The Real Danny Greene Was The Irish Gangster Who Started The Cleveland Mob War

October 6th, 1977. 1:30 in the afternoon. Brainer Place Office Building, Lindhurst, Ohio. Danny Green walked out of his dentist’s office still numb from a tooth extraction. A wad of cotton in his cheek, the autumn sun bouncing off the suburban parking lot. He never made it to his Lincoln. The blue Chevy Nova parked beside him erupted.

The blast tore Green’s left arm clean off his body and threw it 40 ft across the asphalt. His severed limb landed on the hood of another car, the gold Celtic cross still clutched in the fingers. The rest of him was found on the pavement, smoking, almost unrecognizable. Investigators measured the blast radius at over 100 ft.

Windows shattered for three blocks. Time of death, 1:23 p.m. The Irishman was finally dead. This wasn’t just another mob hit. Daniel John Patrick Green was the man who declared war on an entire Kosanostra family and almost won. A former long shoreman, a Union president turned racketeer, a self-styled Celtic warrior who wore green every day, hung the Irisholor over his fortified compound and dared the Italian mafia to come kill him. They tried over and over.

They blew up his house. They shot at him in the street. They planted bombs under his car. Nothing worked. Danny Green believed God protected him. The Cleveland mob came to believe it, too. This is the story of how one stubborn Irishman turned a single American city into a war zone. How 36 bombs exploded in Kyhoga County in 1976 alone.

How a regional turf war so embarrassing, so chaotic, so impossible to ignore finally forced the federal government to unleash a weapon that would dismantle the entire American mafia. The film Kill the Irishman gave you the romance. It gave you the legend. It did not give you the truth.

Because here’s what Hollywood left out. The real Cleveland war wasn’t just a feud between two men. It was the moment the FBI realized the old rules didn’t work anymore. And when it ended, the playbook for RICO, the law that would topple every five family boss in New York, was written in Cleveland blood. To understand how it got this bad, you have to go back to 1976, May 22nd.

The Cleveland mafia had just lost its long reigning boss, John Scalish, on an operating table during heart surgery. Scalish was old school, quiet money, Teamster pension funds, Las Vegas ski. He ran the family for 32 years without a single public scandal. He died without naming a successor. He didn’t even properly initiate new members.

The Cleveland family, once one of the most powerful in America, had become a graveyard of old men. His replacement was James Leavolei, 72 years old, stooped, balding, cheap, a man who clipped grocery coupons and drove a battered Chevy even though he had millions stashed. The family called him Jack White, sometimes Blackie. He was a cousin of the Detroit Lavali mob, and he’d been a soldier in Cleveland for half a century.

He didn’t want to be boss. He took the job because there was no one else. And the first thing waiting for him on his desk was a problem named Danny Green. Green was born November 14th, 1933. Abandoned by his mother at birth in a Cleveland hospital. Raised in a Catholic orphanage on the city’s east side. By age 10, he was fighting Italian kids in Colinwood for the right to walk down certain streets.

He joined the Marines at 17. Came out a heavyweight boxing champion. By the early 60s, he was president of local 1167, the Long Shoreman’s Union on the Cleveland docks. He stole the Union blind, skimmed dues, sold no show jobs. The plane dealer ran a series exposing him. In 1964, he was indicted, removed from the union, but never served real time because by then he was already on the FBI’s payroll as an informant.

That’s the part the movie softpedled. Green flipped on rival mob figures in the mid60s. The bureau gave him cover. He used that cover to build his own crew. He called them the Celtic Club. Young hungry Irish kids from Cullenwood. Keith Ritson, the enforcer. Brian O’Donnell, Kevin McTagert, plus an unstable, brilliant bomb maker from the west side named Art Snapper, who Green would eventually murder when he suspected him of cooperating.

Green operated out of a trailer he parked at 4601 Waterlue Road in the heart of Cullenwood, the Italian neighborhood, right under the mafia’s nose. He flew the Irish flag over it. He blared Irish folk music from speakers. He hung a sign reading, “Future home of the Celtic Club.” It was a middle finger planted in mob territory.

