Saint Valentine's Day Massacre

St. Valentine's Day Massacre
Location Warehouse at Dickens and Clark in Lincoln Park, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Attack type
 Massacre
Weapons Two Thompson submachine guns
Two shotguns
Deaths 7 (Five members of the North Side Gang, and two others)
Perpetrators Chicago Outfit
Egan's Rats
Participant 4 (all unidentified)

The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre is the name given to the 1929 murder of seven mob associates including a mechanic of the North Side Irish gang led by George "Bugs" Moran during the Prohibition Era.[1] It resulted from the struggle – between the Irish American gang and the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone – to take control of organized crime in Chicago.[2] Former members of the Egan's Rats gang were also suspected of having played a significant role in the incident, assisting Capone.

History

On February 14, 1929, seven men were lined up against the front inside wall of the garage at 2122 North Clark Street, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side, and murdered. They were shot by four men using weapons that included two Thompson submachine guns ("tommy guns"). Two of the shooters were dressed as uniformed policemen, while the others wore suits, ties, overcoats and hats. Witnesses saw the "police" leading the other men at gunpoint out of the garage after the shooting.

The victims included seven members of the Moran-led North Gang. Moran's second-in-command, Albert Kachellek (alias James Clark), was killed along with Adam Heyer, the gang's bookkeeper and business manager, and Albert Weinshank, who managed several cleaning and dyeing operations for Moran. Weinshank resembled Moran in appearance and the two men were wearing similar clothes on the day of the massacre. Also killed were gang enforcers Frank Gusenberg and Peter Gusenberg. Two gang collaborators were shot: Reinhardt H. Schwimmer, a former optician turned gambler and gang associate, and John May, an occasional mechanic for the Moran gang.

Inside the garage, John May's German Shepherd, Highball, was leashed to a truck. The dog began howling and barking, attracting the attention of two women who operated boarding houses across the street. One of the women, Mrs Landesman, sensed something was wrong. She sent one of her tenants to the garage to see what was upsetting the dog. The tenant, sickened at the sight, ran out of the garage. When real Chicago police officers arrived at the scene, one of the victims, Frank Gusenberg was still alive. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors stabilized him for a short time. Police tried to question Gusenberg. Asked who shot him, Gusenberg, who had sustained fourteen bullet wounds, replied "No one shot me." He died within three hours.[3]

The massacre was allegedly planned by the organization led by Al Capone to eliminate George "Bugs" Moran, the boss of the long-established North Side Gang. The former boss of the North Side Gang, Dion O'Banion, was murdered by four gunmen in his flower shop on North State Street in 1924.[4] After the murder of O'Banion, each successive leader of the North Siders was also killed, allegedly by various members or associates of the Capone organization.

Several factors contributed to the timing of the plan to kill George "Bugs" Moran. Earlier in the year, North Sider Frank Gusenberg and his brother Peter unsuccessfully attempted to murder Jack McGurn. The North Side Gang's was complicit in the murders of Pasqualino "Patsy" Lolordo and Antonio "The Scourge" Lombardo. Both had been presidents of the Unione Siciliana, the local Mafia, and close associates of Capone. Moran and Capone had been vying for control of the lucrative Chicago bootlegging trade, and Bugs Moran had been moving in on several of Capone's enterprises. Moran was muscling in on a Capone-run dog track in the Chicago suburbs and he had taken over several saloons that were run by Capone, insisting they were in his territory.

The plan was to lure Bugs Moran to the SMC Cartage warehouse on North Clark Street on February 14, 1929. The intent was to kill Moran, and perhaps two or three of his lieutenants. It is usually assumed that the North Siders were lured to the garage with the promise of a stolen, cut-rate shipment of whiskey, supplied by Detroit's Purple Gang, which was associated with Capone. The Gusenberg brothers were supposed to drive two empty trucks to Detroit that day to pick up two loads of stolen Canadian whiskey. All of the victims, with the exception of John May, were dressed in their best clothes, as was customary for the North Siders and other gangsters at the time.

