He and fellow gang member Ted Newberry were approaching the rear of the warehouse from a side street when they saw a police car nearing the building. Most of the Moran gang arrived at the warehouse by approximately 10:30 a.m., but Moran was not there, having left his Parkway Hotel apartment late. The victims were lined up against this wall and shot. The Gusenberg brothers were supposed to drive two empty trucks to Detroit that day to pick up two loads of stolen Canadian whiskey.Īll of the victims were dressed in their best clothes, with the exception of John May, as was customary for the North Siders and other gangsters at the time. 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 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. Both had been presidents of the Unione Siciliana, the local Mafia, and close associates of Capone. The North Side Gang was complicit in the murders of Pasqualino "Patsy" Lolordo and Antonio "The Scourge" Lombardo. Earlier in the year, North Sider Frank Gusenberg and his brother Peter unsuccessfully attempted to murder Jack McGurn. Moran had also been muscling in on a Capone-run dog track in the Chicago suburbs, and he had taken over several saloons that were run by Capone, insisting that they were in his territory. Moran and Capone had been vying for control of the lucrative Chicago bootlegging trade. Several factors contributed to the timing of the plan to kill Moran. Moran was the last survivor of the North Side gunmen his succession had come about because his similarly aggressive predecessors, Hymie Weiss and Vincent Drucci, had been killed in the violence that followed the murder of their original leader, Dean O'Banion. The impetus for the plan may have been the North Side Gang's hijacking of some expensive whisky being illegally smuggled by Capone's gang from Canada via the Detroit River. Al Capone, who was at his Florida home at the time, was widely assumed to have been responsible for ordering the massacre. The massacre was an attempt to eliminate Bugs Moran, head of the North Side Gang. When the police asked him who did it, he reportedly replied, "I won't talk, For God's sake get me to a hospital." He died three hours later. He was taken to the hospital, where doctors stabilized him for a short time and police tried to question him. Schwimmer, a former optician turned gambler and gang associate and John May, an occasional mechanic for the Moran gang.Ĭhicago police officers arrived at the scene to find that victim Frank Gusenberg was still alive, despite having sustained 14 bullet wounds. Two associates were also shot: Reinhardt H. Moran's second in command and brother-in-law Albert Kachellek ( alias James Clark) was killed along with Adam Heyer, the gang's bookkeeper and business manager Albert Weinshank, who managed several cleaning and dying operations for Moran and gang enforcers Frank Gusenberg and Peter Gusenberg. The victims included five members of George "Bugs" Moran's North Side Gang. Witnesses saw the men in police uniforms leading the other men at gunpoint out of the garage after the shooting. Two of the shooters were wearing police uniforms, while the others wore suits, ties, overcoats, and hats. They were shot by four men using weapons that included two Thompson submachine guns. Class=notpageimage| Location of the shootingsĪt 10:30 in the morning on 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.
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