Friday, March 23, 2007

St. Valentine's Day Massacre


I figure I should clear up a bit of my Chicago history. I know that the St. Valentines incident was a massacre, and I know that it involved mobster in prohibition era Chicago, but I felt I should tighten up the facts a bit now that I live here.

Here's some facts:

The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre is the name given to the shooting of seven people (six of them gangsters) as part of a Prohibition Era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois in the winter of 1929: the South Side Italian gang led by Al "Scarface" Capone and the North Side Irish/German gang led by George "Bugs" Moran. The Purple Gang was also suspected to play a large role in the St. Valentine's Day massacre, assisting Al Capone.

On the morning of Thursday, February 14, St. Valentine's Day, six members of George 'Bugs' Moran's gang and a doctor who happened to be at the scene were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the S-M-C Cartage Company in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side. They were then shot and killed by five members of Al Capone's gang (two of whom were dressed as police officers). When one of the dying men, Frank "Tight Lips" Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, "Nobody shot me." Capone himself had arranged to be on vacation in Florida at the time.


And an additionally interesting tidbit:
The garage, which stood at 2122 N. Clark Street, was demolished in 1967; the site is now a landscaped parking lot for a nursing home. The wall was dismantled brick by brick, sold at auction and shipped to George Patey of Vancouver, a Canadian businessman, who rebuilt it in the men's restroom of a bar with a Roaring Twenties theme called the Banjo Palace. After the bar closed, Patey began trying to sell the bricks as souvenirs.


From Wikipedia

No comments:

2009 EDSEL/Lepanto Industries. aLT DELETE. A Division of LABOR CORP. NaDA Publishing.