December 18, 1931: Legs Diamond Is Rubbed Out

December 18, 1931: Bootlegger Jack "Legs" Diamond is rubbed out in Albany, New York. It was at least the 6th attempt on his life, the 3rd in the last year.

John Thomas Diamond was born on July 10, 1897 in Philadelphia. When his mother died, his father moved the family to Brooklyn. Jack found his way to Manhattan, where he got mixed up with a gang called the Hudson Dusters. He served in the U.S. Army in World War I, but deserted, and got caught, and served in Leavenworth Military Prison. He got out in 1921, and met Arnold Rothstein, the mobster who led the fix of the 1919 World Series, eventually becoming personal bodyguard to the man known as "The Brain" and "The Big Bankroll."

Or maybe it was the other way around. Rothstein was killed on November 6, 1928. By that point, Diamond was 1 of the 2 biggest bootleggers in New York, along with Dutch Schultz. Without Rothstein's protection, "Legs" -- the source of the nickname is in dispute, as he was known to outrun cops and be a great dancer in "The Jazz Age" -- was a marked man. He survived being shot in 1924, 1927 and 1930. Schultz supposedly said, "Ain't there nobody that can shoot this guy so he don't bounce back?"

The question was answered in the affirmative on December 18, 1931. He was in Albany, New York, on trial for a kidnapping that had occurred across the Hudson River in Troy. At 4:30 AM, after a night of partying, he got back to his rooming house and passed out on his bed. At around 5:30, gunshots were heard. He had been shot 3 times in the back of the head. He was 34 years old.

Supposedly, the deed was done by the Albany police, trying to prevent him from moving in on the town -- and breaking up their own racket. Sergeant William Fitzpatrick is said to have fired the shots. He was later appointed Chief of Police. In 1945, he, too, was shot and killed, in his own office.

Legs was a known womanizer. But, rather than any of his mistresses, it was his wife, Alice, who was shot and killed in her Brooklyn apartment, to keep her quiet, on July 1, 1933.

Legs was played by Ray Danton in the 1960 film The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, Steven Hill on a 1960 episode of The Untouchables, Peter Allen in the 1988 Broadway musical Legs Diamond, and John Mosby in the 1993 film The Outfit.

*

December 18, 1931 was a Friday. Baseball was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. The NHL scheduled no games. And the football season was over, except for the Rose Bowl, to be played in Pasadena, California on New Year's Day: The University of Southern California beat Tulane University, 21-12.

December 5, 1933: Prohibition Ends

December 5, 1933: The 21st Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is ratified, repealing the 18th Amendment, which had prohibited the production, sale, purchase, transport, and possession of alcoholic beverages in America. After 14 years, Prohibition has ended. 

America's self-appointed moral arbiters had gotten Prohibition ratified in the first place, in 1919 to take effect on January 16, 1920, because they saw alcohol as evil, but also because they saw it as something that those other people enjoy. You know, the immigrants. The foreigners. The Catholics.

As it turned out, Banning liquor and drinking was the worst thing they could have done. There was already organized crime in America, but Prohibition launched it headlong into American life, as Mob bosses like Al Capone were happy to supply the people with the drinks they craved.

With the Great Depression underway by late 1929, people needed a drink more than ever. And so, the desire to keep Prohibition began to fade away. Being "Dry" was a winning stance in the Presidential election of 1920 for Warren Harding, 1924 for Calvin Coolidge, and 1928 for Herbert Hoover.

In 1929 and 1930, the Philadelphia Athletics won the World Series. Both times, Hoover made the short train trip from Washington to Shibe Park in North Philadelphia, and threw out the ceremonial first ball before one of the games. In October 1929, he was cheered. In October 1930, he heard boos and chants of "We want beer! We want beer! We want beer!"

In 1932, the Depression meant that Hoover was going to lose to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, anyway, but being "Dry" hurt Hoover on top of that. FDR was "Wet," and that made him all the more popular.

Did making booze legal again stop organized crime? Far from it. The Mob, figuring that this day would eventually come, was prepared, and had already moved on to other things, like gambling, and illegal drugs.

