Paddy Whacked

by T. J. English

  McBratney’s partner in crime, Eddie Maloney, read about his pal’s murder in a Staten Island newspaper. Years later, in Tough Guy, he wrote:

  McBratney’s death saddened me as nothing else in my life had. He’d been a good friend, and he wasn’t a hardened criminal like some of us. He intended to get out of the life—and I believe he would have—soon as he accumulated that nestegg. I felt bad for Jimmy’s wife, also. She had been as loyal to him as he was to her. On a personal level, Jimmy would have risked his life for me—and I for him—and a person doesn’t make friends like that very often.

  If Jimmy McBratney had been a connected criminal, a member of the Westies or some other organization with at least a semblance of a standing army, he might have been able to barter his way out of being murdered. As it was, McBratney was a freelance criminal with no affiliation and an Irishman to boot. He was expendable.

  In an underworld universe where one misstep could lead to certain death and the almighty dollar was an intermittent commodity, some Irish American gangsters did better than others. The mob was first and foremost a capitalist venture; gangsters with a talent for making money, who knew how to play by the rules and spread the wealth, tended to be treated like royalty.

  Take James “Jimmy” Burke, another independent mick hoodlum plying his trade in the underworld of the 1970s. Burke had one advantage that Jimmy McBratney did not: He operated within a specific commercial territory—Queens, New York—where, for years, he was a smuggler of untaxed liquor and cigarettes, as well as a hijacker of trucks leaving JFK Airport. Burke was well-liked by wiseguys and victims alike. When hijacking a truck, he always slipped a few hundred dollars to the driver, which earned him the nickname Jimmy the Gent. More importantly, Burke adhered to underworld protocol. He kicked back a percentage of his take to Paul Vario, an underboss with the Luchesse family. Vario’s people referred to Burke as the Irish guinea and spoke his name with awe, since he was a dependable cash cow for the mob.

  Not much was known about Burke’s roots. He was born in 1931 to a woman named Conway and orphaned in a Manhattan foundling home. At the age of two, he was designated a neglected child and entered into the Catholic Church’s foster care program. For the next eleven years, he bounced from one foster home to another. It was later revealed by psychiatric social workers that, during these years, he had been alternately beaten, sexually abused, pampered, lied to, ignored, screamed at, locked in closets, and treated kindly by so many different surrogate parents that he had trouble remembering their names or faces.

  At the age of thirteen, Burke escaped from the Mount Loretto Reformatory and began his life of crime. He burglarized homes, passed counterfeit checks, and began to carry a gun. At the age of eighteen, he was arrested for bank forgery. The detectives who brought him in knew that he was passing fraudulent checks on behalf of a neighborhood mafiosi. With Burke’s hands cuffed behind his back, the cops beat him silly trying to get him to implicate his partner. Burke kept his mouth shut, and when he arrived at Auburn Prison in Upstate New York to serve his five-year sentence, he was treated like a paisan by the Italian inmates who respected his adherence to the code of omerta.

  In Wiseguy, Nicholas Pileggi’s classic account of life in the mob, low-level gangster Henry Hill remembers Jimmy Burke as a kind of underworld Sir Galahad whose criminal instincts ran deep.

  The thing you’ve got to understand about Jimmy is that he loved to steal. He ate and breathed it. I think if you ever offered Jimmy a billion dollars not to steal, he’d turn you down and then try to figure out how to steal it from you. It was the only thing he enjoyed. It kept him alive.

  Burke was exceedingly generous with his criminal partners, although his love of the life often made him violent and unpredictable. According to Hill,

  Jimmy was the kind of guy who cheered for the crooks in movies. He named his two sons Frank James Burke and Jesse James Burke. He was a big guy, and he knew how to handle himself. He looked like a fighter. He had a broken nose and he had a lot of hands. If there was just the littlest amount of trouble, he’d be all over you in a second. He’d grab a guy’s tie and slam his chin into the table before the guy knew he was in a war…. Jimmy had a reputation for being wild. He’d whack you.

