Opening Friday at the CineBistro theatre in Tampa's Hyde Park is the new film Kill the Irishman, a look at the real life Cleveland gangster Danny Greene, who ultimately died of a car bomb in 1977 at the age of 47. As I've subsequently learned in recent days, there were lots of car bombs that went off during the mid 1970's in the Cleveland area. In 1976 alone, there were 37 such bombings in Cuyahoga County, which encompasses the Cleveland region.
The film stars Ray Stevenson as Danny Greene, with Vincent D'Onofrio playing John Nardi, a mafia-connected Teamster official, Val Kilmer as a Cleveland detective, Christopher Walken as Shondor Birns, a connected Cleveland club owner and, not for the first time, Paul Sorvino plays mafia boss Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno.
The film is an adaptation of a 1998 book called To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia, written by Rick Porrello, the Police Chief of Lyndhurst, a suburb of Cleveland. Though nationally the story of Greene is barely known, his life and times was filled with lots of drama deserving of getting the celluloid treatment, as he was a larger than life figure who began his career by working in a factory, and rose up to ultimately head up the Longshoreman's union on Cleveland's docks in the early 1960s.
In an interview with CL, author Rick Porello talked about the story and the making of the film. It's not unheard of for films to go into development hell, that perilous place where an option has been taken out on a work but before financing can be found to produce the film. In the case of this particular project took well over a decade to reach fruition (i.e. the silver screen). He said it was thrilling to finally get the news from his agent that the film had received the green light.
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2011.