New Orleans mafia mass lynchings

There are two theories about the infamous mass lynchings of (alleged) mafiosi in New Orleans in 1891: One, an enraged populace rose up against Mafia criminality, which was real and running roughshod over the law; two, the attack was triggered by the most heinous, bigoted feelings and actually encouraged by the power structure of the day.

Just a week after the lynching the Saturday Review stated, “it is at least possible that some hatred of very industrious and successful competitors in business mingled with the more respectable zeal of the lynching party.” Neither theory is airtight. Although there was some desire to undermine the growing economic power of local Italian Americans, only the most rabid of the “there-ain’t-no-mafia-school” could deny the criminal society’s presence in New Orleans.

New Orleans probably was the most anti-Italian city of the era, and its mayor, Joseph A. Shakespeare, was one of the most anti-Italian politicians of his time. A letter from his office castigated Southern Italians and Sicilians as “ ... the most idle, vicious and worthless people among us .... Except the Poles we know of no other nationality which is [as] objectionable as a people.”


But turn-of-the-century New Orleans was filled not only with venal politicians and police on-thetake, but also with many Italian criminals. It was the Italian immigrants who jammed the New Orleans ghettos, which, like any other ghetto, spewed out criminals. Undoubtedly, many Italian criminals of the period were not mafiosi, but it must be conceded that New Orleans represented one of the main ports of entry for mafiosi into the United States, probably rivaling New York.

It is difficult to pinpoint the first appearance of the Mafia in America but it was probably in New Orleans during the late 1800s. Between 1888 and 1890 the New Orleans Mafia (made up of disparate groups as was the case in Sicily) committed an estimated 40 murders without serious opposition.

During this period, Antonio and Carlo (or Charley) Matranga, two Honored Society members from Palermo, Sicily, took control of the Mississippi River docks. Tribute had to be paid to them before a freighter could be unloaded. However, the Matranga operations were challenged by the Provenzano brothers, leaders of another Mafia group. War broke out between the two groups, and killing along the docks became a regular occurrence.

The police failed to stop the battling until the flamboyant chief of police, David Peter Hennessey, personally took over. Soon the Matrangas found themselves hassled at every turn while the Provenzanos were left virtually unbothered. The Matrangas sent warning to the chief but the pressure continued. So they tried to bribe him, only to have him reject their offer.

This convinced the Matrangas that the Provenzanos had offered him more and that Hennessey was determined to have a piece of the riverfront rackets for himself. So they fell back to an old Sicilian custom of killing the government official who got in their way. They did not understand the ramifications that would follow the killing of an American police chief.

Hennessey wrote his epitaph when police, conducting a routine murder investigation, charged two Provenzano brothers with complicity in the murder of a Matranga gangster whose head had been sliced off and stuffed in a fireplace. The Matrangas, determined to kill off the Provenzanos, hired some of the city’s foremost lawyers to aid the prosecution. Then Chief Hennessey came to the rescue.

He told the press he had uncovered the existence of a criminal society, the Mafia, in the city and would offer proof during the Provenzanos’ trial. On October 15, 1890, Hennessey left his office for home. He was cut down by a shotgun blast a half-block from his house. Hennessey managed to direct some shots at a number of his fleeing assailants and when asked who had shot him, he whispered “Dagoes” and collapsed.

The murder outraged the citizens of New Orleans who liked Hennessey, despite many unsavory elements in his police record with the city and despite the likelihood that he might be on the take. A grand jury was convened and announced that “the existence of a secret organization known as the Mafia has been established beyond doubt.” Nineteen men described as Mafia members were indicted as principals and conspirators in the Hennessey murder, but the trial was perceived by most people as a farce.

A large number of the 60 potential witnesses were threatened, intimidated or bribed, and several members of the jury were later found to have taken bribes as well. Despite what was regarded as overwhelming evidence against at least 11 of the defendants, all but three were acquitted, and the jury could not reach a verdict on these three.

All the defendants were returned to the parish prison to await final disposition of their case and then released. There can be little doubt there was considerable elation and celebration of the jury verdict in the Italian section of the city, which inflamed public opinion. (Some observers maintain that the celebrations in the Italian quarter were solely festivities for the birthday of King Umberto I of Italy, but it is ludicrous to believe that a people as discriminated against as the Italians would not celebrate the acquittal of their countrymen. If they had not, the Italians would have been strikingly different from any other national or racial group under similar circumstances.)

What followed was a blot on New Orleans. Two days after the trial’s surprise ending, a great number of mass meetings and other protests fanned by outright bigotry were held. Ultimately, a mob of several thousands, headed by 60 leading citizens, marched on the jail. They had a death list composed of the 11 defendants against whom the evidence was the strongest. Left off the list were those defendants against whom the evidence was weakest, including the Matranga brothers.