  Henry Hill, who was half Irish himself, became a part of Burke’s multiethnic crew based out of a bar in Ozone Park, Queens, called Robert’s Lounge. By the mid-1970s, Burke had become a bookmaker, loan shark, and fence for cargo stolen from JFK Airport. The Luchesse crime family not only tolerated Burke, they also revered the man. His ability to make money for local mafiosi rendered irrelevant the Old World tradition of inducting only men with pure Sicilian blood into Cosa Nostra. Jimmy Burke’s reputation as an earner made him quite possibly the most well-connected Irish American racketeer in America outside of the traditional Irish mobster enclaves of Hell’s Kitchen and South Boston.

  In 1975, Burke got himself convicted, along with Henry Hill, on loan-sharking and assault charges. While serving time at Atlanta Federal Prison, Jimmy the Gent began to plan a major robbery that would be the crowning achievement of his criminal career—or anybody’s, for that matter. The Lufthansa Heist, as it became known, would go down in the annals of crime as the largest robbery in U.S. history, even bigger than the Brinks job.

  The heist was initiated by a Lufthansa Airlines security guard who worked at the airline’s cargo terminal at JFK Airport. News of the terminal’s vulnerability to an inside job was passed along to Burke, who masterminded the break-in plan and put together the robbery team—a mixed crew of mostly low-level cons not unlike the team that robbed Brinks. The robbery was in the planning stages for nearly two years; by the time Burke was paroled from prison, the plan was set and ready to go.

  On December 11, 1978, less than a week after Burke was released to a halfway house in Times Square, he and a group of masked men, armed with rifles and pistols, hit Building 261 at the Lufthansa terminal at JFK Airport. The heist went off without a shot being fired. The robbery crew loaded bags containing $5 million in cash and another $875,000 in jewelry into a van.

  After the heist, the crew stashed away the booty, designating Burke as the disperser of funds. The idea was to wait until the publicity surrounding the robbery died down before absconding with the loot, but, like any underworld plan subject to the vicissitudes of human nature, the whole thing turned bad. Wrote author Pileggi in Wiseguy

  Lufthansa should have been the crew’s crowning achievement. A dream come true. The ultimate score for anyone who ever hi-jacked a truck or moved swag out of the airport. It was the heist of a lifetime. The one robbery where there would have been enough for everyone. Six million dollars in cash and jewels. And yet, within days of the robbery the dream score turned into a nightmare. What should have been the crew’s happiest moment turned out to be the beginning of the end.

  The killings started in early 1979 and continued throughout the year. Before it was over, more than fifteen murders would be attributed to fallout from the Lufthansa Heist. The entire robbery crew—except for Burke—was murdered gangland style. Wives and girlfriends who knew details about the heist were also rubbed out, their bodies cut up and dumped in rivers and vacant lots.

  Two million dollars from the Lufthansa take had been dispersed directly to Mafia underboss Paul Vario, making the crime traceable to the Luchesse crime family. Burke didn’t have to wait around to be told that the unraveling of the post-heist plans and potential investigation were his responsibility. Most of the murders that took place following the robbery were attributed to Burke, whose role as a Mafia subcontractor put him in a highly vulnerable position. Burke himself might have been a victim of the hit parade were he not arrested on a parole violation in April 1979.

  It was Henry Hill, Burke’s half-Irish pal from the Robert’s Lounge crew, who put Jimmy the Gent behind bars for life. Hill was facing life imprisonment on various narcotics violations at the time, and, as part of a deal with the feds, he testified against Burke—not about the Lu
fthansa Heist, in which Hill had no direct involvement, but about one of the subsequent murders. The Irish guinea was given a life sentence, and Hill disappeared into the Witness Protection Program, became the subject of Pileggi’s bestselling book, and saw himself portrayed by actor Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, director Martin Scorcese’s 1990 adaptation of Wiseguy.2

  Jimmy Burke survived as long as he did as an Irish American hood operating in an increasingly Italian American universe for one simple reason: He lined everybody’s pockets with dough. His talents as an earner put him in a unique position in the New York underworld. Elsewhere around the United States, Irish American mobsters of the 1970s tended to be rebels and underappreciated throwbacks to a long gone era. Whereas Burke had endeared himself to the Mafia by playing the game according to their rules, most Irish hoods did not go so quietly into the night. A primary example of this was an audacious Irish American gangster who—at the same time Jimmy the Gent was making money for the Mafia in Queens—was waging a one-man war with Cosa Nostra that would go down in history as quite literally the most explosive battle in the ongoing rivalry between the dagos and the micks. The setting was Cleveland, Ohio. The mick’s name was Danny “the Irishman” Greene.

