Free Mafia: The History of the Mob by Nigel Cawthorne

40 million gallons of wine and beer were seized. In 1925 alone, 173,000 illegal stills were impounded. This did nothing to stem the supply. And with the price of alcohol first doubling and then climbing to ten times what it had been before Prohibition, there was plenty of profit for the bootleggers.
    But the Mafia did not have a monopoly on bootlegging. During Prohibition around 50 per cent of the bootleggers in New York were Jewish and only 25 per cent were Italian.
    However, with the end of the Mafia–Camorra war the Sicilian Mafia families in America allowed the Neapolitans to join their ranks and younger gangsters even worked with mobsters of other races.
    And it was Prohibition that secured the power and influence of the Mafia throughout American society for decades to come.
    Capone’s Early Days
    The man who symbolized the era was Al Capone. He was not a Sicilian and he did not belong to the Camorra, although he was of Neapolitan stock. In fact, he nursed a deep hatred of the Sicilians after his barber father became a target for Black Hand extortion. The young Capone hunted the two Sicilian culprits down and shot them dead.
    Capone’s parents had arrived in New York from Naples six years before he was born. After dropping out of school Capone fell under the influence of Johnny Torrio, a saloon and brothel keeper in Brooklyn.
    Torrio’s lieutenant, Frankie Yale, ran the Harvard Inn in Coney Island and Capone went to work there as a doorman.

    Gangster Johnny Torrio who was into bootlegging in a big way.
    One evening Capone told gangster Frank Gallucio’s sister that she had a nice ass. Gallucio demanded an apology but Capone refused, so the gangster pulled out a knife and slashed Capone’s left cheek. The wound, which needed 30 stitches, gave Capone the nickname ‘Scarface’. Gallucio sat down with the New York bosses after the incident and Capone was warned not to seek retribution for the injury.
    Torrio’s cousin Victoria Moresco was married to ‘Big Jim’ Colosimo. Together they ran a chain of brothels in Chicago. When a Black Hand gang led by ‘Sunny Jim’ Cosmano attempted to extort money from them, Colosimo called for Torrio’s help. Within a month ten members of Cosmano’s gang were dead, but he continued to demand money. Colosimo then agreed to pay him $10,000. However, when Cosmano and his Black Handers arrived to collect the money, Torrio and eight of his gunmen were waiting for them. There was a blaze of gunfire. Cosmano survived a shotgun blast to the stomach, inflicted by Torrio himself. He later fled the city after being smuggled out of the hospital.
    In 1918 Colosimo persuaded Torrio to move permanently to Chicago so he could run the brothels there, leaving Frankie Yale to run the operation in New York. Torrio moved Colosimo’s sleazy brothels upmarket, but behind the scenes the girls were kept there by force and he would not hesitate to kill them if they went to the police.
    Capone was under investigation for murder in New York at the time, so he followed Torrio to Chicago and went to work as a doorman at the Four Deuces, a bordello. It is thought that he first caught syphilis there.
    In 1920 Colosimo divorced Torrio’s cousin and married Dale Winter, a singer at a club he owned. With the advent of Prohibition, Torrio was eager to move Colosimo’s operation into bootlegging, but Dale was against it. Torrio did not take kindly to Colosimo’s refusal. Just one month after the wedding, Torrio called Colosimo and asked him to come to the club. When he arrived, Colosimo was gunned down. Capone was the first to be suspected but the murder had actually been carried out by Frankie Yale. He avoided arrest because a waiter who had seen the hit refused to identify him.
    With Colosimo out of the way, Torrio went into the bootlegging business in a big way, with Capone as his second-in-command. There were only two Italian bootlegging gangs at the time. Most of them were Irish and one was made up of