The St. Valentine's Day Massacre is the name given to the shooting of seven people as part of a conflict between criminal gangs in Chicago on February 14, 1929. Although it was not a major event, it received nationwide media attention.
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Seven members of Bugs Moran's gang, and an ophthalmologist who happened to be in the wrong place, were lined up against a wall in the garage of the S-M-C Cartage Company in Chicago and shot by five members of Al Capone's gang dressed as policemen. When one of the dying men, Frank "Tight Lips" Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, "Nobody shot me." Capone was conveniently on vacation in Florida at the time.
The massacre was a result of a plan devised by Jack 'Machine Gun' McGurn, on behalf of Al Capone, to kill George 'Bugs' Moran. McGurn assembled a team of six men, led by Fred Burke, and intended to have Moran lured into an ambush. Moran and his men would be tricked into visiting a warehouse on Clark Street on the pretext of buying some bargain hijacked whiskey; Burke's team would then enter the building disguised as policemen and kill them. The chief suspects, McGurn and Capone, would be well away from the scene.
The plan did not work. Five men of the Burke team drove up to the warehouse in a stolen police car at around 10:30, three dressed in police uniforms and two in ordinary clothes. They found seven members of Moran's gang but not Moran himself. The gang members were told to line up against the back wall, and were then shot. Moran had been approaching the warehouse but the premature arrival of the police car scared him away. The dead men were James Clark, Frank and Pete Gusenberg, Adam Heyer, Johnny May, Reinhardt Schwimmer, and Al Weinshank.
When the garage, which stood at 2122 N. Clark Street, was demolished in 1967, the wall was sold and shipped brick by brick to George Patey, a Canadian businessman, who rebuilt it in the men's restroom of a bar with a Roaring 20s theme. After the bar closed, Patey began trying to sell the bricks as souvenirs.
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