The Valentine's Day Massacre

History's Greatest Mysteries

This episode investigates the 1929 Valentine's Day Massacre, a brutal execution of seven members of Bugs Moran's gang in Chicago. The narrat

Key takeaways

• Forensic scientist Calvin Goddard used ballistics to link Thompson submachine guns found in Fred Killer Burke's home to the massacre.
• Al Capone had a strong alibi in Florida during the shooting, though investigators suggest he may have orchestrated the hit from afar.

Main topics

• The Valentine's Day Massacre
• Al Capone's criminal empire

Notable quotes

Gangsters did not do this. Cops did it.

Conclusion

The episode highlights how the intersection of organized crime, system

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) And now, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind. Speaker 6 (0:10) Today, one of the most shocking murders in mob history, the Valentine's Day Massacre. On Speaker 4 (0:18) February 14th, 1929, seven men from Bugs Moran's infamous gang are lined up against a wall and executed. Speaker 1 (0:26) There's 70 shots fired. Speaker 4 (0:29) Bugs Moran was supposed to be in that meeting, and he never came. And then he sat back in the wings and watched what happened. Speaker 5 (0:37) This level of violence Speaker 4 (0:39) was off the charts. Speaker 6 (0:40) The 1920s and 30s are full of gangland murders, but the Valentine's Day massacre will go down as both the most brutal and toughest to Speaker 7 (0:50) solve. They published incredibly gruesome images of this violence, and there's this immediate public outcry for justice. People want to know who did this and to see them brought in, but no one can really figure it out. Now we explore Speaker 6 (1:05) the top theories surrounding the Valentine's Speaker 2 (1:07) Day massacre. The person with the most to gang when it comes to the death of Moran and the gutting of his gang is obviously Al Capone. Speaker 3 (1:15) He's quite direct. He says, gangsters did not do this. Cops did it. If Speaker 5 (1:22) this were a revenge killing over the son of a police officer, it would make sense why officers would then look the other way. Speaker 2 (1:32) Even though we're approaching a century since the Valentine's Day massacre, it is still one of the coldest cases in American history. Speaker 6 (1:41) Who carried out the Valentine's Day massacre, and why did they do it? Speaker 6 (1:48) Welcome to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind Studios. Each episode, we take a deep dive into some of the greatest unanswered questions from history, backed by some of the foremost experts on the subject. Today, the Valentine's Day Massacre. Speaker 6 (2:18) January 16th, 1920, Chicago, Illinois. It's a Saturday night, and as midnight draws near, bar patrons take their last sips of legal alcohol. When the calendar flips, America is Speaker 2 (2:32) officially going dry. The Volstead Act, the dreaded 18th Amendment, which has been brewing since the Industrial Revolution hit the United States, and suddenly everybody's working a 40-hour work week. And alcohol is being blamed for absenteeism, tardiness. It's also, more importantly, being blamed for violence that men rain down on women. Speaker 1 (2:59) Prohibition is seen as a Christian cure-all for American bad behavior. They believe that this can end domestic violence, it can end poverty. This is something they believe will make the nation healthier, wealthier, and safer. Speaker 7 (3:17) So as the clock winds down on prohibition, you have kind of two energies taking hold of the American populace. You both have temperance advocates who are so excited that this new, more moral age in America is about to dawn. Then you have people who are ruining the fact that alcohol will no longer be available legally, and they're basically getting drunk on that last night. People talk about it as America's last call. Speaker 4 (3:46) There's no better way to create demand than to tell someone they can't have something. And essentially what the government did is they immediately created a demand for alcohol that could not be satisfied any other way than through illegal means. And that was what the mob was built for. They were able to slip in and immediately start putting together networks of buying and selling alcohol and providing it to people. Speaker 7 (4:15) In this prohibition era, Chicago finds itself as a real hub. It's a big city. It's centrally located for distribution purposes. There's already a kind of notoriously corrupt law enforcement system. And so all of this is kind of the perfect storm for it to be the place that Al Capone makes his name. Speaker 1 (4:35) Al Capone becomes the most important mob boss and the most important bootlegger in Chicago. He's actually Brooklyn-born. He moves to Chicago around 1920, and he takes what is already a pretty well-run gang, and he turns it into a million-dollar, money-making