George “Bugs” Moran

By the late 1920s, Al Capone was the rising star of organized crime in Chicago. Left in his way were only a few potent foes, chief of whom were the Aiello family of mafiosi and the depleted ranks of Dion O’Banion’s North Side Gang. The latter was bossed by George “Bugs” Moran. Although he gained his nickname from his often bizarre and flaky behavior, Bugs was known, especially to Capone, as a brutal and efficient killer.

Bugs Moran ascended in the O’Banion Gang largely due to Capone’s machinations. In 1924, Capone had engineered O’Banion’s murder, and in 1926, he got the successor, Hymie Weiss. The leadership of the North Siders next fell to Schemer Drucci who was killed by a policeman in 1927. That elevated Moran to the top spot.

Capone realized with Moran in charge, the shooting war with the O’Banion gang would escalate. That was the Bugs’s way. Through the years it would have been impossible to dredge up an O’Banion mob shooting caper in which Moran was not involved. He was said to be the first to put a bullet in the head of a riding academy horse the O’Banions snatched and “executed” after it had thrown and kicked to death their celebrated compatriot Nails Morton.


He was the gunman who charged across the street to finish off Johnny Torrio after he had been hit four times by shots fired at his limousine (Moran’s gun misfired and Torrio lived.) Moran was also in the lead car in the famous machine-gun motorcade that sprayed Capone’s Hawthorne Inn with over 1,000 slugs.

Moran’s hatred for Capone bordered on the pathological; he often referred to him, in or out of his presence, as “the Beast” or “the Behemoth.” To vex him, Moran would frequently make peace with Capone and then break the agreement within a matter of hours.

Bugs considered Capone a lowly human, especially since he’d deal in prostitution. A regular churchgoer, Moran, like his predecessors, refused to let whorehouses operate in the gang’s North Side territory. Capone kept trying to set up shops, sending offers to split the profits evenly with Moran. Irate, Bugs once thundered, “We don’t deal in flesh. We think anyone who does is lower than a snake’s belly. Can’t Capone get that through his thick skull?”

Moran, born of Irish and Polish immigrant parents in Minnesota in 1893, grew up in the predominantly Irish North Side of Chicago. He grew up with street gangs, committing 26 known robberies and serving three incarcerations before he was 21. He was soon running with Dion O’Banion, who loved him like a brother.

A natural pair, both possessed the same sort of homicidal “wit.” Once Moran ran into Judge John H. Lyle, one of the city’s few honest and courageous jurists of the era, at a baseball game and said, “Judge, that’s a beautiful diamond ring you’re wearing. If it’s snatched some night, promise me you won’t go hunting me. I’m telling you now I’m innocent.”

Moran’s sense of humor made him rather a darling of newspapermen. Portrayed as something of a jolly good murderer, he was made out to be a likeable fellow. This good press probably put more Chicagoans on Moran’s side with hopes that he would win the war of survival with Big Al.

But the war ended in a draw. The closest Capone got to getting Moran was in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. The Capones suckered Moran into believing he was about to buy a load of hijacked booze from some Detroit racketeers and Bugs arranged to have the loot delivered to the gang’s headquarters, a garage, on the morning of February 14. Moran was late for the appointment, having overslept. Accompanied by two aides, Bugs rushed to the garage just in time to spot three men dressed as policemen and two others in plainclothes enter the garage.

Believing it to be a police shakedown, Moran decided to wait until they left. Minutes later, machine-gun fire was heard from inside the garage, leaving six Moran men and an innocent bystander dead. Moran took off. He announced, “Only Capone kills like that,” and promised vengeance. In order to get Capone, Moran allied himself with the Aiellos and some disgruntled Jewish mobsters under Jack Zuta in a plot to get some of Capone’s men to defect and kill Big Al. All their plots failed, and both Joe Aiello and Zuta died from Capone bullets.

Throughout the 1930s, Moran’s power waned even though Capone himself had gone to prison on income tax charges. In 1936 Moran may have enjoyed a measure of retaliation when Machine Gun Jack McGurn, a Capone enforcer generally held to have been one of the planners or perpetrators of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, was murdered. The press speculated that Bugs Moran had finally got his revenge; but McGurn, at that time on the outs with the mob, was more than likely killed by Capone adherents.

