not in spirit, Congress had "effectively assigned an entire industry to the underworld"; as Jack Kelly explains, Prohibition would come to serve as the "gangsters' higher education, demanding as it did management skills, cooperation, planning and high-level political contacts" (Kelly 76). Public respect for the law eroded, and "turned street thugs into millionaires" (Kelly 76).
The first man to attempt to bring decorum and structure to organized crime was John Torrio, the "thinking man's criminal". Initially the business manager for the famed founding father of American organized crime, Big Jim Colosimo, Torrio ran a notorious night spot in Chicago specializing in gambling, booze and hookers. Prohibition offered Torrio the opportunity to realize a longtime dream: crime not as a bloody, crude affair but as an elegant, organized business (Kelly 68).
In Torrio's Chicago, a North Side bootlegging rival by the name of Dion O'Bannion flourished in his own right due largely to dirty politica
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