Miserable Business
Page 7
Chapter 9
Dean
On November 10, 1924, Dean O’Banion, founder of the North Side Gang, pushed aside his bootlegging business for the day. Out of respect and appreciation, he went to work in his part-owned floral shop preparing arrangements for the funeral of a mob peacekeeper named Mike Merlo.
Merlo had lost a battle with cancer. Mike’s work was a precarious balance of negotiating a never-ending stream of peace treaties between rival gangs. The funeral was expected to be enormous as Merlo worked for gangs from all sides of Chicago and beyond.
Dean arrived early and worked alone in the shop’s backroom. As he was busy clipping special flowers brought in for the event, he heard the ring of the brass entry bell at the front door. Dean called out, “I’ve got my hands full back here for the moment. Go ahead and look around if you like. I’ll be with you shortly.”
An instant later, when the brass bell gave a sharp ring a second time, he stopped working. In his limited view, no one was visible out in the store. He set the flowers aside. Before he finished drying his hands on his heavy canvas apron, the bell sounded yet a third time in an odd slow fashion.
Curious, Dean picked up the partial arrangement and headed for the front. When he stepped into the store’s display area, three serious-looking men dressed in hats and long dark coats stood facing him from the other side of the sales counter.
A nervous chill raced through Dean. He knew the faces. These were the worst of men. The very worst.
He kept a cool appearance on the outside. “Ah fellas, I assume you’re in town for Mike’s funeral?” Dean set the flowers down on the counter. These men wouldn’t come here to talk about floral arrangements. They were more likely here to talk about bloodshed.
Frankie Yale, a notorious mobster from Brooklyn, stepped up to the counter and extended his hand. “Yes, Dean, the funeral, of course.”
When O’Banion ignored the offer of a handshake, Yale turned and motioned toward the two comrades standing behind him. “Dean, do you know John Scalise and Alberto Anselmi?”
Dean recognized the misaligned eyes of John Scalise and shifted his gaze quickly to the older man, Anselmi. Alberto was cursed with an intense stare and stoic Sicilian face. The odd couple had a peculiar appearance that made peaceful citizens decide to cross the street mid-block rather than to pass near them on a walkway.
Dean gave a slow nod to the Murder Twins. He’d seen them in action fighting for the Genna crime family on nearby Taylor Street. When it came to gun battles, they were butchers.
It slammed Dean like a runaway train. His only pistol in the shop was stowed in the back room. He was caught completely unarmed standing in front of an execution squad.
Yale extended his hand again. “We’re all here for Mike and what he’s done for the syndicate right?”
Dean assumed this was supposed to be some sort of peace gesture, but the story was a load of bull. These weren’t the type of men who attended funerals to show their presence or extend condolences to families. These men were cold-hearted contract killers who kept to the shadows and sold more funeral flowers than Dean ever had.
Dean thought about making a run to the back room for the pistol, but the beasts in his midst would never allow it. As it was, there was no choice. Dean succumbed with great trepidation to shake Frankie Yale’s hand.
Like a trap snapping shut, Yale grabbed Dean with a crushing grip. The two of them struggled, Yale dragged Dean around the end of the counter, twisted his arm, and pulled him in close. Yale’s face was red with a horrid grimace. He delivered the message directly in Dean’s ear, “Listen here you ungrateful cheat. I’m here for my pal Johnny Torrio. Do you remember him? He paid you a half a million bucks for your share of the brewery you knew damn well was due for a police raid. Now, Johnny’s lost everything, and he’s sitting in prison while you play with your flowers.”
Dean tried to pull away. Yale wouldn’t relent. “Mike Merlo, the peacekeeper, is gone now, so your day has finally come.”
Dean struggled to get his hand back. His face was as white as a ghost. “Just wait a minute, Yale. Torrio has been selling whiskey to my saloons on my side of town. He asked for this fight!”
Frankie kept his grip on Dean’s hand but pushed him back at arm’s length. “I don’t want to hear no lies from you. Time’s up. No more talking.”
Scalise and Anselmi rushed in from the sides with pistols drawn and fired point-blank. Boom, boom.
Dean collapsed face down on the floor. The three assassins watched him wither. Yale, with a grim smile, set about finishing things. He grabbed the pistol from Anselmi and fired one more shot. Boom.
When the word of Dean’s murder arrived, George Moran, Hymie Weiss, and the reckless Sicilian Drucci were working the north end. By the time they got back to Schofield’s Floral Shop, the street was choked with police cars, curious bystanders, and pressmen taking photos. Hymie was determined to see Dean at any cost. When he got through the street crowd, a pair of unnaturally large police officers guarded the front door. They grabbed Hymie by the shoulders.
One of them questioned, “Hey, buster, where do you think you’re going? There’s been a crime committed here and no one is allowed inside.”
Just as Hymie started to turn back, the officers released their hold of him. He reversed course hard, catching them off guard, and shoved past them. Inside, he sidestepped the other men until he made it to the sales counter. He found Dean on his back. The medical examiner was going over the wounds.
