11. An Escalating Beef
Unlike their conservative predecessors, Frankie Yale and the new Mafiosi were willing to cooperate with other ethnic gangs, so long as there was money to be made. From protection, he soon branched out into prostitution, and ran a string of brothels. When Prohibition arrived, Yale became one of Brooklyn’s biggest bootleggers. The high profits came with correspondingly high risks, and in 1921 he barely escaped an assassination attempt by rival bootleggers. He got away with a shot up lung, while one of his bodyguards was wounded and another was killed. He survived another assassination attempt just a few months later, that claimed the life of another bodyguard. That was followed by yet another attempt in 1923, when he escaped with his life only because the assassins mistook an associate for Yale and shot him dead instead.
In 1924, Yale’s former employee Al Capone asked him for a favor. So he travelled to Chicago with a hit team to murder North Side Gang leader Dean O’Banion, who was locked into a deadly grudge match with Capone and the Chicago Outfit. O’Banion owned a flower shop in Chicago’s North Side, so Yale and a team of Brooklyn hitmen visited, under the pretext of arranging floral arrangements for a mobster’s funeral. The visits were reconnaissance trips to study the layout of the place. On November 10th, 1924, Yale returned to the store with two men. When he and the proprietor shook hands, his accomplices shot O’Banion in the chest and throat, then finished him off with a bullet to the back of the head. Rather than settle the grudge with the North Side Gang, however, the murder merely intensified it, as O’Banion’s successor Hymie Weiss vowed revenge.
