REPORTER BILL MCKAY: Rumor has it, Danny, that the word was out on the street back in March that John Nardi was a target. Did you talk to John Nardi at all about this?
GREENE: I haven’t seen John in about three and a half months, Bill, but I did send him a message very recently. “John,” I said, “be careful. It’s out here very, very strong on the streets that somebody’s out to get you.”
REPORTER: Word has it, Danny, that you are also a target in this so-called gangland war for control. What’s your answer to that?
GREENE: In the world of the streets, I happen to have a very enviable position to many people because I’m in between both worlds, the square world and the street world. And I think I have trust in both sides. I have no ax to grind, but if these maggots in the so-called Mafia want to come after me, I’m over here at the Celtic Club. I’m not hard to find.
With his reckless bravado and growing cadre of adoring followers, Greene was becoming a legend in his own time. But there was an undeniable air of doom surrounding Danny Greene and his people. Everyone knew the Irishman’s day was near, which only added to his warrior-like mystique. One of his young followers even wrote a poem entitled “The Ballad of Danny Greene.”
Among the Crow, the story says
A man was judged by fiercest foe,
Many scalps a brave Chief took
Who fought his way to fame,
Often he outwitted death
Ere history prized his name.
A modern warrior known as Greene
Was very quick and smart and mean,
He scrambled hard and fought like hell
And led a charmed existence,
They shot him down and blew him up
With most regular persistence.
Through guile and luck and skill
Danny Greene is with us still,
He does his job as he must do
With zeal, finesse and pride,
It’s hard to keep a good man down
With Saint Patrick at his side.
Some day he’ll die, as all we must
Some will laugh but most will cry,
His legend will live on for years
To bring his friends mixed pleasure,
For he has done both bad and good
And lived his life full measure.3
Danny loved the poem and had it posted on the wall of the Celtic Club—in green ink.
By September, after another Greene bomb killed another high-ranking capo, the Mafia were beside themselves. They sent a note to Danny practically begging for a truce. A meeting was arranged.
At the time, Danny was stretched thin. His inner circle may have included many adoring followers, but all of the big-ticket rackets were controlled by the Italians. It was worth Greene’s while to meet with Cosa Nostra if he could finagle his way into the game, which was exactly what he did. At a meeting attended by local mob leaders and a Genovese family representative from New York, Greene was told that, if he would agree to a cease-fire, he would be ceded a significant portion of Cleveland’s West Side gambling operations once run by John Nardi. Danny agreed to the deal.
The truce was reported in the Plain Dealer and brought about a noticeable lessening of tension throughout the city, which was precisely what the Mafia wanted. They never had any intention of letting the Irishman get away. All along, the plan had been to create a scenario in which he might let his guard down. A professional out-of-town hit team had been stalking Greene for months, sleeping in cars and eating Chinese takeout, noting his every move. By and large, Danny was a cautious, elusive target. The Mafia’s big break came when they were able to plant a wiretap on the phone of Greene’s girlfriend. While listening to a cassette recording from the wiretap, they heard the following exchange:
GREENE’S GIRLFRIEND: Hi. I’m calling for Danny Greene.
RECEPTIONIST: Okay.
GIRLFRIEND: He has a loose filling and, um, would like to see Doctor Candoli as soon as you can get him in.
RECEPTIONIST: All right, let’s see what we have available…. [pause]. We can squeeze him in on this Thursday—that’s the sixth at three o’clock. Will that work?
GIRLFRIEND: That’ll be fine.
RECEPTIONIST: Good. Then we’ll see Mr. Greene on the sixth at three o’clock.
GIRLFRIEND: Thank you.
RECEPTIONIST: You’re welcome. Have a nice day.
The Mafia hitmen listened to the tape three or four times and then laughed their asses off. Danny Greene was going to have a loose filling replaced, and then they were going to blow him to smithereens.
