Down at the Crack of Dawn

On August 9, 1928 two gangsters exited a speakeasy escorted by a locally famous character named Hugh McLoon. The latter was a short, hunched back fellow who gained fame as a mascot for local sport team and parleyed that into becoming a go-between for the under and upper worlds. He also became an owner in a night club. As the trio walked into the night air,  a sedan pulled up and a machine gun went off. McLoon fell dead and his gangster companions were slightly wounded. Supposedly the gangsters were the target and McLoon was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Within a few days it determined that the man who pulled the trigger on McLoon was Philadelphia gangster Danny O'Leary whose gang was at war with the men wounded with McLoon. Retaliation was swift. After the drive-by, O'Leary and his brother retreated to Camden, New Jersey and took a room at a roadside motel. While leaving a carload a gangsters made an unsuccessful attempt on them. A few days later O'Leary showed up at a Philadelphia boarding house with a young woman he claimed was his wife (his real wife was living at home with their two kids) and rented a room. At one-thirty on the morning of August 15, a guy rang the bell to the building and the landlord answered. The guy asked for O'Leary but was told that nobody by that name lived there. He then asked if anyone moved in recently and was told about the couple who took a room that Monday. He pondered the thought for a moment and then returned to a car containing more men, told them what had transpired and they took off.

A little after five that morning, the men returned and jimmied open the front door of the building and made their way to O'Leary's third floor room and jimmied that door as well. The gunmen made their way to O'Leary's bed and one or more opened fired on the sleeping gangster, hitting him in the head, chest and shoulders. 

The gunfire woke up two tenants who lived on the first floor who came into the hallway in time to see the gunmen and O'Leary's girlfriend nonchalantly walk from the building. Since the group seemed to be in no hurry, the tenants figured the noise they heard was a back firing car and thought nothing of it.

Since O'Leary's moll left with the killers seemingly on her own accord it was determined that she had set up her boyfriend for the kill.

Danny O'Leary