Mount Carmel

Mount Carmel Cemetery lies straight west of the Loop in the suburb of Hillside. It’s an appropriate place to wind up a tour of Prohibition-era crime sites. LeVell and I arrive just before closing. A hundred yards to the right of the Roosevelt Road gate is the Capone monument, as modest as his Prairie Avenue home, the name deliberately hidden by shrubbery. “My Jesus Mercy,” Al’s stone pleads.

“There is no life except in death” is the inscription on the grave of Frank Nitti, buried here under his real name, Nitto. Earl (“Hymie”) Weiss’s remains are encased in an elaborate mausoleum, as are those of the Genna brothers. A walk around the neatly maintained graveyard is sobering. It provides another taste of the reality of it all, a sense of a time when these dead men were larger than life.

All alone in his plot, under a small obelisk, is Dion O’Banion. Appropriately, the day we visit, this florist’s grave is decorated with a modest bouquet of carnations.

Noting the close proximity of mortal enemies like Capone and O’Banion, Weiss and the Gennas, LeVell comments, “When the dead rise on Judgment Day, all hell is going to break loose in Mount Carmel.”