The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre

The garage at two thousand one hundred twenty-two North Clark Street was an unremarkable building: a former repair shop leased by a trucking outfit called the S.M.C. Cartage Company, in a mixed residential and commercial block on the city's North Side. On the morning of February fourteenth, nineteen twenty-nine, four men arrived. Two of them were wearing police uniforms. They herded seven men inside the garage against a brick wall and shot them with Thompson submachine guns.

The seven were members of the Bugs Moran gang, George "Bugs" Moran's North Side organization, and the primary competing outfit to Al Capone's South Side Outfit in the bootleg liquor trade. Moran himself was not in the garage. He had seen men he thought were police arriving outside and decided to wait. Al Capone was in Miami. His alibi held perfectly. No one was ever convicted of the killings.

The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre was not the deadliest event of Prohibition-era Chicago's gang wars. Chicago tallied roughly seven hundred gang related killings across the entire Prohibition era, and most of them received a day's newspaper coverage and were forgotten. What made February fourteenth different was theater: seven men against a brick wall, two shooters in police uniforms, a crime scene that photographers were on before the bodies were removed. The images circulated nationally. The public opinion that had been indifferent to most Prohibition-era violence found itself, for the first time, unable to look away.

The garage was eventually demolished. The brick wall against which the men died was salvaged and sold, brick by brick, to collectors over the following decades. The lot where the garage stood is a parking area adjacent to a senior residential building. Visitors still find it and stand on the sidewalk looking at the empty space, trying to locate the specific patch of concrete where history insists something happened.