  The Legend of Danny Greene

  Cleveland was never really an Irish town. Unlike New York, Chicago, or even Kansas City, where the Irish were able to exert influence well beyond their numbers through political organization, Cleveland’s dominant political leaders were immigrants of Eastern European extraction, due to the city’s large population of Slovenians, Yugoslavians, Hungarians, and Czechoslovakians. Cleveland’s Irish population peaked around the year of 1870, when Irish laborers were drawn to the city by the many new steel mills and stevedoring firms that opened for business along the Cuyahoga River. There were approximately 10,000 Irish or Irish Americans in the city at the time—10 percent of the overall population. That number dwindled in the following decades, although there remained a good number of Irish among the city’s laboring class, in the police department, and within the local hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

  The Irish settled mostly around the east and west banks of the Cuyahoga River’s mouth, especially in the bend of the river known as the Angle, the city’s first Irish neighborhood. By the turn of the century, many Irish had also begun to settle in Collinwood Village, a gritty industrial neighborhood whose central commercial hub was called Five Points (in tribute, perhaps, to the infamous New York neighborhood where so many Paddies settled in the years following the Great Potato Famine). By World War II, Collinwood had become one of the most heavily industrialized areas in the nation. Children in the neighborhood played near the railroad yards and tracks of the New York Central Railroad, or around the various factories that spewed forth toxins and industrial pollutants on a daily basis. It was here that young Danny Greene passed from adolescence into manhood.

  He was born on November 14, 1933, in St. Ann’s Hospital to John and Irene (Fallon) Greene, both Irish immigrants. He was the first child of the young newlyweds, who’d been married in a civil ceremony just five days earlier. The shame and embarrassment that Irene had shouldered while carrying her baby out of wedlock were dispelled by the birth of their healthy baby boy. The joy of that birth did not last long, however. Within hours, Irene’s vital signs dipped to alarming levels. She was immediately moved to the intensive care ward. In the hours that followed, her blood pressure skyrocketed, and she developed a hellish fever. Nothing the doctors did seemed to help. Three days after the birth of her child, Irene Greene died from what was officially diagnosed as an enlarged heart.

  “Baby Greene” hadn’t even been named yet. It wasn’t until after the funeral and burial of his wife that John Greene decided to name his son Daniel, after the boy’s paternal grandfather.

  In the wake of his wife’s sudden and shocking death, John Greene sought solace in the bottle. His heavy drinking cost him his job as a traveling salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. With no source of income and the landlord banging at his door, Greene had no choice but to place his son Danny in the Palmdale Catholic Orphanage in suburban Cleveland.

  In 1939, at the age of six, Danny left the nuns and priests at the orphanage and moved back in with his father, who had recently wed for the second time. The boy didn’t settle in well. He was troubled by the death of a mother he never knew and uncomfortable around his new stepmother. Several times he ran away from home and was once found hiding under a neighbor’s porch. John Greene lost patience with the young boy and turned him over to his grandfather, a widower who lived in a modest wood-shingle house on East 147th Street in the heart of Collinwood.

  Danny Greene’s grandfather worked nights as a pressman at the printing factory of the Cleveland Plain Dealer and slept during the day. Young Danny was left unsupervised most of the time. He attended Catholic grade school, where he was well-liked by the teachers but was an indifferent student and frequently got into trouble. He was in the Boy Scouts for three weeks but was kicked out for giving the scout master a hot foot during a troupe meeting.

  Danny fared better on the streets than he did in school or other mainstream pursuits. Although average in height and weight, he was not afraid to defend himself. In Collinwood, the Irish kids were frequently targeted by corner crews comprised of Italian and Slovenian boys. Danny’s lack of fear and his refusal to knuckle under to the dominant Italian ruffians would prove to be a foreshadowing of his life in the Cleveland underworld. “He was a tough kid, likeable but reckless,” remembered a Collinwood native who knew Danny as a youngster and was quoted years later in Cleveland Magazine. “You could have guessed his life was not going to follow the straight and narrow.”

