Johnny Torrio Shot

After Dion O'Banion double-crossed him at Sieben Brewery, Johnny Torrio's south side organization came into constant conflict with the North side gang. With encouragement from the Genna brothers, Torrio had assented to O'Banion's murder.

In retaliation, O'Banion's followers targeted Torrio. After the bust at Sieben, Torrio had turned over his major operations to Al Capone, making him think he was safe from rival gangsters. However, Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran, two of O'Banion's lieutenants, were motivated by revenge, not business matters, and about 4:30 p.m. on a cold January morning in 1925, they ambushed Torrio in front of his home, pictured here, at 7011 S. Clyde Ave.

Torrio and his ever-loyal wife, Ann, had spent the day shopping in the Loop, and had just returned to their South Shore home. Accompanied only by their driver, they walked up to the front door, with Torrio carrying a load of packages, unaware of the blue Cadillac that had arrived moments after them. Weiss and Moran jumped out and unloaded a hail of bullets, first at the Torrios' car (wounding the driver, who was still inside), then at Johnny Torrio himself. One bullet in the arm, another in the groin, both at point blank range. Finally, Bugs Moran put his pistol to Torrio's head for the coup de grace. Click. No bullets left.

Torrio survived the hit, though barely. After four weeks in the hospital, protected by Al Capone personally at his side day and night, Torrio served his nine-month sentence for the Sieben bust at Lake County Jail, then departed immediately for Italy, where he lived for several years before returning to New York. He never set foot in Chicago again, and Al Capone took over the leadership of his organization.

Sieben Brewery

Besides his numerous other talents, Dion O'Banion was an excellent businessman. After the Torrio-Capone gang took over the Cicero city government in 1924, they assigned a small strip of that suburb to O'Banion, who had helped them in the conquest. He immediately quintupled bootlegging revenues in the area and began to extend his sphere of influence into the West side of Chicago, convincing saloon owners currently working with other gangs to buy their goods from him. Johnny Torrio demanded a cut of the new revenues, but O'Banion refused. O'Banion also made a habit of being a thorn in the side to a group of Torrio associates, the Genna brothers, who ran a large and vicious bootlegging enterprise centered in the West side. It was of the Gennas that O'Banion coined one of the most famous phrases in gangland history: "To hell with the Sicilians!"

Never cross a Sicilian.

Finally, in late Spring, 1924, Dion O'Banion could no longer contain his contempt for Torrio and his associates, and a plan to double-cross his boss took place at this location, currently the Near North Career Metro High School, but previously the site of the Sieben Brewery, jointly owned by O'Banion, Torrio, and Al Capone, located at 1464 N. Larrabee.

O'Banion had heard through the grapevine that the Sieben was scheduled for an upcoming police raid. Before that happened, he called a conference with his co-owners in the enterprise, Torrio and Capone, and announced that he was leaving the rackets, retiring to Colorado. Would they be interested in buying his share? Torrio and Capone readily agreed -- they were sick of the trouble and infighting O'Banion created, and would happily buy his train ticket out of the city.

There was just one more convoy of liquor to be delivered to the Brewery, on May 19, 1924, and after that, O'Banion was scheduled to hand over his interests in the business. Of course, O'Banion knew that that night was the planned evening of the raid. The police showed up and arrested both O'Banion and Torrio. Torrio was eventually sentenced to a nine-month prison sentence. O'Banion was murdered soon after, probably at the behest of Torrio, by Mike Genna and two other Sicilians, the famous assassins, Scalisi and Anselmi.

Thus began the great Beer Wars between the North Side Mob, under Dion O'Banion and his followers, and the Torrio-Capone Syndicate.

Joseph Stenson, Torrio's "Silk Hat"

Joseph Stenson was a leading brewery owner in pre-Prohibition Chicago, the co-owner, with thre brothers, of the Stenson Brewing Company. After the start of Prohibition in 1919, Stenson went into business with Johnny Torrio, the famed leader of the Chicago Outfit, who took over after the death of "Big" Jim Colosimo, and who first brought Al Capone to Chicago.

It was a perfect combination. Torrio had years of experience and tutelage under Colosimo in paying off the police and operating outside the law; Stenson knew the brewery business inside and out. Together, they turned Chicago into the bootlegging capital of the country.

On Nov. 17, 1924, the front page of the Chicago Daily News first introduced the world to Torrio's low-profile business partner, though circumspectly:

John Torrio and a Chicago brewer are the twin kings of commercialized crime in Cook County today...And the brewer is so completely above the law, so thoroughly protected from prosecution, that it is unsafe to mention his name, though the police and the prosecutors know quite well who he is.

The Chicago Tribune had no such misgivings about mentioning Stenson's name, and they did so in the following day's edition. They referred to Stenson as Torrio's "silk hat," the scion of wealth living in the heart of the Gold Coast, whose fortune (which it is estimated, came to $12 million) came from vice.

Stenson's home was at 1218 N. Astor (pictured above), the most prestigious street in the city to this day, and could not have been more different than the 22nd st. Levee district that Torrio ran or the middle-class Southside building Torrio lived in. Stenson's home still stands, and recently changed hands for a sum of $3.5 million.

"Terrible Genna" Headquarters

The Genna brothers, Pete, Sam, Jim, Tony, Angelo, and Mike, organized the massive dispersed labor force that produced distilled spirits for the Torrio-Capone syndicate during Prohibition. Their warehouse and headquarters, disguised to almost no one as an olive oil and cheese import business, was located on this parking lot, at 1022 W. Taylor, in the heart of Chicago’s Little Italy. The Gennas were the most crucial element in the liquor supply chain, and control over their operations was largely the source of the bloody Chicago Beer Wars of the 1920s.

There were seven Genna Brothers born in Sicily, and six of these came to America in 1910, settling in Chicago. They represented the worst of the dark, superstitious, and vengeful stereotypes of that island, and most everyone – the police and even other violent gangsters included – was deeply afraid of them. They got their start as Black Hand extortionists and as enforcers for Italian politician Tony D’Andrea in his long-running and violent feud with rival 19th ward alderman Johnny Powers. After D’Andrea’s assassination in 1921, the Gennas took control of the old D’Andrea headquarters at 1022 W. Taylor, known as the Italian-American Educational Club, and began reorganizing D’Andrea’s constituents into a massive and dispersed distilling organization.

Jim Genna was the oldest and the leader of the clan. Pete started as a saloonkeeper on the Westside and was the master of operations in the business. Sam was the political connection, Angelo supplied the tough guy muscle, and Mike was the runt of the family, subordinate to the others. Tony was a self-styled aristocrat, working as an architect and living at the posh Congress Plaza Hotel on Michigan Avenue. He publicly disdained the criminal activities of his brothers, although when needed, he helped out in the family business as well, and in fact, he eventually gave his life for it.

The photo below shows the Genna family at the height of its power. From left to right, the men in the picture are Sam, Angelo, Pete, Tony, and Jim. Mike was likely the photographer.

