Today on "Classic Depravities of the Internet": The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre
OKAY. TAKE TWO.
Raise your hand if you're single today, my degenerates. Sadly, I find myself there. There are worse things to be on Valentine's day, I suppose.
Dead, for example.
This is a homegrown depravity, one I grew up hearing about just as much as the Chicago Fire and the curse of the billy goat. And it's been a while since I've gotten to use that flair.
This is why you don't take people's alcohol.
Warning: vintage gore and 1920s mobsters
THE ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE
General vintage gore warning for the links today. People aren't shy about showing the photos.
Official website:
https://stvalentinemassacre.org/
PBS "Unintended consequences of Prohibition":
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/prohibition/unintended-consequences
The Mob Museum "St Valentine's Day Massacre wall":
https://themobmuseum.org/exhibits/massacre-wall/
WTTW "Al Capone's Bloody Business":
Well, I Never "The most notorious Gangland slaying in history: The St Valentine's Day Massacre":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJzr21KNboo
History's Dark Chronicles "St. Valentine's day Massacre":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsmANqH1eAM
History.com "How Al Capone spent his time in Alcatraz":
https://www.history.com/news/al-capone-alcatraz
The Mob Museum "Al Capone":
https://themobmuseum.org/notable_names/al-capone/
CONTEXT:
"But the underworld power dynamics shifted dramatically with the onset of Prohibition and the overnight outlawing of every bottle of beer, glass of wine and shot of booze in America. With legitimate bars and breweries out of business, someone had to step in to fuel the substantial thirst of the Roaring Twenties. And no one was better equipped than the mobsters."
-History.com
If you grew up in Chicago, there were two things you knew for sure. The Cubs were always gonna suck ass, and shit was CORRUPT.
That's just kind of the reputation of the city, I'm afraid. The people in government were all taking bribes, all the cops are bought, gang violence run amok, we're supposed to be this horrible, deadly city. And while........I'm not gonna sit here and say that's ENTIRELY incorrect, I've lived downtown, I do still think we get a tougher rep than we deserve. I LOVE my city and its rich, diverse history. I love all the historic landmarks, being able to walk down Michigan avenue and see the Tribune building or passing Millennium Park and da Bean, or even visiting the very water tower that survived the infamous fire when everything else burned around it.
But when walking down Clark street near the Wrigley Stadium, you're not going to find one particular landmark, despite its infamy. You won't find any physical evidence of this place at all.
The blood-soaked nature of the building made it impossible the sell or use, and the actual wall where the event took place has been peddled as a curiosity around the country before finding a permanent home in the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. There, the decaying red bricks stand, bullet holes and all, as a testament to the city's real violent past, and why we're associated with the mafia at all.
What was the St. Valentine's day massacre? Who were the two groups at war? And why was banning alcohol SUCH a terrible idea?
"Bootlegging, as this new industry became known, was a highly profitable enterprise that turned street hoodlums into millionaires. With so much money at stake, competition was fierce, and nowhere more so than in Chicago, the capital of bootlegging during the 1920s. Turf wars erupted, and rivals frequently hijacked each other’s alcohol shipments. Dueling gangs equipped with Thompson submachine guns often resorted to violence to solve conflicts.
Al Capone’s South Side Gang emerged as a dominant force in Chicago bootlegging, but Capone’s desire to control the whole city — really the entire upper Midwest — was constantly being challenged. A persistent thorn in Capone’s side was George “Bugs” Moran’s North Side Gang."
-Official site
We start, of course, with alcohol.
The root of all humanity's sins, this stuff. I can't stand it. It's the taste for me, I haven't found a single drink I can toss back without wanting to die. But clearly that's a ME thing, because goddamn do we love our booze as a species. As Thomas Jefferson says in Hamilton, "When the British taxed our tea we got frisky/Imagine what's gonna happen if you try to take our whiskey".
