A VALENTINE FOR BUGS MORAN: PART ONE

The Massacre on Clark Street

The rise of organized crime in Chicago began with the advent of Prohibition. The law that banned the sale and production of liquor went into effect in 1920 and vast fortunes began to be made by lawless elements in the city. The decline of these criminal empires began almost a decade later in February 1929. It was on St. Valentine’s Day of that year that the general public no longer saw the mob as “public benefactors,” offering alcohol to a thirsty city, but as the collection of cold-blooded killers and thugs that it truly was. The massacre changed the face of Chicago crime forever and led to the end of Al Capone’s role as mob boss of the city.

Chicago in the 1920s

Capone, who had started out as a gun for hire for an old benefactor named John Torrio, quickly rose through the ranks of the underworld to become Torrio’s second in command. After his boss had a brush with death when friends of murdered mobster Dean O’Banion tried to kill him, Capone took over the operations of the South Side Outfit, eventually creating a multi-million-dollar crime empire at the age of only twenty-six. By 1929, Capone had wiped out most of his rivals, with the exception of the remnants of O’Banion’s old gang, now run by George “Bugs” Moran. Moran spent a good part of his time purposely antagonizing Capone and made several attempts to kill him in revenge for the murder of Dean O’Banion in 1924.

In December 1928, Capone left Chicago for Miami Beach, where he kept a second home. In early February, one of his closest confidantes from Chicago, Jack McGurn, arrived for a short visit. After his departure, Capone spoke (as telephone records would later show) at length every day with Jake Guzik, the Outfit’s collector and another confidante of Capone, who lived at Chicago’s Congress Hotel. The telephone conversations between the two men stopped on February 11. Then, a single call was placed to Capone’s Palm Island winter home three days later.

That call came on February 14 – St. Valentine’s Day.

A light snow was falling on North Clark Street on the morning of February 14, 1929. Traffic was moving slowly as a black Cadillac touring car edged onto the street from Webster Avenue. There was a police alarm on the running board and fastened to the back of the driver’s seat was a gun rack like the one used in squad cars. The driver of the Cadillac had on horn-rimmed glasses and was a wearing a policeman’s uniform, which included a cap with a brass star. A man sitting next to him in the passenger’s seat also had on a police uniform. The three men in the back seat were wearing civilian clothes.

As the Cadillac turned the corner onto Clark Street, a truck sideswiped it, forcing it to stop. The truck driver, Elmer Lewis, horrified at having hit what he assumed was a police car, scrambled out of his cab and, filled with remorse and nervous fear, hurried toward the Cadillac. The blue-uniformed man behind the wheel smiled at him, a gap showing where one of his upper front teeth was missing, and waved, reassuring him that no real damage had been done and that he could return to his truck as if nothing had happened. Baffled but relieved, Lewis watched the car drive on for about half a block, then stop in front of a combination garage and warehouse belonging to a shipping and packing company at 2122 North Clark Street. Four men got out of the car and went inside.

The S-M-C Cartage Co. as it looked at the time of the massacre in 1929

 Meanwhile, North Side gang leader George “Bugs” Moran was also on his way to the same garage. The night before, a hijacker had called Moran and offered him a truckload of whiskey from Detroit that could be his for $57 per case. Moran had told him to deliver the shipment around 10:30 a.m. to the North Clark Street garage, which was used as a distribution point for the gang. He told the hijacker that he would have men on hand to help unload the truck. Moran had been suffering from a head cold and got a late start for the rendezvous. With a gambler friend, Ted Newberry, he left his Parkway Hotel apartment, not far from the garage, a little after 10:30 a.m. The temperature was a biting 15 degrees and a bone-chilling wind was blowing from the west. Hunched against the cold, Moran and Newberry took a shortcut through an alley behind the garage. Willie Marks, one of the gang’s specialists in business racketeering, was also running late. He arrived by trolley car at almost the same time.

The garage was a one-story building, constructed from red brick. It was 60 feet wide and 120 feet long, sandwiched between two four-story buildings. Both the plate-glass window in front and the glass-paneled door to the right of it had been painted black to hide the garage’s interior. A white placard with black lettering was placed in the lower part of the window. It read: S-M-C CARTAGE CO. / Shipping -- Packing      Phone / Diversey 1471 / Long Distance Hauling.

Behind the window, running the width of the building, was a narrow office that was separated from the warehouse by a wooden partition. The warehouse had a concrete floor and brick walls. The original whitewash that had covered the brick walls had turned grimy and yellow with age. Tall, wide doors at the rear opened on the loading area in the alley behind the building.

On the morning of February 14, three empty trucks were parked in the garage. A fourth was jacked up in the center of the floor and lying under it, wearing oil-spattered coveralls and repairing a wheel, was Johnny May, a 35-year-old failed safecracker that Moran hired as a mechanic for $50 a week. May lived in an apartment at 1249 West Madison Street with his wife, Hattie, their six children, and a German shepherd named Highball. The dog was tied by his leash to the axle of the truck that May was fixing. May had brought some scraps of meat for him in a paper bag.

Six other men were in the warehouse that morning, gathered around a coffee pot that percolated on a hot plate. They wore their hats and overcoats, shivering in the unheated building.

(Left to Right) Frank Gusenberg; Pete Gusenberg; Al Weinshank, who it is believed was mistaken for George Moran by lookouts across the street on the morning of the massacre. 

(Left to Right) Mechanic John May, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time that morning. He had been previously keeping a promise to his wife to give up a life of crime; Adam Heyer; James Clark

The men included the Gusenberg brothers, Frank and Pete, who had a long day ahead of them. As soon as the hijacked liquor was delivered, they were supposed to drive two empty trucks to Detroit to pick up some smuggled Canadian whiskey. Pete “Goosey” Gusenberg was a 40-year-old career criminal who first started showing up in police files in 1902. He spent several years in the Joliet Correctional Center, earning his parole in 1911, only to end up in Leavenworth in 1923, sentenced along with “Big Tim” Murphy and others after the Dearborn Station mail robbery. After his release, he became a gunman for Moran. Pete was married to Myrtle Gorman. As far as she knew, her husband was a salesman.

