On the night before Easter Sunday, March 29, 1975, a heavy-set man in his late 60s walked out of a lounge on Detroit Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio, and got into his Lincoln. A blast tore through the car, throwing wreckage as far as the chain-link fence separating the bar from St. Malachi Church next door.
Police described it as among the most powerful explosions they had ever investigated. The man was killed instantly. There was very little left to recover.
His name was Alex Burns, but everyone in Cleveland had called him Shondor for 40 years. The newspapers had branded him public enemy number one back in the 1930s. He had been arrested and tried more times than anyone could count, and acquitted at nearly all of them.
He had survived decades of police commissioners who all promised to deal with him. What finally killed him was a bomb planted under his own car.
The story of his life sits between two explosions. When Shondor Burns was 13 years old, his mother was killed by one. Everything in the middle explains how you get from one blast to the other.
He was born Sandor Birnstein in 1905 in Austria-Hungary, the son of Hungarian Jews. The family came through Ellis Island in March 1907, when he was still an infant, and settled in Cleveland within a year. They lived in the Woodland Avenue district, a crowded immigrant quarter of Jewish and Italian families, tenements, small shops, and pushcarts.
Cleveland was a boom city of steel, rail, and shipping, and it took people in by the tens of thousands and put them to work at the bottom.
On November 9, 1920, his mother was in their apartment tending an illegal still. This was the first year of Prohibition, and making liquor at home was simply a way for poor immigrant households to bring in money. It was also genuinely dangerous.
A still is an open flame under a sealed vessel full of alcohol vapor in a tenement kitchen with children in the next room. Fires and explosions in those neighborhoods killed mostly women, because the women were left with the pot while the men worked. A gas connection failed and the still exploded.
Ilona Birnstein was burned over three-quarters of her body and died the following morning.
His father was arrested for bootlegging. In the space of about a day, a 13-year-old boy lost his mother to an explosion and his father to a prison cell. He went to a Jewish orphanage for a period, then to his grandmother.
Nobody has to draw a straight line from that to what he became, but it is worth knowing because of how he died and because of what the family had been doing when it happened. The thing that killed his mother was the illegal liquor business. The thing that made him was the illegal everything-else business.
He left school at 16, had a very short spell in the Navy, and by 1925 was in the Mansfield Reformatory for 18 months for stealing a car. He went in a car thief and came out with contacts, a reputation, and no realistic route back into ordinary work. At some point in those years, he added an S to the end of the family name, so it would not be exactly his father's.
By the middle of the 1930s, the Cleveland papers had settled on a description for him: public enemy number one. What he actually did for most of his life was protection. He sold himself as a labor consultant, which was a joke everybody understood.
A business paid him a regular sum, and in return, nothing happened to it. A business that declined found its windows broken, and if that did not settle the matter, something was set off outside it. He extended the same arrangement to gambling and the numbers rackets, and by the 1940s he was operating alongside the Italian crime family in Cleveland, not inside it because he could never be inside it, but next to it on terms.
He ran nightclubs. The best known was the 1011 Club on Chester Avenue downtown, and it was a real success. Good food, live music, and a clientele that included judges, politicians, and visiting names.
Men who spent their working day discussing what to do about Shondor Burns ate dinner in his restaurant in the evening.
In October 1944, a gas storage tank exploded on Cleveland's East Side and destroyed most of a neighborhood, killing 134 people. Burns kept the 1011 Club open around the clock and fed the emergency crews for nothing. He also sent food regularly to the local police station for officers working the late shift.
None of that was a change of heart. It was a strategy, and an extremely effective one. A man who was a menace and also the man who fed your firefighters is a much harder man to convict.
In 1944, the federal government interned him at a camp in Oklahoma as an enemy alien, because he had never taken American citizenship and his birthplace was now enemy territory. He had lived in Cleveland since he was a baby and had never known anywhere else. Being classified as a foreigner offended him for the rest of his life.
A man who had spent 20 years being described as public enemy number one was untroubled by that. What wounded him was being told he was not American.
The Don King case tells you the rest. In the 1950s, there was a young black numbers operator on the East Side named Don King, the same Don King who would later become the most famous boxing promoter in the world. His operation was making very serious money.
Burns wanted $200 a week from it as what was frankly called a street tax. King paid for a while, and then in December 1956, he stopped.
That took real nerve. He was a black man running a business the law would not protect because the business itself was illegal. He could not call the police about an extortionist.
He could not sue. The entire arrangement rested on the fact that he had nowhere to go. He stopped paying anyway.
On May 23, 1957, at a quarter to 4:00 in the morning, an explosion tore the front porch off Don King's house. King went to the police and testified. At the trial, he told the court that a representative of Burns had offered him $10,000 not to.