After that it was all downhill for Moran. His crimes turned petty compared to what they had been in the bad old days. Eventually he moved to Ohio and in July 1946 he was seized by the FBI along with two others for robbing a bank messenger of $10,000. During Prohibition Moran would have tossed around such a sum as if it were confetti. Moran got 10 years for the crime; when he was released he was rearrested for an earlier bank robbery and sent to Leavenworth for another 10-year stretch. He died there of cancer in 1957.

All his underworld chums—O’Banion, Weiss, Drucci—had lavish gangster burials. Bugs Moran outlived them all but his funeral was a quick burial in a wooden casket in a potter’s field outside the prison’s walls.

Morelli Gang

In 1927 two anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were executed for a 1920 Massachusetts robbery in which two victims were killed. The Sacco-Vanzetti case remains to this day a cause célèbre, with many feeling they were innocent of the charge and had been convicted in an era of superpatriotism and hysteria about foreign radicals.

Within mob circles there was never any doubt as to the pair’s innocence, a fact confirmed in the 1970s by underworld informer Vinnie Teresa (whose testimony has probably been of greater value to authorities than that of another renowned informer, Joe Valachi).

According to Teresa, the $15,776.51 payroll robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company of South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920, was the work of the notorious Morelli gang. The Morellis were five brothers who moved to the New England area from Brooklyn during World War I. Two of them, Frank “Butsey” Morelli and Joseph Morelli, were the leaders of a terrorist mob that ran roughshod over several states, pulling all sorts of robberies and burglaries.

Much speculation by civil libertarians has tied the Morellis to the robbery for which Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted. Newspapers from time to time revived the case, and mentions were often made of Joseph, who died in 1950, and Butsey, who in the 1950s went so far as to sue the Boston Globe for printing a story linking him to the crime.

Butsey was at the time dying of cancer and his motive in this, says Teresa in his book My Life in the Mafia, had nothing to do with trying to clear his name—he was generally identified as the first Mafia boss of Rhode Island—but rather to shield his adopted son from the unwanted publicity. Butsey insisted to the boy he had nothing to do with the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Teresa said he asked Butsey, “What the hell are you suing them for? You can’t beat a newspaper.”

Butsey replied, “What they said was true, but it’s going to hurt my kid. I don’t give a damn about myself. I’m ready to die anyway. But look what it’s doing to my boy. He’s a legitimate kid. He never knew what was going on before.”

As to the murders, Butsey told Teresa: “We whacked them out, we killed those guys in the robbery. These two greaseballs took it on the chin. . . . That shows you how much justice there really is.”

The fact that Teresa’s testimony has been considered reliable enough to lead to the indictment or conviction of more than 50 mob figures certainly lends his disclosure about Sacco and Vanzetti a considerable measure of credibility.

Nicholas Morello

Great men are creations of their times. When Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky formed the national crime syndicate in the early 1930s, they succeeded because the underworld could at that time be logically organized. But Luciano was not the first to dream of a national crime syndicate.

Nicholas Morello, of the notorious Morello family, rose far above his relations to realize that the Americanization of the gangs would have to give birth to a great criminal network, each of its components at peace with the others and in concert controlling all the rackets in the country.

Morello probably saw less need to cooperate with other ethnics than Luciano would later, mainly because during World War I the great ethnic Irish and Jewish criminal gangs were disintegrating. This was even true to some extent of the Italian gangs, but the mafiosi and Camorristas maintained their cohesion. (With the later advent of Prohibition the Irish and Jewish mobs would reorganize.)


In fact, Morello should have had an easier time organizing crime in America than Luciano and Lansky would later, but he found himself too mired down by old-country conflicts. While Morello’s Sicilian gangs controlled the rackets of East Harlem and Greenwich Village in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Camorristas, immigrant criminals from the Camorra gangs of Naples, extended their power in Brooklyn, collecting protection money from Italian storekeepers, coal and ice dealers and other businessmen, as well as operating rackets on the Brooklyn docks.

The Camorristas were under the leadership of Don Pelligrino Morano, a man who had his own dreams of expansion—all aimed solely at eliminating the Manhattan mafiosi. When Morano ordered his men to move in on the East Harlem rackets, money considerations were probably secondary. He really looked to demean his Old World rivals.

