Separating fact from legend is good for journalists but bad for Hollywood.

In the case of infamous Cleveland gangster Danny Greene, killed by a car bomb in 1977, the facts are legendary. The creators of "Kill the Irishman," which opens Friday, did not need to juice the screenplay with wild tales of mob hits, explosive vengeance and hot-headed hubris. It was all in the police reports.

Greene, a fearless hood who dodged at least four murder attempts, once dared Mafia hit men to come after him. On television.

He was an enforcer, an embezzler, a union boss, an FBI informant and a father of five who loved Irish lore and helped the needy in his Collinwood neighborhood. But Greene's rise and fall has always been mostly a local story.

While scores of films have been made about crime kingpins in New York, Chicago and Las Vegas, Cleveland has been largely overlooked. Now Greene's larger-than-life personality will put the city's criminal past, for better or worse, in the national spotlight.

"Kill the Irishman" stars Ray Stevenson as Greene, Christopher Walken as Cleveland racketeer Shondor Birns, Vincent D'Onofrio as mob-connected Teamsters official John Nardi and Val Kilmer as a detective modeled partially on former Cleveland detective, and later police chief, Ed Kovacic.

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From the Plain Dealer archives:

From The Plain Dealer in 2010: The explosive life of Danny Greene

It was a long time coming.

Based on the book "To Kill the Irishman: The War That Crippled the Mafia" by Lyndhurst Police Chief Rick Porrello, the film has been in the works since 1997. Producer Tommy Reid, fresh out of Ohio State University, bought an option on the book before it was published.

The next 12 years became a labyrinth of Hollywood starts and stops before the film was finally shot in 2009, in Detroit. Then, more waiting. After distributor Anchor Bay Films acquired the film last summer, it decided to time its release closer to St. Patrick's Day.

The movie charts Greene's childhood in Collinwood and his rise to the top of the Longshoremen's union on Cleveland's docks in the early 1960s. But its primary focus is the mid-1970s, when Greene's rising power clashed with the Cleveland Mafia.

"So many times Hollywood screenwriters are asked to do a real-life story but to inject false elements in order to make the lead character more likable," said Jonathan Hensleigh, who directed "Kill the Irishman" and co-wrote the screenplay.

"We didn't have to do that with Danny Greene. Say what you want about him, and I'm sure there are those in Cleveland who have relatives who were hurt by Greene, but he did have that generous aspect to his personality. He bought turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas and gave them out to the poor. He subsidized orphan kids to go to school. People in the Collinwood neighborhood spoke highly of him."

Danny Greene timeline

Danny Greene's death was part of a war between two equally violent factions of the Cleveland mob. Click on any item in the timeline for more information; use the + buttons at the bottom to expand the timeline to see more events. Select the map option to locate all the events.

Hensleigh said the movie did not need to fake the humanity.

"It's very unusual. You don't get that with most of these criminals. They usually have that one facet -- the violence, the megalomania and the lust for power. Danny Greene had that, but he also had this man-of-the-people side."

'He had within him a kind of warrior's code

It was a dichotomy that defined his life. Even though Cleveland police long suspected Greene of killing racketeer Shondor Birns and Mafia underboss Leo "Lips" Moceri, they could never prove it. When Greene shot and killed former business associate Mike Frato in 1971, after Frato had shot at him from a passing car, Greene was charged with manslaughter but was acquitted.

Kovacic, now retired, spent years tracking Greene and his cohorts.

"Down deep, once you got past the dirt, Danny was a pretty decent man who got caught up in trying to live up to the image he created," said Kovacic. "He gave me a book one time on Brian Boru, the last great king of Ireland. He said, 'Read this, read this.' And I read it and thought, 'That's what Danny's doing. He's trying to build this legend.' "

Greene is played in the movie by Irish actor Stevenson, who starred in the HBO series "Rome."

"I wasn't interested in the Irish-American aspects, not from the jingoistic, banner-waving perspective. What really got to me about Danny Greene was his passion," Stevenson said.

"He had within him a kind of warrior's code. If you weren't in his line of work, he wasn't going to bother with you. But if you were one of the bad guys? Look out."

Cleveland in the mid-'70s echoed Belfast or Beirut. It was the bombing capital of America in 1976, a dubious distinction that did not include the era's three most famous car-bombing deaths: Birns in 1975 and Nardi and Greene in 1977.

The movie re-creates all three. It also mixes in some vintage TV news footage assessing the mayhem.

Brian Ross, the acclaimed chief investigative correspondent for ABC News, was a young reporter for WKYC Channel 3 in the mid-'70s who developed a national reputation for covering Jackie Presser and corruption in the Teamsters union. He also interviewed Greene several times.

"The camera crews were afraid to go over to Greene's place," said Ross. "They said, 'You're going to get us killed.' There were several who passed on the assignment. They just wouldn't do it."

Ross spoke with Greene after the bizarre bombing of his home/office on Waterloo Road in Collinwood in May 1975. The building was demolished into a mangled mess of bricks, but Greene and his 18-year-old girlfriend miraculously survived.

"He was like a lot of big-time mobsters I had met," said Ross. "He had the air of someone who was gentlemanly and polite. But you knew there was this very dark side to him.

"In his dealings straight up with me, he put on a veneer of charm and respectability. I guess that meant he cared about his image. It mattered to him how he was perceived."

Film takes dramatic license

The movie takes dramatic license with some aspects of Greene's life. His multiple marriages and two sons and three daughters are streamlined to one marriage and two daughters. Several key dates are flashed on-screen, but not all of them are accurate.

The Birns car-bombing occurred on March 29, 1975 (in the movie, it's March 8), and the film misspells the name of the church standing in for St. Malachi (on screen it's St. Malichy's). The old Theatrical Grill is represented by a much smaller restaurant-bar, with none of The Theatrical's charms.

These glitches and changes will mean nothing, of course, to audiences around the country, and perhaps little if anything to Clevelanders, even ones familiar with the facts. It's "based" on a true story; it's not a documentary.

There is, however, an actual documentary, "Danny Greene: The Rise and Fall of the Irishman," which will play in the upcoming Cleveland International Film Festival, starting Friday, March 25.

Produced and directed by Reid, the documentary was filmed partially in Cleveland in 2008. It features interviews with Kovacic, Greene's daughter Sharon, his former wife Nancy and former Prosecutor Carmen Marino, among others.

"It's such a rich part of Cleveland's history," said Reid. "We've had a lot of interest from people who remember Greene, but I also want to reach people who've never heard of him."

The recent Oscar-winning movie "The Fighter" received a lot of press attention because it took six years to make. "Kill the Irishman" took more than 13 years to reach theaters.

"It's the culmination of all this waiting and wondering if the film would ever be made," said Porrello, who just had a new paperback version of his book published by Simon & Schuster's Pocket Books. "I would have been happy with a made-for-TV movie. But Tommy's goal from the very beginning was to have a major theatrical release."

Porrello, Reid and Stevenson are scheduled to attend a New York premiere on Monday and a special screening Wednesday at the Cedar Lee Theatre in Cleveland Heights. The movie opens officially on Friday in Cleveland, New York and Los Angeles, then expands to five more cities in the next two weeks.

"I see this becoming one of the top mob films of all time," said Porrello. "If that happens, it will cement Danny's place in history on a national and international level. It will take its place among the great mob stories of Al Capone and John Gotti, and the great organized-crime films like 'Goodfellas' and 'The Godfather' trilogy. At least that's my hope."

Plain Dealer News Researcher Jo Ellen Corrigan contributed to this story.