(Joseph Esposito)

Born: March 28, 1872
Died: March 21, 1928

Once a dirt-poor immigrant, Diamond Joe Esposito amassed a fortune by participating in bootlegging and racketeering ventures.

A baker on the move

Esposito was born near Naples, Italy, in the small town of Accera. He grew up in poverty and immigrated to the United States in 1895, when he was twenty-three years old. Scrounging a living by taking whatever work he could find, he collected garbage, dug ditches, and carefully saved his money. After a few years he moved from Boston, Massachusetts, to Brooklyn, New York. At the age of thirty-three, he settled in Chicago, where he opened a bakery in the Nineteenth Ward, an area known as Little Italy.

Esposito continued to hustle, working odd jobs to supplement his income from the bakery. He worked for a while as a hod carrier—hard physical labor that required...