THE FUNERAL OF JIM COLOSIMO
GODFATHER OF THE CHICAGO UNDERWORLD
On May 14, 1920, the first of the great, gaudy,
gangland funerals in Chicago history was held when the mob laid “Big Jim”
Colosimo to rest in the city’s Oakwood Cemetery. Largely overshadowed today by
the mobsters that followed in his wake (namely Al Capone), he was once the most
important criminal in Chicago. During the early 1900s, he ruled the city’s
underworld and held it tightly in his grip for a longer period of time than any
man in the history of the Chicago. The money that he raked in from the many
immoral and illegal enterprises that he controlled was conservatively estimated
at $50,000 a month for about eight years, an enormous take at that time,
although small compared with the haul made by the bootleggers and racketeers of
the 1920s.
Colosimo was a great spender. He built a fine home
for his father, and an even grander one for himself, filled with an assortment
of expensive and gaudy furniture. He supported a horde of relatives, some of
whom worked in his various brothels and saloons. He maintained a large staff of
servants, including two uniformed chauffeurs to drive his lavish automobiles.
He kept his massive girth clad in white linen suits and he had a fixation on
diamonds. He wore a diamond ring on every finger, diamond studs on his shirt
front, a huge diamond horseshoe pinned to his vest, diamond cufflinks, and
belts and suspenders that were fitted with diamonds. He bought the stones from
thieves and needy gamblers and hoarded them like other men collect books and
paintings. He often carried loose stones in a small bag in his pocket and when
bored would pour them from hand to hand or would lay them out on a black cloth
to watch them sparkle in the light. Colosimo was a strange character and a man
who helped to usher in the era of organized crime in Chicago.
And the end came when he was betrayed by the man he
believed was closest to him.
Colosimo with his attorney, Charles E. Erbstein
Colosimo was 10 years old when his father brought
him to the United States from Italy. He spent all but two or three of his
remaining thirty-nine years in the red-light district of Chicago’s South Side.
He began his working life as a newsboy and bootblack but quickly changed
careers when he saw the money that could be made in crime. At 18, he was an
accomplished pickpocket and pimp with a half-dozen girls working for him. By
the late 1890s, after several brushes with the law, Colosimo abandoned his life
of crime and became a street-sweeper, the only honest job he ever held. By
1900, he was promoted to foreman of his crew and had organized his fellow
workers into a social and athletic club that eventually became a labor union.
At this point, Colosimo was befriended by the two most powerful political
bosses in Chicago: First Ward Committeeman Michael Kenna and Alderman John
Coughlin. Within the First Ward lay the notorious Levee District, a vice-laden
area filled with whorehouses, saloons and gambling parlors. Kenna and Coughlin
employed Colosimo as their collector in return for the votes of all of the
members of his unions.
In 1902, Colosimo married Vittoria Moresco, who ran
a brothel on Armour Avenue. By 1912, he and his wife owned 35 brothels,
catering to all income levels. He also organized a white slavery ring with
another brothel owner named Maurice Van Bever, a fellow dandy who was
transported around the Levee in a red carriage driven by a liveried coachman.
Perhaps the crowning achievement of Big Jim’s career was the opening of
Colosimo’s Café in 1910 at 2126 South Wabash Avenue. The café became the
premiere nightspot in the city and no other club could compete with its star
entertainers, the beauty of its chorus girls or the skill of its acclaimed
orchestra. With musical attractions, good food and a wide array of vintage
wines, it attracted the rich and powerful from all over the city – all of whom
had to brave the wickedness of the Levee district to get there.
Bounded north and south by Twenty-Second and
Eighteenth streets and east and west by Clark and Wabash, the Levee took shape
during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, also known as the Chicago
World’s Fair, when thousands of people from all over the world descended on the
city. It became one of the best-known concentrations of crime and vice.
Visitors to the district could partake of just about every form of sin
imaginable and in addition to Colosimo’s, there were two other vice rings that
formed the criminal organization that ruled the Levee and which provided the
area’s various forms of “entertainment.”
