Death of Dean O'Banion | Boardwalk Empire
Channel: RELTO
Date: 2022-12-06

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.

Until then, Mike Merlo and the Unione Siciliana had refused to sanction a hit on O'Banion. However, Merlo had terminal cancer and died on November 8, 1924. With Merlo gone, the Gennas and South Siders were free to move on O'Banion.


O'Banion's grave at Mount Carmel Cemetery
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 organized crime figure, the Archdiocese of Chicago denied him burial in consecrated ground. A priest O'Banion had known since childhood recited the Lord's Prayer and three Hail Marys in his memory. O'Banion received a lavish funeral, much larger than the Merlo funeral the day before. He was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois, west of Chicago. O'Banion was originally interred in unconsecrated ground, but his family persevered and he was later reburied in consecrated ground elsewhere in the cemetery.

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 St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929.

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