Birns was sitting at Keystone with two of his fellow gang members when he rose to retrieve some cigars from his overcoat which he had checked in the coat room.

[2][page needed] When the police arrived, they found Birns in his car ready to pull away, while holding a bloody handkerchief to his shoulder.

[2][page needed] Two months later, Rudy Duncan took his 11-year-old foster son, Stanley to a movie show at the Uptown theater outside E. 105th Street and Saint Clair Avenue.

When they got into their car back in the theater parking lot, two men wearing white cotton gloves walked up alongside, one on each side.

[2][page needed] Birns' reputation as a brutal, ruthless enforcer made it easy for him to establish lucrative "protection" services.

At the time, Birns was unaware of the Immigration Act of 1917 which required any alien convicted of a crime of moral turpitude to gain permission prior to entering or leaving the country.

[2][page needed] In 1942, at the height of World War II, Birns was arrested on a deportation warrant based on the auto theft and bribery convictions.

A wartime executive order was issued by Franklin Delano Roosevelt charging Birns as an enemy alien and he was interned at McAlester, Oklahoma.

When the tragic Cleveland East Ohio Gas Explosion that killed 134 persons and left thousands homeless occurred in 1944, Birns kept the club open, 24 hours a day, feeding policemen, firemen and rescue workers for free.

The Cleveland safety director denounced the deal in which the state okayed Birns's license as "stinking to high heaven of politics".

[5] During the 1940s, Birns made a longstanding alliance and had become closely involved with the local Cleveland crime family mobsters such as Angelo Lonardo.

King first gained a reputation prominence in 1954, after he thwarted an attempted armed robbery on one of his gambling houses, by killing one of the stick-up men.

[2][page needed] In October 1956, Birns sent an emissary to King and his colleagues demanding that they pay $200 a week as street tax, or suffer the consequences.

Elijah Abercrombie, a co-defendant, told the jury that police had offered to let him run an unhampered gambling game if he gave them information against Birns.

The judge and jury had difficulty understanding King and his rapid, inarticulate speech leading the local newspapers to dub him "The Talker".

[2][page needed] Throughout his lifetime, Alex Birns craved respectability and sought to obtain it through his popular Alhambra Restaurant, where many judges and politicians dined.

[2][page needed] In spite of being diligently pursued by law enforcement for most of his life, Birns eventually came to respect and admire the city's police officers.

Upon investigation, Cleveland police picked up for interrogation a small-time hood named Clarence "Sonny" Coleman, who owed money to Birns.

[2][page needed] On Wednesday morning, Birns called John Kocevar, chief deputy Cuyahoga County sheriff.

Amid aggressive interrogation by Delau, Birns insisted he had been dining on frog legs in a Garfield Heights steakhouse at the night of Gold's murder.

[2][page needed] For a relatively small cut of their profits, $1,000 weekly, Birns had been serving as a peacemaker and mediator of disputes among the Afro-Americans.

[2][page needed] By the 1970s, Alex Birns had mellowed significantly, playing handball daily and spending several hours on lunch and a cocktail or two.

[2][page needed] Birns was always dealing with heavy opposition from a few Afro-American gangsters who wanted independence from him and the more powerful and politically connected Mafiosi of the Cleveland family.

This contract was soon taken by several minor underworld characters who were burglars by trade, which would result in numerous failed assassination attempts on Greene.

Greene disassembled the bomb himself, removed the dynamite, and brought the rest of the package to the Cleveland Police Department Lieutenant Edward Kovacic.

"[2][page needed] In March 1975, Holy Saturday, the eve of Easter, Birns was blown up via a bomb containing C-4, a potent military explosive, in the lot behind Christy's Lounge, the former Jack & Jill West Lounge, a go-go spot at 2516 Detroit Ave. Birns was blown several feet through the roof of the car and his torso landed near the passenger door.

[2][page needed] A chain link fence between Christy's and St. Malachi Church caught many of the smaller fragments of flesh and bone.

[2][page needed] In the following weeks, homicide investigators wrongly concentrated African-American organized crime as suspects rather than Danny Greene.

[11] Crnic was later killed while attempting to attach a car bomb to a vehicle belonging to Cleveland crime family associate John "Johnny Del" Delzoppo on April 5, 1977.

[12] In the Cleveland Press, Dick McLaughlin summed up his career: "A muscleman whose specialty was controlling numbers gambling on the East Side, keeping the peace among rival operators and getting a cut from each of them, Birns was a feared man because of his violent reaction to any adversary.