
The structure of the modern Chicago Outfit
The Chicago Outfit is a Chicago-based, Italian-American organized crime syndicate that controls organized crime in the Midwest and, even more broadly, the American West as a whole. The family was founded by James Colosimo in 1910, with Colosimo becoming a notorious pimp. In 1920, his lieutenant Johnny Torrio had him murdered so that the family could move into bootlegging during Prohibition, and Torrio's ambitious henchman Al Capone would lead the gang to become the most powerful in Chicago through a series of gang wars and murders. Capone was arrested in 1932 on charges of tax evasion, and Tony Accardo ran the family from the 1940s until the 1990s. By the 2000s, the Outfit was in decline, and it had anywhere from 28 to over 90 made members and at least 100 asociates by 2015.