You saw the movie. You know the bomb. But you don’t know what happened when the hitman came home for Sunday dinner.
You’ve seen the movies. You’ve seen Danny Greene, the Celtic warrior who laughed at the Mafia, get blown to pieces in a dentist’s parking lot in Cleveland . You’ve read about the Cleveland Mob War. You might have even read The Irishman.
But Hollywood cuts the scene when the credits roll. I lived the sequel.
The man who planted that bomb was Ray Ferritto. He was a made man, a cold-blooded mechanic for the mob, and the guy who eventually brought down the entire Cleveland crime family by turning government witness.
To the Feds, he was a weapon. To me? He was almost my brother-in-law.
While the FBI was tearing apart the Midwest looking for leads, Ray was dating Susan DeSantis—the sister of the love of my life, Mary Ellen. We were the “Secret Seven,” a crew operating out of Erie, PA, a neutral zone where the heat from Cleveland and Buffalo came to cool off .
Here is the part the movies leave out: Ray Ferritto walked away.
After admitting to two murders and destroying the Cleveland leadership, he did a year in Witness Protection and then quit. He walked out. He came back to Erie. He lived the rest of his life on the streets, untouched.
Why? Because in our world, you didn’t touch the guys who knew where all the bodies were buried.
I sat across tables from these men. I drove Jimmy “JR” Russell, the man who taught me the game, to meet with the crew of Russell Bufalino (yeah, Joe Pesci’s character). I sat in a 1970 Cadillac with a MAC-10 machine pistol on my lap, waiting for a signal to spray a car full of wise guys .
We weren’t just watching history. We were hot-wiring it.
