look what i found on the internet:
article 1
Ray Ferritto (unknown - May 10, 2004) was a mob hitman for the Cleveland
Mafia, and is most famous for admitting to have killed Irish gangster
Danny Greene in 1977. He died of congestive heart failure at the age of 75.
In the 70s, an Irish gangster named Danny Greene began competing with
the Cleveland Mafia for control of union rackets. This resulted in a
violent mob war between the Mafia and Danny Greene's gang, during which
there were almost 40 car bombings in Cleveland. After eight failed
attempts to kill Greene, boss Jack "Jack White" Licavoli and Angelo "Big
Ange" Lonardo contracted Ray Ferritto to assassinate him.
When Greene was at the dentist on October 6, 1977, Ferritto and Ronald
"The Crab" Carabbia parked their car, with a box bomb in the side door,
next to Danny’s car. When Greene was about to enter his car, Caribbia
set off the bomb and Greene was killed instantly.
A witness saw Ferritto drive away from the scene and a few days later he
was arrested. The state of Ohio indicted Licavoli, Lonardo, Ferritto,
Carabbia and 15 other members of the Cleveland Family for the murder.
Ferritto later learned that the Cleveland mafia wanted him dead, so he
flipped and turned state's witness and testified in the 1978 trial.
Ferritto also claimed responsibility for the 1969 killing of Cleveland
gangster Julius Anthony Petro. He served less than four years in prison
for both murders. He retired in 2000, and moved to Florida where he died
four years later.
article 2
Feature Articles
www.americanmafia.com
October 2002
The day the Cleveland mob died
Another look back at the Greene bombing 25 years ago
By Ken Prendergast
Few Greater Clevelanders under the age of 35 may remember how
different things were in their city in 1977. And it wasn’t just about
disco music, long hair and bell-bottomed jeans.
But, for perhaps the first time in the 25 years since flamboyant
mobster Danny Greene was murdered by a car bomb, young Greater
Clevelanders may have some idea of the fear that pervaded their metro
area in those turbulent years. Today, it's threats of terrorism for
which we're being asked by authorities to maintain a watchful eye.
In the 1970s, however, it wasn't threats of explosive violence
that terrorized Northeast Ohio's citizenry. Instead, it was the real and
horrifyingly frequent use of it. By the time Greene’s life was cut short
Oct. 6, 1977, in the eastern suburb of Lyndhurst, Cuyahoga County had
seen 37 bombings in the previous year -- the most for any major city in
America.
"For a year after the Greene bombing, nobody parked near my wife’s
car at her workplace" at a local flooring company, said Roger Smyth,
then Lyndhurst's chief of police. "Given the times, I can’t blame them."
The Greene bombing would serve as a benchmark. Before it, Greater
Cleveland was frequented by acts of organized crime violence. After it,
the region’s once-powerful mob was silenced. On the bombing’s historic
anniversary, this dramatic change was recalled fondly by current and
former law enforcement officials.
Yet, 25 years ago, few here could have predicted such a downfall,
back when mobsters ran rampant in Northeast Ohio. The Mafia influenced
everything from construction contracts, labor unions and powerful
politicians as they enriched themselves from extensive gambling,
loansharking, prostitution, garbage hauling, governmental contract bid
rigging and other corruptive activities.
A turf battle between rival organized crime factions to control
those rackets erupted in 1976, when John Scalish, godfather of the
Cleveland Mafia since 1944, died unexpectedly during surgery. The aging
mob boss failed to declare a successor in the event of his passing.
That created a leadership vacuum that two rival factions sought to
fill. One was Scalish's traditional Cleveland Mafia family on the East
Side, with James "Jack White" Licavoli taking its reins. The other was a
new gang, mostly from the West Side, led by Greene and Teamster union
boss John Nardi, said Lt. Rick Porrello of the Lyndhurst Police Department.
Porrello has authored two books on Cleveland organized crime
history -- "To Kill the Irishman" and "The Rise and Fall of the
Cleveland Mafia." For Porrello, it's not so much an occupational
interest. His grandfather and uncle were local mob bosses who were
murdered during the bloody years of Prohibition in a fight for control
of the city's bootleg alcohol rackets.
While there had been a number of local bombings and other acts of
mob violence throughout the 1970s, the pace worsened dramatically
following Scalish's death, Porrello said.