The purpose of the Volstead Act, otherwise known as federal Prohibition, was to reduce alcohol consumption, which it did to a mild degree: a study of cirrhosis death rates indicates that alcohol consumption declined around 10-20% during the 1920s. At the same time, Volstead had a number of important unintended consequences, particularly for the way illegal alcohol was produced.

Since large distilleries would be difficult to keep hidden from law and revenue enforcement officials, and because a single raid on such an outfit could have a major impact on profits, the Gennas devised an ingenious method of dividing up their operations among thousands of small back-room stills. They offered $15 per day (a pittance of their profit, but roughly three times average unskilled labor earnings at the time) to each Sicilian family that would keep 50 gallons of corn sugar alcohol “cooking” in their home. Largely illiterate and impoverished, but accustomed to the home distilling process from life in the Old World, these families were more than willing to comply, and so all the streets of Little Italy reeked with the sweet smell of Genna mash. Through the inability to take advantage of the substantial economies of scale in distilling, Prohibition led to an enormous waste of societal resources, including the labor of thousands of immigrant Sicilians, drawn into the industry by the Gennas.

Prohibition also severely limited the ability of alcohol producers to brand and advertise their product and so build public reputations for quality. In doing so, it eliminated incentives for producers to engage in quality controls common in legal industries. Indeed, the Gennas’ product was disgusting and often deadly. Ordinarily, scotch and whisky achieve their amber hue and smooth flavor through a lengthy process of aging in wooden casks. Genna spirits, on the other hand, were no better than industrial quality, colored with food dye, and cut with glycerol in order to make it swallowable. Police raids in later years found dead rats and other impurities in the liquor barrels stored at the warehouse. These issues led to frequent alcohol poisonings, blindings, and deaths in Chicago that, in a legal market for booze, would have turned the Genna brand name to mud and scared customers away.

A third consequence of Prohibition was increased levels of violence as alcohol producers could no longer rely on the legal system to adjudicate disputes with employees, suppliers, and each other. The Gennas were among the most violent gangsters in Chicago history. In May, 1921, Angelo Genna was arrested for the murder of Paul Labriola, a supporter of Tony D’Andrea’s political rival. Twenty-five witnesses from the Club the Gennas later controlled as their headquarters testified that Angelo had been at the Club during the shooting. Moreover, on the last day of the trial, the state’s chief witness changed his story and claimed he had been paid to finger Angelo Genna as the killer. Genna went free.

Less than a year later, Angelo Genna was again arrested for murder, in this case of Paul Notte, in a long-running family feud. Notte named Angelo as his assassin with his dying words, but the testimony was thrown out of court when it was revealed that Notte was under the influence of medication at the time of his death. Again, Angelo went free.

He was not quite so lucky later in 1922, when he was arrested for threatening to kill Genevieve Court, a 15 year old girl who was prepared to testify in a Mann Act case against a Genna family associate, Henry Maltese, that Maltese had kidnapped her to Milwaukee and raped her before attempting to sell her into prostitution. Angelo Genna told Court that she and her family were marked for death if she testified. On the day of her testimony, Angelo sat in the gallery directly opposite the witness stand and gave her the famous Italian “Look,” reminding her of his threats. She recanted on the stand, but later admitted to police what Angelo had done. So fearsome was Angelo’s reputation that in this case, local officials refused to enter Little Italy to serve his arrest warrant. Federal marshals, however, did arrest Genna, and he was convicted and served one year at Leavenworth prison. Angelo Genna is pictured below:

Corruption of public officials was another inevitable consequence of Prohibition, and Genna headquarters was so frequently visited by police officers receiving bribes that it became jokingly known as “the police station.” The Gennas paid out over $8,000 per month in bribes to over 300 officers, mostly from the nearby Maxwell district stationhouse. After the Genna empire tumbled, police “raided” the headquarters and produced a few barrels of liquor for the press, but the true purpose of the raid was to destroy as much evidence of their graft as possible (and to steal and sell the rest of the booze in the warehouse).

By 1923, the Gennas' alky-cooking labor force had become the source for most of the distilled spirits sold by the Syndicate run by Johnny Torrio and Al Capone. Though neither Torrio nor Capone were Sicilians, they cultivated close ties with Mike Merlo, the president of the Unione Siciliana, a political and community organization widely trusted among Little Italy’s Sicilian populace.

One person upset by this partnership was Dion O’Banion, the leader of the Northside gang, which was nominally connected to – or at least at a truce with – Torrio and Capone. Like the Gennas, O’Banion’s gang specialized in spirits, and when the Gennas began selling on the Northside, the former alterboy-turned-singing waiter-turned-florist-turned-gangster O’Banion sought revenge.

“To Hell with the Sicilians,” he was heard to say, and he began hijacking trucks distributing Genna liquor. The Gennas probably would have killed O’Banion immediately, but Torrio and Merlo imposed peace for the sake of business interests and profit.

However, after O’Banion framed Johnny Torrio during the May, 1924 raid on Seiben Brewery, and after Mike Merlo died from natural causes on November 8, 1924, no one was left to shield the Northside Irishman from Sicilian vengeance. Two days after Merlo's death, on November 10, 1924, Mike Genna and two feared Sicilian hitmen, John Scalisi and Alberto Anselmi, killed Dion O’Banion in his flower shop on State St., starting a feud between the Northsiders and the Torrio-Capone Outfit that would last the rest of the decade, culminating in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

The end of the Genna empire came quickly and spectacularly. In May, 1925, Angelo Genna was shot while driving his car, sending him careening into a lamppost on Ogden Ave. One month later, in June, Mike Genna (pictured below) was in a car with Scalisi and Anselmi that ended up in a wild high-speed chase with police through the streets of the Southside. After the car carrying Genna crashed, a shootout took place which ended the lives of two police officers and Mike Genna. The next month, July, saw Tony Genna, the aristocratic architect, murdered on a Westside street corner. With their ranks thinned by 50%, the three remaining brothers quit the Chicago rackets and fled back to Italy.

The murders of Tony and Angelo, and the rationale for the battle that killed Mike, were never known with certainty. The most likely theory involves revenge attacks by O’Banion’s followers, who blamed the Gennas for their leader’s death. At trial, Scalisi and Anselmi, who survived the gunplay that killed Mike Genna, claimed they had been involved in a shootout with Northside gangsters “Schemer” Drucci and “Bugs” Moran earlier in the day; thus, they mistakenly believed the police cruiser tailing them was Drucci and Moran pursuing a continuation of the battle, and the shooting of the two police officers was thus self-defense (they also conveniently claimed the shooter was the dead man, Mike Genna).

An alternative theory is that the Gennas had become powerful and rich enough to do without Capone, and were planning a takeover of the Big Fellow’s operations. In this theory, Capone became aware of the plot and hired Scalisi and Anselmi to kill Angelo and Tony, and to take Mike Genna “for a ride,” which they were doing when they were surprised by the police, starting the shootout.

In any case, the “Terrible Genna” reign of terror in Chicago was over by the fall of 1925, although there were other gangsters only too happy to pick up where they had left off. Jim Genna (pictured below) continued his criminal behavior in Italy, serving two years in prison there for jewel theft. Later, he entered into respectable business, operating a vacuum repair shop in Rome. Pete and Sam lived the rest of their lives in anonymity.

