As part of the same arrangement, Torrio had, in the spirit of peace and good will, and in exchange for armed support in the April election campaign, bestowed upon O ' Banion a third share in the Hawthorne Smoke Shop proceeds and a cut in the Cicero beer trade. The coalition was to prove inadvisable.

O ' Banion was a complex and frightening man, whose bright blue eyes stared with a kind of frozen candour into others'. He had a round, frank Irish face, creased in a jovial grin that stayed bleakly in place even when he was pumping bullets into someone's body. He carried three guns -- one in the right trouser pocket, one under his left armpit, one in the left outside coat pocket -- and was equally lethal with both hands. He killed accurately, freely, and dispassionately. The police credited him with twenty-five murders but he was never brought to trial for one of them. Like a fair number of bootleggers he disliked alcohol. He was an expert florist, tenderly dextrous in the arrangement of bouquets and wreaths. He had no apparent comprehension of morality; he divided humanity into ``right guys'' and ``wrong guys,'' and the wrong ones he was always willing to kill and trample under. He had what was described by a psychologist as a ``sunny brutality.'' He walked with a heavy list to the right, as that leg was four inches shorter than the other, but the lurch did not reduce his feline quickness with his guns. Landesco thought him ``just a superior sort of plugugly'' but he was, in fact, with his aggression and hostility, and nerveless indifference to risking or administering pain, a casebook psychopath. He was also at this time, although not so interwoven in high politics and the rackets as Torrio and Capone, the most powerful and most dangerous mob leader in the Chicago underworld, the roughneck king.