Doc
Doc was born in Brugherio, Italy outside Milan in 1900. His parents were Vittorio and Renata. He was an active outgoing young boy. His father was a Pharmacist and his mother was an herbal gardener. His parents worked together. Doc had a fairly privileged life. He went to a private Catholic School specializing in Science. He never needed for much.
At 16 and a half years he was drafted into the Italian Army in the Great War against the Central Powers. He was trained as an Infantryman. Then sent as a replacement for the 10th Alpini Group. He spent the entire war in the Alpine fighting around Isonzo. After nearly a year there was an opening as a Medic in the unit which he rapidly took.
After 18 months of the worst trench warfare imaginable in the Alps, the Great War was finally over. Doc found solace in alcohol after the war. Eventually he was talked into acting in the local theatre troop. He took to it easily and made enough money to subsist. In 1921, his parents died in a train wreck. After that he decided he needed a change. He took a steamer to America, passed through Ellis Island. In New York he had trouble finding acting work, he was starving. So he hopped a train to Chicago where he heard there was more options.
He arrived in Chicago and found it almost as hard finding acting work. But he did find work, but hardly enough to pay the bills. Another form of worked popped up for a young Italian man in Chicago. While drinking at the Exchequer Club, a gangster stumbled in bleeding with a gun shot to the shoulder. Doc’s past came back, he was once again a Medic in the trenches of Isonzo. He stabilized the man and bandaged his wound. Little did he know an important man was watching him, Johnny Torrio. Mr. Torrio was an important gang leader in Chicago. He came to Doc and offered to pay his way through Chicago University to become a Doctor if he would agree to treat his clients.
Doc agreed and entered Chicago School of Medicine. He excelled and was passing classes easily, if he wasn’t hungover, or drunk. But when it came to practical application of medicine. No one in the class beat Doc. In 1927, during his residency, Doc found the charms of the Dean of the College to be irresistible. They were caught at a seedy motel just off the Navy Pier, naked. Doc was expelled.
It hardly mattered, Doc was an excellent physician and bio-chemist anyway. He just had more work for the gangs. But a few months later Mr. Torrio, left America to go back to Italy and turned the business over to a former rival, a man known as Scarface. Doc didn’t like it, he didn’t like how things were headed. He made his exit the same time as Mr. Torrio. He found work with Sheldons Gang, an Irish Gang on the North Side.
Things were good for a couple years. Plenty of money, patch up a knife or bullet wound now and then, all the booze he wanted to drink and all the women he could handle. Then Scarfaces ‘Outfit’ started taking over all gang activity in Chicago. It got to be too much, and word was Scarface himself learned that Doc should really be working for him. The last day he was in Chicago, he was offered more money than he’d seen to go to work for the Outfit. But these were the same guys that pulled off the St Valentines Day Massacre in ’29 and he wasn’t about to work for them.
Doc had met and gotten to know a driver for Sheldons Gane, an Irishman named Mickey Callahan. Doc convinced Mickey there was no future for them in Chicago and the pair left that night.
They both found work with Legs Diamond, an Irish mobster that worked Philadelphia and New York. Legs had a knack for getting hurt, busted bones, knifed, shot. But he always pulled through. That is until December of 1931.