By 1933, the 18th Amendment was so unpopular, that it became the first Amendment to the Constitution to be repealed. It remains the only one.

This historic day was in December, so there were no games in Major League Baseball. It was a Tuesday, so there were no games in the National Football League. And it was before 1946, so there was, as yet, no National Basketball Association.

Even in the National Hockey League, there was not a full schedule. The New York Rangers and the Chicago Blackhawks were not scheduled to play. These games were:

* The New York Americans lost to the Toronto Maple Leafs, 9-1 at what would later be called "the old Madison Square Garden."

* The Boston Bruins beat the Montreal Canadiens, 5-2 at the Boston Garden.

* And the Montreal Maroons and the Detroit Red Wings played to a 1-1 tie at the Montreal Forum.

November 4, 1928: Arnold Rothstein Is Rubbed Out

November 4, 1928: Arnold Rothstein is rubbed out. "The Brain," who led the Mob's fix of the 1919 World Series, was also the guy who figured out that Prohibition was the way to turn organized crime in America into big business, while Al Capone was still an up-and-comer.

But, like drug dealers who got hooked on their own product, the lure of his original line of work, gambling, proved too much for "The Big Bankroll." He lost $320,000 (about $5.47 million in 2022 money) in a 3-day high-stakes poker game. He said (O the irony) that the game was fixed, and refused to pay up.

He was shot at the Park Central Hotel in Midtown Manhattan (known as the Park Sheraton from 1948 until reverting to its original name in 1984), where a man then a rising star, Albert Anastasia, would see his reign as "the Boss of All Bosses" come to a similar end in 1957. It took Rothstein 2 days to die, and he refused to rat his killer out, telling the police, "You stick to your trade, I'll stick to mine." One source says that his last words were, "My mother did it."

He was 46, and he always knew he would come to such an end: A favorite saying of his was, "The odds on everything in life, including life itself, are six to five against."

A man was arrested for the murder, but was acquitted for lack of evidence, and they may have gotten the wrong guy anyway.

Rothstein was played by Robert Lowery (who played Batman in a 1949 film serial) in The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond in 1960, future Fugitive star David Janssen in The Big Bankroll in 1961, Michael Lerner in Eight Men Out in 1988, F. Murray Abraham in Mobsters in 1991, and Michael Stuhlbarg on

Boardwalk Empire in the early 2010s.

In the 1974 film The Godfather Part II, Mario Puzo had Hyman Suchowsky, the character based on Meyer Lansky (played at that age by John Megna, when older by Lee Strasberg), give himself the "street name" Hyman Roth because he admired Rothstein.

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald used Rothstein as a character, giving him the name Meyer Wolfsheim, a man who managed to "play with the faith of 50 million people." The character does not appear in the 1926 and 1949 film versions, but was played by Howard Da Silva in 1974, and by Indian film superstar Amitabh Bachchan in 2013.

*

November 4, 1928 was a Sunday. Baseball was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season wouldn't start for another 11 days. But these NFL games were played:

* The football version of the New York Giants and the Frankford Yellow Jackets, based in Northeast Philadelphia, played to a tie, 0-0 at the Polo Grounds.

* The football version of the New York Yankees lost to the Chicago Bears, 27-0 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

* The Providence Steam Roller beat the Detroit Wolverines, 7-0 at the Cycledrome in Providence, Rhode Island. The Steam Roller (they officially wrote it as 2 words, no S on the end) went on to win the NFL Championship that season, but the Great Depression knocked them out of business in 1931.

* The Green Bay Packers beat the Pottsville Maroons, 26-14 at Minersville Park in Pottsville, Pennsylvania.

* The Chicago Cardinals, the Dayton Triangles were not scheduled to play that weekend.

I have no way of knowing of Arnold Rothstein had bets on any of these games.

October 23, 1935: Dutch Schultz Is Rubbed Out

October 23, 1935: Mobster Dutch Schultz is rubbed out, along with 2 bodyguards and his accountant, at the Palace Chophouse at 12 E. Park Street in Newark. He was 34 years old.

