Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster (25 page)

These two moves established a pattern for O’Banion. He was daring, certainly, but also a master at bribing cops and judges, which kept him out of jail. In his entire career, he only served two brief stints behind bars: once for getting caught with stolen postage stamps and another time for assault, for which he served three months. This was not a bad record for a man whom Police Chief Morgan Collins described in 1924 as “Chicago’s arch criminal” who had allegedly “killed, or ordered killed, at least twenty-five men.”

O’Banion led a charmed life partly because he seemed to inspire such strong loyalty among his followers. He was generous to a fault, especially with Bugs Moran, whom he treated like a son though they were nearly the same age. When a member of the O’Banion gang was wronged in any way, Dean was quick to stand up for them. In 1988, historian Rose Keefe interviewed a former truck driver of O’Banion’s who remembered him in glowing terms. “I liked running booze for Dean,” said the trucker, J. Barnett, who also drove for other bootlegger syndicates. “He paid well; he never stiffed his drivers like some of the other gangs did…. He really believed in treating his people well.”

O’Banion was fair and friendly, but he was also tough. Barnett remembered seeing O’Banion in action one night at a Chicago restaurant:

All that money and success in the booze business did not make Dean soft. Not at all. One night a group of us were at a chop suey joint on North Clark…. This drunken idiot and his girl sat at a table close to ours, and the man started going at it with the name-calling while the woman sat there and cried. You couldn’t help but stare at a scene like that. Suddenly the guy looks right at Dean, who was sitting on the outside of our booth.

“What the hell are you looking at?” he says.

“Not a hell of a lot,” Dean says back. “What about you?” The guy gets up and comes right over. I was nervous as hell. He was big, and I felt sure that Dean or someone else would say to hell with it and just shoot him. But Dean just waited till he got close enough, then swung out his foot and kicked the guy in the kneecap. Hard. The guy fell down with his leg at a funny angle. Dean jumped out of his chair, got on top of him, and got him in a tight headlock. He pinned the guy’s wrists with his other hand and kept choking him until he begged for mercy. Good thing he did beg because no one was helping him. Even the Chinese people who ran the place stood there and looked fascinated…. Some of the gang leaders were only big men because their guns made them big; without weapons they were nothing. Not O’Banion. Men like him were different from the Italian gangs, who had others do their fighting for them and were only as dangerous as the weapons they carried. Looking back now, I think that was one of the reasons they hated him so much.

O’Banion was the man. As such, his stature as a bootlegger and legitimate tough guy grew accordingly; the former singing waiter from Little Hell became a political force in the Windy City. He’d always been interested in politics. Given his convivial personality and ability to galvanize his followers, he might have made a highly effective ward boss in the manner of Bathhouse John or Hinky Dink. Instead, Deanie became a mobster, albeit one with a special knack for getting out the vote in his North Side wards. During the campaign of 1924, a common ditty heard throughout the city was: “Who’ll carry the 42nd and 43rd wards?” Answer: “Deanie O’Banion, in his pistol pocket.”

Local elections that year were hotly contested. On November 1, the Democrats, fearing that the powerful North Side bootlegger might defect to the Republicans, staged a black-tie testimonial dinner for O’Banion at the Webster Hotel at 2150 North Lincoln Park. Along with Democratic politicians from the Lake Shore wards, labor union leaders, and ranking members of O’Banion’s organization, in attendance were a number of city officials, including the Commissioner of Public Works, six police lieutenants, and the Chief of Detectives. Deanie was presented with a $1,500 platinum watch amid an atmosphere of camaraderie and conviviality that evoked memories of the long-defunct First Ward Ball. The next day, when it was reported who had attended the dinner, there was public outcry, and the Public Works commissioner was forced to resign. The Chief of Detectives claimed that he had been told the dinner was for someone else, and when he recognized Dean O’Banion and his crew, “I knew I had been framed and withdrew almost at once.”

For the Democrats, the dinner proved to be a bust. O’Banion may have been loyal to his gang members, but politics, like bootlegging, was a dirty business. Despite the dinner, O’Banion threw his support to the Republicans and delivered his ward by a two-to-one margin.

