The Outfit Read Online Free PDF

there was no longer a need, or attempt, to conceal the wanton criminality.
    The Second City Meets the Eighteenth Amendment
    When Volstead passed, Chicagoans reacted swiftly: On December 30, two weeks before prohibition became law, infamous Second City gangster Dion O’Banion single-handedly hijacked a truckload of whiskey in anticipation of the exorbitant prices it would fetch on the last “wet” New Year’s Eve. “In twenty minutes we had buyers for the whole load,” Dion later boasted. “We sold the truck separately to a brewery in Peoria.” On January 16, 1920, six hours before the bill took effect, a West Side gangster crated off $100,000 worth of medicinal liquor from freight cars parked in the Chicago railyards. On the other side of town a liquor warehouse was looted. Still others utilized printing presses and forged phony withdrawal slips for presentation at government-bonded warehouses.
    In short time, some fifteen thousand doctors and fifty-seven thousand druggists applied for “medicinal” liquor licenses. In prohibition’s first year, sacramental wine sales increased by eight hundred thousand gallons. This in addition to the illegal trade, which eclipsed the officially sanctioned variety. Windy City “speakeasies” popped up on every corner. Breweries operated in plain sight, with at least twenty-nine in Chicago alone. Countless more were established in suburbs such as Joliet, Cicero, Waukegan, and Niles. As Dion O’Banion said at the time, “There’s thirty million dollars” worth of beer sold in Chicago every month and a million dollars a month is spread among police, politicians, and federal agents to keep it flowing. Nobody in his right mind will turn his back on a share of a million dollars a month.’ Roger Touhy, a former car dealer who seized bootlegging’s brass ring, wrote, “There wasn’t any stigma to selling beer. It was a great public service.” Touhy continued, “Clergymen, bankers, mayors, U.S. senators, newspaper publishers, blue-nose reformers, and the guy on the street all drank our beer.”
    Meanwhile, Colosimo was falling in love with a lissome young woman named Dale Winter. From the first moment Big Jim eyed her singing in his bistro, Colosimo’s Cafe, located at 2126 South Wabash, he was smitten with the girl less than half his age. Colosimo’s primary objective now was, to the astonishment of his friends, quiet domestic bliss.
    Johnny Torrio, by contrast, had visions of the streets of Chicago paved with gold. He, like Touhy and most other businessmen, grasped the obvious. At last there was a clear road map to riches for the immigrant entrepreneur. When Torrio approached Big Jim with his master plan, Torrio must have been stunned by the response: a vehement no.
    In a sad irony, it was now Torrio’s sponsor (and relative) who stood in his way. The Fox made what must have been an agonizing decision: his “uncle” had to be eliminated.
    On May 11, 1920, three weeks after marrying Dale, and a scant four months after Volstead became law, Big Jim Colosimo was murdered in the lobby of his own restaurant. Official sources let it be known that their prime suspect was Torrio’s New York associate Frankie Yale. Although police questioned thirty suspects, including Torrio, no one was ever charged in the crime. One witness, a porter, who had initially described an assailant who fit Yale’s profile, refused to ID him in a lineup. Although never charged, Torrio was widely believed by police to have paid Yale, or
someone,
$10,000 for the rubout of Big Jim. 4
    As Big Jim’s second-in-command, Torrio took charge of the Colosimo empire at a time when the Chicago crime world was in chaos. Rough-and-tumble gang warfare was out of control, with opposing sides clearly divided along racial and ethnic lines: Irish vs. Italians, Greeks vs. Poles, Jews vs. gentiles, and blacks vs. whites. In a frantic effort to establish turf in the newborn high-stakes business of bootlegging, countless