Bombs and bullets used to hold a great deal of sway in Northeast Ohio.
Especially when you had ringleaders like John Scalish, James “Jack White” Licavoli, Angelo Lonardo, Carmine "The Bull" Agnello, and “Irish” Danny Greene.
There was yet another: Alex Shondor Birns, a Jewish gangster in Cleveland who rose to become Cleveland’s Public Enemy No. 1; a ruthless if charming racketeer who might have been responsible for the murder of as many as a dozen people in Cleveland, cold blooded murders, that in most cases, went unsolved.
Recently retired Lyndhurst Police Chief Rick Porrello, author of “The Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia” and “To Kill the Irishman: The War that Crippled the Mafia,” has recently published “Bombs, Bullets, and Bribes: The True Story of Notorious Jewish Mobster Alex Shondor Birns."
As Porrello so meticulously chronicles in his smartly written book, Birns criminal footprints in Cleveland stretches back to the Prohibition era.
He was born Szandor (Hungarian for Alexander) Birnstein in either 1905 or 1907 in Lemešany, a village in eastern Slovakia.
His friends called him “Shon.”
His family made its way to Cleveland (E. 59th Street) when he was only a year old; where they ran a bootlegging business. His mother was killed when the still exploded in their home. Without a mother to look after him, Birns spent time in a Jewish orphanage.
Birns journey into Cleveland’s criminal underworld came thick and fast after dropping out of high school after the 10th grade.
By 1925, age 19, he was shipped off to a Mansfield Reformatory for auto theft; less than ten years later (1933) he served 30 days in a Workhouse for assault and 60 days for robbery.
After educating himself, navigating the highways and byways of the mean streets of Cleveland, first by running a pool hall at E. 55th and Woodland Avenue, Birns found his footing venturing into ‘’numbers’’ or “clearinghouse’’ racket, which amounted to an illegal lottery, the same kind of gambling which is now legal in 45 states plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Birns additionally became skilled at muscling payments from slot machine owners.
Along with his gambling operation, he operated a number of prostitution rings throughout Cleveland; he usually paid police handsomely to avoid raids of his brothels.
Like any successful mobster trying to avoid running afoul of the law, Birns wrapped himself in legitimate business operations. In his case, nightclubs, most notably the Ten-Eleven Club on Chester Avenue; later, the Alhambra at East 105th Street, popular establishments where Birns mixed with and charmed the major power brokers of the city, including the police and the press who were rarely issued a tab.
Reporters loved Birns, as Porrello tells it, because he made great copy to fill their newspapers; police, some police, that is, loved him because they had their palms greased when Birns was charged with criminal activity.
Remarkably, Porrello underscores through all of his crimes, murders, bombings and other criminal activity, and all the times he was hauled in front of a judge, Birns was only convicted of three felonies in his storied criminal life. The last was in 1965, when he tried to bribe a Parma detective. For that, he was paroled from the Marion Correctional Institution in July, 1971
Birns stabbed a man to death in 1929, but walked away free; he was charged again with a shooting in a speakeasy, but was acquitted; in 1931, he robbed a candy store for $1300, but was yet again acquitted. He also broke the jaw of a cab driver without any criminal prosecution.
Even Cleveland safety director Eliot Ness had his crew hoist a ladder in attempt to catch Birns and his organization booking bets. It was unsuccessful.
For the most part, Birns avoided jail time through bribes and keeping his mouth shut. The local newspapers often splashed with pictures of him leaving the courthouse with a devilish smirk on his face after prosecutors failed, time and time again, to make a crime stick.
One powerful police officer, Captain Louis Cadek, regularly lined his pocket taking payments from Birns in exchange for steering police away from Birns’ crooked operations. These were known as officers ‘’on the pad.” The law eventually caught up with Cadek. In 1936, he was convicted on four counts of bribery and sent to prison.
As Plain Dealer reporter Christopher Evans once wrote: “witnesses had a habit of turning up dead or at least badly injured, and juries almost always seemed to deadlock on the most clear-cut cases.”
In many ways, Birns resembled another infamous gangster, Al “Scarface’’ Capone, who ruled Chicago’s south side with an iron fist during Prohibition.
Much like Capone, Birns dressed for success. He was often seen around town mixing with cronies at the Theatrical Grill on Short Vincent, brandishing expensive cigars, wearing brilliant ties, suede and leather shoes, and stylish, well-tailored suites.
Similar to “Big Al,” Birns, though a hardened criminal, unveiled a charitable streak. Capone was widely remembered for providing three meals a day at his soup kitchens in Chicago during the Great Depression. In 1944, there was a tragic East Ohio Gas explosion in Cleveland, killing 135. Birns had his staff at his Ten-Eleven Club working around the clock feeding police and fireman, and those in need of a meal.
