O'BANION, DION PATRICK 1891-1924

GANGSTER

The Florist/Bootlegger

In the early 1920s the illegal rackets on the North Side of Chicago were dominated by an Irish immigrant named Dion O'Banion. On the surface he was a genial man who loved to sing the old songs of his homeland, and he spent most days working in his florist's shop on North State Street. Yet he was also a major bootlegger and drug trafficker whom Chief of Police Morgan Collins considered "Chicago's arch-criminal." Informed insiders claimed that O'Banion—who always carried three guns concealed in special pockets made by his tailor—arranged for the deaths of at least twenty-five of his enemies. It was O'Banion who began the custom of sending large floral arrangements at the public funerals of slain mobsters. He made most of these funeral wreaths himself.

Background

O'Banion started out as a member of a North Side juvenile street gang. His earliest adult crimes were burglary and safecracking. Because of a leg wound from an early gunfight, O'Banion walked with a pronounced limp. By the time Prohibition went into effect in 1920 O'Banion's gang—an ethnic mix of Irish, German, and Jewish hoodlums—was well placed to profit from the newly lucrative racket of bootlegging whiskey.

Rivalry with Capone

Initially O'Banion and his major rival, Al Capone, maintained an uneasy coexistence, but in summer 1924 O'Banion's henchmen began hijacking Capone's liquor trucks. They also shot up several speakeasies in Capone's South Side territory, wounding some of Capone's men. O'Banion dismissed suggestions that he negotiate a truce with Capone, who arranged for his longtime ally Mike Genna to kill the troublesome Irishman. At noon on 10 November 1924 Genna and two companions entered O'Banion's shop, drew revolvers, and started shooting. O'Banion took five bullets in the body and a sixth in the head, The fact that his usually reliable bodyguards were in the back room at the time raised suspicions that they had been paid to stay clear. No one was ever charged with O'Banion's murder.

Sources:

Laurence Bergreen, Capone: The Man and His Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994);

John Kelly, "Gangster City" American Heritage, 46 (April 1995): 65-88.