On the afternoon of October 6, 1977, Greene arrived for his dental appointment and parked in the lot. Danny paged an underling who was supposed to watch his car while he was inside, but the underling never got the message because the batteries in his pager were dead. From the front seat of the car, Danny grabbed his green leather gym bag that served as his survival kit. Inside was a Browning nine millimeter semiautomatic pistol capable of firing multiple rounds without reloading, an extra clip of bullets, a list of car license plate numbers of his various Mafia enemies, a box of green ink pens, and a Mother of Perpetual Help holy card.
Once Greene had disappeared inside the dentist’s office, the hit men pulled up alongside Greene’s car and parked. Inside their own car, on the side flanking Greene’s, was planted a steel-encased remote control bomb covered with a blanket. The two hitmen vacated the rigged car and moved to a different vehicle. They sat and waited for Greene to appear. An hour later, when he did, the hitmen bristled with excitement. As Danny put his key in the car door to unlock it, they detonated their bomb by remote control.
The explosion blew out windows in a nearby store. The bomb car and part of Danny’s car were completely demolished. The Irishman was killed instantly. Although much of the flesh was seared from his body, his body remained largely intact—except for his left arm, which was blown almost one hundred feet away. His prized emerald ring was still attached to a finger, and his Celtic cross pendant was embedded in the asphalt a few feet away from his body.
Greene’s death was the story of the day, resonating beyond Cleveland and throughout the American underworld. He was not the most powerful Irish American mobster ever, nor the wealthiest or the smartest, but the saga of Danny Greene seemed to unfold in a place where crime and folklore were indistinguishable. To some, he was a homicidal maniac, to others, a hero. Either way, as foretold in “The Ballad of Danny Greene,” his legend lives on as a testament to the bold and audacious side of the Irish American gangster.
The Informer
It was not commonly known about Danny Greene until many years after his death that he was a C.I., or confidential informant, for the FBI. Had it been known, the revelation might have been difficult for some of his followers to swallow. Irish mobsters did not have a tradition of blood oaths and initiation rituals in which they pledged undying loyalty to the family, but they were arguably more virulent than the Italians in their hatred of informers. Much of this had to do with the history of Ireland itself, where being a tout had dire political connotations. In Liam O’Flaherty’s classic Irish novel, The Informer (1925), the main character, Gypo Nolan, becomes an outcast in his own community when he informs on a revolutionary comrade who is wanted by the authorities. The novel captures aspects of the Irish psyche that run deep. A quasi-religious ideology rooted in the struggle against colonial oppression in Ireland was transmitted to America via the early gangs and became a badge of distinction for the Irish American mobster.
Danny Greene, no doubt, would justify his actions by saying he was seeking an edge against his enemies. Acting as a dry snitch, he leaked information about his underworld rivals to his FBI handlers, and they in turn leaked information to him. It would later be revealed that Greene’s FBI contacts alerted the Irishman about Mafia assassination plots against him that they overheard on government wiretaps. What information Greene gave up in return is not known, nor is it documented in his FBI file, obtained t
hrough the Freedom of Information Act.
The phenomenon of FBI agents enlisting still-active mobsters as government informants was a relatively new law enforcement technique in the 1970s. The Omnibus Crime Control Act—a massive piece of legislation enacted in 1968—had established within the U.S. Justice Department a number of new far-reaching directives. Among them was the Witness Protection Program, which was designed to induce criminals to turn against their coconspirators by offering them a new name, identity, and place to live after they testified in court. As a subtenant to the witness program, the FBI initiated an ambitious new system for cultivating informants. Individual agents were now encouraged to recruit and register C.I.s who were still active criminals.
This dramatic new approach by the FBI was open to all sorts of messy misinterpretations. Agents and mobsters would now be operating on the same playing field, entering into complex relationships built around the concept of mutual manipulation, leading to the obvious question: Who was using whom?
