Reflecting Can Make Us Feel Small

            On Sunday morning I finished memorizing “Help camionneur” by Serge Gainsbourg. I would normally search for or start working out the chords after a song has been committed to memory, but since I’d already worked out the chords to “Le canari est sur le balcon", which has the same melody, I just started copying those chords onto this song. I would run through it the next day to make sure it fit.

            It was another hot, fan-on day.

            I spent a lot of time writing about Saturday’s Food Bank Adventure.

I cleaned the bottom half of the two-meter high mirror in my living room but it still looks dirty on the other side. The reflective surface has just gotten worn in places over the years and looks smudged, yellowed and speckled with dirt even though it isn’t.

I had three corn crackers with cheese and a sliver of apple pie with whipped cream for lunch.

I did some exercises in the afternoon and took a bike ride to Ossington and Dundas.

I had a fried egg with a piece of toast and a beer for dinner while watching The Untouchables.

In this story Prohibition is still going on. The feds are investigating how some of the legal alcohol being manufactured for drugs and perfume is being diverted into the illicit booze trade. They trace it to a large food distribution company called Brawly Mills. It turns out that the president, E Carlton Duncan and vice president Brooks Wells are in the pockets of Al Capone’s original boss and mentor Johnny Torrio. The feds go over the Brawly books and find that they are delivering alcohol to the Lorelei Perfume Company, which they know to be a front for a bootlegging business. The feds raid the place and one of Torrio's men is killed. Torrio roughs up Duncan for having let Ness look at the books. He’s going to make him pay extra. Wells is a drunk and very upset about Torrio’s treatment of Duncan. He begins ranting in a bar and so they knock him off. The feds uncover that Duncan and Wells were actually brothers and former convicts with the last name Britanno. Duncan is arrested and Torrio arranges for him to be hit before he can talk. The gunmen are killed by the feds and Duncan can’t testify but the booze operation has been crippled, as if that was important.

The real Johnny Torrio came to New York at the age of two with his widowed mother. As a teenager he joined a street gang and quickly became the leader. He joined the Five Points Gang and became one of its lieutenants. Capone also joined and worked for Torrio. Torrio was invited to Chicago by Big Jim Colosimo to help fight the Black Hand extortionists. He did so and stayed on after his success. When Prohibition began Torrio urged Colosimo to get into the bootlegging business but he refused. Torrio had Colosimo assassinated and took over his criminal empire. When the rivalry between Torrio’s Outfit and O’Banion’s North Side Gang was insurmountable, Torrio had O’Banion killed. This started a war that resulted in Torrio being severely wounded in an assassination attempt. After getting out of the hospital he spent a year in prison. He was frightened and in 1925 he retired and moved back to Italy. He came back to New York in 1928 because of Mussolini’s pressure on Mafia elements. He got back in the bootlegging business and helped organize several mobs into the National Crime Syndicate. In 1939 he was arrested for income tax evasion and spent two years in prison. When he got out he retired and spent his time quietly in Brooklyn and Florida until he died in 1957.

Torrio’s main nickname was The Fox. One crime journalist said that Torrio was the closest thing to a criminal mastermind that the United States ever had.