could finger an automatic so skillfully," sighed a sob sister of sozzly journalism, and her sigh was printed.

She also had appreciative words for the living and, taking a fresh start from "over it all the perfume of flowers," she swept into this incomparable bathos:

"But vying with that perfume was the fragrance of perfumed women, wrapped in furs from ears to ankles, who tiptoed down the aisle, escorted by soft stepping, tailored gentlemen [you catch that "gentlemen "]"with black, shining pompadours.

"And, softly treading, deftly changing places, were more well formed gentlemen in tailored garments, with square, blue steel jaws and shifting glances. They were the sentinels.

"In the soft light of the candles at the head of the $10,000 casket sat Mrs. O'Banion, a picture of patient sorrow."

And the flowers!

When gangsters disagree the murderers say it with bullets and the mourners say it with flowers. Two days before the funeral of a gangster who ranked as a big shot" the surviving big shots of his gang, or of gangs that had operated with his gang, will come to their favorite florist and throw down from five thousand to ten thousand dollars for flowers.

Hence the O'Banion rites were extraordinarily floral. One feature piece was a heart composed of American beauty roses and standing eight feet high. There was a huge wreath from the Teamsters' union. A basket of roses have the card of "Scarface" Capone. There was a blanket of roses, orchids, and lilies measuring seven by ten feet. It was sent to cover the grave in Mount Carmel cemetery, where O'Banion had bought a lot in which he had buried a fellow gangster, John Sheey, who was killed in a brawl at the Rendezvous cafe almost a year before O'Banion was killed. There were other flowers by the truckload including two broken columns, and an arch from which swung two white doves, emblems of peace. In all there were twenty-six truckloads.

Extracting the Sting of Death.

The press had done a good job of sozzle during the three days of "lying in state."

For the actual funeral they released everything. The high flown terminology which must convince susceptible youth that gang life is the life aud

gang death rather a stingless dissolution was employed with glib shamelessness.

"The élite of the gun world," began one account in a reputable newspaper, "gave O'Banion a magnificent funeral, a testimonial of the leadership he had attained in the realm where gunplay makes millionaires." It was recorded that Louis Alterie and Earl [Hymie] Weiss, surviving gangsters, had "cried as women might" and that "many other had handkerchiefs to their eyes."

Whatever spectacular features "the élite of gangdom" failed to provide were supplied by a gawking community whose antics also were recorded.

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"The sidewalks were jammed with people for blocks to the north and to the south of the Sbarbaro chapel."— Hundreds of middle aged women passed by the $10,000 casket "—" -"Buildings across the street had hundreds of men on the roofs."- "Mounted policemen had to precede street cars to enable them to pass."-"For more than two hours the throngs had pressed forward."-" Five hundred automobiles were at the cemetery awaiting the coming of the cortége . . . and every electric line car that came there was packed."-" Five thousand people were there before the body left Chicago.

The Practicalities of Gangdom.

Here are two arresting proofs of the foresightedness of gangdom:

The gang officiating at the funeral gave orders that no photographs should be taken. Cameras were snatched from newspaper photographers, plates were smashed, and blows were struck. There was sound reason for this violence. The criminals were taking no risks of identification for deeds committed or in contemplation.

The second precaution was equally practical:

Just before the meager musical service at the undertaker's establishment detectives from the Chicago police department moved unobstrusively among the bereaved and warned them against any careless display or impetuous use of weapons during the last rites. The grieving gangsters took the hint and partially disarmed for the period of time required for the ride from Wells street to the Roman Catholic campo santo, Mount Carmel, which lies beyond the city limits and, consequently, outside Chicago police control.

Willing hands, however, carried some of their weapons to the cemetery ahead

of the funeral procession, so that Alterie and other gangsters who had Vowed vengence against O'Banion's slayers might not be unprepared if homicidal emergencies developed during the trip back to town. "Many persons," says one account of the day's performances, "noticed the revolvers being passed to their owners by the advance gunbearers of those who came with the corpse."

Therefore order reigned in Wells street, "only one man," the veracious chronicler, James Doherty, wrote, "being disorderly enough to be arrested."

Cardinal Puts Foot Down.

Only the Roman Catholic archdiocese remained chill to the former acolyte. The gangsters had counted on a requiem high mass for their hero in Holy Name cathedral. The cardinal archbishop put his foot down-and it is an emphatic foot-on that, and the chancellery refused sanction for the burial of O'Banion in consecrated ground. This refusal was not, of course, based on the grounds that "Chicago's arch criminal" was either a suicide or a convicted murderer who had remained impenitent, but on the grounds, as an ecclesiastic put it, that "a person who refuses the ministrations of the church in life need not expect to receive the ministrations of the church in death."

The real grounds were that the cardinal archbishop knew that certain ecclesiastics had been far too good natured in performing rites which, among ignorant people, respectablized disreputable characters. Such tolerance, he believed, was scandalous.

So there was no resplendent requiem at the cathedral to which Schofield and O'Banion's shop was neighbor, and no regular service of committal at the grave.

But the Rev. Father Patrick Malloy, then of St. Thomas of Canterbury church, was on the scene, both in Wells street and at the grave. Not, however, as was pointed out later by the mildly shocked, as an ecclesiastic, but as a friend, a distinction not likely to have convinced the rigid cardinal archbishop. As a friend, therefore, Father Malloy escorted O'Banion's widow and his father from the coffin to the autos bound for Mount Carmel, and at the grave he recited a litany in Latin, the Hail Mary thrice, and the Lord's Prayer. But he did not sprinkle the coffin with the holy water, nor did he wear the surplice or the stole.