Two of the mafiosi were pulled screaming to the street and hanged from lampposts. Seven others were executed by firing squads in the jail yard, and two more were riddled with bullets as they hid in a doghouse built for the jail’s guard dog. Prominent in the lynch mob were a goodly number of blacks, giving the lynching a unique dimension in the American South.

While some newspapers denounced the hangings, the citizens and especially the business community seemed rather pleased by what had been done. A new song, “Hennessey Avenged,” by a popular poet named Fred Bessel became a best-seller. For a time the lynchings threatened international complications. Italy recalled its ambassador, severed diplomatic relations with the United States and demanded reparations and punishment for the lynchers. Eventually, the affair was settled with Washington paying $25,000 to the dead men’s relatives in Italy.

The lynchings did not kill the Mafia in New Orleans, although newspapers announced, “The Mafia Exterminated.” However, the affair did make an impression on mafiosi. Charley Matranga, who was to pick up the leadership of the mafiosi in New Orleans and rule until the early 1920s, managed to stay in the background thereafter and issue orders that were carried out by front men. And when Lucky Luciano formed the national crime syndicate, a basic rule was enunciated that under no circumstances was a police officer to be murdered.

Night of the Sicilian Vespers

According to a former U.S. attorney general, “forty members of La Cosa Nostra died by gunfire” on September 10, 1931—the same day the Luciano-Lansky forces eradicated the last obstacle to their power, Salvatore Maranzano.

Many criminal accounts hold these murders took place all around the country as old Mustache Petes were assassinated to make way for the new order of organized crime. Yet, no one has ever been able to compile a list of the 40 supposed victims on the Night of the Sicilian Vespers.

A number of murders in the New York area were tied to Maranzano’s fate, but these were more or less predictable rubouts of the crime leader’s more ardent supporters. Such underlings included Jimmy Marino, gunned down as he stood in the doorway of a Bronx barbershop, and Louis Russo and Sam Monaco, who were reported missing and not found for three days when their bodies, throats slit and skulls smashed, washed ashore in Newark Bay. (Informer Joe Valachi recollected, “Sam had an iron pipe hammered up his ass.”) The Luciano-Lansky final touch was obvious: Maranzano faithful were admonished to eschew revenge and join the new setup.


But what of the alleged murders glorified in the press as the Night of the Sicilian Vespers? Luciano maintained that mass slayings were unnecessary, and he was right. Younger mafiosi around the country had been knocking off older Mustache Petes in the past few years for the same reason Luciano had killed Maranzano and before him Joe the Boss Masseria: They stood in the way of new ways to make money. And Luciano said, “The real and only reason Maranzano got his was so that we could stop the killin’. That it was all over.”

There was one other killing that fatal night, however. Gerardo Scarpato, the owner of the Nuova Villa Tammaro, the Coney Island restaurant where Joe the Boss was murdered, was killed.

Scarpato had conveniently disappeared from the restaurant to go for a walk along the beach before Luciano went to the bathroom and four killers walked in and gunned down Joe the Boss. It may be presumed that Luciano felt killing off Scarpato would be a nice gesture to the Masseria faithful.

Frank Nitti

Probably no gangster in American history should be more indebted to television than Frank Nitti. He was introduced to the video-watching public as the great Chicago underworld brain, the foe of the intrepid Eliot Ness and The Untouchables.

The post-Capone Outfit has always proved a bit confusing to the law and mob watchers alike. Using “front men” to a far greater extent than other crime families—the conviction of Capone had been a sobering lesson—the boys made it difficult for outsiders to determine the exact power structure. No wonder in later years other syndicate criminals looked at Chicago with unconcealed horror. Informer Vinnie Teresa said, “Chicago is an eat-’em-up-alive outfit . . . everyone is struggling to get on top, and they don’t give a damn who gets it in the back.”

In this context Nitti was valuable as a man to take the heat and, for that matter, even assassins’ bullets. In that gem of prairie corruption, even Chicago mayor, Anton Cermak, could dispatch his own police “hit men” to try to knock off Nitti so he could replace him and other Caponeites with his own more subservient gangsters. Yet other mobsters, including Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, when establishing the national crime syndicate in the early 1930s, dealt with Paul “the Waiter” Ricca as the leader of the Capones. They gave no thought to Nitti; he didn’t even know what was going on.