Every made guy in Cleveland drove past it every day. By 1976, Green was running a numbers operation, shaking down contractors and partnering with a Teamsters official named John Nardy. Nardy was the nephew of a former Cleveland boss. He was on the family’s outs. He believed Jack White was weak. The old guard was finished and that he and Green could take the city together.

They were probably right. The Cleveland family by then had maybe 20 made members. Half were over 70. The other half were under indictment. Nardy made the first move. He reached out to a Cleveland soldier named Leo Moseri. Moseri was 68 years old, an under boss, an enforcer from the old days who’d done time for murder in the 1930s.

Nardy told him to come to a meeting at the Italian-American Brotherhood Club. Moseri drove from Akran on August 22nd, 1976. He checked into a motel near the meeting spot. He went out for the evening. He never came back. His Mercury marquee was found 3 days later in the parking lot of a Howard Johnson’s. Blood in the trunk. Nobody.

To this day, no one knows where Leo Moseri is buried. Some say a Pennsylvania quarry. Some say the foundation of a Cleveland building. What’s documented is this. He vanished. And the war started the next morning. Jack White called to sit down with his capos. The mood was murderous. Moseri was a friend. He was family. You don’t make an under boss disappear and walk away.

Lavali put out a contract on Green and Nardy the same week. The price was $15,000 a piece. It was a low number, even for 1976. Because Jack White was cheap, and because he assumed any soldier in Cleveland could handle it. Here’s the thing about murdering Danny Green. Nobody in Cleveland knew how to do it. The first attempt came in October 1976.

Two soldiers, Enus Kernik and Eugene Casulo, were assigned the job. They knew Green parked his Lincoln behind his apartment at 12,25 Shore Center Drive. They wired a bomb to the ignition. They wired it wrong. Green started the car. Nothing happened. The bomb fell out from under the engine block onto his driveway. Intact.

Green picked it up, put it in a coffee can, and called his FBI handler. Then he held a press conference. He stood on the front lawn of his fortified house. He smiled. He said, quote, “The Italians are trying to kill me. They can’t even build a bomb that works.” End quote. It led the 6:00 news. That was Danny Green.

He didn’t hide. He performed. He’d answer his phone. Quote, “Danny Green, the Irishman here.” End quote. He drove around Cleveland in a green Lincoln. He wore green slacks, green shirts, green socks. He carried a gold Celtic cross. He told reporters on the record that the mob was scared of him.

Because in 1976, they were. Now you understand why Cleveland became Bomb City USA. In 1976 alone, 36 bombs exploded in Kyhoga County. 21 of them detonated inside Cleveland city limits. The ATF tripled its staff in northeast Ohio. The Cleveland Police Bomb Squad was working 7 days a week. The targets weren’t just green.

They were nardy associates, rival contractors, restaurants suspected of disloyalty. Cars belonging to mob soldiers on the wrong side of internal disputes. The Italian faction was so paranoid they started bombing each other. One soldier named John Ki was killed when a bomb meant for someone else detonated in his trunk on Mayfield Road.

Another, a low-level associate named Joseph Gueimo, lost both legs when he opened the wrong package. The newspapers tracked the count like a baseball score. Bomb count for July. Bomb count for August. The city of Cleveland was in fiscal default by 1978. The first major American city to go bankrupt since the depression. The bombings were one of the reasons businesses fled downtown.

Hotels emptied, conventions canled. The murder of a city, slow motion by dynamite. The Nardy hit came first. May 17th, 1977. John Nardy walked out of the Teamster’s local 410 office on Baggley Road. He climbed into his Oldsmobile. The car parked next to his exploded. Nardy was killed instantly.

The bombers had used a remote detonator from across the street. It was the first time the Cleveland family showed it had finally learned how to do this properly. And the reason they’d learned was because they’d hired outside help. Jack White had finally admitted he couldn’t kill Danny Green with local talent. So he called Los Angeles.

