Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (16 page)

He never shook hands with strangers. If anybody he didn't know approached him, he would face him, feet firmly planted apart, hands on hips, poised to draw a gun at the faintest hostile move. He had good reasons for caution. "Chicago's arch criminal," Chief of Police Morgan Collins said of him, "who has killed or seen to the killing of at least twenty-five men." He would fire on slight provocation, sometimes out of sheer nervousness. He once asked Edward Dean Sullivan, a Herald-Examiner reporter, to recommend a good cigar for a convalescing hospital patient. "Who's sick?" Sullivan asked. O'Banion showed him a clipping from the afternoon edition. A laborer, Arthur Vadis, had been shot in the leg by an unknown assailant. "This morning," O'Banion recounted, "I'm going across the Madison Avenue Bridge and I got plenty on my mind. Somebody's been trailing me lately. An automobile crossed the bridge and backfired. I didn't know what it was. I took a pop at the only guy I saw. I got to send some smokes over to him."

A fancied slight prompted O'Banion to attempt a murder in the lobby of the La Salle Theater. Exactly what Davy "Yiddles" Miller, a prizefight referee, had said or done to offend him was never clear, but having spotted him in the audience, O'Banion waited for him outside after the performance and before hundreds of witnesses put a bullet through his stomach. A younger brother, Max Miller, leaped to the fallen Davy's rescue, whereupon O'Banion fired at him. The bullet glanced off Max's belt buckle. Smiling, the marksman swaggered out into the night. The police arrested him, but neither Davy, who recovered, nor Max cared to prosecute. "I'm sorry it happened," said O'Banion. "It was just a piece of hotheaded foolishness."

He never spent a day in jail for shooting anybody. His political usefulness was too great. just as Big Jim Colosimo had controlled the Italian vote in his part of town, so Deany O'Banion controlled the Irish vote in his. Cajolery and bounty normally sufficed to swing it any way O'Banion chose, but if they failed, he and his cohorts never hesitated to slug, shoot or kidnap. "I always deliver my borough as per requirements," he declared and he always did. So highly did the Democratic bosses of the Forty-second and Forty-third prize O'Banion's vote-getting ability that when they heard he might shift to the Republicans, they gave him a testimonial dinner at the Webster Hotel, climaxing it with the gift of a gem-encrusted platinum watch. Among those present were Colonel Albert A. Sprague, Cook County commissioner of public works and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate; Robert M. Sweitzer, then Cook County clerk; and Chief of Police Michael Hughes. The guest of honor went Republican anyway.

O'Banion loved flowers, and he loved the church, and he was overjoyed to acquire a half interest in William Schofield's flower shop at 738 North State Street, directly opposite Holy Name Cathedral, where he once served as an acolyte and choirboy. Most days, between 9 A.M. and 6 P.M., he could be found in the shop, a sprig of lily of the valley or a white carnation in his buttonhole, happily breathing in the perfumed air as he bustled about, potting a plant here, nipping an excess bud there, arranging a wedding bouquet or a funeral wreath. He became gangdom's favorite florist, a lucrative situation, because underworld etiquette required the foes, as well as the friends, of a fallen
gangster-including those who felled him-to honor him with an elaborate floral creation. To order funerary flowers from any florist but O'Banion would have been as egregious a faux pas for a gangster as it would for a Gold Coast matron to have invitations to her daughter's debut engraved by other than a Cartier or a Tiffany. O'Banion never needed to wait until the mourners actually placed their orders. The moment word of a gangster's demise reached him he knew how many flowers to buy from the wholesalers. It depended on the dead man's rank in the underworld hierarchy. Even before the calls started coming in and while the embalmer was still plugging up the bullet holes in the corpse, O'Banion and his staff would be at work composing floral wreaths, blankets and horseshoes and choosing suitable sentiments to be sewn in gilt letters to the ribbons-"Sympathy from the boys-We'll miss you, dear old pal. . . . Gone but not forgotten." All the caller had to do was identify himself and name the amount he wanted to spend-"This is Charlie. Five grand."

By night O'Banion and his crew devoted themselves to other employment, consisting variously of banditry, burglary, safecracking, hijacking and, after 1920, bootlegging. O'Banion's adoring wife, Viola, maintained, with the willed blindness necessary to most gangsters' wives: "Dean loved his home and spent most of his evening in it. He loved to sit in his slippers, fooling with the radio, singing a song, listening to the player-piano. He never drank. He was not a man to run around nights with women. I was his only sweetheart. We went out often to dinner or the theater, usually with friends. He never left home without telling me where he was going and kissing me goodbye."