Born in 1884, Nitti started out as a barber with a goodly clientele of petty crooks who came to him to fence their stolen goods. This underworld work put him in touch with the Capones at the start of Prohibition; he had ways of peddling some hijacked booze, no questions asked. Within a few years, Capone tabbed him as an efficient organizer and relied on him to see that his orders were carried out.

After Capone went to prison, the newspapers had to have a new Mr. Big. Nitti was very visible. They hailed him as the new head of the Capone mob, and Nitti probably even believed it himself. But it was ludicrous to expect the likes of the Fischetti brothers, Jake Guzik, Tony Accardo, Paul Ricca, Murray Humphreys and others to follow his orders. Only his front-man role made Nitti important.

In 1932 two police officers invaded Nitti’s headquarters and shot and severely wounded him. They were acting, later testimony indicated, under orders of the new mayor, Cermak, who was determined to take over from the Capone mob and redistribute its territories to more favored criminals, especially those bossed by Cermak’s favorite gangster, Teddy Newberry. Nitti lingered near death for a time but finally recovered, a feat that added to his legend.

When the mob under Willie Bioff and George Browne got into its shakedown rackets against the movie industry, Nitti’s name was used as a terror tactic against the film moguls, who were threatened with his personal vengeance. However, federal investigators succeeded in getting evidence against the Chicago gangsters and with Bioff and Browne both talking, Nitti and Ricca were indicted along with several others. Ricca had by this time more obviously taken charge of the mob, often countermanding a Nitti order by saying, “We’ll do it this way. Now let’s hear no more about it.”

Ricca decided the movie indictments made the time perfect to call in Nitti’s cards as a front man. At a meeting of the top leaders of the mob he ordered Nitti to plead guilty and take the rap for all of them. The thought terrified Nitti who had served 18 months in the early 1930s on an income tax charge. He got the “shakes” at the idea of returning behind bars. That sort of reaction made Nitti a logical candidate to seek mercy from the prosecution by confessing and naming all the others.

“Frank, you’re asking for it,” Ricca raged at him, still demanding he be a “standup guy” and take the rap for all. Nitti recognized Ricca’s words as a death sentence. The next day, March 19, 1943, Nitti was seen walking along some railroad tracks. He drew a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his brain.

No hands rule

Adopted by various mafioso leaders since about 1930, the “no hands rule” forbids any mob member from physically attacking another. The purpose of the rule— apparently first propounded by Salvatore Maranzano and later insisted upon by Lucky Luciano—was to prevent needless outbreaks of gang warfare.

The rule was especially important in New York where five crime families operated in the city. Inevitably there was friction between family members about racket rights in certain spots or the exclusivity of a certain shakedown, gambling or loan shark victim. Crime family leaders reserved to themselves the right to decide such matters and did not approve the actions of a hit-happy low echelon hoodlum in provoking a situation in which “honor” would require all-out warfare.

Thus the rule was set. The mere laying of one’s hands on another gangster was cause enough for even the death penalty to be imposed on the offender. While such a “Cosa Nostra code” would seem to guarantee civilized behavior, such was seldom the case. The late Joe Valachi was noted for using violence to keep other Cosa Nostra members from treading on his financial interests, and, on one occasion, he knocked out fellow racketeer Frank Luciano (no relation to Lucky) when he caught him appropriating some of their joint monies.


Taken to the “table”—a Mafia trial—Valachi was tried by Murder, Inc., boss Albert Anastasia, noted for his unpredictable actions. He could have ordered Valachi’s death with a snap of the finger. However, Anastasia went the other way, declaring Valachi to be more in the right than his victim and giving what amounted to an award of damages to Valachi.

In actual practice, the no hands rule does not seem to have been rigidly enforced. When it was, most likely it represented a family boss’s method of achieving some end of his own.

No narcotics rule

There has long been a myth that most or all organized crime bosses eschewed the “dirty business” of drug trafficking. Giving added credibility to such nonsense was the famous, if not always lucid, testimony of informer Joe Valachi. He told one tale that, as former Chicago Crime Commission head Virgil Peterson has noted, “was viewed with skepticism by many knowledgeable law-enforcement officers.”

Valachi declared that under Tony Accardo the Chicago Cosa Nostra paid its soldiers $200 a week to stop dealing in narcotics. Later, apparently in light of inflation, this weekly stipend was increased to $250. According to Valachi, this caused considerable problems in New York City where mobsters were ordered out of the racket with no compensation whatsoever.

In fact many New York mobsters in various of the five crime families were deeply involved in drug trafficking with and without approval from above. Many members of the Lucchese and Bonanno family engaged in narcotics dealings. Joe Bonanno insisted in his autobiography, A Man of Honor, that “My Tradition outlaws narcotics. It had always been understood that ‘men of honor’ don’t deal in narcotics. However, the lure of high profits had tempted some underlings to freelance in the narcotics trade.” In point of fact, Bonanno’s underboss, Carmine Galante, was convicted on a narcotics charge.