Frank Gusenberg was four years younger than his brother. Despite having a police record that dated back to 1909, his only prison sentence was for ninety days in Bridewell for disorderly conduct. Frank was a bigamist, married to two women -- Lucille and Ruth -- at the same time. His double life was unbeknownst to them, as well as the fact that his alleged career as a salesman was a front for robbery and burglary.

Adam Heyer was also present that morning. A business college graduate and certified accountant before doing prison time for embezzlement, he handled all of the gang’s finances and also managed the Fairview Kennel Club, the North Side gang’s dog-racing enterprise. Little else is known about Heyer. Even his wife of seven months, Mame, did not know his birth date, although he was believed to be around 40 years old.

Al “Gorilla” Weinshank (or Weinshenker), the newest member of the gang, had helped Moran muscle into the cleaning and dyeing rackets and was the owner of a club called the Alcazar. Heavyset and round-faced, he bore a resemblance to Moran, which was enhanced on February 14 by the fact that both men happened to be wearing tan fedoras and gray overcoats. It is believed that he may have been mistaken for Moran by a lookout that morning.

The sixth man was Albert Kachellek, who was better known as James Clark, an alias that he had adopted to spare his mother grief over his frequent brushes with the law. Clark was 42 years old and had first been arrested in 1905 for robbery. He spent the next nine years in and out of the Pontiac Reformatory and Joliet Penitentiary. With a string of murders under his belt, he was known as Moran’s chief gunmen, often wreaking havoc alongside the Gusenbergs. Oddly, newspaper reports after the massacre identified Clark as George Moran’s brother-in-law. This mistake was hotly denied by his sister, Mrs. Marie Neubauer, at the coroner’s inquest but writers copying previous writers have kept the error alive over the years.

The unlucky seventh man in the garage that morning was Reinhardt Schwimmer. I have never seen a formal photo of him. This was clipped from a newspaper photograph of the crime scene. 

The seventh man in the garage that day was the anomaly of the group. His name was Reinhart Schwimmer and he was an optometrist (although today he would be considered an optician since he had no formal training in conducting eye examinations or treating eye ailments). Schwimmer was 29 and spent most of his time with gangsters. He had started associating with members of the North Side gang after his divorce in 1923. He spent much of his time in the company of O’Banion, Weiss and Drucci, to the detriment of his legitimate business. Even after marrying a rich widow, he couldn’t stay away from his underworld pals. He liked to pretend that he was in the bootlegging business and often told friends that he could have people killed if he wanted to. After his second wife divorced him in 1928, he moved into the Parkway Hotel and befriended George Moran. Schwimmer was considered part of the gang, although he never got involved in crime – he simply liked the rush of being in the company of gangsters. On the morning of February 14, he had dropped into the garage, as he frequently did on the way to work, to see what the gang was up to. He had stayed behind to chat – a decision that he wouldn’t live long enough to regret.

Elmer Lewis, the truck driver, was not the only person to see the Cadillac stop at the SMC Cartage Company and the four men go inside, the pair in uniform leading the way. On the second floor of the rooming house next door, the landlady, Jeanette Landesman, was ironing a shirt when she heard the car and the truck collide at the corner. She went to the window to take a look and then saw the Cadillac stop in front of the warehouse. Mrs. Landesman also saw four men go into the building.

When Moran and Newberry saw the Cadillac parked out front, they assumed that a police raid or a shakedown was taking place and hurried down the street to a coffee shop. They decided to wait things out and drink coffee until the cops left. Willie Marks, approaching from the south, reached the same conclusion. He ducked into a doorway and avoided the garage altogether.

On the second floor of the rooming house, Mrs. Landesman heard a peculiar banging sound outside, almost like someone furiously beating a drum. The sound lasted for more than a minute and then it was followed by two thunderous blasts, like two cars backfiring. The silence that followed was broken by the plaintive sound of a howling dog. Disturbed, Mrs. Landesman went back to the window and looked out at the snowy, windy street. Her friend across the way, Josephine Morin, looked out of her third-floor window at the same time and they both saw the same four men reappear. The first two, in civilian clothes, had their hands raised. The two men behind them, wearing police uniforms, held guns to their backs and prodded them toward the car. It was a police raid and two men had been arrested, the two women assumed; the fifth man driving the car must have been a plainclothes detective. They climbed into the Cadillac and drove away, continuing south on Clark Street and turning right onto Ogden Avenue.

Next door in the garage, the dog continued to howl mournfully and Mrs. Landesman’s uneasiness grew. Finally, she asked one of her tenants, a man named C.L. McAllister, to see what was going on next door and find out why the dog was howling. He went next door to the warehouse but he didn’t stay inside for long. His face was a ghostly pale when he hurried back up the steps into the rooming house. “The place is full of dead men,” he cried.

We will never know for certain what took place inside of the SMC Cartage Co. on the cold morning of February 14, 1929. Only one man survived the initial slaughter and he never talked. However, historians and crime enthusiasts have spent many years trying to put together the pieces of one of the greatest (technically) unsolved crimes in history.

Crime scene photograph of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre

Here’s what most think happened that day:

The massacre was set in motion by a telephone call from a rooming house across the street from the garage, signaling the killers that everything was in place for an assault on the North Side gang. It is believed that Weinshank was mistaken for George Moran, who had not actually arrived.

At 10:30 a.m., a Cadillac touring car, painted and outfitted to look like a police car, pulled up in front of the warehouse and four men got out, two of them dressed in police uniforms and two in plain clothes. A fifth man, also in plain clothes, stayed behind the wheel of the car.

