"Kill The Irishman"
Our latest library borrow was
"Kill the Irishman", a true story based on the life of Danny Greene. Green was a dock worker who became the union boss of the Cleveland longshoreman's union, battled the mafia to try and gain control of unions, and worked as an FBI informant to help bring down not only the mafia in Cleveland, but in four (or five?) other cities. Unfortunately, he had to die by car bombing in order for FBI to hunt down and capture the mafia guys responsible for his death. Once captured, they ending up singing like canaries and gave away all their compatriots.
The disc also included a documentary film, "Danny Greene: The Rise and Fall of the Irishman (2009)" that was mostly a history of that time along with interviews with Greene's first wife and daughter and many of the law enforcement people and media folks that were active on the cases and stories. It was fun seeing TV reporters from the 1970s that we remembered watching back then. Also pretty interesting when a couple of the names mentioned turned out to be our almost-neighbors from our first house!
We knew the story*, but seeing it covered in a movie really tied together a lot of what we knew in bits and pieces.
Apparently, bombing was the murder method of choice in Cleveland back then.
This article at Cleveland.com says 1976 saw 21 bombing in Cleveland proper, and a total of 37 throughout all of Cuyahoga county. Yikes!
* She was a file clerk for the FBI; he was a salesman at a dealership and worked with another salesman with mafia connections. For somewhere around $10,000-$15,000 (a LOT of money in 1977) she snooped through classified documents to get the names of FBI informants to turn over to the mafia. Danny Greene's name was top of the list. By turning that info over to the mafia, they then got the wheels turning on finally making good killing him.