In 1948 Frank Costello, the caretaker-head of the Luciano family after Charlie Lucky was deported, ordered the family to stay out of drugs. Of all the bosses, probably Costello was the most genuinely opposed to dealing in dope. Since he operated mainly through cooperation with the political power structure on such matters as gambling, he understood that narcotics was the one activity he often could not square—the politicians would be too frightened of public outrage.

However, Costello’s edict applied only to the Luciano family while others ignored it or paid it no more than lip service. Vito Genovese, who finally wrested control of the family from Costello, issued the same edict while actually keeping up a lifelong activity in dope. Genovese did have a few underlings murdered for violating the no drugs rule, but took a different attitude if he himself was cut in for a major portion of the profits. Indeed, Genovese died in jail for narcotics dealing.

It was estimated by informers and law enforcement officials in the 1970s that of the 450-some members of the Genovese crime family at least 100 remained, many to this day, involved in the dope racket. The statistics are probably similar in other crime families—with or without a no narcotics rule.

SS Normandie

On February 11, 1942, not long after the United States entered World War II, the night skies over New York’s Hudson River piers turned crimson in a spectacular fire. Ablaze was the former French liner Normandie, renamed the Lafayette, which was being converted to a troop carrier. It would have made a most efficient troopship since its high speed would have made it an extremely difficult target for German wolfpack submarines then decimating Atlantic shipping.

The fire gutted the Normandie. Flames burned fiercely all over the ship, and it was clearly arson. Officially, the government inferred it was not sure what had happened. It might have been Nazi sabotage or it might simply have been due to worker carelessness. At U.S. Navy headquarters in Washington, “carelessness” was not taken seriously; that possibility had been raised simply to prevent civilian panic. But what had happened to the Normandie?

The truth was not revealed for almost three decades until the posthumous memoirs of Lucky Luciano explained that the ship had been sabotaged by the Mafia. That explanation was later confirmed by the usually tight-lipped Meyer Lansky who, still later, revealed the same basic facts to his Israeli biographers.


It was the Mafia that struck the match to the Normandie. The purpose was to light a fire under the military authorities so that they could be panicked into enlisting the imprisoned Lucky Luciano into efforts to stop sabotage on the docks. Even before the Normandie fire, naval intelligence was convinced that German- or Italian-speaking dock workers were signaling information to off-shore enemy subs. It was clear to these intelligence operatives that they did not have the power to prevent this and neither did the New York police. The only force capable of doing so was the underworld.

The first man to see the opening this gave the Mafia was Albert Anastasia, a longtime Luciano loyalist. Albert conferred with his brother, Tough Tony Anastasio, who then took a plan to Frank Costello, acting head of Luciano’s crime family. Costello journeyed to Dannemora Prison to present the idea of burning the Normandie to Luciano who saw it would give him tremendous leverage with the government. Officials would have to deal with him to keep the docks safe.

With a nod from Luciano, the Normandie burned. Later, Luciano would gloat: “That god-damn Anastasia— he really done a job. Later on, Albert told me not to feel too bad about what happened to the ship. He said that as a sergeant in the Army he hated the fuckin’ Navy anyway.”

The Normandie’s fate galvanized official Washington to action. Almost instantly an emergency plan called Operation Underworld came into being, calling for utilizing the Mafia to help the war effort. The Navy approached Joseph “Socks” Lanza, the racket boss of the Fulton Fish Market, with the idea. Lanza explained he was a small fish in the matter and passed the Navy on to Costello and Meyer Lansky. They let it be known that only Luciano could give the okay.

The mob had won their war. Officials fell all over themselves trying to please Charley Lucky. Costello said he was unhappy being in Dannemora, the “Siberia” of the New York penal system, and maybe he should be transferred to Sing Sing. Officials went one better and moved him to Great Meadow Prison, the most pleasant institution in the system.

Luciano passed the word that the mob had to do all possible on the docks to aid the war effort. Lansky personally lectured Anastasia, telling him that he and his brother mustn’t burn any more ships. “He was sorry,” Lansky recalled, “not sorry he’d had the Normandie burned but sorry he couldn’t get at the Navy again.”

From Great Meadow Luciano issued many orders, ostensibly concerning the war effort, but in conversations with Costello and Lansky he spent most of his time exerting active control once more over the national crime syndicate. And after the war of course Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who had put Luciano in prison for 30 to 50 years on a charge of compulsory prostitution, agreed to his release because of his patriotic services to the government.

