Irish-American Gangster Charles Dean (Dion) O'Banion was born on July 8,1892, in Maroa, Illinois. His mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis and died in 1901 when Dean was only nine years old. Her death devastated Dean and his father.
His father Charles O'Banion sold his house and gave up his barber business and moved with his sons Dean and Floyd to Chicago. Dean found Chicago exciting. He grew up in little hell section of Chicago called Kilgubbin. He became the head of the North Side Gang in Chicago during the bootlegging wars of the 1920s. Until his death he was the leader of the gang that was the chief rival of the South Side Gang lead by Johnny Torrio which included Al Capone. O'Banion ran his operation out of the Scofield Flower Co. across the street from the Holy Name Cathedral where he had once sung as a choir boy. He was brought down via a double-cross that he had perpetrated on South Side leader Torrio. They agreed to meet at the flower shop to discuss a lucrative bootleg deal and as they were making the deal the police raided the place and took Torrio to jail. O'Banion, who had no priors for bootlegging was released but Torrio, who did have prior, recieved a jail sentence. This infuriated Capone who dispatched three gunmen, Frankie Yale, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi to the flower shop under the guise of customers who had arrived to pick up an order. Yale greeted him with a handshake and held him while the gunmen shot O'Banion six times, twice in the chest, twice in the throat and twice in the face. O'Banion's death sparked the bloody Chicago Gang wars that would culminate in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929.
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