Dean Shakes Hands with Death.

"Yes," said the tall man, and extended his hand. Just at that instant Crutchfield went to the rear of the shop. As he passed the swing door -then opened-which separated the front and rear of the shop he glanced back. The tall man was still holding O'Banion's hand.

Then the fusillade-five shots-a hardly calculable pause-a sixth shot.

O'Banion lay sprawling amid the potted plants on the floor. Every bullet had found its mark-two in the right breast-a third through the larynx-a fourth just to the left of the larynx-a fifth in the right cheek-a sixth in the left cheek. The police deduced that the sixth and last shotthe one that come a fraction of a second after the first five-had been fired after O'Banion fell. "The left cheek," said they, "is badly powder burned, you see. It's likely one of the killers bent over the body after it had fallen and fired that shot at very close range to make the job sure. Those people take no chances."

Instantly the fusillade began, Crutchfield rushed to the front of the shop. He was in time to see the three men disappearing through the front door, and making for a dark colored, nickel trimmed Jewett car. A man at the wheel awaited them. He stepped on the accelerator. The engine, already running, spluttered into a roar, and the murderers of Dean O'Banion vanished into mystery and safety.

Two sign painters working outside a building next door said they had not even heard the shots-much less marked the scurry of the flight.

All the authentic details there are concerning the manner in which this murder-if you can call the extinction of vermin by vermin a murderwas committed have been given here because in its boldness, in its pitilessness, in its obvious aspect of reprisal, and in the cold sluggishness of prosecutors confronted with the scandal of such violence in a school and partly residence neighborhood, the killing of O'Banion was representative of scores of other murders which gangdom has committed between the years 1924 and 1929, and continues to commit.

Its sequences were also representative.

A dozen suspects were brought in for questioning-among them John Torrio, Alphonse Capone (alias Al Brown, alias Scarface Al), Hirschie,

Davy, Maxie, and Harry Miller, the Genna brothers, and Vincent Drucci.

What a clever reporter described as "the inevitable Italian wall of silence" promptly encompassed the case. Only one of the Italians who might have shed light on the identity of the killers became loquacious but his remarks, far from aiding the police to find a clue, were significant only as illustrating the ferocity of gangdom's methods and gangdom's willingness to take a chance with the law as administered in the fourth largest city in the world. This gabby gangster was Louis Alterie, friend and fellow criminal of O'Banion, and he said:

"I have no idea who killed O'Banion, but I would be willing to die smiling if I only had a chance to meet the guys who did, any time, any place they mention, and I would get at least two or three of them before they'd get me. I want to shoot it out with them at the corner of State and Madison streets."

In Gangdom Words Drip Blood.

This naming of a definite rendezVous with death was not more bravado. A later gang murder validated Alterie's choice of location within one block, for less than four years afterward Antonio Lombardo, a Sicilian liaison man for gangsters, was shot to death in daylight and amid a throng at the corner of Dearborn and Madison streets.

Days dribbled into weeks and still no progress was made in solving the O'Banion mystery. A month and two days after the murder Capt. Murphy, of East Chicago avenue station, was groaning to the reporters.

66

The police are balked in every way and the investigation is now about hopeless." That was said on Dec. 12, 1924. So, on that day, the coroner's jury adjourned into the new year, fixing Jan. 12, 1925, for the resumption of its deliberations. For all that it since has accomplished it might as well have adjourned to Jan. 12, 2025.

"They change their stories so!" was another plaint of the police, with whom all the suspects played pretty much as they listed.

In the matter of securing convictions in this case, as in all other cases of gang murders the police were puny performers, but as conversationalists they were stalwarts. There was talkand yards of it.

"You see," Chief of Detectives Michael Hughes said cozily four days after the crime, “as I figure it, at least 11 men know who killed O'Banion and why. If the reports to us are correct, there were eight cars parked around Dean's place in addition to the one carrying the three actual killers. Now, with so many in on a thing of that kind, it stands to reason somebody is going to drop something-intentionally or unintentionally-sooner or later. And when a little lead comes-if it ever does-we'll speedily clear this whole thing up."

E

VERY stage of the investigation

of the killing of Dean O'Banion on that November noon in 1924 was marked by indecencies which showed that there was in Chicago and the county of Cook-as there still isa power stronger than the law and dreaded by the officers of the law. The inquest at East Chicago avenue station was attended by the dead man's fellow gangsters who made no concealment of hip pockets that bulged with weapons and who uttered brassy threats against spectators who, in their opinion, might give damaging evidence.

The police gave Mayor Dever those facts, and the mayor said:

"The situation is becoming intolerable. It is time to decide which element in Chicago is going to control. There can be no question as to the outcome in favor of law and its strict enforcement."

Dever Sincere, but No Prophet.

