Everybody’s Favorite Gaijin: The Blog

The Men, The Madness, The Massacre

February 14, 2009 at 8:45 pm (Uncategorized)

This has nothing to do with Japan, but I tell the story every year.

As you all well know by now, today is one of my favorite days of the year. It’s Valentine’s day, and I’m terribly sad to be so very far away from the reason I like this day so much.

The Massacre.

I know that on Valentines Day, most people are concerned primarily with sweets and hallmark cards and either what they have to do, or what they haven’t the opportunity to do, depending on whether or not they are attached.

I am not concerned with these things — what I am concerned with every year on February 14th is the spectacular gangland slaying that occured on this date in 1929 in a North Chicago warehouse between the two (arguably) biggest mobsters in American history. It was 80 years ago on this very morning.

It was in this age of only the most dapper organized crime that our story begins — “Bugs” Moran and Al Capone were the most powerful gang leaders of the prohibition era and ceaseless in their aggression against each other. North Chicago had seen a lot of bloodshed, but nothing like this had ever happened before. Much mystery surrounds the circumstances and events of this day, and I come to you to tell the story as well as it is known.

Moran had made some vicious attempts on Capone’s gang, and Capone’s plan was to wipe Moran for good in the SMC Cartage warehouse that stood on North Clark Street. He set the bait: the promise of a large shipment of bootleg whiskey for a price that seemed (and was) too good to be true. Moran and his men couldn’t pass it up. Capone’s gang was then set to disguise themselves as police officers and kill Moran and his men after they entered the warehouse.

It was 10:30 AM and a light snow was falling on the quiet street as seven of Moran’s men stood in the cold, smoking and waiting for the shipment. Peter and Frank Gusenberg, brothers and thugs for Moran’s gang, Albert Kachellek, Moran’s second in command, Adam Heyer, bookkeeper and business manager, Albert Weinshank, who managed cleaning and dyeing operations and physically resembled Moran, John May, not a gang member but a car mechanic for the gang, and Reinhart Shwimmer, an optician who abandoned his practice for the gambling and the thrill of hanging around gang members — not much of a member himself, but more of a groupie.

Moran himself was not present when the two cars pulled up outfitted to appear as Chicago police detective sedans. Some say he saw the cop cars and fled before he met the men and other say he was simply late to show up that morning. Two men got out of the first car dressed in police uniforms, spurred by the presence of Weinshank and not knowing that Moran had failed to appear. They began to fake a bust on the deal, and Moran’s men cooperated willingly enough, thinking that the men were legitimate cops and busting them for good publicity for the Chicago police department.

When Capone’s fake cops had Moran’s men all lined up against one of the brick walls of the SMC Cartage building, they let in the two men in streetclothes from the other car, and the four of them blasted the quiet morning wide open with a volley of seventy machine gun bullets and two shotgun shells. Moran’s men had been slaughtered in a murder unprecedented in American history, all dead but one.

The fake cops led the men in plain clothes out of the building as if making an arrest to show that the situation was under control — this way, no local residents would feel that there was any need for alarm. A dog chained up nearby began to bark.

It was the dog, trapped beneath a crate, that got the real police’s attention, and led them into the warehouse to discover the carnage. Frank Gusenberg was still hanging on to the last shreds of life at the time, though he refused to speak and died a half hour later.

The investigation was long and extensive, naming almost every notable mobster of the day at one time or another. No one was technically convicted, as there was insufficient evidence to pin the crime on Capone. Despite his connections to the men involved and the grudges held, Capone himself was in Florida at the time of the massacre. When questioned, he said “The only man who kills like that is Bugs Moran.” Moran claimed at the same time, “Only Capone kills guys like that.”

It is said that the massacre was a failure — not only did Capone fail to wipe out Bugs Moran, it can be argued that the unwanted attention garnered to Capone by the investigation was his eventual downfall.

Chicago memorialized the event in its own way and allowed the building to become a tourist spot. The building was transformed first into a furniture store and then into a club where the original bricks were used in the men’s room. The 417 bricks were stored and eventually sold after the club closed down and the pattern seemed to be that anyone who bought or stole a brick found a fair deal of bad luck afterward, leading to the assumption that the bricks are cursed.

The massacre led to the establishment of the first crime detection laboratory in the USA, who cleared the Chicago Police using ballistics and firearms comparisons pioneered by Calvin Goddard, who then received funding to open the first independent crime laboratory at Northwestern University, where ballistics, fingerprinting, blood analysis, and trace evidence were brought together for the first time.

(Written with help from a number of history and mystery websites and of course my beloved wikipedia — I like to try and find new details every year and there’s always more out there!)

Happy Valentines Day