It was a little before 8 p.m. on March 29, 1975.
It was Holy Saturday, and parishioners were filing into St. Malachi for the Easter Vigil.
Nearby, Shondor Birns was leaving from Christy’s, a go-go joint on West 25th Street. He got to his Lincoln Continental, and seconds later, it exploded.
“The explosion was followed by a split second of silence, and then the tinkling sound of falling glass filled the air, as dozens of windows in a nearby building broke with the same soothing clink-clink that breeze-rustled chimes make swaying on a porch,” Michael Roberts wrote in Cleveland Magazine.
Called the city’s Public Enemy No. 1, Birns had a lengthy criminal career stretching back to Prohibition, involving loan sharking, racketeering and occasionally contract killing on behalf of Cleveland’s mob family. He was by turns brutal and charming and could be found holding court in any of a half-dozen bars throughout Cleveland (many of which he held silent partnerships in).
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In the 1960s, he’d taken on Danny Greene as a protege. The young labor racketeer was on the rise, and Birns used him to maintain peace in the rackets. But it turned out to be a fateful move, as a decade later, the two had a falling out — ostensibly over a mob-backed loan for an after-hours club — and Birns put out a contract on Greene. But Greene, who relied on bombs as part of his arsenal, struck first.
Birns’s bombing death would be a prelude to a violent mob war in Cleveland. In 1976, mob boss John T. Scalish died after open-heart surgery. He hadn’t designated a successor, and nature abhors a vacuum. There was so much violence that Cleveland became known as Bomb City, USA — culminating in the car bombing of Greene himself, in 1977.
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