Hymie saw the bullet holes in Dean’s chest and neck. His head was twisted to the side in a distorted fashion. Just then, the pair of police officers caught up. One of them used his nightstick to clock Hymie from behind.
Hymie was dizzy from the blow and fell to the floor. One of the officers ran his hands around inside Hymie’s coat and retrieved a handgun. He raised it in the air. “Hey, look what we have here!”
He rolled Hymie over on his back and stood with one foot planted in the middle of his chest.
Hymie moaned from beneath the officer’s foothold, “Who did this to Dean? I wanna know who the shooter is.”
The larger officer kicked him in the ribs. “What difference does it make to you anyway? What’s your name, buster?”
Hymie gave a fake name to the policeman.
“How do you know the victim?”
Hymie blurted out without thinking. “Ah, we are...” His voice trailed off.
The cop was quick to respond. “So, you’re one of the Northsiders. Should be no surprise to you this happened. Everyone knows about the dirty trick Dean played on Torrio.”
Hymie was mad. “You’re on their payroll, aren’t you?”
The officer looked away.
Hymie tried to get his attention. “You’re not going to do a thing about this, even though someone was gunned down here today in cold blood? Who exactly shot him?”
The policeman got Hymie up off the floor and pushed him toward the front door. “Why would I tell you anything about the shooter, so you can hunt him down? No, you boys better clean up your act, or we’re gonna stop your little booze-running business.”
Chapter 10
Transition
It was a raw November day in 1924. The autumn wind raked the last leaves from the trees and sent them tumbling through the Chicago streets like miniature tumbleweeds. The outdoor markets were packed up for the season, and the streets were deserted. Hank spent the day with Hymie Weiss and George Moran at a rural sportsman’s club. They sat in a private lounge area. They needed to get out of the city and regroup after the murder of Dean O’Banion.
Hymie led the discussion. “For God’s sake, Dean was thirty-two years old. If Torrio can get to him, I swear none of us are safe. Has the world gone mad? Can’t a guy take shelter on his own premises?”
Hank knew the feeling of loss. He was doodling on a scrap of brown pa
per. The dark and shadowed sketch showed three men with guns hovering over a collapsed body. “I saw them you know.”
Hymie barked back, “What are you talking about?”
“I saw Dean’s murderers.”
Hymie got up and stood over Hank. “What exactly do you mean?”
Hank tore his drawing in half, crumpled the scraps, and threw them into the fireplace. He looked up at Hymie. “I was too late to stop them from killing Dean.”
George crossed the room and stared at Hank. “Who were they? I want names!”
“I didn’t know what they had done. Dean was busy making plans for Merlo’s funeral. I drove to the shop to talk to him. I thought he might need help with all of those floral arrangements. As I approached Schofield’s, I passed a sedan leaving the block heading south on State Street. Frank Yale was behind the wheel with Scalise and Anselmi riding in the car. I can still see it in my mind in slow motion. Scalise turned as we passed and glared at me. He was yelling something, but I couldn’t hear him.
George turned away in anger.
“I left my car in front of the floral shop and headed inside to tell Dean about the dangerous sharks cruising the street.” Hank closed his eyes, reliving the tragic scene. “I found him when I ran inside. Dean was lying in a heap beside the counter. He was surrounded by blood-soaked flowers. His cutting shears were there, but I never saw any gun. I shook him for a long time, but he was gone. I got back in my car and raced down State Street trying to catch up with those three killers. I drove for miles, but I never found them. They had turned off somewhere and vanished.”
Hymie spoke first. “It was just a crazy idea. Dean shouldn’t have crossed Torrio. Selling the damn brewery to him the day before a police raid may have seemed like a smart move, but at what price? How do we pick up the pieces after this?”
The anger raging inside George reached the boiling point. He unloaded like a volcano spewing molten lava on everyone. “I’ve had enough of this intolerable scum. We’re going to crush these snakes with everything we have once and for all. I’m not talking about an eye for an eye. I want each of their heads cut off and stuck on a pole on Main Street! I don’t care how many men it takes. This is war!” The words echoed across the room.
His rant continued. “We can’t tolerate these cowards and their rotten underhanded murder. It’s one thing to try to get the best of each other. It’s completely different to murder someone working in their own legitimate business with their guard down.” George pitched his glass at full strength into the brick fireplace where it shattered into a thousand pieces.
A steward rushed through the door. When he saw the red rage on George Moran’s face, he apologized for interrupting and backed out of the room.
Chapter 11
The Pain
On that horrible day, Hymie Weiss lost his best friend and inherited the leadership of the North Side Gang, a task for which he had never longed. The Italians and Sicilians would soon find out, killing Dean was the worst move they could have made. A war was underway in Chicago. They just didn’t realize it yet.
Unlike his Italian counterparts, Hymie wasn’t content leading from behind while directing others to do the dirty work. He detested the business of prostitution and was completely unafraid of death. Invisible to anyone who didn’t know him, Hymie Weiss had become a nasty powder keg with a lit fuse. No one would get away with killing his friend.