On St. Valentine's Day, most of the Moran gang had already arrived at the warehouse by approximately 10:30 AM. Moran was not there, having left his Parkway Hotel apartment late. As Moran and one of his men, Ted Newberry, approached the rear of the warehouse from a side street, they saw a police car approach the building. They immediately turned and retraced their steps, going to a nearby coffee shop. They encountered another gang member, Henry Gusenberg, on the street. Henry was warned and turned back. Willie Marks, also a North Side Gang member, spotted the police car on his way to the garage. He ducked into a doorway and jotted down the license number before leaving the neighborhood.

Capone's lookouts likely mistook one of Moran's men for Moran himself – probably Albert Weinshank, who was the same height and build. That morning the physical similarity between the two men was enhanced by their dress: both happened to be wearing the same color overcoats and hats. Witnesses outside the garage saw a Cadillac sedan pull to a stop in front of the garage. Four men, two dressed in police uniform, emerged and walked inside. The two fake police officers, carrying shotguns, entered the rear portion of the garage and found members of Moran's gang and two gang collaborators, Reinhart Schwimmer and John May, who was fixing one of the trucks. The "police officers" then ordered the men to line up against the wall.

The two "police officers" then signaled to the pair in civilian clothes who had accompanied them. Two of the killers opened fire with Thompson sub-machine guns, one with a 20-round box magazine and the other a 50-round drum. They were thorough, spraying their victims left and right, even continuing to fire after all seven had hit the floor. The seven men were ripped apart in the volley. Two shotgun blasts afterward all but obliterated the faces of John May and James Clark, according to the coroner's report.

To give the appearance that everything was under control, the men in street clothes came out with their hands up, prodded by the two uniformed police officers. Inside the garage, the only survivors in the warehouse were Highball (May's dog) and Frank Gusenberg. Despite fourteen bullet wounds, he was still conscious, but died three hours later, refusing to utter a word about the identities of the killers. The Valentine's Massacre set off a public outcry that posed a problem for all mob bosses.[5]

Victims

Investigation

Since it was common knowledge that Moran was hijacking Capone's Detroit-based liquor shipments, police focused their attention on Detroit's predominantly Jewish Purple Gang. Mug shots of Purple members George Lewis, Eddie Fletcher, Phil Keywell and his younger brother Harry, were picked out by landladies Mrs. Doody and Mrs. Orvidson, who had taken in three men as roomers ten days before the massacre; their rooming houses were directly across the street from the Clark Street garage. Later, these women wavered in their identification, and Fletcher, Lewis, and Harry Keywell were all questioned and cleared by Chicago Police. Nevertheless, the Keywell brothers (and by extension the Purple Gang) would remain ensnared in the massacre case for all time. Many also believed what the killers wanted them to believe – that the police did it.

February 22, police were called to the scene of a garage fire on Wood Street where a 1927 Cadillac Sedan was found disassembled and partially burned. It was determined that the car had been used by the killers. The engine number was traced to a Michigan Avenue dealer, who had sold the car to a James Morton of Los Angeles. The garage had been rented by a man calling himself Frank Rogers, who gave his address as 1859 West North Avenue – which happened to be the address of the Circus Café, operated by Claude Maddox, a former St. Louis gangster with ties to the Capone organization, the Purple Gang, and a St. Louis gang called Egan's Rats. Police could not turn up any information about persons named James Morton or Frank Rogers. But they had a definite lead on one of the killers. Just minutes before the killings, a truck driver named Elmer Lewis had turned a corner only a block away from 2122 North Clark and sideswiped what he took to be a police car. He told police later that he stopped immediately but was waved away by the uniformed driver, whom he noticed was missing a front tooth. The same description of the car's driver was also given by the president of the Board of Education, H. Wallace Caldwell, who had also witnessed the accident. Police knew that this description could be none other than a former member of Egan's Rats, Fred 'Killer' Burke; Burke and a close companion, James Ray, were well known to wear police uniforms whenever on a robbery spree. Burke was also a fugitive, under indictment for robbery and murder in Ohio. Police also suggested that Joseph Lolordo could have been one of the killers, because of his brother Pasqualino's recent murder by the North Side Gang.

