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The First Vice Lord: Big Jim Colosemo and the Ladies of the Levee ReviewThis is a brisk and entertaining account of the infamous career of Big Jim Colosimo, an influential political fixer, restauranteur and career criminal who was murdered shortly after the start of the Prohibition Era. Colosimo preceded Johnny Torrio and Al Capone as one of the top racketeers in Chicago. His celebrated restaurant and night club was unique in that served patrons from all classes of society, professional athletes, crooks, celebrities, politicians and elite members of the city's social register alike.
Jim Colosimo rose to power as a leader of Chicago's sanitation workers and as a top precinct captain for the notorious political bosses of the 1st Ward, Democratic aldermen "Bathhouse John" Coughlin and Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna. Colosimo and his first wife, Victoria, owned and operated numerous lucrative brothels in the infamous Levee district. During elections, Colosimo turned out the pimps, cadets and whores to deliver their votes to the political machine. He was on good terms with the Everleigh sisters and collected payoffs from various Levee resort operators to be divided with the politicians and the police.
The key problem that I found in reading this book was that so much of the political and election data supplied in the text was clearly erroneous. I would have given this book a better rating if not for these errors: State's Attorney John Wayman did not conduct vice raids in the Levee as a prelude for a run for governor in 1913 (he had been an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1912 which was held months before the raids began in earnest); "Big Bill" Thompson was not the incumbent alderman of the 2nd Ward when he ran for mayor in 1915 (he had served in the city council more than a decade earlier) and he was not encouraged to make the mayoral race by Carter Harrison's decision to retire (Harrison was a mayoral candidate in 1915, but lost to County Clerk Robert Sweitzer in the nominating primary); Thompson testified on behalf of his former campaign manager, Fred "Poor Swede" Lundin, during the latter's trial for orchestrating corruption and wasteful spending at the Chicago Board of Education, but Thompson was not under indictment as a criminal defendant charged with participating in this particular scandal; William E. Dever defeated Arthur C. Lueder in the 1923 mayoral race (Thompson was not a candidate that year). Political events are an intregal part of the Colosimo story, but the book is quite careless in supplying the necessary details correctly.
The errors that I have referred to are merely a sampling of the mistakes to be found in the otherwise enjoyable text. There are several more, but space does not permit me to list all of the non sequiturs. One final example will suffice. According to the glossary, the Volstead Act was the popular name for the 13th Amendment which ushered in the legal prohibition of alcohol in the USA. In fact, the Volstead Act (the bill was named for its Congressional sponsor, US Representative Andrew J. Volstead of Minnesota) was the legislation that implemented the 18th Amendment; the 13th Amendment was passed during the Reconstruction era and formally abolished slavery in the United States immediately after the conclusion of the Civil War.
There is some good information in this book (the material related to Colosimo's second marriage to Dale Winters, his officially unsolved murder and his lavish funeral is well handled), but the presence of so many historical errors prevents me from rating the book as definitive.
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