A further example of the incompatible difference in personalities was when two policemen held up a Torrio beer convoy on a West Side street and demanded $300 to let it through. One of the beer runners telephoned O ' Banion -- on a line tapped by the detective bureau -- and reported the situation. O ' Banion's reaction was: ``Three hundred dollars! To them bums? Why, I can get them knocked off for half that much.'' Upon which the detective bureau despatched rifle squads to prevent trouble if O ' Banion should send his gunmen out to deal with the hijacking policemen. But in the meantime the beer runner, unhappy with this solution, telephoned Torrio and returned to O ' Banion with the message: ``Say, Dionie, I just been talking to Johnny, and he said to let them cops have the three hundred. He says he don't want no trouble.''

But Torrio and Capone had graver cause to hate and distrust the Irishman. For three years, since the liquor territorial conference, Torrio had, with his elastic patience, and because he knew that retaliation could cause only violent warfare and disaster to business, tolerated O ' Banion's impudent double-crossing. They had suffered, in sulky silence, the sight of his sharp practice in Cicero.

When, as a diplomatic gesture of amity and in payment for the loan of gunmen in the April election, Torrio had given O ' Banion a slice of Cicero, the profits from that district had been $20000 a month. In six months O ' Banion had boosted the profits to $100000 a month -- mainly by bringing pressure to bear on fifty Chicago speak-easy proprietors to shift out to the suburb. These booze customers had until then been buying their supplies from the Sheldon, Saltis-McErlane, and Druggan-Lake gangs, and now they were competing for trade with the Torrio-Capone saloons; once again O ' Banion's brash recklessness had caused a proliferation of ill will. The revenue from O ' Banion's Cicero territory went up still higher, until the yield was more than the Torrio-Capone takings from the far bigger trade area of Chicago's South and West Sides. But he still showed no intention of sharing with the syndicate. At last, even the controlled Torrio was unable to hold still, and he tentatively suggested that O ' Banion should take a percentage in the Stickney brothels in return for one from his Cicero beer concession. O ' Banion's reply was a raucous laugh and a flat refusal.