As O’Banion explained to his close confederate, Hymie Weiss: “We’re big business without high hats.”
So O’Banion began dressing the part, clothing his athletic frame in finely tailored suits—always tasteful, never flashy—and keeping his small hands carefully manicured. He also branched out into legitimate business, including a North Side flower shop across from Holy Name Cathedral. There he indulged his love of all things floral, moving about with the lurching gait he’d acquired after a youthful collision with a streetcar. He specialized in gangland funerals.
O’Banion “could twist a sheaf of roses into a wreath or chaplet so deftly as not to let fall a single petal,” wrote Fred Pasley, Capone’s first biographer.
But even among his flowers, O’Banion never went unarmed: his suits contained special pockets for three guns.
“His round Irish face wore an habitual grin,” Pasley wrote. “His fathomless blue eyes, wide and unblinking, stared at all comers with a candor fixed and impenetrable.”
This cheerful front belied the quick trigger finger of someone who could swing wildly from childish silliness to dispassionate violence and back again. O’Banion told a Chicago journalist about the time a car backfired as the florist walked across a downtown bridge.
“I didn’t know what it was,” O’Banion admitted. “I took a pop at the only guy I saw.”
When O’Banion read the man he’d shot was in the hospital, he sent him a few cigars.
Some claimed O’Banion had killed eight men; the chief of police put his tally at no less than twenty-five. To Pasley, this incorrigible rebel lashed out at the constraints of civilization “like a man in a crowded street-car seeking elbow-room.” That anarchic attitude made him a threat to the peaceful criminal empire that Torrio hoped to build.
O’Banion—rich from bootlegging, but still blowing safes—was backed up by an improbable bunch. Louis Alterie was a self-styled cowboy who dressed the role; Vincent “Schemer” Drucci, in priestly drag, propositioned women as they walked by; George “Bugs” Moran was saner than his nickname but not by much; and crafty Pole Earl “Hymie” Weiss displayed a proclivity for violence. Together this rogues’ gallery ran a surprisingly stable bootlegging setup on the North Side, if occasionally sidetracked by any easy score that came along.
The Sicilian Genna family provided a buffer between O’Banion and Torrio—six brothers controlling countless Italian and Sicilian alky cookers on the Near West Side—but trusted few outside their clan. On the Near South Side, Frankie McErlane was an unbalanced alcoholic prone to brutality.
Any bootlegging peace meant stage-managing this diverse ethnic brew of criminal personalities into something cohesive. The goal, of course, was avoiding open warfare, encouraging bootlegging gangs to pool their resources, while the Thompson administration enabled organized graft.
Torrio knew he had to keep public opinion on the Outfit’s side. But police corruption meant lax enforcement of other crimes—a cop taking in $25 a week for ignoring Prohibition laws, or working after hours as a guard outside a brewery, was less motivated to look into house burglaries or street muggings. A public happily looking the other way on violations of bootlegging laws got suddenly alert when a drunken gangster ran down a pedestrian, or a drive-by shooting endangered innocent bystanders.
And then, in 1923, Mayor Thompson, bogged down in scandals, declined to run again. A Democrat, former judge William E. Dever—campaigning to clean up Chicago—won by more than a hundred thousand votes. The new mayor replaced all key positions with competent leadership, including a new police chief.
With a reform administration in power in Chicago, Torrio turned to the suburbs. Like many a tycoon, he had the “cash register mind,” as one judge described it, to spot new markets. Automobiles had opened up fresh vice territories—where city dwellers once had to go to their local red-light district, they now had the means to head out into the country, patronizing brothels and roadhouses in environs where fewer police meant fewer payoffs.
Locals didn’t always welcome the arrival of gangsters and prostitutes, but that was where Capone and his brothers came in. Under Torrio’s direction, they began a hostile takeover of the suburbs, spreading Chicago’s corruption west, like a growing stain.
An early target was Forest View, a village founded by a lawyer from Chicago as a haven for veterans of the Great War. When the founder, also the town’s police magistrate, learned Capone and his brother Ralph hoped to build a hotel in the area, he welcomed their arrival.
“It looked like a good chance to improve our village,” he said, adding he knew nothing of the Capones. But as soon as he got a look at the parade of hoods and prostitutes, the city father sought to turn them away, shrugging off a threat from Ralph Capone as a joke.
