Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (60 page)

To keep Junior alive, the Gambinos paid the relatively small amount of $21,000 for his release. Then they set their sights on Jimmy McBratney, who had been identified as a member of the kidnapping crew.

Snatching mafiosi or Mafia-connected criminals and holding them for ransom had become a cottage-industry for a certain type of Irish gangster who liked to live dangerously. The Gambino family, in particular, had been plagued by a recent rash of kidnappings, many of which ended badly. Carlo Gambino, scion of the largest crime family in America, became distraught when his own nephew was kidnapped early in 1972. A ransom of $100,000 was paid for his release, but the young Gambino kid never materialized. In January 1973, the police acted on a tip and dug up the body of Gambino’s nephew at a garbage dump in New Jersey. Although there was nothing linking McBratney to this particular kidnapping and murder, the Irish mug made a wonderful fall guy. The word went out: “Get Jimmy McBratney. He killed Don Carlo’s nephew.”

On the night of May 22, 1973, McBratney was drinking at a Staten Island bar and restaurant called Snoope’s when three Italian-looking hoods strolled in and announced that they were detectives who wanted to take him in for questioning. McBratney smiled because he recognized the ruse as the same sort of approach he used in his own kidnappings.

The three Italians were vintage
gavones
, and one of them even wore his hair slicked back in a ducktail like it was still 1959. It would later come out that this particular
gavone
was an up-and-coming Gambino soldier by the name of John Gotti.

Gotti and the others jumped McBratney right there in the bar. The big Irishman put up a furious struggle. In front of several startled witnesses, he dragged Gotti and the other two Italians the full length of the bar, getting in a few licks of his own, before they immobilized him against a wall. Then one of the men put a gun to McBratney’s head and, in full view of the barmaid, fired three shots at close range, killing him instantly. The three killers then escaped into the night.
¹

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 Lufthansa 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.
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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.