The more forward-looking Morello thought it foolish to continue such old battles and offered to make a peaceful settlement. Morano took such a move as a sign of weakness and spurned the offer. By 1916 the warfare was so intense that only the most hardy mafioso or Camorrista dared cross the East River into the other’s domain. They usually returned home in a hearse.

Then, surprisingly, that same year Morano announced he was in favor of Morello’s call for an armistice. He invited Morello to come to Brooklyn to discuss terms, of course guaranteeing him safe conduct.

Morello proved wisely cautious and for six months did no more than dicker about holding such a peace meeting, though he realized he would have to go if he hoped to advance his master plan. The meeting was arranged in a café on Navy Street, and Morello showed up accompanied only by his personal bodyguard. Morano was deeply disappointed. He had hoped Morello would bring his top lieutenants with him. Still, Morello was the main prize, and as soon as the mafioso and his bodyguard stepped from their car, a five-man execution squad opened up on them, killing them in broad daylight.

Morano was greatly surprised when he was arrested for murder. He had been under the assumption that the payoffs he had made to a New York police detective, Michael Mealli, had “cleared the operation with the cops.” Some of the killers cooperated with the law for lighter sentences and Morano and his top aides were sent to prison for life. When the sentence was pronounced, the Brooklyn Eagle reported: “Morano was surrounded by a dozen Italians who showered kisses on his face and forehead. On the way to the jail other Italians braved the guard and kissed Morano’s hands, cheeks and forehead.”

With Morello dead and Morano imprisoned, what the newspapers called the first Mafia War came to an end. So too did the dreams of Nick Morello for a “great combination” of the gangs. At the time Salvatore Luciana was only a teenage thug, but already he appreciated what Morello had tried to do. When he grew older he would Americanize his name to Charles “Lucky” Luciano and he would Americanize the Mafia as well.

Peter “the Clutching Hand,” Morello

One of the most important members of the notorious Morello family, Peter “the Clutching Hand,” Morello was a devious killer whose tactics terrified his enemies. During the 1920s he was the bodyguard- adviser to Joe the Boss Masseria, regarded at the time as the most important mafioso in New York. Joseph Bonnano (Joe Bananas), shortly thereafter a boss of one of New York’s five crime families, made it clear why Morello was also called “the old fox”— he did Masseria’s thinking for him.

The Clutching Hand was cut down in August 1930 during the Castellammarese War. By whom is a matter of some dispute. Informer Joe Valachi insisted the job was done by Buster of Chicago, a mysterious hit man imported by Salvatore Maranzano, the leader of the anti-Masseria forces. This, like much of Valachi’s testimony, has been viewed with considerable doubt by Mafia watchers. Morello was cut down in his East Harlem business office, and it is doubtful that a stranger like Buster could have gotten to him, especially since at the moment he was handling a huge amount of cash, receipts from his loansharking racket.

Far more believable is Lucky Luciano’s version. The ambitious Luciano, like Morello, was allied with Joe the Boss, but he had decided by then that the time was ripe to get rid of Masseria. That being the case it was decided that Morello had to die first. As long as Morello lived, Masseria was considered impregnable, and even if the Boss were killed, Morello would undoubtedly go underground to carry on a fierce war with Luciano.

Luciano assigned Albert Anastasia and Frank Scalise to the job and they were able to penetrate Morello’s headquarters. They found Morello with a collector in his operation, Giuseppe Pariano, and, as Luciano put it, “he hadda get it too.” As a bonus, Anastasia and Scalise appropriated the $30,000 in cash lying on Morello’s desk.

Morello family

Founding Boss Giuseppe Morello

The first Mafia family firmly established in this country was literally a family of criminals. The Morellos settled in New York in the latter part of the 19th century, after emigrating over the years from the Sicilian town of Corleone, a community credited with supplying more Mafia members to America than any other place on the island.

The American head of the huge clan of brothers, half-brothers and brothers-in-law was Antonio Morello, a brutal and cunning criminal credited with personally committing between 30 and 40 murders in the 1890s. His two younger brothers, Joe and Nick, succeeded him to leadership.