Soon after, a pair of armed men showed up before dawn at the man’s home, and escorted him to the town hall, where seven goons awaited to beat him with gun butts and, when he fell to the floor, kick him repeatedly. Bleeding and dazed, he knelt and pleaded for his life. They told him to get out of their town.
“I moved,” the founder said. So did nearly two dozen other respectable citizens of the village, similarly beaten and driven off.
Capone’s gang took over the government and built a massive brothel, the Maple Inn, housing sixty prostitutes and bringing in roughly $5,000 a week. Thanks in part to its presence, the once-peaceful village of Forest View earned a new name—“Caponeville.”
The Outfit’s approach in Cicero, an industrial town half an hour outside Chicago, was somewhat different. Many of its fifty-some thousand inhabitants were Bohemian by birth or extraction, and liked to have a beer after work, no matter what the Constitution said. They did not, however, want wide-open vice in their town, though a local slot machine racket did quite well under police protection.
Torrio made no attempt to pay off the local authorities. Instead, he “brought an automobile load or two of painted women,” as the Tribune described them, and set up a brothel on Roosevelt Road. Police quickly shut it down, even tossing furniture through its windows, then raided the next Torrio brothel as well. Torrio responded by having the Cook County sheriff round up all of Cicero’s slot machines.
“Then Torrio made it known that if he couldn’t have prostitutes,” the Tribune reported, “nobody else could have slot machines.”
Eventually, the gangsters and the locals came to an arrangement—the Outfit could sell its beer in town, but the brothels would stay in Forest Park and other suburbs. The interlopers also took over Cicero’s casinos by partnering with the local racketeers, offering protection for a hefty cut.
As his base of operations, Capone chose the town’s biggest inn, the Hawthorne Hotel, and had its windows outfitted with bulletproof shutters. Next door he set up the Outfit’s premier gambling den, the Hawthorne Smoke Shop, whose handbook alone brought in a staggering $50,000 daily.
But Capone had a grander vision for Cicero than simply milking it for cash. Robert St. John, the editor of the town’s muckraking young newspaper, recalled learning of a meeting Al and Frank Capone held for their handpicked candidates for the Town Board. After one man complained about his meager municipal salary, Al unloaded a profanity-laced tirade, berating the corrupt officials for their lack of vision.
“Why don’t you make Cicero a real town?” he supposedly said. “Improve it! Fancy it up! . . . Pave the streets with cement! Make the dump an up-to-date place!”
The paving job proved exceedingly expensive, costing ten or twenty thousand dollars per city block, and the Capones set up a system of providing kickbacks to contractors, costing the taxpayers even more.
Back in Chicago, Torrio’s peacemaking efforts between bootlegging factions were going bust. Gang warfare between his allies and vicious South Side bootlegger Edward “Spike” O’Donnell raised the new mayor’s ire. Oddly, the mayor himself was opposed to Prohibition but abhorred the violence it engendered. If he cleaned up the breweries, he thought, the violence would wither away.
This theory did not bear out.
In the meantime, an overzealous, publicity-happy Prohibition agent got himself banished to the hinterlands, where he promptly raided John Torrio’s West Hammond, Indiana, brewery. This involved a $2,500 fine and shuttering the brewery for a year, not a big deal in the scheme of things—Torrio pleaded not guilty. The courts were choked with Prohibition cases, and his trial would not come up for months.
While Torrio was busy, Capone was dealing with Cicero, aided by brothers Ralph and Frank. Mayor Dever’s Chicago victory moved Cicero Democrats to run a reform slate against longtime mayor Joseph Klenha, under whom various casinos and taverns flourished. Capone backed Klenha’s candidacy to keep Cicero secure for Outfit operations, assigning brother Frank to make sure Klenha won.
Frank began with leaflets and threats, but intimidation soon escalated into violence. The Democratic clerk running for election was roughed up; on Election Day, poll workers were beaten or kidnapped as thugs flooded in, set on insuring everyone voting did so for the current His Honor.