The intensity and audacity of the violence was understood when
Scalish's underboss, Calogero "Leo Lips" Moceri turned up missing in
August 1976. In a motel parking lot in Akron, only his blood-stained
Mercedes was found. It was rare for a Mafia family’s underboss to be
assassinated.
Two of Scalish's enforcers also were targeted by henchmen working
for Greene and Nardi, Porrello added.
First was Eugene "The Animal" Ciasullo. He was seriously wounded
in July 1976 by a nails-laden bomb hidden in a flower pot on the front
steps of his Richmond Heights home. Battling cancer, Ciasullo now lives
near Pittsburgh. He is on probation for his alleged role in a 1990s
Cleveland-area drug ring. Ciasullo declined to be interviewed for this
story.
In September 1976, another of Scalish's enforcers was targeted,
Porrello told. A bomb planted in Alfred "Allie" Calabrese's car instead
killed an innocent man. Frank Pircio, 50, of Collinwood, died when he
tried moving the mobster's Lincoln Continental to get his own car out of
a shared driveway, the Cleveland Press reported. Calabrese died in 1999
of a stroke while behind bars, according to federal prison records.
In 1976, FBI agent Joseph Griffin was promoted from being a field
agent in Buffalo, to become an assistant special agent in charge at the
FBI’s Cleveland office. He was thrust into the job as the local mob war
was nearing its peak.
"Fortunately, my specialty was organized crime," Griffin said. He
was later named special agent in charge of the Cleveland FBI and wrote a
book, "Mob Nemesis," about his experiences.
Law enforcement officials were beginning to get tips from sources
that a mob war was underway and about to intensify.
"Sometime in March of 1977, I got phone call from someone I knew,"
said Pete Elliot, who worked at Cleveland's U.S. Marshal's office from
1967-90. "He was upset and scared. This person indicated that Danny
Greene was going to be killed and there was going to be a mob war. He
named names, and that anyone suspected of being an informant would also
be killed.
"The person indicated the local mob didn’t have the balls to kill
Danny Greene," Elliot continued. "He said Danny Greene had outsmarted
all of them. Instead, they were going to get someone on the West Coast
and another person from Western Pennsylvania to kill Greene. After
listening to the information for about a week, I took that (information)
to the organized crime strike force, but they said the information
wasn't to be believed."
Mob informants were rare in those years. They still adhered to the
Mafia’s code of silence, Omerta, enforced by death. Years later, it was
learned that Greene was an FBI informant, and often took advantage of
that status for his own benefit.
After the attacks on the Cleveland Mafia, Licavoli turned the
tables and instructed his own henchmen to target Nardi and Greene.
Porrello said the two men survived multiple attempts on their
lives, including a remarkable incident in March 1977 in the parking lot
of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Nardi and Greene were
returning from a meeting in New York City with Gambino Crime Family boss
Paul Castellano. Calabrese and another mobster, Pasquale "Butchie"
Cisternino, had planted a remote-controlled bomb in the car occupied by
Nardi and Greene. But Calabrese and Cisternino were too far away to
trigger the bomb.
Nardi apparently didn’t have Greene’s luck or cunning.
On May 17, 1977, one half of the Mafia’s rival faction’s
leadership was killed when Nardi was blown to bits by a car bomb outside
his Teamsters office downtown. His brutal death garnered national
headlines, which embarrassed Greater Clevelanders, based on the content
of follow-up media coverage of the Nardi bombing.
Bombs were the preferred method of killing in those years, said
law enforcement officials. Not only did their use erase much crime scene
evidence, bombs also sent a powerful message to civilians and others
that the Mafia shouldn’t be crossed.
Compared to Nardi, Greene had survived more attempts on his life,
going back to the late 1960s, including a bombing that leveled his
Collinwood apartment building in 1975. The attempts intensified after
Scalish died and Greene tried to force his way into leading the
Cleveland mob.
"Greene had the luck of the Irish," Porrello said.
As it turned out, Greene's Irish luck wasn't without limits.
In September 1977, a reputed mob wire man, Carmen Marconi, got
into Greene's home and his hangouts to tap his phones, said Smyth,
Lyndhurst's police chief from 1967-88. He said Marconi was a clever man.
