The First Vice Lord: Big Jim Colosemo and the Ladies of the Levee Review

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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.The First Vice Lord: Big Jim Colosemo and the Ladies of the Levee Overview

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Chicago Blues Review

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Chicago Blues ReviewCHICAGO BLUES
By twenty-one Chicago blues artists.
Edited by Libby Fischer Hellmann
Bleak House Books, October 2007
456 pages, Hardcover, $27.95
Chicago, like most large cities anywhere in the world, is really two or more cities. It exists in different times and sometimes in different universes, even while occupying the same real estate. Daytimes the people of the upper world are there, crowds of shoppers, traffic, wheelers and dealers, the thousands or millions who go busily about their daily lives in the hard sunlight, visible to almost everybody.
Then there's the other city, the one you encounter at night after the sun departs along with the suited workers. This city is a little less crowded, except in the sometimes stifling bars or underground caverns. In this city you'll meet good cops trying to control the violence, and you may brush up against the others, those acquiring their reputations as bad and dangerous boys and girls. In the nighttime you can also meet the scufflers, the dealers, the thugs the killers, and the other slitherers through the night.
There are still other players in Chicago. They are the makers of music, of art, of story. And while they intersect with the rest of the night crawlers, it's often the horn players in the bars and night clubs who lend texture and rhythm to the boozy, bluesy night, to that night thick with desire and trepidation, with humidity and icy winds. This city is sometimes violent in places where the sun never filters in, where dark denizens shun the scrutiny of the day. The urban canyons of Chicago are often dark enough all day long to sustain the underlife, and the river that runs the wrong direction.
Intermingled with the busy daytime traders and the nighttime scufflers are the watchers, the storytellers who observe and remember and write it all down. They go down the dangerous streets and trash-strewn alleys so you don't have to. You can read all about it and experience it at a safer distance, know that frisson of danger, without really getting dirty.
If that's your thing, this is a book for you. If you want to have an up-close experience of the down and dirty blues of Chicago, this is a book you really want to read. Here, collected by astute and talented storytellers who drift through this urban scene, observing, recording, writing it down, are some of the best of the good stories. Twenty one of them, collected and shaped in a single volume aptly named "Chicago Blues." Dark stories of dark deeds, crisply written, sometimes enlightening, most relating tales of unregenerate and occasionally ordinary crime and criminals. Here is the corrupt politician, the vengeful ER nurse, here is history and flashback, here is skin-crawling realism. Life and death in the big city.
I have a tenuous connection with Chicago of an earlier time, of Count Basie and the old Blue Note, of North Clark Street. I have connections with several of the authors represented in this excellent anthology. That said, if you are looking for the true blue essence of the canyons of urban Chicago noir, if you want a sample of the gritty, sticky pavement of crime, of individuals pushed beyond their limits, of the grasping, panting, unredemptive jazz and jive of big city noir, here's a collection that takes hold and grasps and satisfies until the final curtain. This one is a winner, a keeper. This is the blues.
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Chicago Blues as seen from the inside - The Photographs of Raeburn Flerlage Review

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Chicago Blues as seen from the inside - The Photographs of Raeburn Flerlage ReviewI met Flerlage a few years ago in Chicago when I was doing some research for a now-forgotten project and I went through his collection of fantastic photos with him in his apartment and loved every second of it. The composition and lighting in these pictures is beautiful, and he catches something of the energy of the performances that is pretty amazing. Flerlage isn't one of these precious blues prigs (e.g., Steve Calt) who spends all of his time trying to protect some pet thesis and trashing everyone else's work relentlessly, but is a real dude who lived jazz and blues on the South Side in a way that few other writers or photographers have. The result is what you see -- great photographs, on the ground, in the clubs with the people who made the scene as wild and energetic as it was. If you want to see pictures that give you a real taste of the power of jazz and blues in teh 50s and 60s, get this book and linger over these fantastic photographs. You won't regret it.Chicago Blues as seen from the inside - The Photographs of Raeburn Flerlage Overview

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