Both Capone and Birns would serve time for income tax evasion. Birns, was in fact charged with income tax evasion on three different occasions: in 1948, 1949, and 1950. He served a total of three years in prison.
In addition to both being christened Public Enemy No. 1, Capone and Birns resembled each other in another important way: they knew how to settle scores if you double-crossed them or owed them money.
The 1929 St Valentine’s Massacre in which Capone’s henchmen took out seven members of Chicago’s North Side Gang is one such extreme example of Capone settling scores.
When world renowned boxing promoter Don King (who cut his teeth operating the numbers racket in Cleveland during the 1950s) refused to keep paying Birns protection money, King soon found his front porch (and part of his living room) blown up with a stick of dynamite.
When Birns absorbed a bullet from the gun of a bouncer at a nightclub in 1934, Birns returned the favor, only this time, killing the bouncer while he was driving his car a few months later. Police were never able to pin the murder on Birns.
The body of Mervin Gold, found in the trunk of his own car on Chagrin River Road in Solon, Ohio.
Photo Credit: Cleveland Public Library, Photograph Collection
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Arguably, one of the most sensational cases of Cleveland’s unsolved murders centers on the killing of Mervin Gold, a financial manipulator, twice convicted on fraud, who in July, 1963 was found in the trunk of his own car on Chagrin River Road in Solon, Ohio.
According to Gold’s wife, her husband, Mervin Gold was on his way to meet Shondor Birns on the night he went missing. His wife presented police with a document left behind in his briefcase at home, which was an affidavit, showing that Gold received stolen bonds from Birns himself.
Much like he had in the past, Birns arranged an air-tight alibi, saying he was nowhere near the murder and was with another woman of “fine character.”
At the Coroner’s inquest, Birns took the fifth 90 times. Gold’s murder remained unsolved and the case was dropped due to lack of evidence.
Cleveland Police Detective inspect Birns' demolished Lincoln Continental
Photo Credit: Cleveland State University Cleveland Press Collection/Rick Porrello
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The moral of the story of Cleveland mobsters, undoubtedly must be: If you live by the bomb, you die by the bomb.
On Holy Saturday night, March 29, 1975, Alex (Shondor) Birns, 69, was the victim of a horrific bomb explosion after turning the key in the ignition of his Lincoln Continental after exiting Christy’s Bar at W. 25th Street and Detroit Avenue. His body was blown through the roof of the car; parts of his body could be found next door at St Malachi Church where parishioners were gathering for the 8. p.m. Holy Saturday Vigil Mass.
Cleveland’s Public Enemy No. 1 was buried on April Fool’s Day, of all days, at Hillcrest Cemetery in Bedford Heights.
Not until 1983 would a Plain Dealer article link Birns murder to members of the Hells Angels.
Two years later, another notorious Cleveland mobster, Danny Greene, met a similar fate. After leaving the dentist’s office in Lyndhurst on October 6, 1977, a bomb planted next to Greene’s car exploded, killing the Irishman immediately. The bomb was thought to have been planted by hitman Ray Ferritto.
After the Danny Greene murder, the thuggish mobsters that lurked on Cleveland streets began to fade away as law enforcement agencies became more circumspect and the FBI became more aggressive in dispatching organized crime task forces to major U.S. cities.
Most successful in combating organized crime, not only in Cleveland, but in major cities nationwide has been the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute (passed into law in 1970), which has provided the FBI with indispensable tools to operate undercover operations, use court-authorized electronic surveillance, and recruit informants, cooperating witnesses, and consensual monitoring.
What makes “Bombs, Bullets & Bribes’’ so fascinating is its author, Rick Porrello, actually has skin in the game.
His grandfather, Raymond Porrello, and his six brothers, the ringleaders of a prominent crime family, were involved in the beginnings of the Cleveland Mafia during Prohibition, most prominently on East 110th and upper Woodland Avenue. Raymond Porrello, Rosario Porrello (a great uncle of Rick Porrello), along with one of their henchmen, Dominic Gueli were gunned down in a cigar shop on E 110th and Woodland, in a spot that came to be infamously known as ``Bloody Corner.”
Porrello, unlike his grandfather and his great uncles, has been on the right side of the law his entire life, as a Lyndhurst Police Officer for 31 years, the last ten years as Police Chief before announcing his retirement.
Unlike most organized crime historians, Porrello is able to write about his subjects having developed keen perspectives from both sides of the fence.
A rare attribute, indeed.
For anyone interested in learning about Cleveland’s social history during a time when mobsters, racketeers, bombs and bullets were symbolic of the criminal underworld, this splendidly written and well researched book is just what the doctor ordered.
--Bill Lucey
December 29, 2019
