INNOCENCE LOST

I would have been on pins and needles during the delay, It took 90 minutes to gather all the men and horses, once the decision had been made. They had been scattered because of the threat of an air attack. But they were eventually rounded up and formed up. And then the charge they made was historic.

When  the Australian Fourth Light Horse Brigade advanced at the gallop they were not waving sabers but bayonets. Still it may have been one of the most successful cavalry charges in all of history. It is also usually credited with being the last combat cavalry charge in history. 

It was 31 October , 1917 – Halloween - when the British Army made a third attempt to break the Turkish line anchored on Gaza. They had a new General, Allenby, and a new plan. Instead of attacking the barbed wire and trenches close to Gaza, again, Allenby decided to try the other end of the Turkish defenses, at Beersheba. It was a similar choice to the sweeping left hook sent against Iraq forces in 1991: then, fast armored columns were supported by fleets of fuel trucks. But the limiting factor in 1917 was not fuel but water. 

There have been wells at Beersheba as far back as the biblical Abraham. In 1917 there were 17 producing dependable potable water.  It was the wells which made the capture of the village vital for any army coming out of the Negev desert, because the weapon of maneuver in 1917 was not the tank but the horse.

It is simply astonishing that a prey animal, a grass eater, could be so powerful a weapon of war. Since 4000 B.C. humans have trained horses to assist in killing other humans and other horses. We have ridden their backs into close combat where Equus caballus is shot with arrows, pierced with spears and slashed with swords. 

And beginning in the 17th century, horses were then cut by shrapnel and surrounded by deafening gunfire and explosions. And what is most astonishing is that for a horse, such combat is much more frightening than for a human.

Horses have the largest eyes per body size of any land animal. The construction of those lovely huge eyes also gives them a field of vision of 350 degrees, far wider than a humans’. 

Humans hear in the range of 30 to 19,000 hertz. Horses, with their 180 degree rotating ears, giving them the equivalent of sound depth perception, hear 55 to 33,500 hertz.  In short, hoses can see and hear much more of the horrors on a battlefield more accurately than a human can.

And the sound of a rifle or pistol in their own riders’ hands is more frightening because it is closer. So given this higher level of horror why have horses joined us in war?

It has been pointed out that war horses actually lived much more happy lives than their pampered domesticated stabled pets of today because a war horse is constantly surrounded with other horses – a herd. 

An army is a strict hierarchical social structure that mimics the herd. Every combat maneuver used by cavalry is based on herd behavior. A column of horses willing follows the horse in front rather than run for safety alone, and a horse in a charge will run because all the other horses are running as well.

But the actual charge of Napoleonic cavalry (and the Australian Light Horsemen of 1917) was a good deal slower than the paintings might suggest. Sabers might be wildly waving and lances glinting in the sunlight, but charging horses do not slam into enemy troops at the end of a charge. 

The “shock” effect of a cavalry charge was more psychological then physical. No horse will 

ride onto spikes or spears, or even willingly ride down a human. Horses have no country, no national pride. They will defend young  members of their own herd, but not to the death.  They are aggressive only when they cannot escape. Running is freedom. Running is life. To a horse the very idea that "Into the valley of death rode the 600" is insanity, illogical and inconceivable. 

The 800 mounted men of the 11th and 12th regiments formed up to the east of Beersheba, behind a ridge. 

Their commander was Lieutenant Colonel William James Bourchier (above)  and he had trained his men to fight as mounted infantry.  

But this afternoon with their rifles slung across their backs and their bayonets gripped tightly in their right hands, they were pure cavalry, straight from the ancient steppes of Eastern Europe and the rolling fields of Belgium. They crossed the ridge line in three waves at a trot, about 8 miles an hour, with five meters between each horse. 

The three lines advanced across the open desert toward the Turkish infantry trenches four miles away.  After a mile a battery of Austrian-Hungarian artillery began to bark at them. Shells exploded just behind them as the Axis gunners tried in vain to adjust their range to match the horsemen’s advance. 

About two miles out they broke into a canter, about 15 miles an hour. 

The Turkish machine guns began to pepper the advancing cavalry. But most of the Turkish infantry were holding their fire, waiting for the horsemen to dismount and attack on foot. 

But instead, a half mile from the trenches, they broke into a gallop, and fell upon the stunned Turkish soldiers at 30 miles an hour.

