Saint Valentines Day

Here are some traditional Valentines Day images that you will find
everywhere over the next few days.

................................Happy Valentines Day

And now for something completely different here is the story of the
1929 St Valentines Day massacre in Chicago

For a city that is so filled with the history of crime, there has been
little preservation of the landmarks that were once so important to the
legend of the mob in Chicago.

Gone are the landmarks like the Lexington Hotel, where Al Capone kept
the fifth floor suite and used the place as his headquarters.

But most tragic, at least to crime buffs, was the destruction of the
warehouse that was located at 2122 North Clark Street.

It was here, on Valentine's Day 1929, that the most spectacular mob hit in gangland history took place..... the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

The building was called the S-M-C Cartage Company and was a red, brick structure on Clark Street.

The events that led to the massacre began on the morning of the 14th. A group of men had gathered at the warehouse that morning, set up by a Detroit gangster who told Moran that a truck load of bootleg booze was on its way to Chicago.
Bugs Moran was already late for the morning meeting, he was due to arrive at 10:30 but didn't even leave for the rendezvous, in the company of Willie Marks and Ted Newberry, until several minutes after that.

While the seven men waited inside of the warehouse, they had no idea that a police car had pulled up outside, or that Moran had spotted the car and had quickly taken cover.

Five men got out of the police car, three of them in uniforms and two in civilian clothing. They entered the building and a few moments later, the clatter of machine gun fire broke the stillness of the snowy morning.

Soon after, five figures emerged and they drove away, when neighbors went to check and see what was going on... they discovered a bloody murder scene.

Moran's men had been lined up against the rear wall of the garage and had been sprayed with machine-guns. They killed all seven of them but had missed Bugs Moran. He had figured the arrival of the police car to be some sort of shakedown and had hung back.

When the machine gunning started, he, Marks and Newberry had fled.

The murders broke the power of the North Side gang and Moran correctly blamed Al Capone.
No one will probably ever know who the actual shooters were, but one of them was probably Machine Gun McGurn, one of Capone's most trusted men.
Moran was proclaiming that "only Capone kills guys like that".
Moran was right.... Capone had been behind the killing and this was perhaps the act that finally began the decline of Capone's criminal empire.

He had just gone too far and the authorities, and even Capone's adoring public, were ready to put an end to the bootleg wars.

Chicago, in its own style, memorialized the warehouse on Clark Street.

The place became a tourist attraction and the newspapers even printed the photos of the corpses upside-down so that readers would not have to turn their papers around to identify the bodies.
In 1949, the front portion of the S-M-G Garage was turned into an antique furniture storage business by a couple who had no idea of the building's bloody past.

They soon found that the place was visited much more by tourists and curiosity-seekers than by customers and eventually closed the business.

In 1967, the building was demolished. However, the bricks from the bullet-marked rear wall were purchased and saved by a Canadian businessman.
In 1972, he opened a night club with a Roaring 20's theme and rebuilt the wall, for some strange reason, in the men's restroom. Three nights each week, women were allowed to peek inside at this macabre attraction.

The club continued to operate for a few years and when it closed the owner placed the 417 bricks into storage. He then offered them for sale with a written account of the massacre.

He sold the bricks for $1000 each, but soon found that he was getting back as many as he sold.

It seemed that anyone who bought one of the bricks was suddenly stricken with bad luck in the form of illness, financial ruin, divorce and even death.
According to the stories, the bricks themselves had somehow been infested with the powerful negative energy of the massacre!
Whatever became of the rest of the bricks is unknown..........

Or that's what the legend says....

The garage was located at 2122 North Clark Street and the area is now marked by a fenced lawn and five trees. The center tree marks the area where Bugs Moran's men met their deaths.