9. A Massacre to Cap Off a Grudge
Hymie Weiss’s successor, George “Bugs” Moran, carried on the North Side Gang’s war against Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit. The gangsters’ grudge reached a crescendo on February 14th, 1929, when seven members of the North Side Gang were stood up against a wall, then cut down by automatic weapons gunfire in what came to be known as the Valentine’s Day Massacre. It began when Capone hatched a plan to lure Moran to a warehouse, with the promise of a delivery of cut-rate stolen whiskey, then kill him along with his chief lieutenants. Just before he reached the warehouse, however, Moran spotted a police car approach the warehouse, and turned around. Four men in police uniforms exited the vehicle, entered the warehouse, and ordered its occupants to line up against a wall for a pat down.
The cops were fake, and as soon as the men turned around to face the wall, the “policemen” opened fire with shotguns and Thompson submachine guns. Six died on the scene, and a seventh, who took fourteen bullets, refused to ID the shooters. He told investigators “nobody shot me”, before he expired. A key suspect was Jack “Machine Gun” McGurn (1902 – 1936), who got his nickname because of his love of Thompson submachine guns. McGurn was a Sicilian-born small time boxer, who changed his birth name from Vincenzo Gibaldi to the Irish-sounding Jack McGurn, because boxers with Irish names got better bookings back then. Boxing didn’t pan out, however, so McGurn leaned more into his criminal sideline as mob muscle. By the mid-1920s, he had become one of Al Capone’s chief bodyguards and hitmen.
Although a suspect in the 1929 Valentine’s Day Massacre, the authorities were unable to charge McGurn for lack of evidence. Because mob loyalty is largely a myth, Capone and the Chicago Outfit distanced themselves from McGurn to avoid the heat he drew as a suspect. Cast off, McGurn tried to become a professional golfer. He did no better than he had as a boxer, and fell into poverty. His misery came to an end on February 15th, 1936, one day after the seventh anniversary of the massacre, when three hitmen shot him dead in a Chicago bowling alley. They reportedly left a Valentine’s card near McGurn’s corpse, that read: “You’ve lost your job, you’ve lost your dough, Your jewels and cars and handsome houses, But things could still be worse you know… At least you haven’t lost your trousers!“
