Torrio's business sense caught the eye of Paul Kelly, the leader of the Five Points Gang. While he was a teenager, he joined a street gang together with another James Street resident Robert Vanella and became its leader he eventually managed to save enough money and opened a billiards parlor for the group, and from there grew illegal activities such as gambling and loan sharking. His first jobs were as a porter and bouncer in Manhattan. When he was two his father, a railway employee, died in a work accident shortly after, Torrio immigrated to James Street on the Lower East Side of New York City with his widowed mother in December 1884. Torrio was born in Irsina (then known as Montepeloso), Basilicata, in Southern Italy, to Tommaso Torrio and Maria Carluccio originally from Altamura, Apulia. Crime journalist Herbert Asbury affirmed: "As an organizer and administrator of underworld affairs, Johnny Torrio is unsurpassed in the annals of American crime he was probably the nearest thing to a real mastermind that this country has yet produced". Peterson of the Chicago Crime Commission stated that his "talents as an organizational genius were widely respected by the major gang bosses in the New York City area". The US Treasury official Elmer Irey considered him "the biggest gangster in America" and wrote, "He was the smartest and, I dare say, the best of all the hoodlums. Torrio had several nicknames, primarily "The Fox" for his cunning and finesse. Torrio proposed a National Crime Syndicate in the 1930s and later became an adviser to Lucky Luciano and his Luciano crime family. John Donato Torrio (born Donato Torrio, Italian: Janu– April 16, 1957) was an Italian born-American mobster who helped build the Chicago Outfit in the 1920s later inherited by his protégé Al Capone.
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