Politics and crime were Deanie’s vocation, but when pressed, he would admit that the thing he loved most was flowers. To O’Banion, flowers represented beauty, and beauty tended to bring out his sentimental side. In order to surround himself in flora and fauna, O’Banion, with business partner William E. Schofield, opened Schofield’s Florist Shop in 1923. It was located on North State Street, directly across from Holy Name Cathedral. O’Banion spent hours at the shop cutting and arranging bouquets himself. From the beginning, business was excellent, with near daily orders from the city’s various underworld factions whose gang members were being killed at an alarming rate.

Even before O’Banion stiffed Johnny Torrio at the Sieben Brewery, fleecing him of half a million dollars and setting him up to be arrested, the peace treaty arranged by Papa John had been tearing at the seams. The primary culprits were a murderous family of immigrant Sicilian brothers known as the Gennas. For months, the six Genna brothers and their crew of feared gunmen had been muscling in on rival gang territory. On the North Side, they flooded O’Banion’s district with cheap whiskey they cooked up themselves and sold for three dollars a gallon. (O’Banion sold his for six to nine dollars a gallon.) The Irishman was being undersold in his own backyard.

“You gotta do something about this,” O’Banion told Papa John. “These Gennas are pissing all over my territory. I want ’em stopped, or I’ll stop ’em myself. You understand?”

Torrio always talked Deanie down by advising caution and promising results, but after being set up and arrested courtesy of O’Banion, the Italian Mob boss was in no great mood to aid his sneaky Irish partner. It all came to a head on November 3, when O’Banion and his sidekick Hymie Weiss attended a weekly split-the-profits meeting at the Ship, a gambling emporium in the Chicago suburb of Cicero that was jointly controlled by Torrio, O’Banion, and others. Torrio was not there that night; he was in Italy with his family. Presiding over the meeting instead was Torrio’s second-in-command, Scarface Al Capone, who was there with five or six other Italians. As Capone handed O’Banion his weekly cut, he noted that Angelo Genna of the Genna brothers had lost heavily at roulette that week and left an IOU for $30,000. Capone suggested to the group that, in the interest of general amity, they cancel Genna’s debt.

“Are you kiddin’ me?” said O’Banion. He picked up the phone, called Angelo Genna, and told him he had one week to pay up—or else.

Later, back at Schofield’s Flower Shop, Hymie Weiss cautioned his boss to consider backing off a bit. The Gennas, after all, were known to be fiercely homicidal. Deanie, in response, uttered a phrase that would ring throughout the underworld. “You can tell them Sicilians to go to hell,” he said.

In subsequent accounts of Gangland Chicago, much has been made of O’Banion’s statement. But given the ethnic rivalries of the time, the Irishman had probably voiced the sentiment on other occasions. Certainly, Sicilian and Italian racketeers made similar comments about “crazy micks,” “Irish pigs,” or “donkey Irish bastards.” It is more likely that O’Banion’s fate was sealed not by this relatively benign ethnic jibe, but in a carefully devised plan by Capone, in place for months, to eliminate the Irishman and take over his territory. In any event, the result was not good for Deanie O’Banion.

On the morning of November 10, O’Banion was in the back of his flower shop clipping the stems off some chrysanthemums. The last few days had been particularly busy. Two days earlier the president of the Unione Siciliane, Mike Merlo, had passed away after a long illness. Mike Merlo was a popular man, and his death resulted in a tremendous volume of orders for flowers. Al Capone placed an order for $8,000 worth of roses, Johnny Torrio for $10,000 worth of assorted flowers. One of the Genna brothers had visited the shop to order a wreath. The various orders had required the shop to stay open late the night before, so on this morning only O’Banion and his African American porter were in the shop when three men entered the front door.

William Crutchfield, the porter, caught a glimpse of the visitors as they entered. The man in the middle, he said later, was “tall, well-built, well-dressed, smooth-shaven, wore a brown overcoat and a brown fedora hat. He might have been a Jew or a Greek.” His companions were “Italians…short, stocky, and rather rough looking.” Crutchfield saw his boss drop what he was doing and approach the men in a friendly manner.

“Hello boys,” said O’Banion. “You want Merlo’s flowers?”

“Yes,” replied the tall man, extending his hand for Deanie to shake.

That was all Crutchfield saw. His boss motioned for him to close the door to the back room, which the porter did, assuming O’Banion wanted privacy. A few moments later, he heard gunshots and dashed into the front room to find Deanie O’Banion on the floor, surrounded by broken containers of carnations and lilacs. O’Banion was bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds, the red blood soiling a handful of lily-white peonies. By the time police arrived, Deanie was already dead.