Joe was noted as even more vicious, and with his brother-in-law, the notorious Lupo the Wolf, operated the so-called Murder Stable in East Harlem where enemies or victims of the gang were taken and either convinced to give in or tortured and killed. The screams in the night from the Murder Stable were an awesome yet frequent sound in East Harlem.


But Joe lacked the vision to be a great crime leader and he was soon superseded by his brother Nicholas. Not illogically, Nick Morello was described later as an early version of Lucky Luciano in that he also dreamed about forming a great criminal syndicate to run all major rackets in the country. However, he was assassinated by Brooklyn Camorristas in 1916, and the superstructure that was to become national organized crime remained unbuilt for another decade and a half.

Nick was the last Morello to achieve leadership of the clan, which later passed on to Ciro Terranova, who maintained, despite personal weakness, a measure of authority in the Mafia until the 1930s. Peter “the Clutching Hand” Morello rose to near top power as the number one adviser to Joe the Boss Masseria, but he was killed during the Castellammarese War in 1930. His demise, since he was clearly the brains of the Masseria loyalists, assured the doom of Joe the Boss.

This hardly spelled the end of the Morellos in organized crime. Today a great many Morello descendants remain entrenched in various New York–New Jersey Mafia rackets.

Willie Moretti

In his day, Willie Moretti was a tough enforcer and syndicate boss, a power in New Jersey rackets to whom extortion, dope pushing and murder were part of the normal way of doing business. By the time he died in what the mob regarded as a “mercy killing,” he was a clown, the comic relief at the Kefauver hearings, and a real threat to the mob with his loose lip. That was to prove to be the end of tough Willie Moore, as he was sometimes known.

A boyhood friend of Frank Costello, Moretti was in his younger days as rough and ready as any gangster. In New Jersey, he bossed an enforcer troop of about 60 gunmen, who protected his longtime partner, Longy Zwillman, and his own racket interests. The racket interests were extensive, often intermingled with the New York interests of Lucky Luciano, Frank Costello, Joe Adonis and others.

New York Times crime reporter Meyer Berger once observed, “the Morettis had their bookmaking agents among workers in the major factories in Bergen, they shared the bookmaking profits pouring into the New York mob’s astonishingly widespread New Jersey wire system, and they were partners in plush casinos and so-called ‘sawdust,’ or dice barns deep into Pennsylvania.”


Their top casino in Bergen was the Marine Room in the famed Riviera nightclub, located just north of the George Washington Bridge on the Palisades. The Riviera was a nightclub with top entertainers. The floor show was open to the public; getting into the gambling room was another matter. All the players had to be known or they had to stay in the dining rooms and watch the show.

Moretti was known within the underworld as singer Frank Sinatra’s original godfather. They had become fast friends when the singer from Hoboken was performing for peanuts in local roadhouses and clubs. In 1939, Sinatra, while singing with Harry James’s orchestra, made his first hit recording, “All or Nothing at All.”

Band leader Tommy Dorsey signed him for what Sinatra must have regarded as a princely sum, $125 a week. Sinatra’s popularity was soaring thanks to the bobbysoxers who followed him everywhere. But he was locked in by his contract to Tommy Dorsey. The much-repeated underworld tale of what happened is this: One night Willie Moretti showed up at Dorsey’s dressing room and stuck a gun into the band leader’s mouth. Moretti then suggested that Dorsey might sell Sinatra’s contract. The price agreed on was one dollar.

A few years after that Moretti started acting funny at times, showing the first signs of mental illness brought on by the ravages of untreated syphilis. Moretti loved to gamble and claimed to be winning bets on horses for millions of dollars. He tried to place bets on horses and races that didn’t exist. He even started at times to talk about syndicate affairs, matters that were not to be mentioned in public. Eventually quite a few capos loyal to Costello began saying Willie was a threat to everyone.

Murder of Willie Moretti

Costello had been best man at Willie’s wedding and held him in high affection. Costello decided the best thing to do with Moretti was to get him out of the line of fire, sending him for a long vacation out West with a male nurse. Moretti frequently telephoned Costello, in conversations wiretapped by the police, begging to be allowed to come back. Costello refused and went on protecting Willie from himself. Only when Moretti became less voluble was he allowed to return.

When Moretti was called before the Kefauver committee, many mobsters wanted him knocked off, even though he had been behaving better. Costello again prevented it, and after much stalling Moretti finally appeared before the Senate committee. He proceeded to talk and talk and talk, though he said very little.

