Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre
The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was the 1929 murder of seven members and associates of Chicago’s North Side Gang. The men were gathered at a Lincoln Park garage on the morning of that feast day. They were lined up against a wall and shot by four unknown assailants who were dressed like police officers. Former members of the Egan’s Rats gang working for Capone are suspected of a significant role.
About Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in brief
The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was the 1929 murder of seven members and associates of Chicago’s North Side Gang. The men were gathered at a Lincoln Park garage on the morning of that feast day. They were lined up against a wall and shot by four unknown assailants who were dressed like police officers. The perpetrators have never been conclusively identified, but former members of the Egan’s Rats gang working for Capone are suspected of a significant role. The incident resulted from the struggle to control organized crime in the city during Prohibition between the Irish North Siders, headed by George Moran, and their Italian South Side Gang rivals led by Al Capone. The plan was to lure Moran to the SMC Cartage warehouse on February 14, 1929 to kill him and perhaps two or three of his lieutenants. Most of the Moran gang arrived at the warehouse approximately 10:a.m., but Moran was not there, having left his Parkway Hotel apartment by 30:a m. They approached the rear of the warehouse from a side street when they saw a car approaching the building and retraced their steps. They encountered a number of Capone’s lookouts who mistook one of Moran’s men for a police officer and warned him, so he too turned back to the garage and he ducked into a doorway and jotted down the license number before leaving the neighborhood. The North Side gang 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 ofCapone. Moran was the last survivor of the North Side gunmen; his succession had come about because his similarly aggressive predecessors Vincent Drucci and Hymie Weiss had been killed in the violence that followed the murder of original leader Dean O’Banion. Several factors contributed to the timing of the plan to kill Moran. Earlier in the year, North Sider Frank Gusenberg and his brother Peter unsuccessfully attempted to murder Jack McGurn. It is usually assumed that the North Siding were lured to the warehouse with the promise of a stolen, cut-rate shipment of whiskey, supplied by Detroit’s Purple Gang which was associated with Capone and the late Ted Newberry. Two collaborators were also shot: Reinhardt H. Schwimmer, a former optician turned gambler and gang associate, and John May, an occasional mechanic for the Moran Gang. All of the victims were dressed in their best clothes, with the exception of John May,. as was customary for the NorthSiders and other gangsters at the time. Two of the shooters were dressed as uniformed policemen, while the others wore suits, ties, overcoats, and hats. Witnesses saw the fake police leading the other men at gunpoint out of the garage after the shooting. He had sustained 14 bullet wounds; the police asked him who did it, and he replied, “No one shot me.”
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This page is based on the article Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 24, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
