Valentine's Day Massacre: Capone's Gangsters Execute Seven

Seven men stood facing a garage wall on Chicago’s North Clark Street when four gunmen — two dressed as police officers — opened fire with Thompson submachine guns and a shotgun. The Valentine’s Day Massacre of February 14, 1929, lasted less than ten minutes and left seven members of Bugs Moran’s North Side Gang dead in what remains the most infamous gangland killing in American history. The target, Moran himself, survived only because he was running late. Chicago in the 1920s was a war zone. Prohibition had created a black market worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, and rival gangs fought for control of bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution. Al Capone, operating from his headquarters at the Lexington Hotel, controlled the South Side. George "Bugs" Moran ran the North Side. The two organizations had been killing each other’s members for years in an escalating cycle of ambushes and reprisals. Capone’s men lured seven of Moran’s associates to the S-M-C Cartage Company warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street, reportedly with the promise of a shipment of hijacked whiskey. The killers arrived in a stolen police car. Two entered wearing police uniforms, ordered the victims to line up against the wall as if conducting a raid, then signaled the other gunmen. The seven men were cut down with approximately 70 rounds. One victim, Frank Gusenberg, was still alive when real police arrived. Asked who shot him, he replied, "Nobody shot me." Capone was in Miami at the time and was never charged. No one was ever convicted. But the massacre backfired spectacularly. The brutality shocked even Depression-era Chicago, galvanized public support for federal law enforcement, and helped make Capone the most hunted criminal in America. Within two years, he was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to eleven years in federal prison. The massacre that was supposed to eliminate Capone’s competition instead created the public outrage that ultimately eliminated Capone himself.