There, in the morning shadow of the largest Catholic Cathedral in the city, the brazen gangster took over operating the North Side Gang from the same small office above Schofield’s floral shop on State Street.
Hymie was the real brains behind the Sieben Brewery swindle and, for a period, was the negotiator of peace with the bloody Sicilian Genna family on nearby Taylor Street. Earl Weiss was a vicious man who once shot his own brother in a disagreement. He was an in-your-face force to be dealt with, but when a truce was possible, he could bring himself to the table with an assertive yet amicable tone.
Josephine Simard, a lanky dancing showgirl with a pretty face, but a gold digger, was his weakness and the one woman who’d tolerate him. Not exactly a match made in heaven. Earl was enamored with her primped-hair beauty, and she with his money and the excitement of being a gangster’s girlfriend, despite the fact she already had a husband living back in her quiet home province of Quebec. It was a secret she never revealed to Hymie.
Unusual for a tough, fearless leader of Chicagoland bootleggers, Hymie was adept at making plans and negotiating with both rival gangs and the cops. When he wasn’t crippled with incapacitating migraine headaches, Weiss was a strong leader for the North Side. While locked in prison serving an unbearable six months for bootlegging, Hymie vowed to never be taken into custody again due to his ill-health.
Upon the death of his best friend Dean O’Banion, Hymie became obsessed with killing Johnny Torrio and his rising star—Al Capone.
Chapter 12
Mother
In the quiet hours of a mid-winter morning, Hank tried his new key in the door lock and made his way successfully into the office above Schofield’s. He flipped on the lights and surveyed the rooms. It was here somewhere. The place could have used a secretary for organization, but it wasn’t a large office. He was determined to find the box with his father’s possessions. George Moran confirmed he’d seen the box more than once.
Hank started by probing through the desk drawers. Then he moved on to dragging items down from the closet shelves. There was a sturdy-looking typewriter that appeared adequate to anchor a ship at sea. There were books and paper records, some picture frames, and an old lamp, but no box.
On the floor below, beside a chair with one missing arm, was a shotgun with a busted stock, a barrel-shaped basket, some old calendars, and a rolled-up map. He pulled the basket out of the closet and, on the floor beneath it, was a plain box built from wood strips.
Hank retrieved it and put the box down in the middle of a desk. He removed his coat and hat, collected the old oil lamp from the closet, and placed it on the desk. He struck a match from a box sitting next to an ashtray and lit the lamp. In ink, the name Hudson was scrawled across the box lid. The box was large enough to hold a pair of men’s shoes. He was curious why George Moran and Hymie Weiss would have kept it around after all this time. Hank assumed they had lost track of it.
He pulled the cover off the box and set it aside. The contents were a hodgepodge of things his dad owned at the time of his death. There was an old brass pocket watch. Hank took it out and wound the stem. He held it next to his ear and listened to the smooth ticking of the mechanism. He picked up a well-worn Sheffield pocketknife with a folding blade. Hank pulled the blade free and smiled as he thought about his father using it more often for car repairs rather than self-defense. There were racetrack betting stubs and a photo with curled edges of his mother in her teen years riding a horse.
Hank drew a Colt forty-five revolver with wooden grips from the box. The cylinders and chamber were empty. The gun had an easy balance as he sighted down the barrel at a clock on the wall.
At the bottom of the wooden crate, Hank found it. He almost didn’t notice it at first. It simply lay flat face down beneath the other odds and ends of his father’s life. It was a long thin brownish-gray book with a heavy paper cover clad in canvas. The canvas material was dried and cracked at the binding, flaking apart in slivers once bound with glue. The print on the front had blue letters with the faded, but discernible words Travel Journal. To Hank, it didn’t make much sense. His parents never traveled for leisure. He wasn’t sure they knew how.
The cover popped and cracked as the stiff binding yielded to the separation of opening. Inside the first page, taped in place, were two black-and-white photos of young children playing in the sand on a beach. The note between the photos was in his mother’s hand. It read, Robert, Henry, and Gloria, South Carolina, July 1900. Hank had no memory of the ocean.
Here and there were notes in his father’s handwriting. He found one on the fifth page. Check out a move into the Gold Coast. Halfway through the book, he found another. Get out of this business before something else happens. The word before was underlined three times.
Near the back of the book, Hank noticed the ragged remains of three pages ripped from the book. The next intact page contained a handwritten scribble beginning with, Johnny Torrio is stealing our... The rest of the page corner was torn off. What remained didn’t say what was stolen.
The final pages in the journal were wrinkled and many of the ink numbers were smeared and illegible. Hank studied the figures he could read and tried to make sense of them. The values were decreasing in size. It was clear the business was falling apart.
Between the columns, near the dates the month before his father died, was a smudged note in black ink. Hank stared at it. He couldn’t quite make it out. He pulled the book close and held it there. After a few moments, he turned the book clockwise to angle it slightly. Hank looked again. He felt a surge of cold rush up his neck like a winter breeze when his eyes gained their focus on the words—Avenge Mattie.
Hank read the words again. He pushed the box aside and left the journal there by itself. His suspicions were confirmed. Mother had been murdered after all.