The structural recipe calls for opening with the single most-cited work in the fact sheet, but the facts for Jim Colosimo contain no named work or singular creation. Proceeding instead from identity, the biography moves to origin, then to career, and closes on the concrete fact of his death, all within the bounds of what the facts support.

Jim Colosimo was a United States citizen who worked as an entrepreneur, a racketeer, a procurer, and a criminal. He held citizenship in both the United States and the Kingdom of Italy, a dual belonging that marked him as a man who had crossed from one world into another. His occupations placed him at the intersection of commerce and organized illegality during the early decades of the twentieth century.

He was born on February 16, 1878, in Colosimi, and was a citizen of the Kingdom of Italy by birth. At some point he made his way to the United States, eventually settling in Chicago, where he pursued the several occupations the record attributes to him: entrepreneur, racketeer, procurer, criminal. The facts do not specify the precise nature of his entrepreneurial activities, nor do they name associates or successors, and so those matters are left without elaboration.

He died in Chicago on May 11, 1920. The authorized record identifies him as Colosimo, Jim, with a death date appended in place of a birth date — a notation that captures something of how his life has been catalogued, defined by its end in the city where he had settled, rather than by its beginning in the Italian town where he was born some forty-two years before.