Public outrage over the Gennas’ crimes, and the Sicilian community’s complicity, reinforced political attempts to limit Southern European immigration. Even the Tribune cited the example of the Gennas in a 1926 editorial, published during Scalisi and Anselmi’s trial, using rhetoric that just as easily could have come from commentators in some quarters today:

As long as this country permits the importation of murderers, so long will it make little progress in suppressing murder. The city and state officials are not chiefly to blame; the responsibility falls directly upon the federal government. The immigration laws are not enforced. The examination of prospective immigrants is not sufficiently rigid. The sifting process is bungled. The meshes are too large and the work is too hasty. Men whose criminal records might easily have been learned are permitted through carelessness or indifference to enter the country. If by chance a criminal is excluded at Ellis Island he is able without much difficulty to cross the border at another point. There are countrymen of his within the gates to give him a helping hand.

After Prohibition, the Genna headquarters building was converted into a hardware store owned by the Chiarugi family, which remained until the mid-1960s, when it was demolished in urban renewal efforts (the Chiarugis moved their shop a few blocks west, where it exists today). The spot holds a parking lot today. The Little Italy neighborhood, far from the impoverished slum it was only a few decades ago, is a desirable and gentrified town-and-gown neighborhood, home to many students and faculty from nearby University of Illinois at Chicago.

Al Capone Arrested for DWI

After growing up in the Italian slums of Red Hook, Brooklyn, Al Capone briefly worked as an accountant in Baltimore. But in 1921 when his old friend from New York, Johnny "The Fox" Torrio, called and offered him work in his Chicago crime syndicate, Capone jumped at the opportunity.

The advent of Prohibition created opportunities for enterprising and intelligent men to make a fortune in the underworld, and Capone was just that type of man. Upon his arrival in Chicago in 1921, the future gang leader was first tested by Torrio with street-level enforcement work at the Four Deuces and organization of a prostitution enterprise in Rogers' Park. But with his business acumen and willingness to employ violence, Capone quickly climbed the corporate ladder, and he became Torrio's closest business partner within a year.

It was at this point that Al Capone first came to the attention of the Chicago police department, when, intoxicated, he slammed one of Torrio's cars into a parked taxi cab at the corner of Randolph and Wabash, pictured above. The story in the Tribune, reprinted below in full, tells what happened next:

Capone was right. Torrio's "pull" within the police department, as evidenced by his phony sheriff's badge, kept Capone out of prison. Needless to say, if Capone had been sentenced for his DWI in 1922, the entire course of the 1920s in Chicago would have been different.

Antonio Lombardo Killed in the Loop

In 1925, Antonio Lombardo became president of the Chicago chapter of the Unione Siciliana, a community and political organization of immigrants. In those days, the presidency of that organization was one of the most profitable -- and dangerous -- jobs in the world, and danger caught up with Lombardo on September 7, 1928 near the corner of Madison and Dearborn Streets in one of the most spectacular mob hits of all time.

Tony Lombardo was born in Sicily in 1891, and came to Chicago as a teenager. He built a successful grocery business as a young man, and in so doing, elevated his political profile in the impoverished neighborhoods of his countrymen, including Little Sicily/Little Hell on the north side and the 19th ward on the west side. Lombardo was an associate of the "Terrible" Genna family, which controlled the dispersed network of home distilleries, mostly operated by Sicilians, which supplied the Johnny Torrio – Al Capone syndicate with product during the Prohibition years. Lombardo's wholesale grocery had the lucrative position of supplying bulk sugar (one of the main ingredients in home “alky-cooking” for the Genna network.

(Pictured: Antonio Lombardo)

Lombardo’s partners in the grocery business included Joseph Ferraro and Joseph Aiello. Aiello, one of a large family of brothers that ran a bakery and a candy shop in Little Sicily, was particularly ambitious in growing the enterprise. Lombardo and Aiello operated a major wholesaling operation on Randolph Street near Aberdeen, of which Lombardo made Aiello president.

In 1926, the two, along with Ferraro, purchased land on Kinzie St., between Halsted and Green streets from an old steel yard, intending to open a fruit market. By that time, Lombardo was known as a major figure in the underground liquor trade, having been recently involved in a high-profile case involving abuse of licenses granted to synagogues for sacramental wine. The Tribune reporter included a wink and a nod in the story noting the real estate transfer:

A wholesale fruit market, with an accent on grapes (what does this mean, Watson?), is to be opened by Giuseppi Aiello, Antonio Lombardo and Joseph Ferrara, on an irregular shaped piece of property fronting seventy-six feet on Halsted street, 125 feet on Green street, 252 feet on Kinzie street and 252 feet on a paved court.

The three bought the property, which is now covered by the Kennedy Expressway, for $176,799, with a down payment of $45,000. It was shortly after this that Aiello and Lombardo fell out over Aiello's ambitions for greater control in the business (later, a lien would be placed on the property when Aiello failed to pay his share of the mortgage). Aiello also coveted the presidency of the Unione Siciliana, a position Lombardo held at that time.

(Pictured: Letterhead for Lombardo grocery concern on Randolph St., with Aiello listed as president)

The death of Unione president Mike Merlo in 1924 led to the assassination of Dion O’Banion, likely at the orders of Capone and Torrio, and in the subsequent bloodshed, the city’s bootlegging business was divied between rival gangs, with Capone and Torrio controlling the south side and Cicero, and O’Banion’s followers “Hymie” Weiss, George “Bugs” Moran, and Vincent “Schemer” Drucci taking hold of the north side. Lombardo and the Gennas worked with the Torrio-Capone syndicate, with Angelo Genna succeeding Merlo to the presidency of the Unione.

When Angelo Genna was killed in 1925, Sam “Samoots” Amatuna became president of the Unione, but only for a brief period before he, too, was assassinated. Then, it was Lombardo who became “Don” to the city’s Sicilian population. The presidency of the Unione Siciliana, which claimed 15,000 members, involved substantial political influence over an important voting bloc, and so it created the opportunity for the one who held that position to become a “fixer” with connections in city hall. Control of the Unione was thus highly important for the Capone bootlegging business, which relied not only on the network of Sicilian amateur distillers which pledged their loyalty to the Unione president, but also on Unione-connected politicians and police officers to look the other way, or even work proactively against competitors. The Unione presidency was also an position of great community esteem, prominent in resolving disputes and feuds among Sicilians, including “Black Hand” extortion plots, which were especially problematic at that time. Thus, Lombardo was a real-life Chicago version of Vito Corleone.

However, the connection between the Unione and organized crime had become fixed in the public’s mind, and Lombardo sought to change this impression by renaming the Chicago chapter as the "Italo-American National Union" and allowing non-Sicilian Italians to join. The name change angered some, including the president of the New York branch of the Unione, powerful mobster Frankie Uale.