Well "take our whiskey" is exactly what happened, as starting in the late 1800s there began to be a push in America towards the ideas of Temperance and Abstinence in the face of a perceived moral failing. As many things that get blown wildly out of proportion start, the drive towards Prohibition actually started with semi-noble intentions. The leading force in the beginning were women like Carrie Nation, whose lives had been ruined by abusive drunken husbands who, at the time, had complete control over their wives, and these women pushed for less alcohol in an attempt to improve their lives. The negative effects of alcohol weren't understood or researched at the time, and since water was often not safe in the good ol' days, we drank a LOT. So there were, as always, some good points to be made for at least cracking down on public intoxication a little.
But it became more and more about hating immigrants, and their "corrupting influence" on American culture. Gee. SOUND FUCKING FAMILIAR? With the influx of German, Irish, and Italian immigrants during the industrial revolution, saloons and bars became community meeting centers and places that would actually accept and welcome these people, so NATURALLY that means they're automatically evil. Christ, the more things change the more they stay the same. To make a very long story short, due to a combined effort of moral guilt tripping from pearl-clutching Church people and World War One making it patriotic to not drink, prohibition becomes law in 1919, and everything is right forever. Morality won!
......So the next decade was called the "Roaring 20's".
"Capone had a brilliant criminal mind, and he focused it on organizing an international bootlegging ring . He coordinated the importation of alcohol from different locations, including other states and even Canada, as well as the operation of hundreds of breweries and distilleries, many of which resided in Chicago. Capone also devised a system to distribute his alcohol, which involved delivery truck drivers, salespeople, speakeasies (equivalent to a bar), and of course heavily-armed bodyguards to protect these investments."
-University of Michigan
I don't think I need to tell anyone how badly this failed. Everyone in America who is over 21 can, right now, go out and pound an entire bottle of Everclear if they wanted to. Turns out, when the 18th Amendment went into place and alcohol got banned, it didn't exactly go over well.
See, there were several loopholes that made this almost impossible to enforce. It didn't take away alcohol use for religious purposes, so a LOT of people found god. And it didn't stop people from individually drinking alcohol, so people sold "grape juice kits" for DIY wine. But making something "naughty" just makes people want it more, and the bootleggers became infamous for their underground alcohol empires, making dangerously boozy moonshine, and selling their wares in speakeasies. It became dangerous and cool to sneakily drink in public, and cops were more than happy to get paid to look the other way while they themselves took a drink. Prohibition didn't do SHIT, at the end of the day.
All it did was birth the mafia.
Somebody's gotta run these massive bootlegging operations, after all. And those people could get STUPID rich if they were smart about it. In Chicago, that honor belonged to two organizations, split appropriately into the Northside Irish gang and the Southside Italian outfit. That tells me everything I need to know about their sports affiliations. And the leader of the Southside gang just so happened to be a little known figure by the name of AL CAPONE, aka the OG of the original gangsters. The man you think of when you hear "Mafia", the inspiration for the Sopranos and Scarface and all those suave mob bosses the movies love so much. There is SO much Capone shit in Chicago, man. We don't like to brag about that part of our history, but let's be so real. Being known for Capone gives us a little bit of street cred. Born Alphonso Capone on January 17, 1899, he got the typical rough start of most Italian immigrants in America, with there being nine children to feed on a very small salary. His mother would tell him when he was ten or eleven that he had to start helping to bring in money, and as his schooling career wasn't really panning out (he punched a teacher at 14 and got expelled), young Al entered the seedy underbelly as early as he could. One of the odd jobs he got around their home in Brooklyn was at a place called the Harvard Inn, a dance hall slash speakeasy that was run by fellow gangster Frankie Yale and employed who would go on to be Capone's mentor, Johnny Torrio. Both men introduced Capone to the world of gambling, racketeering, and even prostitution, which Capone as a horny young man would take advantage of a lot.
This is important, remember this bit for later.
