When most people think of Valentine’s Day they think of love, however, in 1929, Valentine’s Day was the date of a mob-related killing now referred to as The Saint Valentine's Day massacre.
This shooting killed seven people. It came as a result of a Prohibition Era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois. The two gangs were the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone and the North Side Irish/German gang led by Bugs Moran. And there is some speculation that former members of the Egan's Rats gang also played a large role in the St. Valentine's Day massacre, assisting Capone.
So what exactly happened?
Well, to put it simply seven people were killed execution style. On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929, on St. Valentine's Day, six members of George 'Bugs' Moran's gang and a mechanic who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, were lined up against the wall of a garage. They were then shot by four members of Capone’s gang.
The garage they were in was the SMC Cartage Company in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side.
One of the reasons this shooting was so big was that when one of the dying men, Frank Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, "Nobody shot me."
“Bugs” Moran was Capone’s main rival, and so this massacre was a plan to eliminate that rivalry. However, there were other motivations behind it as well. It was planned to be retaliation for an unsuccessful attempt by Frank and his brother Peter Gusenberg to murder Jack McGurn earlier in the year. It was also sort of a payback because the North Side Gang's complicity in the murder of Pasqualino Lolordo as well as Antonio Lombardo, and because Bugs Moran was muscling in on a Capone-run dog track in the Chicago suburbs. Not to mention the big rivalry between Moran and Capone for control of the lucrative Chicago bootlegging business.
Capone was on vacation in Florida at the time of the massacre, but he had a hand in planning it. The St. Valentine's Massacre was planned by Al Capone and various members of his gang.