Holy Name Cathedral Gangland Shooting

The cathedral ahead still carries scars from one of Prohibition Chicago's most brazen killings. On October eleventh, nineteen twenty six, North Side gang boss Hymie Weiss was walking from a courthouse toward his headquarters, directly across the street from the cathedral, when gunmen hidden in an upstairs rooming house opened fire with a submachine gun and a shotgun. Weiss and an associate were killed instantly, and three other men with him were wounded. Stray rounds from the ambush struck the cathedral itself, chipping stone near the entrance in scars that some accounts say were visible for years afterward.

Weiss had taken over leadership of the North Side gang less than two years earlier, after his predecessor and friend, Dean O'Banion, was gunned down inside his own flower shop in nineteen twenty four. The Archdiocese of Chicago had refused O'Banion a funeral mass and burial in consecrated ground afterward, judging him too notorious a criminal for the church's full rites, and a priest from his childhood said only a brief private prayer over his coffin instead of a proper service. Weiss, despite always carrying a rosary in his pocket by most accounts and being raised Catholic himself, met his own violent end less than two years later in the literal shadow of the cathedral that had turned his closest friend away at the door. He is buried today at Mount Carmel Cemetery just outside the city, in the very same cemetery as both O'Banion and the rival gang leader who most historians believe ordered his death, Al Capone.