Pub GuideIt's about time they made a movie about Irish mobster Danny Greene
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"Walken, Kilmer in new Irish mobster movie": Click here
34 years ago this month, folks in the Midwestern U.S. turned on the TV and saw a strongly built man with flowing blonde hair standing before two trailers in a vacant lot.
One trailer was the man’s home. His apartment had just been blown to smithereens by gangsters.
The other trailer flew the Irish Tricolor flag and had a sign which read “Future Home of the Celtic Club.”
Asked by gathered reporters about what it felt like to survive a gangland bombing, the man, whose name was Danny Greene, said, “I’m an Irish Catholic. I believe that the guy upstairs pulls the strings, and you’re not going to go until he says so. It just wasn’t my time yet.”
Word is getting around Hollywood that a movie is to be made about Cleveland Irish gangster Danny Greene. Val Kilmer, Christopher Walken and Vincent D’Onofrio are among those who have signed on to star in the movie, which begins shooting in Detroit this week.
A couple of questions arise when you hear news like this. Cleveland actually had Irish gangsters? Is Greene really an Irish name? How is any director in the world going to handle three oddballs such as Kilmer, Walken and D’Onofrio?
But the bigger question, once you know a thing or two about Danny Greene, who spread chaos through the Midwest crime scene in the seventies, is this -- why did it take so long to make a movie about the man known simply as “The Irishman”?
Though Cleveland’s Irish population was never as strong as Boston and New York’s, it was sizeable. John Greene and Irene Fallon left Ireland and settled in Cleveland. They were married just a few days before Danny was born in November of 1933, just as the Great Depression was kicking into high gear.
As Irish gangland authors T.J. English and Rick Porello have noted in separate books, Irene, Danny’s mother, died just three days after Danny was born.
Danny’s father, plagued by drink and unemployment, placed Danny in the Palmdale Catholic Orphanage. Not surprisingly, Danny Greene’s youth was a troubled one.
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