A new probe into the mysteries of the St. Valentine's Day massacre
David Jackson, Tribune staff reporterCHICAGO TRIBUNE
We all know what happened in the dimly lit garage at 2122 N. Clark St. on that chilly Valentine's Day morning 75 years ago.
Newspapers from coast to coast ran photos of the seven men in spats and boutonnieres splayed where the tommy guns dropped them.
The St. Valentine's Day massacre of 1929 certified Chicago as the gangster capital of the world and changed American history. It helped spur the repeal of Prohibition, got the feds involved in busting the mob and made Al Capone a household name even as it sealed his downfall in the underworld. Since then, books and movies have recounted how the victims were lined up against a brick wall, then gunned down from behind by Capone thugs dressed as cops.
But after 75 years, the crime remains shrouded in mystery. No one was ever convicted of taking part in it, and the identities of the gunmen have been the subject of contentious speculation.
We know who the victims were -- six henchmen of Capone rival George "Bugs" Moran, along with a 29-year-old optometrist who hung around mob guys because they were as hip then as TV's Sopranos are now.
But we don't know why the seven happened to be in the garage that morning, all decked out in silk shirts, white scarves and diamond stickpins. Or why Moran wasn't with them.
"There will always be competing hypotheses" about key issues in the case, Capone biographer Laurence Bergreen said in an interview. "I think it will always be unsolved because of the amount of deception involved in the crime."
In accounts of the time, Capone's Chicago has a remarkably contemporary feel. It is a place of drive-by shootings, gaping paparazzi, glory-seeking pols and gunmetal snowdrifts that slow Clark Street traffic on Valentine's Day.
This was the era when Chicago earned the reputation it still wears with a curious mix of shame and pride. People come from all over the world to gawk at the nondescript lot where bullets once flew on the holiday of love.
The massacre "solidified Chicago as a place of esoteric criminal behavior and violent gangs," said UCLA history professor Eric H. Monkkonen.
And it mesmerized the rest of the nation.
This wasn't the most heinous mass slaying America had seen, or the one with the highest tally of corpses. It caught public attention because of "a funny configuration of facts," says Northwestern University School of Law professor Leigh Bienen.
"People were attracted to the primordial violence and the overlay of gangland glamor," as well as Capone's "fundamental challenge to the rule of law." And, Bienen says, they were outraged by those riveting, almost pornographically gruesome pictures.
A visual trigger
"The famous photographs of the victims became an incendiary visual trigger," Bienen said.
Even today, the tableaux of tangled bodies exerts a strange, horrific pull.
The photos forced Americans to confront the lawless brutality of the bootleggers who got them high. A few days later, the Tribune ran a story slugged "Dry Law Doomed" that began: "The noble experiment has blown up in the country's face."
Immediately suspected of masterminding the event although he was never indicted for it, Capone was named America's first Public Enemy No. 1. "Probably no private citizen in American life has ever had so much publicity in so short a period," the New York Times wrote three months after the crime.
President Herbert Hoover urged aides to find a way to jail him, and the massacre became "one of a series of high-profile crimes that redounded to the benefit of the FBI," said University of Florida history professor Jeffrey Adler. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover used the case to boost the bureau's profile and funding, while agents from the rival Treasury Department put Capone in Alcatraz.
Capone was hounded by authorities as a trickle of evidence implicated his lackeys -- although they couldn't make a case stick, police eventually recovered the burned hulks of both getaway cars as well as a machine gun used in the crime, and they took statements from two mob molls and a reputed lookout.
Jailed about a year later on a minor gun charge, Capone was imprisoned for taxevasion in 1932. He would spend his last years in a syphilis-induced dementia and die in 1947. And the earth-shaking crime he masterminded would go unsolved.
Creatures of Prohibition
Prohibition turned ordinary folks into lawbreakers, and transformed the bootlegger who serviced them into something of a folk hero.
A lionlike man with glittering black eyes, Alphonse Capone lived in luxury hotels and granted interviews to syndicated columnists such as Walter Winchell. Chicago's crime lord insulated his rackets by achieving an unprecedented scale of political corruption. He lavished bribes on police, judges and journalists as he slaughtered competitors with impunity.