Nowhere was this subterranean interaction between crooks and coppers more multilayered than in the city of Boston, where local law enforcement, whether FBI, Massachusetts State Patrol, or Boston police, tended to be heavily Irish American. In Boston, cops and crooks had sometimes grown up in the same neighborhoods, gone to the same schools, or even come from the same families. A wily Irish American mobster with the right connections was in a position to play this system to his advantage, which was certainly the case for the man who emerged in the 1970s as the rising star of the Boston underworld: Whitey Bulger.
Whitey was the proverbial Irish leprechaun, a little green man with magical powers, all pluck and brass balls. He had survived CIA-sponsored LSD experiments, a stint at Alcatraz, the gangland elimination of Donnie Killeen (his boss), and come through it all smarter and stronger than ever. From 1972 to 1975, he had lived in constant fear for his life. The FBI team of Paul Rico and Dennis Condon approached Bulger on numerous occasions to tell him they had picked up underworld chatter suggesting that he was going to be killed by the Winter Hill Gang, of which he was a member. It was Agent Condon, a native of Charlestown, who took the initiative and opened a file on Bulger with the intention of signing him on as a C.I. Condon and Bulger had conversations, much of which Condon paraphrased in a series of FBI reports filed as far back as the early 1970s. In one report, dated August 7, 1971, Condon writes, “The [potential informant] is still reluctant to furnish info and is spending most of his time working for a group that has him marked for elimination.”
After a couple more conversations with Bulger, Condon gave up. In 1975, he was approaching retirement and turned over the Bulger file to an ambitious young agent in the Boston office of the FBI named John Connolly.
The relationship that developed between Bulger and Connolly rightly stands as a landmark in the history of the Irish Mob in the U.S. In some ways, it was a relationship rooted in history, linked to an era when Irish American gangsters and Irish American cops were not infrequently cut from the same cloth. A century ago, the Irish gangster was sometimes viewed within the community as a necessary evil; he may have been a criminal, but at least he advocated for his people. In the long march from the ghetto to the gravy train, the gangster played his role. Consequently, the local Hibernian leatherhead might cut him some slack, especially if he knew the lad or knew his family, or if the crook had shown the foresight to factor the lawman into the financial give-and-take of his activities.
John Connolly was not some grubby cop looking to bring home a paper bag filled with cash to the missus. He was a G-man, schooled at the FBI training facility at Quantico, Virginia, exalted by Hoover, praised by presidents, and lionized by Hollywood. Connolly was at the forefront of the Bureau’s new emphasis on street smarts, daring, and initiative, especially when it came to cultivating what were known as Top Echelon informants. Connolly was a brash native Bostonian who walked the walk, talked the talk, and could have been a gangster. Instead, he was a lawman whose primary goal from early in his career was to build his reputation on the scattered bones of the Mafia.
He was also from Southie, born and raised on the same block as the Bulger family. In later years, when Connolly’s methods and ethics were called into question, he would go out of his way to underscore Whitey Bulger’s reputation as a near-mythical figure in the neighborhood. According to Black Mass, Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill’s devastating account of the Bulger-Connolly relationship, the two men first met when Connolly was eight years old. At a baseball field in Southie, Connolly was attacked by an older and much bigger kid. The future FBI agent was taking a beating when a nineteen-year-old neighborhood guy, whom he recognized, stepped in and chased the bullies away. Young Connolly’s savior that day was none other than Whitey Bulger.
Connolly’s family eventually moved out of the Old Harbor housing project to City Point, Southie’s best address because it was on a promontory jutting out into the sea, with splendid views of the harbor and city. Like many Southie residents, Connolly’s parents hailed from Galway, one of Ireland’s western-most counties. The family was devoutly Catholic and imbued with the neighborhood’s traditional instinct toward patriotic duty and government employment.
