Look up. Holy Name Cathedral — the seat of the whole Chicago archdiocese, and one of the most beautiful buildings in the city. It is also, historically, one of the more dangerous street corners in it, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a church.
The reason is the block across the way. In the nineteen twenties, that corner held a flower shop called Schofield's, and Schofield's was a front for the North Side Gang. Its owner was a man named Dean O'Banion, who ran a real floristry business by day and a bootlegging empire by night, and he was unusually good at both. He genuinely loved arranging flowers. He also arranged the funeral wreaths for gangsters he had personally helped make dead, which is a level of customer service you don't often see.
O'Banion's own death is the one that lit the fuse. In November of nineteen twenty-four, three men walked into the shop. O'Banion, ever the host, stepped forward to shake hands. One of them took his hand and gripped it hard, pinning h
is gun arm, and while he was held there, the other two shot him where he stood among his flowers. A murder disguised as a handshake. His funeral was its own spectacle — a bronze casket, a mile of cars, and something like fifty thousand dollars in flowers, some of it sent by the very men who'd killed him.
That killing started a five-year war, and the man who picked up O'Banion's operation was Hymi
