The Irishman

by

JC Sullivan
 

 To be released on March 17, 2010, what could be a more appropriate date for a film simply titled, “The Irishman”? The movie is based on “To Kill the Irishman”, Rick Porello’s true life crime story of one of Cleveland’s most colorful Irish-American gangsters, the late Danny Greene.

Greene’s hard luck began on the day he was born. His mother, Irish-born Irene Fallon, who had married his father only a few days earlier, died in childbirth at St. Ann’s Hospital. His father John, also Irish-born, unable or unwilling to raise him, abandoned him to Parmadale, a Catholic orphanage. Six years later, when he re-married, his father brought the boy into the home. Danny soon ran away from his alcoholic father and ended up being raised by his maternal grandparents, Patrick and Sarah (Tate) Fallon, in the Collinwood section on Cleveland's east side. When his father died in 1959, the newspaper obituary didn’t even mention Danny, only his children from the 2nd marriage.

With little adult guidance, Danny’s attentions drifted from schoolwork to extra-curricular activities, “shooting dice and street fighting”. He was a handsome, likeable and athletic, traits that endeared many adults and youngsters to him.

A high school dropout, he joined the Marines in 1951, later receiving an honorable discharge. He eventually ended up back in Cleveland working the Lake Erie docks and ocean ships as a laborer in Local 1317 of the International Association of Longshoremen. When their union President ran into a conflict of interest situation, the popular Danny was appointed as an interim Trustee. When the next election was held, he was elected IAL President. Thus was the beginning of his eventual associations with organized labor and the Cleveland Mafia, then-headed by James “Jack White” Licavoli, and an unbelievable maze of underworld characters.

As mobsters do when their ‘families’ are threatened by others muscling in on their territory and income, they kill each other. In 1977, after at least seven previous attempts, they finally got to him after his girlfriend used a tapped phone line to make a dentist appointment for him. A car bomb awaited him outside Dr. Candoli’s office, just like the car bomb Greene used to blow Shondor Birns into two pieces. Despte his Irish-sounding name, Shondor Birns was Jewish.

Filmed in Detroit, the flamboyant and always-green-clad Greene stars Ray Stevenson. Fellow mobster Shondor Birns is portrayed by Christopher Walken. My Cleveland vice detective father, the late John J. Sullivan, arrested Birns on more than one occasion. Val Kilmer is a Cleveland police detective who becomes friends with Greene. Others rounding out the troupe include Vinnie Jones, Marcus Thomas, Linda Cardellini, Laura Ramsey, Paul Sorvino, Mike Starr, Tony LoBianco, Vinnie Vella, Steve Schirippa, Jason Butler Harner, Robert Davi and Fionnula Flanagan.

It will indeed be a monumental screen-writing task for the movie’s script writers and film editor to give us a top view of the Cleveland and northeast Ohio crime family genealogy that Executive Producer Porello laid out in his book.