He called a soldier named Ray Ferto. Ray Ferto was 58 years old, lean, balding, born in Eerie, Pennsylvania with mob ties stretching back to the Pittsburgh and LA families. He was a hitman by trade. He’d done a dozen murders over 30 years. He had an ulcer. He chewed ant acids like candy. He smoked marijuana to calm his nerves before contracts. He was tired.

He wanted to retire. Leavolei offered him $75,000 and a piece of the Cleveland rackets to come east and finish green. Ferto took the job because he needed the money. He arrived in Cleveland in early summer of 1977. He was partnered with a local soldier, Ronald Kurabia, called Ronnie the Crab, who knew Green’s movements.

They tried to plant a bomb in May. Green moved his car. They tried again in July. Green changed his routine. They tried again in August. Green didn’t show up. Green was lucky. Green was careful. Green was, by his own telling, blessed. But Ferto had something the others didn’t. He had patience. And he had a key piece of intelligence the FBI didn’t know about until later.

The Cleveland family had a source inside the phone company. They were getting Green’s incoming calls in real time. When Green scheduled a dentist appointment for October 6th at Brainer Place in Lindhurst, the killers knew it before the dentist did. The day before October 5th, Ferto and Kurabia drove a stolen blue Chevy Nova to the parking lot.

They parked it in a spot near where Green’s Lincoln was expected to go. The Nova contained a magnetic bomb on the passenger side door packed with C4 and steel ball bearings. The trigger was a remote operated from across the lot. They waited. Green arrived at 12:45 p.m. He was relaxed. He’d taken a sedative at the dentist. He walked out around 1:20.

He stopped to talk to another patient in the lot for a moment. He climbed toward his Lincoln. Ferto pressed the button. The Nova exploded. Green died instantly. He was 43 years old. The Cultic cross was found 70 ft from his body, still on its chain. This is where the war should have ended. Green was dead. Nardy was dead.

The Italians had won. Jack White was supposed to be triumphant. Instead, the killing of Denny Green was the beginning of the end for the Cleveland family. Because Ferto and Carabia had been seen. A woman named Debbie Smith had been sitting in the parking lot waiting for her doctor’s appointment. She’d noticed the two men. She’d noticed the Nova.

She’d written down the license plate. She gave it to the Lindhurst police that afternoon. Within 72 hours, the FBI had Ferto identified. Within 30 days, he was in federal custody. And within 90 days, Ray Ferto did the one thing every mafioso swears they’ll never do. He flipped.

He sat down with federal agents and told them everything. He named Lavolei. He named Carabia. He named the under boss, Angelo Lonardo, called Big Ange, who had personally approved the hit. He named Tony Liberator, a Cleveland soldier who’d been in on the planning. He explained how the contract worked. He explained the $75,000 fee. He explained the radio detonator.

He explained the source inside the phone company. He gave the federal government a road map to the entire Cleveland family. And here’s where the story stops being about Cleveland and starts being about the entire American mafia. In the spring of 1978, the local Kyhoga County prosecutor took the case to state court.

Jack White and his crew were tried for the murder of Danny Green. They were acquitted. The jury didn’t believe Ferto, didn’t trust the witnesses, didn’t want to convict. It was the third major mob trial in Cleveland that decade to end in a quiddle. The state had failed. The state was always going to fail.

Mob trials in mob towns rarely went the prosecutor’s way. But the federal government had a new weapon passed in 1970, sitting in the US code, almost unused for 8 years. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO, drafted by a Notre Dame law professor named G. Robert Blakey. It allowed prosecutors to charge an entire criminal enterprise, not just individual crimes.

It allowed them to use murders, even acquitted state murders, as predicate acts in a federal pattern of racketeering. It allowed 20-year sentences for each count. It allowed the seizure of every asset. Nobody had used RICO against the mafia before. Federal prosecutors didn’t believe in it. They thought it was too complex, too risky, too untested.

They preferred old-fashioned cases. Tax evasion, hijacking, lone sharking, one man at a time. Then they looked at Cleveland. They had Frito, a hitman willing to testify. They had Carabia, the Wheelman, ready to flip after a state murder conviction. They had documented bombings going back years that could be charged as raketeering acts.

