As part of the same arrangement, Torrio had, in the spirit of peace and good will, and in exchange for armed support in the April election campaign, bestowed upon O'Banion a third share in the Hawthorne Smoke Shop proceeds and a cut in the Cicero beer trade. The coalition was to prove inadvisable. O'Banion was a complex and frightening man, whose bright blue eyes stared with a kind of frozen candour into others'. He had a round, frank Irish face, creased in a jovial grin that stayed bleakly in place even when he was pumping bullets into someone's body. He carried three guns- one in the right trouser pocket, one under his left armpit, one in the left outside coat pocket- and was equally lethal with both hands. He killed accurately, freely, and dispassionately. The police credited him with twenty-five murders but he was never brought to trial for one of them. Like a fair number of bootleggers he disliked alcohol. He was an expert florist, tenderly dextrous in the arrangement of bouquets and wreaths. He had no apparent comprehension of morality; he divided humanity into "right guys" and "wrong guys", and the wrong ones he was always willing to kill and trample under. He had what was described by a psychologist as a "sunny brutality". He walked with a heavy list to the right, as that leg was four inches shorter than the other, but the lurch did not reduce his feline quickness with his guns. Landesco thought him "just a superior sort of plugugly" but he was, in fact, with his aggression and hostility, and nerveless indifference to risking or administering pain, a casebook psychopath. He was also at this time, although not so interwoven in high politics and the rackets as Torrio and Capone, the most powerful and most dangerous mob leader in the Chicago underworld, the roughneck king. O'Banion was born in poverty, the son of an immigrant Irish plasterer, in the North Side's Little Hell, close by the Sicilian quarter and Death Corner. He had been a choir boy at the Holy Name Cathedral and also served as an acolyte to Father O'Brien. The influence of Mass was less pervasive than that of the congested, slum tenements among the bawdy houses, honkytonks, and sawdust saloons of his birthplace; he ran wild with the child gangs of the neighbourhood, and went through the normal pressure-cooker course of thieving, police-dodging, and housebreaking. At the age of ten, when he was working as a newsboy in the Loop, he was knocked down by a streetcar which resulted in his permanently shortened leg. Because of this he was known as Gimpy (but, as with Capone and his nickname of Scarface, never in his presence). In his teens O'Banion was enrolled in the vicious Market Street gang and he became a singing waiter in McGovern's Cafe, a notoriously low and rowdy dive in North Clark Street, where befuddled customers were methodically looted of their money by the singing waiters before being thrown out. He then got a job with the Chicago Herald-Examiner as a circulation slugger, a rough fighter employed to see that his paper's news pitches were not trespassed upon by rival vendors. He was also at the same time gaining practical experience as a safe breaker and highwayman, and learning how to shoot to kill from a Neanderthal convicted murderer named Gene Geary, later committed to Chester Asylum as a homicidal maniac, but whose eyes misted with tears when the young Dion sang a ballad about an Irish mother in his clear and syrupy tenor. O'Banion's first conflict with the police came in 1909, at seventeen, when he was committed to Bridewell Prison for three months for burglary; two years later he served another three months for assault. Those were his only interludes behind bars, although he collected four more charges on his police record in 1921 and 1922, three for burglary and one for robbery. But by now O'Banion's political pull was beginning to be effective. On the occasion of his 1922 indictment the $10,000 bond was furnished by an alderman, and the charge was nolle prossed. On one of his 1921 ventures he was actually come upon by a Detective Sergeant John J. Ryan down on his knees with a tool embedded in a labour office safe in the Postal Telegraph Building; the jury wanted better evidence than that and he was acquitted, at a cost of $30,000 in bribes, it was estimated. As promptly as Torrio, O'Banion jumped into bootlegging. He conducted it with less diplomacy and more spontaneous violence than the Sicilians, but he had his huge North Side portion to exploit and he made a great deal of money. Unlike the Sicilians, he additionally conducted holdups, robberies, and safe-cracking expeditions, and refused to touch prostitution. He was also personally active in ward politics, and by 1924 O'Banion had acquired sufficient political might to be able to state: "I always deliver my borough as per requirements". But whose requirements? Until 1924 O'Banion pistoleers and knuckle-duster bullyboys had kept his North Side domain solidly Democratic. There was a question-and-answer gag that went around at that time: Q. "Who'll carry the Forty-second and Forty-third wards"? A. "O'Banion, in his pistol pocket". But as November 1924 drew close the Democratic hierarchy was sorely troubled by grapevine reports that O'Banion was being wooed by the opposition, and was meeting and conferring with important Republicans. To forestall any change of allegiance, the Democrats hastily organised a testimonial banquet for O'Banion, as public reward for his past services and as a reminder of where his loyalties lay. The reception was held in a private dining room of the Webster Hotel on Lincoln Park West. It was an interesting fraternisation of ex-convicts, union racketeers, ward heelers, sold-out officials, and gunmen. The guest list is in itself a little parable of the state of American civic life at this time. It included the top O'Banion men and Chief of Detectives Michael Hughes. When Mayor Dever heard of the banquet he summoned Hughes for an explanation of why he had been