The St. Valentine's Day Massacre

The case

A little after half past ten on the morning of 14 February 1929, a black Cadillac touring car that looked exactly like a police detective's car stopped outside the S.M.C. Cartage Company on North Clark Street, in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighbourhood. Two of the men who got out wore police uniforms. Inside the brick garage behind the office, seven men were waiting. Five belonged to the North Side Gang of George "Bugs" Moran, the last serious rival to Al Capone's organisation. The other two had simply chosen a bad place to spend the morning.

The visitors behaved like a raiding party. They ordered the seven to face the north wall, and the men complied, apparently expecting nothing worse than an arrest and a fine. Then two Thompson submachine guns and a shotgun were fired along the line. About seventy rounds came from the Thompsons. The gunmen left by the front door in a little piece of theatre: the two in plain clothes walked out with their hands raised, marched along by the two in uniform, so that anyone watching from the street saw what looked like a routine arrest.

What the neighbours actually noticed was a dog. Highball, the dog belonging to the mechanic John May, would not stop howling, and people went to look. Six men were dead. Frank Gusenberg, one of Moran's enforcers, had crawled some distance across the floor and was still alive. At the hospital a police sergeant asked him who had shot him. Gusenberg, keeping the underworld's rule to the end, insisted that nobody had, and died within hours.

Moran himself was the obvious intended target, and he was late. Arriving with two associates, he saw what he took for a police car outside, assumed a raid was under way and went for coffee instead. He was soon telling a reporter that only Capone killed like that. Capone was at his house in Miami Beach that morning, which settled nothing: nobody imagined he had pulled a trigger himself.

Several investigations started at once, run by the police, the state's attorney and the Cook County coroner, Herman Bundesen. A deputy Prohibition administrator muddied things early by suggesting real policemen had done it. Bundesen's citizens' panel brought in Calvin Goddard, then building the new science of firearms identification, and paid for him to set up a laboratory in Chicago. Goddard test-fired the Thompsons held by the city police and showed none of them had been used. On 22 February the Cadillac turned up, partly cut apart and burned, in a garage on Wood Street. A second car, a Peerless, was blown up in suburban Maywood five days later, with what looked like planted evidence inside.

Capone gunmen were arrested, Jack McGurn among them. He had an alibi from his girlfriend, who said they had spent the day together in a hotel room, and the charges against him and others were dropped. The best physical evidence arrived by accident in December 1929, when Fred Burke, a former St. Louis gangster known for posing as a policeman, shot a patrolman after a car crash in St. Joseph, Michigan. Police searching his bungalow found two Thompsons. Goddard matched both to the bullets from the garage. Burke was eventually caught in 1931, tried in Michigan for the patrolman's murder, and sentenced to life. He was never tried for the massacre.

Bundesen closed his inquest in November 1931 with the finding that the seven had been killed by persons unknown. In 1935 a minor gangster, Byron Bolton, told the FBI he had been a lookout across the street and named the gunmen as Burke, Fred Goetz, Gus Winkler, Ray Nugent and Bob Carey, acting for Capone. By then most of those men were dead or missing, and nobody was prosecuted. Historians still disagree about who was in the garage, and some doubt that Capone gave the order at all.