Gangster Gats: Colosimo the Vampire or Colosimo the Vampire Hunter?

Near this table the police found an order blank which contained various words and names in pencil. The police believe the paper may contain a clew. A phone number on the paper is 4020 Calumet. This is the number of the National Rubber Products company. There is the name of Samuel Lavine, with an address on Vernon avenue; the words, “So long vampire,” and “Saturday evening.”… the word “buffalo” is also jotted down there, and “So long, Letty.”

‒ Chicago Daily Tribune, “Colosimo Slain; Seek Ex-Wife, Just Returned” (12-MAY-1920

 

On the afternoon of 11-MAY-1920, Giacomo “Big Jim” Colosimo stepped into the vestibule of his restaurant, the famous Colosimo’s Café at 2126 South Wabash Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. Colosimo was the head of a powerful criminal organisation that would soon be known as the Chicago Outfit. Right now, he had taken a telephone call and presumably wanted to return to his new wife. At this moment, a man previously hidden in the cloakroom stepped into the vestibule and fired two shots from a .38-calibre handgun ‒ newspapers, covering all bases in the face of knowing nothing, claimed it was “a revolver, or perhaps an automatic pistol.” The first shot missed, the second entered Colosimo’s big head behind the right ear and went into his brain, killing him. Colosimo never managed to draw his own pearl-handled .38-calibre revolver. The shooter, short, stocky, moon-faced, swarthy, and nattily dressed including a derby hat, disappeared.

Investigator Weapons: Fending Off Sharks

Eugene F. McDonald, radio manufacturer and commander of the yacht Mizpah, back from a cruise about the Galapagos Islands in the eastern Pacific, greeted friends here with a tale of fighting great schools of sharks with machine guns. “They were so thick that we were afraid they would endanger the yacht. We killed hundreds of them,” McDonald said. McDonald related that his party, which included several scientists, made discoveries of a scientific nature on the islands so startling that they could not be revealed until after further exploration.

– The Enquirer & Evening News, “Machine Guns Used to Fight Off Sharks” (14-FEB-1930)

 

Lieutenant Commander Eugene “Gene” McDonald, an officer in the US Naval Reserve Force, was the millionaire owner of the Zenith Radio Company in Chicago, Illinois. On 03-JAN-1930, he embarked on a 5-week cruise of the East Pacific, starting in Miami, Florida, and travelling through the Panama Canal. McDonald was the owner and skipper of the Mizpah, a 56-metre luxury yacht built for then-outrageous $1.3 million using components of a discarded US Navy destroyer. While nominally based on Lake Michigan in the Lincoln Park yacht harbour in Chicago, the vessel was seaworthy and was often stationed in Miami. The Mizpah had a 27-man crew and sported eight fully equipped state rooms with real beds rather than cramped berths.