May 10 Illinois History Minute

It’s May Tenth, the day in 1920 that Chicago Mafia boss Big Jim Colosimo was ambushed and shot to death at his South Side restaurant. No one was ever charged in his murder, although associates, including Al Capone, have been suspected.

Also on this day in 1992, former FBI agent and Chicago native Robert Hanssen was sentenced to fifteen consecutive life sentences without parole for selling U-S secrets to the KGB and its successors. Hanssen was paid more than a million dollars by the Russians for his information over a 22 year period.

And on this day in 1994 serial killer John Wayne Gacy was put to death by lethal injection at the Stateville prison near Joliet, for the murders of 33 young men and boys. The bodies of most of them had been found buried in the crawl space of Gacy’s house in the Chicago suburbs.