Chicago’s South Side Levee District
Big Jim Colosimo owned two large brothels in the
district: the Victoria and the Saratoga. The Victoria was named in honor of
Colosimo’s wife, Victoria (Vittoria) Moresco. Colosimo himself spent most of
his time at his restaurant on Wabash Avenue, near Twenty-Second Street.
The Levee ran wide open for years, under the
protection of its vice lords, well-paid Chicago cops and, of course, corrupt
politicians, who made sure that the necessary money made it into the right
hands. Reformers, especially religious ones, constantly hampered operations in
the Levee and eventually, the crusade (and propaganda) against “white slavery”
would get the better of the district.
During the heyday of the Levee, Colosimo’s Café was
the heart and soul of the district. It was a place of gaudy opulence, from its
gilded doorknobs to the massive mahogany and glass bar. Green velvet covered
the walls and gold and crystal chandeliers hung from a sky-blue ceiling where
cherubs cavorted on cotton-white clouds. The restaurant was a dazzling
dreamscape of gold mirrors, tapestries and murals of tropical vistas. With the
flick of a switch, a hydraulic lift raised or lowered the dance floor.
Festivities seldom got underway before midnight and often continued until well
past dawn. In a suite of rooms on the second floor, gamblers could find any
game they fancied from faro to roulette to high-stakes poker.
Colosimo’s Café enjoyed national renown and it was
a place where local dignitaries and businessmen might rub elbows with killers
and thieves. It catered to visiting celebrities like Al Jolson, George M.
Cohan, John Barrymore and Sophie Tucker, whose “coon-shouter” songs with
gestures (like the “Angle Worm Wriggle”) had caused the normally permissive
Chicago police to place her under arrest for indecency. Colosimo loved the
opera and no matter how packed the place was, he could always find a seat for a
member or guest of the Chicago Civic Opera Company. He considered acclaimed
tenor Enrico Caruso a close friend.
But as profitable as Colosimo’s was, it produced
only a fraction of the fortune that allowed Big Jim to maintain two limousines,
each with its own chauffeur, homes for his father and himself, a wife and a
mistress. The chief sources of his annual income were white slavery and his
chain of brothels.
Colosimo’s restaurant on south Wabash, in the heart of the Levee.
A menu from Colosimo's Restaurant
An interior view of the swanky cafe.
Colosimo had actually met his wife because of the
Levee’s sex trade. In 1902, while working as a bagman for ward bosses Kenna and
Coughlin, he made the acquaintance of Victoria Moresco, a fat, unattractive,
middle-aged madam who operated a second-rate brothel on Armour Avenue. She
offered Jim the position of manager and he accepted. Two weeks later, they were
married. Under Colosimo’s management, the brothel prospered and he soon
acquired a brothel of his own, then another, until before long, he owned and controlled
scores of them. Out of every $2 that his girls made, Colosimo kept $1.20. Like
many of his competitors, he also ran a number of saloons near, or connected by
passageways, to his bordellos.
Colosimo’s older, and quite unattractive, wife, Vittoria Moresco.
The supply of available prostitutes never really
met the demand for the turnover was far too rapid. The average parlor house
whore seldom lasted more than five years. As she aged quickly, she would sink
to cheaper and cheaper houses until she hit bottom on Bed Bug Row or became a
streetwalker. Drink, drugs and disease usually completed her destruction. So,
to replenish their stock, the vice controllers of the Levee turned to white
slavery.
The origin of the term “white slave” is usually
associated with Mary Hastings, a Chicago madam of the 1890s who lured many young
Midwestern girls to her brothels in Chicago’s notorious Custom House Place vice
district. Seeking out girls between the ages of 13 and 17, she promised them
jobs in the big city. To their alarm, the girls were instead taken to one of
the brothels, where they were locked up, stripped and “broken in” by
professional rapists. The broken girls that Mary did not employ, she sold to
other brothel-keepers at prices that varied depending on the girls’ ages and
looks, very young girls being the most sought-after. In the midst of all of
this, one of her victims managed to scrawl on a piece of paper, “I’m being held
as a slave,” and tossed the note out of a window. Found by a passerby and taken
to the police, who raided the brothel and rescued the girl, the note supposedly
inspired a newspaper reporter to coin the term “white slave.” Incidentally, the
raid didn’t do Mary Hastings any serious damage. She continued to operate at
the same address for several more years until four of her captives escaped and
finally brought about her downfall.