By 1929, the 30-year-old was close to consolidating all of Chicago's bootlegging, gambling and prostitution operations. Capone's most vexing rival was Bugs Moran, whose small but trigger-ready crew controlled vice in the 42nd and 43rd Wards on the North Side.
Moran's outfit could not be wiped out. It had been run by Dion O'Bannion until Capone had him assassinated in 1924, and then by Earl "Hymie" Weiss, who was hit by Capone gunmen in 1926. Under Moran, the gang sprang back with a vengeance, spraying bullets at Capone's top lieutenants. Capone decided to take out Moran and his top henchmen in one audacious blow. The plan he confected was a masterpiece of deception.
Moran and his crew sometimes gathered at the SMC Cartage Co. garage at 2122 N. Clark St. Two Capone lookouts rented a room in a boarding house across the street and staked out the place for weeks.
At shortly after 10 o'clock on Valentine's Day morning, as members of Moran's gang drifted into the garage, Capone's boys went in for the kill.
Pretended to be cops
To confuse the victims, at least two of Capone's thugs wore police uniforms, and they arrived at the garage in two black touring cars that resembled detective bureau squads. A police raid would have been a trifle to Moran's crew -- the officers could be expected to conduct a mock search, pocket their bribes and move on.
We can only guess at what happened next. The "cops" presumably entered the garage and ordered Moran's crew against the wall. Other Capone henchmen probably stepped forward and opened fire with submachine guns. They drilled the victims with an average of about 15 slugs apiece.
Newspapers from coast to coast ran photos of the seven men in spats and boutonnieres splayed where the tommy guns dropped them.
The St. Valentine's Day massacre of 1929 certified Chicago as the gangster capital of the world and changed American history. It helped spur the repeal of Prohibition, got the feds involved in busting the mob and made Al Capone a household name even as it sealed his downfall in the underworld. Since then, books and movies have recounted how the victims were lined up against a brick wall, then gunned down from behind by Capone thugs dressed as cops.
But after 75 years, the crime remains shrouded in mystery. No one was ever convicted of taking part in it, and the identities of the gunmen have been the subject of contentious speculation.
We know who the victims were -- six henchmen of Capone rival George "Bugs" Moran, along with a 29-year-old optometrist who hung around mob guys because they were as hip then as TV's Sopranos are now.
But we don't know why the seven happened to be in the garage that morning, all decked out in silk shirts, white scarves and diamond stickpins. Or why Moran wasn't with them.
"There will always be competing hypotheses" about key issues in the case, Capone biographer Laurence Bergreen said in an interview. "I think it will always be unsolved because of the amount of deception involved in the crime."
In accounts of the time, Capone's Chicago has a remarkably contemporary feel. It is a place of drive-by shootings, gaping paparazzi, glory-seeking pols and gunmetal snowdrifts that slow Clark Street traffic on Valentine's Day.
This was the era when Chicago earned the reputation it still wears with a curious mix of shame and pride. People come from all over the world to gawk at the nondescript lot where bullets once flew on the holiday of love.
The massacre "solidified Chicago as a place of esoteric criminal behavior and violent gangs," said UCLA history professor Eric H. Monkkonen.
And it mesmerized the rest of the nation.
This wasn't the most heinous mass slaying America had seen, or the one with the highest tally of corpses. It caught public attention because of "a funny configuration of facts," says Northwestern University School of Law professor Leigh Bienen.
"People were attracted to the primordial violence and the overlay of gangland glamor," as well as Capone's "fundamental challenge to the rule of law." And, Bienen says, they were outraged by those riveting, almost pornographically gruesome pictures.
A visual trigger
"The famous photographs of the victims became an incendiary visual trigger," Bienen said.
Even today, the tableaux of tangled bodies exerts a strange, horrific pull.
The photos forced Americans to confront the lawless brutality of the bootleggers who got them high. A few days later, the Tribune ran a story slugged "Dry Law Doomed" that began: "The noble experiment has blown up in the country's face."
Immediately suspected of masterminding the event although he was never indicted for it, Capone was named America's first Public Enemy No. 1. "Probably no private citizen in American life has ever had so much publicity in so short a period," the New York Times wrote three months after the crime.
