Johnny Torrio
Torrio took up residence in Chicago in 1910. By 1920 he had risen from strong-arm man to be the practical head of Colosimo's vice industry, and was fermenting with ideas of modernisation and development. The ideas remained frustrated, for Colosimo's ambition had lost its drive. He was middle-aged, rich and complacent and, additionally, his emotional zest was diverted upon the person of a café singer named Dale Winters, whom he married after divorcing his wife early in 1920. On May 11, three weeks after his mar- riage, Colosimo ceased to be a hindrance to Torrio's career. On that day he went to his café to receive a truckload of bootleg whisky which Torrio had arranged to be delivered. Torrio had also arranged for Frankie Yale (or Uale), a New York mobster who was also national head of the Unione Siciliana, to be in attendance. No official charge was ever brought against anyone, but the Chicago police afterwards revealed that they had good reason to believe that Torrio had paid Yale 10,000 dollars to dispose of Colosimo, which he did by shooting him through the head. Colosimo's was the first of the gangster funeral extravaganzas—and, at that time, the most candid exhibition of the intimate friendship be- tween Chicago's politics and crime. The last ride of the pimp and pickpocket was attended by 5,000 mourners, not only gunmen, white-slavers, dive-keepers and bootleggers, but prominent public officials. His honorary pallbearers in- cluded three judges, an assistant State's attorney, two Congressmen, a State Representative, eight Chicago aldermen and leading members of the Chicago Opera Company. The Catholic arch- bishop refused to permit the use of church or cemetery because of his divorce, but at the Colo- simo home a Presbyterian clergyman presided and Alderman Bathhouse John Coughlin- Kenna's confederate in the First Ward—knelt at the coffin and recited the Hail Marys and the prayers. Hymns were sung by the Apollo Quartet. Colosimo was carried out to the hearse while a band played 'Nearer My God to Thee.' A cavalcade, including 1,000 members of the First Ward Democratic Club, moved towards Oak- wood Cemetery—`they moved,' observed the Chicago Tribune next day, 'behind the funeral car of Cesar, to pay homage to the memory Of the man who for more than a decade has been re- cognised as the overlord of Chicago's under- world. . . . Raised to the throne of the half world, he was a maker and breaker of political aspirations.. . . It is a strange commentary upon our system of law and justice. In how far can power, derived from the life of the underworld, influence institutions of law and order?'
This was not a question with which Torrio- piously present at the funeral—was bothering himself, for the answer was obvious to him. He proceeded to use the power at which Colosimo had merely fumbled with dramatically effective results. He reorganised the gang and turned it into an instrument capable of seizing the oppor- tunities, presented by the new fact of life, Pro- hibition, that Colosimo had been too lazy and old-fashioned to perceive. In other circumstances, Torrio could have had a brilliant career as a business efficiency expert. Asbury considered Torrio to be probably 'the nearest thing to a real master mind that this country has yet pro- duced.' He built the modern machine of out- lawry; he was the first planner and administrator of crime in the context of twentieth-century capitalism; for three years he controlled and ex- tended Chicago's vice industry by a delicate balancing of compromise and strategy, eschew- ing violence except for the occasional execution necessary to maintain discipline. By later standards of syndicated crime, Torrio was a novice, a self-made success cleverly improvising in the period before illegal free enterprise was rationalised into interlocking cartels, but he was a trail-blazer and an original thinker.
Whereas many of the brewers might, despite the strong urgings of their cupidity, have finally hung back from doing a deal with the average disreputable roughneck from the city's under- world, they were able to convince themselves that Torrio was a 'nice guy,' a man you could do business with in a manifestly normal way. He had a benign face, a soft and courteous voice, and dressed in respectably quiet clothes. His new associates quite certainly were aware that he traded in women, issued murder orders, drew iri- come from brothels and employed pimps, and systematically bribed officials and police, but there were other aspects of his life upon which they could fix their attention and thereby ease their conscience. He was not personally armed and stated proudly that he had never fired a gun in his life. He neither smoked nor drank, and was never heard to utter an obscene or profane word. His Kentucky-born wife later indignantly refuted malicious stories that her husband had lived an immoral life. He had been, she declared, 'the best and dearest of husbands.' He conducted his busi- ness within respectably regular office hours, re- turned in the early evening to his Michigan Avenue apartment to sit in slippers listening to broadcast concerts or his huge collection of operatic and classical records, and, said Mrs. Torrio, her married life had been 'one long, un- clouded honeymoon.' Such a high standard of personal probity apparently helped hitherto legitimate businessmen speedily to argue them- selves out of any initial misgivings they might have felt in entering the beer racket.
And by now he had working with him a young man whose enterprise and talent were to outclass and outpace his present master's. He– was Al Capone, whom Torrio had in turn just brought in from New York as a new recruit for the team, and who was to show outstanding aptitude for exploiting the changing conditions in which crime was to operate for the next fourteen years.
Not until the late summer of 1920, six months after Prohibition had become law with the Vol- stead Act, did Torrio turn his attention fully to liquor iraffic. Meanwhile he had renovated and consolidated Colosimo's vice empire and struck out into new territory. He had a strong army, a force of more than a hundred troops split into platoons; and under his direction they established beachheads in Cook County suburban towns. The strategy was one of politeness and persua- sion. Having decided on a sound location for a road-house brothel and cabaret, the district was cased. Householders in the neighbourhood of the proposed establishment were interviewed. If they showed willingness not to start protesting, Torrio through his agents showed his willingness to settle any outstanding bills, pay off the mortgage, supply a new car or have the house redecorated and repaired. Similarly the local civic authorities and police were approached and satisfactory stipends agreed upon in return for non-interference. By these means, a chain of brothels and gambling parlours were opened in a dozen country towns west and south-west of Chicago.
Immediately, at the inception of this strange epoch of generally condoned social brigandry there is found the complicity of the 'good people' indicted by those who take the Nelson Algren view of the causes of the corruption and flight of civic standards. It was the upright citizens, the businessmen, who in the beginning, lured by the prospect of big money-making, eagerly co- operated with Torrio in his scheme. In the Chicago Daily News, on November 17, 1924, Charles Gregston described the partnership be- tween Torrio and pre-Volstead brewers. 'John Torrio and a Chicago brewer are the twin kings of commercialised crime in Cook County today.' he charged. 'They are the men back of the guns and the gangs. They are the organisers, the directors, the fixers and the profit-takers. Torrio is absolute in the field of vice and gambling; the brewer is king of the beer racket. They work together and the others, with a few exceptions, work for them.'
Early in his career in Chicago, during the five years before Prohibition began, Torrio had looked far beyond Colosimo's constricted hori- zons, bound by the First Ward boundaries, and seen the harvest in harlotry offered by the 932 square miles of Cook County. He surveyed the industrial towns of East and South Chicago Heights, Calumet City, Hammond, Gary, Whit- ing and Burnham, with their big working-men populations employed by the oil refineries and steel plants, and here he spread a chain of cheap cribs and dance-hall brothels. He also foresaw the profound social change that the automobile was to bring about, and at cross-roads on the bleak prairie highways he set up his first road- houses with gambling, prostitutes and music for the Stutz-Bearcat crowd, the new species of four- wheeled reveller and girl-friend who liked the excitement and anonymity of driving out into the dark country to an oasis of bright lights.
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