When Marconi’s alarm company was raided by police in the late 1970s,
officers found privileged communications equipment stolen from the
telephone company’s high-security research lab. Phone company officials
had no idea how the equipment was taken, Smyth said.
He said it was Marconi who recorded Greene's girlfriend making an
Oct. 6, 1977 dentist appointment for her boyfriend at the Brainard Place
office building at Cedar and Braindard roads in Lyndhurst. Marconi’s
discovery was quickly delivered to mob boss Licavoli, court records
later showed.
Smyth, who was in Los Angeles on Oct. 6, attending a conference of
the Internal Association of Chiefs of Police, got a call in his hotel
room from Lyndhurst Capt. Harry Bell.
"He said a car blew up and thought it was Danny Greene," Smyth
said. "I left the next day for Cleveland."
A Chevy Nova was parked next to a Lincoln Continental owned by one
of Greene's enforcers. When Greene emerged from the dentist's office and
approached the door to the green Lincoln, a remote-control button was
pushed. The Cleveland Mafia hoped the violent explosion had eliminated
its worst headaches.
"Instead, they were about to begin," Porrello said.
Lyndhurst police’s lead bomb technician George Soptich began
several days work, collecting bits of trace evidence from the bomb
blast. All the pieces he collected allowed him to put the bomb back
together. His painstaking efforts are still taught at the FBI’s academy
on how to do a post-blast investigation, Smyth said.
In the office building’s parking lot, among the pieces from the
bomb and the shattered Chevy, there were other, more disturbing discoveries.
"I walked around the parking lot and there were little pieces of
flesh everywhere," said Joe Darwal, a Sun Newspapers photographer for 28
years. He arrived at Brainard Place only minutes after the explosion.
Upon Smyth’s return to Cleveland, he learned there was a
remarkable break in the case. Debbie Spotz, an artist related to a Berea
police officer, spotted a car driving away from the Greene bombing.
She considered the driver to be suspicious, as the driver didn't
seem surprised at the violent explosion, according to court records.
Spotz sketched a detailed composite of the driver's face, which law
enforcement officials immediately recognized as mobster Raymond Ferritto
of Erie, Pa., Smyth said.
"As soon as I got back to Cleveland, we had the drawing," he
added. "That investigation was all coming together. I was surprised we
had such a big break. We had so many bombings back then, and a lot of
them went unsolved."
With a search warrant in hand, Smyth and Lt. Joe Wegas, then-head
of Lyndhurst’s detective bureau, drove to Ferritto's home in
Pennsylvania. There, the two men were shocked at what they found.
"We couldn’t believe it," Smyth said. "In the visor of Ferritto's
car, there’s the registration of the car that blew up Danny Greene. We
were dancing around the back yard."
"It showed these guys are not the sharpest tools in the box,"
Griffin laughed. "They made mistakes and we capitalized on them."
Porrello said Ferritto soon turned himself into the FBI in
Pittsburgh. He immediately was arrested. The Cleveland Mafia quickly
took out a contract on Ferritto’s life, Porrello added.
On a Friday afternoon in December 1977, Elliot was placed in
charge of witness security for the U.S. Marshal's office in Cleveland.
As a matter of courtesy, he decided to pay a visit to Cleveland's
organized crime strike force chief Doug Roller to introduce himself. As
they chatted, Roller's phone rang.
"He kept saying `Oh my God' and `That’s terrific'," Elliot said.
"When he got off the phone, he said `Ray Feritto just flipped (over to
the prosecution's side).' That's when I knew this bombing was going to
reverberate throughout the country. That night, I was moving Ray Feritto
into protective custody."
Ferritto was the Lakewood man’s first witness. It proved to be a
baptism by fire. Elliot later learned the FBI was able to convince
native Clevelander and West Coast mobster Jimmy "The Weasel" Frattianno
to become a witness against the mob in the Greene murder case. At the
time, Frattianno was the highest-ranking mafioso to turn against his
former brethren in court. There would be more to come.
The Greene murder trial was one of the most notable court battles
in Cuyahoga County history. The trial was also the county’s longest --
79 days. As part of the evidence displayed, the car bomb was
reconstructed with a mock-up car door, just as the mob hitmen had done.
