Already flirting with disaster, O’Banion further tempted fate by betraying Johnny Torrio and Al Capone to the police, with whom he had developed a mutually beneficial relationship. “He was spoiling it for everybody,” Al explained and complained: “Where we had been paying a copper a couple of hundred dollars, he’d slip them a thousand. He spoiled them. Well, we couldn’t do anything about it. It was his funeral.” So it would be, but not just yet. In return for his money, O’Banion received information that he planned to use against his bootlegging partners in a byzantine scheme that demonstrated how clever the florist could be—and how reckless.
Just six weeks after the funeral of Frank Capone, and days after the murder of Joe Howard, O’Banion came to the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero, where he met with Torrio and Al Capone, whom he startled with his announcement that he planned to retire from bootlegging. The Gennas had made life too difficult and dangerous for him, he explained. Indeed, he planned to leave Chicago altogether and retire to Colorado. Torrio and Capone greeted the news with jubilation. The volatile Irishman made trouble wherever he went, and his graceful retirement from the bootlegging scene could only be a blessing. All they had to do was meet his price, and O’Banion had thought about that, as well. The three men jointly owned the Sieben Brewery, and O’Banion offered to sell his share for half a million dollars. He even volunteered to transport their last shipment of beer as partners; it was scheduled for May 19, 1924. Delighted, Torrio and Capone saw to it that O’Banion received immediate payment in full.
O’Banion’s offer to relinquish his share of the Sieben Brewery to Torrio and Capone concealed considerable guile. Prior to the meeting, O’Banion had learned through his police contacts that the brewery was to be raided by police on the night of May 19. Normally, a raid on a brewery was a matter of small import in Chicago—it usually indicated that the right police captain had not been paid off, or wanted more, and nothing was easier to arrange than a quick cash payment to the proper authorities—but this raid, as O’Banion discovered, was to be different. This time federal authorities under the direction of the U.S. attorney were running the operation with Mayor Dever’s blessing. Since Torrio already had a prior conviction for violating the Prohibition laws dating back to 1923, a second conviction would probably lead to enormous fines, a jail sentence, and the publicity Torrio abhorred.
On the night of May 19, the raid on the Sieben Brewery occurred exactly as O’Banion had anticipated. As Torrio, O’Banion, and a small army of their henchmen supervised the loading of barrels onto a convoy of trucks waiting to distribute them to thirsty speakeasies across Chicago and the state of Illinois, police swooped down and arrested twenty-eight sullen bootleggers. Torrio was detained, as was O’Banion, to maintain the fiction that he had no prior knowledge of the raid. Only Al Capone himself managed to avoid arrest, for he was not present at the brewery that night. Once Torrio was delivered to the custody of federal authorities, he realized that O’Banion had effected an elaborate and humiliatingly successful betrayal. In anger, he refused to post bond for O’Banion, as he routinely did for his other partners and employees. Torrio himself was soon free on bail, but he was later convicted of owning a brewery and received a sentence of nine months in jail and a $5,000 fine—all of it due to the perfidy of Dion O’Banion.
After the raid and Torrio’s arrest, O’Banion’s days in the bootlegging business, indeed, his days on Earth, were numbered. Not that O’Banion himself displayed the slightest sign of concern about his safety as he bustled about his flower store, cheerfully greeting his customers; of all gangsters he was the most accessible and personable. It was hard to dislike the short, limping, smiling young man—hate him, yes, but not dislike him.
On November 3, O’Banion and his ally, “Hymie” Weiss, arrived at the Ship, Capone’s Cicero gambling establishment, to divide the profits with his partners. Business proceeded as usual, except for small but revealing comments the participants made from time to time. Al, for instance, noted that Angelo Genna had racked up a $30,000 IOU, and in the interest of preserving the health of all concerned, he recommended they forgive the debt, but O’Banion would have none of it. He went straight to a telephone, called Genna, and instructed him to pay the debt within a week’s time. The demonstration showed Capone and Torrio how serious the rift between the Gennas and O’Banion really was. Al and Johnny were doing all they could to keep the murderous Sicilians happy, but they could not control the reckless O’Banion, who was liable to get them all into trouble. As they left the Ship that day, “Hymie” Weiss cautioned O’Banion to stop antagonizing Torrio and the Gennas. But O’Banion was in a feisty mood; he was not one to take orders from anybody. “Oh, to hell with the Sicilians,” he told Weiss.