The Italo-American National Union also contributed prominently to charities, including, for example, hurricane relief in Florida in 1926. It attempted to raise its profile as a leading civic organization by inviting important Italian politicians to Chicago. At the time, Benito Mussolini had recently consolidated control of that country, and so Lombardo brought Mussolini’s U.S. ambassador to Chicago for a prominent series of speeches promoting fascism:

God sent Benito Mussolini to an imperiled Italy and did, thereby, a service to all the world, Baron Giacomo de Martino, Il Duce's ambassador to this country, yesterday declared three times during the first day of his three day visit to Chicago. And three times yesterday groups of the ambassador's countrymen, once at the Italian Chamber of Commerce luncheon at the Drake, again at the Italo-American union massmeeting at the Coliseum, and last at the union's dinner at the Palmer house -- jumped to their feet and cheered mightily as they shot out their right arms in the Roman salute of Fascism.

After his falling out with Lombardo, Joseph Aiello allied himself with the Northsiders, Weiss, Moran, and Drucci. Aiello knew that, with control of the Unione, the North side gang could take control over the entire Chicago alcohol business, and reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. He also coveted the social standing that Lombardo held in the Sicilian community, and the jealousy made him murderous.

In one instance, Aiello allegedly offered $35,000 to a chef to poison Lombardo and Capone. In another case, he offered Torrio-Capone ally Ralph Sheldon $50,000 for each of the heads of Capone and Lombardo. Capone offered peace to the north side gang by offering to divide the city along Madison street, which led to a brief ceasefire, but before long, Aiello’s ambitions on the Unione presidency, and Lombardo’s ruthlessness in maintaining it, led to more bloodshed.

Early in 1927, police uncovered a stash of weapons and ammunition in a sniper nest across the street from Lombardo’s home on W. Washington St., near Cicero Ave., and a similar one at the Atlantic hotel, across from Alderman Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna’s post-Volstead headquarters on Clark St., where Capone and Lombardo were frequent visitors. When Lombardo realized the extent of Aiello’s bloodlust, he moved his family out to a more easily guarded single-family home on S. Austin Blvd. in Cicero. But he knew that eventually either he or Aiello would meet an early grave.

After the discovery of Aiello’s weapons caches, the police arrested him on weapons charges and placed him in a cell at detective headquarters. In the adjoining cell they placed three Capone gunmen who had also been caught with illegal weapons while searching for Aiello, and a police officer who spoke Italian hid nearby, listening in on the conversation. The officer’s report refers to Capone’s frequent alias, Al Brown:

"Can't we settle this thing?" Aiello then pleaded with the trio. "Give me fifteen days, just fifteen days, and I will sell my stores and my house, and leave everything in your hands. Think of my wife and my baby, and let me go."

The Brown [Capone] gangsters gazed at their subdued foe scornfully and replied, according to the listening policeman:

"You dirty rat, you started this thing. We'll end it. You're as good as dead now."

Nevertheless, Aiello did manage to escape after the incident, and fled to New York, where he remained for a year, no doubt spending plenty of time commiserating with Frankie Uale about their shared dislike for Lombardo.

With Aiello out of town, Lombardo relaxed his guard, and even helped Capone go on the offensive. When, in November, 1927, the gang discovered north side gambling operations on Monroe St., two blocks south of the Madison Street border, bomb explosions there served as a "final warning." When questioned by a reporter about the bombings, Lombardo replied:

"Me, a bomber? Go to the people who know me best. Ask the Italians of Chicago if I am a bomber. Find one of them who will say I am a criminal. You can't do it."

It’s unclear whether this was supposed to be exculpatory, or simply a statement of Lombardo’s absolute power in the Sicilian community.

(Pictured: Antonio Lombardo)

By 1928, Joseph Aiello was back in Chicago, and again plotting a takeover of the Unione Siciliana. Lombardo still stood in his way, but not for long. On September 7, 1928, at 4:30 p.m., Lombardo, his long-time business partner Joseph Ferrara, and a bodyguard, Joseph Lolordo, stepped out of the offices of the Italo-American National Union in the Hartford Building at 8 S. Dearborn St. They walked north towards the corner of Madison St., where a large crowd had gathered. Across the street at the Boston dry goods store, an airplane was being dragged up the side of the building up to the 11th floor by ropes, and into a window, for a store promotion. Practically everyone on the scene was focused on the unusual sight -- everyone except two mysterious men from out of town, dressed in dark gray suits.

50 feet west of Dearborn, on the south side of Madison st., at the corner of the Hartford building, and just in front of a Greek restaurant, Tony Lombardo turned to his bodyguard.

“Look at the airplane,” he pointed across the street.

At that moment, the two men in gray appeared out of the doorway of the Greek restaurant, ran up behind Lombardo, and unloaded their revolvers into the Unione president’s head, also shooting Ferrara in the back, before dropping their guns at the scene and running east on Madison. Lombardo’s bodyguard, Joe Lolordo, took off running after them, while the panicked crowd of bystanders scattered.

Gunmen and policemen ran here and there with waving guns, men and women in the crowded street jumped first one way and then another, wondering from which direction the next bullet might come. People in stores ran out, then ran back in. Which way safety lay they could only guess.

A police officer tackled Lolordo, thinking he was one of the assassins, while the real assassins ducked into a nearby shoe store, exiting out the back and escaping the chase. Antonio Lombardo, president of the city’s largest Italian group and a major underworld figure, died on the street, shot to death in broad daylight in front of thousands of witnesses at one of the city’s busiest intersections. In the photo at the top of this post, the spot of the shooting is on the sidewalk, roughly at the right-hand end of the wooden scaffolding.

(Pictured: scene on the street at the site of Lombardo's shooting)

A week later, Ferrara also died of his wounds. Following underworld protocol, he refused to cooperate in the police investigation of the shooting before his decease, but based on identification by another eyewitness, Frank Marco, a New York hoodlum and a known acquaintance of Aiello’s, was charged with the crime. Marco wasn’t located, however, until his bullet-riddled body was found on E. 19th street in New York City in February, 1930. No one else was ever charged with the crime, but everyone assumed the hit must have been ordered by Aiello, possibly with the assistance of Frankie Uale’s gunmen from New York.

After Lombardo’s death, his bodyguard's brother, Pasqualino Lolordo, took over the presidency of the Unione, until Lolordo, too, was shot and killed at his home in January, 1929. According to most sources, Aiello finally did become president of the Unione Siciliana for about a year while Capone was in prison in Philadelphia on weapons charges. But when Capone returned to Chicago in 1930, Aiello made plans to flee the country; however, a sniper's bullet found him first.

The Hartford building, where Tony Lombardo’s Unione Siciliana headquarters were on the 11 floor, and in front of which he was killed, was built in 1893. Standing at 14 stories, it was one of the city’s tallest. It was destroyed, along with all other buildings on the same block, in 1965 to make way for the First National Bank Building, now called Chase Tower.

Colosimo's First Brothel

"Big Jim" James Colosimo started his first brothel at this location, 2001 S. Archer, known as "The New Brighton". Interestingly, at around the same time, Paul Kelly, the famed leader of New York City's Five Points gang, also opened his headquarters on the Lower East Side under the same name. Both men began long-lived criminal empires: the Five Pointers were later absorbed into the New York mafia, while Colosimo founded the Chicago Outfit, which would continue major crime operations in Chicago, Florida, and Las Vegas through the 1970s and into the 1980s.