Colosimo was deeply involved in Chicago’s white
slave traffic. In 1903, he had joined forces with Maurice and Julia Van Bever.
They organized a new gang to handle fresh stock, established connections with
white slavers in New York, St. Louis and Milwaukee, and over the course of the
next six years imported hundreds of girls, either putting them to work in their
own establishments or selling them off to other brothels.
Vice made Colosimo a vast fortune, which, in turn,
made him one of Chicago’s wealthiest Italians. Thanks to this, he became a
natural target for Black Hand extortionists.
The Black Hand first emerged as an organized crime
entity around 1900. Because of the isolation caused by their lack of language
skills, Italian immigrants were easy prey from criminals within their own
ranks. Suspicious of authority, they were at the mercy of groups like “La Mano
Nera,” the Black Hand, a shadowy society that terrorized poor and working-class
Italians. In fact, the “society” was simply a collection of criminals, and the
name was created by journalists, but the notion of it inspired real terror.
The way the Black Hand operated was both simple and
direct. First, a victim who showed signs of prosperity would be chosen from
among the Italian immigrant population. For instance, if a man purchased any
property and that fact became public knowledge, he could almost count on the
attention of the Black Hand. A letter, bearing a signature of the Black Hand
was sent to the victim demanding money. If the letter was ignored, or the
victim refused to pay, his home, office or business would be bombed. If he
still refused to pay, he would be murdered. Most of the letters were blunt
instructions about sums of money and where they were to be delivered. Others
were more clever and worded with deference and Italian courtesy. No matter how
they were phrased, each brought the promise of death if the instructions were
not carried out to the letter.
Hundreds of threat letters were received and
countless murders were carried out between 1900 and 1920. Despite the magnitude
of these operations, none of the extensive investigations conducted by the
police ever revealed a Black Hand organization that reached national or even
citywide proportions. The "Black Hand" was not an actual group, but a
method of crime. It was used by individuals, by small groups, and by large,
organized gangs. In Italy and Sicily, the tactic was employed by the Mafia and
called the Black Hand because as a general rule, extortion letters, which
formed the initial phase of the terrorism, bore the imprint of a hand in black
ink. The letters were also sometimes marked with crude drawings of a skull and
crossbones or, for variety, crosses and daggers. Between 1900 and 1920, there
were an alleged 400 murders in Chicago ascribed to the Black Hand. The gangs
that made up the Black Hand preyed on the Italian and Sicilian immigrants and
many murders occurred.
In 1909, Colosimo received his first Black Hand
extortion letter. He knew what to expect and at first, he went along with it.
He met demands for as much as $5,000 but as the extortionists continued to
plague him, demanding more and more money each time, he decided to fight back.
He commanded plenty of tough gunmen and at the next attempt, Colosimo wrapped
up a bundle of plain paper, armed himself with a revolver and, accompanied by
an assortment of muscle concealing sawed-off shotguns, set out for a rendezvous
under a South Side bridge in advance of the appointed time. After dropping off
the bundle as directed, Colosimo and his men hid in the shadows across the street.
At midnight, three men approached the bundle. Before they could examine it,
they were blasted to death amidst the roar of the shotguns.
After that, Colosimo enjoyed a moment of peace, but
it did not last long. He soon received a demand for money from yet another
Black Hand gang. He decided that he needed someone to work with him in Chicago
who was smarter and more ruthless than he was. Vittoria convinced her husband
to call John Torrio, her nephew in New York.
John Torrio was 31 years old when he came to
Chicago in 1909. Soon after he arrived, three more Black Hand extortionists
were slaughtered under the Rock Island Railroad overpass on Archer Avenue.
Torrio, with his personal aversion to bloodshed, had arranged the massacre.