The bold retort became a refrain among Chicago bootleggers, many of whom felt the same way but were afraid to utter those ominous words: to hell with the Sicilians. Inevitably, the Sicilians said, in effect, “To hell with the Irishman.” Together with Capone and Torrio, the Gennas planned the assassination of Dion O’Banion. The murder was to be accomplished the old-fashioned way, which meant the organization would murder O’Banion face to face, at his place of business, in the middle of the day, and everyone in Chicago would know who was responsible, and why.
One matter remained to be resolved before the assassination could be carried out. The Torrio-Capone organization required the blessing of Mike Merlo—Don Miguel Merlo, to give his honorary title—the president of an influential organization known as the Unione Sicilione. Originally a fraternity of immigrant Sicilians who had banded together for self-protection, the Unione had over the years mutated into a racketeering power broker. Under Merlo’s direction, the Unione proved adept at manipulating Chicago’s racketeers, all of whom needed its support in the bootlegging trade and feared its potential for violence. In Chicago as elsewhere in the United States, Southern Italian immigrants persisted in their fear of and disdain for Sicilians, whom they held to be violent, inflexible, and superstitious. No one—not even Dion O’Banion—dared to incur the opposition of the Unione Sicilione and its 15,000 members. Merlo was opposed to the idea of Torrio and Capone eliminating O’Banion—the murder would be bad for business, bad for everybody—and as long as he remained in office, there would be no assassination. But Mike Merlo, the one man who stood between O’Banion and death, was suffering from cancer; the disease was in its advanced stages, and on November 8 he collapsed and died.
Initially, Mike Merlo’s passing proved a boon for O’Banion, who promptly sold $100,000 of flowers to the mourners, including a spectacular twelve-foot- high floral effigy of the deceased. Capone alone accounted for $8,000 worth of flowers. O’Banion also received one curious order, so small that he nearly overlooked it. Jim Genna, one of his sworn enemies, visited the store and bought $750 worth of flowers for Merlo’s funeral. He left as inconspicuously as he had come, carrying with him a mental blueprint of the interior of O’Banion’s flower store.
The selection of Merlo’s successor provoked Frankie Yale to return to Chicago. As head of the powerful New York branch of the Unione, Yale had considerable influence over the selection of who would fill the corresponding post in Chicago. He conferred with Torrio and Capone, and the three men decided to appoint Angelo Genna, one of the six Sicilians who wanted only to see Dion O’Banion in his coffin. As the new president of the Unione Sicilione, Angelo had no objection to the immediate elimination of a certain North Side bootlegger who had recently humiliated him on the telephone over a little IOU. So it was that the Torrio-Capone syndicate finally arranged for the assassination of Dion O’Banion, which became the most highly publicized and significant gangland slaying of Prohibition-era Chicago, eclipsing even the death of “Big Jim” Colosimo four years before.
• • •
On Monday, November 10, 1924, only two days after the death of Mike Merlo, O’Banion left the twelve-room apartment where he lived with his wife (the couple had no children) and proceeded directly to his place of business, William E
. Schofield’s North State Street flower store, where he passed much of the morning preparing a large order for the funeral of yet another beer war victim. He was accompanied by three employees, and they were surrounded by plants and flowers of every description: roses, palms, ferns, chrysanthemums. Outside the window, on State Street, schoolchildren swarmed around a parochial school, and across the street loomed the Gothic Holy Name Cathedral, huge, impressive, and cavernous. O’Banion knew it well, for he had served as an altar boy at Holy Name years before.
At noon, a blue Jewett sedan parked in front of the flower store. The driver remained at the wheel, and as the motor idled, the door opened. An eleven-year-old boy named Gregory Summers watched three men get out of the car. “Two of them were dark and they looked like foreigners. The other man had a light complexion,” he would later recall. The three men opened the door to Schofield’s flower store.