Trooper Eric Elliot remembered, “It was the bravest, most awe inspiring sight I’ve ever witnessed ...the boys were wild-eyed and yelling their heads off.” And Trooper Vic Smith would write years later, “Of course we were scared, wishing to hell we weren’t there…But you couldn’t drop out and leave your mates to it; you had to keep going on.” 

In fact the Turkish infantry was so stunned by the cavalry’s audacity that they failed to adjust their sights and most of the Turkish rifle fire that finally began went sailing over the horsemen’s heads. As the cavalry drew nearer their formation dissolved, which made it harder for the gunners to pick a target, 

And suddenly it seemed to the Turkish soldiers’ that their gun sights were filled with the barrel chests of charging horses, each carrying a screaming mad man directly at each Turkish private and corporal.

The Australian horses leapt across the first trench line. And many of the Turkish soldiers, brave men and determined, well led and well disciplined, threw down their rifles and ran away. To the horses, they were not running into danger, but trying to escape it. And once over the first trench line, in fact they had. 

The Australian regiments carried the trench and the wells and the village beyond. The attack captured 38 officers, 700 men, 9 field guns and 3 machine guns. Many more Turkish soldiers, having run into the desert, came back to the wells over the next few days and surrendered. The cost for this triumph was 31 Australians troopers killed and 36 wounded, almost all of them in the fight for the trenches.

By five-thirty the battle was over. The Turkish Gaza line had been turned. But so surprised and stunned were the victors themselves that it was almost another hour before anyone thought to send word back headquarters. Instead they took the time to enjoy the cool waters from the Wells of Beersheba. 

We have no listing of how many horses were killed or wounded. But afterward a trooper noted, “It was the horses that did it; those marvelous bloody horses.”

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ELEPHANT DIAPHRAGMS

 

I want to begin by stating the facts. Frisbie's started baking pies commercially in 1924. When Joe Frisbie died in 1940, his widow, Marina, inherited the family bakery. She ran the ovens on Kossuth Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut for another 18 years, baking up to 80,000 pies a day.  As was the industry standard, each of the tin pie plates was stamped with the company name, and carried a 5 cent deposit -  to be repaid for every pie tin returned.

By 1958 the deposit had risen to 10 cents and advancing age induced Marina to sell her business to the  competition, Table Talk Pies out of Worcester, Massachusetts (above). Table Talk was not interested in supporting the  competition and Frisbie's Pies ceased to exist.  In the 1960's Table Talk was sold to baby food maker "Beach Nut", which 2 years later, closed company entirely.  But Table Talk came out of bankruptcy in 1986, thanks to Mister Christo Cocaine. Today their 300 employees are still baking some 250 million little pies ever year.  Those are the facts. Now, somehow, despite those facts, the legend has been perpetrated that Bridgeport students at Yale University began throwing pie tins, and thus invented the Frisbee.

The first problem with this legend is that Yale University is not in Bridgeport. Yale is in New Haven, which is 20 miles further to the north. And that is a very long way to throw a Frisbee. There are other problems with the legend, all of which give me the feeling that the Yale alumni were throwing something around besides pie plates. But despite these facts, an original Frisbie Pie tin still sells on Ebay for about $25 – a 25,000% increase in value, primarily because of its mythical connection to a plastic toy. In truth, the non-immaculate conception of the Frisbee is a much more interesting story than the myth.

According to the tale as related by Fred Morrison (above, right)  to writer Ben Van Heuvelen, back in 1937,  the then 17 year old Fred and his fiancé Lucile Nay (above, left)  were in her back yard tossing around the lid from a can of popcorn, because they didn’t have a football. The lid’s flight was horribly erratic, and the teenagers made a game of trying to predict which direction the lid would take on each toss. Over the California winter, the pair began playing the game with various lids and plates, and discovered that pie tins produced the best "spin”.  The following  spring , while they were throwing a 5 cent pie tin around on the beach, a man approached Fred and asked where he could buy the toy. Fred immediately sold him the lid for a quarter – a 500% profit.

Having been slapped in the face by opportunity, the couple bought pie tins in bulk from a local hardware store and every weekend took them to the beach where they tossed the tins back and forth, to attract a crowd. The resultant sales did not make the Morrison's rich, but this was still the depression, and every quarter helped. Then World War Two changed the world.

