St. Valentine's Day massacre
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the wrestling event, see WWF St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
The St. Valentine's Day massacre is the name given to the shooting of seven people as part of a Prohibition Era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois in the winter of 1929: the South Side Italian gang led by Al "Scarface" Capone and the North Side Irish/German gang led by George 'Bugs' Moran.
On the morning of Thursday, February 14, St. Valentine's Day, seven members of Moran's gang were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the S-M-C Cartage Company in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side. They were then shot and killed by five members of Al Capone's gang (two of whom were dressed as police officers). When one of the dying men, Frank "Tight Lips" Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, "Nobody shot me." Capone himself had arranged to be on vacation in Florida at the time.
The massacre was a result of a plan devised by Capone gang member Jack 'Machine Gun' McGurn to eliminate Moran, Capone's chief criminal enemy. The massacre was planned by McGurn partly in retaliation for an unsuccessful attempt by Frank and his brother Peter Gusenberg to murder him a month earlier while at a telephone booth. Territorial corruptions between "Bugs" Moran and Al Capone about who'd own the Chicago bootlegging business and make the most money from it also led Capone to accept Jack's inquiry on the killing.
McGurn assembled a team of six men led by Fred Burke with the intent of having Moran lured into an ambush. Moran and his men would be tricked into visiting a warehouse on North Clark Street on the pretext of buying some bargain hijacked bootleg whiskey; Burke's team would then enter the building disguised as police officers and kill them. The chief architects of the plan, McGurn and Capone, would be well away from the scene.
Before any shooting had begun, Capone had placed lookouts in the apartments across the street from the warehouse. Capone, wishing to keep the lookouts inconspicuous, chose two men from another state to keep watch. Five members of the McGurn gang drove to the warehouse in a stolen police car at around 10:30 a.m., two dressed in police uniforms and three in ordinary street clothes. Moran, supposedly watching the warehouse, spotted the police car and fled. However, one of McGurn's lookouts confused one of Moran's men for Moran himself, and gave the signal to McGurn's men and they approached the warehouse.
At the warehouse, they found seven members of Moran's gang, and told them to line up facing the back wall, which they apparently did willingly, believing their captors were real (and comparatively harmless) police. All seven men were then shot and killed with a Thompson submachine gun.[1] Among the dead were James Clark (AKA Albert Kachellek), Frank and Pete Gusenberg, Adam Heyer, Johnny May, optician Dr. Reinhardt Schwimmer, and Al Weinshank.
To show by-standers that everything was under control, two of Capone's men dressed as civilians came out with their hands up, led by the gang members posing as police officers. John May's Alsatian dog was the only survivor. Cops heard the howling of the dog and arrived at the SMC Cartage to find the dog trapped under a beer truck and floor covered with blood and bullet shells.
The massacre marked the end of Moran's power on the North Side, and his gang vanished into obscurity, enabling Capone to take over the area; however, the event also brought the belated and full attention of the federal government to Capone and his criminal activities. This was ultimately Capone's downfall, for it led to his conviction and imprisonment on the Volstead Act and income tax evasion charges in 1931.
The garage, which stood at 2122 N. Clark Street, was demolished in 1967; the site is now a landscaped parking lot for a nursing home. The wall was dismantled brick by brick, sold at auction and shipped to George Patey of Vancouver, a Canadian businessman, who rebuilt it in the men's restroom of a bar with a Roaring Twenties theme called the Banjo Palace. After the bar closed, Patey began trying to sell the bricks as souvenirs.
The massacre was used as a plot device in the 1959 film Some Like it Hot and was the subject of Roger Corman's 1967 film The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. The TV series Early Edition included a final season episode named “Everybody Goes to Rick’s” whose story was based around this event. It also inspired the song "Valentine's Day" by singer/song-writer James Taylor and rapper 50 Cent's 2005 album "The Massacre." It also gave its name to WWF St. Valentine's Day Massacre, a pay per view event held in 1999. In the Simpsons episode 8f03 aired Oct 10th 1991, there is a reference to the massacre when Bart shows Fat Tony an "Itchy & Scratchy" cartoon where Itchy lines up a bunch of cats in front of a wall and shoots them with a machine gun. Fat Tony then replies (laughing) "It's funny because it's true.". And the character of Johnny "Tight Lips", who hardly gives any information to anyone, even his own gang, is based on Frank Gusenburg. His catchphrase is "I ain't sayin' nothin'.", which he says even after he has been shot by a stray bullet.
[edit] External links
| City of Chicago |  |
|---|---|
| Geography • Climate • Government • History • Places and Landmarks • Colleges and Universities • Public Schools • Sports • Community Areas • Neighborhoods • Economy • Parks • Metropolitan Area |
