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 conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois on February 14, 1929, the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone and the North Side Irish gang led by George 'Bugs' Moran.

Related Topics:
Chicago, Illinois - February 14 - 1929 - Al Capone - George 'Bugs' Moran

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On the morning of St. Valentine's Day, six members of Moran's gang and an optician, who enjoyed associating with gangsters, had been lined up against the rear wall in the garage of the S-M-C Cartage Company in the Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago, Illinois and had been brutally 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 was conveniently on vacation in Florida at the time.

Related Topics:
Optician - Chicago, Illinois - Al Capone - Frank "Tight Lips" Gusenberg - Florida

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The massacre was a result of a plan originally devised by Capone gang member Jack 'Machine Gun' McGurn to eliminate Moran, Capone's chief criminal enemy. The massacre was planned by McGurn partly as retaliation for an unsuccessful attempt by Frank and Peter Gusenberg to assassinate him a month earlier. McGurn assembled a team of six men, led by Fred Burke, and intended to have 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 suspects, McGurn and Capone, would be well away from the scene.

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The plan did not work. Five men of the Burke team drove up 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. They found seven members of Moran's gang but not Moran himself. The gang members were told to line up facing the back wall, which they apparently did willingly believing their captors were real (and comparatively harmless) police, and were then shot and killed with a tommy gun. Moran had been approaching the warehouse but the premature arrival of the police car scared him away. The dead men were James Clark, Frank and Pete Gusenberg, Adam Heyer, Johnny May, Dr. Reinhardt Schwimmer (the optician), and Al Weinshank. 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, but it also finally brought the full attention of the federal government to Capone and his criminal activities, which soon led to his conviction and imprisonment on income tax evasion charges in 1931.

Related Topics:
Tommy gun - James Clark - Frank - Pete Gusenberg - Adam Heyer - Johnny May - Reinhardt Schwimmer - Al Weinshank - Income tax - 1931.

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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 and shipped to George Patey, a Canadian businessman, who rebuilt it in the men's restroom of a bar with a Roaring '20s theme. After the bar closed, Patey began trying to sell the bricks as souvenirs.

Related Topics:
1967 - Canadian

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The massacre was used as a plot device in the 1959 film Some Like it Hot as well as the subject for Roger Corman's 1967 film The St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Related Topics:
1959 - Some Like it Hot - Roger Corman - 1967 - The St. Valentine's Day Massacre

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