Big Jim's career began in 1897, when he found a job working as a street sweeper, cleaning horse manure out of the alleys in pre-automobile Chicago. He quickly moved up from this lowly job to alley inspector in 1901, a position that gave him substantial ability to extort business and home owners. He also began unionizing the street sweepers, working together with Italian political power Tony D'Andrea and "Dago Mike" Carrozzo to create a powerful voting block of immigrant voters who could be purchased for the right price.

Colosimo had always dabbled in the underworld, working briefly in the business of writing Black Hand extortion letters, and pimping a group of streetwalkers in the old Custom House Place red light district. By 1902, however, he had left low-level criminality behind and was charting a path to becoming the city's first king of vice. He opened a pool room with gambling apparatus, renting space above one of "Mushmouth" Johnson's later resorts, the Frontenac, on 22nd and Dearborn. He also met and married a young madam in the Levee named Victoria Morseco.

Moresco grew up in the Northside Italian conclave known as Little Hell or Little Sicily, but as a teenager became involved in prostitution, and rose quickly to the position of madam at the brothel at 2001 S. Archer. In 1902, at age 20, she married Colosimo, who was three years her elder, and taught him the business of running a "disorderly hotel". He quickly took over the management of his wife's brothel, renaming it "The New Brighton".

Later, he opened a second brothel next door on Armour, which he named in honor of his wife, who operated the business for the remaining years of their marriage, "The Victoria" (Armour Ave. was vacated south of 20th St. to make way for the Hilliard Towers housing project in the 1960s; also, the rest of Armour was renamed Federal Street). He also opened a restaurant, the Brighton Cafe, on the first floor of the New Brighton.

By 1909, Colosimo had convinced Johnny Torrio (coincidentally, a member of Paul Kelly's gang) to move to Chicago from New York and take charge of his prostitution operations, headquartered at the New Brighton. Upon Colosimo's death in 1920, Torrio took over the entire organization, leading it into the Prohibition era.

Thus, it was Torrio who was cited as the proprietor for the New Brighton in 1914, when Chicago mayor Carter Harrison, Jr., was finally forced by public acclaim into closing down the Levee, and on May 30, 1914, the New Brighton's business license was revoked. The Tribune noted that Harrison's reason for shutting down the brothel "was not so much the activities of women as the character of the man habitues," an indication that the New Brighton was no peer of the Everleigh Club in class or amenities.

Through Colosimo's deep influence with aldermen Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna and "Bathhouse" John Coughlin, he was finally able to reopen the New Brighton, though most of his other gambling houses, drug dens, and brothels were closed as public pressure on the police forced the end of open vice in Chicago, forcing him to expand further into the suburbs, a process which Torrio and Al Capone continued in the 1920s.

The spot where the New Brighton stood -- and where most of the major Levee institutions stood -- has been completely vacated and turned into parkland surrounding the Hilliard Towers apartment buildings.

Victoria Moresco's Childhood Home

Victoria Moresco was born in Italy, one of eighteen children, and came to New York with her family in the 1880s, but eventually settling in Chicago in 1891. She became wife to "Big" Jim Colosimo, taught him the prostitution racket, and their stormy relationship may have been the cause of his death.

When the Moresco family arrived in Chicago, they settled at 526 Division St., around the location of Mother's Original Night Club, pictured here. At the time, the area was a majority Italian slum known as "Little Hell" for the myriad crimes that took place here. Dion O'Banion was another product of Little Hell.

After Victoria (or "Vittoria" as the newspapers sometimes called her) became an adult, she moved to the Southside and opened a small brothel in the 22nd St. Levee. In 1902, she married a fellow Italian immigrant with ambition in criminal enterprises, Big Jim Colosimo. Together, they reigned over the vice district, and Victoria was in charge of running the couple's several large mid-price brothels.

In his latter days, Big Jim fell in love with a cabaret singer from his cafe, Dale Winter. After an acrimonious divorce, he left Victoria, and she moved west to Los Angeles, where she became involved with, and eventually married, Antonio Villiano. Victoria lived in Los Angeles until her death in 1964.

At the time of Colosimo's murder in 1920, only a short time after the divorce, Victoria (or possibly Villiano or one of Victoria's brothers) were considered prime suspects, but no evidence ever surfaced against them. Colosimo's murder has never been solved, but the most likely theory is that Johnny Torrio, Colosimo's second-in-command, was unsatisfied with his boss' personal life (Torrio was a strict Roman Catholic and disapproved of divorce), and especially with the way it was distracting Colosimo from the business the two men ran. Torrio may have hired Frankie Yale or another New York-based hitman to come to Chicago to take down Colosimo, allowing Torrio to take command of the organization.

Capone's Cicero Headquarters

Al Capone's Chicago headquarters were the Four Deuces, the Metropole Hotel, and later, the Lexington Hotel. But in Cicero, the town his syndicate owned, from the Mayor to the streetsweepers, business was chiefly transacted at the Hawthorne Inn, at 4833 W. 22nd Street.

After Capone's violent takeover of the town of Cicero in the election of 1924, he set up shop at the Hawthorne, fitting it with bullet-proof shutters and surrounding every entrance with battalions of armed guards. This was the true city hall in Cicero, the center of power, and when orders emerged from the Hawthorne Inn, even the mayor, Joseph Z. Klenha, jumped.

It was at the Hawthorne that Dion O'Banion began his double-crossing scheme, telling Capone and Johnny Torrio that he planned to leave the bootlegging game for greener pastures out West, leading to Torrio's arrest at Sieben Brewery, O'Banion's assassination, and Torrio's brush with death.

Having failed to kill Torrio, O'Banion's henchmen attempted to avenge their slain leader's life with a direct frontal attack on the Hawthorne Inn on September 20, 1926. On that date, Al Capone was eating lunch on the first floor of the Hawthorne. At 1:15 p.m., the sound of machine gun fire echoed through the restaurant, sending the waiters and patrons running out the back. Capone and his bodyguard hit the deck as a car passed by and the sound of bullets intensified.

Once the gunfire ceased, Capone arose unharmed and ran to the door, ready to get a good look at his assailants. Suddenly he noticed something odd: despite hundreds of bullets, not a thing was broken in the restaurant. The apparent drive-by shooting was a decoy, and only blanks had been fired, in an attempt to draw Capone out of the restaurant to his death. With this sudden realization, Capone's bodyguard tackled him, just as a caravan of seven Lincolns, headed by Schemer Drucci, Bugs Moran, and Hymie Weiss, passed by the Hawthorne, practically razing the hotel with machine gun fire. Almost 1000 shots were fired into the establishment, but again the Northsiders were frustrated: not one person, and certainly not Capone, was killed.

In retaliation, Capone ordered the hit on Hymie Weiss at O'Banion's flower shop, and the cycle of violence between the Capone Outfit and the North side gang continued to intensify.

The Hawthorne Inn remained open until 1970, and during much of that time, it remained a mob hangout. Today, the location is the parking lot for a bank.