(The address no longer exists, as the 60 Park Place Building has wiped it out. A restaurant called Dutch's Lounge has opened at 24 E. Park.)

Schultz had asked the Mafia Commission for permission to kill the U.S. Attorney investigating him in New York, Thomas Dewey. They refused, because it would have meant the U.S. government declaring all-out war on them, a war the Mob knew it couldn't win. They thought he might try it anyway, and rival Charles "Lucky" Luciano sent 2 hitmen from Murder, Incorporated to do it. He was shot at 10:15 that night, and died at 2:20 the next morning.

Born on August 6, 1901 as Arthur Simon Flegenheimer, Dutch Schultz started as a bouncer at a Bronx speakeasy, whose owner, Joey Noe, took a liking to him for his ruthlessness in throwing guys out. He joined Noe's bootlegging operation, and took over when Noe was rubbed out in 1928, as part of the Castellamarese War. Schultz may have ordered the 1928 killing of Arnold Rothstein, the gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series; and the 1930 attempted rubout of Legs Diamond, who recovered, only to be killed by another gang the following year.

When Prohibition ended in 1933, Schultz moved into a numbers racket (an illegal lottery) and extortion. But Dewey, remembering how Al Capone was brought to justice, indicted Schultz for tax evasion. So Schultz made his request, and it ended up backfiring.

He didn't die immediately, and was still conscious when he was loaded into an ambulance that would take him to Newark City Hospital (now University Hospital). He had $3,000 in cash (about $64,000 in 2022 money) on him, and gave it to an intern in the ambulance, because, "It's not going to do me any good where I'm going." When it looked like Schultz might live, the intern got scared that Schultz might want the cash back, and gave it to the police.

Schultz lived for 29 hours, and remained lucid long enough for the police to question him, and ask him if he knew who shot him, or if he knew who sent them. Keeping the Mob's code of silence, he wouldn't say.

With a tombstone bearing his real name, he is buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York -- the same cemetery as Babe Ruth, Billy Martin, Ralph Branca, Giants owners Tim and Wellington Mara, Heywood Broun, Dorothy Kilgallen, Conde Nast; steel magnate Charles M. Schwab (no relation to the investment guru Charles R.), Fred Allen, James Cagney, Sal Mineo and 1920s Mayor Jimmy Walker.

One of the gunmen, Charles Workman, served 23 years in prison. The other, Emmanuel Weiss, was arrested for a different murder, and executed in 1944. Albert Anastasia, the Commission head, "the boss of all bosses," remained in power until getting whacked himself in 1957.

Lucky Luciano and his business partner Meyer Lansky allowed their friend Abner "Longy" Zwillman, a former bootlegger and the king of Newark's "numbers racket," to take over Schultz's New Jersey operations. He became the most powerful gangster between the Hudson and Delaware Rivers, until his tax problems piled up, and he was found dead in his West Orange home in 1959, shortly before he was to testify before a Senate Committee in Washington. It's been alleged that Vito Genovese, head of the New York crime family that still bears his name, ordered it, with Lansky's blessing.

Luciano was convicted in 1936, a case prosecuted by Dewey, but the charges had nothing to do with the Schultz murder, for which he was never charged. He was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison. During World War II, he accepted a deal with the federal government, negotiated by Lansky: Through his operations, he had naval knowledge that could help win The War. In 1946, his sentence was commuted, on the condition that he accept deportation back to Italy. He accepted, and died in Naples in 1962. Lansky lived on until 1983, his power and fortune having waned, but he was never imprisoned. Nor was he assassinated, like the Hyman Roth, the character based on on him for the film The Godfather Part II.

Schultz has been played by Lawrence Dobkin on 3 episodes of the TV series The Untouchables in 1959, Vic Morrow in Portrait of a Mobster in 1961, Vincent Gardenia in Mad Dog Coll the same year, James Remar in The Cotton Club in 1984, Dustin Hoffman in Billy Bathgate in 1991, and Tim Roth in Hoodlum in 1997.