Connolly joined the FBI in 1969 and quickly distinguished himself. While assigned to the New York City office, he made a daring street corner arrest of one of his hometown’s most notorious criminals who was hiding out in New York at the time. Cadillac Frank Salemme was wanted for the car bombing of John Fitzgerald, a well-known Boston mob lawyer. On Third Avenue in Manhattan, Connolly happened upon Salemme walking out of a jewelry store; he chased the Beantown gangster through the snow and arrested him. It was a major feather in the young agent’s cap. He was rewarded with his dream assignment as a special agent with Boston’s Organized Crime Squad.
In late 1975, after having been in the local office less than a year, Connolly approached Whitey Bulger. Connolly was friendly with Whitey’s younger brother, state senator Billy Bulger, whose political career was on the rise. As natives of the same Southie turf, Connolly and Whitey had much in common, including a sense of pride in the accomplishments of others from their old neighborhood. As Irishmen, they also had a heightened sense of tribal loyalty stoked by years of schoolyard competition and street corner rivalries between the city’s ethnic factions, especially the Irish and the Italians.
They met in a parking lot at Wollaston Beach in the shipbuilding city of Quincy, on Boston’s southern border. On a pleasant moonlit night, they sat in the front seat of Connolly’s Plymouth talking about old times and mutual concerns. Whitey, who’d recently turned forty-six, was no spring chicken. Although he was a physical fitness buff and as tough as a man could be at his age, the Boston underworld was crawling with younger, hungrier predators. Whitey’s emergence as the boss of Southie made him a marked man; if he hoped to stay alive, maintain his position, and get ahead, he would need to massage the system.
The Mafia in New England was expanding in 1975, with the Godfather Syndrome then in full flower. Connolly told Bulger that they had a mutual enemy—what the feds referred to as LCN, La Cosa Nostra. If Whitey were willing to feed him information on the Italians and help him make cases, then Connolly would help protect Bulger from his enemies; in this mutually beneficial relationship, the Irish mobster would become an official, registered informant for the FBI and in return be virtually inoculated from criminal prosecution.
“The only thing you can’t do is kill people,” Connolly told Bulger.
Whitey jumped at the deal. That very month, he signed on as a C.I. and proceeded to continue his murderous ways. In fact, Bulger’s newfound status as a protected informant likely gave him delusions of grandeur, leading him to surmise that the U.S. government, in the person of John Connolly, now had a vested interest in maintaining the fiction that he was some kind of honorable racketeer willing to help the FBI in their efforts to take down the dreaded Mafia.
Just one month after signing on as an official FBI informant, W
hitey Bulger murdered Tom King. King was a former member of the Mullin Gang, now affiliated with Winter Hill, whose primary fault was that he had once whipped Bulger in a bar fight. In the back seat of a car near Carson Beach in Southie, Whitey shot King in the head. Then he and a couple of accomplices buried King’s body in a marshy area near the Neponsit River in Quincy.
Whitey’s main accomplice that day was Steve Flemmi, a savage contract killer who went by the nickname the Rifleman because he had become an expert marksman while serving as a paratrooper during the Korean War. Unbeknownst to almost everyone, Flemmi had himself been an FBI informant since 1965. Now that he and Bulger were both secretly affiliated with federal lawmen, they formed a partnership that crossed ethnic lines (Flemmi was Italian American). Over the next two decades, the duo of Bulger and Flemmi would become known as one of the most homicidal gangster partnerships in the history of the American underworld.4
The benefits of Bulger’s newfound status as a Top Echelon informant were immediately apparent. In 1977, John Connolly got wind of the fact that Bulger was one of numerous local criminals under investigation by a federal prosecutor in connection with an elaborate race-fixing scheme. A group of mobsters led by Howie Winter, boss of the Winter Hill gang, had been fixing races for years along the East Coast by paying bribes to track officials, jockeys, and horse owners. Combined with various extravagant bets placed with designated bookmakers—some of whom were in on the scam and some not—it had been a highly profitable racket. Prosecutors estimated that the Winter Hill Gang’s race-fixing scam had amassed more than $8 million in profits while operating in eight states.
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