seen the Nova and thought it was out of place and had 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. On the one day it mattered most, somebody remembered him. He was identified. He was arrested.
Then he learned something that changed everything. The people who had brought him in had decided that he was a loose end. He had done the job he was sent to do, competently, for men who had failed to do it themselves. 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 told them everything. His testimony 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. 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, one of the most senior figures in the Cleveland organization at the time. But the case that 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.
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. 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.
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. He was, by the accounts of people who met him in those years, 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.