Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone (7 page)

Such pleasures were not cheaply procured, and only the rich could afford to spend many evenings at the Everleigh Club. A meal with wine began at $50, and the cost rose according to the rarity of the dishes ordered. The price of a girl ranged from $10 to $50, depending on the length of time and the nature of the favors her companion demanded. For a circus the price was determined by the number of performers and the degree of lasciviousness-$25 to $50 a spectator with a minimum of five spectators.

No Levee brothel could survive without tribute to the Dink and the Bath. To refuse to buy protection was to invite police raids and a listing on the police register of known vice resorts. In eleven years the Everleigh sisters, whose gross nightly profit averaged between $2,000 and $2,500, enriched the aldermen by about $100,000.

During the first decade of the century the number of Chicago brothels reached a total, estimated by the Chicago Vice Commission, of 1,020, employing about 5,000 madams, servants and prostitutes, most of them situated within the Levee. The commission put the gross revenue in 1910 at $60,000,000 and the net at more than $15,- 000,000. These figures did not include the myriad independent call girls and streetwalkers working out of hotel rooms or rented flatsagain, mainly in the Levee. Their earnings probably exceeded $10,- 000,000 a year.

In addition to the harlots, the Levee crawled with homosexual hustlers, pimps, procuresses, white slavers, dope peddlers, thieves, killers for hire. Hundreds of the pimps banded together as the Cadets' Protective Association, while the madams formed their own cartel, the Friendly Friends, which raised a slush fund for police payoffs. There were peep shows catering to adolescents, agencies that supplied performers for stag parties, burlesque houses like Harry Thurston's Palace of Illusion with its chorus line of Negro girls performing obscene dances, "stockades," where white slaves were held captive, "broken in"-that is, raped-and sold into prostitution. In one stockade, run by a young Negress, the specialty was teaching novices a repertory of sexual tricks.

Such was the environment in which James, son of Luigi Colosimo, grew to manhood. Papa Luigi, a native of Cosenza, in Calabria, thrice married, with two other sons and two daughters, came to the Levee in 1895, when Jim was seventeen. He brought with him an heirloom, an ancient sword whose continued possession-as Big Jim liked to tell the story-guaranteed that some Colosimo someday would attain great power. Big Jim professed to believe himself to be the elected one, and after he did attain power, he hung the talisman on the walls of his office at the rear of Colosimo's Caft. There he also kept a Bible upon which he swore his lieutenants to fealty.

In his boyhood Big Jim constantly shifted back and forth between crime and spasms of honest toil, the latter probably brought on by the chastening effect of police pursuit. He had many narrow escapes. He started as a newsboy and bootblack. He also stole. He hauled drinking water for a railroad section gang laying tracks through the First Ward and developed a deft touch as a pickpocket. At eighteen, muscular, dashing, radiating animal magnetism, he became a pimp and acquired a stable of diligent girls. Then, reduced to poverty and penitence after a brush with the law, he went to work as a street sweeper. Promoted to foreman, he organized his fellow sweepers into a social and athletic club. Like every denizen of the Levee, Big Jim recognized the sovereignty of Aldermen Coughlin and Kenna, and he set out to ingratiate himself with them by delivering the club votes to their political machine. In return they made him a precinct captain, an office that conferred virtual immunity from arrest. It was the first of numerous quid pro quos. Under the aldermen's patronage Big Jim rose to poolroom manager, saloonkeeper and-the juiciest plum-one of their brothel bagmen. In the last capacity he established his effectiveness once for all when he called on Georgie Spencer to notify him that the cost of protection was about to go up. Georgie balked and in the ensuing argument reached for a knife. Slipping on brass knuckles, Big Jim battered him to a jelly, lifted $300 from his billfold, the assessment due, and left him at death's door. Collections flowed smoothly thereafter. During a vice investigation ten years later Minna Everleigh identified Big Jim as the agent through whom she had paid Coughlin and Kenna $100,000.

In 1902, while fulfilling his bagman's duties, Big Jim made the acquaintance of Victoria Moresco, a fat, homely, middle-aged bawd who operated a second-rate brothel on Armour Avenue. She was devastated by his dark Latin virility. She offered him the post of manager, which he eagerly accepted. Two weeks later they were married. Under Colosimo's management and the benevolence of his aldermanic protectors, the brothel prospered. In his bride's honor he named it the Victoria. Presently he acquired a brothel of his own, then another, and before long he owned or controlled scores, most of them $1 and $2 cribs, though the Victoria and later the Saratoga came to rank among the Levee's fancier vice resorts. Out of every $2 his girls earned Colosimo kept $1.20. Like most of his colleagues, he also ran a number of saloons near, or connected by, passageways to his bordellos.