The proprietor was in the back, lovingly arranging his flowers, but the porter, a black man named William Crutchfield, looked up from his mopping and assumed the group consisted of the racketeers with whom his boss so often did business. However, these men were not well dressed, which was out of the ordinary. O’Banion appeared, genial as always. The night before a man had called to say he would stop by at noon the next day to pick up a wreath. O’Banion assumed this group was collecting the order. “Hello, boys,” he said, “have you come for the flowers?” His left hand held a pair of shears, and he extended his right arm, preparing to shake hands with his customers, one of whom clutched O’Banion’s outstretched arm and pulled him forward, off balance.
Crutchfield, who may have suspected danger, decided his mopping was finished and retreated to the back room, where he heard five shots, a pause, and then a sixth shot ring out. O’Banion’s two other employees, who were also in the back, fled the scene, but Crutchfield ran to his boss, whom he found sprawled on the floor, surrounded by his flowers, his eyes wide open, his body jerking convulsively, and his blood seeping onto the floor. The shots had been fired at such close range that O’Banion’s clothing was burned. He had taken five bullets in the body and a sixth in the head. His assassin, the man who had grasped his arm and pulled him off balance, was Mike Genna. With Genna was a notorious team of Sicilians who now lived in Cicero: John Scalise and Albert Anselmi. These men served one and only one function: they killed on the orders of whoever their boss happened to be at the time. They were handsomely recompensed for this job, receiving a cash payment of $10,000 apiece, as well as a diamond ring worth another $3,000. As soon as the three had accomplished their chore, they ran out of the store, dove into the Jewett, and as Gregory Summers continued to watch in amazement, sped off.
Relieved that another racketeer was out of the way, the police did not try too hard to catch O’Banion’s killers. As a matter of routine they interrogated Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, and the Gennas, all of whom professed to revere their old companion Dion and to make a convincing show of grief at his death, pointing to the large floral arrangements they had sent to his funeral as proof. They were so beautiful they brought a lump to the throat. The police even suspected that Frankie Yale might have come all the way from Brooklyn to hasten O’Banion to the grave, though Yale excused himself by saying he had come to town to attend the funeral of Mike Merlo, and after making his statement to the police, he returned by train to New York and relative safety. Although the police suspected Yale had killed O’Banion, he had actually come to consult with Torrio and Capone rather than to deprive the Gennas of their revenge. With the death of Dion O’Banion, the Torrio-Capone syndicate appeared to have accomplished a major coup; they had eliminated the most unpredictable and dangerous of all major bootleggers, they had ingratiated themselves with the Gennas, and they had annexed O’Banion’s rich North Side territory.
For all these reasons, then, the funeral of Dion O’Banion was not an occasion for mourning but rather a great victory celebration. Torrio and Capone were glad to see him go, and they wanted to give the old boy a magnificent send-off. Not that everyone approved. The Catholic Church, in the person of Cardinal Mundelein, refused to permit a funeral Mass for O’Banion at Holy Name, the cathedral across the street from the murder scene, and forbade his burial on consecrated ground. The ecclesiastical rebuff did little to dampen the festivities. O’Banion’s murderers laid on the largest, most lavish gangster funeral ever seen in Chicago, as if to persuade themselves that he really was dead, after all.
