Dean O'Banion
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Dean O'Banion | |
---|---|
racketeer | |
Years active | c. 1910–1924 |
Known for | Founder and leader of the North Side Gang during Prohibition |
Charles Dean O'Banion (July 8, 1892 – November 10, 1924) was an American
Early life
O'Banion was born to Irish
As a youngster, "Deanie," as he became known, sang in the church choir at Chicago's
O'Banion and his friends (
O'Banion worked as a waiter at McGovern's Liberty Inn, where each evening he would delight patrons with his beautiful Irish tenor voice as his pals were picking pockets in the coatroom. O'Banion also drugged his patrons' drinks, known then as "slipping them a Mickey Finn." When the drunk patrons left the club, O'Banion and his pals would rob them.
The gang also met the political bosses of the 42nd and 43rd wards through Annenberg; their job was to use violence to help steer the outcome of elections.
Life as a bootlegger
In December 1919, shortly before Prohibition came into effect, O'Banion was walking down Chicago Street when he came across a parked liquor truck. O'Banion took a roll of nickels out of his pocket, approached the driver and knocked him out. O'Banion proceeded to drive off with the liquor. He sold the whiskey in the back to saloon keepers for a total of $15,000 ($235,576 in 2021).[2]
With the onset of
At the height of his power, O'Banion was supposedly making about $40 million in 3 years from liquor. During one famous caper, O'Banion and his men stole over $100,000 worth of
In 1921, O'Banion married Viola Kaniff and bought an interest in
Bootleggers divide Chicago
In 1920,
O'Banion lived with Torrio's deal for about three years before becoming dissatisfied with it. Since a recent election in neighboring Cicero, Illinois, the city had become a gold mine for the South Siders and O'Banion wanted a cut of it. To placate him, Torrio granted O'Banion some of Cicero's beer rights and a quarter-interest in a casino called The Ship. The enterprising O'Banion then convinced a number of speakeasies in other Chicago territories to move to his strip in Cicero. This move had the potential to start a bootleg war. Torrio attempted to convince O'Banion to abandon his plan in exchange for some South Side brothel proceeds. O'Banion angrily refused, as he abhorred prostitution.
Meanwhile, the
Murder of John Duffy
Meanwhile, O'Banion continued on the offensive. In February 1924, he moved against his South Side rivals by unsuccessfully trying to frame Torrio and Capone for the murder of North Side hanger-on John Duffy, a gun for hire from Philadelphia.
Duffy, following a violent drunken argument, had smothered his bride Maybelle Exley with a pillow while she slept (although other sources claim Duffy shot her twice in the head). When he awoke the following morning, he panicked and called a friend, asking for a car and money to get out of town. He was soon contacted by O'Banion, who agreed to help him. He told Duffy to meet him at the Four Deuces, a South Wabash club run by the Torrio-Capone organization.
At the club, several eyewitnesses reported seeing Duffy being picked up around 8:00 pm in a Studebaker by O'Banion and an unidentified man. Duffy's body was later found in a snowbank outside Chicago; he had been shot three times in the head with a .38 caliber pistol. Another witness later told police that he saw O'Banion and two other men dump Duffy's body, but he later retracted his statement.
As Duffy had been last seen at the Four Deuces, suspicion logically focused on club manager Al Capone. The subsequent investigation brought unwanted attention from law enforcement on the club, as it was a source of illegal gambling, prostitution and bootlegging. When police started to view O'Banion as a possible suspect, the gang leader told reporters: "The police don't have to look for me, I'll go and look for them. I'll be at the state's attorney's office at 2:30 PM Monday afternoon ... I can tell the state's attorney anything he wants to know about me. Whatever happened to Duffy is out of my line. I don't mix with that kind of riffraff."
Police officials were never able to gather enough evidence to charge O'Banion with Duffy's murder. They theorized that O'Banion and two accomplices drove Duffy to a remote woodland area. Stopping on Nottingham Road, Duffy and O'Banion got out of the car to relieve themselves. At that point, O'Banion stood behind the unsuspecting Duffy and shot him in the back of the head. O'Banion then shot Duffy twice more before dumping his body in the snowbank. Police think that O'Banion killed Duffy because he wanted to avoid a highly publicized investigation into the murder of Duffy's wife. By meeting Duffy at a Chicago Outfit club and taking Duffy for "a one way ride", he hoped to shift blame for Duffy's murder onto Torrio and Capone.
