Blooming Flowers by Kasia Boddy

Author:Kasia Boddy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300243338
Publisher: Yale University Press

Katsushika Hokusai, Chrysanthemums and Horsefly, c. 1833–34. Monet owned a copy of this print, which is displayed today in his house at Giverny.

Claude Monet, Massif de chrysanthèmes, 1897.

Happier with a tommy gun than a paint brush, ‘short, limping, smiling’ Dean O’Banion was, nonetheless, his biographers all note, an artist of the chrysanthemum. With ‘a natural eye for design and color’, he gained a reputation for ‘artful floral pieces’ and ‘choice’ funeral memorials during the bootlegger years of the early 1920s. O’Banion’s main job was as the boss of Chicago’s North Side Gang. In 1921, however, he bought a stake in the William F. Schofield Flower Shop, conveniently situated opposite the Holy Name Cathedral. The shop was partly a convenient front (Big Bill Schofield handled most of the day-to-day floristry, and the gang met upstairs to discuss the million-dollar trade in ‘beer and blood’), but O’Banion took real pride in the lavish floral arrangements that gangster funerals required. They paid pretty well too.

For several years, the North Side Gang had a working arrangement with the Johnny Torrio/Al Capone Southside gang, and the ‘terrible Gennas’ of Little Italy. Things changed in November 1924, when O’Banion refused to write off one of Angelo Genna’s gambling debts. ‘To hell with the Sicilians’ was his blithe if foolish attitude, for to hell with O’Banion was the Sicilian response. Genna persuaded Torrio and Capone to send their men to Schofield’s, ostensibly to pick up flowers for the funeral of Mike Merlo. As president of the influential Unione Siciliana, Merlo deserved a lot of respect – and it was given in the form of $100,000 worth of floral tributes. Schofield and O’Banion created horseshoes, pyramids, pillars and quilts; Capone himself commissioned an $8,000 rose sculpture. Merlo’s death was important for another reason, too. Keen to keep the peace, he had dissuaded Capone and Genna from going after O’Banion. But now Merlo was dead and soon afterwards, so too was O’Banion. When the police arrived at the shop, he was found lying on the floor riddled with bullets (one also smashed a glass cabinet and lodged itself in a display of American Beauty roses). Inches from his left hand lay a pair of florists’ scissors and some clipped and bloody chrysanthemums. So much for the flower’s promise of longevity: O’Banion was only thirty-two. What was bad for him (and many other bootleggers) was, however, good for the store; in the six-year all-out gang war that ensued, business at Schofield’s bloomed and boomed.

The incongruity of gang violence and floristry – like all the clashes and comings together of guns and roses (cherry blossoms or chrysanthemums) – gives the story an almost legendary appeal. Most recently, Schofield’s featured in HBO’s Prohibition-era drama Boardwalk Empire, and in 2018, a Glasgow florist, calling itself O’Banions, marked its launch and its determination to be ‘the most badass florist in Scotland’ by tastefully ‘flower-bombing’ the city.

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