The jury deliberated for 11 hours and acquitted Shondor Burns.
That happened again and again over 30 years. Charge after charge, trial after trial, acquittal after acquittal. On one of them, he turned and blew kisses to the jury as he left, and a Cleveland newspaper ran the headline: "Who runs this town?
Burns or the law?" He was finally convicted in the 1960s, and it was not for violence. It was for lying to the Internal Revenue Service about what he owned.
Which brings us to Danny Greene. In the 1960s, Burns took on an ambitious young Irish-American from Collinwood to work with his numbers people. Danny Greene was a former president of the Longshoreman's Union local, physically fearless, and completely certain of himself.
He had a public streak that none of the older men had. He gave interviews, he handed out food in his neighborhood, and he made a point of letting everyone know he was not afraid of the Italians. Burns hired him because he was useful.
Everybody who dealt with Danny Greene made that calculation, and most of them came to regret it.
For a while it worked. Then there was the loan. Greene wanted $75,000 to set up a gambling house.
Burns did not have that sitting in a drawer, so he arranged it through the Gambino family in New York. The money never did what it was supposed to do. It ended up in the hands of a numbers man named Billy Cox, who spent it on narcotics.
The police raided Cox's house, arrested him, and seized what was left. The money was gone, and New York wanted it back from the man who had vouched for it, which was Shondor Burns.
Burns went to Greene. Greene said the loss was not his fault and refused to pay a penny. Burns was nearly 70.
He had personally vouched for a $75,000 loan from a New York crime family, the money had disappeared, and the man he had vouched for was telling him it was his own problem. He put a price on Danny Greene's head. He handed $25,000 to an associate to have it done.
Greene, at a service station in Collingwood, found a bomb in his own car. It had been wired wrongly and had failed to go off. He took it apart himself, and he told a Cleveland police lieutenant named Edward Kovacic what he intended to do with it.
He said he was going to send it back to the old bastard who had sent it to him. That is not a figure of speech. That is a plain statement of intent made to a police officer years before it happened.
There was one more layer on top of it. Greene had attached himself to John Nardi, a Teamsters official with his own long quarrel with the Cleveland crime family. Burns' whole position, by contrast, depended on staying on good terms with that same family.
By 1975, they were not just two men with a debt between them. They were drifting onto sides of a fight over who would run the city. A fight that broke fully into the open the following year when the old boss died.
That war was fought with bombs. Cleveland in those years had so many car bombings that the national press started calling it Bomb City. In 1976 alone, there were 37 in the county.
This was not a metaphor about a dangerous city. People genuinely stood at their windows in the morning and watched their neighbors start their cars.
On Holy Saturday, Shondor Burns went to a lounge on Detroit Avenue, and when he came out and got into his car, the bomb went off next to a church. Nobody was ever charged with it. The first police theory was wrong, as it so often is in these stories.
Investigators initially looked at black crime figures on the East Side, which tells you a fair amount about how that department worked, given that the man who had publicly promised to send Burns a bomb was standing right there in the city.
Years afterwards, an FBI informant who had worked for Danny Greene named the man who had actually placed it, a Hells Angel called Enis Krennic, who was said to have been paid $7,500 by Greene. Krennic never answered for it. On April 5, 1977, he was killed while attaching a car bomb to somebody else's vehicle.
Danny Greene had six months left. That October, outside a dentist's office, a bomb in a car parked beside his own finished him as well. The war Burns died in took everybody in it.
There is one small detail from the wreckage on Detroit Avenue that says more about Shondor Burns than any of the rest of it. $843 in cash was recovered from the scene. The Internal Revenue Service claimed it against the taxes he still owed.
Fifty years of protection money, nightclubs, street taxes, and acquittals. The last transaction of his life was the government taking $800 off a dead man for a bill he had spent decades avoiding.
He was buried at a cemetery outside Cleveland. He is remembered now, when he is remembered at all, as a supporting character, the old gangster in the story of Danny Greene, the man who gave the Irishman his start and then tried to kill him. There is a film about Greene.
There is no film about Shondor Burns.
But he lasted 50 years in a city that produced some of the most violent organized crime in the United States, and he did it without ever being a member of anything, because he was Jewish and the organization he worked beside would never have him. He had no family behind him, no rank to hide behind, and no rule protecting him. What he had instead was a restaurant where judges ate, a habit of feeding policemen, and an extraordinary record in front of juries.
He beat the state of Ohio for 30 years, and it never laid a finger on him.
What finally got him was the same thing that took his mother out of a Woodland Avenue apartment when he was 13. Somebody doing something illegal, and it going off. Fifty-four years apart in the same city by the same mechanism.
And of every debt in this story, the $75,000, the street taxes, the $200 a week, the only one anybody ever collected was the tax bill. And they collected it off the road.