When news of these outrages reached him, Mayor Dever found a judge to deputize a squad of Chicago police as the court’s special agents. Soon plainclothes detectives in an unmarked car were stopping across from the Twenty-Second Street and Cicero Avenue polls, where Al’s brother Frank, his cousin Charlie Fischetti, and another Outfit soldier stood watch. Nearby, at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company, twenty thousand–some workers were streaming out into a rainy, chill afternoon, though the arriving police from Chicago seemed unconcerned about witnesses.
Apparently Frank shot at the plainclothes officers, who returned fire, plugging Al’s big brother through the heart, while Fischetti ran into a field to surrender. The other thug was wounded on the run.
Some said Frank drew but didn’t fire, others that he didn’t draw at all, but the officers produced Frank’s gun with three empty chambers. In any event, Frank probably did not know these men arriving in an unmarked sedan were plainclothes police.
Al Capone won the Cicero war, carrying Klenha to victory, but lost a beloved brother.
The wake and funeral were held at the home on Prairie Avenue, the silver coffin’s lavish floral displays purchased from O’Banion’s flower shop. A one-hundred-car cortege with fifteen bearing flowers—Capone unshaven in the old country mourning manner—was almost as elaborate as Colosimo’s.
Frank’s killing struck Al a terrible blow. At twenty-five, Al was still at an age where a man feels immortal. That was over. And whatever rage and frustration followed, however deep his desire for revenge, young Capone could do nothing. Johnny Torrio would not sanction Al becoming a cop killer.
On May 8, 1924, in a Levee bar, Jack Guzik waddled past Joe Howard, a minor hood who’d lately been hijacking liquor trucks. The well-lit Howard hit Guzik up for a loan and got promptly refused. Annoyed, the hijacker thrashed the portly panderer.
Guzik ran to Al Capone, who had a low tolerance for hijackers, much less any who went around pummeling Outfit staffers. Al would take care of it. He found Howard at Heinie Jacob’s tavern near the Four Deuces.
Howard said, “Hello, Al.”
Irate, Capone ignored any social niceties, demanding to know why Howard had clobbered Guzik, to which the drunken hijacker replied, “Go back to your girls, you dago pimp!”
Al did not appreciate being called a pimp, even though he ran brothels, and took umbrage. He clutched Howard’s shirtfront with one hand and filled his other with a gun. He fired six times, sending four bullets into Howard’s head and another two in a shoulder. Then Capone stormed out, leaving Howard on the floor, floating in a sea of blood.
Annoying Al Capone so soon after he’d lost his favorite brother proved ill-advised. While demonstrating a soon-to-be-celebrated hot head, Capone had sent a message—those who risked their lives hauling Outfit beer were under his protection, and hijackers targeting a Torrio shipment might want to reconsider.
Just ask Joe Howard.
By the time witnesses were brought in for the inquest, memories had changed and another patron present on that murderous night simply disappeared. Al, in hiding for a month or so, hadn’t attended the inquest, either. He showed up after the fact, though, at the Cottage Grove Police Station.
“I hear the police are looking for me,” he said.
When told he was suspected of murder, Capone said, “Who, me? Why, I’m a respectable business man. I’m a second-hand furniture dealer. I’m no gangster. I don’t know this fellow Torrio. I haven’t anything to do with the Four Deuces. Anyway, I was out of town the day Howard was bumped off.”
The so-called Beer Wars would soon follow, with Torrio asked to mediate the conflict between the Genna family and Dean O’Banion. The latter became convinced the Italians were conspiring against him, and hatched a scheme to get rid of Torrio without firing a shot.
O’Banion offered to sell the would-be mediator his share of the Sieben Brewery on the Near North Side, claiming he planned to retire with his missus to Colorado, leaving Torrio to deal with the Gennas. Johnny agreed and paid O’Banion hundreds of thousands in cash. But O’Banion knew, courtesy of a police tip-off, a raid on the brewery was in store for May 19.
Before dawn that morning, several carloads of gun-toting gangsters converged at the Sieben Brewery on North Larrabee Street—a sprawling complex, complete with beer garden, topped by a squat brick tower. With them were Torrio and O’Banion, who oversaw the loading of several hundred beer barrels onto a small fleet of trucks. Meanwhile, out of sight, armed sentries were being taken into custody.