Sieben brewery raid
The last straw for Torrio was O'Banion's treachery in the Sieben brewery raid. Both O'Banion and Torrio held large stakes in the Sieben brewery in Chicago. In May, 1924, O'Banion learned that the police were planning to raid the brewery on a particular night. Before the raid, O'Banion approached Torrio and told him he wanted to sell his share in the brewery, claiming that the Gennas scared him and he wanted to leave the rackets. Torrio agreed to buy O'Banion's share and gave him half a million dollars. On the night of O'Banion's last shipment, the police swept into the brewery. O'Banion, Torrio, and numerous South Side gangsters were arrested. O'Banion got off easily because, unlike Torrio, he had no previous Prohibition-related arrests. Torrio had to bail out himself and six associates, plus face later court charges with the possibility of jail time. O'Banion also refused to return the money Torrio had given him in the deal.
Torrio soon realized he had been
O'Banion and the Tommy gun
During the summer of 1924, O'Banion and his wife Viola took a long vacation at the
It is believed that one of O'Banion's machine guns eventually found its way to South Side gunman
Death
On November 3, 1924, Dean O'Banion made a telephone call to arch-rival Angelo Genna that became heated. Their disagreement concerned a debt Genna had incurred at The Ship, the casino that the North Side gang boss owned a piece of along with the Chicago Outfit. As O'Banion had sat in with Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Frank Rio, and others to tally the week's profits, it was mentioned that Angelo Genna had bet a large amount of cash, plus a sizable marker. Capone recommended that they cancel the marker as a professional courtesy. O'Banion, instead, spoke to Genna on the telephone and abusively demanded that he pay his debt within a week. With this insult, Angelo Genna and the Genna crime family could no longer be restrained.[4]
Until then,
Using the Merlo funeral as a cover story, over the next few days Brooklyn gangster Frankie Yale and others visited Schofield's, O'Banion's flower shop, to discuss floral arrangements. However, the real purpose of these visits was to memorize the store layout for the hit on O'Banion.
On the morning of November 10, 1924, O'Banion was clipping chrysanthemums in Schofield's' back room. Yale entered the shop with Genna gunmen John Scalise and Albert Anselmi. When O'Banion and Yale shook hands, Yale grasped O'Banion's hand in a tight grip. At the same time, Scalise and Anselmi stepped aside and fired two bullets into O'Banion's chest and two into his throat. One of the killers fired a final shot into the back of his head as he lay face down on the floor.
Since O'Banion was a major
The O'Banion killing sparked a brutal five-year gang war between the North Side Gang and the Chicago Outfit that culminated in the killing of seven North Side gang members in the
In popular culture
In the early years of the "Public Enemy" era, Dean O'Banion and other Irish mobsters of the previous decade served as the basis for many gangster films of the 1930s. James Cagney, for example, based his character on O'Banion and his lieutenant Earl "Hymie" Weiss in the 1931 film The Public Enemy.[5] Seasons 3 and 4 of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire featured a fictional version of O'Banion, portrayed by Arron Shiver.
He appears as a playable character in the strategy video game Empire of Sin published in 2020 by Romero Games and Paradox Interactive.
O'Banion's twin careers as a florist and Chicago gangster is reflected in the character of Giuseppe Givola in Bertolt Brecht's play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.
In Nigel Balchin's The Small Back Room (1943) a character refers to O'Banion as an example of someone whose job appeared harmless but wasn't: "I'm a harmless Assistant Secretary [...] But don't let that worry you. Dion O'Banion kept a flower shop in Chicago."
Date | Title | Country | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1959 | Al Capone
|
U.S. | Portrayed by Robert Gist |
1967 | The St. Valentine's Day Massacre | U.S. | Portrayed by John Agar |
1975 | Capone | U.S. | Portrayed by John Orchard |
1993 | The Untouchables Pilot (Parts 1 and 2) | U.S. | Portrayed by Michael Parks |
1993 | The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues | U.S. | Portrayed by Victor Slezak |
2012–2013 | Boardwalk Empire | U.S. | Portrayed by Arron Shiver |
2016 | Making of the Mob: Chicago | U.S. | Portrayed by Stephen Lovatt |
2017 | Gangster Land | U.S. | Portrayed by Mark Rolston |
See also
Footnotes
- ^ The Dean O'Banion Project
- ^ Paddy Whacked: The Saga Of The Irish Mafia on Youtube
- ^ Helmer, William and Arthur J. Bilek. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre: The Untold Story Of The Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone Nashville: Cumberland House, 2004. pgs. 27–28, 36–38.
- ISBN 0-688-12838-6, pg. 116
- American Movie Classics. Retrieved October 24, 2010.
References
- Keefe, Rose. Guns and Roses: The Untold Story of Dean O'Banion, Chicago's Big Shot before Al Capone. Cumberland House, 2003. ISBN 1-58182-378-9
- Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of Chicago: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1986. ISBN 1-56025-454-8
- Butts, Edward. Outlaws of the Lakes: Bootlegging & Smuggling from Colonial Times to Prohibition. Thunder Bay Press, 2004. ISBN 1-882376-91-9
- English, T.J. Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. ISBN 0-06-059002-5