A childless couple, they occupied a twelve-room apartment on North Pine Grove Avenue, a short spin from the flower shop in O'Banion's late-model Locomobile. His proudest home possessions were the player-piano, for which he had paid $15,000, and a Victrola, and he was constantly setting them both to playing the same tune and trying to synchronize them.

"We're big business without high hats," O'Banion once remarked to his second-in-command, Earl "Little Hymie" Weiss, after they had hijacked a liquor truck. He nevertheless aped the dress and manners of the Gold Coast high-hatters, wearing a tuxedo when he attended a dinner or theater and minding his grammar and etiquette, and he insisted that his cohorts restrain their natural impulses. O'Banion popularized formal attire among gangsters, and owing partly to his example, their general social behavior distinctly improved.

He limped, his left leg being shorter than his right, the aftermath of a boyhood fall from a streetcar. He was otherwise a prime physical specimen, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped. He had slender hands, with long, tapering fingers, which he submitted regularly to a manicurist's care. He parted his brown, silken, wavy hair low on the left side. His face was round, his chin cleft, and his normal expression one of geniality and goodwill toward men.

He was born Charles Dion O'Banion twenty-eight years before Prohibition to an immigrant Irish plasterer and house painter in Aurora, Illinois. His mother died when he was five, but he retained a glowing memory of her, speaking of her frequently as the maternal ideal. One Memorial Day, as his customers were ordering flowers to decorate the graves of their loved ones, he was moved to such transports of filial piety that he jumped into his Locomobile and drove 150 miles to his mother's grave in the tiny village of Maroa, Illinois. Finding her tombstone with difficulty because of the weeds overgrowing it, he had it replaced by a huge monument visible at a distance. When his father grew too told to work, O'Banion settled a sum on him large enough to take care of him for the rest of his life. There was also a married sister in Coldwater, Kansas, to whom he regularly sent money.

"Deany was a fighter as a boy but a good worker," said his father. In his infancy the family left Aurora for Chicago and a tenement flat on the edge of the North Side's Little Sicily, a maze of narrow, garbage-strewn streets, overrun by dogs and rats, the air hazy and reeking with the smoke of surrounding factories. The flames from a gasworks chimney that reddened the sky at night gave the area its nickname-Little Hell. It was formerly an Irish shantytown called Kil- gubbin, and about 1,000 Irish remained, but the "dark people"-the Sicilians-had been coming since 1900, and now they were in the majority. Though barely half a mile square, Little Hell surpassed even the Levee in the incidence and diversity of its vice and crime. Every year for twenty years between twelve and twenty violent deaths occurred in Little Hell. One spot, the intersection of Oak and Milton streets, became known as Death Corner after thirty-eight people had been gunned down there in little more than a year. Thirteen of those murders were attributed to a single Black Hander, identity never discovered, whom the press dubbed the Shotgun Man.

For the boy O'Banion this baneful environment was partly offset by the influence of Father O'Brien at Holy Name Cathedral. During four years as a chorister and altar boy Deany developed such religious zeal, his conduct was in all ways so estimable, that the pastor hoped he might someday qualify as a novitiate. But before his voice changed, the choirboy was attracted to a gang of juvenile Little Hellions, the Market Streeters, and though he continued to observe religious ritual, Father O'Brien's moral precepts soon went by the board. At ten he was peddling newspapers and thieving. At sixteen he was a singing waiter in McGovern's Saloon, one of the lowest North Side dives, reducing the drunks to maudlin tears and picking their pockets or, if they became altogether helpless, a condition he frequently hastened by slipping them Mickey Finns, jackrolling them. By his seventeenth year he had enlisted as a slugger in the newspaper circulation wars on the side of the Herald-Examiner, overturning the competition's delivery trucks, burning newspapers, and beating up dealers who sold them. As leader of his own gang, he turned to burglary, safecracking and highway robbery. In 1909 he served three months in the House of Correction and two years later, another six months for blackjacking his prey. Those six months constituted his total prison record. Having demonstrated his efficiency as a ward heeler, he could rely on political patrons to keep him out of prison.