The Moran gang members inside were likely puzzled when the two uniformed officers walked into the garage. Protection money was undoubtedly being paid to avoid problems from the police but the gangsters probably assumed that it was a raid being carried out to appease the reformers. It was likely that they would be out of jail almost as quickly as they were taken in. The uniformed men took weapons from five of the men in the garage. Reinhart Schwimmer was unarmed and so was Johnny May, who was pulled from under the truck protesting that he was only a mechanic and not part of the gang. He was a failed criminal and had promised his wife that he would stay on the straight and narrow. As he had promised her, he carried a St. Christopher medal in his back pocket. The experience was probably only mildly annoying at that point.  Schwimmer would most likely have been thrilled to be arrested. Now he would be able to prove to his friends that he really did have gangster connections.

After removing the weapons from the North Side men, the police signaled the two men in plain clothes who were waiting on the other side of the front office partition. The two men walked into the warehouse, Thompson machine guns in their hands. The North Side men were then herded up against the wall and shot to death. Only one of them survived – Frank Gusenberg. With fourteen slugs in his body, he managed to crawl about twenty feet from the rear wall. The others were dead where they had fallen at the foot of the wall, Clark on his face, Weinshank, Heyer, May and Schwimmer on their backs. Pete Gusenberg had died kneeling; his upper body slumped against a chair. Schwimmer was still wearing his hat and Weinshank’s tan fedora rested on his chest. Where the seven men had been standing against the wall, the bricks were now splashed with blood. Darker crimson stains ran across the oily floor. Highball, howling and snapping, pulled at his leash, trying in vain to get to the executioners.

The murders had been carried out with precision. The Tommy guns were swung back and forth three times, first at the level of the victim’s heads, then their chests, and finally at their stomachs. The victims were literally blown to pieces. Some of the corpses on the floor were only held together by bits of gristle, flesh and bone. In spite of this, signs of life must have still flickered in Johnny May and James Clark after the machine gun fire, for they had also been blasted with shotguns at such close range that their faces had almost been obliterated.

   

Then, spreading leaving pools of blood, seventy shell casings and the mutilated bodies of seven men behind, the plainclothes killers walked out with the phony cops, pretending that they are being arrested. The driver was still waiting for them behind the wheel of the car outside.

The police take away the victims of the massacre through the loading doors in the back of the building. (Below) A crowd gathered in from the shipping company in hopes of getting a glimpse through the painted windows at what was going on inside. Ironically, this photo was taken from almost the exact same vantage point that the lookout had in the days before the massacre. 

After the discovery of the massacre, the police were summoned and the investigation began. It wasn’t long before crowds began to gather in front and in back of 2122 North Clark Street, all hoping to get a look at the dead bodies inside. 

   

When the police arrived, Sergeant Tom Loftus was the first on the scene. Oddly, a detective named Clarence J. Sweeney would later place himself at the scene and would also claim that he was at the side of Frank Gusenberg when he died from his wounds in the hospital three hours later. Sweeny kept the myth going over the years, involving himself more and more in the story, but Loftus was actually the first policeman to arrive and he questioned Gusenberg before the ambulance got there. Frank had managed to crawl almost twenty feet, leaving a bloody trail behind him, before collapsing on the floor. 

Loftus asked him: “Do you know me, Frank?”

Gusenberg: “Yes, you are Tom Loftus.”

Loftus: “Who did it or what happened?”

Gusenberg: “I won’t talk.”

Loftus: “You’re in bad shape.”

Gusenberg: “Pete is here, too.”

   

Loftus then asked him if they had been lined up against the wall and Gusenberg again told him that he wasn’t going to talk. Gusenberg’s legendary statements of “Nobody shot me” and “I ain’t no copper” turned out to be fabrications of Detective Sweeney and the newspapers. Sweeney claimed to be at Frank's bedside, yet Loftus detailed Officer James Mikes to be near Gusenberg at all times with no mention of Sweeney ever being there.

Loftus visited Gusenberg at Alexian Brothers Hospital and tried to question him again. Once more, Frank refused to talk. Before he died, though, Loftus asked him if the killers wore police uniforms and this time Frank whispered “Yes” before he finally succumbed to his wounds.

"Only Capone kills guys like that," George Moran told the newspapers.

One newspaper quote that was printed correctly came from George Moran. When he learned of the massacre that he had escaped by only a few minutes, he told reporters: “Only Capone kills like that.”

News of the massacre quickly spread throughout the city and across the country – even to as far away as Miami, where Al Capone was conveniently hosting guests who were in town for the impending world championship fight between Jack Sharkey and “Young” Stribling. Capone had invited more than one hundred guests to his place on Palm Island, including sportswriters, gamblers, show business people, racketeers, and politicians. Capone was a boxing enthusiast and bet on Sharkey to win the title. He frequently visited his training camp and was photographed by news cameramen standing proudly between Sharkey and Bill Cunningham, a sportscaster and former All-American center.

Al Capone was conveniently in Florida at the time of the massacre. 

On the night of February 14, Capone hosted an elaborate party at his estate. They feasted on a lavish buffet and drank champagne that was served by a half dozen of Capone’s bodyguards. Mae Capone stayed quietly in the background, seeing to everything that anyone needed. When it came to be Sonny’s bedtime, his father took him by the hand and led him from group to group to say goodnight. The small boy with the hearing aid, a shy, withdrawn little figure with huge eyes and a bashful smile, was a sharp contrast to his bombastic father.

Jack Kofoed, sports editor for the New York Post, brought his wife, Marie, to the party. As the humid night wore on, she decided to cool off in the swimming pool. She retired to the Venetian bathhouse carrying her bathing suit and she saw, in the corner of the ladies’ dressing room, what appeared to be a crate covered with a canvas drop cloth. She sat down on it to remove her shoes and quickly jumped up with a cry of pain. Something had poked her in the leg. She lifted the cloth and saw that the open crate was filled with shotguns, revolvers and Tommy guns.