Muldoon began and Archbishop Quigley completed, and in which rest the bodies of Bishop Porter, Archbishop Feehan, and Archbishop Quigley.

On the O'Banion lot was erected a monument inscribed with the words "My Sweetheart." When the cardinal archbishop heard of that he was as nearly furious as the good man ever allows himself to become, and he ordered the monument removed. That was done. A granite shaft, unadorned with words of endearment, now marks the spot.

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Unhappily," said Dr. Sheil, auxiliary bishop of Chicago, when we were talking over these matters a few days before these words were written, "it is true that O'Banion is buried about 80 feet from those venerated men." The bishop's feeling seemed to be that, as between hunting a fallible mortal out of his grave or not doing that, he would prefer to leave the ultimate adjustments to heaven. He was far from reconciled to scandal, but he was humane.

The funeral, which was the first of gangdom's highly spectacular antics in the requiescat-in-pace line, had a terriffic aftermath.

A MacCartney to the Fore.

The Sunday following the funeral preachers fulminated about it from their pulpits. The utterances of two of them were extremely pungent.

"We have this last week," said Dr. A. J. MacCartney, pastor of Kenwood church, "witnessed a strange anomaly upon the part of a law abiding community, the burial of a recognized criminal attended by thousands and his grave heaped high with flowers from his partners in crime. What a tyranny we live under in this city

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What," asked Dr. John Thompson, pastor of Chicago Temple, "are the youth of our city to think about it? No man could go so long in crime without being apprehended and punished if he did not have accomplices and sympathizers. . . . The churches are partly to blame for such a condition because they spend their time in theological controversy instead of getting together as a unit in fighting a condition which all agree is wrong and dangerous. These heresy hunters remind me of a man going out with a machine gun to hunt grasshoppers."

The O'Banion Case Epitomized Much.

First, it epitomized a great city's crawling acceptance of lawlessness. Second, it epitomized a juvenile acquiescence in the glorification of worthless, dangerous men. Out of acceptance and acquiescence grew a long, fantastic sequence of indecencies that made the great city a byword throughout Christendom. Directing the indecencies was that "nice personality "as the saying ran-John Torrio, whom we shall encounter in the next chapter amid a fusillade that plentifully punctured him and just missed scaring all the "personality" out of him.

"C

AUTERIZE it! Cauterize it!" moaned John Torrio the afternoon in January, 1925, when gangdom had pumped four shotgun slugs and a pistol bullet into him.

"Cauterize it," he kept moaning to surgeons who bent over him in Jackson Park hospital, and he tried to point to his shattered jaw.

The plea not only showed a lively appreciation of the blessings of antiseptic surgery on the part of Chicago's most powerful gangster, bootlegger and bawdy house keeper, but it also shed piercing light on the grisly methods of the warfare waged by gangsters against one another.

John Torrio knew-none betterthat a practice of gangdom's killers is to boil bullets intended for their victims in a decoction likely—although not guaranteed-to cause gangrene. Some say that a large ingredient in this witch's brew is onion and that after the boiling the missiles are rubbed with garlic. Dr. M. W. K. Byrne will tell you that garlic in contact with gunpowder creates a poison.

Terrors of a Hunted Man.

In any case, John Torrio was apprehensive not only that his wounds might prove fatal, but also that he might die of poison. As a matter of fact, infection did develop in his wounded jaw. Illustrative of his sagacity amid stress and terror was the further fact that he commanded he be laid in no bed overlooked by a window, a fire escape, or other means of access from the outside.

Having lived for twenty years in Chicago and having all that time been engaged in nefarious occupations, he thoroughly understood the uncertain nature of the thread by which life hangs in our midst.

He feared, in short, that the two gangsters who had failed to kill him on his doorstep-and almost at his wife's side-would hunt him out in the haven of healing and complete the

job they had left unfinished when something frightened one of them away as he was about to fire the decisive bullet into the prostrate Torrio.

This attempt on the life of the richest and most successful vice purveyor and bootlegger operating in the United States was made in daylight of Jan. 24, 1925. The scene was the sidewalk in front of his residence, 7011 Clyde avenue. It is a nice neighborhood, not far from the South Shore Country club.

Gangdom Behind Schedule.

Readers of the first two chapters of these annals of the most murderous and most thoroughly organized scoundrels that ever infested an American city may recall that Dean O'Banion, co-criminal of Torrio until they quarreled, had been shot to death by gangsters on Nov. 10, 1924, in the florist shop which was his blind.

Thus the repercussion of the O'Banion success had been eleven weeks in coming-which was away behind gangdom's regular schedule of reprisal.

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But the gangsters who had set out to avenge O'Banion-whose death had already taken its place in police supposition as a Torrio crime "-had not been idle all that time. What was called "Torrio's bravado" had steeled him to attendance upon O'Banion's wake. Investigation by the police showed that immediately after that function he had disappeared. So had several of O'Banion's closest and most ruthless henchmen, who, the police believed, had trailed Torrio to Hot Sprinks, Ark.; then to Havana, Cuba; then to St. Petersburg, Fla. But he was well guarded, and he arrived sound if not safe in Chicago. The alleged O'Banion trailers arrived a few days later.

Torrio knew the men who had fired the five shots into him in front of his home, but he refused to tell the police.

Gangdom almost never does tell the police. Telling them is called squawk