In 1998, Michael Walsh published As Time Goes By, an authorized combination prequel and sequel to the film Casablanca. It imagines Humphrey Bogart's character as a young man named Yitzik Baline, working for Solly Horowitz, a mobster based on Schultz. When Horowitz is rubbed out on October 23, 1935, "Rick" Baline, by then running Horowitz' speakeasy, has to flee the country, and changes his name to Richard Blaine.

*

October 23, 1935 was a Wednesday. Puerto Rican golfer Juan Antonio "Chi-Chi" Rodríguez was born.

The baseball season was over, the hockey season didn't start for another 2 weeks, there was no NBA, and it was a Wednesday, so there were no football games. So there were no scores on this historic day.

May 26, 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924

May 26, 1924: The Immigration Act of 1924 is signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge. It was intended to control the racial makeup of the United States by greatly restricting immigration.

People had long been coming to America from all over the world. In the late 1840s, the Irish Potato Famine brought in people from Ireland, to the point where, by the end of the 20th Century, there were more Irish people in America than in Ireland. The European Revolutions of 1848 also led millions of people, especially Germans, to flee. Most Americans don't realize it, but Germans are still the largest ethnic group in America -- ahead of African-Americans and Hispanics, let alone Irish and Italians.

The late 19th Century saw a great deal of immigrants from Southern Europe: Italy, Greece, and the Balkan countries in between that were then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These people were, at the same time, joined by many Jews fleeing Eastern Europe, including Austria, Romania and the Russian Empire, including present-day Poland and Ukraine.

The Southern Europeans were white, but darker-skinned than people from Germany and the British Isles. And they were Catholic, in many cases Eastern Orthodox, which seemed, to many Americans, to be even more "foreign" than the Roman Catholicism practiced by the Irish. Many of the Eastern Europeans were also Catholic, some Eastern Orthodox. And the Jews weren't even Christian.

These immigrants included my mother's paternal grandparents from Vilnius in Lithuania, before 1901, when their 1st child was born in Manhattan; and my father's Catholic paternal grandparents from Borki Wielkie in northeastern Poland, sometime between 1891, when my great-grandfather was born there, and 1914, when my grandfather was born in Newark, New Jersey. It's only recently that I was able to narrow it down that far, much less any further. (As for maternal grandparents, my mother's were English and my father's were Dutch, and they were already here before the American Civil War of the 1860s, but that's all I know so far.)

All this foreignness led to a backlash, which got to be disgusting. In 1896, one national magazine actually printed these words: "Europe is vomiting."

This cartoon had the same idea.

But it didn't stop. In 1907, immigration to America peaked, with 1.1 million people coming in. April 17 of that year was the busiest day New York's Ellis Island immigration station ever had.

White Anglo-Saxon anger over immigration, including agitation from the Ku Klux Klan -- who, let's not forget, were Protestant, and thus as much anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic as anti-black -- was a big reason why Prohibition was passed -- and a big reason why it passed when it did. Anti-immigrant and anti-liquor activists knew that, after the reapportionment from the 1920 Census, they'd never have another chance, so they had to get it done before then, to strike the blow they wanted against the Germans with their beer, the Italians with their wine, the Irish with their whiskey, and the Eastern Europeans with their vodka.

The 18th Amendment was ratified in 1919, and took effect in 1920. Of course, ethnic gangs got better organized, and bootlegged and sold booze, and the American Mafia as we know it was born. Prohibition totally backfired, and the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th in 1933. By that point, organized crime had anticipated this, and had increased their involvement in their other fields, including gambling and prostitution. Drugs soon followed.

The activists did not learn their lesson, and tried harder to restrict immigration. The Immigration Act of 1924 was also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, for its sponsors, Representative Albert Johnson of Washington, and Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, both Republicans.

Johnson was not merely a racist, he was a eugenicist. In 1927, he justified the Act as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed." And Reed was an out-and-out fascist: On July 1, 1932, during the Bonus Army march on Washington, He took to the Senate floor, and said, "I do not often envy other countries and their governments, but I say that if this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now."

