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rectitude, and religious devotion.
    Despite the antagonisms that persisted between the Irish and the Italians, many Irish girls showed a distinct preference for Italian boys because the latter did not shrink from early marriage, whereas the Irish boys tended to wait until they felt settled and secure in their occupation. Johnny Torrio married an Irish girl from Kentucky, Ann McCarthy. Capone was so eager to marry Mae Coughlin that he obtained a special dispensation from the church, eliminating the necessity to publish banns. Presumably the difference in ages embarrassed the bride; on the certificate of marriage registration she lowered her age by one year and Capone raised his by one. The ceremony was performed on December 18, 1918, by the Reverend James J. Delaney, pastor of St. Mary Star of the Sea Church, where the Coughlins worshiped. The bride's sister Anna and a friend of Capone's, James De Vico, acted as witnesses. The following year Mae Capone bore her first and only child, Albert Francis, nicknamed Sonny. Torrio was the godfather, and on each of Sonny's birthdays he bought him a $5,000 bond. "I'd go the limit for Johnny," Capone said in later years.
    Torrio had been spending more and more time in Chicago ever since 1909, when his uncle, James "Big Jim" Colosimo, first fetched him there, and though he continued to pursue various joint ventures in New York with Paul Kelly, Frank Yale and others, Chicago was now his base. Capone's fortunes, meanwhile, had not progressed. The money he craved to pamper his wife and son eluded him. Already suspected of two murders, he faced indictment for a third, if a man he had sent to the hospital after a barroom brawl should die. The man lived, but this Capone did not wait around to learn. A message came from Torrio, summoning him to Chicago. He needed no urging. With his wife and son he fled New York.
     

THE capstone of his career was Colosimo's Cafe. Opened in 1910 at 2126 South Wabash Avenue and remodeled four years later, it had become the ne plus ultra of Chicago night life. No other pleasure palace in the city could compete with the talent of its star entertainers, the beauty of its chorus girls or the virtuosity of its orchestra, which alternated "jass," or "jaz" (as they spelled it then) , with operatic medleys. Nor could any Chicago restaurant boast a more accomplished chef than Colosimo's Antonio Caesarino or a wider choice of vintage wines. Ben Hecht, at the time a columnist on the Chicago Daily News, marveled at the quantity and diversity of Big Jim's collection of imported cheeses.
    For the bon ton from the North Side "Gold Coast" who patronized the cabaret its location added piquancy to the trip downtown. They had to venture deep into the wicked Levee. Bounded north and south by Twenty-second and Eighteenth streets and east and west by Clark and Wabash, the Levee had one of the world's heaviest concentrations of crime and vice. Colosimo's place was all gaudy opulence from its gilded portals to its immense mahogany and glass bar. Green velvet covered the walls. Gold and crystal chandeliers hung from a skyblue ceiling where rosy, dimpled seraphim gamboled on cottoncandy clouds. Wherever the eye fell, it was dazzled by gold-framed mirrors, murals depicting tropical vistas, tapestries. At the flick of a switch hydraulic lifts raised or lowered the dance floor on which bobbed-haired women with calf-length skirts and their tuxedoed escorts performed whatever gyrations the current fad dictated-onestep, two-step, Boston, turkey trot, fox trot, grizzly bear, bunny hug, Castle walk-to the beat of "Tiger Rag," "Ja-da," "Pretty Baby," "Dardanella," "Ohl How She Could Yacki, Hacki, Wicki, Wacki, Woo." The festivities, which seldom got up full steam before midnight, sometimes went on past dawn. In a suite of rooms on the second floor gamblers could find any game they fancied from faro to chuck-a-luck at any stakes they cared to hazard.
    Colosimo's Cafe enjoyed national renown, and the