The guests at the party that night whispered among themselves about the Chicago massacre that was being reported in the evening papers and on radio broadcasts. Tact prevented them from speaking about it too loudly. Capone never mentioned it at all.

The next morning, when additional details had been published, among them Moran’s comment about the massacre, Jack Kofoed called on his party host. “Al, I feel silly asking you this,” he said, “but my boss wants me to. Al, did you have anything to do with it?”

“Jack,” Capone said, bending a serious gaze on his friend, “the only man who kills like that is Bugs Moran.”

To Be Continued….

"The Man Who Got Away"

“THE MAN WHO GOT AWAY”

The Demise of George “Bugs” Moran

Most famously known as the man who narrowly escaped death at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, George Moran had ended up with the North Side mob almost by accident since he managed to outlive all of his friends. But Moran’s power was broken by the massacre and he eventually drifted away from Chicago and died in prison on February 25, 1957. It was a forgettable moment for the man who once challenged the reign of Al Capone.

George “Bugs” Moran

George "Bugs" Moran was born Alelard Cunin in Minnesota in 1891, the son of a French stone mason named Jules Cunin, and his wife, Marie. His father was later recalled as a mean-tempered man and the two never got along, although he and his mother stayed on good terms throughout this life. He ran away in 1910 and adopted the name of George Moran. He became involved with a gang of young toughs who began specializing in stealing horses. In 1912, Moran was arrested for the first time. He spent several stints in jail after that for other crimes, including larceny and burglary.

    

Moran made friends in Joliet Correctional Center and began hanging around the North Side after his release. One day, Moran was listening to a speech given by an outdoor orator and became annoyed when a man in the crowd started heckling him. Moran confronted the heckler and a fight broke out. As a result, Moran’s chest and neck were badly slashed with a knife and he spent the rest of his life wearing high-neck collars to hide the scars. His nickname of “Bugs” was probably created by newspaper writers (as most gangsters’ more colorful handles were) but it was noted that Moran had a fiery temper, which led to the moniker.

Following the knife attack, and after recuperating for several weeks in the hospital, Moran began hanging around McGovern’s, a cabaret at 666 North Clark Street, where Dean O’Banion worked as a singing waiter. Many criminals who were just starting out hung around the place and Moran became friends with many of them, including O’Banion. The two began working together, robbing warehouses, with other members of what would become the North Side gang. After one fouled-up job, Moran was captured. He kept his silence and served two years in Joliet without implicating O'Banion in the crime. After he was released, he went back to work with his friend. He was soon captured again and, once more, he kept silent about who he worked with. He stayed in jail this time until 1923.

When Moran got out the last time, he joined back up with O’Banion’s now formidable North Side gang. They had become a powerful organization, supplying liquor to Chicago's wealthy Gold Coast. Moran became a valuable asset, hijacking liquor trucks at will. He became known as O'Banion's right hand man, always impeccably dressed, right down to the two guns that he always wore.

Moran fell in love with a showgirl who had recently arrived in America from Turkey. Her name was Lucille Bilezikdijan and she had a child from a previous relationship, which she feared would turn Moran away from her. Instead, he raised the boy as his own and not long after, he fathered his own child with Lucille. Like so many other gangster wives, Lucille averred that her husband was, “one of the best men she had ever known.”

After O’Banion was murdered, Moran served as one of his pallbearers – and then as one of his avengers. He took part – along with Hymie Weiss and Vincent Drucci – in several assassination attempts on Capone and in January 1925, was the first man to fire a bullet into John Torrio outside his South Side apartment building (see earlier blog post).

Moran was identified in the Torrio hit by the 17-year-old son of the apartment building’s janitor, Peter Veesaert, who had been standing in the doorway of the building at the time of the attack. He was shown some photographs that were taken by the police during Dean O’Banion’s funeral and he pointed out George Moran as the first man who shot Torrio. Bravely, he insisted that his identification was correct when he was brought face-to-face with Moran after he was arrested. “You’re the man,” Peter said. The police wanted to hold Moran until they could establish some evidence in support of the boy’s identification but Judge William Lindsay released him under $5,000 bail. He was never indicted for the crime.

Moran continued to take part in the attempts to kill Capone – and continued burying his friends who were slain in the Chicago violence. In time, by blood and attrition, he became the leader of the North Side gang and was just as relentless against Capone’s business efforts as O’Banion, Weiss and Drucci had been. On the highway between Detroit and Chicago, they hijacked trucks of liquor that had been shipped to Capone by the Purple Gang. They bombed saloons that exclusively sold his beer. They had assisted Joe Aiello when he had reclaimed the liquor stills of Little Italy. The North Side gang had attempted twice to kill Capone’s favorite gunman, Jack McGurn. The second time, the Gusenberg brothers had caught up with him in a telephone booth at the Hotel McCormick and emptied a Tommy gun through the glass. Major surgery and a long recovery in the hospital saved his life. The gang even started their own dog racing tracks. Moran opened a track in Southern Illinois while his business manager, Adam Heyer, opened the Fairview Kennel Club in Cicero, not far from Capone’s Hawthorne Kennel Club – which was set on fire during a terrorist attack. In late 1928, Moran became entrenched with the Master Cleaners’ and Dyers’ Association, a blatant challenge to Capone. He managed to get control of an independent plant, the Central Cleaning Company, and installed two of his men, Willie Marks and Al Weinshank, as vice-presidents. In short, Moran took every opportunity to provoke Capone, both on the streets and in the newspapers, where he often publicly blamed Capone for local violence.

Just days before the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Moran was contacted and asked to be at the garage on North Clark Street where the massacre occurred. He arrived a few minutes late and, seeing what he believed were police cars outside, was at a nearby coffee shop when his friends were slaughtered. He narrowly missed being killed and to this day, many historians believe that Al Weinshank was mistaken for Moran by the lookouts for the assassins. The massacre was a simple, cold-bloodedly efficient assassination that was meant to kill George Moran and break the back of the North Side gang, opening up its territories and operations to Al Capone. But they missed Moran and from that point on, he was known as “the man who got away.”