They had Lonardo, the underboss, who would eventually flip himself and become the highest ranking mafioso ever to cooperate with the government up to that point. They had a city that had been turned into a war zone. The American public was watching. The pressure was political. The case made itself. In 1982, Jack White Lavi, Angelo Lonardo, John Kandra, and a dozen other Cleveland-made men and associates were convicted under Rico of running a criminal enterprise.

Lavali got 17 years. Lonardo got life. The Cleveland family as a functioning Kosanostra organization ceased to exist. But the real significance wasn’t the convictions. It was the proof of concept. The federal organized crime task forces in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Kansas City were all watching the Cleveland trial.

They saw the template. They saw how informants could be used. They saw how predicate acts could be stacked. They saw how a hitman like Ferto could bring down an entire family. And 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 prosecution that brought down the bosses of the Genevies, Lucesy, and Columbbo families simultaneously was directly modeled on the Cleveland playbook. G. Robert Blakey, the law’s author, consulted on the commission case. Rudy Giuliani, then US attorney for the Southern District of New York, called the Cleveland prosecution, quote, “The proof that RICO works 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 Lindhurst parking lot. It started with a magnetic bomb on a blue Chevy Nova. It started with a stubborn Irishman who wouldn’t die quietly and an old mafia boss who finally killed him and then watched his entire organization disintegrate as the price.

Ray Ferto lived in witness protection until 2004. He died of natural causes in Eerie, Pennsylvania in a modest house owing nothing to anyone. He told a reporter near the end, quote, I killed a lot of people. Green was just one. To me, it was just a job. End quote. He never expressed remorse. He was buried under his real name. Angelo Lonardo, the under boss who approved the green hit, was sentenced to 103 years.

He flipped in 1983. He testified against Cleveland, against the Genevese family, against the commission. He went into witness protection. He died in 2006, never having served a full sentence, having outlived almost every man he ever betrayed. Jack White Lavoi died in federal prison in 1985 at the age of 81.

He never expressed remorse either. He never paid a dime in restitution. His estate was worth less than $10,000. He’d spent his whole life chasing a fortune he never enjoyed. Cleveland never recovered as a mafia city. The remaining members died off or aged out. The rackets passed to street gangs, motorcycle clubs, Russian crews.

Today, there is no functioning Cleveland Kosanastra family. The FBI’s Cleveland Organized Crime Squad was disbanded in the mid200s. There was nothing left to investigate. And Danny Green, he’s buried at St. John’s Cemetery in Cleveland under a simple Celtic cross. His grave is still visited. People leave four leaf clovers.

They leave Irish flags. They leave bottles of whiskey. He has become, in the strange way of these things, a folk hero. The Irishman who took on 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’s the romance. That’s Hollywood. The real story is colder. Danny Green wasn’t a hero. He was an FBI informant who used federal protection to build a criminal empire. He extorted contractors. He murdered an associate, Art Snapper, in cold blood. He fed information to agents while running rackets they pretended not to see.

He was like Jack White, like Ray Farito, like every man in this story, a calculator of advantage. He was just better at the math. What the Cleveland War actually proved was this. The American mafia by 1976 was already dying. The old code was gone. The discipline was gone. The earners were aging out. The young guys couldn’t be trusted.

A single Irishman with a press agent and a tape recorder was able to humiliate one of the oldest crime families in America for 18 months before they could even kill him. And once they did kill him, they did it so clumsily that they handed the federal government the case that would dismantle every Kosanostra family in the country. Cleveland wasn’t a sideshow.

Cleveland was the autopsy, everything that came after. The commission case, the pizza connection, the Gotti trials, the decimation of the Chicago outfit. All of it traces back to the lessons learned in a Lindhurst parking lot on a sunny October afternoon when one Irishman finally ran out of luck. The mob killed Danny Green to save themselves.

Instead, they killed themselves. That’s the real ending. Not glory, not honor, not vengeance. Just the slow, grinding stupidity of men who couldn’t see that the world had already changed and that the bombs they were planting under each other’s cars were really being planted under their own organization. If y