It is not often that I can claim to be even on the periphery of a true crime story, but I remember well when Cleveland, OH’s gangster, Danny Greene was killed. I was in high school at the time, and my best friend’s father worked in the building where Danny Greene was killed. He was killed in the parking lot in a car explosion, and everyone who worked in the building was questioned during the subsequent police inquiry.
Until that time, I did not know about Danny Greene. Since I was in high school, I was far more consumed by fashion and grades, than local Cleveland news. However, Danny Greene was a very big part of both Cleveland politics and history, and has become a piece of the diverse melting pot of Cleveland’s past.
A new movie about Greene is being released in Cleveland just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, which is a new way to celebrate being Irish, but somewhat appropriate in that Danny Greene was an Irish gangster. The film is called Kill the Irishman starring Ray Stevenson as Danny Greene and Christopher Walken as Shondor Birns. While this film will show us Danny Greene, Hollywood style, another film will show at the Cleveland International Film Festival, The Rise and Fall of the Irishman, a documentary of Danny Greene’s life.
Danny Greene grew up in a different Cleveland than we live in today, when diversity was not celebrated, but instead was a source of war between rival ethnic groups. In both chronicles of Danny Greene’s life, we find a man who was proud to a violent leader of men, and fiercely hated Italians. Danny Greene lived in the Collinwood neighborhood of Cleveland, attended Collinwood High School, where he dropped out, and began working as a dockworker on the waterfront. From those beginnings, Greene entered the world of the dockworker’s union, where he began his rise to fame as a thug and gangster.
Danny Greene was known to have injured and killed, extorted and stolen from many, and suspected of even more deaths. Bombs were associated with his work, so it is not surprising that he himself was killed by a bomb. Nevertheless, as dangerous a person as he was, Danny Greene’s story adds a new flavor to the lexicon of Cleveland’s history, and I will be interested in both versions of his life.
For more information on Danny Greene, read the book behind the making of the movie, To Kill the Irishman: The War that Crippled the Mafia
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