Boardwalk Empire Celebration
One Scene from History - the murder of Big Jim Colosimo
-from ‘Capone’ by John Kobler
A week later, on Tuesday, May 11, Torrio telephoned to announce the delivery at the cafe of two truckloads of whiskey. He was very precise about the time–4p.m. Big Jim left the house a few minutes before the hour, ablaze with diamonds, a red rose in his buttonhole, a homburg perched jauntily on his large head. In his right hip pocket he carried a .28-caliber pearl-handled revolver. His car, driven by a chauffeur named Woolfson, was standing at the curb.
There were two entrances on South Wabash Avenue about 50 feet apart. Woolfson deposited Big Jim at the arched north entrance and drove back to Vernon Avenue. Big Jim pushed open a glass-paneled door and crossed a small porcelain-tiled vestibule, passing a cloakroom, a phone booth and a cashier’s cage, walked the length of the main dining room, went through an archway into a second dining room used for overflow crowds, and entered his office at the rear. Presently, a porter, coming up from the basement, noticed a stranger going into the vestibule. The porter returned to his duties below, where four other employees were working.
In the office, standing beneath the Colosimo family sword, Big Jim’s secretary, Frank Camilla, and Chef Caesarino were discussing the day’s menu. Big Jim asked them if anybody had called. Nobody had. This appeared to trouble him. He tried unsuccessfully to reach his lawyer, Rocco De Stefano, on the phone. After chatting a while with Camilla and Caesarino, he walked back toward the vestibule through the auxiliary dining room. They had the impression that he intended to wait for his caller there or on the sidewalk. They glanced at a wall clock - it showed 4:25 - and resumed their discussion of the menu. A moment later they heard two sharp reports. Caesarino dismissed them as backfire, but Camilla decided to investigate. He found Big Jim lying facedown on the porcelain tiles of the vestibule, blood streaming from a bullet hole behind his right ear. A second bullet had cracked the cashier’s window and buried itself in the plaster wall opposite. Big Jim was dead.
Into a police dragnet the day of the murder blundered the veteran Five Pointer and executioner Frankie Yale. He had been in town a week and was about to board an eastbound train when the police stopped him. They could not connect him with the murder at that time, however, and they let him go on to New York. Then the porter came forward with a description of the stranger he saw entering the cafe on Colosimo’s heels. It fitted Yale. Finally, a stool pigeon passed along the underworld rumor that Torrio had paid Yale $10,000 to rid him of Colosimo. At the request of the Chicago authorities the New York police picked up Yale, and the porter was brought to New York. Face-to-face with the killer, the witness froze. He swore he could not identify him. The investigation foundered there, but the police of both cities doubted neither Yale’s guilt nor Torrio’s.
janainaart
vaporwave
baratheonpilled
andulkaphoto
pixelskylines
areudirty
germansingergirl
