Merciless Murder: A True St. Valentine's Day Tale

St. Valentine's Day in Chicago rocks in any year ... but a twist of fate and a hail of machine-gunfire in Chicago, on February 14, 1929, blew this town onto the front pages of newspapers worldwide, and marked the beginning of the end of the Al Capone Gangster Rule that still thrills and fascinates millions of Americans.

Ironically, Capone himself was only peripherally involved in this bloody and shocking skirmish in the gang war that killed seven men - one of them an innocent bystander - and set the feds on his scent for good.

Chicago police, and eventually Capone's once-adoring public, were outraged by the St. Valentine's Day Massacre's ingenious sleight-of-hand, contrived by Capone's vicious right-hand man, Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn, a gangster known for his cold heart, love of the Tommy Gun, and long memory for real or imagined wrongs.

McGurn was able to pull off this hugely violent, very public gangland murder in broad daylight on a busy Chicago street by using killers dressed as members of the Chicago Police Department, driving a decked-out Chicago police car, to wipe out a group of his rivals.

Gangland Vengeance

It's widely believed that McGurn instigated the slaughter in hopes of assassinating George "Bugs" Moran, a fellow bootlegging gangster who ran the famed Chicago Northside O'Banion organization after O'Banion's own assassination five years earlier.

The O'Banion organization had been at war with the Cicero-based Capone group for years, and Capone blamed the Northsiders for periodically hijacking liquor shipments meant for Capone's gang. In the midst of a widespread and violent Chicagoland gang war, two of Moran's henchmen - the Gusenberg brothers - had nearly killed McGurn in an earlier hit in a public phone booth, and Capone's man craved revenge.

Capone understood and probably condoned his friend's wish to wipe out the Northsiders and extract revenge on his assailants, but the legendary Italian wanted none of the carnage to touch him. His primary concern was the taint to his public persona, which he cultivated carefully with well-publicized kindnesses to children, and with generous gifts to charities and civic groups in both the Chicago and Cicero communities.

So with Capone off on a Florida vacation, McGurn plotted and executed a cold-blooded plan to decapitate and cripple the Moran gang. He set up the ambush by arranging for a high-stakes transaction of hijacked contraband with a liquor dealer who played straight with Moran for a time in order to earn the gangster's confidence.

When McGurn decided to make the hit, Moran himself chose the location - a nondescript Chicago garage, the now infamous S.M.C. Cartage Co., a red, brick-walled structure on Chicago's busy Clark Street. The "dealer" put the word out to McGurn. Moran would be there on St. Valentine's Day, no later than 10:30 a.m. Six men would be with him, he said.

The Massacre

The massacre itself was swift and merciless. McGurn's lookouts counted noses - seven men had entered the garage - and gave the high sign for the gangster's hired killers to make their play.

According to news accounts of that bloody day, witnesses to the gunplay and carnage recalled mostly that members of the Chicago Police Department, in full uniform and with sirens blaring, swooped down on a group of men in the warehouse. Expecting a bold and brave daylight arrest, onlookers gathered at the scene and watched from nearby businesses.

The surprised bootleggers never tried to resist when police announced their "raid." The seven men, including McGurn's despised assailants, the Gusenberg brothers, raised their arms in signs of surrender.

For their compliance, the gangsters were lined up against the brick wall and murdered in cold blood, with round after round of shockingly noisy Tommy Gun fire.

The "police" then waited for all the bodies to fall away from the wall, before filling the prone bodies with bullets a second time. Two civilians who left with the "police" after the massacre were believed by onlookers to be under arrest.

The Aftermath

In fact, no one was ever convicted of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. The one man who might have been able to shed some light on the killers' identities was McGurn's antagonist, Frank Gusenberg. The Chicago man, pumped full of bullets, lived for several hours after the attack but refused to reveal the massacre's circumstances.

Among the St. Valentine's Day dead was a young Chicago optometrist, Dr. R. Schwimmer, whose only role in the mob era seems to have been his desire to be where mobsters hung out. But seven men were expected at the red-brick building, and seven men were murdered, Schwimmer among them.

Not among the dead that day was the tardy Bugs Moran, who arrived on Clark Street just in time to see a police car pull up. He suspected a raid, and watched the scene from a nearby coffee shop. Thus, McGurn's aspirations to kill the Northside leader were thwarted.

The police investigation into the heinous crime was also thwarted, first, by Gusenberg's refusal to talk, then by eyewitness reports - and some early press stories - that Chicago police themselves were responsible for the bloody scene.

Moran openly accused Capone, but Capone had clearly been 1,500 miles away on St. Valentine's Day, 1929. For his part, Capone retorted that Moran was responsible for murdering his own men.

PostScript: Fred "Killer" Burke

One man who was later tagged as one of the killers - but never prosecuted for the crime - was Fred "Killer" Burke, a Kansas native who fled to Stevensville, Michigan after the massacre and lived a quiet life under an assumed name.

A stash of firearms found in Burke's Michigan bungalow in December 1929 contained several machine guns and other evidence that police connected to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

Burke, living in Michigan under the name Fred Dane, blew his own cover later that year when he rear-ended a truck near St. Joseph, Michigan, about 60 miles across Lake Michigan from downtown Chicago. After the accident, Burke engaged in a heated argument with the farmer who owned the vehicle.

Police arrived, and Burke took off in his own car, with St. Joseph Officer Charles Skelley in hot pursuit, clinging to the running board of the truck. Fearing he'd be tapped as a culprit in the Chicago massacre, and unwilling to be captured and returned to Illinois where the death penalty was in force, Burke pulled out a weapon and fired three times at the local policeman, who later died at the hospital.

Two years later, Burke was finally arrested in Missouri and extradited to Michigan, where he was convicted of Skelley's murder. He thanked the court for sentencing him to life in prison in Michigan, where he died in 1940.

Beginning of the End

The magnitude of the brazen daylight St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the use of law enforcement as ruse and victim, and the increasingly violent aftermath of revenge killings spiraling out of control, capped a growing frenzy among law enforcement and the press of the day that mobster-ism had to be stopped.

For Moran, it was the end of his empire. Although he survived the Massacre, he could never rebuild his organization and he died in prison.

For McGurn, St. Valentine's Day retained it stain. He was later gunned down in a local bowling alley on Valentine's Day Eve, 1936.

For Capone, life would never be the same. He was dethroned in the public eye and hunted ceaselessly by federal agents until he was finally convicted of tax evasion charges and sentenced to prison, where he died in 1947 of syphillis.