Word: banion
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...murder moved Capone up. Now he was cheek by jowl with Diamond Jim's lieutenant, Johnny Torrio. The two worked well together. In four years Capone & Torrio ruled Cicero, the Chicago suburb whose name has been notorious ever since. Only disputant of their power was Dion O'Banion, on Chicago's North Side, who ran a flower shop as a sideline, specialized in floral pieces for gangster funerals, a highly lucrative trade. O'Banion said he hated Wops. One November noonday three men came to his shop, riddled him with bullets and left him sprawling...
...Banion mob was wild. In a cavalcade of seven cars, led by Hymie Weiss they went openly to Cicero's Hawthorne Hotel, Capone's headquarters, sprayed the windows with Thompson submachine guns. Capone crouched out of harm...
...brash ones died. Colosimo and O'Banion had been too brash. So was Hymie Weiss. Weiss was shot down several months later in front of the Holy Name Cathedral on Superior Street. Others died in doorways, in telephone booths, in alleys, in bed, at the wheels of their expensive cars. In the decade there were 4,242 homicides on the blotter of the Chicago police alone, most of them unsolved. But nobody shot Capone...
...Brooklyn boy was not brash. He was smart, and a coward. It was a healthy combination. Johnny Torrio was shot up and fled. The last of the opposition, remnants of the O'Banion gang, were ambushed in a Clark Street garage on St. Valentine's Day in 1929, machine-gunned...
...assistant in Chicago, Johnny Torrio selected a stocky Brooklyn boy named Al Capone. In 1920, Jim Colosimo was shot dead. Torrio succeeded him as Chicago's top racketeer and kept Al Capone as a $75-a-week underling. Johnny Torrio left Chicago shortly after Dion O'Banion's elaborate funeral in 1924, went back to be riddled with bullets by O'Banion's gunmen. He recovered, served a short jail sentence for running a brewery, and went to Italy for a holiday. When he returned he settled down in New York, announced that...