Other killings followed until finally, Colosimo was free of his tormentors.
John Torrio around the time he arrived in Chicago to help Colosimo with
his Black Hand extortion threats.
But Torrio’s service to Colosimo went far beyond
planning the murders of Black Handers. He was an organizational genius. Years
later, Elmer L. Irey, chief of the Enforcement Branch of the U.S. Treasury
Department, called him “the father of modern American gangsterdom.” This was no
exaggeration for within months, the cool, soft-spoken New Yorker had
consolidated Colosimo’s holdings in such a way that he became the foremost
Chicago racketeer of his era. Starting with the Saratoga brothel, of which his
grateful uncle made him the manager, Torrio was soon supervising all of
Colosimo’s brothels and getting them on a sound financial footing. He next
organized the saloons and the gambling dens. He guided the Colosimo-Van Bever
white slave ring into the dominant force in the Levee and personally saw to the
bribing of police and public officials. When Colosimo branched out into the
protection racket, Torrio collected the payments, using no other persuasion
than a quiet word of warning, a thin smile and an ice cold stare. He suffered a
slight setback when he was arrested, along with other members of the white
slave ring, after the transporting of a dozen girls from St. Louis to Chicago.
Maurice and Julia Van Bever paid a $1,000 fine and went to jail for a year.
Five others received lesser sentences, among them the prosecution’s main
witness, a pimp named Joe Bovo, who had delivered the St. Louis merchandise.
Torrio, however, was freed because Bovo would not testify against him.
Colosimo, shielded by his political connections, was not even questioned in the
case.
In the same year that Torrio came to Chicago,
reform movements began gathering strength. Crusaders eventually succeeded in
closing down most of the brothels in the Levee and in other vice districts in
Chicago. A reform mayor came into office and managed to move many of the police
officials who had been protecting Colosimo to other parts of the city and in
one of his last acts in office, even managed to get Colosimo’s liquor license
suspended. But the mayoral election of 1915 brought a new Republican mayor into
office, William “Big Bill” Thompson, who was destined to become the hero of
every pimp, whore, gambler, gangster and bootlegger in Chicago.
John Torrio watched the emergence of Big Bill
Thompson’s regime with great interest. He knew that the time was coming for
even bigger money to be made in the Chicago underworld. Interestingly, he
catered to the vices of others while he himself seemed to have none. He never
smoked, drank or gambled and took no interest in any woman but his wife, Ann.
He kept a daily routine like any banker or professional man, leaving home in the
morning and either walking to his office on South Wabash or driving to Burnham.
He spent nine or ten hours attending to the details of the brothel business,
which mean moving whores from house to house to make sure that customers saw
fresh faces. His workday also involved purchasing food, drink and linens for
the whorehouses, and calculating the profits from the night before. If he
didn’t encountered any problems that needed to be dealt with, he returned home
each night by 6:00 p.m. and had dinner with his wife.
Johnny Torrio was a family man, a devoted husband,
a quiet and contented businessman – and one of the most cold and calculating
gangsters in Chicago history. He routinely ordered the deaths of rivals,
thought nothing of directing beatings, bombings and shootings, and ascribed no
humanity to the prostitutes he handled. He regarded them simply as a commodity,
to be bought, sold and replaced when they ran out. Crime was just business to
Torrio and in his case, crime definitely paid.
Torrio was an exemplary business manager. Because
of his hard work and the leniency of the Thompson administration, Colosimo had
become the top Chicago vice lord. His political value extended far beyond the
Levee and with his City Hall connections. He no longer depended on the ward
politicians for protection; in fact, they came to him for favors. The café was
Colosimo’s pride and joy, perhaps even his obsession. He dealt with all of the
minutiae of running the restaurant and was happiest there, fussing over
customers and celebrities and being flattered and admired by them in return. He
gave virtual autonomy to Torrio when it came to all of his other business
dealings – his first serious mistake.
His second mistake was a romantic one.
