FBI Vault file on John Torrio
The FBI Vault's release of the Bureau file on John Torrio, one part of 236 scanned pages, including a 1946 extortion case in which he was the victim and a 1947 background memorandum.
- Date
- 1946/1947
- Kind
- case-file
- Source
- FBI Records: The Vault
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Rights
- A work of the United States government, prepared by federal officers or employees as part of their official duties. Public domain in the United States. 17 U.S.C. § 105.
The Vault lists one part, “John Torrio Part 01 (Final),” of 236 scanned pages. This archive read it through the viewer’s OCR text layer and checked the pages cited here against the scans. The date range on this page covers the documents described below, not the whole file.
Page 55 is an office memorandum on an extortion case; its date line is partly illegible in the OCR. “The victim, John Torrio, is a former henchman of Al Capone.” It says he received a threatening letter in 1946 demanding $10,000 under threat of death and was told to leave the money at a Brooklyn theater in October 1946, and that complaints were later filed against two men. Page 123 quotes an inquiry reply about “John Torrence or John Torrio, as he is sometimes known.”
Pages 226–227 hold a memorandum from Ryan to Rosen dated April 19, 1947, “to set forth background information” on Torrio. It draws on a Chicago Office crime survey of April 7, 1944. It says Jim Colosimo “imported Johnny Torrio from New York to be his bodyguard and right-hand man,” that “Colosimo was murdered on May 11, 1920, and it is alleged by the Chicago Police that this killing was planned by Johnny Torrio,” and that Torrio then brought “a New York hoodlum named Alfonse Capone” to Chicago. It says Torrio was arrested in January 1925 in a raid on the Sieben Brewery, and that “In 1939 Torrio was sentenced to a term of two and one-half years in a Federal penitentiary for Income Tax evasion and placed on probation for ten years.” A newspaper clipping on the Brooklyn case is filed after the memorandum; this archive does not reproduce it.
The 1947 memorandum repeats a crime survey and a police allegation. It is not a finding of fact. The OCR of page 226 scrambles the line order; the words are quoted as printed.