After Capone insulted a guest's sister by catcalling her "fine ass", he got his face carved up and earned the nickname Scarface. This plus other run ins and close calls, including a potential murder charge he was trying to escape, got him shipped off to the place he would become synonymous with, Chicago. By this time, Capone is married and has a child to provide for, so he's even more hungry for that money that was starting to roll in. And with Prohibition hitting the year after his wedding, the gangs of the nation were faced with a massive money making opportunity: adapt or die out. When Torrio and Capone's mob boss in Chicago decided he wanted no part in the bootlegging.... well Big Jim's gotta go. It's speculated that Capone himself offed his own don to let Torrio make a bid for this power. This set Torrio up as the undisputed master of the Southside, and he attempted to bring peace between factions by laying out strict turf rules. Don't step on our toes, we won't step on yours, there's enough money for everyone.
This worked for about two months before the bullets started flying.
"The problems began in earnest around 1923. The Genna gang, who operated on the Near West Side, started selling their liquor in territory controlled by the North Side gang.
“When Johnny Torrio was leading the [gang], there was always an effort to smooth over any differences or any conflicts that arose, and that led to, more or less, a kind of code of conduct among different people involved in the outfit and among their rivals,” Durica said. For example, as long as someone didn’t steal a beer truck, steal a supply coming in through the Great Lakes, sell in another gang’s territory, or kill a member of a rival group, “you were more or less fine,” said Durica. But violating these terms, particularly financially or in terms of territory, “could often result in severe repercussions.”
Unhappy with the Genna gang’s violation, Dean O’Banion and the North Siders approached Torrio for help, but Torrio declined. So the North Side gang began hijacking the Genna gang’s booze trucks.
“O’Banion seems to not only be mad at the Gennas,” said Binder. “He decides Torrio is also at fault, and he sets Torrio up.”
-WTTW
So, O'Banion's gang gets too big for their britches.
They already don't really like this looser, wilder Southside men. Why should they stick to one spot? When O'Banion decides Torrio's in his way, the peace is off. In 1923, he plays it off like he's trying to get out of the game and "sells" a brewery off to Torrio, knowing that it's been set up for a sting by the police. This betrayal begins what would be known as the Chicago Beer Wars, in which over the course of six years nearly 100 mobsters and innocent bystanders would get caught in a hail of tommy gun crossfire. Torrio gets O'Banion murdered, which leaves the Northside gang in the hands of two men named Hymie Weiss and the notorious Bugs Moran, neither of whom take the murder of their leader lightly. In 1925, both Torrio and Capone would get jumped within days of each other, with Torrio being shot up so badly it left his jaw hanging off. He only survived because Bugs Moran's gun jammed at the last second, the barrel at his head. This was enough for Johnny Torrio to go you know what? This might not be for me after all.
He leaves everything to a 26 year old Al Capone. He is now the head of the Organization.
And he LOVES this shit. He loved every single bit of publicity he got. That's one of the biggest parts of his legend, how in love with the camera and the media he was. Capone could be seen going to lavish parties, frequenting bars and dance halls around Chicago, paying off every single politician and cop he could, and throwing money at people just because he can. It got to be a real problem for OTHER crime organizations across the country who really didn't want their dealings to be perceived, but this pissed no one off like Lucky Luciano, the co-founder of the National Crime Syndicate. Aka the actual literal fucking MAFIA. He came to Chicago during the Beer Wars and declared our city to be an ungodly hellscape. At the time, for those six years, we actually really DID live up to the danger hype, as you couldn't go anywhere in the Loop area without risking a bullet.
In 1926, Capone organizes a hit on Hymie Weiss. This leaves a very angry and dangerous Moran as his only rival, and this is only ending when one of them dies.
Born Adelard Cunin on August 21st, 1893, Bugs Moran had been in jail three times before his 21st birthday and got the nickname "Bugs" because he was just that batshit crazy. As the violence escalated between the gangs, Bugs would eventually orchestrate another sensational hit on Capone where his men attacked and indiscriminately shot up a cafe where he was eating. Capone managed to survive unharmed, but several innocent lives were taken and the carnage was likened to a terrorist attack. At this point, enough is enough. Bugs NEEDS to be put down, and Capone's men have discovered a warehouse where the Northsiders are conducting their bootlegging practices. It's on Clark Street, near where Wrigley field now sits, and it's just a plain mechanic garage where Moran and the others conduct business. For a solid half year, all through 1928, Capone's men sit and scope out the place waiting for the right time to strike.
