Harry Houdini a boarding house on East 79th Street. He was joined by the rest of the family once Rabbi Weiss found permanent housing. As a child, Ehrich Weiss took several jobs, making his public début as a 9-year-old trapeze artist, calling himself "Ehrich, the Prince of the Air". He was also a champion cross country runner in his youth. When Weiss became a professional magician he began calling himself "Harry Houdini", after the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, after reading Robert-Houdin's autobiography in 1890. Weiss incorrectly believed that an "i" at the end of a name meant "like" in French. In
Hymie Weiss place as Al Capone and Dean O'Banion. Weiss and other Prohibition-era mobsters served as the basis for many gangster films of the 1930s. James Cagney, for example, based his character on both Weiss and Chicago gangland figure Dean O'Banion in the 1931 film "The Public Enemy". Hymie Weiss Henry Earl J. Wojciechowski, also known as Hymie Weiss (January 25, 1898 – October 11, 1926), was an American mob boss who became a leader of the Prohibition-era North Side Gang and a bitter rival of Al Capone. He was known as 'the only man Al Capone feared'. Born Henry Earl J.