Because of the post war housing shortage 1946 found the couple living in an Army surplus tent on Camp San Luis Obispo.  Fred was pouring concrete slabs for home fuel tanks, and Lucy was working at a Lockheed plant. But Fred couldn’t get the profitable spinning pie plate idea out of his head, and eventually mentioned it to his boss, Warren Franscioni.  During the war both Warren and Fred had been pilots, and Warren, like Fred, also saw the potential in the spinning pie plates.  But, it seems that unlike Fred, Warren had been paying attention in ground school, and was familiar with the work of Daniel Bernoulli.

Now I remember Daniel because his father, Johann Bernouli, was the biggest heel in the history of mathematics. At one point, father and son tied for a first prize in physics. Johann was so consumed by jealousy that he kicked Daniel out of the house. Johann then waited until Daniel published the work he had won the prize for, and then Johann rewrote the same material, backdating it, so it looked like the son had stolen from the father. What a heel. Father and son never spoke again.

Of course what most people remember about Daniel Bernouli is that before he was 30 he had laid out the mathematics of flight, two hundred years before they would be put to use; one half the pressure of a fluid, times the velocity of the fluid squared, plus the density of the fluid, equals the Bernouli Constant. And that may mean nothing to you, (it confuses the heck out of me) but it keeps airplanes in the air.  And, with the spin imparted by a flick of the wrist, it also keeps a Frisbee floating on the air.

Warren explained the Bernouli constant to Fred, and Fred diagramed the basic pie plate shape, except he added a thick outer edge to mimic an airplane’s wing. He called the angle toward the center of the plate “The Morrison Slope”.  

The pair then drove down to Glendale, California (above), where they showed Fred's drawings to the Southern California Plastic Company. The manager saw the potential and handed over eight cylinders of a new plastic called Tennite,   Fred then drew eight variations on his original drawing.  But before they handed the plastic over to a machinist to carve the drawings into reality, he changed the title on the plans, to disguise the product. He labeled the schematics “Diaphragms for Elephants”.  I guess he figured that title would not arouse any curiosity.

Fred and Warren tested the molded diaphragms, and delivered the one that flew the best back to Glendale.  In 1948 the first production run of 3,000 Whirlo-Ways (patent #183626) were squeezed out of the injection molds in just two colors, black and blue.  Lucile wrote the copy for the packaging, instructing customers to “Play catch – invent games. Experiment!”  In 1951 Warren reenlisted in the Air Force for the Korean War, and Fred and Lucy continued to develop the Whirlo-Ways by themselves.

Marketing now took over. The Whirlo-Ways became Whirloways, which became Flyin-Saucers, and  Flying Saucers became Pluto Platters. But the basics of the device did not change; it was a thing that, when you threw it, it floated and bobbed and weaved with a grace that a ball can only dream of.

In 1955, while Fred and Lucile were displaying their Pluto Platters in Los Angeles, they were spotted by two falcon hunters, who had formed a company to market their plastic sling shot, intended to propel meat into the air for training birds of prey. They named their company “Wham-O” after the shout they made when firing their sling shots. But Arthur "Spud" Melin and Richard Knerr were smart enough to realize that most of their slingshots were not being bought by falconers. The problem was they weren’t sure who was buying them.

So they decided to change products, and jumped at the chance to use their meager sling shot profits to buy the North American rights to a Australian bamboo exercise tool which, duplicated in plastic, became the Hula Hoop. Wham-O sold 25 million Hula Hoops in four months, 100 million in two years. In 1956 the pair used their profits from the Hula Hoops to pay Fred and Lucille one million dollars for the patent and the molds of the Pluto Platters.

Wham-O’s designers made some improvements on the platters, and in 1958, the year after Frisbie Pies had shut down, they renamed the Pluto Platter as the Frisbee. Why they chose that name I have never been able to discover to my satisfaction. But I suspect somebody in the Wham-O marketing department was a Yale Alumni. Ivy League gets the credit for everything, you know, even the stuff they had nothing to do with. The rest is Frisbee history.

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WARD HEALERS

I suspect, although nobody recognized it at the time,  they called last round on the Levee just after five on Monday afternoon, 27 November, 1905. That was the hour when 38 year old Marshall Field  Jr, the heir to a great fortune died at Chicago’s Mercy hospital. He had been admitted five days earlier with a gunshot wound to the abdomen, and now he was dead. And there has never been a good explanation as to just how or where he had been shot.

The official story was that while in his bedroom that morning Marshall (above) had been cleaning his gun, dropped it and the gun had gone off. 

