Word: banions
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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...
...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...
...Colosimo was shot dead in his Chicago restaurant. Some accused Torrio, others Capone. At any rate Torrio quickly stepped into the dead man's shoes, kept Capone as his right-hand man. When Dion O'Banion's North Side gang hijacked too much of their beer in 1924; O'Banion was neatly drilled in his Chicago flower shop. Torrio attended the $50,000 funeral with Capone, looked at his dead foe, murmured disconsolately: "Poor Dion." But the floral wreath he sent was dumped in an ashcan, and Torrio fled to Hot Springs, Ark., to New Orleans...
...last week at a church in a down-at-heel section of Brooklyn as Lou Hill. "Former Hijacker, Gambler, Confidence Man," a Chicago hoodlum turned holy. High point of imaginative Lou Hill's career was strong-arming on a Chicago newspaper route with the late Dion O'Banion, who was later killed in his flower shop, supposedly by that former Brooklynite, Al Capone. In 1923, a fugitive from justice, Lou Hill staggered into a Springfield mission, heard a sermon which converted him. He says he returned to Chicago to give himself up but District Attorney Robert E. Crowe...