President Herbert Hoover urged aides to find a way to jail him, and the massacre became "one of a series of high-profile crimes that redounded to the benefit of the FBI," said University of Florida history professor Jeffrey Adler. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover used the case to boost the bureau's profile and funding, while agents from the rival Treasury Department put Capone in Alcatraz.
Capone was hounded by authorities as a trickle of evidence implicated his lackeys -- although they couldn't make a case stick, police eventually recovered the burned hulks of both getaway cars as well as a machine gun used in the crime, and they took statements from two mob molls and a reputed lookout.
Jailed about a year later on a minor gun charge, Capone was imprisoned for taxevasion in 1932. He would spend his last years in a syphilis-induced dementia and die in 1947. And the earth-shaking crime he masterminded would go unsolved.
Creatures of Prohibition
Prohibition turned ordinary folks into lawbreakers, and transformed the bootlegger who serviced them into something of a folk hero.
A lionlike man with glittering black eyes, Alphonse Capone lived in luxury hotels and granted interviews to syndicated columnists such as Walter Winchell. Chicago's crime lord insulated his rackets by achieving an unprecedented scale of political corruption. He lavished bribes on police, judges and journalists as he slaughtered competitors with impunity.
By 1929, the 30-year-old was close to consolidating all of Chicago's bootlegging, gambling and prostitution operations. Capone's most vexing rival was Bugs Moran, whose small but trigger-ready crew controlled vice in the 42nd and 43rd Wards on the North Side.
Moran's outfit could not be wiped out. It had been run by Dion O'Bannion until Capone had him assassinated in 1924, and then by Earl "Hymie" Weiss, who was hit by Capone gunmen in 1926. Under Moran, the gang sprang back with a vengeance, spraying bullets at Capone's top lieutenants. Capone decided to take out Moran and his top henchmen in one audacious blow. The plan he confected was a masterpiece of deception.
Moran and his crew sometimes gathered at the SMC Cartage Co. garage at 2122 N. Clark St. Two Capone lookouts rented a room in a boarding house across the street and staked out the place for weeks.
At shortly after 10 o'clock on Valentine's Day morning, as members of Moran's gang drifted into the garage, Capone's boys went in for the kill.
Pretended to be cops
To confuse the victims, at least two of Capone's thugs wore police uniforms, and they arrived at the garage in two black touring cars that resembled detective bureau squads. A police raid would have been a trifle to Moran's crew -- the officers could be expected to conduct a mock search, pocket their bribes and move on.
We can only guess at what happened next. The "cops" presumably entered the garage and ordered Moran's crew against the wall. Other Capone henchmen probably stepped forward and opened fire with submachine guns. They drilled the victims with an average of about 15 slugs apiece.
However the killing went down, it made a
din like a chorus of pneumatic drills. To confuse neighbors into
thinking the police were on the scene and had the situation under
control, the two phony cops escorted out the other Capone gunmen with
their hands held high like arrested prisoners.
The killers then sped away in the look-alike detective cars with sirens blaring.
Capone had an airtight alibi -- he was more than a thousand miles away, in sunny Palm Island, Fla.
The presumed prime target, Moran, wasn't at the garage. It's possible a Capone lookout mistook one of the seven men for him. Several historians have speculated Moran was about to enter when he saw the look-alike cops or sensed the setup.
Confusion ensues
With news photographers at their heels, the first police tumbled in minutes later to find a howling dog and what authors William Helmer and Arthur Bilek called "a scene that belonged to a slaughterhouse."
In their account of the crime, "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre: The Untold Story of the Gangland Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone" (Cumberland House, 305 pages, $24.95), Helmer and Bilek describe the chaos that followed.
Almost immediately, the few known facts about the massacre were muddied by authorities working at cross-purposes. In one egregious example, assistant Prohibition administrator Maj. Fred D. Silloway held a press conference to expound on his theory that the massacre was carried out by rogue cops. He predicted it would be solved in a day.
Speculation by the media
Making the case murkier, the city's six major dailies larded their reports with wannabe witnesses and soaring leaps of speculation.
Once they settled on Capone, police and journalists conjectured that the gunmen included Sicilians John Scalise and Albert Anselmi -- Capone veterans who worked in tandem to carry out some of the era's most grisly hits. (Capone would later catch the two plotting to betray him and beat them to death with a baseball bat at an infamous mob dinner.) Much of the focus on Scalise and Anselmi was driven by anti-Italian prejudice. In fact, a trail of evidence linked the crime to lesser-known gunmen Capone recruited from St. Louis' Egan's Rats gang.
Capone lieutenant "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn was spotted by eyewitnesses on Clark Street, and briefly arrested. But the dapper, ice-hearted gunslinger produced his "blond alibi," a willowy, platinum-plated moll named Louise Rolfe (the name as published has been corrected in this text) who swore they spent the morning lounging in a downtown hotel .
Fred R. "Killer" Burke, who left his bloody signature on Missouri before coming to Chicago, was linked to the crime by the ballistic "fingerprints" on bullets and a machine gun later found at a farmhouse he used.
An alleged lookout or gunman named Byron Bolton gave various accounts while he was in custody for a separate mob kidnapping in the late 1930s. But Bolton's key assertions shifted significantly.
Indeed, the contemporary sources of information are fragmentary and tainted by the possibility of Capone's corruption.
"There is no real question that Capone is behind it. But as to who actually participated in the killings, people who are at all cautious say we don't know," said Columbia College history professor Chris Thale.
And so we can look forward to more books and movies about this defining moment in gangland history. May the truth one day be told.
The slaughter that defined violent crime in Chicago
Sifting through law enforcement files and newspaper accounts, authors William Helmer Jr. and Arthur Bilek have produced the first book-length account of the Jazz Age's defining crime, "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre: The Untold Story of the Gangland Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone" (Cumberland House, 305 pages, $24.95).
Helmer and Bilek finger the triggermen and lookouts as a ruthless group of non-Italian thugs Capone dubbed his "American boys," and conjecture that Capone may have hatched the devious plot at an autumn 1928 gathering at a resort near Cranberry Lake, Wis.
In the book's strongest passages, the writers trace the often-competing investigations of police, a county coroner, the state's attorney and federal Prohibition agencies, and show how, one by one, those probes inexplicably ran aground.
Helmer and Bilek have the credentials to reopen the storied case. Bilek was a Chicago police lieutenant and chief of the Cook County Sheriff's Police before becoming a professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Former Playboy editor Helmer's crime books include a noted chronicle of the Thompson submachine gun.
In their haste to retell this amazing yarn, the authors neglect to include the sort of solid attribution we have come to expect from Jazz Age crime histories. Laurence Bergreen's critically acclaimed 1994 biography, "Capone: The Man and the Era," offered 60 pages of citations and source notes. Helmer and Bilek are quick to quarrel with previous authors -- they write, for example, that some of the killers went out the garage's back door, not the front, "as virtually every account describes." But they rarely explain how they evaluated the morass of contradictory and inconclusive evidence that forms our current record of the crime.
They offer instead a tantalizing read about a case that cannot be called closed.
Among other noted recent books on the Capone syndicate:
- "Capone: the Man and the Era" by Laurence Bergreen. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
- "Capone: the Life and World of Al Capone," by John Kobler. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.
- "Mr. Capone: the Real -- and Complete -- Story of Al Capone" by Robert J. Schoenberg. New York: Morrow, 1992.
A more complete Capone bibliography is available from the Chicago Historical Society, on their Web site at www.chicagohs.org/history/capone/cpnbibli.html.
-- David Jackson
The killers then sped away in the look-alike detective cars with sirens blaring.
Capone had an airtight alibi -- he was more than a thousand miles away, in sunny Palm Island, Fla.
The presumed prime target, Moran, wasn't at the garage. It's possible a Capone lookout mistook one of the seven men for him. Several historians have speculated Moran was about to enter when he saw the look-alike cops or sensed the setup.
Confusion ensues
With news photographers at their heels, the first police tumbled in minutes later to find a howling dog and what authors William Helmer and Arthur Bilek called "a scene that belonged to a slaughterhouse."
In their account of the crime, "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre: The Untold Story of the Gangland Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone" (Cumberland House, 305 pages, $24.95), Helmer and Bilek describe the chaos that followed.
Almost immediately, the few known facts about the massacre were muddied by authorities working at cross-purposes. In one egregious example, assistant Prohibition administrator Maj. Fred D. Silloway held a press conference to expound on his theory that the massacre was carried out by rogue cops. He predicted it would be solved in a day.
Speculation by the media
Making the case murkier, the city's six major dailies larded their reports with wannabe witnesses and soaring leaps of speculation.
Once they settled on Capone, police and journalists conjectured that the gunmen included Sicilians John Scalise and Albert Anselmi -- Capone veterans who worked in tandem to carry out some of the era's most grisly hits. (Capone would later catch the two plotting to betray him and beat them to death with a baseball bat at an infamous mob dinner.) Much of the focus on Scalise and Anselmi was driven by anti-Italian prejudice. In fact, a trail of evidence linked the crime to lesser-known gunmen Capone recruited from St. Louis' Egan's Rats gang.
Capone lieutenant "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn was spotted by eyewitnesses on Clark Street, and briefly arrested. But the dapper, ice-hearted gunslinger produced his "blond alibi," a willowy, platinum-plated moll named Louise Rolfe (the name as published has been corrected in this text) who swore they spent the morning lounging in a downtown hotel .
Fred R. "Killer" Burke, who left his bloody signature on Missouri before coming to Chicago, was linked to the crime by the ballistic "fingerprints" on bullets and a machine gun later found at a farmhouse he used.
An alleged lookout or gunman named Byron Bolton gave various accounts while he was in custody for a separate mob kidnapping in the late 1930s. But Bolton's key assertions shifted significantly.
Indeed, the contemporary sources of information are fragmentary and tainted by the possibility of Capone's corruption.
"There is no real question that Capone is behind it. But as to who actually participated in the killings, people who are at all cautious say we don't know," said Columbia College history professor Chris Thale.
And so we can look forward to more books and movies about this defining moment in gangland history. May the truth one day be told.
The slaughter that defined violent crime in Chicago
Sifting through law enforcement files and newspaper accounts, authors William Helmer Jr. and Arthur Bilek have produced the first book-length account of the Jazz Age's defining crime, "The St. Valentine's Day Massacre: The Untold Story of the Gangland Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone" (Cumberland House, 305 pages, $24.95).
Helmer and Bilek finger the triggermen and lookouts as a ruthless group of non-Italian thugs Capone dubbed his "American boys," and conjecture that Capone may have hatched the devious plot at an autumn 1928 gathering at a resort near Cranberry Lake, Wis.
In the book's strongest passages, the writers trace the often-competing investigations of police, a county coroner, the state's attorney and federal Prohibition agencies, and show how, one by one, those probes inexplicably ran aground.
Helmer and Bilek have the credentials to reopen the storied case. Bilek was a Chicago police lieutenant and chief of the Cook County Sheriff's Police before becoming a professor of criminal justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Former Playboy editor Helmer's crime books include a noted chronicle of the Thompson submachine gun.
In their haste to retell this amazing yarn, the authors neglect to include the sort of solid attribution we have come to expect from Jazz Age crime histories. Laurence Bergreen's critically acclaimed 1994 biography, "Capone: The Man and the Era," offered 60 pages of citations and source notes. Helmer and Bilek are quick to quarrel with previous authors -- they write, for example, that some of the killers went out the garage's back door, not the front, "as virtually every account describes." But they rarely explain how they evaluated the morass of contradictory and inconclusive evidence that forms our current record of the crime.
They offer instead a tantalizing read about a case that cannot be called closed.
Among other noted recent books on the Capone syndicate:
- "Capone: the Man and the Era" by Laurence Bergreen. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
- "Capone: the Life and World of Al Capone," by John Kobler. New York: Da Capo Press, 1992.
- "Mr. Capone: the Real -- and Complete -- Story of Al Capone" by Robert J. Schoenberg. New York: Morrow, 1992.
A more complete Capone bibliography is available from the Chicago Historical Society, on their Web site at www.chicagohs.org/history/capone/cpnbibli.html.
-- David Jackson
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