"Capt. Soptich wanted to set it off with a cherry bomb in the
court room for the jury," Smyth recalled. "I told him `no way -- you're
going to scare the daylights out of the jury.' That was his point. So we
chose to use a bell instead and, when it went off, the jury still jumped
out of their chairs."
However, only two convictions resulted from the trial --
Cisternino and Ronald "The Crab" Carabbia. While Cisternino died behind
bars in 1990, Carabbia was released on parole Sept. 24, 2002, much to
the chagrin of federal officials who feared he would return to his
reputed role as a mob leader.
"He (Carabbia) is the one guy who could try to bring it (the mob)
back. He has what it takes," said Griffin, Cleveland’s retired FBI
special agent in charge who is now chief executive officer of Quest
Consultants International, an investigations firm based in Chicago
comprised mostly of former FBI agents.
But the Greene trial, its mob turncoats and subsequent
investigations had dramatic repercussions.
"As we started off and the bad guys started turning against each
other, others started turning," Smyth said. "It went into the other
(mob) cases here in Cleveland. Then it led to us getting indictments in
New York (City) and Los Angeles. This (Greene murder case) was one of
the first multi-jurisdictional, law enforcement strike forces in the
country. All the agencies started working together for the first time."
"As a result of that (Greene) bombing that first year, in offshoot
cases, I took in 26 witnesses," Elliot said. "Until I retired in 1990, I
took in 80 witnesses, most of which were for organized crime cases. With
their families, that amounted to about 250 people."
"They (federal marshals) made the case," Smyth said. "Without the
witnesses, we wouldn't be anywhere. There were (death) contracts on all
of them. Years later, after things cooled down, a source told me that my
name was brought up once at the Card Shop (a Mafia hangout in
Cleveland's Little Italy) as someone to be eliminated."
Follow-up court cases against the Cleveland Mafia in the early
1980s convicted local mob boss Licavoli and, later, underboss Angelo
"Big Ange" Lonardo, of various organized crimes. Before Lonardo was sent
to jail, he was named interim boss of the Cleveland Mafia. He soon
turned against his mob pals.
"Most of these guys were maggots," Griffin said. "But one of them
who had some class was Lonardo. He wouldn’t sit next to the others at
the (court) hearings. After Lonardo was sent to prison, I sent agents to
see him and we talked about him helping us. They stayed in close contact
with him. Finally, we asked if he would testify for us in a case and he
agreed. It was very exciting. Lonardo was the highest-ranking Mafia
member to ever testify, since he was an interim boss. (Sammy) Gravano
(who testified against Gambino leader John Gotti) was only an underboss."
Lonardo, inducted into the Mafia in the 1940s and respected by
mafiosi nationwide, was used by the FBI and federal prosecutors as a
witness in subsequent court cases throughout the country to seriously
damage the national Mafia hierarchy, Porrello said.
"Removing a city’s mob leadership," Griffin said of Cleveland, "to
tell you the truth, it’s never been done anywhere else in the country."
Some say organized crime in Cleveland is all but dead. But Elliot
disputes that.
"I don't think that's true," he said. "There’s still a lot of
operations going on."
"If the government is staying on top of things in Cleveland,"
Griffin responded. "They can keep the mob from coming back. But it all
began with Danny Greene," he said.
END
article 3
October 2002
Danny Greene - Plus 25
By Rick Porrello
With almost daily media coverage of terrorist bombings, it’s hard
to believe that such a vicious weapon was once used on a regular basis
in Cleveland, Ohio’s underworld to settle scores and eliminate
competitors – “headaches” as the mobsters called them. So many bombs
were being detonated in 1970s Cleveland that it became known as Bomb
City, U.S.A. To deal with the problem, the local office of the Alcohol
Tobacco and Firearms, the federal agency charged with regulating
explosives and investigating bombings, had to be tripled in manpower.
Danny Greene, a flamboyant mob associate with a penchant for the
color green and excessively proud of his Celtic heritage got his start
in the 1960s as president of the local International Longshoremen’s
Association of. He could have been a highly successful businessman but
he wanted excitement. After a shocking expose by the Cleveland Plain
Dealer, he was ousted from the docks and fined $10,000 for embezzling
union funds. Danny had been forcing longshoremen to unload filthy grain
boats and "donate" their paychecks to a union hall "renovation fund."
