Al Capone moves his gang's headquarters to Cicero, Illinois

After the 1923 election of reform mayor William Emmett Dever, Chicago's city government began to put pressure on the gangster elements inside the city limits.

To put its headquarters outside of city jurisdiction and create a safe zone for its operations, the Capone organization muscled its way into Cicero, Illinois. This led to one of Capone's greatest triumphs: the takeover of Cicero's town government in 1924. Cicero gangster Myles O'Donnell and his brother William "Klondike" O'Donnell fought with Capone over their home turf. The war resulted in over 200 deaths, including that of the infamous "Hanging Prosecutor" Bill McSwiggins.

The 1924 town council elections in Cicero became known as one of the most crooked elections in the Chicago area's long history, with voters threatened at polling stations by thugs. Capone's mayoral candidate won by a huge margin but only weeks later announced that he would run Capone out of town. Capone met with his puppet-mayor and personally knocked him down the town hall steps, a powerful assertion of gangster power and a major victory for the Torrio-Capone alliance.