Please valentine’s day 2021 improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. This article needs additional citations for verification. This article possibly contains original research. The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre was the murder of seven Irish members and associates of Chicago’s North Side Gang that occurred on Saint Valentine’s Day 1929.
Saint Valentine’s Day, Thursday, February 14, 1929, seven men were murdered at the garage at 2122 North Clark Street, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side. The victims included five members of George “Bugs” Moran’s North Side Gang. Al Capone was widely assumed to have been responsible for ordering the massacre, despite being at his Florida home at the time. Hymie Weiss and Vincent Drucci, 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.
The North Side Gang was complicit in the murders of Pasqualino “Patsy” Lolordo and Antonio “The Scourge” Lombardo. The plan was to lure Moran to the SMC Cartage warehouse on North Clark Street on February 14, 1929, to kill him and perhaps two or three of his lieutenants. It is usually assumed that the North Siders were lured to the garage with the promise of a stolen, cut-rate shipment of whiskey, supplied by Detroit’s Purple Gang which was associated with Capone. The victims were lined up against this wall and shot. Most of the Moran gang arrived at the warehouse by approximately 10:30 a. Moran was not there, having left his Parkway Hotel apartment late.
He and fellow gang member Ted Newberry approached the rear of the warehouse from a side street when they saw a police car approaching the building. They immediately turned and retraced their steps, going to a nearby coffee shop. They encountered gang member Henry Gusenberg on the street and warned him, so he too turned back. Capone’s lookouts likely mistook one of Moran’s men for Moran himself, probably Albert Weinshank, who was the same height and build. Witnesses outside the garage saw a Cadillac sedan pull up to a stop in front of the garage. Four men emerged and walked inside, two of them dressed in police uniform. To give the appearance that everything was under control, the men in street clothes came out with their hands up, prodded by the two uniformed policemen.
Inside the garage, the only survivors in the warehouse were May’s dog “Highball” and Frank Gusenberg — despite 14 bullet wounds. He was still conscious, but he died three hours later, refusing to utter a word about the identities of the killers. The Valentine’s Day Massacre set off a public outcry which posed a problem for all mob bosses. Within days, Capone received a summons to testify before a Chicago grand jury on charges of federal Prohibition violations, but he claimed to be too unwell to attend. It was common knowledge that Moran was hijacking Capone’s Detroit-based liquor shipments, and police focused their attention on Detroit’s predominantly Jewish Purple Gang. Orvidson had taken in three men as roomers ten days before the massacre, and their rooming houses were directly across the street from the North Clark Street garage.
On February 22, police were called to the scene of a garage fire on Wood Street where they found a 1927 Cadillac sedan disassembled and partially burned, and they determined that the killers had used the car. They traced the engine number to a Michigan Avenue dealer who had sold the car to a James Morton of Los Angeles. The garage had been rented by a man calling himself Frank Rogers, who gave his address as 1859 West North Avenue. Capone murdered John Scalise, Anselmi, and Joseph “Hop Toad” Giunta in May 1929 after he learned about their plan to kill him. The case stagnated until December 14, 1929, when the Berrien County, Michigan Sheriff’s Department raided the St. 320,000 in bonds recently stolen from a Wisconsin bank, two Thompson submachine guns, pistols, two shotguns, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Joseph authorities immediately notified the Chicago police, who requested both machine guns.
On January 8, 1935, FBI agents surrounded a Chicago apartment building at 3920 North Pine Grove looking for the remaining members of the Barker Gang. A brief shootout erupted, resulting in the death of bank robber Russell Gibson. The FBI had no jurisdiction in a state murder case, so they kept Bolton’s revelations confidential until the Chicago American newspaper reported a second-hand version of his confession. The newspaper declared that the crime had been “solved”, despite being stonewalled by J.
Edgar Hoover and the FBI, who did not want any part of the massacre case. Bolton claimed that he and Jimmy Moran were charged with watching the S. Cartage garage and phoning the signal to the killers at the Circus Café when Bugs Moran arrived at the meeting. She revealed that her husband and his friends had formed a special crew used by Capone for high-risk jobs. The mob boss was said to have trusted them implicitly and nicknamed them the “American Boys”. Despite Byron Bolton’s statements, no action was taken by the FBI. All the men whom he named were dead by 1935, with the exception of Burke and Maddox.
Many mobsters have been named as part of the Valentine’s Day hit team. Two prime suspects are Cosa Nostra hit men John Scalise and Albert Anselmi. In the days after the massacre, Scalise was heard to brag, “I am the most powerful man in Chicago. Unione Siciliana president Joseph Guinta had recently elevated him to the position of the Unione’s vice-president.