The Act prevented immigration from Asia, and set quotas on the number of immigrants from the rest of the world: 165,000 per year, and 3 percent of any country from their 1910 population. It also authorized the creation of the country's first formal border control service, the U.S. Border Patrol, and established a "consular control system," which allowed entry only to those who first obtained a visa from a U.S. consulate abroad.

Albert Johnson was defeated in the Franklin Roosevelt landslide of 1932. He died in 1957, a proud racist and eugenicist to the end. David Reed was defeated in 1934, in another Democratic landslide. He died in 1953. His house in Washington, D.C. is, with some appropriateness, now the Embassy of a nation of nonwhite people: The Asian nation of Laos.

The 1924 Act would define U.S. immigration policy for nearly three decades, until being substantially revised by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, and ultimately replaced by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

On November 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Its most significant effect was that it allowed immigrants who had entered the U.S. illegally before January 1, 1982 to apply for legal status, provided they paid fines and back taxes. This provision, which Reagan himself referred to as “amnesty,” allowed around 3 million immigrants to secure legal status after paying $185, demonstrating “good moral character” and learning to speak English.

Conservative activists since Reagan, who have demagogued the issue of illegal immigration since the 1990s and especially since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, find it hard to believe that their favorite President of all time could have done such a thing, but he did. Say what you want about him, and I have, but the man did believe that immigrants made America stronger, not weaker.

And every President after him agreed: Both George Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama -- until Donald Trump, who was so anti-immigrant, he made Calvin Coolidge look like a believer in open borders. 

*

May 26, 1924 was a  Monday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees beat the Detroit Tigers, 8-2 at Yankee Stadium. "Bullet Joe" Bush went the distance for the win. Babe Ruth hit a home run, and 2nd baseman Ernie Johnson went 4-for-4 with 2 home runs and 3 RBIs. Ty Cobb, by this point also the Tigers' manager, went 0-for-3 with a walk.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the Cleveland Indians, 10-9 at Fenway Park in Baltimore. Tris Speaker, by this point also the Indians' manager, went 2-for-5 with an RBI.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the St. Louis Browns, 2-1 at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. George Sisler, the Browns' greatest player ever, went 0-for-4.

* The Washington Senators beat the Chicago White Sox, 8-2 at Griffith Stadium in Washington.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds, 4-3 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. None of the other National League teams were scheduled for the day.

March 9, 1926: America’s 1st Female Big-City Mayor

March 9, 1926: Doc Brown is Mayor of Seattle. Seriously. No, Back to the Future fans, this isn't as a result of time travel, and messing with the space-time continuum: This really happened, to a real person. He was elected in 1922, and was re-elected in 1924.

But on this day, he is defeated for re-election. The winner becomes the 1st female Mayor of a major American city.

Bertha Ethel Knight was born on October 19, 1868 in Ware, in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. She attended Indiana University, and returned to Worcester to teach at her Alma Mater, Classical High School. In 1894, she married Henry Landes, a geologist she met at IU. He got a teaching post at the University of Washington, and they moved to Seattle, where they raised 3 children.

Bertha Knight Landes was a Republican, and by the time her children were grown, she had become President of the Washington State chapter of the League of Women Voters. In 1922, she and the aptly-named Kathryn Miracle were elected the 1st 2 women on the Seattle City Council. Edwin J. Brown, a Democrat and a dentist, known as "Doc," was elected Mayor.

In 1924, Brown left town to serve as a Delegate to the Democratic National Convention on New York. He chose Landes to serve as acting Mayor, and the Council approved it. Big mistake, from his perspective: She fired the corrupt chief of police, and cracked down on speakeasies. (Prohibition was on.) When Brown got back, he reinstated the Chief. So Landes ran against Brown in 1926, and beat him by 6,000 votes, a landslide given Seattle's size at the time.

"I suppose some of the politicians believe I should merely stay at home and darn my husband's socks," she said in an interview. "That is a laudable occupation, no one will deny, but it certainly does not take all of a woman's time."

