The Sieben Brewery Raid
The last straw for Torrio was O'Banion's treachery in the Sieben Brewery raid. Both O'Banion and Torrio held large stakes in the Sieben brewery in Chicago. In May, 1924, O'Banion learned that the police were planning to raid the brewery on a particular night. Before the raid, O'Banion approached Torrio and told him he wanted to sell his share in the brewery, claiming that the Gennas scared him and he wanted to leave the rackets. Torrio agreed to buy O'Banion's share and gave him half a million dollars. On the night of O'Banion's last shipment, the police swept into the brewery. O'Banion, Torrio, and numerous South Side gangsters were arrested. O'Banion got off easily because, unlike Torrio, he had no previous Prohibition-related arrests. Torrio had to bail out himself and six associates, plus face later court charges with the possibility of jail time. O'Banion also refused to return the money Torrio had given him in the deal.
Torrio soon realized he had been double-crossed. He had lost the brewery and $500,000 in cash ($6.6 Million in 2012 dollars), had been indicted and had been humiliated. Neverthless, Torrio was willing to overlook this insult in order to maintain peace in the Chicago underworld, until O'Banion himself made the situation irretrievable later that year.
Read more about this topic: John Duffy (mobster)
Famous quotes containing the word raid:
“John Brown and Giuseppe Garibaldi were contemporaries not solely in the matter of time; their endeavors as liberators link their names where other likeness is absent; and the peaks of their careers were reached almost simultaneously: the Harper’s Ferry Raid occurred in 1859, the raid on Sicily in the following year. Both events, however differing in character, were equally quixotic.”
—John Cournos (1881–1956)