Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone by John Kobler Read Free Book Online Page A

silken bolsters, the Chinese, Egyptian, and Japanese rooms, heady with incense. . . . Each of the parlors had a gold spittoon and a fountain that sprayed perfume.
    No lineup of wriggling seminaked girls marred the refinement of the Everleigh Club. Handpicked by the sisters (without the intermediate agency of any pimps, whom they scorned) for their beauty, good health, freedom from addiction to drugs or alcohol, taste in clothes, ladylike manners and sexual artistry, the Everleigh Paphians sauntered casually through the parlors with the aplomb of a guest at a Gold Coast soiree. When a gentleman expressed his preference, one of the sisters would introduce him, observing all the amenities prescribed by etiquette.
    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