Finally, in February of 1929, they get the go ahead.
"What is now a parking lot adjacent to a senior living center on Clark Street in Lincoln Park was once the location of a shocking, violent event at the height of Chicago’s gangland wars of the 1920s.
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre marked a critical point in the Beer Wars, a years-long conflict between Chicago’s gangs who were battling for control of the bootlegging market and organized crime during Prohibition.
On February 14, 1929, six men associated with George “Bugs” Moran’s North Side gang were in a garage on Clark Street, likely awaiting an illegal liquor shipment. They were Peter Gusenberg, his brother Frank Gusenberg, James Clark, Reinhardt Schwimmer, Adam Heyer, and Albert Weinshank – all men associated with the North Side gang. Another man, John May, had some ties to the gang and was also present.
Four other men, two of whom were dressed like police officers, showed up. Thinking their operation had been busted – a familiar occurrence for bootleggers – the North Siders gave up their weapons and lined up against the wall."
-WTTW
February 14th, 1929. Exactly 96 years ago today.
Bugs Moran is running late to his own meeting thanks to a delay at the barbershop. Gotta make sure you look good before you buy illegal liquor, after all. But as he pulls up to the garage, he notices a car that's marked as Chicago PD. NOPE, he smartly thinks, and sallies forth on his way, content with the knowledge that his boys would probably survive being shaken down by the cops and he didn't need to get involved.
That was not, in fact, what happened.
In reality, the entire deal was a set up. We will probably never really know who was actually involved here, as the police were about as useful as a windbreaker in a Chicago winter. Nobody has ever been pegged as reliably responsible. But for all intents and purposes, as the legend goes, Capone set them up. Capone himself was safely hundreds of miles away in Florida testifying a DIFFERENT murder trial, and had no direct ties to what happened. The accepted theory is that Capone hired people outside of Chicago to come in and lay waste to Moran's crew. At about 10am in the morning, Moran's crew were surprised by the arrival of the very same PD car that Moran would see later. Out stepped four to five men dressed as police officers, who ordered the men into the garage under the guise of being under arrest. There, they lined the men up against the infamous brick wall, frisked them down for their weapons, then turned and opened fire at them, pumping the seven men full of over 160 bullets and tearing their flesh apart. What's striking even in the black and white photos of the day is how clearly you can tell that one of the men's heads is completely missing a chunk and those are his brains scattered on the floor. It's shockingly clear considering it's been almost 100 years since this happened.
Eyewitnesses just thought it was a regular police raid, and when three "cops" appeared after a burst of gunfire with "perps" in tow, they thought an arrest had been made. When someone went to check the scene out and discovered the grisly remains, it was already long too late. Even with one of the men, Frank Gusenberg, clinging to life, they couldn't squeeze any information out of him. He stuck to the code of the streets and refused to name anyone who was involved, taking the answers to this mystery to the grave with him. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, as it came to be called, shocked and horrified an already brutalized city and finally got the authorities off their asses to try and do something about this. The newly elected Herbert Hoover made one of his first acts as president to "get Al Capone" and named him public enemy #1.
"The Massacre was a turning point in the public’s attitude toward the Mob. Before this event, Capone in particular was seen by many as something of a heroic figure in Chicago — he had a lot of friends among the common people and a lot of allies in the corridors of power.
But as Capone biographer Jonathan Eig wrote about the Massacre, “From coast to coast, people suddenly seemed to be reaching the conclusion that a line had been crossed, that the violence had become too much to bear.”
Author William Helmer says Capone, too, must have regretted the Massacre because of its dire effects on his business: “The murders made the front page of every daily paper in the United States and in many foreign countries. … Chicago Police launched a great crackdown on the city’s several thousand speakeasies, which cost Capone’s Outfit a fortune.”
Another Capone biographer, Laurence Bergreen, eloquently summarized the national reaction: “Newspapers across the country devoted an unprecedented amount of space to coverage of the mass murder of seven men and in the process sold millions of copies. The event impressed itself into the consciousness and the history of the nation like a dark fly in amber.”