No, he explained, he was not a member of the Mafia because he didn’t have a membership card. And he offered such pearls of wisdom as “They call anybody a mob who makes six percent more on money”; and concerning gangsters he knew: “wellcharactered people don’t need introductions.” When Moretti left the stand, the committee members seemed satisfied. Senator Estes Kefauver thanked him for his forthrightness, and Senator Charles Tobey found his frankness “rather refreshing.”

“Thank you very much,” Willie replied to the praise. “Don’t forget my house in Deal if you are down on the shore. You are invited.”

The mob was quite pleased with how Moretti had handled himself on the witness stand, but Willie started to deteriorate in late 1951. He talked regularly to New Jersey newspapermen and made noise about holding a press conference to review gambling in New Jersey. Vito Genovese, a Costello enemy, began strong lobbying for Moretti’s execution.

Genovese knew that if he could get rid of Moretti he could move his own men into Willie’s operations and further erode the power of Costello. Moretti, Genovese said, was losing his mind, and the entire organization could be in trouble. “If tomorrow I go wrong, I want you to hit me in the head too,” Genovese said. Finally even such a staunch ally as Albert Anastasia was convinced that a “mercy killing” was necessary for the sake of both Willie and the syndicate.

On October 4, 1951, Willie sat down in a New Jersey restaurant with three or four men (the testimony varies on this). When the waitress stepped into the kitchen, they were chatting amiably in Italian. Suddenly there were several gunshots and when the waitress peered through the kitchen door, all the customers except one were gone.

Fifty-seven-year-old Willie Moretti lay dead on the floor, his left hand on his chest. It was a typical mob rubout, and there would be no convictions. Willie had been shot up front, supposedly a mark of “respect” accorded to bosses. They had a right to see what was happening.

In this case it could well have been a sign of respect since, after all, everybody genuinely liked Willie. They just happened to like him better dead.

Cesare Mori

Probably no individual was more responsible for the mass exodus of mafiosi from Sicily to the United States than Cesare Mori, one of Benito Mussolini’s most devoted agents of suppression. Mussolini had used Mori earlier to wipe out socialist unrest during his political campaign in Bologna, and Mori was one of the chief architects of Mussolini’s 1922 march on Rome when he seized complete power.

As a reward for fascist labors, Mussolini appointed Mori prefect of Palermo, the most powerful position on the island. Mori’s principal task in Sicily was to unseat the lazy and corrupt administrators and replace them with ardent Fascists. Since the administrators in most of the towns were allied with the Mafia, the “Honored Society” fell into conflict with the Fascists.

The Mafia used the same tactics of terrorism in fighting the government that it used against its many victims. Many of Mori’s new appointees were assassinated as soon as they took office. The Mafia even carried its vengeance into downtown Palermo, murdering leading Fascists in the streets before hundreds of witnesses.


In 1924 Mussolini himself visited Sicily and was embarrassed by the Mafia in Piana dei Greci, where the mayor, Don Ciccio Cuccia, who was also the Mafia boss of the area, bawled Mussolini out for coming with so many police motorcyclists to guard him. He said, “Your Excellency has nothing to fear when you are by my side.” Then he turned to his men and announced, “Let no one dare touch a hair of Mussolini’s head. He is my friend and the best man in the world!”

Inwardly, Mussolini seethed, understanding full well Don Ciccio’s message that he, not the leader from Rome, was the true power. Don Ciccio made the point all the more clear when Mussolini was slated to make an address from a balcony to the local populace. The only audience the Mafia leader permitted to show up, one account states, was “twenty village idiots, one-legged beggars, bootblacks and lottery-ticket sellers.”

The enraged Mussolini afterward ordered Mori to wage all-out war against the Mafia. Two months later Cuccia vanished into a Fascist prison, and the drive to stamp out the Mafia went into high gear. Mori’s methods were, if anything, more ruthless and barbarous than those used against the socialists. Rights of those arrested were wantonly abused. Confessions were extracted by torture.

