The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre was the murder of seven members and associates of Chicago's North Side Gang on Saint Valentine's Day 1929. The men were gathered at a Lincoln Park, Chicago, garage when between four and six men entered, two of whom were disguised as police officers. The seven men were lined up facing a wall and shot with Thompson submachine guns and a sawed-off shotgun; seventy rounds were fired from the Thompsons, and one cartridge was fired from the shotgun. Six of the victims died immediately; one lived for a short while but refused to identify the killers.
The murders occurred amid the competition for control of organized crime in the city during Prohibition. Police and historians have speculated that the murders were an attempt to kill the head of the North Side Gang, George "Bugs" Moran, although he had not arrived by the time the attack started. The North Siders were rivals of the Chicago Outfit, a criminal organization headed by Al Capone, and much of the speculation has focused on whether he was behind the murders.
The police, the Illinois Attorney General's office, and the coroner's office all opened investigations into the murders. Calvin Goddard, a pioneer in forensic ballistics set up a lab in Chicago with his team and equipment. Two cars likely to have been involved in the shootings were found; both had been destroyed. Police arrested several gang members in connection with the shootings, but a lack of evidence meant none were charged.
In 1935, Byron Bolton, who had been identified as a possible lookout at the crime, was arrested on unrelated charges. He confessed to being a lookout and said the murderers were Fred Goetz, Gus Winkler, Fred Burke, Ray Nugent and Bob Carey. His accusation was supported by the memoirs of Winkler's widow, Georgette. The accusations have been disputed by some historians who have suggested that "Three Fingered Jack" White and Tony Accardo were involved.
The violence associated with the Thompson machine gun in events like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the activities of John Dillinger led to changes in gun control legislation in the US, with the introduction of the National Firearms Act in 1934. The massacre has been discussed or referenced in books, including histories, and depicted on television and in film.
Background
Prohibition and organized crime
In 1920, the ratification of the 18th Amendment banned the manufacture, distribution, importation, and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States, beginning the Prohibition era. In October 1919, the Volstead Act defined an alcoholic beverage as any that contained more than 0.5 percent alcohol.
Organized crime in the US pre-dated Prohibition, with gangs already involved in such activities as widespread brothel and gambling-house control. Prohibition brought about the growth of bootlegging, as the pre-existing gangs involved themselves in the illegal liquor trade. It brought with it "a previously unknown level of competitive violence" between rival groups, according to criminologist Robert M. Lombardo. One study calculated that the homicide rate in Chicago, Illinois, for example, rose 21 percent during Prohibition; the Chicago Crime Commission identified 729 gangland-affiliated murders in Cook County, Illinois, between 1919 and 1933 – 15 percent of all murders in the area.
Bugs Moran and the North Side Gang
George "Bugs" Moran was the leader of the North Side Gang, a Chicago-based criminal organization during Prohibition. According to historian Rose Keefe, Moran derived his nickname from his "intense stare, coupled with his sometimes homicidal temper".
The North Side Gang was the second most powerful gang in Chicago in the 1920s, behind the neighboring Chicago Outfit of Johnny Torrio and Al Capone. The North Siders were active in bootlegging, running speakeasies and gambling dens, and labor union racketeering; they also continued their pre-Prohibition activities of looting warehouses, safeblowing, and hijacking. The North Side Gang had been fighting with the Chicago Outfit from the mid-1920s. Hymie Weiss, then the leader of the North Side Gang, attempted to kill the Chicago Outfit's second-in-command, Al Capone, on January 12, 1925: Weiss shot at Capone's car and wounded the driver, but Capone escaped unharmed. After the deaths of Weiss and his successor, Vincent Drucci, Moran rose to become the head of the North Side Gang.
On September 20, 1926, Capone was living on two floors of the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois. While he was in the hotel's dining room, a car drove past with a man on the running board firing blanks from a machine gun into the air. Capone wanted to go and see what the commotion was, but his bodyguard, Frank Rio, pushed him to the ground. Ten cars then drove past the hotel, firing machine guns and shotguns into the building and the cars parked in front. Police estimated that over a thousand rounds were fired. There were no deaths, but some injuries, including a woman sitting in a car who suffered glass splinters in her eye. Capone paid all her medical expenses at a cost of $10,000.
Despite the dislike between the rival gangs, they maintained a business relationship. Capone received shipments of Canadian Old Log Cabin whiskey from the Purple Gang, a criminal group from Detroit, Michigan; he would then sell the alcohol to Moran's speakeasies. After he was offered a supply of cheaper whiskey, Moran terminated the agreement and sold the cheaper product for the same price, increasing his profits. The new whiskey was inferior to the Old Log Cabin brand and was not well received by his customers. Moran went back to Capone and asked him to resume the supply of Old Log Cabin, but Capone refused, saying he had a new buyer. Moran then hijacked as much of the Purple Gang's shipments as he needed to supply his speakeasies.
Al Capone and the Chicago Outfit
The Chicago Outfit started as a prostitution, gambling, and labor racketeering organization in the early 1900s under the leadership of Big Jim Colosimo; it was the largest and best-organized criminal group in Chicago. When prohibition began, Colosimo was reluctant to move into bootlegging; he was murdered in May 1920, probably at the behest of his second-in-command, Johnny Torrio. The gang grew under Torrio as he moved it into bootlegging. He made deals with smaller gangs in Chicago, creating a cartel for liquor trading across the city. On January 24, 1925, Weiss, Moran and another North Side member ambushed and shot Torrio. Moran's gun then failed to fire – or was empty – as he was about to kill Torrio; the North Siders fled, believing Torrio was dying, but he survived. Torrio spent time in the hospital and then nine months in prison on a pre-existing charge. He was so shaken by the attack that, upon his release, he handed over the leadership of the Outfit to Capone and moved to New York.