Police then announced that they suspected Capone gunmen John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, as well as Jack McGurn himself, and Frank Rio, a Capone bodyguard. Police eventually charged McGurn and Scalise with the massacre. John Scalise, along with Anselmi and Joseph 'Hop Toad' Giunta, were murdered by Capone in May 1929, after Capone learned about their plan to kill him, and before he went to trial. The murder charges against Jack McGurn were finally dropped because of a lack of evidence, and he was just charged with a violation of the Mann Act: he took his girlfriend, Louise Rolfe, who was also the main witness against him and became known as the "Blonde Alibi", across state lines to marry.

The case stagnated until December 14, 1929, when the Berrien County, Michigan Sheriff's Department raided the St. Joseph, Michigan bungalow of “Frederick Dane”, the registered owner of a vehicle driven by Fred "Killer" Burke. Burke had been drinking that night, rear-ended another vehicle and drove off. Patrolman Charles Skelly pursued, finally forcing Burke off the road. As Skelly hopped on the running board he was shot three times and died of his wounds later that night. The car was found wrecked and abandoned just outside St. Joseph and traced to Fred Dane. By this time police photos confirmed that Dane was in fact Fred Burke, wanted by the Chicago police for his participation in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

When police raided Burke's bungalow, they found a large trunk containing a bullet-proof vest, almost $320,000 in bonds recently stolen from a Wisconsin bank, two Thompson submachine guns, pistols, two shotguns, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. St. Joseph authorities immediately notified the Chicago police, who requested that both machine guns be brought there at once. Through the then relatively new science of forensic ballistics, both weapons were determined to have been used in the massacre – and that one of Burke's Tommy guns had also been used to murder New York mobster Frankie Yale (who participated in O'Banion's murder) a year and a half earlier. Unfortunately, no further concrete evidence would surface in the massacre case. Burke would be captured over a year later on a Missouri farm. As the case against him in the murder of Officer Skelly was strongest, he was tried in Michigan and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. Burke died in prison in 1940.

Bolton revelations

On January 8, 1935, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents surrounded a Chicago apartment building at 3920 North Pine Grove, looking for the remaining members of the Barker Gang. A brief shootout erupted, resulting in the death of bank robber Russell Gibson. Also taken into custody were Doc Barker, Byron Bolton, and two women. While interrogating agents got nothing out of Barker, Bolton (a hitherto obscure criminal) proved to be a "geyser of information", as one crime historian called him. Bolton, a former Navy machine-gunner and associate of Egan's Rats, had been the valet and sidekick of a slick Chicago hit man named Fred Goetz aka "Shotgun" George Ziegler. Bolton was privy to many of the Barker Gang's crimes and even pinpointed the Florida hideout of Ma and Freddie Barker (both of whom were killed in a shootout with the FBI a week later). To the agents' surprise, Bolton kept on talking and claimed to have taken part in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre with Goetz, Fred Burke, and several others.

Because the FBI had no jurisdiction in a state murder case, they attempted to keep Bolton’s revelations confidential, until the Chicago American newspaper somehow got its hands on a second-hand version of the bank robber’s confession. The newspaper declared that the crime had been “solved”, despite being stonewalled by J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau, who did not want any part of the massacre case. Garbled versions of Bolton’s story went out in the national media. Pieced together, his tale went like this: Bolton claimed that the murder of Bugs Moran had been plotted in “October or November” 1928 at a Couderay, Wisconsin resort owned by Fred Goetz. Present at this meet were Goetz, Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Fred Burke, Gus Winkeler, Louis Campagna, Daniel Serritella, William Pacelli, and Bolton himself. The men stayed two or three weeks, hunting and fishing when they were not planning the murder of their enemies.

Byron Bolton claimed he and Jimmy Moran were charged with watching the S.M.C. Cartage garage and phoning the signal to the killers at the Circus Café when Bugs Moran arrived at the meeting. Police had indeed found a letter addressed to Bolton in the lookout nest (and possibly a vial of prescription medicine). Bolton guessed that the actual killers had been Burke, Winkeler, Goetz, Bob Carey, Raymond "Crane Neck" Nugent,[7] and Claude Maddox (four shooters and two getaway drivers). Bolton gave an account of the massacre different from the one generally told by historians. He claimed that he saw only “plainclothes” men exit the Cadillac and go into the garage. This indicates that a second car was used by the killers. One witness, George Brichet, claimed to have seen at least two uniformed men exiting a car in the alley and entering the garage through its rear doors. A Peerless sedan had been found near a Maywood house owned by Claude Maddox in the days after the massacre, and in one of the pockets was an address book belonging to victim Albert Weinshank. Bolton further indicated he had mistaken one of Moran’s men to be Moran, after which he telephoned the signal to the Circus Café. When the killers (who had expected to kill Moran and maybe two or three of his men) were unexpectedly confronted with seven men, they simply decided to kill them all and get out fast. Bolton claimed that Capone was furious with him for his mistake (and the resulting police pressure) and threatened to kill him, only to be dissuaded by Fred Goetz.

