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Daring Escapes from Concentrations Camps, Enemies, and Crashed Planes

Khalid Elhassan November 11, 2021 36 min

Mikhail Devyataev had to escape not only German pursuit, but also survive his own side's antiaircraft fire. History Net

Johnny Torrio after he managed to escape death, and his bullet riddled car — Johnny Torrio after he managed to escape death, and his bullet-riddled car. Chicagology

13. Jonny Torrio’s Miraculous Escape

In retaliation for the assassination of their boss, the North Side Gang ambushed Johnny Torrio outside his apartment on January 24^th, 1925. The hitmen unleashed a fusillade of gunfire, and Torrio took bullets to the jaw, lung, abdomen, groin, and legs. As he lay severely wounded on the ground, a hitman walked up to the stricken mobster to finish him off with a coup de grace shot to the head. Fortunately for Torrio, the killer’s gun jammed. The miraculous escape from death shook Torrio and convinced him to get out while he still could. So he handed control of the Chicago Outfit over to Al Capone and moved to Italy. His retirement did not last long, however. Italy’s Fascist dictator cracked down on the mafia, and Torrio had to return to the US in 1928.

Back home, he became a mob consultant and respected emeritus figure, and demonstrated that he was a criminal visionary and one of the American mafia‘s most talented and intelligent leaders. Torrio branched out from traditional rackets and went into the boardrooms, to become the godfather of corporate crime. He also set up the National Crime Syndicate – a loose confederation of several ethnic organizations. It included the Italian-American Mafia and the Jewish mob, and to a lesser extent, Irish-American and African-American gangsters, among a total of fourteen different organizations, which cooperated from 1929 until the 1960s. Torrio managed to escape the violent end of many mobsters and passed peacefully of a heart attack in a barber’s chair in 1957.

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Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.