The year Capone took over the Chicago Outfit, the gang's gross income from their racketeering was conservatively estimated by the United States Attorney General's office at $105 million a year. It had a weekly payroll of $300,000 for the thousand men employed and an estimated $15 million per year for bribes. By 1929, Capone's annual income is estimated to have been over $40 million.
Massacre
Sources differ about the build-up to the murders. Some – including those by writer Troy Allen and historian Paul R. Kavieff – state that on February 13, 1929, Moran received a phone call offering a truckload of highjacked Purple Gang whiskey for sale. He told the caller to deliver it to the garage at 2122 North Clark Street in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side at 10:30 am. William J. Helmer and Arthur J. Bilek, in their history of the killings, disagree and point out that the men, except for two, were Moran's trusted inner circle and best killers; all were wearing expensive suits, which makes it unlikely that they were going to unload a truck. Historian Rose Keefe interviewed one of Moran's relatives, who said: "I can tell you one thing, there was no meeting with out-of-town gangsters or any plans to unload bootleg. They were there to meet George [Moran] because he'd been shot and they were losing their territory to Capone."
On Saint Valentine's Day, February 14, seven men were in the garage waiting for the truck and for Moran and his fellow gang members Willie Marks and Ted Newberry, who were running late. The seven men in the garage were Albert Kachellek (alias James Clark), Moran's second in command and brother-in-law; Adam Heyer, the North Side Gang's bookkeeper and business manager; Albert Weinshank, who managed several cleaning and dyeing operations for Moran; and gang enforcers Frank Gusenberg and his brother Peter. Two non-gang members were also present: Reinhardt H. Schwimmer, a former optician turned gambler, who liked to hang around the gang; and John May, an occasional mechanic at the garage, who had brought his dog Highball with him. May was fixing the wheel of a truck.
Between 10:30–10:35 am, a black Cadillac pulled up outside the garage. The driver and front-seat passenger wore police uniforms; the three men in the back wore civilian clothes. They exited the car and went into the garage. Shortly afterwards, Moran drove past and saw what he thought was a police car; he went around the corner for a cup of coffee to avoid what he presumed to be a raid in progress on the premises. The seven men inside the garage were forced to line up against the wall, facing it. The assailants then shot them in the back with Thompson submachine guns. The shooting was methodical, with fire directed along the line of men three times: at the level of the head, chest, and the stomach; seventy rounds were fired from the machine guns and one from a sawed-off shotgun in the first volley. The coup de grâce was then applied to Clark and May with the shotgun. The gunmen left by the front door: two in civilian clothes, holding their hands above their heads, were followed by the two wearing police uniforms, holding the Thompson submachine guns as if they had their companions under arrest.
Neighbors were alerted to the massacre by Highball's barking and called the police. When they arrived, the police found six dead men and one, Frank Gusenberg, still alive; he had crawled 20 feet (6.1 m) from where he had been shot, despite having been hit multiple times. Gusenberg was taken to the Alexian Brothers Hospital in Elk Grove. He was interviewed by Sergeant Clarence Sweeney of the Chicago Police Department, who asked him: "Who shot you?" Gusenberg replied "No one. ... No one shot me." Sweeney then said: "Frank, Pete's dead and you're in a bad way. Who shot you?" Gusenberg replied: "No one." He died shortly afterwards.
Reaction
Newspapers covered the massacre and investigations, selling millions of copies and "devot[ing] an unprecedented amount of space to coverage of the mass murder", according to historian Laurence Bergreen. The Valentine's Day Massacre caused shock among the public. According to Jonathan Eig, Capone's biographer:
This crime stirred people in a way they had seldom been stirred before. From coast to coast, people seemed suddenly to be reaching the conclusion that a line had been crossed, that the violence had become too much to bear, that the experiment known as Prohibition had blown up once and for all.
When Moran heard about the murders, he checked into St. Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois, for four days under an alias, claiming that he had the flu. He sent a message to John Egan, the head of detectives at Chicago Police Department, that he did not know who was responsible for the killings: "We don't know what brought it on. We're facing an enemy in the dark." A reporter tracked him down at the hospital; Moran told him that "Only Capone kills like that".
A federal grand jury was convened in Chicago on March 12 to hear evidence about bootlegging in the city. Capone was subpoenaed to appear. Instead, he claimed he was sick and provided a note from a Miami, Florida, doctor that said he had been suffering from bronchopneumonia since January. The note also stated that:
it would be dangerous for him to leave the mild climate of southern Florida and go to the City of Chicago. ... There would be a very grave risk of a collapse which might result in his death from a recurrent pneumonia.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated and gathered affidavits from several people who saw Capone attending events in public. Based on the FBI's evidence, a judge turned down Capone's request for a forty-day postponement and instructed him to turn up on March 19. The testimony was postponed one day to March 20, when Capone was questioned for an hour before the grand jury. He admitted that he had not paid income tax – he had previously said "The government can't collect legal taxes from illegal money" – but suggested he could make a deal to "split any difference he had with the government and might pay the salary of several prohibition agents for a year or two". He was scheduled to make a second appearance at the hearing when George Johnson, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, said no further testimony was needed and that he was free to go.
Investigation
Investigation begins
Within hours of the shooting, Chicago's district police, the city's detective bureau, the Illinois Attorney General's office, and the coroner's office under Herman Bundesen all opened separate investigations, which operated largely independently from one another. The situation was confused by an announcement, from the Chicago deputy Prohibition administrator Major Frederick D. Silloway, that the police had undertaken the killings. Although he retracted his statement later that day, several newspapers carried headlines that stated the police was involved.