One of the most common methods involved stretching a suspect on his back over a wooden box with his hands and feet wired to the sides of the box. The victim was then drenched with brine and whipped. The brine made the lashes more painful but left no marks. Other tortures involved administering electric shock to the genitals, one of the earliest known uses of this brutal method, and forcing prisoners to swallow saltwater through a funnel until their stomachs swelled painfully.

Fascist judges paid no attention to such minor details and convicted accused mafiosi by the hundreds. An estimated 600 innocent persons were also convicted through such tortures and the lying testimony of jealous neighbors or Fascist Party members.

In some cases members of separate Mafia gangs were convicted of the same crimes in different courts, and others were convicted of crimes that had never occurred. From the American point of view, the worst aspect of Mori’s campaign was that it caused at least 500 young mafiosi to seek refuge in the United States.

Mori terrorized the citizenry in the Mafia-infested Western provinces and paraded about as a conquering Roman of old. It was common for towns he visited to decorate triumphal arches with the welcoming words, “Ave Caesar.”

Mori’s campaign ended in 1929 following the conviction of Don Vito Cascio Ferro, the most charismatic of all the Mafia leaders, on a framed-up charge of smuggling. Don Vito, who died in prison in 1932, denounced his judges in court, saying, “Gentlemen, since you have been unable to find any evidence for the numerous crimes I did commit, you are reduced to condemning me for the only one I have not.” In any event, by the time of Ferro’s death, Mori had crushed most Mafia organizations. Those that survived pledged fealty to Mussolini, a position they maintained until the Allied invasion of Sicily during World War II.

Whatever is thought of Mori’s methods, there was little doubt that he offered the world the most authentic description of the Mafia, one that applies still today both in Italy and in the United States— even if it conflicts with the versions offered by American governmental agencies and such controversial informers as Joe Valachi.

In a book he later wrote, The Last Struggle with the Mafia, Mori noted it was not an “association in the sense of being a vast aggregate organized and incorporated on regular principles.” The Mafia, he observed, functions with statutes, rules of admission, and election of chiefs. The chief attained power simply by imposing his will on others. Members were accepted automatically if they had the proper qualifications and were automatically expelled or permanently eliminated when they no longer met these qualifications.

Profits were not divided by any set measure but went proportionally to the strongest. Only in a few cases, Mori said, were there any Mafia groups that held regular meetings, had secret laws and used concealed marks of recognition, but they were clearly the exception to the rule. Most important, Mori found the Mafia to be a “potential state which normally takes concrete form in a system of local oligarchies, closely interwoven, but each autonomous in its own district.”

This description is true of organized crime in the United States today. A crime family in New York would not dream of going into Detroit to kill an individual without clearing it first with the local powers and indeed would most likely request the local organization to take care of the matter for them. It would then be up to the local organization to comply if it so wished.

If however it preferred to grant the proposed victim sanctuary, there is little the outside crime family can do. The organization of such crime fiefdoms clearly is not based on tradition, but rather on raw power. It is this tradition of Mafia power and regional autonomy that keeps organized crime in America somewhat disorganized.

The disorganized nature of the Mafia kept Mori from achieving total victory and left him with many adversaries in Sicily. Mori died in 1942, probably a pity from the mafioso point of view since Mafia vengeance on him under protection of the Allies would certainly have been as brutal as the justice accorded Mussolini by the partisans.

Samuel J. “Nails” Morton

Within the madcap underworld of 1920s Chicago, Nails (so called because he was as tough as nails) Morton was always believed to have died because of treachery, and a treachery most despicable because it was carried out by a dumb animal.

Nails was a top enforcer for the Dion O’Banion Gang, virtually the only Jew among the North Side Irish mobsters. As much as any single gunner, Morton was responsible for holding the Italian gangsters under Torrio and Capone—as well as the Genna brothers and others—at bay on the North Side from 1920 to 1924.

Morton, known by the police to have committed several murders, enjoyed respect bordering on terror from other mobsters mainly because he had won the Croix de Guerre in France in the Great War and been promoted on the battlefield to a first lieutenancy. That, and the fact that he concocted very inventive death traps for foes, made rival gangsters avoid confrontations with him. Often he would try to lure an enemy into combat by accusing him of making anti-Semitic slurs.

However, as celebrated as Morton could be for his killing ways, he was to become most noteworthy for the way he died and the gangland vengeance that followed.