His claims were corroborated by Gus Winkeler's widow, Georgette, in both an official FBI statement and her memoirs, which were published in a four-part series in a true detective magazine during the winter of 1935–36. Georgette Winkeler revealed that her husband and his friends had formed a special crew used by Capone for high-risk jobs. The mob boss was said to have trusted them implicitly and nicknamed them the “American Boys”. Byron Bolton’s statements were also backed up by William Drury, a maverick Chicago detective who had stayed on the massacre case long after everyone else had given up. Bank robber Alvin Karpis later claimed to have heard secondhand from Ray Nugent about the massacre and that the “American Boys” were paid a collective salary of $2,000 a week plus bonuses. Karpis also claimed that Capone himself had told him while they were in Alcatraz together that Goetz had been the actual planner of the massacre.

Despite Byron Bolton’s statements, no action was taken by the FBI. All the men he named, with the exceptions of Burke and Maddox, were all dead by 1935. Bank robber Harvey Bailey would later complain in his 1973 autobiography that he and Fred Burke had been drinking beer in Calumet City at the time of the massacre, and the resulting heat forced them to abandon their bank robbing ventures. Claude Maddox was questioned fruitlessly by Chicago Police, and there the matter lay. Crime historians are still divided on whether or not the “American Boys” committed the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Other suspects

Over the years, many mobsters, in and out of Chicago, would be named as part of the Valentine's Day hit team. Two prime suspects are Cosa Nostra hit men John Scalise and Albert Anselmi; both men were effective killers and are frequently mentioned as possibilities for two of the shooters. In the days after the massacre, Scalise was heard to brag, “I am the most powerful man in Chicago.” He had recently been elevated to the position of vice-president in the Unione Siciliana by its president, Joseph Guinta. Nevertheless, Scalise, Anselmi, and Guinta would be found dead on a lonely road near Hammond, Indiana May 8, 1929. Gangland lore has it that Al Capone had discovered that the pair was planning to betray him. Legend states that at the climax of a dinner party thrown in their honor, Capone produced a baseball bat and beat the trio to death.[8]

Murder weapons

The two Thompson submachine guns (serial numbers 2347 and 7580) found in Fred Dane’s (an alias for Fred Burke) Michigan bungalow were personally driven to the Chicago coroner’s office by the Berrien County District Attorney. Ballistic expert Calvin Goddard tested the weapons and determined that both had been used in the massacre. One of them had also been used in the murder of Brooklyn mob boss Frankie Yale, which confirmed the New York Police Department’s long-held theory that Burke, and by extension Al Capone, had been responsible for Yale's death.

Gun No. 2347 had been originally purchased November 12, 1924, by Les Farmer, a deputy sheriff in Marion, Illinois, which happened to be the seat of Williamson County. Marion and the surrounding area were then overrun by the warring bootleg factions of the Shelton Brothers and Charlie Birger. Deputy Farmer was documented as having ties with Egan’s Rats, based 100 miles (160 km) away in St. Louis. By the beginning of 1927 at the very latest, the weapon had wound up in Fred Burke's possession. It is possible he had used this same gun in Detroit’s Milaflores Massacre March 28, 1927.

Gun No. 7580 had been sold by Chicago sporting goods owner Peter von Frantzius to a Victor Thompson (also known as Frank V. Thompson) in the care of the Fox Hotel of Elgin, Illinois. Some time after the purchase the machine gun wound up with James "Bozo" Shupe, a small-time hood from Chicago’s West Side who had ties to various members of Capone’s outfit.

