Ah, the Prohibition Era; a time when a guy with a fast car, a dream,
and a machine-gun, could make oodles of kale supplying an insatiable citizenry
with their much desired clown juice. For a bootlegger, one of the grand things about having the grands
in your pocket was being able to blow some of it on a jane before getting
yourself dead.
For the gangsters of old, romance and death went together like
gin and tonic, a situation that produced one of the semi-legendary figures to come
out of this alcohol fueled epoch: The “Kiss of Death Girl”, so called because a large number of her
paramours ended up on the slab. Lots of women lost their men to the gun but a
“Kiss of Death Girl,” had more than the average bear. New York City had one and
so did Chicago. We shall examine the Windy City’s hexed vixen first.
Her name was Mary Collins and she was a North Sider who became acquainted with the gangsters of her bailiwick in the early days of the Dry Era. The first of Mary’s fellas to end up with a toe tag was a friend and fellow gun man of North Side gang leader Dean O’Banion named John Sheehy.
Kiss of Death Girl a.k.a. Mary Collins
The end of Sheehy came in a speakeasy known as the Rendezvous on the evening of December 7, 1923. As the story goes, Sheehy simply asked for a bucket of ice and was told no by the waiter. Gangsters don’t like to hear no; so Sheehy went to the bar to fetch it himself, but again was told no. One writer put it that it was Mary, whose birthday they were celebrating, that wanted the ice so she could throw the cubes at the band’s drummer and this is why Sheehy’s request was denied.
Sheehy didn’t appreciate the inhospitable nature of both the waiter and club’s steward so pulled out his roscoe and killed them both. Before Sheehy and Mary had a chance to vacate the premises however, police arrived and Sheehy managed to wing one of them before catching a bullet himself and expiring the next day.
Headline for Sheehy shooting
In our next installment we'll meet victims #2 and #3 of the Kiss of Death Girl.