Numbers racket

The numbers racket in various forms has been known to the world since at least 1530 when the Italian national lottery started (well before the political unification of Italy, indicating perhaps that gambling may have been more of a driving force than nationalism). Through the centuries—and certainly in our time under Mafia rule in the United States—the numbers game has been without doubt the biggest and most profitable gambling racket of all.

According to recent estimates, at least 20 million people a day engage in this illegal pastime, and the total annual take is in the billions, with organized crime reaping a quarter billion in profits in New York City alone. Even state lotteries have not crippled the illegal racket; numbers players don’t have to make the IRS their partners in big scores.

So-called policy shops, where people go to play the numbers, showed up in America in the 1880s. Al Adams, a New York operator, had about 1,000 policy shops in the city, and was one of the biggest bribe donors to Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall. Adams became known as “the meanest gambler in New York” because he rigged the numbers results not only to cheat his clients but also so that he could then bet heavily on the correct numbers with other operators so that he could drive them out of business and take over their shops.


Eventually Adams went to prison after Tweed was dethroned. To reassure numbers players that everything thereafter would be legit, operators switched to taking the numbers from Treasury Department figures, released daily by telegraph, and obviously not to be fixed.

While numbers had been played in the United States since 1880, the game has changed many times, and, although long popular in Harlem, penny-ante numbers, which was to prove the most lucrative of all, came into being only in the 1920s. Before that even black operators in Harlem sold only 50¢ and $1 numbers tickets.

Later they experimented with a 10¢ ticket. Over the years both Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky told various interviewers that Lansky was the true inventor of numbers, meaning the game, which could be played for as little as a penny by inhabitants of the poorest ghettos. Certainly among the players on the Jewish Lower East Side the opinion was that numbers was Lansky’s game.

Interestingly the Chicago Outfit did not discover numbers until the 1940s when Sam Giancana was doing time in the federal prison at Terre Haute. Black racketeer Edward Jones bragged to him how much profit he was making out of the numbers racket, with most of his customers making bets as little as one cent to a nickel.

The Chicago Outfit then slaughtered the black operators and took over. Even though there was a national crime syndicate and the New York mobs under Luciano and Lansky had made millions out of the racket, they had never informed Chicago how profitable the business was. Within organized crime the fact remains that things operate the same as in legitimate business.

The term policy applied to the numbers game has its derivation in the penny insurance that was highly popular in the poor ghettos; both were a cheap gamble on the future. The winning number, one in a thousand ranging from 000 to 999, paid off at 600 to one. Meaning that for 1¢ a winner would get back $6 (or less in certain localities).

Since mathematical odds against the player were actually 1,000 to one the profit potential in numbers is far greater than in any other form of gambling. Numbers operations thus could support a whole bureaucracy from the “banker” on top down through operators, distributors, agents and runners. Basically, only the agents and runners face much risk of arrest, and it is the duty of those above them immediately to bail them out and put in a fix to prevent a conviction, or, at worst, to support the families of those sent to prison.

Whether or not Lansky was the inventor of pennyante numbers or not, it was hardly a copyrightable idea, and it soon was embraced by armies of independent operators. A Madam St. Clair, a Harlem operator, became a millionaire from numbers and would have done so even if she hadn’t thrown in an extra fillip—her policy wheel was credited with providing a magical potency to the players.

The mobsters were not about to let independents like St. Clair clean up in numbers. Prohibition beer czar Dutch Schultz pioneered the forcible takeover of the numbers racket in Harlem, terrorizing individual bankers into buying his protection and then simply announcing he was assuming control of their businesses.

Madam St. Clair once avoided mob executioners by hiding in a pile of coal in a Harlem cellar. Schultz reintroduced the old Adams method of cheating on the numbers results which had been switched by then to the wagering totals of various racetracks. Schultz’s “mathematical brain,” Otto “Abbadabba” Berman, worked out a system to rig the numbers so that only low-played numbers won.

After Schultz was murdered by the syndicate the numbers racket in Harlem was effectively taken over by Luciano and Lansky, with operations under the supervision of Vito Genovese, Luciano’s right-hand man.

Over the years probably as many murders have been committed to gain control of and hold onto the numbers racket as were done during the old mob bootleg wars. Certainly, numbers money remains in many areas the prime source of illegal payoffs to politicians and police for protection.

It is often said that the Mafia has been losing control of the numbers racket as the ghettos turn increasingly black and Hispanic. It is a theory nurtured by the Mafia. The fact remains that the mobs in some places have simply granted “franchises” to certain ethnics (as in the past to Poles and Jews, among others, in their ghettos) and for their pay guarantee full protection to the numbers operators.