The butler and a nurse said they had immediately rushed to his aide. But a reporter for the Daily News tried to replicate the accident with an identical weapon, but no matter how many times or ways they dropped the gun it  refused to discharge. 

The papers were afraid of losing advertising from the Marshall Field Department Stores (above), which was then the largest retail chain in America, so the public questions stopped there - for the time being. But around town the assumption was the heir to one of the largest fortunes in America  had shot himself. And then there were rumors, which appear to have originated within the local cab drivers, that Field had actually been shot in one of the houses of ill-repute and rushed in a cab back to his own home. The next afternoon, it was from there he had been rushed to the hospital. 

The twin Fields' mansions, father’s and son’s (above), stood next to each other along what was called “Millionaires Row” -  Prairie Avenue on Chicago’s south side, surrounded by mansions occupied by 70 of the richest families in America. Moral reformer Lincoln Steffens described Chicago as, "...first in violence, deepest in dirt, loud, lawless, unlovely, ill-smelling, irreverent, new. an overgrown gawk of a village, the "tough" among cities, a spectacle for the nation".   

After the funeral Marshall Junior’s widow and his three children moved in with his father. But it stood no chance of being a happy home. The very next year the elder Field died of pneumonia, and the widow returned to her native England, leaving behind an open wound - primarily caused, many believed, by a section of Chicago called the Levee

The Levee District was home to sin and vice of unsurpassed depravity and popularity. It was bordered by 18th street on the north, 23rd street on the south, South Clark on the west and South Wabash Avenue on the east. And at its immoral center was the Everleigh Club. 

For eight years Ada and Minna Everleigh (above) were the unofficial “Queens of the Levee”, running one of the most popular upper class brothels in the Chicago. Minna (right) famously greeted each customer with a delightfully wicked, “How’s my boy?” 

Their thirty working girls catered to an upscale clientele, charging $50 just to get in the front door of 2131-2133 South Dearborn (above). 

It was common knowledge that for years Marshall Field Jr. had been a regular at the Everleigh Club (above, entrance hall), and the rumor was that Marshall had actually been shot at the club by one of the working girls, or had shot himself there because he was being blackmailed by one of the "ladies".  Those kinds of things were not unheard of on The Levee. 

To the south of the Club was Ed Weiss’s bawdy house, "The Capital", and to the north was "The Sapphro", run by his brother Lou Weiss.  

In fact, jammed into the Levee were dozens of houses of prostitution, catering to whatever sin the customers could afford; Dago Franks, French Em’s, the Old 92....

...and in direct cutthroat competition with the Everleigh sisters was Madam Vic Shaw (above), whose house sat at Dearborn and Cullerton. In between the whore houses were opium dens, cocaine factories, gambling joints, peep shows and bars - lots and lots of bars. 

Ringmasters of this sin circus, the Princes of the Levee, were two Aldermen who represented the district;  the big, blustery John J. Coughlin (right), and his diminutive doppelganger, Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna (left). 

The gimlet eyed “Hinky Dink” (above) received his nickname because he stood just 5 feet tall. He was normally “…glum and quietly dressed”, and usually chewing on a cigar.  He was a teetotaler, and his wife was a temperance worker. 

Hinky Dink Kenna not only had the political connections to protect the Levee, he also owned and operated several bars and gambling houses in the district, the most famous of which was The Workingman’s Exchange on Clark Street, home of "The Big Beer".. 

Here barflies, bums, tramps and the homeless could buy a "Big" (20oz) Beer for a nickel, pick up a free lunch and, come election day, get a job as a “repeater”, for this was where politics and vice crossed paths.

According to the mythology, customers at the Working Men's Exchange" were given pre-marked ballots by Democratic Ward Heelers, so called because they walked the voting districts. These "repeaters" were then transported to various polling places, where they would trade their pre-marked ballots for blanks. 

Supposedly after committing voter fraud they would then return to "The Exchange" where they handed in their blanks for a payment of fifty cents each. While they drank a free beer, their new ballots would be marked and the game would go another round.  Such a fraud may have functioned in one voting district, but clearly would have collapsed if tried city wide.  And it is doubtful the residence of The Levee would have voted against the men who protected the primary industry.  Over twenty years neither "Bathhouse" nor Hinky Dink never even came close to losing an election.

“Bathhouse” John Joseph Coughlin earned his nickname because at one time he had worked as an masseur at a bath house, which was also a Levee euphemism for a gambling joint.  Bathhouse claimed "Why, money didn't mean anything to me....I might have been a rich man's son and gone to Yale, and never amounted to nothing!"