One evening in 1913, Jack Lait, a reporter from the
Chicago Daily News, came into
Colosimo’s and began telling him about a girl that he had heard singing in the
choir at the South Park Avenue Methodist Church. Lait told him that the girl
was talented and a knockout and he thought she deserved a better place to
showcase her talents. Why not Colosimo’s? Big Jim agreed to give her an
audition and the next evening, Lait introduced him to Dale Winter, described as
a “slender, demure brunette with blue eyes and skin like rose petals.”
Dale was only 19 years old. She had been born in
Ohio and dreamed of a career in opera. Her father had died when she was only
five and after high school, her mother took her to New York. She auditioned for
producer George Lederer, who was casting a road company version of the operetta
Madame Sherry, which had been a smash hit. Dale won the ingénue role, which was
essentially the part of an innocent young girl. Chaperoned by her mother, she
traveled across the country to San Francisco, where the tour ended. Hoping to
stay on the road, she put together a vaudeville sketch with another actress,
sold it to a company that was about to depart for Australia, and went along to
play the main part. In Australia, the venture collapsed, stranding Dale and her
mother 6,000 miles from home. Luckily, they were able to borrow money from a
sympathetic actor and managed to get back to San Francisco. A booking agent
sent them on to Chicago, where, he assured them, Dale could find work with a
newly organized light opera company. Unfortunately, they arrived to find that
the company had disbanded without ever staging a single performance. The two
women were penniless, but the South Park Avenue Methodist Church kept them from
starving when they hired Dale as a soloist.
Colosimo and his new love, singer Dale Winter. Ironically, the only
decent girl he ever knew would lead him to his death.
Colosimo found that Dale Winter was everything that
Lait had promised. He needed no convincing to hire her for his stage show and
she soon became his star attraction, enchanting the customers every night with
a repertoire of operatic arias. She did not want to leave the church choir,
though, and she continued to sing hymns by day until the congregation
discovered that she moonlighted at Colosimo’s. They were scandalized and
demanded her immediate dismissal. The church pastor was more tolerant and chose
as a theme for his next sermon the Bible passage of John 8:7 – “He that is
without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at her.” But the
congregation was not moved by his defense and he had no choice but to let Dale
go.
Dale was upset by this turn of events. She was not
happy with the atmosphere of the Levee, but felt she had no choice but to work
there. She promised herself that she would quit as soon as she had enough money
saved up to get herself and her mother back to New York. Grand opera was still
her dream, not singing in a café. As the star of Colosimo’s floor show, many
better job opportunities came her way. The Broadway impresario Morris Gest
offered her a contract, as did Florenz Ziegfeld, whose dazzling shows featured
stunning girls. Dale had been looking for a way back to New York and any of
these opportunities would have gotten her there. However, by the time they came
along, it was too late. She no longer planned to leave Chicago because she had
fallen in love with Big Jim Colosimo and he had fallen in love with her. Big
Jim left his wife, confiding in Torrio that his love for Dale was “the real
thing.”
“It’s your funeral,” Torrio replied, which would
turn out to be prophetic words.
With Dale’s gentle guidance, Colosimo began to
acquire a little polish. He learned to moderate his loud, overbearing voice and
to clean up his language. He hired a tutor to help him perfect his English. He
began to dress more conservatively, leaving his diamonds at home. He began
spending more time with artists and his wealthy customers, neglecting the
politicians and underworld characters with whom he normally fraternized. Dale liked to ride horses in the city parks
and Colosimo, attired in equestrian gear, would trot along beside her. He
badgered his friend Caruso for an opinion about Dale’s voice and when the great
tenor found it pleasing, he asked for an audition with the opera company. The
conductor also liked her voice but found it needed training, so Colosimo
enrolled her at the Chicago Musical College.
It was ironic that Dale Winter, the only decent
girl that Colosimo ever knew, would be the reason for his death. Emotional
vulnerability was seen as a weakness in the underworld and word began to spread
that Colosimo was getting soft. The Black Hand extortionists resumed their
demands and now Colosimo paid them off out of fear that something might happen
to Dale. They plagued him constantly until the day he died.
