Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre
On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929, St. Valentine’s Day, five members of the North Side Gang, plus non-members Reinhardt H. Schwimmer and John May, were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the SMC Cartage Company (2122 North Clark Street) in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side. They were shot to death, possibly by members of Al Capone’s gang, possibly by “outside talent” (that is, gangsters from outside the city who would not be known to their victims), most likely by a combination of both.
Two of the shooters were dressed as Chicago police officers, and the others were dressed in long trenchcoats, according to witnesses who saw the “police” leading the other men at gunpoint out of the garage (part of the plan). When one of the dying men, Frank Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, “I’m not gonna talk” despite having 14 bullet wounds. Capone himself had arranged to be on vacation in Florida. The St. Valentine’s Massacre resulted from a plan devised by a member or members of the Capone gang to eliminate the Polish-Irish Bugs Moran.
Moran was the boss of the North Side Gang which had been formerly headed up by Dion O’Banion, who had been murdered nearly five years earlier. Jack McGurn is the person most frequently cited by researchers as a suspected planner. The massacre was planned by the Capone mob for a number of reasons: in retaliation for an unsuccessful attempt by Frank and his brother Peter Gusenberg to murder Jack McGurn earlier in the year; the North Side Gang’s complicity in the murders of Pasqualino “Patsy” Lolordo and Antonio “The Scourge” Lombardo; and Bugs Moran’s muscling in on a Capone-run dog track in the Chicago suburbs. Also, the rivalry between Moran and Capone for control of the lucrative Chicago bootlegging business led Capone to plan the hits and the O’Banion gang’s demise.
The plan was to lure Bugs Moran and his men to the SMC Cartage warehouse on North Clark Street. It is assumed usually that the North Side Gang was lured to the garage with the promise of a cut-rate shipment of bootleg whiskey, supplied by Detroit’s Purple Gang. However, some recent studies dispute this. All seven victims (with the exception of John May) were dressed in their best clothes, hardly suitable for unloading a large shipment of whiskey crates and driving it away. The real reason for the North Siders gathering in the garage may never be known for certain.
A four-man team would then enter the building, two disguised as police officers, and kill Moran and his men. Before Moran and his men arrived, Capone stationed lookouts in the apartments across the street from the warehouse. Wishing to keep the lookouts inconspicuous, Capone had hired two unrecognizable thugs to stand watch in rented rooms across the street from the garage.
At around 10:30 a.m. on St. Valentine’s Day, the Moran gang had already arrived at the warehouse. However, Moran himself was not inside. One account states that Moran was supposedly approaching the warehouse, spotted the police car, and fled the scene to a nearby coffee shop. Another account was that Moran was simply late getting there.
The lookouts allegedly confused one of Moran’s men (most likely Albert Weinshank, who was the same height, build and even physically resembled Moran) for Moran himself: they then signaled for the gunmen to enter the warehouse. 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 phony police, carrying shotguns, entered the rear portion of the garage and found members of Moran’s gang, a sixth man named Reinhart Schwimmer, who was not actually a gangster but more of a gang “hanger-on”, and a seventh man, John May, who was a mechanic fixing one of the cars, and technically not a member of the gang but an occasionally hired mechanic.
The killers told the seven men to line up facing the back wall. There was apparently not any resistance, as the Moran men thought their captors were real police.
Then the two “police officers” then signaled the pair in civilian clothes. Two of the killers started shooting with Thompson sub-machine guns, one containing a 20-round magazine and the other a 50-round drum. All seven men were killed in a volley of seventy machine-gun bullets and two shotgun blasts according to the coroner’s report.
To show bystanders that everything was under control, the men in street clothes came out with their hands up, prodded by the two uniformed cops. The only survivors in the warehouse were John May’s German shepherd, Highball, and Frank Gusenberg who, despite fourteen bullet wounds, was still clinging to life, but would die 3 hours later. When the real police arrived, they first heard the dog howling. On entering the warehouse, they found the dog trapped under a beer truck and the floor covered with blood, shell casings, and corpses.
Photographs of the scene were taken immediately after the shooting by Jun Fujita and published in the Chicago Daily News.