Alderman Coughlin (above) was over sized, usually overdressed and prone to outbursts of bad poetry he had written himself, such as his infamous “She sleeps by the Drainage Canal” or “Why did they build the lovely lake so close to the horrible shore?”  

Bathouse's  typical “Signs of Spring “concluded, “There are many other signs of spring which come by wireless wire; One of which is Yours Sincerely, who is tuning up his lyre. Just to twang a song to nature 'bout the brooks and fields of green; O, I wonder if I'm understood; I wonder, yes, I ween.”  

It was said that one of Chicago’s mayors once asked Michael Kenna (above) if Bathhouse was just crazy or a drug addict. Hinky Dink replied, “To tell you the god’s truth, Mayor, they ain’t found a name for it yet.”  As for himself,  Hinky Dink  could not stand to listen to Coughlin's poems unless he was pretty drunk.

These two Aldermen had a genius for skimming protection money from the Levee. Their enforcement arm was the Chicago Police, and in addition to their weekly take of thousands of dollars per establishment, they sold tickets to the annual First Ward Ball. 

In the words of one web site, “Every employee of a house of ill-repute or gambling den, every robber, pickpocket, safe-cracker, and streetwalker, and every bartender, bawdy house entertainer, and low groggery proprietor, all were required to buy tickets…”

The Ball was held each December, and Ike Bloom, owner of “Freiberg’s Dance Hall”, was responsible for selling the tickets. Ike himself was half clown and half cold blooded killer, whose club was “the most notorious place in Chicago”, which was quite a charge, considering Chicago. Nobody declined to buy tickets from Ike.  

The ball was billed as a charity, and in 1906, the year after Marshall Field's accidental death/suicide, a reporter from the Tribune asked Hinky Dink where all money went. Hinky Dink replied, “Charity, education, burying the dead, and general ward benefits for the people” 

Asked what he meant by ‘education’, Hinky got a little testy. “It consists", he snapped, "of hiring good halls and good speakers to teach the people of the First ward to vote the straight Democratic ticket.” And that was the end of that interview. 

Each December the First Ward Ball grew in size and sank in reputation. The 1908 festivity attracted “20,000 drunken, yelling, brawling revelers” who spilled out onto the streets around the Coliseum.  

When the Law And Order League tried to stop the orgy, they inspired Bathhouse to write, “Strike up the march, professor, and I will lead the way; We'll trip the light fantastic too, until the break of day. Who knows that ere another ball, we'll be outside the city hall; Be gay, but not too gay.” 

And Hinky Dink  (above, right) groused, “Whenever you hear one of them fellows shouting that Hinky Dink is a menace to society and that he has horns, just keep your hand on your watch. Savvy?” 

One newspaper  attempted to describe the scene inside the Coliseum. “The crowd was so enormous that when women fainted – a common occurrence – they had to be passed overhead from hand to hand towards the exits. Cigar smoke settled...in such thick fogs that visibility was no greater than 30 feet in any direction. The noise of shuffling feet and murmuring overpowered the sound of the dance band, and fist-fights and shoving erupted in all quarters." 

When Lyman Atwell, photographer for the Tribune…began setting up his flash and tripod, security notified (Bathhouse) who…personally jumped on Atwell, breaking his camera and knocking him to the ground…"

"As usual, things started to get interesting at midnight, when the regiments of madams and their inmates showed up, led by the Everleigh Sisters. This caused another influx of thousands of men to attempt to enter the building…”  Hinky Dink lorded over the affair from a table off the main floor. Then, at midnight, Bathhouse, wearing a green jacket, a mauve vest, lavender pants and a stove pipe silk hat led a winding Conga Line called The Grand March. Said the newspaper, “The most infamous party in Chicago history lasted until 5 a.m., when the last drunken revelers staggered out…” 

But, after the death of the Marshall Field Jr., the millionaires began speaking with their feet, trading  their row homes along Prairie Avenue for even larger mansions with extensive grounds along the safer Gold Coast in the northern suburbs along the lake.  One newspaper observed that Prairie  Avenue had become undesirable to those for whom it was affordable, and unaffordable to those for whom it was desirable.