The hall had already been renovated - painted green when Danny took office.
About this time Danny was recruited by an F.B.I. agent as a C.I.
or confidential informant. Because of Danny’s connections to labor
racketeers and mobsters and the information he was privy to, he became
classified as a highly-prized T.E. or Top Echelon informant.
Later Danny worked for as an enforcer for local mobsters including
Alex "Shondor" Birns, well-known Jewish racketeer labeled as Cleveland’s
Public Enemy Number One during the 1950s and 1960s. After a dispute over
a $60,000 loan Greene refused to repay, Birns had a bomb planted in his
car. It was the first in a series of botched attempts on the brash and
lucky Irishman's life. Danny found the bomb.
"I’ll return this to the bastard who sent it to me,” Danny swore.
Sure enough, a few weeks later Birns was blown out the roof of his
car, in two pieces.
In 1976 there was a bombing war being raged in Cleveland for
control of the rackets. Danny Greene and labor union figure John Nardi
teamed up against James “Jack White” Licavoli, a former member of the
Purple Gang. The aging but powerful and wealthy Licavoli reluctantly
took over the reigns after the death of longtime mob boss John Scalish.
Greene and Nardi’s strategy was a quick and aggressive offensive.
In 1976 Licavoli’s cousin and mob underboss Leo "Lips" Moceri,
disappeared. A few days later a pool of blood was found in the trunk of
his car. Moceri’s body has never been found. Next Greene and Nardi went
after Eugene Ciasullo. Nicknamed "the Animal," Ciasullo was the
Cleveland mob’s most feared enforcer. He was seriously injured and put
out of commission for several months with a bomb that was placed on his
front porch.
James Licavoli had enough and ordered his henchman to "get rid of
the Irishman," but the inexperienced soldiers had no luck. The attempts
by the self-proclaimed tough guys were almost comical. In one attempt,
the hitmen placed themselves too far from Greene for the radio signal
from their remote transmitter to detonate a bomb placed next to their
target’s car.
Finally Licavoli’s men got Greene’s partner John Nardi. Nardi had
been carrying a .38 revolver, but it was no match for the powerful bomb
that was planted on a car, parked next to Nardi’s vehicle and detonated
by remote control.
But the mob soldiers still couldn’t seem to eliminate Danny Greene
who sat boldly outside the headquarters of his “Celtic Club,” under an
Irish flag. After so many failed attempts on his life, Danny had
developed an aura of invincibility that intimidated many of those
mobsters trying to kill him. Danny knew it and was taking advantage of it.
He was interviewed by a television reporter and boldly issued a
challenge to the Mafia.
Greene declared. “I have no axe to grind, but if these maggots in
this so-called Mafia want to come after me, I'm over here by the Celtic
Club. I'm not hard to find."
Cleveland Mafia members were incensed. An exasperated mob
lieutenant complained, “how did this guy ever come into the picture?”
But in the end, Danny went out the way he predicted. "When you
live by the bomb, you die by the bomb."
It happened on Oct. 6th, 1977, a sunny afternoon in the Cleveland
suburb of Lyndhurst. near Interstate 271. Danny Greene arrived at the
Brainard Place Medical Building for a dental appointment. He parked his
car, grabbed a leather bag which contained a 9mm pistol and went up to
have a loose filling repaired.
Mob associates Ronnie Carabbia from Youngstown and Ray Ferritto
from Erie, PA. were already there in the parking lot and watched Greene
enter the building. This was the chance they had been waiting for. They
parked a “Joe Blow” car with a fake registration next to Danny’s car.
Inside the car was a specially built door packed with a powerful
explosive charge and wired to a remote-controlled detonator.
When Greene returned to his car, the two mobsters detonated the
bomb killing Greene instantly. The Irishman was dead. And the Cleveland
Mafia was celebrating.
Several days after Greene's murder, the F.B.I. intercepted some
interesting conversation through their Title III hidden microphone
surveillance at Mafia boss James Licavoli's house. Apparently Licavoli,
his right-hand man John Calandra and an unidentified male were
complaining about Frank Embrescia, Frank Brancato and John Nardi. They
felt that these men, deceased mobsters, as well as the F.B.I. were
responsible for Greene's rise to power.
