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gangs flexed their collective muscle. The period was characterized by continual intergang terrorism featuring bombings, truck hijackings, and kidnappings. In a sixteen-month period, 157 Chicago businesses were bombed. Taking their cue from the Black Handers, the bootleggers, led by bomb masters such as Jim Sweeney and Joe Sangerman and their experts, Soup Bartlett and George Sangerman, detonated more than eight hundred bombs between 1900 and 1930, dynamite and black-powder bombs being the weapons of choice. (Before the prohibition wars, the explosives were used in labor union struggles.)
    Immediately upon assuming leadership, Torrio, as he had in New York, brokered a gangland agreement that resulted in a mutually beneficial crime consortium: essentially, a truce. Convening the leaders of all the Chicago crime fiefdoms, Torrio built his case on irrefutable logic: thanks to Volstead, there was no longer a need to fight over the now massive treasure or to dabble in petty crime. There was enough money to go around. At Torrio’s suggestion, the gangs carved up the city into discrete and sovereign territories.
    The essentials of the arrangement held that the Torrio “Syndicate,” as it was now called, took the downtown Loop and part of the West Side; the South went to Danny Stanton’s gang; the Northwest to William “Klondike” O’Donnell’s contingent; smaller districts to the Frankie Lake-Terry Druggan gang and others. Only the South Side O’Donnells, Spike and Walter (no relation to the Northwest O’Donnells) refused to participate, a big mistake since all five brothers were quickly executed by Torrio’s gunmen. A U.S. district attorney now referred to Torrio as unsurpassed in the annals of American crime; he is probably the nearest thing to a real mastermind that this country has yet produced.
    Torrio soon branched out into the suburbs. Within weeks of Big Jim’s murder, Torrio’s army of whores and roulette-wheel spinners were overrunning dozens of surrounding communities. And of course the booze flowed freely as Johnny’s bootlegging dreams became reality. Torrio’s source of strength, his ability to broker cartels and alliances, was in fact the reason his own bootlegging empire would become so formidable. Displaying brilliant foresight, Torrio had engineered a longstanding alliance with two key Chicago powerhouses: the Genna family and the Unione Siciliana.
    The Genna family, who had arrived in Chicago’s Little Italy from
big
Italy in 1910, virtually owned the enclave. Known as wild men, and Black Handers, the boys established themselves as a collective to be reckoned with. After Volstead they immediately applied for one of the few exempted licenses for the production of industrial alcohol. “The Terrible Gennas” - brothers Angelo, Pete, Sam, Mike, Tony, and Jim - siphoned off most of their licensed industrial alcohol, colored it with various toxins known to cause psychosis, and called it bourbon, Scotch, rye . . . whatever. Glycerin was added to make the concoction smooth enough to be swallowed. 5
    The brazen and volatile Gennas paid more than four hundred police to escort their booze-carrying truck convoys. Their distilleries operated within blocks of police stations, with workers on twenty-four-hour shifts. In fact, so many men in blue made appearances at their warehouse, locals jokingly nicknamed it The Police Station. In no time at all, the Gennas were grossing $300,000 a month, only 5 percent of which went to overhead, that is, official graft.
    The Gennas paid Sicilian families $15 per day (ten times what they would have earned at hard labor) to distill fifty gallons of corn-sugar booze. The arrangement, and the compliance of the largely illiterate Sicilian families, was made possible because the Gennas, old-world, blood-oath Sicilians, had the support of “The Unione.”
    The Unione Siciliana di Mutuo Soccorso negli Stati Uniti was founded in New York in the 1880s and eventually incorporated