Johnny Torrio and Al Capone's Accounts Receivable Department

The Torrio-Capone Outfit could have been entirely rolled up in 1924, if not for some behind-the-scenes legal wrangling and judicial payoffs.

After Chicago mayor William "Decent" Dever, the "dry" Democrat, shut down Capone's headquarters at the Four Deuces, the gang moved all their accounting operations to the second floor of a nondescript brick shopping center on the northwest corner of 22nd and Michigan, at 2146 S. Michigan. The photo above shows the location today (taken from the perspective of Michigan Ave.); see below for a newspaper photo of the scene at the time of Capone's residence (taken from the perspective of 22nd St.).

The shopping center was busy most of the time, and featured restaurants, offices, and dry goods, so for awhile, no one noticed the unusual activities in the physician's office on the second floor, where hung a sign reading "Dr. Frank Ryan" (some accounts claim the sign used Capone's favorite pseudonym, A. Brown, but this seems unlikely, given the gang's expertise at discretion) . A peak inside Dr. Ryan's office revealed an ordinary waiting room, furnished with various vials of medicines.

But beyond the waiting room were file cabinets upon file cabinets, containing the gang's accounts receivable records. There, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik, the Outfit's chief accountant, kept ledgers detailing the assets, income and trade secrets of the largest bootlegging and prostitution ring in the world.

When Chicago police raided the doctor's office in April, 1924, and arrested Guzik, Frank Nitti, and Johnny Patton (the latter two were top lieutenants in the gang), they found ledgers showing major beer customers, locations of all speakeasies under Torrio-Capone control, details of the gang's liquor supply chain from Canada and the Carribean, corporate control documents for breweries owned and operated, and detailed T-charts for the suburban brothels in Stickney and Burnham. Embarrassingly, they also uncovered a list of police officers and federal agents receiving hush money.

The incredible findings were enough to shut down Torrio and Capone for good. As Mayor Dever told the newspapers, "We've got the goods now." Not only Chicago and Cook County authorities, but the Bureau of Investigation and the IRS in Washington prepared to examine the seized documents. William McSwiggin, the county attorney, was ready to empanel a grand jury.

Capone's men worked furiously behind the scenes. In Judge Howard Hayes, they found their man. Shortly after the raid, he summoned all seized records to his courtroom. The following day, without notifying McSwiggin, he returned all of these documents to Capone's attorneys, on the basis that the police had no search warrant for the accounting records, only for illegal liquor. A few weeks later, he dismissed all charges against the arrested men.

McSwiggin and the feds were infuriated at being outmaneuvered by Capone and undercut by Judge Hayes, but Capone remained a free man until 1931. After the raid, he relocated his headquarters to the Hotel Metropole across 22nd street.

Capone's Chicago Headquarters

Johnny Torrio, the second great gang leader of Chicago, ran a tough dive called The Four Deuces, located where this empty lot now stands, at 2222 S. Wabash. After taking over leadership from "Big Jim" Colosimo, Torrio consolidated prostitution, gambling, and liquor operations throughout the city. He also hired a young Brooklyn-born gangster named Alphonse Capone, who had recently arrived in Chicago. Torrio himself was from Brooklyn, and had known Capone when the latter was a boy. Thus, he trusted "Scarface" to run some of his cribs and collect protection money. So effective and brutal was Capone's reputation on the streets of Chicago, that he was quickly elevated to the post of manager of the Four Deuces, and this remained Capone's headquarters after Torrio left Chicago.

In 1924, Capone moved his headquarters a few blocks west to the luxurious Hotel Metropole at 2300 S. Michigan, currently being developed as a condominium, where Capone's gang controlled two floors and sixty hotel rooms, patrolled at all times by heavily-armed gunmen. The basement of the Hotel held $150,000 worth of wine and liquor at the height of national Prohibition.

The site of the Metropole is currently being redeveloped as a condominium.

O'Banion's Flower Shop

The first great North side gangster was Dion O'Banion, who ruled from this location at 736 N. State St.

O'Banion was the Renaissance man of crime, a professional singer who was a talented pickpocket and safe-cracker. But the great love of O'Banion's life was floral arrangement, for which he had a passion and talent. In the halcyon days of gangland, it was customary to send flowers to the funeral of a man you shot, and O'Banion supplied the goods for most of the underworld's needs. In was at his flower shop that he ran his gang, and it was at the flower shop, while working late at night on arrangements needed for the next morning, that he was assassinated by Mike Genna, and the famous assassins, Scalisi and Anselmi, in November, 1924., at the behest -- or at least with the indifference of -- Al Capone and Johnny Torrio. O'Banion was Torrio's North Side operative, but was restless and eventually betrayed Torrio to the police in an elaborate scheme. It was O'Banion who coined the famous gangland phrase, "To Hell with the Sicilians." Men like O'Banion did not last long in those days. After his death, O'Banion's gang was later led by Bugs Moran, who moved the headquarters north to a garage on N. Clark Street, the site of the famous St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Despite the value of this property, located in Chicago's Gold Coast just two blocks from the tourist meccas of N. Michigan Ave., the location of O'Banion's flower shop is a strangely nearly empty block which serves largely as a parking lot for the Holy Name Cathedral, the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in Chicago, which was built in 1874. O'Banion had served in this church as a choir boy, and due to his infamy, the rector refused to allow his funeral service to be held there.

138 Years of Murder in Chicago

Unlike other posts on this site, this one focuses not on a single crime scene or an historical account of one or two individuals, but instead summarizes the facts on over a century of murder in Chicago. One of the main purposes of this blog is to understand Chicago's historic and modern reputation for crime, and comparisons over time can be illuminating.

The figure above shows the city's murder rate, expressed as murders per 100,000 residents, between 1870 and 2008. This gives a long-run summary view of homicide in Chicago over the last 138 years. I focus here on murder because, unlike rape, larceny, and other crimes, the likelihood of unreported victims is less severe with murder. The cops will eventually notice every corpse lying in the street, although it is true that some "accidental" deaths may actually have been murders, and some bodies are never found.

Data from 1931 to the present is drawn from the FBI's annual Crime in the United States, and is based on reports from local police agencies. Figures from 1870 - 1930 are based on Chicago police department data processed by Homicide in Chicago, a project hosted at Northwestern University School of Law. All figures include both murders and non-negligent manslaughter.

Between 1870 and 1920, Chicago's crime rate grew at an essentially steady pace, reaching a peak of 10 per 100,000 in 1919. During this period, Chicago was growing in population and density. High population density is typically associated with greater crime rates for several reasons. First, in small towns, every face is familiar, but in large cities, criminals are less likely to be recognized by witnesses. Realizing a lower likelihood of being caught, criminals commit more crimes. Second, crime pays better in cities, because there are more people to rob -- there's no point in becoming a robber in the first place if you can't hit lots of targets. Finally, and especially relevant to Chicago during this period, big cities attract large communities of poor immigrants with few prospects for legal employment. Criminal, on the other hand, is a profession open to all.