LICAVOLI: Embrescia was so fuckin' burned up when Shondor got it.
Hey if he couldn't handle him, that's his own fault.
CALANDRA: That's right. That's right.
UNIDENTIFIED: How can a marked man put a big flag in front of his
house. He had a big Irish flag out by the side, anybody could see it. He
put it there on purpose. He'd be sitting out there under the sun.
CALANDRA: He has some pretty good connections though.
LICAVOLI: He had some connections all right. The fuckin' F.B.I. He
used to tell them about every goddamed thing everyone did.
CALANDRA: You know that with Greene. He was the F.B.I.'s boy.
LICAVOLI: Oh fuck yes. But he didn't work with the F.B.I., he told
them what to do! He told them what to do. He said F.B.I. your ass. He
thought he got so fuckin' big. Well he wanted it all that's all. Him and
Nardi. That fucker. He used to give them the money and he used to give
them all the information. He created a monster.
CALANDRA: Nardi and Brancato.
LICAVOLI: That's right. They created that guy. And all the fuckin'
headaches we used to have.
Licavoli didn't know then but his headaches were just beginning.
The Mafia's celebration was cut short. There was much sloppy work
and a few observant witnesses and extraordinary investigations by the
Lyndhurst Police, Cleveland Police, F.B.I. and other law enforcement
agencies.
One of the witnesses was a sketch artist who drew an amazing
likeness of Ray Ferritto for authorities. When a search warrant was
executed at Ferritto’s house in Erie, police found the registration
papers for the bomb car and arrested him. Another embarassing blunder.
But Ferritto was the only one who had been picked up. Mafia boss
Licavoli and his crew had a plan. They would merely kill Ferritto and be
in the clear. But word bot back to Ferritto. When he found out that the
very mob he was serving had put out a contract on his life, he “flipped”
and made a deal with police.
As a result, numerous Cleveland mobsters were arrested. Ronnie
Carrabbia and Pasquale “Butchie” Cisternino were convicted of state
murder charges and sentenced to life in prison. Cisternino died while
incarcertated. Carrabbia was paroled in September of this year after
serving twenty-four years.
As a result of Ferritto’s testimony and federal charges that
followed the state trial, Southern California mob captain Jimmy "Weasel"
Fratianno (who recommended Ferritto for the Greene murder) defected and
co-authored The Last Mafioso.
In 1982, acting Cleveland mob boss Angelo “Big Ange” Lonardo, a
product of Cleveland’s Prohibition-era sugar war, sentenced to life for
drug racketeering also went to work for the government and was
eventually released from prison. At the time Lonardo, called "the
highest ranking mobster ever to testify for the government" helped put
away mob bosses Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno of New York's Genovese Mafia
family, Anthony "Tony Ducks" Corallo of the Luchesse clan and Carmine
Persico of the Colombo family. It all started with Danny Greene.
A Cleveland attorney defending a local mobster commented in 1982:
“Danny Greene died five years ago and he’s still fucking with us.”
Danny would have been proud.
I went to high school with a guy who's family were allegedly big time
dealer / smugglers. A couple of years after we graduated, the Mom & Dad
were found slaughtered in their home.
Can't say that I do.
--
Arrrghhhgorra buh bhuh do arrrrgggghhhhnnnn!!!!
-- Joe Strummer
why?
Actually, I don't remember her. Other than the name.
> I went to high school with a guy who's family were allegedly big time
> dealer / smugglers. A couple of years after we graduated, the Mom & Dad
> were found slaughtered in their home.
My English teacher was on the front page one day. I was going to
deliver newspaper at 4:30 AM and there was Mr. Payne--arrested for
murdering a color guard a couple years earlier.
Because her Dad might have killed you.
>
> Actually, I don't remember her. Other than the name.
Heh. Maybe you did fuck her.
>
>> I went to high school with a guy who's family were allegedly big time
>> dealer / smugglers. A couple of years after we graduated, the Mom &
>> Dad were found slaughtered in their home.
>
> My English teacher was on the front page one day. I was going to
> deliver newspaper at 4:30 AM and there was Mr. Payne--arrested for
What's a color guard?
That's funny. I thought the same thing... But that was in HS.
> What's a color guard?
They waved flags around with the marching band.