The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre

The Prohibition Era was the golden age of organized crime in the United States. Trafficking illegal liquor provided a tremendous source of revenue for gangs, many of which were already involved in prostitution and gambling. Given the great profits that could be made in bootlegging at this time, violence between rival gangs was almost inevitable. The most violent and most memorable event in the gang wars of the 1920s occurred on February 14th, 1929. It was appropriately known as the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre.

In the 1920s, crime in Chicago was controlled mostly by two rival gangs. Bugs Moran and his Irish/German gang controlled the north while Al Capone and his Italian gang controlled the south. While the two gangs were often at odds with each other, Al Capone had a whole list of grievances with the Moran gang by the winter of 1929. He thought that Moran and his men were trying to move in on his bootlegging and dog racing operations and he knew that some of Moran's men were behind an attempted hit on Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn, one of the leading figures in Capone's "Chicago Outfit."

McGurn wanted to take revenge on Moran, so he approached Capone with a plan to murder Moran and several of the most important figures in Chicago's Irish/German mob. Capone agreed and McGurn worked out the details of the plan with Fred "Killer" Burk and Fred Goetz. Capone himself made sure he was on vacation in Florida on the day for which the hit was planned.

The plan hinged on luring Moran to a warehouse. It is not clear how they planned to do this, but they were successful on getting six of Moran's men to show up at the warehouse on the morning of the 14th of February dressed in their best clothes. Moran was missing, however. It is not clear if he escaped the massacre, or avoided it by arriving too late. Whatever the reason, Moran was not one of the victims.

Capone's men mistook one of Moran's men for Moran himself and signaled two men disguised as police officers to move into position. The two fake police officers, armed with shotguns, entered the warehouse where they found six of Moran's men along with a mechanic who just happened to be there working on a car.