Nails, who developed a yen to circulate in finer circles, took to horseback riding in Lincoln Park “where the society swells ride.” One day in 1924, a riding stable horse threw Nails and kicked him to death. It was an act that could not be overlooked or forgiven. Four leading O’Banions—Bugs Moran, Little Hymie Weiss, Two Gun Alterie and Schemer Drucci—descended on the riding stable and at gunpoint kidnapped the offending horse.

The creature was led to the spot where it had dispatched Morton, and there, after the very angry Alterie punched the horse in the snout, was shot in the head, once by each gangster, in worthy underworld fashion. Gang boss O’Banion bewailed the fact he had not been around when Nails was killed and vengeance exacted; such moronic behavior fit O’Banion as well as his men.

Yet despite his unsavory record, Nails was accorded an elaborate funeral with considerable military, fraternal and religious honors. City, county, state and federal officials were prominent in attendance, and the Chicago Daily News reported: “Five thousand Jews paid tribute to Morton as the man who had made the West Side safe for his race. As a young man he had organized a defense society to drive ‘Jew-baiters’ from the West side.”

A year after Morton’s death ill-fated plans were laid for a memorial tribute to him. The printed announcement of the service bore the names of Rabbi Felix A. Levi, General Abel Davis, Captain Ed Maher and the Reverend John L. O’Donnell. The principal address was to be made by a leading attorney, Frank Comerford.

Perhaps what sent matters awry was the added announcement that also participating in the tribute would be Johnny Torrio, Terry Druggan and Hymie Weiss (the new leader of the North Siders, Dion O’Banion having by then been assassinated). General Davis backed out of the arrangements, saying it would be an error to flaunt such gangsters and Morton’s record “in the faces of decent citizens.” The whole affair then fell apart. It was, said one writer, “another kick in the head for poor Nails.”

Motorcade murders

During the inception of organized crime in the 1920s, the motorcade system of killing came into vogue. Whether Hymie Weiss or Bugs Moran—both subsequent leaders of the Irish O’Banion Gang, the prime opposition in Chicago to the Torrio-Capone forces—invented the system is unclear.

Bugs Moran, a cunning if rather pathological killer, was always attracted to spectacular killings and probably deserves the credit. Certainly he headed up more such murder convoys than any other gangster.

Moran and a dozen gangsters, each armed with a fully loaded tommy gun and riding in a half-dozen limousines, swept past the victim’s home, place of business or hangout. As the motorcade slowed, each gunner spattered a thousand or so .45-caliber cartridges in the general direction of the target. Such overkill was generally effective, even if a few innocent bystanders occasionally got caught in the deadly hail of bullets. That was merely an unfortunate sidebar to otherwise spectacular success.


The most publicized murder motorcade of all was one that failed, an attempt to rub out Al Capone at the Hawthorne Inn in Cicero, Illinois, in 1926. A two-story brick structure, the inn had been converted to Capone’s specification into a fortress. Bulletproof steel shutters protected every window, while armed guards were stationed at every entrance. The second floor was reserved for Capone’s private use.

The building, dubbed Capone’s castle, almost became Capone’s deathtrap. On September 20, Capone and bodyguard Frankie Rio were dining in the rear of the Hawthorne’s restaurant when a single car drove past and opened fire with a machine gun. When the shooting stopped, the pair, with the other diners, rushed to the windows and doors to see what had happened. There were no bullet marks. The gunners had been firing blanks.

Frankie Rio understood instantly and knocked Capone to the floor, falling on top of him. Just then a convoy of 10 cars passed slowly in front of the inn, and a seemingly endless number of guns protruding from every one of the curbside windows let loose a deadly hail of fire.

Directly above Rio and Capone, woodwork, mirrors, glassware and crockery splintered. A Capone gunman, Louis Barko, who had rushed into the restaurant when the blank shots were fired, went down with a bullet through his shoulder.

In all 1,000 bullets were fired, and the inn, restaurant, lobby and offices were literally ripped asunder. Thirty-five cars parked at the curb were riddled with bullet holes. Remarkably, no one was killed, although Mrs. Clyde Freeman, sitting in a car with her infant son on her lap, was struck by a bullet that creased her forehead and injured her eyes. Capone footed $5,000 in medical bills to save the woman’s eyesight.