Meanwhile, John Torrio, while continuing to take
care of Colosimo’s affairs, slowly and quietly began to build his own
organization. He began making plans for other vice spots besides Burnham and
found that officials in Stickney, a small village about eight miles outside of
the city, were open to his ideas. At the edge of the Levee itself, a block from
Colosimo’s Café, he took over a four-story red brick building located at 2222
South Wabash Avenue. It would be known thereafter as the Four Deuces. On the
first floor, he opened a bar and office. The second and third floors were used
as gambling rooms and the fourth floor was a brothel. The cellar of the Four
Deuces was a torture chamber. According to Judge John H. Lyle in his book The
Dry and Lawless Years, hapless individuals from whom the mobsters wanted
information were taken down to the cellar and tortured until they talked.
Afterward, they were killed and their bodies hauled out through a trap door at
the back of the building, to be dumped along a country road or sunk into the
deep waters of a rock quarry.
The Four Deuces at 2222 South Wabash Avenue
Around the time that Torrio opened the Four Deuces,
in late 1919, he sent for his friend from Brooklyn, Al Capone. The young man’s
initial duties were humble ones, working as a bodyguard, chauffeur, bartender
and as a capper for the brothel, working out on the street to lure men inside.
Shortly after Capone came to Chicago, a momentous
event occurred. It was an event that Torrio had long been planning for and he
had been trying, without much success, to get Colosimo to exploit. The profits,
Torrio was convinced, would be many times more than anything they had ever made
with their vice operations. But Colosimo was not convinced – gambling and
whores had made him a fortune, why risk the unknown? Torrio finally had to
accept the fact that Colosimo’s days were over. It was a new era for American
crime.
Prohibition had come to pass and American had just
gone dry.
John Torrio studied the new law and surveyed
Chicago and the rest of the country with impatience. He had seen this coming.
He had predicted it to his friends and business associates and knew that this
was going to be the way that organized crime could amass untold amounts of
wealth. To take something that had always been legal, and make it illegal -
especially something as pervasive as alcohol - and then expect Americans to
adhere to the letter of the law was incredibly naïve. Torrio knew that by
taking advantage of Prohibition, and providing the people with what they
wanted, the mob could reach new levels of power. This was a way for men like
himself to become millionaires – and yet, his hands were tied. He was unable to
rouse Colosimo into action. Big Jim was too entranced with Dale Winter and had
lost all interest in business.
Torrio was fuming. He was desperate to get
organized and start filling the need that had been created. Most of the saloons
and roadhouses in and around the city had stayed open with expectations of
obtaining liquor somehow. Torrio (and many others) believed that the risk of
supplying alcohol was very small compared to the rewards. With Big Bill
Thompson in office, Chicago was likely to be a “wide-open town.” The way had
been paved for the underworld to reap huge benefits from Prohibition and Torrio
wanted to take advantage of the situation. Colosimo, though, was interested in
nothing but his pretty, young girlfriend.
Torrio knew that Colosimo’s time was coming to an
end.
Colosimo, meanwhile, was dealing with his domestic
drama. He had been living apart from Victoria Moresco for three months by this
time and had offered her $50,000 if she would not contest his divorce action.
She agreed and the decree became final on March 20, 1920. Within three weeks,
Victoria had married a Sicilian hoodlum twenty years her junior named Antonio
Villani. Big Jim married Dale. They honeymooned at a fashionable spa in French
Lick, Indiana, and then returned to Chicago, where they settled into Colosimo’s
ornate mansion at 3156 Vernon Avenue. He had no idea that his domestic bliss
was to be short-lived.
A week after Colosimo’s return, on Tuesday, May 11,
Torrio telephoned to announce the delivery of two truckloads of whiskey at the
café. The trucks would be there, he stressed, at 4:00 p.m. and Colosimo needed
to be on hand for the delivery. Colosimo left his house a few minutes before
the hour and climbed into a car, driven by his chauffer, a man named Woolfson,
which was waiting at the curb. Dale asked him to send the car back so that she
and her mother could go shopping. He promised to do so, kissed her goodbye and
drove away. Woolfson later reported that Big Jim muttered to himself in
Italian, a language that the chauffeur didn’t understand, for the entire drive.
