Evening Times-Republican, 12 May 1920, page 1: Underworld king slain

The front page of the Evening Times-Republican of Marshalltown, Iowa, for 12 May 1920 prints an Associated Press story datelined Chicago, May 12, headed “UNDERWORLD KING SLAIN.” The deck reads “James Colosimo, Owner of Famous Chicago Restaurant Shot to Death.” It says the shooting of James Colosimo, proprietor of a restaurant “in the former tenderloin district,” the afternoon before “remained as much a mystery as ever today.”

The sentence that gives the place reads, in the Library of Congress OCR, “was shot and killed by an unknown assailant at the front door of his cafe at 2128 South Wabash avenue yesterday afternoon.” The OCR reads the house number as 2128. On the scan the last digit is not clearly legible at this resolution, so this archive cites the page for “South Wabash avenue” and does not fix a house number from it. The story adds that he was “slain by a single bullet fired from a cloakroom,” that the only eyewitness “disappeared before the finding of the body,” and that police were weighing more than one theory.

The report is the first-day wire account, and the police theories it prints are not findings. “Uncrowned king of Chicago’s underworld” is the wire’s phrase.