Although the St. Valentine’s Massacre greatly diminished the power of George Moran and the North Side gang, it did not completely destroy it. Moran managed to keep control of most of his territory and what remained of his gang through the end of Prohibition and into the early 1930s. But with the repeal of Prohibition, the North Side gang declined along with almost everyone else and Moran decided to leave Chicago.

Many crime writers believe that Moran's biggest liability as a gang boss was Moran himself ---he was simply not very smart in the ways of long-term survival as a mob leader. While Capone was a master at planning his operations several steps in advance (thanks to his mentoring by Torrio), Moran operated almost like an ordinary street fighter, doing everything by cause and effect. So, having been squeezed out of Chicago at the end of Prohibition, he reverted back to his early life of pulling common crimes like safecracking and robbery. Moran went from being one of the wealthiest gangsters in Chicago to a penniless crook in less than two decades.

Moran toward the end of his life

In July 1946, Moran was arrested in Ohio for robbing a bank messenger of $10,000, a paltry sum compared to his ill-gotten gains during the Prohibition days. He was convicted and sentenced to ten years in the Ohio Penitentiary. Shortly after his release, Moran was again arrested for an earlier bank raid, receiving another ten-year sentence, this time in Leavenworth. Only a matter of days after arriving there, most of which were spent in the prison hospital, Moran died of lung cancer on February 25, 1957. He was buried in the prison cemetery.

While at the height of his career in Chicago, Moran was quoted as saying, “I hope when my time comes that I die decently in bed. I don’t want to be murdered and left for dead beside the garbage cans in some Chicago alley.” And he didn’t – he died lonely and mostly forgotten in a prison hospital bed. And one has to wonder, if he’d had the chance, would he have changed his mind about his choice?

The story of George Moran, the North Side Mob, Capone and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is chronicled in my book BLOOD, GUNS & VALENTINES, which is available in print from the website and as a Kindle edition.

A Valentine for Bugs -- Aftermath of the Massacre

A VALENTINE FOR BUGS

The Aftermath of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

On this date in 1929, the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre took place at the S-M-C Cartage Company building at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago. In a few moments of savage gunfire, Al Capone effectively wiped out the resistance from the remnants of the North Side mob, founded by Dean O’Banion and by 1929, in the hands of George “Bugs” Moran. On that cold winter morning, Capone missed Moran but managed to kill six other members of the North Side gang, as well as an optometrist who was a friend of the gangsters.

The SMC Cartage Company at the time of the Massacre in February 1929. 

For today’s, history post, though, we’re going to take a look at what happened at 2122 North Clark Street AFTER the massacre took place on February 14.      

We will never know for certain what took place inside of the SMC Cartage Co. on the cold morning of February 14, 1929. Only one man survived the initial slaughter and he never talked. However, historians and crime enthusiasts have spent many years trying to put together the pieces of one of the greatest (technically) unsolved crimes in history. It ended with seven men dead, a flurry of accusations and a blight on the property that never lifted.

The bloody aftermath of the massacre
(Below) A crowd gathered outside to witness the carnage inside the garage.

Chicago, in its own way, memorialized the warehouse on Clark Street where the massacre took place. It 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.

Right after the massacre, the SMC Cartage Company was temporarily boarded up. The building had been leased by Moran gang associate Adam Heyer but was owned by Frank C. Brusky, who moved his own trucking firm (Brusky Overland Movers) into the space in 1930. When he did, he renovated the building, installed two more windows and added space for storage on the second floor.

The building as it looked in 1930, when it was boarded up. 

During the renovations, Brusky discovered a trap door in the corrugated ceiling of the garage, directly above the spot where the Moran gangsters were killed. The door led to a concrete chamber nestled against the second floor wall that was undetectable from below. The chamber contained funnels, a stool, an alcohol hydrometer, a crate that could contain a five-gallon bottle of liquor and a block and tackle system that could lower the crate to the floor of the garage. Brusky called the police, who searched the premises again. They first believed the secret room to be torture chamber but Police Captain Thomas Condon concluded that it was merely an alcohol cache.

By 1935, the building was occupied by Red Ball Movers, Inc., a moving company that also did telephone directory pick-ups and exchanges each year. In 1936, it was purchased by Anaconda Van Lines, which was owned by Samuel J. McArthur.

The building in the 1950s, when it was the Werner’s storage company.

(Below) The Infamous wall where the massacre took pace during the time when the building was owned by the Werners. They were frequently harassed by people wanting to take a look at the wall.

In 1949, the building was taken over by Charles and Alma Werner, who turned it into a moving, packing, shipping and storage office for antique furniture. At the time, they had no idea of the buildings’ bloody past. They soon found that tourists, curiosity-seekers and crime buffs visited the place much more often than customers, all of them asking to see the infamous wall in back. Depending on her mood, Mrs. Werner either turned them away or allowed them to take a look. She once stated that she wished she and her husband had never bought the building. The Werners were later bought out by the city of Chicago, who wanted the place torn down and replaced with apartments for the elderly.

In 1967, the building was demolished. However, the bricks from the bullet-pocked rear wall were preserved and purchased by a Canadian businessman named George Patey. The bricks were packed and shipped across the border and then put together as the main attraction for a traveling crime show that was displayed at shopping centers, museums and galleries. The show was only a moderate success so, in 1971, Patey opened a Roaring Twenties themed nightclub called the Banjo Palace and rebuilt the wall, for some strange reason, in the men’s restroom. Three nights a week, women were allowed to peek inside at this macabre attraction. To make matters even more bizarre, a sheet of clear acrylic was placed in front of the wall so that patrons could urinate and try and hit targets that were painted on the glass. The club closed down in 1976 and the 417 bricks that made up the back wall were placed in storage until 1997.

