The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which took place on the morning of February 14, 1929, cemented Chicago’s reputation for savage crime, infuriated the community, and made Al Capone the apparent mastermind, which ultimately resulted in his arrest and imprisonment. Additionally, most historians concur that the lookouts, who resided in a rented room here at 2119 N. Clark, directly across the street, were largely responsible for the crime’s failure.
The following is known: On the morning of February 14, 1929, seven members of the Northside gang, then led by George “Bugs” Moran (its previous leaders, “Hymie” Weiss, “Schemer” Drucci, and Dion O’Banion, had already been killed), arrived at the S.M.C. Cartage Company’s garage, a location the gang frequently used for deliveries of illegal alcohol. Moran was supposed to join them that morning, but he wasn’t there yet.
The lookouts across the street noticed the guys entering the garage and alerted a party of assassins, who were travelling in two vehicles outfitted with sirens to resemble police cruisers. The deadliest murder scene in Chicago’s history occurred when two men wearing police uniforms and two men wearing trenchcoats got out of the cars and went into the garage.
There, they reportedly utilised machine guns to fire off almost 70 bullets, instantly murdering six members of the Moran gang. The victims included Albert Weinshank, a labour racketeer who organised laundry businesses for the gang, Pete Gusenberg, a street-level tough for the Moran gang, John May, a mechanic who worked with the gang, James Clark and Adam Heyer, two ranking members of the gang, and Reinhart Schwimmer, an optician who was involved in various gambling operations with Moran. Frank Gusenberg, Pete’s brother, was the seventh guy to pass away; he remained in the hospital for another three hours.
After the shooting, the two police officers approached the two men in trenchcoats outside the garage while brandishing their weapons. The two men in trenchcoats held up their hands until the police officers returned to their cars and drove away.
It is known this much. It is highly unlikely that anyone will ever know who the gunmen were or why they committed the crime.
The most popular hypothesis is that “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, one of Al Capone’s lieutenants, came up with the scheme as a way to murder Moran, destroy the rival booze operations of the Northside gang, and exact revenge on the Gusenberg brothers for an earlier attempt on McGurn’s life. According to this idea, McGurn hired Harry and Phil Keywell to rent rooms at 2119 N. Clark St. to serve as lookouts. Harry and Phil Keywell are two members of the Purple Gang, a ruthless organisation with its headquarters in Detroit. The Keywells, who only knew Moran from newspaper images, mistook Weinshank for Moran when the six men came and gave the order to assault.
The image below depicts Clark Street during the tragedy. The murders happened in the garage, which is the short building on the left side of the street marked with a “X.” The towering building in the foreground, also marked with a “X,” is the building at 2119, which served as the lookout nest.
The most popular theory holds that the four assassins included John Scalisi, Albert Anselmi, Fred Burke, a hired gun from the St. Louis Egan’s Rats gang, and another man, possibly McGurn himself or future Outfit leader Tony “Joe Batters” Accardo, but more likely Joseph Lolordo, who was a member of the Genna operation and had previously participated in the Weiss and O’Banion killings.
Moran, who overslept that morning, showed up late, noticed the police cars, and fled the area, narrowly escaping death.
The perfect alibi was provided by Al Capone’s presence in Miami at the time, where he was conveniently being questioned by the district attorney about gambling-related issues. McGurn asserted that he and Louise Rolfe were in a hotel room at the time. The police tried to get Rolfe to testify against McGurn in court after determining that he was the murderer in chief, but they were foiled when, in a dramatic turn frequently mimicked by criminals on Law and Order and CSI, McGurn married Rolfe, enabling her to assert spousal privilege against testifying. McGurn was killed in a bowling alley seven years and one day after the Massacre, and a mocking “Valentine’s Day card” was pinned to his body.
When Fred Burke was detained for a murder in Michigan years later, it was discovered that he was connected to the crime. The ballistics of two machine guns that the police discovered in his residence were identical to the rounds used in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Despite not serving any time for the Chicago crimes, Burke received a life sentence for the murder in Michigan.
Although the aforementioned is the massacre’s most popular idea, there have been countless revisionist accounts. Some contend that the Purple Gang was solely to blame for the sensational crime because Moran failed to pay them for the alcohol they had imported from Canada to sell in Chicago. They claimed that Capone and McGurn would have been too smart to draw attention to themselves with such a sensational crime. Others contend that Moran was not the target at all and that the hit was the brainchild of Curly Humphrey, the labour gangster boss of the Capone network. The real target was Albert Weinshank, who was impeding Humphrey and controlling the lucrative laundry industry in the city. Jack McGurn’s “valentine,” which was affixed to his body after his murder, made a vague allusion to laundry.
At the time, all fingers pointed at Capone, either as the mastermind of the plan or at the very least as a tacit assenter to McGurn’s plot. The real killers and reason are likely to never be revealed with clarity. Following the shocking murders, Capone’s name truly became global, drawing continual media, law enforcement, and, worst of all, IRS scrutiny. Capone probably would have remained anonymous for at least a few more years if it weren’t for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (Capone was, in actuality, a sick man who had only a few years left before senility took hold). Capone’s career as a mobster came to an end when the tax revenue agents targeted his gambling activities and imprisoned him in 1931.
The observation house at 2119 N. Clark still survives, but the S.M.C. Cartage garage, where the killings took place, was demolished in the late 1960s. It has continued to operate as a hotel with a restaurant on the ground floor over the years. In the early 1980s, Samarai Sushi, one of Chicago’s earliest sushi restaurants, opened there; currently, the location is occupied by an Italian eatery.