Had he been a subtler safecracker his name might never have appeared on a police blotter at all, but his guilt was usually glaring. In attempting to open a safe with a charge of dynamite, he once blew out the entire side of an office building, but hardly scratched the safe. In 1921 a Detective Sergeant John J. Ryan caught O'Banion, Hymie Weiss and two lesser satellites in flagrante as they started to blast open a Postal Telegraph safe. With his sweetest smile, O'Banion explained that Ryan had misinterpreted their presence; they were there simply to apply for jobs as apprentice telegraph operators. An alderman furnished the $10,000 bail bond for O'Banion, and it cost $30,000 in bribes to have the case nolle prossed. Not long after, the police raised the fingerprints of O'Banion, Weiss and Vincent "Schemer" Drucci on the dial of a safe they had emptied in the Parkway Tea Room. The jury acquitted them. "It was an oversight," O'Banion remarked to a reporter as he strutted out of the courtroom. "Hymie was supposed to wipe off the prints, but he forgot."

Every good ward heeler knew when and where to scatter bounty, and O'Banion was no exception; but as his fortunes soared, his charity went beyond self-interest. He genuinely pitied the outsider, the derelict, the disenfranchised such as he and his parents had been. O'Banion often visited the slums, his car laden with food and clothing. He gave money to the aged poor and to the orphaned young, paid their rent and their medical bills. He once sent a crippled boy to the Mayo Clinic and, when told that neither surgery nor medication could cure him, undertook to support him as long as they both should live. "No high-salaried organization to distribute my doles," he said. "My money goes straight to those who need it."

O'Banion's general staff consisted of criminals no less individualistic. Hymie Weiss, born Wajiechowski of Polish parentage, invented one of gangland's favorite murder methods and coined the phrase for it-"taking him for a ride." The victim was lured into the front seat of a car, the back of his head exposed to the gunman behind him. Gangsters considered the cerebellum an ideal target because the bullet was unlikely to "take a course"-that is, to be deflected from a vital area. The killers would fire when the car reached a desolate spot, fling open the door, and eject the corpse. The first one-way ride victim, executed by Weiss himself in July, 1921, was another Pole, Steve Wisniewski, who had hijacked a beer truck belonging to O'Banion.

Like O'Banion, Weiss attended Holy Name Cathedral. He wore a crucifix around his neck and frequently fingered a rosary. Thin and wiry, with hot black eyes set far apart, tense, tempestuous, vindictive, he was the brainiest member of the gang and the cockiest. He once sued the federal government. A U.S. marshal, armed with a warrant for a violation of the Mann Act, broke into the apartment Weiss shared with a Ziegfeld Follies chorine named Josephine Libby. Weiss forced him to leave at the point of a shotgun. Returning with a raiding party, the marshal seized a bottle of knockout drops, handcuffs, revolvers, shotguns and a dozen cases of whiskey, brandy and champagne. Weiss brought an action in federal court to recover some silk shirts and socks which, he claimed, the raiders had also confiscated. Nothing came of either Weiss' civic suit or the government's criminal charges.

On behalf of whichever political party happened to be sponsoring the gang during municipal elections Weiss would go swashbuckling from poll to poll with a revolver and hold off the officials while his fellow thugs stole ballot boxes. He had a tigerish temper. "I saw him only once in the last twenty years," said his brother Frank, who drove a newspaper delivery truck during Chicago's circulation wars. "That was when he shot me."

Josephine Libby's opinion of her lover was practically interchangeable with Viola O'Banion's opinion of her husband. "Earl was one of the finest men in the world," she said, "and I spent the happiest time of my life with him. You'd expect a rich bootlegger to be a man about town, always going to nightclubs and having his home full of rowdy friends. But Earl liked to be alone with me, just lounging about, listening to the radio or reading. He seemed to me pretty well read. He didn't waste time on trash, but read histories and law books. If you hadn't known what he was, you might have mistaken him for a lawyer or college professor. He was crazy about children. 'I like 'em, Jo,' he said. 'I want a boy of my own some day. I don't amount to much, but maybe the youngster would turn out all right.'"

On safecracking sorties O'Banion and Weiss usually took along Schemer Drucci and George "Bugs" Moran. Drucci's sobriquet stemmed from his imaginative but impractical schemes for robbing banks and kidnapping millionaires. He made his underworld debut looting telephone coin boxes. Bugs Moran had committed twenty-six robberies and served three prison sentences, totaling two-years, before his twenty-first birthday. A Pole from Minnesota, the Irish name notwithstanding, he married the sister of another O'Banionite, James Clark, alias Albert Kashellek, a full-blooded Sioux Indian. Moran was a moonfaced 200-pounder with a cleft chin, whom O'Banion tended to treat like a court jester. He had a certain rueful wit. His misdeeds often brought him for arraignment before judge Lyle, whose threshold of tolerance for gangsters was low, and he invariably requested a change of venue. "Don't you like me, Moran?" the judge once asked him. "I like you, Your Honor," Moran replied, "but I'm suspicious of you."