She built the Civic Auditorium (now named Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, in honor of a donor), brought Seattle City Light under city control, and reduced the influence of organized crime, which, given the city's status as a port city, was running rampant. Opponents derided her as "Bluenose Bertha" and, inevitably, "Big Bertha.: Her anti-Prohibition, or "dry," stance proved unpopular, and she she was defeated for re-election by a newcomer in 1928.

She continued to advocate for women in public service, and lived until November 29, 1943. Brown lived until 1941. Henry Landes had died in 1936. None of the Landes children entered politics.

Here's a list of America's "major league" cities, and when they had their 1st female Mayor -- if any:

* 1926, Seattle, Bertha Landes.

* 1948, Portland, Oregon, Dorothy McCullough Lee.

* 1974, San Jose, Janet Gray Hayes. Although San Jose had not yet had a major league team in any sport, this was the 1st time a woman had been elected Mayor of an American city with at least 500,000 people.

* 1975, Cincinnati, Bobbie Sterne.

* 1975, San Antonio, Lila Cockrell.

* 1975, Phoenix, Margaret Hance. This was the 1st time a woman had been elected Mayor of an American city with at least 700,000 people.

* 1976, Dallas, Adlene Harrison, after Wes Wise resigned to make an unsuccessful fun for Congress. Dallas first elected a female Mayor in 1986, with Annette Strauss.

* 1976, St. Petersburg, Florida, Corinne Freeman.

* 1978, San Francisco, Dianne Feinstein, after the assassination of George Moscone. She won in her own right in 1979.

* 1979, Chicago, Jane Byrne. This was the 1st time a woman had been elected Mayor of an American city with at least 800,000 people, or 1 million, or 2 million, or 3 million.

* 1981, Houston, Kathy Whitmire.

* 1982, Columbus, Kathleen McMillan.

* 1983, Sacramento, Anne Rudin.

* 1985, San Diego, Maureen O'Connor.

* 1986, Tampa, Sandra Freedman, after Bob Martinez resigned to run for Governor. She won in her own right later that year.

* 1987, Charlotte, Sue Myrick.

* 1988, Pittsburgh, Sophie Masloff, after the death of Richard Caliguiri. She won in her own right in 1989.

* 1990, Washington, Sharon Pratt Dixon.

* 1991, Salt Lake City, Deedee Corradini.

* 1991, Las Vegas, Jan Jones.

* 1992, Orlando, Glenda Hood.

* 1993, Minneapolis, Sharon Sayles Belton. She was also the city's 1st black Mayor.

* 1998, Kansas City, Kay Barnes.

* 2001, Atlanta, Shirley Franklin.

* 2001, Cleveland, Jane Campbell.

* 2006, Baltimore, Sheila Dixon, after Martin O'Malley was elected Governor. She won in her own right in 2007.

* 2010, Oakland, Jean Quan.

* 2015, Nashville, Megan Barry.

* 2017, New Orleans, LaToya Cantrell.

* 2017, St. Louis, Lyda Krewson.

* 2021, Boston, Kim Janey, after Marty Walsh was appointed U.S. Secretary of Labor. She was also the city's 1st black Mayor. She subsequently lost a Primary to Michelle Wu, who became the city's 1st Asian Mayor and its 1st elected female Mayor.

* 2022, Los Angeles, Karen Bass. This made L.A. the largest American city to have had a female Mayor.

* 2023, Philadelphia, Cherrelle Parker.

So far, none: New York, Newark, Anaheim, Buffalo, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee.

UPDATE: In 2022, Ashleigh Aitken was elected the 1st female Mayor of Anaheim. In 2023, Donna Deegan was elected the 1st female Mayor of Jacksonville. In 2025, Mary Sheffield was elected the 1st female Mayor of Detroit, and Eileen Higgin was elected the 1st female Mayor of Miami.

*

March 9, 1926 was a Tuesday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season, Professional basketball barely existed. There were 2 games in the NHL. The New York Americans beat the Boston Bruins, 1-0 at the Boston Arena (now the Matthews Arena). And the Pittsburgh Pirates (who did not survive the Great Depression) beat the Montreal Canadiens, 4-3 at the Mount Royal Arena in Montreal.