The conservatives Republicans now abandoned Millionaires Row, convinced it was the debauched Democratic Ward Heelers who had ruined the morals of  their city. In fact, the 1908 First Ward Ball would be the last.  Not that the drugs, gambling and prostitution were dying out. It was more that the Republican solutions having failed to stamp them out, they gave up and moved away. 

The mayor finally ordered the Everleigh club (above) closed in October of 1911. 

The sisters said they walked away with $1,000,000 in cash, and their post Levee lifestyle in New York City seemed to support that retirement fund.  Minna took the change philosophically. “If it weren't for married men”, she admitted, “we couldn't have carried on at all, and if it weren't for cheating married women we could have made another million.” Minna died in 1948, Ada died in 1960. She was 93.

Then in 1913, in far off Los Angeles, California, a woman appeared who claimed to know the truth concerning the  death of Marshall Field Junior. Her name was Mrs. Ver Scott Prosser (above), and she was awaiting trial for having murdered Mister Prosser. But while behind bars she confessed to having used the names Vera Leroy, Viola Gilmore, Vera Scott - even  eVra Gardineer.  But during her time working at the opulent Everleigh Club, she was known simply as "Vera the French Girl".  Except she was from Cleveland.

Said one of the men who worked at the club, "Vera was a wonder at getting the money when she wanted to be, but she was a little devil when she had been drinking. The Everleigh sisters used to have to threaten to throw her out. But...they wouldn’t throw her out because she had too many suckers come there to buy wine." ( above, ballroom in Everleigh Club)   She was described as impulsive, neurotic , hot-tempered, jealous, winsome. coquettish and fanciful." To modern ears it sounds as if she was an undiagnosed manic depressive.

Vera said that Marshall Field was well known at the Everleigh Club (above, music room).  "Everybody called him by name, and...Emma Everleigh, gave him the courtesy of a private room. We went there...with a girl named Alice." During the sex, the volatile Vera suddenly slighted and claimed that Marshall had injured her.  "I jumped up," said Vera, "and I remembered he had a gun in his trousers.. I was inflamed with drink and crazy mad. I told him that I would teach him never to do that kind of trick again." 

Although Alice tried to talk Vera down, "I aimed the gun at Field and told him to stand aside. He was without clothes. The trigger must have been very finely set, for it pulled before I intended." At the sound of the shot Emma Everleigh rushed into the room (above). According to Vera, even the wounded Field told her, "Don't get excited. I won't tell. Call me a cab, quick, and get me out of this, and don't say anything."

According to Vera, Field’s father gave her $26,000 to leave the country.  The man who worked at the Everleigh Club noted that "After the Field affair she disappeared completely. I heard a lot of rumors concerning her. These rumors had her all over the world." In fact she traveled to China, had an affair with a blue blood, returned to the states, married Mr. Prossser  who she later admitted shooting. However the jury found she had acted in self defense, and she returned to Cleveland, where she died in obscurity.  

Bathhouse John Coughlin (above) served 46 years as a Chicago Alderman. 

He died in 1938, $50,000 in debt.  Evidently, poetry never paid very well.

“Hinky Dink” Kenna spent his last years (above) alienated from his family, living in a suite in the Blackstone Hotel and cared for only by a male nurse.  He died in 1946 and left behind a million dollars…in cash. 

His will stipulated that $33,000 of it should be set aside to construct a mausoleum for his grave. His survivors had Hinky’s will set aside. Instead they marked his passing with an $85.00 wooden tombstone, which was later replaced by a simple marble ground level marker, just as if he had been nobody special at all. 

At Hinky’s funeral, half the pews were empty, and few sent flowers. As one old First Ward lobbygog (Ward Heeler) put it, “If you don't go to other people's funerals, they won't go to yours.”  

In truth it was not the reformers or the Law and Order League that put the Levee out of business, but rather the arrival of Prohibition in 1920, which freed the Levee from its confinement, and let it spread out and multiply. 

The new Prince of Chicago sin was “Big Jim” Colosimo (above),  who married Madam Victoria Shaw. Big Jim plowed the profits from the whore house into his nightclub. Then, in 1919 Colosimo opened a new brothel at 2222 Wabash avenue, which he called "The Four Duces".  As a bartender and bouncer he brought a young thug out from New York named Al Capone.

The following year, 1920, Big Jim was gunned down leaving his night club. And it was rumored the man who pulled the trigger was Al Capone. As Hinky Dink explained, “Chicago ain't no sissy town.” And Marshall Field Jr. would have certainly agreed.

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