There were two entrances to the café on South
Wabash Avenue, about fifty feet apart. Woolfson dropped Colosimo off at the
arched north entrance and then drove back to Vernon Avenue to pick up Dale and
her mother. Colosimo pushed open the glass-paneled door and walked across a
small, tiled vestibule, passing a coatroom, a telephone booth and a cashier’s
cage. He then walked through the main dining room, went through an archway into
the second dining room, which was often used for overflow crowds, and entered
his office in the back. A few moments later, a porter, who was coming up from
the basement, noticed a stranger enter the vestibule near the doors, as if he
had followed the boss in off the street. The man seemed to know where he was
going so the porter returned to his duties downstairs, where four other staff
members were also working.
In Colosimo’s office, his secretary, Frank Camilla,
and Chef Caesarino were discussing the night’s menu. Colosimo asked them if
anyone had called. No one had, which seemed to trouble him. He tried
unsuccessfully to reach his attorney, Rocco De Stefano, on the telephone and
then sat at his desk and listened to the dinner plans. The three men chatted
for a few minutes and then Colosimo walked back toward the vestibule through
the two dining rooms. Camilla and Caesarino both later stated that they had the
impression Colosimo intended to wait for the man with the whiskey delivery
either in the vestibule or on the sidewalk outside. Camilla recalled glancing
at the clock – it was 4:25 p.m. – and then he continued his discussion with the
chef. A moment later, the men heard two sharp cracks. Caesarino dismissed them
as a backfiring automobile, but Camilla decided to investigate. When he did, he
found Big Jim lying face down on the cold tiles of the little vestibule. Blood
was streaming from a bullet hole behind his right ear. The second bullet had
cracked the glass of the cashier’s window and had buried itself in the plaster
wall. Colosimo was dead.
The end of Jim Colosimo, right in the entryway to his own restaurant --
“Beauty killed the “beast”, so to speak.
Camilla immediately called the police. Thanks to
Colosimo’s political clout, Chief of Police John J. Garrity personally rushed
to the scene. The chief of detectives was also called in, as were several
detectives from the state’s attorney’s office. Camilla called Dale to tell her
the news and she fainted.
The police questioned more than thirty suspects,
including Torrio and Capone, both of whom were occupied elsewhere at the time
of the shooting – in view of a large number of witnesses. Torrio’s eyes filled
with tears when he was notified of his uncle’s death. “Big Jim and me were like
brothers,” he said in an uncharacteristic display of emotion.
The investigation into Colosimo’s murder was
hastily conducted and uncovered no real leads, except for one. During the
dragnet that followed the murder, the police stumbled onto veteran Five Points
gang member Frankie Yale at Union Station. Yale had been in town for a week and
was just about to board an eastbound train when the police stopped him. There
was nothing to connect him to the murder, so he was allowed to leave for New
York. Soon after, the porter came forward with his description of the stranger
that he saw in the vestibule of the café, a description that eerily resembled
Frankie Yale. Rumors were already swirling in the underworld that Torrio had
paid Yale to bump off his uncle, so detectives from Chicago contacted New York
and asked them to pick up Yale and hold onto him until they could get there
with the porter to see if he would identify Yale as the mystery man. The porter
was brought to New York but when he was face-to-face with the Yale, he froze
and swore that he could not identify him as the man he had seen. Later, this
condition of not being able to remember the faces of killers would be dubbed
“Chicago amnesia.” The investigation foundered after that but the police never
doubted the guilt of Torrio and Yale. Officially, Colosimo’s murder still
remains unsolved.
Colosimo’s funeral was held on May 14 and became
the first of the gaudy gangland affairs that would be held throughout the
1920s. The lavishness of the floral tributes (with wreaths from Johnny and Al
among the largest), the costly bronze casket, the size of the cortege and the
sordid mix of politicians and mobsters set the standard for gangster funerals
to come. No rites were held in a Catholic church or cemetery because Archbishop
George Mundelein forbade them, not because Colosimo was a murderer, a
whoremonger or white slave trafficker, but because he divorced his wife to
marry Dale Winter.
