February 14, 1929: The St. Valentine's Day Massacre

February 14, 1929: The most famous killing in the history of American organized crime takes place on the North Side of Chicago. Because it happened on February 14, it becomes known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Chicago's organized crime was then divided between the North Side Gang, led by St. Paul, Minnesota-born Irish gangster George "Bugs" Moran, and the South Side Mob, led by Brooklyn-born Italian gangster "Scarface" Al Capone. With World War I still fresh in people's memories, their fight for control of bootlegging liquor under Prohibition was known as "The Bootleg Battle of the Marne."

Bugs Moran

Seven members of Moran's gang were lured to the SMC Cartage warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, in the Lincoln Park section of the North Side, with the promise of a stolen, cut-rate shipment of whiskey from Detroit's infamous Purple Gang. But when they got there, they were accosted by 4 men, 2 dressed as Chicago police officers and 2 claiming to be plainclothes detectives. The uniforms and badges were easy enough to obtain, since Capone was said to have half the city's police force on his payroll.

The fake cops lined the men against a wall of the warehouse, and shot them with submachine guns. The victims were: 

* Albert Kachellek, 40, Moran's second-in-command.

* Adam Heyer, 40, Moran's bookkeeper and business manager.

* Peter Gusenberg, 40, and his brother...

* Frank Gusenberg, 35, both enforcers for the North Side Gang.

* John May, 34, a mechanic for the North Side Gang.

* Reinhardt Schwimmer, 29, an optician and gambler, associated with the North Side Gang.

* Albert Weinshank, age unknown, who ran several operations for Moran.

The rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire had become the ugliest roar of the "Roaring Twenties."

Weinshank was the problem: With his face and his clothes, he resembled Moran, and the Capone men thought they had Moran. They didn't: He had decided to sleep in that day, which explains why his Number 2, Kachellek, went. Being lazy had saved Moran's life.

Frank Gusenberg was the only man who lived long enough for the real police to arrive. As has so often been the case with those who survive gangland slayings, however briefly, he refused to identify his killers. Capone denied any involvement. And no one was ever indicted for the crime, let alone convicted of it.

The result was, in spite of surviving, Moran lost his influence. Soon, Capone was in command of all of Chicago crime. Capone was finally busted for income tax evasion, and served time in federal prison from 1931 to 1939, before being released for health reasons. He died in exile in Miami in 1947. 

Al Capone. "Scarface" preferred this angle, since his

broken-bottle-caused scars were on the other side of his face.

Moran tried several petty crimes to rebuild his former fortune, but failed, and died in prison in 1957 -- 10 years after Capone, but he could hardly be said to have "beaten" him.

Pretty much every movie made about Capone re-creates the Massacre. The original 1932 version of Scarface, where Paul Muni's character Tony Camonte is based on Capone, re-created it. So did the 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot, where Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play musicians, unconnected to organized crime, who have to flee Chicago because they witnessed the Massacre. On an episode of The Golden Girls, Sophia Petrillo (played by Estelle Getty) claimed to have witnessed it. (The character would have been 22 years old at the time, so, at the least, it was possible.)

On February 14, 1951, Sugar Ray Robinson defended the Middleweight Championship of the World against Jake LaMotta at the Chicago Stadium. It was the 6th fight between them, and in their 2nd fight, LaMotta dealt Robinson what was then his only loss. This time, Robinson left no doubt, pummeling LaMotta to the point where the referee stopped the fight in the 13th round. Because of the date and the location, the fight became known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

LaMotta, played by Robert De Niro in the 1980 film Raging Bull, said, "I fought Sugar Ray Robinson so many times, I got diabetes." De Niro played Capone in the 1987 film version of The Untouchables, although that film begins in 1930, and does not show the Massacre.

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February 14, 1929 was a Thursday. Actor Vic Morrow was born. He was the father of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.

It was the off-season for baseball and football, and the NBA hadn't been founded yet. But 5 games were played in the National Hockey League that day:

* The New York Rangers, defending Stanley Cup Champions, lost to the Toronto Maple Leafs, 3-1 at the Mutual Street Arena. Maple Leaf Gardens opened 2 1/2 years later.

* The New York Americans and the Detroit Cougars played to a tie, 1-1 at the still-new building that would later be called "the old Madison Square Garden." The Cougars would become the Detroit Falcons the next year, and the Detroit Red Wings in 1932.

* The Montreal Maroons beat the Ottawa Senators, 4-0 at the Montreal Forum.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Bruins, 2-0 at the Duquesne Gardens in Pittsburgh. Named for the city's baseball team, after the next season, the Pirates moved across Pennsylvania, becoming the Philadelphia Quakers, but their awful performance and the Great Depression led to their folding.

* And, elsewhere in Chicago that night, the Montreal Canadiens beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 1-0 at the Chicago Coliseum. The Chicago Stadium opened a few weeks later. In 1986, it was discovered that the Hawks' original charter had "Blackhawks" written as one word, despite the fact that it had nearly always been written as two words, "Black Hawks." So the name was then formally changed to the single word.