The supply of prostitutes never quite met the demand. The turnover was too rapid. The average parlor house whore seldom lasted more than five years. Aging fast, she would sink to cheaper and cheaper houses until she hit bottom on Bed Bug Row or took to the streets. Drink, drugs or disease usually completed her destruction. To replenish their "stock," the whoremasters resorted to white slavery.

The origin of the term "white slave" is sometimes associated with Mary Hastings, a Chicago madam of the nineties who prowled through the Midwest seeking seducible young girls. She preferred those between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. By promising them a job in Chicago, she gulled many of them into returning with her. Once inside her three-story brothel on Custom House Place, they were stripped, locked in a top-floor room, and abandoned to professional rapists. The broken-in girls whom Mary Hastings did not employ herself she sold to other brothelkeepers at prices ranging from $50 to $300, depending on their age and looks. One victim managed to scrawl on a scrap of paper, "I'm being held as a slave," and tossed it out of her prison window. Found by a passerby and taken to the police, who raided the brothel and rescued the prisoner, the note supposedly inspired a newspaper reporter to coin the term "white slave." (The raid evidently caused Mary Hastings no serious damage since she continued to do business at the same address for several more years until four captives escaped and brought about her downfall.)

The countrywide scope of white slavery was never statistically determined. Without arriving at any national figures, the Chicago Vice Commission did uncover evidence indicating that while no wellorganized syndicate existed, there were numerous small, loosely affiliated gangs of white slavers. The interstate traffic was heavy enough to warrant federal action. In 1910 Congress passed the White Slave, or Mann, Act, making it punishable by five years' prison to transport a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. This legislation, together with state antivice laws, crippled but did not end the traffic for a good many years. Between 1910 and 1914 the Vice Commission documented seventy-seven local cases, of which the following typified the modi operandi of the more brutal white slavers:

Case 5a. M.B., 18 . . . came to Chicago from a small Wisconsin town, April 1911. M.B. claimed she came to stay with her aunt, held a position in general housework and sewing for two months, met F. at a saloon, took her to J.'s place (a resort), F. promised to marry her, stayed with him there that night, next morning J. (the woman keeper) told the girl she could make $65 per week and she could have half of what she made, girl refused . . . social worker takes girl back to her aunt's, 3 days later met F. again and took girl back to J.'s place where she practiced prostitution for 5 months, girl was whipped with rawhide by J.'s husband, J. took all money girl earned, an opium joint in the place... .

Case 39. . . . born in Hungary, came to the United States in 1908, married in New York City 5 months after arrival, lived with him 6 months, left him because he turned out to be a drunkard and because he beat her, came to Chicago, worked as a waitress in northside restaurant, met G (Bohemian evidently) at her rooming house in the Bohemian area, he was 50 years of age and a cripple, he sent a woman to see her, H. got on friendly terms with girl, taken by H. to South Chicago vice district on promise of better work, this was a ruse evidently and the better work was at a resort, forced to stay with men, prevented from leaving. . . .

In his recollections of the early Chicago gangsters, The Dry and Lawless Years, Municipal Court Judge John H. Lyle described a case in which he intervened when he was a young alderman.

One evening a youth living in my ward came to see me for help. His 16-year-old sister had been missing for weeks. She had sent a letter, postmarked St. Louis, stating that she was happy in a new job. The brother was sure something was wrong. His anguish stirred my sympathy.

I hired a detective who found the girl in a bawdyhouse. He brought her back to Chicago. Her wretched condition supported her story. This beautiful high school student had gone into the Levee seeking a real estate office where she was to make a payment on the family home.

She asked a man for directions. He persuaded her to enter a restaurant. A knock-out drop was slipped into her coffee. She was taken to a resort where the man seduced her and then sold her to the keeper for $200. Repeated use of drugs clouded her mind. She was used as a prostitute for several days and then resold for $400 to a bagnio in St. Louis.

One of the Levee's leading panders was Maurice Van Bever, a preening dandy who rode around in a carriage driven by a top-hatted coachman. With his wife, Julia, he ran two whorehouses on Armour Avenue. In 1903 Van Bever and Colosimo combined forces. They organized a gang to handle fresh stock, established connections with white slavers in New York, St. Louis and Milwaukee, and during the next six years imported hundreds of girls, either booking them into their own establishments or selling them to their fellow whoremasters.

