Word: torrio
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...went to work for Johnny Torrio, a First Ward vice and bootleg racketeer, running a saloon and brothel (at $75 a week) on South Wabash Avenue. He did his work well. Soon he became Torrio's field general and drill sergeant, and was cut in on a $100,000-a-year profit. Chicago began to hear the newcomer's name. It was Al Capone...
...Money. With Torrio, he pushed south and west across Chicago and into the saloons, gambling joints and dance halls of suburban Burnham, Stickney and Cicero. He built his own army. By 1924 he commanded 700 men, was making $100,000 a week and lusting for more. But Dion O'Banion, a murderous Irishman with a sweet smile and a passion for flowers, stood...
With Prohibition came the era of "The Big Shots." The Capone enterprises, which grossed $100,000,000 yearly, were organized by Johnny Torrio, whose fame has been unjustly eclipsed by his scar-faced successor. Says Asbury: "Johnny Torrio is unsurpassed in the annals of American crime; he was probably the nearest thing to a real mastermind that this country has yet produced." Torrio boasted, "I own the police," had uniformed officers guard his costlier liquor shipments. In five years of gang warfare 500 mobsters were assassinated. Sniffed Mayor Big Bill Thompson, "It's all newspaper talk...
...Born in Austria, Jewish Max Steuer emigrated to Manhattan as a boy, worked day & night to pay for his legal education. At the height of his career, candid, inconspicuous Steuer was reputed to have made $1,000,000 a year. Among his clients: Max ("Boo Boo") Hoff, Gangster John Torrio, ex-Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania, Fight Promoter Tex Rickard, onetime Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty, Charles E. Mitchell, onetime president of National City Bank of New York...
...Supplied evidence for 947 income-tax-evasion convictions, including Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Waxey Gordon...