For O’Banion’s next-to-last resting place they selected a funeral home whose owner, John A. Sbarbaro, led a curious double life. Even while running the mortuary preferred by Chicago’s gangland, he served, incredibly enough, as an assistant state’s attorney; in fact, he worked with William McSwiggin, the young “hanging prosecutor” who had been so determined to indict Al Capone for the murder of Joe Howard only six months earlier. Sbarbaro personified the affinity between criminals and politicians in Chicago, a phenomenon that so often frustrated the prosecution of even the most blatant crimes. At Sbarbaro’s funeral parlor at 708 North Wells Street, O’Banion “lay in state” (in the apt words of the Chicago Tribune) in a casket said to cost $10,000, wrought of silver and bronze, surrounded by gold candlesticks, and highlighted with a gold tablet reading “Dion O’Banion, 1892-1924.” At thirty-two, he was approximately five years past his prime by gangland’s standards, and considering his recklessness, it was remarkable that he had lived as long as he had. Of course Torrio was nearly twice his age, but Torrio was the exception, and he had turned over much of the day-to-day operation of the syndicate to Capone. As musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra played solemn music in the background and the deceased’s immediate family cried softly, the mourners filed past the bier to pay their respects to the slain racketeer. The funeral procession was so large that it became the subject of national attention and fascination. It extended for a mile and included three bands and a police escort dispatched by Capone from the village of Stickney. (Only an order from Chicago’s chief of police prevented what was certain to have been an embarrassingly large contingent of that city’s force from joining the parade.) The pallbearers included “Hymie” Weiss, who had counseled O’Banion to apologize to the Gennas, and who would immediately begin plotting to take over the rich North Side empire O’Banion had controlled; another up-and-coming racketeer by the name of “Bugs” Moran; and four other gangsters (racketeer being too polite a term for them): “Schemer” Drucci, Louis Alterie, Frank Gusenberg, and Maxie Eisen (“the Simon Legree of the pushcart peddlers,” according to one journalist). More than two dozen cars were required to transport flowers from the funeral home to the cemetery, including a large basket of roses bearing a message of consummate irony: “FROM AL.”
The cortege reached awesome proportions; 10,000 people walked behind the hearse, and when they reached Mt. Carmel Cemetery they joined another 10,000 mourners assembled at the grave site, where Father Patrick Malloy, who had known and liked the deceased since O’Banion was a boy, delivered a truncated eulogy. Capone and Torrio were in attendance, although they knew that O’Banion’s allies saw past the floral arrangements and realized exactly who was responsible for the death of their friend and leader. When a reporter sidled up to “Hymie” Weiss, asking who the racketeer thought had actually killed O’Banion and suggesting Al Capone, Weiss drew back as if confronted by a snake. “Blame Capone?” he said with heavy irony. “Why Al’s a real pal. He was Dion’s best friend, too.” Feelings ran so high that all mourners were ordered to check their weapons until the funeral had concluded, but Torrio and Capone were obliged to pass a long, uncomfortable day that began at the funeral home and ended at the cemetery, where across O’Banion’s grave they confronted the accusatory stares of Weiss, Drucci, and Moran.
O’Banion’s stupendous last rites became a remarkable—and, for the political Establishment—humiliating display of the racketeers’ influence and power over Chicago. Here was what the Johnny Torrio Association had come to, all the way from a Brooklyn stor
efront recruiting children to this, the grandest funeral Chicago had ever seen. It was as if a carnival was coming to town, a carnival of death. In the Chicago of the mid- and late 1920s there would be more of these days of the dead, when a gangster funeral brought the entire city to standstill. They were indicative of the hold that men such as Torrio, O’Banion, and Capone were developing on the popular imagination. People were fascinated not because they were criminals—criminals were nuisances, they were dreary—but because they lived by their own rough code and were willing to die in pursuit of their goals. It is always fascinating when people choose to die in public; the sight makes the spectators feel more alive; so it was with the gangsters and their dark allure. Better than any politician, they understood what it took to draw a crowd. The funeral amounted to precisely the show of strength Mayor Dever and the other embattled bureaucrats at City Hall dreaded, a sign for all the world to behold that they were losing the war against the bootleggers, racketeers, and pimps for control of Chicago. “Are we living by the code of the Dark Ages or is Chicago part of an American Commonwealth?” Dever asked in his characteristically archaic diction. “One day we have this O’Banion slain as a result of a perfectly executed plot of assassins. It is followed by this amazing demonstration. In the meanwhile his followers and their rivals openly boast of what they will do in retaliation. They seek to fight it out in the street. There is no thought of the law or of the people who support the law.” Such words came as high praise to the bootleggers and racketeers responsible for the situation. Not even the church was capable of exercising authority over the outlaws. O’Banion was laid to rest in unconsecrated ground, as the church had insisted, but this was Chicago, and five months later the body was exhumed and moved to consecrated ground. In disgust, John Stege, a high-ranking police captain, said, “O’Banion was a thief and a murderer, but look at him now, buried eighty feet from a bishop.”
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