powerhouse. Speaker 6 (4:58) By some accounts, Al Capone's operation brings in $100 million a year, about $1.7 billion in today's money. Speaker 5 (5:07) There were actually two rival gangs at this time that were really vying for everyone's attention. There was the Chicago Outfit run by Al Capone and the Northside Speaker 7 (5:17) Crew, which was run by George Bugs Moran. Speaker 5 (5:21) Bugs Moran earned the nickname Bugs because he was very violent, he was very volatile, and they kind of thought he wasn't all there. He was just kind of buggy. Speaker 6 (5:31) While Capone rules Chicago's South Side, Moran maintains a stronghold on the North Side, and by 1926, their rivalry turns into an all-out war. Speaker 4 (5:43) Bugs Moran and Al Capone couldn't stand that one might be growing faster than the other. And before long, we see Al Capone looking over his shoulder. In fact, he has a $50,000 bounty on his head that's bringing people from out of state in. trying to kill Al Capone. Speaker 2 (6:03) One of the tactics that was exclusively a Chicago thing was created by the Northsiders, the marriage of the Thompson submachine gun to an eight-cylinder automobile. Absolutely devastating. Speaker 4 (6:18) So with this bounty on his head, Al Capone had an entourage of people who would travel with him, whose sole responsibility was to look out for something that would place him in danger. And that day came in a little restaurant in Cicero, near Southside Chicago. And Capone's eating when all of a sudden a bunch of cars pull up. The windows come down and men with Thompson submachine guns start spraying the building with bullets. More than a thousand bullets were fired at Capone that day. And miraculously, this guy is able to escape unharmed. Speaker 7 (6:59) It's important to realize that even though these two men loomed so large, this was an era where petty criminality was everywhere. Everybody in Chicago seemed to be on the take at this time. Speaker 6 (7:10) The city's police force was notoriously corrupt. Even Chicago Mayor William Hale Thompson was rumored to be Speaker 7 (7:17) in Al Capone's pocket. The public is kind of willing to turn a blind eye to some of this stuff. A lot of people felt that, you know, These guys can kill each other off. We don't really care. Just keep our booze flowing and keep us out of Speaker 6 (7:30) the Speaker 7 (7:30) crossfire. Speaker 6 (7:31) All that changes on the morning of February 14th, 1929, Valentine's Day. Speaker 1 (7:38) There is a meeting in a garage on the north side, and there's seven members of the gang that are waiting for their boss, George Bugs Moran, to meet them. Speaker 1 (7:50) According to eyewitnesses in the neighborhood, they see a Cadillac pull up and four or five men jump out of this Cadillac, two dressed in police uniforms, and they knock on the door of the garage. It's very likely that the seven men assembled in the garage thought that this was just a simple police shakedown. Speaker 4 (8:11) This was something that gangs were used to at that time. And frankly, if it's true that they owned the police through bribes and other kinds of things, it wasn't too stressful to go through the process, get arrested and get bailed out and the charges to be dropped. But this time it was much different. Speaker 2 (8:30) So they are told, get against the wall, put your hands up. The ones who had weapons have their weapons relieved of them. Speaker 2 (8:40) The men from the Cadillac unsheathe their overcoats, pull out Thompson submachine guns and shotguns, and then they open fire. There's Speaker 1 (8:58) 70 shots fired. According to eyewitnesses, the perpetrators get back into the Cadillac and they speed off. People in the neighborhood know something has gone on. They've heard these shots. So a few brave souls go into the garage and discover what is clearly a horrific crime scene. Speaker 6 (9:21) Newspapers across the country pick up the story, dubbing it the Valentine's Day Massacre. Speaker 7 (9:27) They published incredibly gruesome images of this violence. And if you can imagine, before this, people knew about the crime and the violence of the underworld, but it was very much sort of below the radar of what most people had in their face. Then all of a sudden, you have this brutal act of violence and pictures Speaker 2 (9:45) of it in the newspaper. The usual suspects are rounded up. But no arrests were ever made that stuck. Even though we're approaching a century since the Valentine's Day massacre, it is still one of the coldest cases, one of the most intriguing mysteries when it comes to crime in American history. There's this Speaker 7 (10:07) immediate public outcry for justice. People want to know who did this and to see them brought in. But no one can really figure it out. The rivalry between Bugs Moran and Al Capone is legendary. So when a group of Moran's men gets gunned down so violently, minds immediately go to