  In 1951, at the age of eighteen, Greene dropped out of high school and joined the Marine Corp. He served his three years with the Fleet Marine Force Division at Camp Lejune, North Carolina. He gained respect there more for his abilities in the boxing ring than as a soldier. As in school, discipline was a problem for the blue-eyed, blond-haired Irish kid whose penchant for pranks often crossed the line between humor and cruelty. He was frequently transferred from one camp to another for disciplinary reasons.

  In 1953, Greene was honorably discharged from the marines and returned to Cleveland. He soon found work in a typically Irish area of employment as a longshoreman. At this time, the city’s waterfront was booming. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 added nearly 9,000 miles of sea coast to the United States and Canada, making the Great Lakes region a relatively new and bustling port. The number of shipping vessels carting iron ore, grain, automobiles, and general merchandise tripled over a ten year period, with the number of longshoremen in the local ILA office doubling during that same period.

  Although Danny Greene was apparently a lazy worker who once got fired for sleeping on duty in the hold of a ship, he was a popular figure among his fellow dock wallopers. He had a charismatic personality and exhibited leadership traits, mostly through his fearless nature. As a result, in 1961, he was easily elected president of ILA Local 1317, which covered the Cleveland waterfront. A year later, he was also elected district vice president of the Great Lakes Office of the ILA.

  As a union organizer, Danny achieved a level of maturity and discipline that had been lacking throughout his youth. He took great pride in his job. The first order of business was turning the local office into a presentable front for various union-related ventures. He started by totally refurbishing the ILA headquarters, painting the interior walls of the office kelly green in honor of his Irish heritage (he also used green ink pens, had the union bylaws reprinted in green ink, and drove a green Cadillac). He began hosting popular parties at union headquarters before and after Cleveland Browns games—parties that were attended by a Who’s Who of local movers and shakers, including judges, cops, mobsters, and councilmen.

  “Before I got here, union headquarters was a packing crate and a light-bulb on a cord,” Greene jokingly told a reporter.

  As a labor leader, Greene
was a fierce advocate for his men. He was constantly at war with the stevedoring companies, who wanted to choose their own anchor men during the loading and unloading of vessels. To enforce his will, Greene formed an inner circle of ex-boxers and gangsters who threatened, muscled, beat, or bombed the opposition into submission. His victims could be stevedoring companies, or business agents, or even fellow dock workers who were not sufficiently acquiescent.

  Years later, while being questioned by detectives, a member of Greene’s inner circle explained the arrangement: “If someone complained, they’d get a beating. If someone went to the police, they’d get a beating. Even if one of them just said something bad about Danny, we’d rough him up.”

  “Was there a name for this group?” asked the police interrogator.

  “Yeah. The grievance committee.”

  Danny Greene’s stature as a union official elevated him to new levels of a power within Cleveland’s tough-as-nails intersecting worlds of politics, labor, and crime. He began to hang out at some of the city’s most well-known underworld night spots on Short Vincent Avenue, the city’s entertainment district during the 1960s. One of his favorite spots was the Theatrical Bar & Grille; it was here that he first met Alex “Shonder” Birns, a Jew of Austrian-Hungarian extraction who was a local mobster legend. Birns had been around since the days of Prohibition, when he ran corn sugar into Cleveland from across the Canadian border. He still presided over a thriving loan-sharking and numbers operation and was believed to have numerous lawyers, judges, and policeman on his payroll.

  While frequenting the nightclubs, restaurants, and strip joints along Short Vincent Avenue, Greene developed a taste for the nightlife that would eventually sully his reputation as a union official. Although his annual ILA salary came to a grand total of $6,000, Danny lived a life of conspicuous consumption; he spread money around the clubs, arrived for work in his green Cadillac, and seemed to have plenty left over for his wife and two young kids, not to mention the occasional mistress. His lifestyle—lavish by Cleveland standards—caught the attention of an enterprising reporter for the Plain Dealer. The paper began an investigation of the district office of the ILA that uncovered a secret building fund, which was controlled by Greene. As it turned out, the union president was fleecing his own local, forcing workers to put in overtime hours for which they were never paid. Instead, the money went into Greene’s pocket.