Sir Harry Oakes

Harry and Eunice Oakes visit a racetrack in Toronto, some time in the 1930s

In 1943, U.S.-born Sir Harry Oakes, a tough old examiner who became, according to some, the world’s richest man, was murdered. The Bahamas’s number one citizen, Sir Harry was catered to by the duke of Windsor, the former king of England and then-governor of the islands.

In the aftermath of Sir Harry’s death in 1943, kept secret by the duke for some hours, ensued one of the most inept police investigations, and probably the most celebrated murder trial, of the war years. The duke of Windsor, after the discovery of the body, called in American lawmen to investigate, informing them that Sir Harry had committed suicide—a remarkable observation since Sir Harry had died of massive head wounds made by some kind of pronged instrument. What’s more, the bed where Sir Harry lay had been set ablaze and the dead man’s body incinerated. In a macabre touch, feathers were spread over the burned corpse. Clearly this was no run-of-the-mill suicide!

But if it wasn’t suicide, that meant the investigation run by imported Miami police captain Otto Barker and Edward Walter Melchen was aptly described by one authority as “one of the most lackadaisical criminal investigations of modern times.” There was considerable evidence that the murder was committed by American gangsters seeking to infiltrate the island for gambling purposes.


Harry Oakes had the prestige and power to get the official okay for such activities, but the former gold hunter who hit the second largest gold strike in history was a contrary individual who could give his word one moment and break it the next. It appeared he had taken $1 million as a downpayment from a leading American mobster operating out of Miami, Meyer Lansky, and then refused to push for the establishment of a casino in Nassau.

The Florida investigators developed no interest in their fellow Miamian and instead came up with “evidence” that pinned the murder on Sir Harry’s unwanted son-in-law Alfred de Marigny, an aristocratic Frenchman from Mauritius, who though handsome and charming, was suspected by Bahamian society of being a bad sort.

The trial proved to be a sensation and the social event of the year on the islands. Wealthy landowners had their servants queue up for seats at the trial long before dawn. De Marigny was tied to the murder by tainted evidence, particularly a fingerprint of very dubious origin and worth. The prosecution’s case was built on innuendo. De Marigny had a bad reputation and wanted his father-in-law’s money. Sir Harry disliked him intensely and was not about to give him any money. His son-in-law murdered him.

The defense’s case was aided by the highly professional work of a famed American private detective, Raymond Schindler, who had to contend with all sorts of roadblocks set up by the local authorities. He was denied access to many matters, was followed and his telephone tapped. Yet he easily destroyed the prosecution’s case—a conclusion approved by Erle Stanley Gardner, one of the many writers assigned to cover the 13-week trial. It took the jury only two and a half hours to clear de Marigny.

But who killed Sir Harry Oakes? The royal government was decidedly uninterested in finding out thereafter. There are law enforcement agencies in the United States whose investigators have been convinced by a number of underworld informers that they have discovered the true story. The thesis, presented in a number of recent books on the case, has Lansky more than a little upset by Sir Harry’s refusal to go through with his agreement.

Lansky insisted that a local mild-mannered Bahamian real estate man named Harold Christie (who no one at the time knew had a Boston police record) was in on the deal to get Sir Harry to see the light. Christie knew what the underworld did to men who crossed them, knew that Sir Harry’s high position would offer him no protection.

Finally, the story goes, Lansky said he was sending a special emissary to settle matters once and for all. He was accompanied by four button men who arrived aboard a fast power cruiser on the afternoon of July 7, 1943. Christie and Sir Harry drove down to the docks and went aboard the craft.

Sir Harry, rather than Lansky’s emissary, did most of the talking and yelling. He said he had no intention of letting gangsters get a foothold on the islands. Lansky’s emissary said nothing, but he nodded slightly to one of the enforcers. Sir Harry went down hard when hit in the head with a four-pronged winch handle.

Christie was terrified by the sudden violence, but Lansky’s man assured him Sir Harry was only stunned. He had the real estate man and one of the button men pack the millionaire into the car and take him back to his mansion. There it was obvious that Sir Harry was never going to wake up again.

Christie was frozen with fear, but Lansky’s operative went about the grisly task of undressing the dead man and getting him into pajamas. Then the bed was set on fire, followed by the corpse. The feathers were a lastminute detail, intended apparently to give the killing a bizarre touch. Christie was left to say whatever he wanted, but he could not mention Lansky or his enforcers at all.

Of course, the Oakes case was never officially solved and Lansky had not been tied to it in any firm way by 1963, when, 20 years after the murder, Lansky got his gambling monopoly in the Bahamas. According to later investigation, the cost to Lansky to get the fix in was approximately $1 million—the same amount offered Sir Harry Oakes.