Businessman George Patey with the infamous bricks

Patey tried offering the wall for sale, along with a written account of the massacre but had trouble selling the entire wall in one piece. Patey, along with a friend named Guy Whitford (who contacted me about the wall in 2002) tried to sell the single piece for some time, without success. The original lot came with a diagram that explained how to restore the wall to its original form. The bricks were even numbered to facilitate reassembly. They remained on the market for several years, but there were no buyers. Eventually, Patey broke up the set and began selling them one brick at a time for $1,000 each. Patey died in December 2004, by which time he had sold most of the bricks. A large number of them are now on display at the crime museum that opened in Las Vegas last year.

But there are legends that say that Patey had some trouble selling some of the bricks. The stories say that some buyers returned their bricks soon after purchasing them. It seemed that anyone who bought one was suddenly stricken with bad luck in the form of illness, financial ruin, divorce and even death. According to the stories, the bricks had somehow been infested with the powerful negative energy of the massacre. This story has been dismissed as a “journalistic embellishment,” but there are many who maintain that it’s the truth. These same people insist that Patey’s 417 bricks were not the only surviving bricks from the warehouse.

In recent years, other bricks have emerged that are said to have come from the wall, or at least from the building itself. These were not bricks purchased from Patey; rather they were smuggled out of the lot by construction workers and curiosity-seekers. It was said that from these bricks, too, come the legends of misfortune and bad luck. Are these bricks authentic? The owners say they are, but the reader will have to judge for himself.

Whatever the legend of the bricks, and whether or not they were somehow "haunted" by the horrific murders, there is little doubt that the massacre site on Clark Street was haunted – at least for awhile.

For many years, people walking along the street, or who lived nearby, reported hearing the sounds of screams, moans, muffled voices and even the unmistakable thump-thump-thump of Tommy gun fire. The garage is long gone now, demolished in a misguided attempt by city officials to erase all vestiges of Chicago's gangster past. 

A portion of the block was taken over by the Chicago Housing Authority and a fenced-in lawn that belongs to a senior citizens’ development now marks the area where the garage once stood. Five trees are scattered about the site and the one in the center actually marks the point where the rear wall once stood, where Moran's men were lined up and mercilessly gunned down. The apartment building where Jeanette Landesman lived and where she heard the sound of the terrified German shepherd barking in the garage still stands but all remnants of the SMC Cartage Company have vanished. Or have they?

This empty lot on Clark Street marks the site of the SMC Cartage Company. Small remnants of the building remain, like the tar line of the roof on the wall of the building next door, and bricks in the back alley that came from the garage. 

According to reports, residents of the senior housing complex built on one end of the lot have had strange encounters in the building, especially those who live on the side that faces the former massacre site. A television reporter from Canada interviewed a woman who once lived in an apartment that overlooked the small park area. She often complained that, at night, she would hear strange voices, sounds and knocking on her door and her window. She complained to the management, who dismissed her claims as imagination but assigned her another apartment. A new tenant moved into the rooms and she also complained of odd happenings, including knocking sounds on her door at night. When she opened the door to see who was there, she never found anyone nearby. One night, the tenant stated that she saw a dark figure wearing an old fashioned-looking hat. He remained in place for a few moments and then faded away. Most of the strange phenomena experienced by the new tenant also faded away and soon eerie events either stopped completely or she became so used to them that they no longer bothered her anymore.

    

Outside, along Clark Street, passersby occasionally reported strange sounds, like weeping and moaning, and the indescribable feeling of fear as they walked past the former site of the garage. Skeptics tried to laugh this off, saying that the sounds were nothing more than the overactive imaginations of those who knew what once occurred on the site, but based on the reports of those who had no idea of the history of the place, something strange was apparently occurring.

Those who were accompanied by their dogs also reported their share of weirdness. The animals seemed to be especially bothered by the section of lawn where the garage’s rear wall once stood, sometimes barking and howling, sometimes whining in fear. Their sense of the tragedy that happened there many years ago seemed to be much greater than that of humans.

However, many believe that what dogs sensed at the site was not the human trauma experienced in the massacre, but rather the trauma that must have been experienced by Johnny May's German Shepherd, Highball. The poor animal must have been terrified by what occurred that morning, from the deafening sounds of the Tommy guns to the bloody slaying of his beloved owner. Tied to the front bumper of the truck, Highball had nowhere to run. It should be noted again that it was not the sound of machine-gun fire that alerted Mrs. Landesman to the horror inside the garage: it was the howling and barking of the dog.

Johnny May’s traumatized German Shepherd, Highball

Tragically, Highball was so traumatized by the events of that morning that he had to be put down after the massacre. Chicago Sun reporter Russell V. Hamm, one of the first newsmen on the scene, said that the dog was never the same again. His bizarre behavior left the police no choice but to put him to death. 

Could the animals that subsequently passed by this empty lot have sensed the trauma suffered by Highball so many years ago? As any ghost buff can tell you, it's the events of yesterday that create the hauntings of today and sometimes, those who lived in the past can leave a little piece of themselves behind to be experienced over and over again.

While the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre seems to be quiet today, the violent events of the city’s gangster era still reverberate over time. Men like Al Capone, whether city officials want to admit it or not, left an indelible mark on Chicago. It seems that the events of St. Valentine's Day 1929 left one, too.

The ghosts of the massacre may not be still around today – but one of them made his presence known for many years after his death. He had a reason for staying behind and, according to his victim, haunted him to the grave.

Want More? Then pick up my book BLOOD, GUNS & VALENTINES, which not only tells about the rise of Capone’s power in the Chicago underworld, but details the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, who died, who was involved and who was the ghost that haunted Capone for the rest of his life. You get an autographed copy of the book at from the website, or it’s also available in a Kindle edition. 

Vengeance for O'Banion!

