Word: torrio
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...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...
...Brooklyn boy was not brash. He was smart, and a coward. It was a healthy combination. Johnny Torrio was shot up and fled. The last of the opposition, remnants of the O'Banion gang, were ambushed in a Clark Street garage on St. Valentine's Day in 1929, machine-gunned...
...Johnny Torrio, tough, buttoneyed little dean of the Prohibition criminal era, was on trial in Manhattan last week for the same offense that undid his pupil Al Capone: cheating on his income taxes. Slit-eyed, impassive sat Johnny as 34 of the Government's 75 witnesses told on him. Then one morning his high-powered lawyer, Max D. Steuer, did not appear in court. Johnny Torrio and two of his four co-defendants pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the Government of $86,000 in taxes between 1933 and 1935. The Last of the Big Shots, who once spent...
...business which Johnny Torrio went into and later sold was a firm named Prendergast Davies Co., Ltd. which then specialized in acquiring Government revenue tax stamps, putting them on cut whiskey. Aware in April 1936 that the Government was investigating his affairs, Johnny Torrio blandly decided on another trip to Italy, applied for a passport. When he went to the White Plains, N. Y. post office to get the decoy registered letter which the Government mailed to him, he was popped into jail. When bail was set at $100,000, his wife produced it in cash from her handbag...
Last week's indictment was an indirect result of Torrio's arrest in 1936. Evidence dragged out of 100 reluctant witnesses by United States Attorney Lamar Hardy indicated that in 1933, Torrio's income was $150,000, that Prendergast Davies (now in other hands) had done a $4,500,000 business in 1934. Chief of Johnny Torrio's current associates appeared to be a brother-in-law named William Slock-bower. Said Mrs. Slockbower to reporters: "We never expected anything like this . . . I'm sure it's going to be a terrible surprise...