Suspicions on Al Capone and bloody attack with the seal of the mafia: how did the Valentine's Massacre happen

February 14, 1929. 10.30 am Thousands of people in Chicago buy romantic cards, flowers and chocolates from their partners, and many others organize the Valentine's Day celebration. Meanwhile, seven men anxiously wait in a garage. The address: Clark Street 2122. Their leader, George Moran, an Irish mob boss, has not arrived yet, has been delayed in the hairstyle. They were told that this morning there would be a large shipment of whiskey that they had to unload and quickly put on the streets.

These are the years of the dry law and the illegal trade in alcohol forged fortunes. At the agreed time, a Cadillac is parked at the door. Not only did the truck not arrive with the hundreds of boxes of Scotch and bourbon promised, but two policemen came out of the car. There are four who enter the garage. Two dressed in a cross suit, a tie and a hat (like all men at the time) and two in police uniform. Moran arrived at this place and, seeing the uniforms, he went to a nearby bar to wait for the result.

Inside the garage, the police ordered Moran's seven men to stand against the wall. Suddenly, the two costumes opened fire with Thompson machine guns, the ones that popularized the gangster movies and that allow to shoot repeatedly. The two officers also opened fire with their hunting rifles. It was a shooting. In cold blood

The ground was dyed red. The wall was filled with small craters. The murderers approached the shot and continued to shoot. The burst of grace. They wanted to make sure no one was alive. Then a little parody to leave the place: the two dressed as police (at this point and it must be badumed that it was two mafioses well disguised) have indicated the costumes that with hands raised are went to the car. In this way, they wanted to pretend to have been arrested in front of the spectators who came to this place because of the roar of the shooting.

The police arrived a few minutes later. The picture was scary. Everything was blood and death. The corpses were scattered and several faces were deformed by the number of bullets. But not everyone was dead. Frank Gusenberg, one of the seven, still hooked on life, a little thread held him in this world. When they noticed, they rushed to an ambulance. The police investigators were annoyed by the doctors, they were fighting for a place next to the stretcher. They wanted information, clues of the only survivor. He had fourteen shots to the body. They asked him intensely, screaming in case he did not listen well, who had been the perpetrator of the murder.

Gusenberg did not seem conscious. However, at the insistence, he opened his eyes. He took, with great difficulty, air and in a rattle said: "Nobody … Nobody shot me." It was his last words. He died as soon as he arrived at the hospital. Mafioso until the end.

The next day, the newspapers published the photos of the corpses. At that time, the photographers arrived almost at the same time as the police. The images caused immediate amazement. Seven bodies deformed by the shots. There were two sets of photographs. The time of arrival at the scene of the crime and subsequent events during which a person lined up the six corpses remaining in the garage. Hard to determine which ones were the most impressive. If those of the first mess of blood and disorder, in which it was difficult to understand where one body began and where the other ended, or the disturbing order of others in which they exceeded the visible damage and took Awareness of the magnitude of the tragedy

These newspapers, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies in their morning and evening editions, in which police reporters and photographers were stars, not only brought these images . In addition, they immediately baptized the event with a name that would last forever: the Valentine's Day Mbadacre.

You can not fully understand these crimes if you do not go back a few years and do not explain certain circumstances, facts and characters. The Mafia, the Roaring Twenties, Chicago, the Dry Law and, of course, Al Capone.

It had been a few years since the 18th Amendment to the National Constitution had been adopted in the United States. It prohibited the manufacture, trade and transfer of alcohol. This amendment has been confirmed by the Volstead Act. These were times of prohibition, prohibition. Instead of ending alcohol consumption, this ban has resulted in the proliferation of underground bars and homemade alcoholic beverages. The mafia has resumed business quickly across the United States.

In Chicago, after a little truce, unleashed a fierce fight of bands who stole the illegal shipments. Each ethnic group seemed to have a mafia organization that wanted to impose it. Jews, Poles, Italians and Irish wanted their share.

Johnny Torrio, the leader of the Italian mafia, had a young lieutenant who was distinguished by his ability to work and his lack of scruples – essential conditions for success in the mafia: Al Capone. At one point, Torrio established a truce between the groups. Territories have been allocated and some peace has been sought.

Business was good and there was something for everyone. The North Side Band, integrated by the Irishman, was his main rival. The leader Dion O & # 39; Banion, by gesture of goodwill, sold his main business, a huge brewery, to Tarrio for half a million dollars. Two days after the sale, the police closed down the premises, confiscated all the merchandise and arrested the Italian gangster. O 'Banion, without firing a single shot, had avenged Tarrio.

Al Capone took the place of his boss while he was in prison and stated in public: "Poor O. Banion, his head has escaped from his hat". A few weeks later, as he was leaving Mbad, the Irishman was shot on the steps of the city's cathedral.

From that moment, the violence has multiplied. The Irish left for revenge and shot Tarrio, who miraculously survived but left the city forever and the company was entrusted to Al Capone.. Account adjustments were commonplace and were done in daylight. The shooting had become a regular sight in the corners of downtown Chicago. During a visit to the city, Lucky Luciano, the famous New York gangster, said: "Chicago is a crazy city, no one is safe on the street". Some journalists have asked the federal government to send Marines dominate the streets.