It was a classic mob hit. In a reconstruction of the event days later, police authorities determined that the tall man shaking O’Banion’s hand had jerked him forward and pinned down his arms. Before Deanie could break free, the others opened fire, six shots in all—two passed through his chest, a third through his right cheek, the fourth and fifth through his larynx. The sixth and final shot was fired at close range into his brain after he fell.

Three days later, the city of Chicago witnessed the largest funeral ever staged up to that time. At the Sbarbaro funeral chapel, O’Banion’s body lay in an open casket, the bullet holes and powder burns expertly covered by the embalmer’s art, a rosary clasped in his folded hands. On a marble slab beneath the casket was the inscription:
Suffer little children to come unto me
. “Why, oh, why?” wailed Viola O’Banion, as her late husband’s remains were escorted by a massive cortege that would swell to fifteen thousand people by the time it reached Mount Carmel Cemetery.

Among the mourners was Al Capone, there to pay his respects along with Johnny Torrio and the Genna brothers. Anyone who knew anything about the Chicago underworld knew that these were the men who had arranged the murder of Deanie O’Banion. Members of the O’Banion gang mumbled angrily under their breath, but this was not the time for revenge. This was a time for sorrow.

At the cemetery grounds, O’Banion’s body was interred in a section set aside for those who had been excommunicated by the church. In an official statement—in words that would have stung O’Banion, a devout Catholic, almost as much as the bullets that killed him—a spokesperson for the local archdiocese explained, “One who refuses the ministrations of the church in life need not expect them in death. O’Banion was a notorious criminal. The Church did not recognize him in his days of lawlessness and when he died unrepentant in his iniquities, he had no claims to the last rites for the dead.”

One priest who defied the archdiocese’s directive was Father Patrick Malloy, formerly of Holy Name Cathedral, where Deanie had sung as a choirboy. As grave diggers threw the last clods of earth onto the grave, the good father knelt and recited a litany of three Hail Marys and the Lord’s Prayer. To those who knew and loved Dean O’Banion, it was a fitting tribute.

In life, he was a killer unworthy of the church he so cherished. In death, O’Banion’s stature as the most notorious historical figure of his time became engrained in the legend of Chicago. If there were such a thing as a Mount Rushmore for the Founding Fathers of the Irish American underworld, his would be the fourth and final face on the mountain top—alongside Morrissey, McDonald, and Madden.

Kingdom of the Gangs

Dean O’Banion’s North Side bunch was not the only Irish American gang the Italians had to contend with—not by a long shot. In fact, as leader of the Irish Mob in Chicago, O’Banion had been an ameliorating presence; as long as Deanie was around, the other Irish gangs felt an obligation to observe John Torrio’s peace treaty. Now that he was gone, the dogs of war were unleashed. The result was a period of gangland violence unprecedented in American history.

While a couple of Irish American bootlegging operations sided with Torrio-Capone, the majority did not. In the wake of O’Banion’s murder, among the many prominent Irish gangs or gangsters to emerge and take their place in the annals of Chicago gangdom were:

Bugs Moran
—Nobody revered Dean O’Banion more than raven-haired, pudgy Georgie Moran, who had an impish, playful demeanor similar to that of his boss. After O’Banion was brazenly murdered, Moran, Hymie Weiss, and the gang’s other remaining members went after the Italians with a vengeance. Their first act was a blatant attempted hit on Capone, in January 1925. Big Al was having lunch at a State Street restaurant when the O’Banionites, thinking Capone was in his car, opened fire on the curbside Sedan with shotguns and automatics. (“They let it have everything but the kitchen stove,” a policeman later reported.) Having missed their target, a few days later Moran and the gang kidnapped Big Al’s most trusted bodyguard, tortured him with lit cigarettes and concertina wire, then shot him five times in the head and dumped his body in the woods. A week later, they set their sights on Papa John Torrio. In front of his home, they gunned him down on the sidewalk, hitting him in the jaw, arm, and groin. Moran then stood over Torrio, who was still squirming and put a gun to his temple to administer the coup d’ grace, but the chamber was empty. Before he could reload, Moran was forced to flee the scene. Papa John recovered in the hospital, then quit the Chicago underworld for good. “It’s all yours, Al,” he told Capone on his way out of town. “I’m not ready to die.”