On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929, St. Valentine's Day, five members of the North Side Gang, plus non-members Reinhardt H. Schwimmer and John May, were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the SMC Cartage Company (2122 North Clark Street) in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side. They were shot to death, possibly by members of Al Capone's gang, possibly by outside talent, most likely by a combination of both. Two of the shooters were dressed as Chicago police officers, and the others were dressed in long trenchcoats, according to witnesses who saw the "police" leading the other men at gunpoint out of the garage. When one of the dying men, Frank Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, "I'm not gonna talk" despite having 14 bullet wounds. Capone himself had arranged to be on vacation in Florida. The St. Valentine's Massacre resulted from a plan devised by a member or members of the Capone gang to eliminate the Polish-Irish Bugs Moran. The killers told the seven men to line up facing the back wall. There was apparently not any resistance, as the Moran men thought their captors were real police. Then the two "police officers" then signaled the pair in civilian clothes. Two of the killers started shooting with Thompson sub-machine guns, one containing a 20-round magazine and the other a 50-round drum. All seven men were killed in a volley of seventy machine-gun bullets and two shotgun blasts according to the coroner's report. To show bystanders that everything was under control, the men in street clothes came out with their hands up, prodded by the two uniformed cops. The only survivors in the warehouse were John May's German shepherd, Highball, and Frank Gusenberg who, despite fourteen bullet wounds, was still clinging to life, but would die 3 hours later. When the real police arrived, they first heard the dog howling. On entering the warehouse, they found the dog trapped under a beer truck and the floor covered with blood, shell casings, and corpses. Photographs of the scene were taken immediately after the shooting by Jun Fujita and published in the Chicago Daily News. [READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE]
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