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.

*

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. 

January 16, 1919: Prohibition Is Ratified

 

January 16, 1919: The 18th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is ratified, prohibiting the production, sale, purchase, transport and possession of alcoholic beverages in America. In exactly one year, January 16, 1920, Prohibition takes effect.

America's self-appointed moral arbiters had gotten Prohibition ratified because they saw alcohol as evil, but also because they saw it as something those other people enjoy. You know, the immigrants. The foreigners. The Catholics.

Of course, the 1st Amendments guarantee of freedom of religion led to exceptions for sacramental wine. And, as with certain drugs, doctors could still use alcohol in medical procedures, and even proscribe it to patients, although this was heavily regulated.

Billy Sunday, a former major league pitcher who had become America's foremost evangelist, wrote, "The rain of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn out prisons into factories, our jails into storehouses and corn cribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, children will laugh, hell will be for rent."

Billy Sunday

He actually believed all of that. The only thing missing was the proclamation of America as a "new Jerusalem." None of it came to pass. He added, "If any State fails to ratify the amendment the star in the flag that represents it should be draped in mourning."

Will Rogers, the Western-themed entertainer and newspaper columnist, knew: "Prohibition is like Communism: It's a great idea, but it won't work."

Will Rogers

As it turned out, Rogers was right, and Sunday was wrong: Banning liquor and drinking was the worst thing that the American federal government could have done. There was already organized crime in America, but Prohibition launched it headlong into American life, as Mob bosses like Al Capone were happy to supply the people with the drinks they craved. Prohibition became the most-broken law in American history.

Al Capone. His business card read,

"Second Hand Furniture Dealer."

With the Great Depression underway by late 1929, people needed a drink more than ever. And so, the desire to keep Prohibition began to fade away. Being "Dry" was a winning stance in the Presidential election of 1920 for Warren Harding, in 1924 for Calvin Coolidge, and in 1928 for Herbert Hoover. In 1932, the Depression meant that Hoover was going to lose to Franklin Roosevelt, anyway. But being "Dry" hurt Hoover on top of that. FDR was "Wet," and that made him all the more popular.

Did making booze legal again stop organized crime? Far from it. The Mob moved on to other things, like gambling, and illegal drugs.

The 18th Amendment was so unpopular that, on December 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, repealing the 18th Amendment. After 14 years, Prohibition was ended. It remains the only Amendment to the Constitution that has been repealed.

In 1956, a little more than 22 years after the repeal, with memories of the era still fresh, an episode of The Honeymooners showed Ralph Kramden (played by Jackie Gleason) worried about having to go to the IRS office the next morning, fearing he may have inadvertently filed an incorrect tax return. His best friend and upstairs neighbor, Ed Norton (Art Carney), tells him to "stand on the 18th Amendment."

Ralph: "You mean, stand on the 5th Amendment. The 18th Amendment was for Prohibition."

Ed: "That's just what I mean: Say you were drunk when you made out your taxes!"

In 2011, 78 years after the repeal, with every major player in the drama having died, some of old age, Ken Burns premiered his documentary Prohibition on PBS. He broke it into 3 parts, stretching over 5 1/2 hours: "A Nation of Drunkards," "A Nation of Scofflaws," and "A Nation of Hypocrites." 

On January 16, 2022, a little over 88 years after the repeal, there are still several bars in this country whose signs proudly proclaim "Since 1933" or "Est. 1933" (for "established"). Others managed to stay in business from 1920 to 1933 as simple restaurants or tea rooms -- some selling booze in secret. These were called "speakeasies," "beer flats," "blind pigs" and "blind tigers." From 2011 when I first visited it until 2019 when it closed due to high rent, my favorite bar in New York was named The Blind Pig.

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January 16, 1919 was a Thursday. It was the off-season for baseball. The NFL and the NBA had not yet been founded. And there was only 1 NHL game played: The Montreal Canadiens beat the original version of the Ottawa Senators, 10-6 at Dey's Arena in Ottawa.