VENGEANCE FOR O’BANION

The Near-Miss Assassination Attempt on John Torrio

On this date, January 24, 1925, an attempted Chicago mob assassination changed the face of Chicago forever. On that evening, North Side gangster attempted to kill John Torrio, the undisputed leader of Chicago gangland. Torrio was a mentor and boss of Al Capone and the man directly responsible for dividing Chicago up into territories for individual gangs at the start of Prohibition. He was a man who believed in settling trouble through words and negotiations, rather than by bullets. But he was willing to order violence when it was needed – and it was often needed during the tumultuous years of the early 1920s.  

Chicago mob boss John Torrio

Unfortunately for Torrio, he made two big mistakes in 1924. First, he allowed the assassination of Dean O’Banion, the leader of the North Side mob, who had been causing problems for other gangs by hijacking liquor shipments and selling whiskey in other gangs’ territories. The North Siders were an eccentric and reckless bunch and their leader was no exception. O’Banion then made the mistake of setting up Torrio himself on liquor charges, which would eventually lead to the mobster spending time in jail. At that point, Torrio lost all patience with O’Banion and allowed Capone to arrange for his murder.

This led to Torrio’s second mistake – he underestimated the pathological need for revenge that would grip the remaining members of the North Side mob. O’Banion had not just need the boss, he was their friend and loyalty was important above everything else to the North Siders. They would do just about anything to avenge the death of Dean O’Banion and their actions began the famous Chicago “Beer Wars.”

On January 24, Torrio’s mistakes came home to roost when he was attacked by North Siders. The severe wounds that he suffered led to not only his abrupt departure from Chicago after his prison sentence, but led directly to the ascendancy of Al Capone.

The assassination of Dean O’Banion in November 1924 turned out to be John Torrio’s last great achievement in Chicago. He left the city soon after the funeral and embarked, with his wife, Ann, on an extensive tour of vacation spots in the South and the Caribbean. They visited Hot Springs, Arkansas (a favorite gangland recreation spot of the era), New Orleans, Havana, the Bahamas, Palm Beach and St. Petersburg – never realizing that they were staying just one step ahead of gunmen that had been dispatched by O’Banion’s right-hand man Hymie Weiss, who were trying to kill Torrio whenever they got the chance. To Weiss’ regret, they never caught up with him, always arriving a day or two late, or perhaps missing them only by a few hours.

Al Capone was Torrio’s second in command and was gravely concerned about the murder attempts by the North Side mob – both for himself and his friend. 

But the North Siders weren’t just after Torrio.On January 12, Capone and two bodyguards were driven by his chauffeur, Sylvester Barton, to a restaurant at State and Fifty-Fifth streets. When they reached the restaurant, Capone got out of the car, leaving the two bodyguards behind. The door had just closed behind him when a long black car cruised slowly by. Inside were North Siders Hymie Weiss, Vincent Drucci and George Moran, all clutching shotguns and automatics. As they rolled up next to Capone’s car, they opened fire, raking it from front to back with their weapons. A policeman later said, “They let it have everything but the kitchen stove.” The bodyguards managed to come out of the hail of bullets unscathed but Sylvester Barton, the driver, was hit once in the back.

The close call prompted Capone to place a special order with General Motors – a $30,000 custom-built limousine that weighed over seven tons. It had a steel, armor-plated body, a steel-hooded gas tank, bulletproof windows, a gun compartment behind the rear seat and a removable back window that allowed occupants to open fire unimpeded on pursuing vehicles. Capone began using the car regularly, even when traveling short distances. He knew that he was an easy target walking down the sidewalk. When he had to cross a street – or even a hotel lobby – a cluster of bodyguards surrounded him, walking two and three deep on every side. In the nightclubs that he patronized, no strangers were allowed to sit at adjacent tables. At the opera, bodyguards took the seats on every side. In his office, as a precaution against an assassin who might somehow slip past his guards, he used a swivel chair with a high, armor-plated back. He rarely kept an appointment at the agreed upon time and place, always sending a messenger ahead to make a last-minute change. Ironically, despite all these precautions, no life insurance company would sell him a policy, as he found out when he applied for one in 1925.

While Barton the chauffeur was recovering from his wound, Capone used Tommy Cuiringione, alias Rossi, as his driver. He proved to be a chauffeur and bodyguard of exceptional loyalty. Not long after he started driving the boss, some of Weiss’ men kidnapped him and tried to force him to tell them where they might ambush Capone. One morning, a month later, two boys were walking a horse through some woods southwest of Chicago and stopped at a cistern to water the animal. The horse backed away and refused to drink. That afternoon, the boys mentioned the odd incident to a police officer they knew. He instructed the boys to take him to the cistern. He looked inside and hauled out what remained of Tommy Cuiringione. He had been beaten and burned with cigarettes and then shot five times in the head. His killers had tried to hide the body by wiring his wrists and ankles to a concrete block and dropping him in the cistern. Capone never forgot the fact that Tommy didn’t talk.

Hymie Weiss was Dean O’Banion’s second in command and took over running the North Side mob after his friend was killed. He was intent on avenging the death of O’Banion. 

Torrio and his wife returned to Chicago in the mid-January. After being free for seven months on bail, Torrio and 11 co-defendants now had to stand trial in the Sieben Brewery case, which O’Banion had set Torrio up in. He was almost happy to be inside a courtroom because he knew that it was a safe place to hide from Weiss’ gunmen. Torrio was shaken by the latest attempt to kill Capone and he was looking for a place to find refuge. Where would be the safest? In federal prison, he realized. On January 23, Torrio appeared before Federal Judge Adam Cliffe and entered a guilty plea in his case. He would be safely behind bars and by the time he got out, Capone would have dealt with Hymie Weiss.

Before passing sentence, Cliffe offered Torrio five days during which time he could settle his affairs. He took his wife shopping on Michigan Avenue on January 24. His car was in the shop for repairs, so he borrowed a Lincoln sedan from Jake Guzik, along with his driver, Robert Barton, Sylvester’s brother. It was almost dusk when the automobile, packed with shopping bags and parcels, turned onto Clyde Avenue on Chicago’s South Side. It stopped in front of 7011, where the Torrios occupied a third-floor apartment. Neither Barton nor the Torrios noticed the black Cadillac with no license plates that was parked at the corner of Clyde and Seventieth streets.