In releasing that prophecy the mayor showed himself a tragic opti- | mist. For there was question as to the outcome and there still is. THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE of Jan. 8, 1929, contained an extensive news report on the uncovering of gang conditions in Chicago Heights so oppressive and brazen that for months they had made that suburb no less than a fief of crime. THE TRIBUNE of the next day contained a first page news report of the murder of a Sicilian politician and gangster by three gangsters who closed an argument with him in his home with eleven decisive bullets fired into their victim's head, neck and shoulders. [Gangsters, by the way, always fire high.] In the same issue were three more news articles on current machinations and crimes of Chicago's gangsters. IN THE TRIBUNE of the next day, Jan. 10, appeared three news reports of the developments of the pre

ceding 24 hours relative to [1] the latest illicit liquor operations, [2] the latest murder, and [3] the latest bombing by gangdom in Chicago.

The point is that none of those articles was in a crusading or a review strain. All were reports of current events.

A Mayor Who Would Not Wink.

But William Dever was sincere in his belief that the law could win against gangdom. He proved that by refusing to wink at any political deals between his administration and gangdom. His attitude probably cost him reëlection. He was heavily defeated by William Hale Thompson, whom this community knew to be unincumbered by any sterling convictions about anything. It was the firm belief of those who best knew gangdom's resources that Mr. Dever could have had a hundred thousand dollars of gangdom's money for his campaign chest in 1927, not by asking for itgangdom is not so crude as to make high officialdom come crawling to itbut by acquiescing in the gift. Acquiescence would have insured the protection which gangdom requires. It is also the firm belief of those who account themselves specially informed that the hundred thousand which nobody dared offer William Dever was not kept in complete idleness elsewhere.

Reviewing events of thirty anarchic hours, Mayor Devere said:

"On one day we have O'Banion, alleged 'king' of our underworld, shot down in daylight in his place of business as the result of a deliberate and minutely organized assassins' plot. And the next day we have the chief man Friday of the 'king,' this fellow Louis Alterie, openly boasting of the nimbleness of his trigger finger and the number of guns he's carrying, and dar

It came when he was told that in October, 1924, less than two weeks before Gangster O'Banion was slain, Commissioner of Public Works Col. A. A. Sprague, a Dever nonpartisan appointee; County Clerk Robert M. Sweitzer, Chief of Detectives Michael Hughes, and a half dozen police lieutenants had been respectability's prize attractions at a banquet in the Webster hotel, when O'Banion was presented with a diamond studded platinum watch by his fellow gangmen in crime and in politics.

The mayor ordered an investigation.

Hughes' explanation was that he had understood that the party was to be in honor of Jerry O'Connor, secretary of the Theater Janitors' union, that as soon as he entered the banquet hall and “recognized a number of notorious characters whom he had thrown into the detective bureau basement half a dozen times," he knew he had "been framed," and that he "withdrew almost at once."

Words! Words! Words!

Mr. Dever, with touching confidence in the go-getiveness of a police force of which commanding officers were so befuddled as to where respectability's Who's Who ended and criminality's Who's Who began, closed with this fulmination:

"The gangsters are to be disarmed and jailed or driven out of town. Every one of the city's six thousand policemen is to be thrown into the fight and public opinion is counted upon to spur municipal and state court judges into coöperation."

"Public opinion counted upon."

Hah! There was no public opinion. There was only a sodden public acquiescence supplemented by a legalistic inertia which, from the criminal's point of view, amounted to extraordinarily practical "coöperation" with him.

The crowning indecency of the O'Banion case was O'Banion's funeral.

The Late Lamented in Epitome.

To estimate the shrieking irony of those obsequies you must briefly consider what O'Banion had been. He had been a jackroller-which, next to pimp, is the most contemptible and cowardly kind of criminal a man can be-safecracker-in 1921 the police caught him in the act of cracking a safe in the Postal Telegraph building, Chicago, but a Chicago jury acquitted him-bootlegger, hi-jacker, illicit brewer, thief, and killer. When as a boy he was a member of the old Market street gang that laid terror upon the Orleans and West Chestnut street neighborhood it was said of him that he would "steal anything movable." He had a score of hiding places in and near Chicago. Whatever legitimate occupation he had followed-and he had been newsboy, waiter, truck driver, politician, florist, and yachtsman-he always supplemented those occupations with outlawry. If he failed to do that when he was acolyte to Father O'Brien

at the Holy Name cathedral it was solely because the good man was smarter than the child and could control him within the sacred precincts.

Travesty-Yet Important.

And yet this menace to humankind was laid away with a splendor which would have given distinction-of a sort to the obsequies of a citizen who had long and faithfully served his city. The funeral travesty makes an important page in the chronicles of gangdom because it did worse than make Chicago disgusting before the world. It made the city ridiculous.

Platoons of photographers, batteries of sob sisters, were assigned to the rites by a hectic press.

Ornate phrases which in other days were reserved for description of the world's farewell to heroes and statesmen were lavished upon this perform

ance.

The body was described as "lying in state" in the Sbarbaro undertaking rooms at 708 North Wells street. The bullet scarred body, from the cheeks of which the stains of powder burns had been obliterated, was, in fact, on view for three days after the killing.

Details of the exhibition were layishly imparted to an interested public,

"Tufted Cushion Extra."

The "casket," a word which is popular journalese for the useful receptable called in simpler times a coffin, was