Word: colosimo
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Chicago was strident, corrupt, lavish, fat from war contracts in 1919 when a young hoodlum from Brooklyn slipped into Diamond Jim Colosimo's South Side underworld and muttered his name. The hoodlum, branded on one swart cheek by the razor memento of the Neapolitan Camorra, was Al Capone...
Prohibition, an experiment noble in purpose, was about to begin. Midnight on Jan. 16, 1920, it went into effect. Five months later, guns barked and drilled plump Diamond Jim Colosimo dead as a herring in his own restaurant. The murder was a clue to the sudden bustle in the underworld. Colosimo, owner of brothels, had tried to bite off too much of the new business in illicit booze. That killing set the pattern for many more...
...Chicago, Colosimo's murder moved Capone up. Now he was cheek by jowl with Diamond Jim's lieutenant, Johnny Torrio. The two worked well together. In four years Capone & Torrio ruled Cicero, the Chicago suburb whose name has been notorious ever since. Only disputant of their power was Dion O'Banion, on Chicago's North Side, who ran a flower shop as a sideline, specialized in floral pieces for gangster funerals, a highly lucrative trade. O'Banion said he hated Wops. One November noonday three men came to his shop, riddled him with bullets...
...brash ones died. Colosimo and O'Banion had been too brash. So was Hymie Weiss. Weiss was shot down several months later in front of the Holy Name Cathedral on Superior Street. Others died in doorways, in telephone booths, in alleys, in bed, at the wheels of their expensive cars. In the decade there were 4,242 homicides on the blotter of the Chicago police alone, most of them unsolved. But nobody shot Capone...
...school of criminals that flourished in the prohibition era, Johnny Torrio was probably dean. From Brooklyn's Five Points Gang he went to Chicago as chief gunman for James ("Big Jim") Colosimo. As assistant in Chicago, Johnny Torrio selected a stocky Brooklyn boy named Al Capone. In 1920, Jim Colosimo was shot dead. Torrio succeeded him as Chicago's top racketeer and kept Al Capone as a $75-a-week underling. Johnny Torrio left Chicago shortly after Dion O'Banion's elaborate funeral in 1924, went back to be riddled with bullets by O'Banion...