16

The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre: When the Gangsters Ruled Chicago

By late 1928, the street thug, bootlegger and murderer Al ‘Scarface’ Capone practically owned Chicago, one of the biggest cities in the USA, with a population of 3 million people. In a few short murderous years, Capone had expanded far beyond booze, gambling and prostitution. Capone’s Mafia-affiliated organisation controlled at least 91 of Chicago’s trade unions, which in turn controlled every aspect of normal life in the huge city. Capone’s thugs collected union initiation fees and monthly dues and in return gave the employers protection from the unions and their right to strike against them. It was pay up or be killed. Everyone paid.

The cost to the public was mind-boggling. When Capone moved into the cleaning and dyeing industry, in order to get the protection money the merchants had to raise the price of cleaning a suit by 75 per cent. When Capone gained control of the kosher butchers, the price of corned beef went up by 30 cents a pound. In Chicago alone, the Mafia’s control of the unions was costing consumers an extra $136 million a year. That was around an extra $45 for every man, woman and child.

But Al Capone was anything but unpopular. On the surface at least. Everyone knew him, and wherever he appeared a crowd would gather. And little wonder. From the huge roll of notes he produced he would peel off $10 tips for bell boys, $20 for hat check girls and $100 for waiters and maître d’s. When an inno­cent bystander was severely wounded in a public shootout with Capone’s men and opposition gangsters, Capone paid the woman’s hospital bills and paid for repairs to the restaurant that was the backdrop to the gunfight. But given that in 1928 Al Capone’s income was around $105 million per year, he could afford it.

But Al Capone had a pebble in his shoe that was annoying him enough for him to exact a terrible punishment, which has gone down in history as the most infamous gangland hit of them all. The pebble was an Irish bootlegger named George ‘Bugs’ Moran. As is the way of the Irish, Moran had fearlessly gone into competition against Capone in the grog distribution business and was hijacking Capone’s trucks and setting them on fire.

Things really got out of control when Bugs’ boys tried to muscle in on Capone’s control over the garment unions. And Al wasn’t all that impressed either when Bugs’ assassins narrowly missed bumping off one of Capone’s favourite henchmen, a terrible bit of work named Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn. When Bugs took to calling Capone ‘the Beast’ in public and telling anyone game enough to listen, ‘If you ask me, Capone’s on dope,’ Bugs was way past his use-by date.

By early 1929, with Bugs Moran becoming more of an embarrassment as each day passed, Al Capone had had enough. He took off to Florida where he conducted his business over the phone with his top aides, did a bit of fishing and enjoyed the anonymity. On the morning of 14 February, Capone had his customary morning swim and a long breakfast and then took himself down to the office of the Dade county solicitor, Robert Taylor, for a chat about what he had been doing in Florida. Truth be known, Capone was establishing a watertight alibi for himself for what was about to happen back in Chicago.

So with Capone away in Florida, that morning Chicagoans rose to flowers and chocolates to celebrate St Valentine’s Day with their loved ones. At the SMC Cartage Company garage at 2122 North Clark Street, members of Bugs Moran’s gang were waiting for a truckload of whisky from a hijacker in Detroit. They were also waiting for the arrival of their leader who, as fate would have it, was running late. The gang members consisted of Johnny May, Frank and Pete Gusenberg, James Clark, Adam Heyer and Al Weinshank. With them was Reinhardt H Schwimmer, an optometrist and friend of Moran’s who, although he was not a gangster, enjoyed the company of criminals. And there was a stray dog.

A long black Cadillac with a police bell on its running board and a gun rack behind the driver pulled up outside. Bugs Moran, running late for his appointment, spotted the car pull up and, thinking that he had just walked in on a police raid, turned and hurried away. Four men, two in police uniforms and two in civilian clothes, emerged from the Cadillac and disappeared into the garage while a fifth man stayed at the wheel.

One resident thought he heard the sudden clatter of a pneumatic drill going on and off in short bursts, then the sound of an automobile backfiring twice. Two neighbourhood women, drawn by the noise, looked out of their windows and saw two men in civilian clothes leave the garage, hands in the air, followed by two policemen with their guns drawn. They got in the Cadillac and drove off. It seemed as if it was just another raid. And then the dog emerged from the garage and started a sad and deathly howl as if it was mourning the dead. And it would not stop. Those who went to investigate fled to call the real police, sick to the stomach at what they saw. All the while the dog sat on its haunches, howling at the moon, as the gun smoke wafted from the garage.

As best as anyone could reconstruct it, the seven men in the warehouse had been disarmed, lined up against the wall and then cut down at close range by submachine guns and shotguns. They were riddled with bullets and there was blood everywhere, on the floor and all over the brick wall against which they had stood. Miraculously, Frank Gusenberg survived, but lasted only a few hours. His dying words were, ‘Nobody shot me. I ain’t no copper.’ But Capone’s killers had missed their main man, and Bugs Moran let it be known who had slaughtered his gang. ‘Only Capone kills like that,’ he told the press, breaking the underworld’s code of silence.

Although no one was ever charged with the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, it was the beginning of the end for Al Capone. Vendetta followed vendetta and with at least 227 gangland killings from 1927 until 1930, law enforcement agencies decided to get rid of Capone no matter what. Unable to catch him on racketeering or murder charges, in 1931 Al Capone was found guilty of evading millions of dollars in tax and was sentenced to 11 years in Alcatraz, where he lost his mind from advanced syphilis of the brain and died after his release.

In 1936, Jack ‘Machine Gun’ McGurn, who had allegedly helped to orchestrate the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, was murdered on St Valentine’s Day with a note left in his hand that included a joke. Since Bugs Moran loved jokes, it is believed that he murdered Machine Gun in retaliation for the slaughter of his gang. In February 1957, Bugs died of lung cancer in prison, where he was serving a 10-year sentence for bank robbery.