Then thirty cops descended on the brewery, sending bootleggers scurrying. While all around were losing their heads, O’Banion kept his, even saying hello to one officer and suggesting another had earned a raise. He calmly advised the workers to give up without a fight.
Torrio knew he’d been had: he’d paid all that dough for a brewery about to be shuttered. He would face jail time on this, his second bust, while O’Banion, looking at his first offense, could pay the fine with Torrio’s own money. The obvious setup was enough to convince the normally peaceable Torrio his Irish rival had to go.
O’Banion’s flower shop was well located in the Gold Coast of the Near North Side, across from Holy Name Cathedral and its wealth of weddings and funerals. The Irishman co-owned the shop, which he relished running. When not facing a judge, cracking a safe, or bashing a rival senseless, he was helping wealthy women select floral arrangements or providing young gents with just the right corsage for their best girl, pistols ever present in specially designed pockets.
On November 10, as the shop was busy dealing with dozens of orders for the latest gang-related wake and funeral, three men came in around noon to pick up their purchases. O’Banion emerged to greet familiar faces and extend a hand, instructing his assistant to go in back. Fifteen minutes later the assistant behind his closed door heard gunshots.
Five bullets shook the florist, hitting him in the head, chest, and neck, with another splintering display-case glass behind which roses burned as red as the blood O’Banion now lay sprawled in. The gunmen scrambled out the front, knocking down three teenage boys. O’Banion’s staff, hearing the shots, had fled out the backroom door.
Suspects were not in short supply—O’Banion was linked with a half dozen or more murders. Capone and Torrio had already been around to buy flowers that week and were given a pass. Anyway, the underworld code of silence meant no one would ever be caught. Twenty-some cars made up the long procession to O’Banion’s grave; there was no lack of flowers.
John Torrio was off dealing with his bootlegging charges when, just before Christmas, the Four Deuces was finally padlocked. Alphonse Capone, antique furniture dealer, had moved his office a few blocks away—the door now bore a new name and an even unlikelier profession: Dr. Ryan, M.D.
Less than two weeks into 1925, “Doctor Ryan’s” car made an unscheduled early-morning stop. A cold dawn had awaited the driver and his passen
gers after some all-night partying. Now, at Fifty-Fifth and State, they found themselves nosed to the curb by a sedan, their vehicle promptly perforated with pistol bullets and peppered with shotgun blasts—“everything but the kitchen stove,” a weathered police sergeant would report.
In the car were Al’s cousin Charlie Fischetti, an Outfit bodyguard, and the ganglord’s chauffeur, who got a nonfatal back wound, as well as two others who escaped unharmed. Al was not present. Nonetheless, shortly thereafter Capone paid $20,000 for a custom Cadillac outfitted with armor plating and bulletproof glass.
Staying alive meant living under constant guard. A crowd of armed bodyguards would now surround Capone, tall enough to tower over him and thick enough to be human shields. As he walked, they slowly scanned the area for threats.
“For Al’s protection, [his] men wear bullet-proof vests,” reported the New Yorker. “Nothing smaller than a fieldpiece could penetrate his double-walled fortress of meat.”
Even the bulletproof Cadillac was not enough to keep Capone entirely safe; he rode about town in a convoy with a scout car in front and another packed with gunmen in the rear. At restaurants, he sat where he could see the door and duck out if need be. He avoided open windows, living behind curtains and shutters, and divided much of his time between well-fortified hideouts and the homes of friends—usually fellow Italians, connected to the Outfit but not always overtly.
“You fear death every moment,” he would say in 1929. “Worse than death, you fear the rats of the game, who would run and tell the police if you didn’t satisfy them with favors. I never was able to leave my home without a bodyguard. . . . I haven’t had peace of mind in years.”
Johnny Torrio might have been wise to be schooled by his pupil.
Thirteen days after the assassination attempt on Capone, Torrio—on parole and awaiting sentencing for the brewery bust—returned from shopping with his wife, Anna, to his apartment at 7011 South Clyde in the South Shore neighborhood near Jackson Park. Driving was Capone’s chauffeur’s brother. Anna emerged and started for the door. Johnny trailed after with an armful of packages as two men came running at him from a parked Cadillac.
Scarface and the Untouchable Page 7