It was inevitable that an Italo-American as conspicuously nouveau riche as Colosimo would attract the attention of Black Handers.

The Black Hand was not, as some writers have misrepresented it to be, a nationwide criminal conspiracy. Contrary to what its victims, too, imagined, it was not synonymous with the Mafia, the Camorra, the Unione Siciliane or any other secret society. It was simply a crude method of extortion with a long Italian-chiefly Sicilian-tradition, transplanted to America during the mass migrations of the eighties. The majority of its early practitioners in America were Italians with criminal records in their native land who had joined the movement westward to victimize their compatriots. Individually or in small community gangs of five to ten members, long experienced in the use of the Black Hand, they preyed mainly on the cafoni, the ignorant Southern Italian peasants. About the only thing they had in common with the Mafia was their technique of terrorism, but they fostered the delusion that Black Hand and Mafia were identical because of the fear the latter had always aroused among Italians, a fear so ingrained that few victims dared even breathe the word.

In the Little Italy of America to display any sign of affluence, such as expensive jewelry or an automobile, was to arouse the malign interest of the Black Hand. For that reason many Italo-Americans hesitated to buy property and if they did, few banks would mortgage it. Having selected his victim, the Black Hander would send him an anonymous letter, demanding money, signed La Mano Nera and usually garnished with sinister symbols-daggers, skull and crossbones, a hand imprinted in black ink. The letters were sometimes blunt, sometimes couched in the flowery idiom of old-world courtesy.

Mrs. Joseph Lupo, for example, a resident of~Chicago's North Side Little Italy and a real estate investor, bought a small apartment building for $25,000. At the same time her daughter also bought one nearby. Six weeks later Mrs. Lupo received the following note:

Place $4000 in a red handkerchief and put it with $4000 from your daughter. Place it at the west end of the Chicago avenue bridge at midnight Thursday. We have looked at your new building on Park Avenue and have found a nice spot where a bomb could do a great amount of damage if you don't obey. Don't notify your son-in-law, Marino Modeni.

Ignoring the warning, Mrs. Lupo appealed to Marino, who, though terrified, went to the police. Two plainclothesmen kept watch by the bridge all through the appointed night, but the Black Handers never showed up.

In the courtly epistolary vein, another Chicago Black Hander wrote to a Sicilian named Silvani:

MOST GENTLE MR. SILVANI-

Hoping that the present will not impress you too much, you will be so good as to send me $2000 if your life is dear to you. So I beg you warmly to put them on the door within four days. But if not, I swear this week's time not even the dust of your family will exist. With regards, believe me to be your friend.

Silvani, too, mustered the courage to go to the police. They traced the letter to one Joseph Genite, raided his home on South Racine Avenue, in Little Italy, and uncovered a cache of revolvers, shotguns, and dynamite. Despite the evidence, they failed to establish Genite's guilt.

No accurate tally of Chicago's Black Hand crimes was possible. The police found it convenient to ascribe every unsolved crime involving Italians to Black Handers. Still, the frequently quoted figure of 400 Italians killed by bullets, knives, bludgeons or bombs between 1895 and 1925 was probably not excessive. How many people survived injuries inflicted by Black Handers during the three decades of their greatest activity and how many quietly yielded to threats were incalculable. On May 25, 1913, the Chicago Daily News speculated:

In the first ninety-three days of this year, 55 bombs were detonated in the spaghetti zone. Not one of the 55, so far as can be determined, was set for any reason other than the extraction of blackmail. A detective of experience in the Italian quarter estimates that ten pay tribute to one who is sturdy enough to resist until he is warned by a bomb. Freely conceding that this is all guess work, then 550 men will have paid the Mano Nera since January 1. The Dirty Mitt never asks for less than $1,000. If a compromise of $200 was reached in each of the 550 cases, "Black Handers" profited by $110,000 in 93 days. That's an average of $1,111 a day, which is fair profit for the expenditure of five two-cent stamps, a dollar's worth of gunpowder and 15 quarts of wood alcohol chianti, that being the usual ration. Perhaps these figures are inaccurate in detail, but they are conservative enough en masse. Well informed Italians have never put the year's tribute to the "Black Hand" at less than half a million dollars.