Between 1926 and 1929, about 200 mafiosi were killed on public roads. The dead have multiplied but no one has been imprisoned. The police chief of the city came to declare: "I do not want to encourage the company, but if someone must die, it is good that the gangsters kill themselves". In the few cases that were tried, prosecutors, judges and juries were purchased. He began to talk about an epidemic that affected the witnesses of these cases: Chicago amnesia. Put to the bar to accuse a gangster, the witnesses have forgotten even the most minute circumstances.

This state of permanent violence in which Chicago sank was largely the work of Al Capone, his ferocity, his search for power and his boundless ambition.

Capone is defended against the media: "Some call it smuggling, organized crime, everything is a matter of point of view, I call it business, it is said that I violate the prohibition, which do not do it, I only sell whiskey and beer better people I answer a very popular request. Nothing more. Some of the senior judges are my main clients. They say that I live in illegality. But no one lives in legality. "

His business was far more important than the sale of alcohol, in violation of the unusual prohibition law. While it consolidated his empire, he also dealt with other objects with which gangsters collected: clandestine gambling, protection and prostitution. The ABC of organized crime. Capone was good for business. And I could predict certain situations. He warned in every interview that the stock market would fall, prompting his neighbors to sell the stock. And he also knew that the Voestad law had little life and began to diversify its interests and investments. He joined unions (almost all the productive activities of the city were under his coat), with means of transport and with milk. Despite his violence and the obvious illegality on which his power rests, he was not rejected by the ordinary citizen. It has a lot to do with his charisma and his habit of appearing in the media.

Capone was fascinated to see his face in the newspapers, to read in print his stentorian and haughty statements. He was a media character before the concept existed. That explains why he was the most famous gangster of his time when, throughout the United States, there were at least two dozen men with equal power and a similar attachment to legality. I wanted to be famous as Babe Ruth, sign autographs, be recognized on the street. From the public enemy, I wanted to become a public figure. The fact that many journalists received monthly envelopes had a considerable impact on the creation of their public image. He did not consider it wise that a mafia boss would be a blanket for The weather.

The clandestine nature of his business was opposed to his omnipresence in public conversations. Enjoy the role and research with audacity. Al Capone defined himself as a public benefactor who offered small pleasures to the inhabitants of his city: alcohol, gambling, prostitutes. And this, in addition, filled the deficiencies of the state by gestures of solidarity grandiloquent public jars, Christmas gifts and other gifts with which he was destined to win the affection of the people on foot.

But everything changed this morning of February 14, 1929. The Valentine's Day mbadacre was a breaking point. It was the beginning of the end. These bored corpses, liquidated with brutality, marked the end of public complacency. The company opened its eyes and Al Capone was seen as what he was, an unholy criminal.

A few months later, the crack of the stock market, the Great Depression and the change of social humor would occur. The roaring twenties, the age of jazz, those times when pleasure was imposed had ended abruptly, "this time of miracles, art, excesses and laughter, in which people decided pleasure, those in their thirties and even fifty had joined the dance ", as he described it Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

It was never possible to determine who was responsible for the Valentine's Day Mbadacre. The first, of course, was Al Capone. His alibi was that he was on vacation with his family in Miami; and there were the pictures in the newspapers the next day to prove it. Sitting at the edge of a basin with a silk dress and a thick Havana between the lips, legs crossed and eyes lost in the horizon. The police pointed to a killer who was part of Capone's group. But in the middle of the investigation, they were killed in mysterious circumstances (like all the murders of the time gangsters were involved).

Some primitive ballistic skills later determined that the two Thompson's used in the shoot belonged to two gangsters from another group. This did not matter. Nobody seemed to see these new signs. The people had already indicted the crimes at Al Capone. It did not matter whether he was the intellectual author or not. There were so many for which he had not been punished that for some he had to pay. The era of jazz was over and also that of impunity.

The end of the gangster is known. Unable to hold him responsible for the constant crimes committed by his gang, he was accused of tax evasion. The trick was to overcome the lack of payment of several federal taxes. Al Capone faced the cause with his usual carelessness. I thought that if I had not been punished for much more serious crimes, those accusations would go well. I hoped to be able to manage, as I have always done, justice. What he did not understand, it is the change of time of the time. His time had pbaded and he did not know how to see it.

Al Capone rejected an agreement in which they proposed to plead guilty and spent two years in prison. From the beginning of the hearings, the judge dismembered the jury after learning that most of its members had been purchased. The new jury, who lived hidden and cloistered, declared him guilty. The judge has pronounced the heaviest sentence in a US court for tax evasion: 11 years in prison.

He did not leave until 1940, a few years before the completion of his sentence, of an advanced syphilis which touched him. He died a few years later, at the age of 48 in Miami. He looked like someone from a lot older. Prison, sickness and lack of power wreaked havoc.