Charles Dion “Deanie” O'Banion

He was Al Capone’s toughest competitor in the latter’s struggle for power in Chicago, the gangster capital of the world. Even after he was assassinated in 1924 in a Capone–Johnny Torrio coup, O’Banion’s ghost continued to haunt Capone. O’Banion supporters, enraged by his murder, refused to give in and for the balance of the decade the carnage on Chicago streets reached unparalleled levels.

O’Banion had a kind of perverse charisma; he was as charming a psychopath as one could find. And he would do anything for a laugh. His sense of humor was legendary, although best appreciated by the criminal mind. Among his more innocent practical jokes was giving a friend Ex Lax and telling him it was sweet chocolate.

Really thigh-slapping fun was his shotgun challenge. He would surreptitiously fill both barrels of a shotgun with hard-packed clay and then bet some friend or acquaintance that he could not hit the side of a barn some 30 feet away. With the money down, O’Banion made a ritual out of loading both barrels and handing the shotgun to the sucker. He moved back out of the way of the inevitable recoil as the patsy pulled the trigger. The backfire would cause him to lose an arm or an eye or even three-fourths of his face. Dear Deanie would still be howling about it the following day.


Chicago chief of police Morgan Collins labeled O’Banion “Chicago’s archcriminal” and said he killed at least 25 men. Others said Collins was less than half right, that O’Banion had at least 60 murders to his credit as he cheerfully made his appointed murder rounds, always with a rosary in his pocket and a carnation in his buttonhole.

He also had three pistols tucked away in special pockets of his expensive madeto- order suits. For years O’Banion had been the darling of the Democrats for his skill at getting out the vote, until he switched to the Republicans at higher pay. The oftquoted joke of the time was: “Who’ll carry the Forty-second and Forty-third wards?” The answer was, “O’Banion, in his pistol pocket.”

O’Banion grew up in the Little Hell district on Chicago’s North Side. He lived a double life as an acolyte and choir boy at Holy Name Cathedral and as a street punk in a tenement jungle jammed with saloons and whorehouses. Thanks to his training in the church choir Deanie became a singing waiter in the tough dives on Clark and Erie. He brought tears to the customers’ eyes with sentimental Irish ballads, and when they were deep in their cups, he’d pick their pockets.

After-hours, O’Banion labored as a street mugger, becoming partners with a young Lou Greenberg, destined to become the multimillionaire owner of the Seneca Hotel on the city’s Gold Coast. One midnight, each without knowing the other was present, they had pounced on the same victim in an alley, and then over his prostrate body contemplated bashing the other for the loot. Instead, wisdom prevailed. They split the take and became partners. The arrangement continued for several months until in 1909 Deanie was imprisoned three months for robbery.

In 1911 he did another three months for carrying concealed weapons. Although he was arrested many times thereafter, it was the last prison time O’Banion did in his life. He quickly learned that Chicago was the city of the fix and always spent the money required to cool the ardor of policemen, prosecutors and judges.

He graduated from street mugging to a form of journalism as a slugger for Maxie Annenberg, Moe Annenberg’s brother. Maxie at the time was in charge of promoting sales of the Chicago Tribune, and O’Banion was used mainly to bop newsdealers to convince them that the Trib was not only the world’s greatest newspaper but for their purposes Chicago’s only newspaper.

Later on O’Banion transferred his loyalties to the newer Hearst papers in town. At the same time O’Banion learned the safecracking art under one of the racket’s foremost practitioners, Charlie “the Ox” Reiser. From Reiser he learned the theory that convictions were impossible without witnesses and dead witnesses made for terrible testimony. It didn’t always come to that. On one occasion an executive of Hearst’s American put up $5,000 bail to secure his release on a safecracking charge. There were newspapers to sell, after all.

By the time Prohibition came, and with it the enormous new opportunities for criminals, O’Banion was the leader of a mighty gang on the North Side. Among the senior members were Bugs Moran, Hymie Weiss, Schemer Drucci (the only Italian O’Banion ever trusted and vice versa), Dapper Dan McCarthy, Two-Gun Alterie and Frank Gusenberg.

The O’Banions, almost completely Irish in lowerlevel manpower, formed an alliance with many Jewish gangsters of the old 20th Ward, especially those working with Nails Morton, and the gangs more or less merged. When Morton was killed in a horseback riding accident, the grief-stricken O’Banions exacted the proper underworld revenge by executing the horse.

