Who was he, I wondered? And what were all those local officials doing at his splashy funeral? The answer lies in his history, as related on the same site:

Giacomo Colosimo emigrated from Calabria, Italy, arriving in Chicago in the 1890s. Giacomo, or Jim, was at first a pickpocket, a pimp, and a Black Hand extortionist, while working the occasional honest job as a street sweeper.

When he became a [street sweeper] foreman, he was noticed by “Hinky Dink” Kenna and “Bathhouse” John Coughlin, First Ward Aldermen. He worked for them as a Democratic precinct captain [i.e., collecting votes from his fellow municipal employees], and thug, collecting tribute for the corrupt aldermen, who were also owners of brothels in their district, which included the Levee [a red light district].

His gangland career was advanced by his marriage to a madam. He soon owned two hundred brothels, which comprised the majority of brothels in the Levee district in downtown Chicago. His brothels were replenished by the abduction, imprisonment, and rape of women by his white-slave-trade ring. Often, victims were  approached with an appealing job offer, which then led to their kidnapping. And because of Colosimo’s political connections, he operated without interference from the city.

Jane Addams, founder of the world-famous social settlement Hull House on Chicago’s near West Side, describes in her book, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1914), how the payoffs worked in the Levee, in this instance for Colosimo’s friends, aldermen Kenna and Coughlin.

...the ward politician... keeps a disorderly saloon which serves both as a meeting place for the vicious young men engaged in the traffic [of women] and as a market for their wares. Back of this, the politician higher up receives his share of the toll which this business pays that it may remain undisturbed (36).

Addams, one of the most prominent social reformers of her time, also wrote that local policemen’s fortunes were “so tied up to those who profited by the white-slave trade that the most well-meaning man upon the force is constantly handicapped (43).”
This picture of criminal activity interlocking into local politics and policing we shall see again.

After learning about “Big Jim” Colosimo, called at the time the “whoremaster of Chicago,” I began to think about Mae’s story in a new light. I wondered if my grandmother, about whom I had heard so little, had somehow gotten caught up in this enormous web of human misery. It would explain her “boom-and-bust” existence, her being out all night, and her mafioso Italian.
I learned that many women in prostitution were single mothers, like Mae, whom no one wanted to hire in legitimate businesses because of the social stigma.

I now had a bigger picture to work with. What I knew for sure was here was a young mother on her own, who couldn’t get a regular job, who probably had to work nights and leave her child alone (as many people did in those days), who had no financial security, and who had a live-in Mafia friend. My dad had long since died by the time I came to wonder if she had been trafficked into prostitution. My cousin Doris, in her early 80s, whom I spoke to a couple times on the phone, recently offered, “You know your grandmother was kind of a black sheep.” And then she clammed up on the details.

So here I was on this trip to find out what I could about this business up in Florence County, the old Hollywood Hotel Bar. I figured that I could find a few oldtimers, like my mom who was in her late 70s, who had been around when my grandmother owned the Hollywood. When I arrived, I found a sign in front of a 1960s or 1970s building, proclaiming itself the “New Hollywood Supper Club.” I wasn’t surprised at the recent vintage of the building because I had already heard from an Iron Mountain dentist I’d met at an art fair that the old Hollywood had burned down. Also on the curve in the road were two more restaurants and two bars. This little “metropolis” had no houses or other buildings, just bare trees that had already dropped their leaves in September, desolate but beautiful pines, and lonely but lovely lakes. The name of the town? Spread Eagle.

I went into one of the bars. It was a typical Wisconsin tavern, dark and sort of homey, with a small handful of people drinking and smoking at the bar. Armed with my photos of the old Hollywood, of my grandmother and her husband in front of it, I showed the pictures around. Everyone was too young to have been around then, and no one recognized them. But then a man came in who was closer to the generation I was looking for. Pat Printz was a pleasant-looking fellow with black glasses and a friendly demeanor. He looked closely at the photos. “Sure! I remember the old Hollywood,” he said, with emphasis, and a slight Eastern accent.
“What kind of a place was it?” I asked.

Without hesitation, he replied, “It was a whorehouse!” Eureka! There it was—my answer! And I had only been in town for fifteen minutes!

Pat didn’t recognize either my grandmother or her husband, but he did say that there had been a number of brothels here in the 1930s and 1940s. “We had no law,” he explained. “The sheriff was part-time and just collected payoffs.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear what Pat had to say, for I had already read the 1914 Report and Recommendations of the Wisconsin Legislative Committee to Investigate the White Slave Traffic and Kindred Subjects. The report describes prostitution as being enmeshed with local politics (the same picture as in Chicago) in nearly every Wisconsin city in 1913-1914. I understood how that had worked in Chicago, but what I didn’t entirely understand yet was how that worked up here.