With the onset of national Prohibition in 1919, many of these immigrants gained lucrative employment in the bootlegging field, and for the first few years of the 1920s, at least, murder rates fell by nearly 50%. But as the various parts of Johnny Torrio's syndicate began falling apart in 1924, culminating in the murder of Torrio's north side associate Dion O'Banion, likely at the hand of his south side associates, the Genna brothers, Chicago's "Beer Wars" began, and the murder rate skyrocketed by 250% between 1923 and 1928. Also around the same time, the notoriously-violent Al Capone took over full control of Torrio's organization in 1925.

Even as Prohibition ended in 1931, murder rates remained high throughout the early 1930s, the worst years of the Great Depression, before falling below 5 per 100,000 in 1943. No doubt the massive mobilization of American men out of Chicago and into military companies in army barracks and overseas locations played no small role in the low murder rates of the early 1940s -- men have traditionally constituted the vast majority of both murderers and murder victims.

After WWII, Chicago's murder rate again began to climb as the city continued growing in size until around 1950. The city's demographics also changed during this period, as increasing automobile ownership and better highways allowed families seeking larger homes to commute from the suburbs, while younger cohorts without children remained in the city (most murderers are drawn from the ranks of 17-24 year olds).

Between 1943 and 1965, Chicago's murder rate rose at a roughly constant rate, increasing by 1 per 100,000 about every three years. However, between 1965 and 1970, the murder rate rose much more dramatically, increasing from 11 per 100,000 in 1965 to 24 per 100,000 in 1970.

Why did the murder rate rise so quickly in the late 1960s? Some point to stricter standards for policing and stronger rights for accused criminals during this period, symbolized by the Miranda case in 1966, in which the Supreme Court ruled that the police must inform arrested persons of their rights before interrogating them. Criminals facing a lower probability of punishment rationally commit more crimes.

There is also some evidence that the generation born after World War II had substantially poorer family formation rates, with an increasing share of children growing up in single-parent households. As I've written elsewhere, as these children reached their late teens and early adulthood -- when offense rates are highest -- in the late 1960s, the quantity of violent crime rose proportionately.

Another potential factor in the growth of crime during this era was the changing consumption patterns and legal status of drugs. The use of heroin and psychodelic drugs increased during the 1960s as production and transportation costs fell, and these drugs also become especially popular among enlisted men and counterculture communities. The pharmacological effects of increased drug consumption -- at least among the class of drugs popular during this period -- on violence are debatable. However, increased usage also led to substantially greater levels of enforcement. Federal prohibition on heroin stretches back to the 1910s, but LSD only became illegal in 1966. Arrests for drug crimes, which were exceptionally rare before 1965, skyrocketed afterwards. With prohibition comes incentives for violence between customers, dealers, and suppliers, who can no longer depend on the courts and police to enforce contracts and mitigate violence.

The war on drugs continued through the 1970s and 1980s. Especially prominent as a source of crime is the arrival of crack cocaine in the mid-1980s. Crack was an immediately and immensely popular drug, and its arrival in Chicago kicked off massive and bloody turf wars among rival drug-selling organizations (primarily street gangs) for control of retailing markets in the city.

While crack consumption has not waned much since the 1980s, boundaries between rival sellers have largely been settled. Thus, the end of the "crack epidemic" coincided with big declines in Chicago's murder rate. In the mid-1990s, the murder rate in Chicago (and nationwide) fell dramatically, declining below 50% of its 1992 peak by 2004. Besides the end of the crack epidemic, there are potentially several causes for this remarkable turnaround.

In other cities, such as New York, declines in crime have been attributed to substantial increases in the number of police on the street and to creative policing strategies. Chicago, however, saw little change in the size of its police force, and "broken windows" and other techniques were slow in gaining acceptance at the CPD, although greater efforts towards community engagement, such as the CAPS program, did begin in the early 1990s.

Imprisonment rates also increased during this period, with Illinois holding 27,516 prisoners in 1990 and 45,281 in 2000. With more criminals behind bars, there are fewer on the street committing crime. In addition, an increased likelihood of a lengthy prison sentence likely deters some would-be criminals.

Finally, and most controversially, some researchers have recently pointed to the role of legalized abortion in the evident decline in crime during the 1990s. While some states legalized abortion procedures before 1973, Illinois and most other states saw legalization after the Supreme Court's famous Roe v. Wade decision that year. A large share of women seeking abortions do so because they feel unprepared to raise a child -- and no doubt many of them in fact are poorly prepared for motherhood. After the legalization of abortion, this theory argues, many children, who would have been raised in high-risk environments, were never born. This "missing cohort" would have reached their late teens and early 20s during the early 1990s; thus, the decline in murder rates in the 1990s may be partially due to the fact that many would-be murderers were never born.

The statistical evidence regarding this theory is controversial and, in many places, contradictory. Nevertheless, it is difficult to doubt that at least some of the decline in Chicago's murder rate during the 1990s is due to legalized abortion.

By 2008, Chicago's murder rate was 18.03 per 100,000, roughly the same as it was in 1967. Nevertheless, the city's rate is substantially higher than some other large cities, including New York City (6.3 per 100,000) and Los Angeles (10.0 per 100,000). On the other hand, Chicago is relatively safe compared with Philadelphia (23.0 per 100,000), Detroit (33.8 per 100,000), and Gary, Indiana (73.2 per 100,000).

Colosimo's Home

James "Big Jim" Colosimo was the first great Chicago mobster, considered by many to be the founder of "the Outfit." He lived in a large home at this location, 3156 S. Vernon.

Born in Italy, Colosimo came to Chicago as a teenager and, in 1897, became a sweeper with the "white wings," a city-funded group that cleaned manure out of the streets. Big Jim was a natural leader and soon organized the streetsweepers union. He parlayed that job into political power, which he used to become the city's king of vice for over 20 years.

Colosimo married into the vice business, his wife Victoria being a brothel owner, and together with Maurice Van Bever, the gang ran a profitable white slavery ring in the 1910s and 1920s. Van Bever was imprisoned in 1909. Together with the Mona Marshall case, Van Bever's trial brought public opinion to bear on interstate prostitution traffic, leading to the passage of the Mann Act in1910. Van Bever's absence opened up a top position in the gang for Johnny Torrio, who at that time was in charge of Colosimo's biggest brothel, the Saratoga. It was Torrio who later brought Al Capone to Chicago to help him run the gang after Colosimo's death.

Colosimo's house was not far from his chief place of business, Colosimo's Cafe, which for many years before and after Big Jim's death, was a place to be seen for the city's power elite. It was to this home that Colosimo brought his second wife, the beautiful young singer and actress Dale Winter, whom he loved dearly and hoped to retire with from the vice trade. Unfortunately for Big Jim, he died within a month of his marriage, shot by an assassin, most likely Frankie Yale, working on behalf of his friend and Colosimo's protege, Johnny Torrio.

The site of Colosimo's home is now a quiet South side park.