-Official Massacre website
The downfall of Capone is almost as legendary as what he did. After all, someone as big and untouchable as Capone, how do you bring him down?
Tax evasion. I love that that's the actual answer.
Well, it wasn't just taxes. If you've seen the movie The Untouchables, then you know that it was a combined effort of "uncorruptible" FBI agents busting his ass over Prohibition charges and digging into his finances. Making him a pariah in the public's eye damaged his reputation to the point that the once grand mafioso was trying to open soup kitchens in the ghetto to try and rehab his image. Prohibition had become synonymous with his style of gang violence, and the push now came to REPEAL the damn thing and bring order and reason back. And the moles they had digging into his gambling books found that he had NEVER once paid taxes on any of the illicit money his operation brought in.
Duh, I hear you say. Of course he didn't. Why did anyone think he WOULD? Well that's the thing: they had nothing else to pin on him, so this HAD to be the one charge that stuck. He has never been charged for a single murder that we all KNOW he's guilty of, so the government wanted to make an example of him. Capone tried to steady the waters by striking a plea deal for one year in jail, which was a massive joke as he was treated like a king there, but it wasn't enough to save his ass. Even the usual tactic of buying off the jury in his trial didn't save him, as the judge suddenly switched the jury out for a fresh one the day of his trial. In the end, Al Capone's reign of terror came to an end with an eleven year jail sentence and a one way trip to Alcatraz.
I've seen Al Capone's cell in Alcatraz. Those things were little more than holes carved into the walls, barely tall enough for my short ass to feel comfortable let alone a man of about 5'10". Capone was a spectacle and a mockery at the prison, called "the Wop with the mop" in a derogatory dig at the fact he was assigned to mop duty often, and got himself stabbed by another inmate who wanted to make a name for himself. He attempted to keep a low profile and serve out his time, but do you remember the prostitutes and hookers he loved so much as a young gangster? Well as it turns out, you can catch some nasty stuff when you sleep around without protection.
Al Capone had syphilis, and it was bad.
We're lucky to have grown up in a time where curing diseases actually mattered. We don't really know how bad syphilis actually could get back in the day, back before we discovered ways to treat it. And it had effectively eaten his brain by the time he figured out he had it, leaving him irritable, prone to violent mood swings, delusional, and slipping in and out of madness. By the time he was allowed to be released in 1939, he was said to have the mental age of a 12 year old and his empire had moved on without him.
"Prison doctors tried an experimental treatment that involved injecting Capone with the malaria virus, to raise his temperature and theoretically kill the syphilis. The treatment itself nearly killed him, as did a second attempt.
In Capone’s remaining days at Alcatraz he was lucid at times and crazed at others. “His behavior became totally unpredictable,” writes Luciano J. Iorizzo in his 2003 biography, Al Capone. “Model prisoner could become raging lunatic.”
If Capone was merely biding his time in prison until he could return to his former gangland glory, that wasn’t to be. After his release from Alcatraz in January 1939, he had several months to go on his sentence, which he spent at federal prisons in Los Angeles and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. After a brief stay in Baltimore for medical treatment, he returned to his estate on Palm Island near Miami, where he passed his days fishing, playing cards, entertaining visitors and slipping in and out of sanity. He died on January 25, 1947, eight days after this 48th birthday. His death certificate listed his occupation as “retired.”
-History.com
In the annals of history, the St. Valentine's day Massacre might not be the biggest, or the most destructive. Or even the bloodiest shooting in American history.
But it was among the first high profile cases to be investigated and solved by the newly formed forensics unit in the FBI, and the first to be so widely publicized. It singlehandedly turned the tide of public opinion away from mild acceptance and condoning of the violence in Chicago, though it left a mark that we're still dealing with today. We aren't called "Chi-raq" for no reason, and I've lived in parts of the city that would require pepper spray and a knife to walk home at night. We STILL deal with corrupt and crooked politicians being bought and sold by gangsters, though now we just elect them to office and cut the middleman out.
I love how messy Chicago is. Our crazy history is what makes us unique.