Happy St. Valentine's (Massacre) Day!

On this date in 1929, seven men sat talking in the SMC Cartage Company garage on North Clark Street in Chicago. Five of them were notorious gangsters, members of George ‘Bugs’ Moran’s gangland outfit. With them were Reinhardt Schwimmer, a wealthy optician who liked to be seen with gangsters, and John May, the garage mechanic. Two men, dressed as policemen, went into the garage. They lined the seven men up against the wall and took their guns.

Two hit-men - ‘torpedoes’, as they are known in Chicago - burst into the garage. One carried a sawed-off shotgun, the other a Tommy gun. They opened up on the seven unarmed men and twenty seconds later, it was over. One man’s head had been blown open. Another man was slumped over a chair; shreds of skin dangled between his splintered bones and shattered teeth. Four corpses, riddled with machine gun bullets, stared lifelessly at the ceiling. ‘My God!’ gasped Sergeant Fred O’Neill, the first real policeman to arrive on the scene, ‘What a massacre!’

Amazingly, one of the gangsters had survived the shooting. Frank Gusenberg was one of Moran’s top advisers. In the hospital, Sergeant O’Neill begged him to reveal who had shot him. ‘I’m not gonna talk,’ was all he could get out of the hardened criminal.

Then, at last, Gusenberg motioned to the officer. ‘I’m cold,’ he whispered, ‘get me another blanket.’ But Gusenberg was already covered with blankets. The cold he felt was the cold of death. As it swept over him, it carried away the only witness to Chicago’s worst gangland massacre, the last victim of Al Capone's valentine to rival Bug's Moran's gang..