Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [9]
After Frank Capone’s funeral, apparently throwing in the towel after months of feuding, Dion O’Banion told Torrio and Al that he was getting out of bootlegging and offered to sell them his share in a brewery. The catch was that he knew the police were planning to raid it. Capone missed the assignation, but Torrio was arrested, fined $5,000 and sentenced to nine months in prison.
Capone’s organization swung into action. One morning in November 1924, as O’Banion was preparing yet another funeral arrangement, three men walked into his flower shop. O’Banion came towards them, one hand outstretched. Although his assistants later insisted that they didn’t recognize the men, O’Banion must have known them for he never shook hands with strangers. In a classic mob assassination, the two outside men grabbed his arms and held him tightly. They fired two bullets into his chest, two into his larynx, preventing him from making a sound, one into his right cheek, and finally, after he fell, one into his head, at such close range that the powder scorched his skin.
Dion’s killers were said to have been paid $10,000 apiece and been given valuable diamond rings, but no witnesses to the crime came forward and no arrests were made. The police—even those who were not on the mob payroll—were content to let the gangsters feud among themselves. As the murder rate on Chicago’s streets rose year by year—from 16 in 1924, to 46 in 1925, to 76 in 1926—in total only six men were brought to trial.
No expense was spared at O’Banion’s funeral, which doubled as a victory celebration for Al Capone. Although O’Banion received no religious rites and was buried in unconsecrated ground, a police escort, three bands and ten thousand mourners, Capone among them, followed his bronze-and-silver coffin to the graveyard. Twenty-six vehicles were needed to transport the flowers, which included a large bunch of roses with a card signed “From Al.”
O’Banion’s death only intensified the Beer Wars. His second-in-command continued his vendetta against the Italian gangs, the violence aggravated by both sides’ use of the machine gun, or “Chicago typewriter.” Tommy sub-machine guns, which fired eight hundred rounds a minute, had been designed for use in the Great War but did not go into production until 1921. By the mid- 1920s, with their serial numbers filed off, they were available on the black market for as much as $2,000 each.
In early 1925 Johnny Torrio was shot and wounded by O’Banion’s men and returned to New York with $30 million in his pocket to work with his old friends, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. His departure left Capone in sole—but shaky—charge of Chicago’s increasingly divided underworld at the age of twenty-six.
Guarding against another attack, Capone no longer went anywhere without a pair of bodyguards. In public places he always sat at the back of a room, facing the door and near a window he could escape through if the need arose. He preferred not to travel during the day, and his own car always followed one or two smaller scout cars. After one assassination attempt, suspecting his driver of involvement, Capone had him kidnapped, tortured and murdered. The man’s mutilated body was found dumped in a water cistern outside the city limits as a warning to other potential traitors.
In the midst of this heightening gang warfare, the young journalist Robert St. John was still buzzing around Capone like