    

Barton opened the rear door of the sedan and helped the Torrios gather up their bags. Ann Torrio went ahead along the short sidewalk that led to the front door in the center of the apartment building. The Cadillac slowly moved forward. As she pushed the door open, backing inside since her hands were full, the Cadillac stopped across the street, directly alongside the sedan. Ann could see what appeared to be four men inside the car – and all of them were holding guns! She started to scream as Torrio stepped out of the car and onto the sidewalk. It was too late. She could only watch helplessly as two men, later determined to be George Moran and Hymie Weiss, jumped from the car with automatics drawn and ran toward her husband. The first man (Moran) fired two shots and Torrio fell to the ground, his jaw broken by one bullet and the other in his chest. As he twisted on the sidewalk, Weiss shot him in the right arm and the groin. At the same time, the two men who were still in the Cadillac, Vincent Drucci and Frank Gusenberg, opened fire with shotguns at the sedan, shattering windows and tearing open holes in the metal. A bullet hit Barton in the right leg below the knee.

George Moran came very close to killing Torrio. If the clip on his automatic had not been empty, he would have had his revenge against the mob leader. 

Moran bent over Torrio and held his automatic to the fallen man’s temple, planning to deliver the final shot, but the clip was empty. Before he could reload, Drucci began honking the horn of the Cadillac, signaling frantically that they needed to leave. Moran and Weiss ran to the car and they sped away.

Somehow, Torrio managed to crawl toward the apartment building and his wife, who was still screaming, dragged him inside. A neighbor, Mrs. James Putnam, witnessed the shooting and called the nearby Woodlawn police station. An ambulance arrived and Torrio was raced to Jackson Park Hospital.

Barton, ignoring his leg wound, got into the sedan and sped off toward Seventy-First Street. He passed a car driven by retired detective sergeant, Thomas Conley, who, spotting the sedan filled with bullet holes, gave chase. He confronted Barton in a drugstore as he was limping out of a telephone booth. The bleeding man refused to tell Conley what was going on. He pushed past him, got back into the car and drove off again. After traveling halfway across the city, he was finally forced to pull over by a patrol car, taken to a local station house, and then the hospital. The person that Barton had telephoned, the police believed, was Al Capone.

Torrio’s automobile after the attack.. it was filled with bullet holes. 

Newspaper reporters managed to get to Torrio at the hospital and began badgering the badly wounded, but still conscious, mobster with questions. He spoke with difficulty because of his shattered jaw but managed to say, “Sure, I know all four men, but I’ll never tell their names.” And he never did.

The police found a neighbor who was willing to talk, though. The 17-year-old son of the apartment building’s janitor, Peter Veesaert, had been standing in the doorway of the building at the time of the attack. He was shown some photographs that were taken by the police during Dion O’Banion’s funeral and he pointed out George Moran as the first man who shot Torrio. Bravely, he insisted that his identification was correct when he was brought face-to-face with Moran after he was arrested. “You’re the man,” Peter said. The police wanted to hold Moran until they could establish some evidence in support of the boy’s identification but Judge William Lindsay released him under $5,000 bail. He was never indicted for the crime.

Capone made it to Jackson Park Hospital soon after the ambulance arrived. He was in tears when he learned that his friend’s condition was critical. He not only refused to leave Torrio’s bedside but he insisted that Torrio be given an inner room on the top floor. Two policemen stood on guard outside of Torrio’s door but Capone also placed four of his own bodyguards in the corridor. It turned out that these precautions were necessary. During the night, hospital staff reported three carloads of armed men circling the building. The police were notified and eventually the cars drove off.

Despite the seriousness of his wounds, Torrio recovered quickly. In less than three weeks, he was discharged from the hospital. He left by way of a hidden fire escape, surrounded by bodyguards. That same day, February 9, with his jaw and face bandaged and hidden behind a scarf, he appeared again before Judge Cliffe. He was ordered to pay a $5,000 fine and sentenced to spend nine months at the Lake County Jail in Waukegan, Illinois.

Torrio showed up for court with a scarf around his neck to hide the still-healing bullet wounds from the assassination attempt. 

Aware of the danger that Torrio was in, the warden of the jail fitted the windows of Torrio’s cell with bulletproof, mesh-steel blinds and assigned two deputy wardens to patrol the corridor outside. Other additions to the cell had nothing to do with Torrio’s safety. The little chamber was cozily outfitted with throw rugs, an easy chair, framed pictures and a down mattress for the bunk. This was not unheard-of treatment for rich, well-connected prisoners – especially in Chicago.

The warden also allowed Torrio to hold business conferences at the jail and in March, a month after his incarceration; he met with Capone and his attorneys. The treaties between the gangs that Torrio had created and worked so hard to enforce were now wrecked beyond recovery. There was no hope of peace in the Chicago underworld and Torrio had no stomach for war. So, he announced to Capone and his lawyers that he planned to retire from Chicago and divest himself of all of his interests in the city. With no demands, payments or conditions, he turned everything over to Capone: the brothels, the breweries, the speakeasies and the gambling houses, which together produced annual revenue in the tens of millions of dollars.

Capone was literally the crowned the king of the Chicago underworld and he became the most powerful man in the city – at only 25 years old. But his new empire did not come cheap. With the syndicate crumbling, it was all in danger of coming apart. To secure it again, and continue producing wealth, Capone had to win back, overthrow or destroy every major gang in Chicago.

Read the full story of Capone’s rise to power, the gangster wars of Chicago and even the ghostly tale that haunted Capone to the grave in my book, BLOOD, GUNS & VALENTINES. Available as an autographed print edition or as a Kindle edition from Amazon.com