Long before Prohibition ever rolled around, there were hoodlums in Chicago. Certainly other cities like New York and New Orleans have had their share of hoodlums and gangsters, but Chicago became famous for its colorful gangland characters.
Chicago had bootleggers as far back as the 1600s. Pierre Moreau, also known as “the Mole,” was selling firewater to the Indians while the Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette was preaching the gospel.
In the late 1800s, the first threads of an organized crime network in Chicago were established by Michael Cassius McDonald. McDonald, a prominent Chicago gambler, created a system in which all gambling establishments and brothels had to pay him a tribute in order to continue operating without police interference. McDonald’s syndicate was a tremendous success and made a lot of money, which in turn made him a very influential figure in Chicago Democratic party politics. It got to the point that if a candidate wanted to win the Democratic nomination for mayor or alderman he had to meet with McDonald’s approval.
But while McDonald was credited with creating the extortion methods and political fixing many later gangsters followed, real organized crime in Chicago was created by the very body which should have sought to destroy it: the city government.
In 1893, First Ward alderman “Bathhouse” John Coughlin, with the help of tavern owner Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, created the framework for organized crime in Chicago by establishing a legal defense fund for gamblers and prostitutes. Coughlin used McDonald’s tried-and-true method of collecting tributes and monthly fees in return for police protection — and it worked beautifully. Because the First Ward contained the lucrative red-light district, the two partners started making a lot of money from their tribute-collection business. And because the First Ward also included the multimillion-dollar corporations headquartered in the Loop, the Coughlin and Kenna began gaining power within the city’s government in leaps and bounds.
The system worked so well for the powerful duo that they soon discovered they couldn’t handle the entire business by themselves. So they enlisted the help of a saloon owner in their ward, “Big” Jim Colosimo.
As things turned out, Colosimo was just the sort of ambitious go-getter Kenna and Coughlin needed for the job. He had started out as a street sweeper in the closing years of the 1800s but quickly moved up in political importance as he began to help win votes for Kenna and Coughlin’s re-elections. As a reward for his hard work, the aldermen named Colosimo as their official precinct captain. The fact that Colosimo also happened to marry Victoria Moresco, a madame of one of the red-light district’s most profitable brothels, certainly didn’t hurt his career either.
As the First Ward tribute gatekeeper, Colosimo collected enormous sums from all of the saloons and brothels in the ward. It was said that of every $2 a prostitute made, $1.20 went to Colosimo.
Colosimo was one of Chicago’s first “real” gangsters, and he certainly played the part well. His standard wardrobe glistened with a small fortune in diamonds.
Colosimo ruled all of Chicago’s underworld without many challenges until about 1910. It was then that the Italian mafia began trying to impose its own tribute on Colosimo. But Colosimo wasn’t about to give up the business that had made him a wealthy man. So, he sent for Johnny Torrio, his nephew in New York City.
Torrio was a member of New York’s infamous Five Points Gang and had the mafia connections necessary to help eliminate his uncle’s tormentors. Usually anyone who was “lucky” enough to receive a letter from the mafia and who didn’t meet their demands usually found themselves with a shorter lifespan than they had expected. But this time, the blackmailers were the ones who were given early retirements, courtesy of Torrio.
And so, in 1910, at the age of 28, Torrio came to Chicago and established himself as a future underworld boss to be reckoned with by streamlining his uncle’s business and eliminating every hostile threat in one fell swoop. And while Colosimo’s life certainly improved when his bright nephew came to his rescue, Chicago would never be the same again.