dishonouring the police department by consorting with these felons and fixers. Hughes said that he had understood the party was to be in honour of Jerry O'Connor, the proprietor of a Loop gambling house. "But when I arrived and recognised a number of notorious characters I had thrown into the detective bureau basement half a dozen times, I knew I had been framed, and withdrew almost at once". In fact, O'Connor was honoured during the ceremony with the presentation of a $2500 diamond stickpin. There was a brief interruption while one of O'Banion's men jerked out both his guns and threatened to shoot a waiter who was pestering him for a tip. Then O'Banion was presented with a platinum watch set with rubies and diamonds. This dinner was the start of a new blatancy in the relationship between the gangs and the politicians, which, prior to 1924, says Pasley, "had been maintained with more or less stealth", but which henceforth was marked by these ostentatious gatherings, denounced by a clergyman as "Belshazzar feasts", at which "politicians fraternized cheek by jowl with gangsters, openly, in the big downtown hotels". Pasley continued: "They became an institution of the Chicago scene and marked the way to the moral and financial collapse of the municipal and county governments in 1928-29". However, this inaugural feast did its sponsors no good whatever. O'Banion accepted his platinum watch and the tributes to his loyalty, and proceeded with the bigger and better Republican deal. On Election Day- November 4- he energetically marshalled his force of bludgeon men, bribers, and experts in forging repeat votes. The result was a landslide for the Republican candidates. This further demonstration of O'Banion's ballooning power did not please Torrio and Capone. In the past year there had been too many examples of his euphoric self-confidence and self-aggrandisement for their liking. He behaved publicly with a cocky, swaggering truculence that offended their vulpine Latin minds, and behaved towards them personally with an unimpressed insolence that enraged them beneath their blandness. They were disturbed by his idiotic bravado- as, when his bodyguard, Yankee Schwartz, complained that he had been snubbed by Dave Miller, a prize-fight referee, chieftain of a Jewish gang and one of four brothers of tough reputation, who were Hirschey, a gambler-politician in loose beer-running league with Torrio and O'Banion, Frank, a policeman, and Max, the youngest. To settle this slight, O'Banion went down to the La Salle Theatre in the Loop, where, he had learned, Dave Miller was attending the opening of a musical comedy. At the end of the performance, Dave and Max came out into the brilliantly lit foyer among a surge of gowned and tuxedoed first nighters. O'Banion drew his guns and fired at Dave, severely wounding him in the stomach. A second bullet ricocheted off Max's belt buckle, leaving him unhurt but in some distress. O'Banion tucked away his gun and walked out of the theatre; he was neither prosecuted nor even arrested. That sort of braggadocio, for that sort of reason, in the view of Torrio and Capone, was a nonsense. A further example of the incompatible difference in personalities was when two policemen held up a Torrio beer convoy on a West Side street and demanded $300 to let it through. One of the beer-runners telephoned O'Banion- on a line tapped by the detective bureau- and reported the situation. O'Banion's reaction was: "Three hundred dollars! To them bums? Why, I can get them knocked off for half that much". Upon which the detective bureau despatched rifle squads to prevent trouble if O'Banion should send his gunmen out to deal with the hijacking policemen. But in the meantime the beer-runner, unhappy with this solution, telephoned Torrio and returned to O'Banion with the message: "Say, Dionie, I just been talking to Johnny, and he said to let them cops have the three hundred. He says he don't want no trouble". But Torrio and Capone had graver cause to hate and distrust the Irishman. For three years, since the liquor territorial conference, Torrio had, with his elastic patience, and because he knew that retaliation could cause only violent warfare and disaster to business, tolerated O'Banion's impudent double-crossing. They had suffered, in sulky silence, the sight of his sharp practice in Cicero. When, as a diplomatic gesture of amity and in payment for the loan of gunmen in the April election, Torrio had given O'Banion a slice of Cicero, the profits from that district had been $20,000 a month. In six months O'Banion had boosted the profits to $100,000 a month- mainly by bringing pressure to bear on fifty Chicago speak-easy proprietors to shift out to the suburb. These booze customers had until then been buying their supplies from the Sheldon, Saltis-McErlane, and Druggan-Lake gangs, and now they were competing for trade with the Torrio-Capone saloons; once again O'Banion's brash recklessness had caused a proliferation of ill will. The revenue from O'Banion's Cicero territory went up still higher, until the yield was more than the Torrio-Capone takings from the far bigger trade area of Chicago's South and West Sides. But he still showed no intention of sharing with the syndicate. At last, even the controlled Torrio was unable to hold still, and he tentatively suggested that O'Banion should take a percentage in the Stickney brothels in return for one from his Cicero beer concession. O'Banion's reply was a raucous laugh and a flat refusal. Still more jealous bitterness was engendered by the O'Banion gang's seizure from a West Side marshalling yard of a freight-car load of Canadian whisky worth $100,000 and by one of the biggest coups of the Prohibition era- the Sibley warehouse robbery, which became famous for the cool brazenness of the operation. Here was stored $1,000,000 worth of bonded whisky. These 1750 cases were carted off in a one-night operation by the O'Banion men, who left in their stead the same number of barrels filled with water.