Al Capone Murders Joe Howard

Al Capone arrived in Chicago in 1921, working as a street-level thug for Johnny Torrio. Capone's business acumen led to quick promotion through the ranks of the gang. His capacity for violence didn't hurt either. An incident that occurred here, at 2300 S. Wabash, on May 7, 1923, proved early on Capone's willingness to employ the gun. The following day's Tribune reported:

Another murder in the liquor and crime serial was accomplished last night. Alphonse Capone, vice lord of the south side bad lands where he is better known as Al Brown of "Four Deuces" fame, is sought as the slayer.

The order to capture Capone went out thirty minutes after the body of Joseph L. Howard, beer runner and burglar, credited with three notches on his gun, was found lying in front of the cigar counter of "Hymie" Jacobs' saloon at 2300 Wabash avenue. Howard had been shot six times, four times in the face and twice in the right shoulder.

Howard was a low-level neighborhood hoodlum, and after one too many drinks, became involved in a physical altercation with a leading Torrio-Capone associate, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik. When Guzik told Capone about the confrontation, Big Al hunted Howard down at Hymie Jacobs' bar, just a half-block from Capone's Chicago headquarters at the Four Deuces. When Capone arrived, he demanded an apology from Howard, and Howard replied by calling Al Capone a pimp -- a moniker he despised (though it was true). Thus, Capone's rage and violence.

After the command to find Capone went out, the police immediately checked the Four Deuces and Capone's home on Prairie Ave., with no success. Capone went into hiding for a month (probably in Cicero), while sending word through his lieutenants that any witnesses with loose lips had better think twice before talking to the police. In fact, though there were several eye witnesses in the saloon who say the murder, strangely it seemed that everyone just happened to be looking away at the exact moment of the killing.

"I'll bet 50 cents Al Brown didn't kill him, and I'll bet $50 they never convict him of the murder," was the word on the street.

Eventually, realizing the coast was clear, Capone walked into the police station one day, saying, "I hear you're looking for me. What's this all about?" A young assistant state's attorney, William McSwiggin, continued the investigation earnestly for a few more months, but was never able to put together enough evidence to prove Capone's involvement. A couple of years later, in 1926, McSwiggin himself met his end at the hands of Capone's henchmen, though accidentally, it seems.

Nevertheless, even years later, in 1931, Capone feared he might be prosecuted for the Howard murder, and sent Louis "Little New York" Campagna to "take care of" any remaining witnesses. But by that time, tax evasion was the more pressing problem for Big Al, and it doesn't seem that anything came of the order.

Interestingly, this wasn't even the first gangland murder to take place at this address. In 1913, Jimmie Kelly (nee James Fletcher -- for a time in the early 20th century, it was common for gangsters to change their names to sound more Irish) was found murdered in a hallway in the residence above the bar. Kelly was the leader of the Archer Avenue Gang, and was killed by rival gangsters.

The building that housed Hymie Jacobs' bar remained until the 1960s, when it was demolished. The lot currently serves as an industrial storage yard.

Colosimo's Cafe

"Big Jim" Colosimo, the first of the great Chicago gangsters, operated a cafe here on the west side of Wabash Ave., between 21st and 22nd streets. Big Jim ruled the underworld for longer than any other single man, including Al Capone, from the mid 1890s until his death in 1920. He owned two brothels and was known to operate a white slavery ring, kidnapping women and forcing them into prostitution. The ring was associated commercially with similar rings in New York, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, and is thought to have imported over 200 girls into Chicago, selling them for between $10 and $150 to Levee brothels. His cafe was the recognized social and political power center of the Levee, where aldermen, vice lords, and other powerful community members met and divvied out the spoils of the "contributions" made by First Ward business owners for protection.

It was Colosimo who invited Johnny Torrio, a gangster from Brooklyn, to come to Chicago and join his enterprise, in 1908. On May 11, 1920, Colosimo was assassinated here at his Cafe. The crime was never solved, but many believe Torrio ordered the hit in order to consolidate power over Colosimo's gang, in which he had risen to be the number two man. Frankie Yale, an associate of Torrio's from New York and head of the Unione Siciliane there, is the most likely gunman.

After Colosimo's death, his heirs sold their interest in the cafe to the restaurant manager, Michael Potson, who continued to run the restaurant successfully into the 1940s, when he was first sued by the famous comedy duo, Abbott and Costello over a gambling dispute, then indicted for gambling by the FBI. The cafe was seriously damaged in a fire during 1953, after which a Church of Divine Science congregation renovated the building and held services for several years, until 1958. In that year, the city condemned the property and destroyed it.

Today, the location of Colosimo's Cafe is occupied by "Tommy Gun's Garage," a gangster-themed restaurant and show where you can order "Big Jim's Lasagna" as an entree.

Black Hand Gang Eliminated -- by Johnny Torrio?

Late in the evening on November 22, 1911, three men were shot in the Rock Island Railroad underpass at Archer Street. Two died at the scene, the other was seriously injured and sent to the hospital. Why? There appear to be two theories.

The dead men were Pasquale Damico and Francisco Denello. According to the next day's Tribune, Damico was shot at close range nine times in the back, while Francisco Denello was shot twice, once in the head and the other through his left side. Denello's brother, Stephano, who was also shot, was discovered by a policeman dragging himself down the sidewalk a block away, and rushed to the hospital.

Under police questioning, Stephano refused to reveal any clues about his attackers. He did, however, ask that Levee big shot and Chicago Outfit founder "Big" Jim Colosimo be brought to his bedside. When Colosimo showed up, however, Stephano refused to talk with him.

Police identified the Damico and the Denellos as a Black Hand gang, sending extortion threats to prominent Italian businessmen in the neighborhood. The police captain interviewed by the Tribune said,

The city is rid of a bad gang. It is my belief that the three men were lured to the scene of the shooting by men whom they have blackmailed or were attempting to obtain money from through Black Hand letters. The Denello brothers and Damico have done most of the black hand work in this police district. We have known for a long time that they were black handers, but it has been impossible to get their victims to rap against them. Fear of death has kept them from giving the police information that might have sent the gang to the penitentiary.

As an important Italian businessmen, Colosimo was likely the frequent target of Black Hand gangs. Some historians believe that the fact that practically nothing was left of Colosimo's fortune upon his assassination indicates that he paid heavily to the Black Hand, although as the gangster king of the city, it is difficult to imagine that he would have suffered such indignities.

Instead of paying up, Colosimo may have dispatched his right-hand man (and his successor in leadership of the Outfit), Johnny Torrio, to "bump off" any would-be extortioners. The extreme manner in which Damico was riddled with bullets may have been a warning to other hoodlums that Big Jim was not to be taken advantage of.

Two weeks later, however, the Tribune advanced an alternative theory of the killings: they were part of a classic Italian love triangle. Police theorized that Mary Palaggi, a Levee saloon-keeper's daughter, was engaged to one man, but desired by another. The Denello brothers, it is claimed, were friends of the fiance (though he denied it), and Damico was an associate of the would-be paramour. The shootout under the railroad tracks, then, arose from a dispute among the parties, not an attack from assassins. The question of why the surviving Denello would have called for Colosimo in the hospital is left unanswered.

The underpass separates the Levee area, now dominated by the Hilliard Towers apartments and the Harold Ickes Homes housing project, from Chinatown, visible at the end of the road in the photo below.