Both submachine guns are still in the possession of the Berrien County Sheriff's Department in St. Joseph, Michigan.

Legacy

Crime scene and bricks from the murder wall

2122 N. Clark St., former site of the SMC Cartage Company, now the parking lot of a nursing home
Another view of the site

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. There is still controversy over the actual bricks used to build the north inside wall of the building where the mobsters were lined up and shot. They were claimed to be responsible, according to stories, for bringing financial ruin, illness, bad luck and death to anyone who bought them.[9]

The bricks from the bullet-marked inside North wall were purchased and saved by Canadian businessman George Patey in 1967. His original intention was to use them in a restaurant that he represented, but the restaurant's owner did not like the idea. Patey ended up buying the bricks himself, outbidding three or four others. Patey had the wall painstakingly taken apart and each of the 414 bricks numbered, then shipped them to Canada.

There are conflicting reports about what George Patey did with the bricks after he obtained them. In 1978, Time reported that Patey reassembled the wall and put it on display in a wax museum as a backdrop for gun-wielding gangsters shooting each other to the accompaniment of recorded gunshots. The wax museum later went bankrupt. Another source, an independent newspaper in the United Kingdom, reported in February 2000 that the wall toured shopping malls and exhibitions in the United States for a couple of decades. In 1968, Patey stopped exhibiting the bricks and put them into retirement.

In 1971, Patey opened a nightclub called the Banjo Palace in Vancouver that had a Roaring Twenties theme and the famous bricks were installed inside the men's washroom with a Plexiglas shield, so that patrons could urinate and try to hit the targets painted on the Plexiglas.[10] In a 2001 interview with an Argentinian journalist, Patey said, "I had the most popular club in the city. People came from high society and entertainment, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum." The bricks were placed in storage until 1997 when Patey tried to auction them on a website called Jet Set On The Net. The deal fell-through after a disagreement with the auction company. The last known substantial offer for the entire wall was made by a Las Vegas casino but Patey refused the $175,000 offer.

In 1999, Patey tried to sell them brick by brick on his own website and sold about one hundred to gangster buffs. These came with signed certificates by Patey. Patey died December 26, 2004, having never revealed how much he paid for the bricks at auction. The remaining bricks of his massacre wall were given as an inheritance to his niece who sold them to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, which opened February 14, 2012. While the wall is no longer complete because of Patey's sale of some bricks, it still remains the original massacre wall against which the seven men were lined up and killed by Capone's men.

Artistic representations

Dramatic

Improvisational theatre tournament

Popular music

Other popular culture references

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Valentine’s Day Massacre Chicago 1929". Retrieved 18 February 2014.
  2. ↑ O'Brien, John. "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 12 April 2013.
  3. ↑ Boyle, William (2015). "Valentine's Day Massacre". Salem Press Encyclopedia.
  4. ↑ "Dion O'Bannion". Encyclopedia Britannica. November 5, 2013. Retrieved 2014-12-30.
  5. ↑ Reppetto, Thomas A. "The "Get Capone" Drive: Print the Legend." American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power. New York: H. Holt, 2004. 121. Print.
  6. 1 2 Hoffman, Albert A., Jr. (2010). Some Historical Stories of Chicago. Xlibris. p. 188. ISBN 978-1-4535-3969-9.
  7. ↑ "Raymond Nugent". Find A grave. April 13, 2004. Retrieved 2014-12-30.
  8. ↑ Hoffman, Dennis Earl (2010). Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders: Chicago's Private War Against Capone. Southern Illinois University Press. pp. 71–89.
  9. ↑ "Blood, Roses & Valentines". PrairieGhosts.com. Retrieved 2014-12-30.
  10. ↑ "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre Wall bricks". My Al Capone Museum. February 2001. Retrieved 2014-12-30.
  11. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1628109/synopsis
  12. ↑ "Welcome to the Official Website of The Old Maltese!". The Old Maltese. December 27, 2014. Retrieved 2014-12-30.
  13. ↑ "Poll puts National ahead of Labour". The New Zealand Herald. 15 February 2004. Retrieved 29 April 2011.
  14. ↑ "Catherine Judd Speech In Praise Of Individuals". Scoop. 8 March 2004. Retrieved 2014-12-30.

Further reading

External links

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