uttering the underworld's ultimate accolade. "Whatever game he played, he shot straight. He wasn't greedy. There could be dozens of others getting theirs. The more the merrier as far as he was concerned. He had what a lot of us haven't got-class. He brought the society swells and the millionaires into the red-light district. It helped everybody, and a lot of places kept alive on Colosimo's overflow. Big Jim never bilked a pal or turned down a good guy and he always kept his mouth shut."
Capone observed an ancient Italian mourning custom: During the three days between Big Jim's death and his burial he didn't shave.
A thousand First Ward Democrats preceded the cortege as it wound through the Levee on its way to the nonsectarian Oakwood Cemetery. They paused before the crepe-draped portals of Colosimo's Cafe while two brass bands played a dirge. Dale Colosimo and De Stefano rode behind the hearse in a car with drawn curtains. Five thousand mourners followed. The fifty-three pallbearers and honorary pallbearers included, in addition to criminals of every stripe, nine aldermen, three judges, two Congressmen, a state senator, an assistant state's attorney and the state Republican leader. The Bath had tried to persuade judge Lyle, then a Republican alderman, to join the pallbearers, but he declined.
"Jim wasn't a bad fellow, John," the Dink pleaded. "You know what he did. He fixed up an old farmhouse for broken-down prostitutes. They rested up and got back in shape and he never charged them a cent."
"Well," said Lyle, "now that he's dead, who's going to run this convalescent camp?"
"Oh, Jim sold it. Some of the girls ran away after they got back on their feet. Jim got sore, said they didn't have no gratitude."
The Chicago American reported:
"No matter what he may have been in the past, no matter what his faults, Jim was my friend and I am going to his funeral."
These and similar words were heard today from the lips of hundreds of Chicagoans. They were heard in the old Twenty-second Street levee district, over which Jim for so many years had held undisputed sway, they dropped from the mouths of gunmen and crooks, while many a tear ran down the painted cheeks of women of the underworld.
They were heard from many a seemingly staid businessman in loop skyscrapers and from men famous and near-famous in the world of arts and letters, who had all mingled more or less indiscriminately with the other world which walks forth at night.
Referring to gangster funerals in general, the perceptive Illinois Crime Survey illuminated the nature of the relationship between crime and politics:
Political power in a democracy rests upon friendship. A man is your friend, not merely because he is kind to you, but because you can depend on him, because you know that he will stick and that he will keep his word.
Politics in the river wards, and among common people elsewhere as well, is a feudal relationship. The feudal system was one that was based not on law but upon personal loyalties. Politics tends, therefore, to become a feudal system. Gangs, also, are organized on a feudal basis-that is, upon loyalties, upon friendships, and above all, upon dependability. That is one reason why politicians and criminal gangs understand one another so well and so frequently enter into alliances with each other against the more remote common good.
the rule which Colosimo established and maintained was a rule outside of and antagonistic to the formal and established order of society . .. for it is an undoubted fact that friendship . . . frequently does undermine the more formal social order. Idealists are notoriously not good friends. No man who is more interested in abstractions like justice, humanity and righteousness than he is in the more common immediate and personal relations of life, is likely to be a good mixer or a good politician... .
The city of Chicago, if we look at the map, is clearly divided into two regions, the east side and the west side-the lake
Capone observed an ancient Italian mourning custom: During the three days between Big Jim's death and his burial he didn't shave.
A thousand First Ward Democrats preceded the cortege as it wound through the Levee on its way to the nonsectarian Oakwood Cemetery. They paused before the crepe-draped portals of Colosimo's Cafe while two brass bands played a dirge. Dale Colosimo and De Stefano rode behind the hearse in a car with drawn curtains. Five thousand mourners followed. The fifty-three pallbearers and honorary pallbearers included, in addition to criminals of every stripe, nine aldermen, three judges, two Congressmen, a state senator, an assistant state's attorney and the state Republican leader. The Bath had tried to persuade judge Lyle, then a Republican alderman, to join the pallbearers, but he declined.
"Jim wasn't a bad fellow, John," the Dink pleaded. "You know what he did. He fixed up an old farmhouse for broken-down prostitutes. They rested up and got back in shape and he never charged them a cent."
"Well," said Lyle, "now that he's dead, who's going to run this convalescent camp?"
"Oh, Jim sold it. Some of the girls ran away after they got back on their feet. Jim got sore, said they didn't have no gratitude."
The Chicago American reported:
"No matter what he may have been in the past, no matter what his faults, Jim was my friend and I am going to his funeral."
These and similar words were heard today from the lips of hundreds of Chicagoans. They were heard in the old Twenty-second Street levee district, over which Jim for so many years had held undisputed sway, they dropped from the mouths of gunmen and crooks, while many a tear ran down the painted cheeks of women of the underworld.
They were heard from many a seemingly staid businessman in loop skyscrapers and from men famous and near-famous in the world of arts and letters, who had all mingled more or less indiscriminately with the other world which walks forth at night.
Referring to gangster funerals in general, the perceptive Illinois Crime Survey illuminated the nature of the relationship between crime and politics:
Political power in a democracy rests upon friendship. A man is your friend, not merely because he is kind to you, but because you can depend on him, because you know that he will stick and that he will keep his word.
Politics in the river wards, and among common people elsewhere as well, is a feudal relationship. The feudal system was one that was based not on law but upon personal loyalties. Politics tends, therefore, to become a feudal system. Gangs, also, are organized on a feudal basis-that is, upon loyalties, upon friendships, and above all, upon dependability. That is one reason why politicians and criminal gangs understand one another so well and so frequently enter into alliances with each other against the more remote common good.
the rule which Colosimo established and maintained was a rule outside of and antagonistic to the formal and established order of society . .. for it is an undoubted fact that friendship . . . frequently does undermine the more formal social order. Idealists are notoriously not good friends. No man who is more interested in abstractions like justice, humanity and righteousness than he is in the more common immediate and personal relations of life, is likely to be a good mixer or a good politician... .
The city of Chicago, if we look at the map, is clearly divided into two regions, the east side and the west side-the lake
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