Johnny Torrio

Sometime while working under James Colosimo, Johnny Torrio married Anna Theodosia Jacob. He loved her very much and was forever devoted to her. The couple did not have any children.

Initially, Anna was ignorant about the real nature of his business. To the society, he was known as Mr. Langley. After his arrest in 1936, she came to know something about it and made him promise that he would refrain from wrong doing, a promise he kept until his death.

On April 16, 1957, while he was waiting for a hair cut in a barber’s saloon, Torrio had a heart attack. He was immediately taken to the nearby Cumberland Hospital, where he died within few hours.

Johnny Torrio, also known as Donato, was born as Giovanni Torrio on January 20, 1882 in Irsina, at that time a village near the city of Matera in Southern Italy. His father, Tommaso Torrio, a railway employee, died in a workplace accident when Giovanni was two years old.

Soon after his father’s death, his mother, Maria Carluccio, migrated to the USA, taking her only child, Giovanni, with her. There, they began to live in a slum in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City. Sometime while living here, his name was changed to more Americanized Johnny.

In New York, Maria met and married Salvatore Caputo, a grocery store owner and bootlegger. Eventually, Johnny had three half siblings, Nicholas, Isabella and Grace, born out of his mother’s second marriage to Carluccio.

While still very young, John began to work as a porter in his stepfather’s grocery shop, which was actually a front for his bootlegging business. Thus, he came in contact with criminal activities early in his life. It is not known whether he ever went to school.

While still in teens, Johnny Torrio became involved with James Street Gang, a group of petty criminals. Eventually, he became the leader of the gang and saved enough money to open a billiard parlor for the group. Slowly, he began to branch out into gambling, especially number games.

By 1904, his business acumen caught the attention of another crime boss based in Lower Manhattan; the leader of Five Point Gang, Paul Kelly. Torrio also greatly admired Kelly and by 1905, James Street Gang was transformed into Five Points Junior and started receiving training in organized crime.

Kelly advised Torrio to dress conservatively and to speak without swearing. He also told him to set up a legitimate business as a front. Over time, Torrio became Kelly’s number two.

Along with working for Kelly, he also opened a legitimate operation of his own at Brooklyn dock. Behind it, he started operating illegitimate business such as loan sharking, which involved giving out loans at an extraordinary high rate of interest, bookmaking, opium trafficking, hijacking and brothel running.

To run errand for him, Torrio recruited neighborhood children, one among whom was a boy called Alphonse Gabriel Capone. Later known as Al Capone, he quickly earned Torrio’s trust and soon became a member of Five Point Junior, graduating to Five Point Gang within a short spell.

In 1909, Johnny Torrio moved to Chicago at the invitation of his aunt, Victoria Moresco. She and her husband, James Colosimo, notoriously known as Big Jim, were the owners of more than one hundred brothels and saloons as well a night club in Chicago.

Since they had made it big, the Colosimos were being blackmailed by a group of extortionists and wanted Torrio to take care of that. On reaching Chicago, Torrio fixed an appointment to have the money paid; but as the extortionists came to collect it, he had them gunned down.

On neutralizing the extortionists, Torrio started running the brothels for his uncle and aunt, setting up his root in Chicago. Soon, he started expanding the brothel business BY obtaining virgins through White Slave Trades.

He also organized the muscle power necessary for running such a business. When two women escaped from the brothels and threatened to report, he sent two of his men, who met the women as undercover agents and gunned them down before they could testify against him.

For the first ten years, Torrio operated from Colosimo's Café at 2126 South Wabash Avenue. Over the time, he opened a new saloon and a gambling den. In 1919, he opened a brothel called ‘The Four Deuces’ at 2222 South Wabash Avenue and began operating from there.