March 29, 1975
Taking care of business—in Cleveland they did it with bombs. Alex “Shondor” Birns, Cleveland’s high-profile and violent Public Enemy Number One, knew this better than anyone. Birns was responsible for so many bombings that it would be hard to count them all.
Maybe the reason Birns felt the impulse to use bombs went way back to his childhood, during Prohibition. At that period, ordinary people got into bootlegging too, supplying local hoods with homemade rot-gut. One such ordinary person was Birns’s own mother, Illon. One day, while Illon was tending to the family still, the makeshift apparatus exploded and she was killed, which must have devastated her young son.
By the time Birns was sixteen, he had started to fall in with the local hoods. A tough street fighter, he became a member of the Woodland Mob, before branching out on his own in the protection and numbers rackets. The money he earned was good, too, and gave Birns important contacts within the Cleveland Mafia.
Though he lived by his fists, Birns could be charming and affable when he wanted to be. He loved to drive expensive cars and dress in the latest fashions. He became great pals with the local press too, and would often shoot the breeze with them. But for all this, there was no denying how tough Birns was when the situation called for it. And of course, there were always his bombs.
Birns was very impressed by over-the-top Irish-American hood Danny Greene, who could bust it up with the best of them. In the early 1960s, Birn hired Greene as part of his mob and made use of Greene’s fists (and guns) when needed. But hiring Greene turned out to be the worst move he ever made.
As the 1960s turned over into the 1970s, relations between Birns and Greene became somewhat strained. It didn’t help that Birns felt Greene had reneged on a sizeable loan from him, one that he himself had borrowed from the Gambino family. So Birns put out a contract on Greene, and this being Cleveland, naturally one of the weapons of choice was a good old-fashioned bomb. It was too bad for Birns that Greene discovered the device before it could explode and decided to send it back directly where it had come from.
The end for Birns was truly terrible. On March 29, 1975, he left one of his favourite restaurants. Shortly after he got into his Lincoln and turned on the ignition, an explosion was heard that rocked the street, setting off car alarms. Glass rained down onto the pavement—the windows of nearby buildings had been blown out—and people came running from all directions. Birn himself had been blown through the roof of his car and severed in two; his upper body lay in one place, while his legs came down somewhere else. For all that, though, the tough old mobster was still alive for a few moments before his body shuddered and he faded into oblivion. Birns had died in the same manner he had inflicted on others.