Seven Men Against a Wall: The Morning of February 14, 1929
A Chicago garage, a cold Valentine's morning, two men in police uniforms — and seventy rounds fired before anyone could ask why.
On the morning of February 14, 1929, seven men connected to Chicago's North Side Gang gathered at a garage in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. It was Saint Valentine's Day, an ordinary winter morning in a city gripped by Prohibition, where bootlegging profits had turned rival gangs into armies.
The North Side Gang, led by George 'Bugs' Moran, had spent years locked in a bloody rivalry with the Chicago Outfit, the organization run by Al Capone. That morning, the men waiting inside the garage had no way of knowing whether Moran himself would arrive — and by the time the violence began, he had not yet shown up.
Between four and six men entered the garage. Two of them were disguised as police officers, a detail that likely reassured the men inside; a police raid, however unwelcome, was survivable in a way that a gang hit was not. There was no reason yet to run.
The seven men were ordered to line up facing a wall. It was a position used in arrests and searches — another reason the ruse held. For a few moments, the men stood as if this were a routine matter, backs turned, hands presumably raised or resting against the brick.
Then the shooting began. Thompson submachine guns tore into the line of men, spraying seventy rounds across the garage. A sawed-off shotgun added a single blast to the barrage. The sound must have been deafening in the enclosed space, over almost as quickly as it started.
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