In the end, a Presbyterian minister, Reverend
Pasquale De Carol, performed the funeral rites in Colosimo’s Vernon Street
mansion. Dale was in attendance, barely able to stand. Hymns were sung, Hail
Marys were recited and the Catholic Prayer for the Dead was intoned. Ike Bloom,
who managed one of the Levee’s most disreputable dancehalls, offered a
heartfelt eulogy. “There wasn’t a piker’s hair on Big Jim’s head,” he said.
“Whatever game he played, he shot straight. He wasn’t greedy. There could be
dozens of others getting theirs. The more the merrier as far as he was
concerned. He had what a lot of us haven’t got – class. He brought the society
swells and the millionaires into the red light district. It helped everybody,
and a lot of places were kept alive on Colosimo’s overflow. Big Jim never
bilked a pal or turned down a good guy and he always kept his mouth shut.”
More than 1,000 people preceded the cortege as it
wound its way through the Levee to Oakwood Cemetery. They paused for a moment
before the crepe-draped entrance to Colosimo’s Café while two brass bands
played a dirge. Dale rode behind the hearse in a car with drawn curtains. More
than 5,000 mourners followed behind her. The 53 pallbearers and honorary
pallbearers included, in addition to criminals, nine aldermen, three judges,
two congressmen, a state senator, an assistant state’s attorney and the state
Republican leader.
Colosimo was laid to rest in the family mausoleum
at Oakwood Cemetery and Dale lay grief-stricken for the next 10 days. She learned
that her marriage to Colosimo had not been legal under Illinois law, which at
that time required a one-year interval between divorce and re-marriage.
Colosimo had no will and Dale had no claim to his estate. His family
nevertheless gave her $6,000 in bonds and diamonds. Victoria Moresco was given
$12,000 and the remainder of his money went to his father, Luigi.
Dale tried briefly to manage Colosimo’s Café but
she had no experience in running a business and it was eventually taken over by
Mike “The Greek” Potson, a professional gambler who had long been a minority
partner with Big Jim. Dale and her mother returned to New York. She took back
her maiden name and stepped into the leading role in a popular musical called
Irene at the Vanderbilt Theater. She continued
in the role for several years in New York and then took it on the road. She was
in San Francisco in 1924 when she married actor Henry Duffy. They ran a large
and successful string of theaters on the West Coast and appeared in numerous
shows together until the 1930s, when Dale finally left the theater and turned
her energies to raising their two children. The Depression and the popularity
of movies closed many of the couple’s theaters in the late 1930s. They were
forced to file for bankruptcy in 1941. In 1945, they divorced. Dale appeared in
a few forgettable film roles and went on to marry and survive two wealthy men,
Herschel McGraw and Edward S. Perot, before her own death in 1985.
Mike Potson purchased the remaining shares of
Colosimo’s Café in late 1920 when Luigi Colosimo returned to Italy. He kept the
restaurant going but the wet bar and the gambling at the café attracted the
attention of federal enforcement agents during Prohibition. In 1926 and again
in 1928, a federal judge padlocked the place for violations of the Volstead
Act. It was raided several more times before Prohibition finally came to an
end. After that, Potson kept the club popular with musical reviews and
performances and it continued into the middle 1940s, although by then, Potson’s
reputation as a gambler had started to get in the way of good business.
Hollywood comedians Abbott and Costello sued Potson over gambling losses they
sustained on the second floor, adding to the place’s bad publicity. In 1948,
Potson was indicted on a broad range of gambling charges and ended up going to
prison. He died in 1955.
After several failed attempts by outside interests
to purchase Colosimo’s and get it going again, a fire swept through the
property in January 1953. The Church of Divine Science then purchased the
building, tried to clean it up a little and started holding services there.
However, the rundown condition of the building forced the city to take action
and a suit was filed to raze the property. The wrecking ball came for Colosimo’s
on February 7, 1958, marking an end of an era in South Side Chicago history.
