History Spotlight, 2/14

The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre took place on this day in 1929 in Chicago, Illinois. Henry VIII probably would have appreciated Al Capone's management style. As with most of these gangland slayings, it involved one gang (in this case Bugs Moran's Irish gang) muscling in on the racket of another gang (Al Capone's Italians). In this case, Bugs Moran's people were hijacking Al Capone's liquor shipments and selling them as their own. I think we've all seen enough movies to know how this is going to come out.
Moran's North Side gang was lured to a warehouse/garage at 2122 North Clark Street with the promise of truckloads of cut-rate hootch that formerly belonged to Capone. Capone (who was conveniently on vacation in Florida) had arranged for a lookout in a rented office across the street to alert the hit men when Moran arrived. Fortunately for Moran, he was late to the scene, but the lookout saw one of the other men and misidentified him as Moran and gave the go-ahead.
Two cars disguised as police cars and full of men dressed in Chicago Police Department uniforms (or as plain clothes detectives) screeched up outside the ware house and ushered the soon-to-be victims inside. Moran's gang thought that they were real cops and that this was one of the phony busts the notoriously corrupt Chicago PD would occasionally run to get people off their backs and complied.
Once inside, the phony cops had Moran's people line up facing the back wall and opened fire with their Tommy guns and that was that.
The massacre was one of the most sensational of the time. Previously, the common public perception of the bootleggers was that they were modern-day Robin Hoods, fighting against government oppression. The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre knocked the shine off that myth, exposing the mobsters for the vicious thugs they really were. Bugsy Moran got whacked for good a few years later and Al Capone would be sent to prison on tax evasion charges in 1931.