Charles Dion “Deanie” O'Banion funeral

O’Banion’s approach to Prohibition, even before it went into effect, was to stockpile supplies by hijacking booze from legitimate sources. He tried to continue the same method when the 18th Amendment became effective. “Let Johnny Torrio make the stuff,” he was quoted. “I’ll steal what I want of it.” However, even a consummate thief like O’Banion could not steal enough to meet the needs on the North Side, and he started taking over some of the area’s top breweries and distilleries.

This switch in tactics removed a major source of conflict between the Torrio-Capone mob and the North Siders, although Torrio and Capone were deeply upset that O’Banion would not let them operate whorehouses in the North Side, which would have added millions to their income. Deanie’s religious inclinations simply would not allow dealing in bodies—although he seemed totally untroubled about filling bodies with lead. Still, if they won O’Banion’s forbearance about hijacking, Torrio was more than content to let the Irish keep the North Side.

Torrio was more concerned with syndicating the booze and other rackets in the city so that the various elements could function without harassment from other gangs. Given the makeup of the various gangs, the concept in at least some cases bordered on the utopian. In the first place O’Banion couldn’t give up hijacking booze forever; the principles of stealing were too strongly ingrained in him.


Then too the Terrible Gennas could not be controlled. A murderous Sicilian family, they had organized moonshining in Little Italy into a veritable cottage industry, with the manufacturing of bathtub booze the chief source of income for many families. Since such rotgut was produced so cheaply, the Gennas could and did invade other areas and undersell other bootleg gangs.

O’Banion for one was not going to stand for that. Neither would Torrio. The O’Banions and the Gennas believed in direct action and warred on each other. Torrio, more cunning than either of them, solved his problems by secretly helping Gennas knock off O’Banions and O’Banions knock off Gennas.

Then O’Banion pulled a swindle that victimized Torrio and caused him to lose face in the underworld. He informed Torrio he was quitting the rackets and was heading West as soon as he could sell off an illegal brewery for a half-million dollars. Torrio jumped at this opportunity to be rid of the unpredictable O’Banion and eagerly put up the money.

Almost instantly after the deal was closed and Torrio took possession, federal agents swooped down and seized the brewery and charged Torrio with violation of the Prohibition law. Torrio discovered O’Banion had learned in advance of the upcoming raid and dumped off the property on Torrio. Even when Hymie Weiss, O’Banion’s loyal lieutenant, urged him to make amends to Torrio, the gang chief rejoiced contemptuously, “Oh, to hell with them Sicilians.”

Now all-out war was inevitable although Mike Merlo, a power in politics and the head of Unione Sicilana, the now bootlegger-corrupted fraternal organization, kept the peace for a time. Then in November Merlo died of natural causes and Torrio was free to act. O’Banion knew an attack was coming but figured his enemies would wait until Merlo was in the ground. He was wrong.

Deanie ran a florist shop on North State Street, directly opposite the church where he had once been a choir boy. The place was partly a dodge to provide him with a legitimate front, but it also satisfied his love for flowers. And O’Banion got a perverse joy out of making a small fortune from selling his blooms for the many gangland funerals.

He did a land-office business for the Merlo affair, some of his creations selling for thousands of dollars. On the evening of November 9, he got a special order by telephone for a custom wreath to be picked up the following morning. At the appointed time three men appeared. “Hello, boys,” O’Banion greeted them. “You from Mike Merlo’s?”

The man in the middle nodded and grabbed O’Banion in a firm handshake. It was an old trick but O’Banion, given the solemnity of the occasion, fell for it. He could not escape the handshake and reach the guns he had on him at the time. The other two men pulled out guns and started firing. O’Banion took a bullet in each cheek, two through the throat at the larynx, and two in the right breast.

They gave O’Banion one of the most flowerbedecked funerals Chicago had ever seen. Naturally the murder was never officially solved, although the killers were later identified as Albert Anselmi and John Scalise. The handshaker was Frankie Yale, a big-shot gangster imported from New York especially for the job by Torrio and Capone.

The death of Deanie did not end the war, as the remaining O’Banions sought savage revenge for their chief’s death. Weiss and Drucci who in turn succeeded to leadership met lead-filled ends, and Johnny Torrio as well was nearly assassinated.

Recovering from his near-fatal wounds, Torrio decided he’d had enough of Chicago and retired back to Brooklyn, taking $30 million with him in consolation. In the meantime Capone took charge and continued the war to win control of Chicago, masterminding the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre which wiped out all the top North Siders except for Bugs Moran.

The importance of the fight with the O’Banions was that it kept Capone off-balance for years. He too thought of organizing crime nationally, but, unable to do what had to be done in Chicago, he was forced to leave that promising field open for the New York mobs under Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky.