The St. Valentine's Day massacre is the name given to the shooting of seven people 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 Capone and the North Side Irish/German gang led by George 'Bugs' Moran.
On the morning of February 14, St. Valentine's Day, six members of Moran's gang and an optician who associated with gangsters, 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 was conveniently on vacation in Florida at the time.
The massacre was a result of a plan devised by Capone gang member Jack 'Machine Gun' McGurn to eliminate Moran, Capone's chief criminal enemy. The massacre was planned by McGurn partly in retaliation for an unsuccessful attempt by Frank and his brother Peter Gusenberg to murder him a month earlier. McGurn assembled a team of six men led by Fred Burke with the intent of having Moran lured into an ambush. Moran and his men would be tricked into visiting a warehouse on North Clark Street on the pretext of buying some bargain hijacked bootleg whiskey; Burke's team would then enter the building disguised as police officers and kill them. The chief suspects, McGurn and Capone, would be well away from the scene.
Five members of the Burke team drove to the warehouse in a stolen police car at around 10:30 a.m., two dressed in police uniforms and three in ordinary street clothes. They found seven members of Moran's gang but not Moran himself. Moran had been approaching the warehouse but the premature arrival of the police car scared him away. The gang members were told to line up facing the back wall, which they apparently did willingly, believing their captors were real (and comparatively harmless) police, and were then shot and killed using a tommy gun. The dead men were James Clark, Frank and Pete Gusenberg, Adam Heyer, Johnny May, Dr. Reinhardt Schwimmer (the optician), and Al Weinshank. The massacre marked the end of Moran's power on the North Side, and his gang vanished into obscurity, enabling Capone to take over the area. But the event also brought the belated and full attention of the federal government to Capone and his criminal activities, which led to his conviction and imprisonment on Volstead Act and income tax evasion charges in 1931.
from Wikipedia
mc *cheers*
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