Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [8]
Gangster funerals were spectacles of power, sentimentality and hypocrisy. Mourners displayed ardent piety, all the more deeply felt in the knowledge that their own lives were very far from virtuous. At the same time they used elaborately coded rituals to establish their allegiances, their position within the criminal hierarchy and their relationship to the community at large.
In the late 1920s the Illinois Crime Survey reported, “In great funerals, the presence of the political boss attests the sincerity and the personal character of the friendship for the deceased, and this marks him as an intimate in life and death.” Because the ties between individuals in immigrant communities were based on family and locality, distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate society were blurred. This helps explain why local grandees, businessmen and officials made a point of paying their respects to fallen gangsters. It wasn’t necessarily corruption; the dead man might have had roots in a neighboring Calabrian village or been married to a cousin. These personal links meant far more than an arbitrary legal system.
When “Big Jim” Colosimo, head of the Italian mafia in Chicago during the 1910s, died in May 1920, five thousand mourners followed his cortège. His more than fifty pallbearers included judges, aldermen, Congressmen and a state Senator, marching alongside the bootleggers and brothel keepers who had been his customers and clients. The Church was more scrupulous: Colosimo was refused a Catholic funeral and buried in unconsecrated ground. The Archbishop who had turned him down specified that this was not because of the way he had made his living—but because he had divorced his wife.
Colosimo had been murdered on the orders of Johnny Torrio, his deputy and nephew by marriage. Torrio, who was said to have paid $10,000 to have Colosimo removed, paid all his funeral expenses and wept profusely for his “brother.” Colosimo had been well known in the business for being anti-Semitic. When Torrio arrived in Chicago to work for him Colosimo had congratulated him on no longer having to work with “dirty” Jewish hoods like Arnold Rothstein, Bugsy Seigel and Meyer Lansky—hoods who had been Torrio’s friends and associates for years. The biggest wreath at his funeral was signed, “From all the sorrowing Jew boys of New York.” On the day of Frank’s funeral, the Capone family home (one by one, his brothers and sisters and widowed mother had followed Al to Chicago) was hidden by a wall of extravagant flower arrangements, including a lyre created from orchids and lilies and a six-foot heart made of red carnations. His silver-plated, satin-lined coffin was followed by a huge crowd of mourners who, according to Italian custom, had let their beards grow until the day of the funeral. The flowers were supplied by an impish, baby-faced Irishman named Dion O’Banion. As a gangster himself, as well as an orchid connoisseur, he could be relied upon to create floral arrangements appropriate to both the rank of the mourner and the deceased.
Immigrant communities, especially those living outside the law, defined themselves against other immigrant communities. Al Capone was an exception to this rule—like all good employers he valued merit more highly than background—but for the most part the Italians hated the Jews, who hated the Irish, and so on. Dion O’Banion controlled the Irish vote in Chicago’s northern wards and ran a bootlegging ring from his florist shop opposite Holy Name Cathedral, where as a boy he had served at mass