O ' Banion was born in poverty, the son of an immigrant Irish plasterer, in the North Side's Little Hell, close by the Sicilian quarter and Death Corner. He had been a choir boy at the Holy Name Cathedral and also served as an acolyte to Father O ' Brien. The influence of Mass was less pervasive than that of the congested, slum tenements among the bawdy houses, honkytonks, and sawdust saloons of his birthplace; he ran wild with the child gangs of the neighbourhood, and went through the normal pressure-cooker course of thieving, police dodging, and housebreaking. At the age of ten, when he was working as a newsboy in the Loop, he was knocked down by a streetcar which resulted in his permanently shortened leg. Because of this he was known as Gimpy (but, as with Capone and his nickname of Scarface, never in his presence). In his teens O ' Banion was enrolled in the vicious Market Street gang and he became a singing waiter in McGovern's Cafe, a notoriously low and rowdy dive in North Clark Street, where befuddled customers were methodically looted of their money by the singing waiters before being thrown out. He then got a job with the Chicago Herald-Examiner as a circulation slugger, a rough fighter employed to see that his paper's news pitches were not trespassed upon by rival vendors. He was also at the same time gaining practical experience as a safe breaker and highwayman, and learning how to shoot to kill from a Neanderthal convicted murderer named Gene Geary, later committed to Chester Asylum as a homicidal maniac, but whose eyes misted with tears when the young Dion sang a ballad about an Irish mother in his clear and syrupy tenor.