Happy Valentines Day! Valentine's Day in Chicago is known for something far more infamous than hearts, candy and flowers. The worst event in Chicago Gangland History took place on the holiday. Besides being the beginning of the end an era of organized crime history in the Windy City, the event spawned several ghost stories and paranormal tales.
In order to understand the St. Valentines Day Massacre, it's important to understand the history of the 1920's gangster era. Organized crime in Chicago was built, at the turn of the century, on gambling and prostitution in an area of the city known as the Levee. Young women were lured to the city with false promises of jobs or marriages while girls as young as 13 were kidnapped and carried across state lines. They were all forced into selling themselves. There were entire blocks in which every house was a brothel. The person who took control of the area was Big Jim Colosimo. Colosimo owned a restaurant, which is now a 1920’s style dinner club called “Tommy Gun’s Garage”. When the city finally shut down the Levee before World War 1, Colosimo continued to operate out of his restaurant even though he businesses ceased to be as concentrated and were spread south of the area. His rackets became known as the Chicago Outfit and he ran it until 1920 when he was mysteriously assassinated in his restaurant.
The Chicago Outfit was originally known as the South Side Gang. After Colosimo’s murder, Johnny Torrio and his assistant Al Capone took over the organization. They decided that Prohibition was a great opportunity to make money and unite the underworld of the city. They attempted to form partnerships with different gangs through the city including the North Side Irish Gang that was run by Dean O’Bannion.
O’Bannion ran the north side gang out of a flower shop across the street from Holy Name Cathedral on State Street downtown. He had been an alter boy at the church. O’Bannion had been involved in racketeering from the time he was a teenager in an area known as “Little Hell” which is modern day River North area of the city. For whatever reason the Irish gang refused to go along with what Torrio and Capone proposed. O’Bannion was murdered in his flower shop and a full fledged war between the 2 gangs started. Chicago was engulfed in a torrent of bullets and bombs as the 2 gangs slugged it out. After being wounded, JohnnyTorrio retired and gave control of the south side gang to Al Capone.
O’Bannion’s gang continued to operate out of the flower shop. and was taken over by Hymie Weiss. Weiss was known as the only man Al Capone ever feared. One afternoon in October 1926, after a gang meeting in the flower shop, Weiss and 2 associates were gunned down as they were leaving. Snippers with machine guns were shooting from windows in buildings on the corner of Superior and State. These shooters were intent to make sure that Weiss and his associates were dead blanketed the area with bullets and ended up shooting not only the building where the flower shop was but also Holy Name Cathedral.
The bullets remain in the edifice of the church. Rumor has it that the church tried to fill the holes on several occasions but the bullet marks kept reappearing. This is the first of several paranormal events from this era. The Archdiocese of Chicago, tired to people gawking at the bullet holes in the edifice of where the flower shop stood, bought the building across the street and promptly tore it down. It became a parking lot.
Bugs Moran succeeded Hymie Weiss and the gang wars continued for another 2 1/2 years. Things came to a head on Valentines day 1929. At 10:30 in the morning, In a garage on Clark Street in Lincoln Park, the members of the North Side gang was gathered waiting for Moran to arrive. As Bugs and a couple of others approached the garage, they saw a police car arrive. The men quickly left the scene.
What happened next was this: Two men in police uniforms carrying shotguns entered the garage and made the occupants line up facing against the wall. In addition to the five members of the gang was a mechanic and an optometrist. Then, two men in plainclothes, carrying machine guns, came in and and shot down the seven men standing against the wall. The men in police uniforms then marched out of the garage holding their shotguns up to the plainclothes men who walked out with their hands up. The four got back into their car and left. The only witness to the crime was a dog that had to be put down because the shooting drove him insane. Not all the men died right away. Those that lived long enough for the real police to arrive refused to tell what happened even claiming that “no one shot me”. The case remains unsolved to this very day.
The St. Valentines Day Massacre was the end of the Moran gang, which had become a rag tag group of petty criminals. It also was the precursor to the end of Al Capone. Capone had been at his vacation home in Florida and claimed to have nothing to do with the murders. The story got front page headlines across the country and many law enforcement agencies decided that there had been enough bloodshed in Chicago and it was time to put an end to it. A few months late,r after a gathering of crime families around the country in Atlantic City, Capone was arrested in Philadelphia for carrying a handgun and sentenced to one year in prison at Eastern Pennsylvania Penitentiary. In his absence the United States Federal Government began investigating his businesses for tax violations and shutting down his illegal liquor operations. When he returned to Chicago in 1930 everything had changed. He eventually was sentenced to prison for 11 years for income tax evasion. While in prison the syphilis he contracted years before when he worked in a brothel caught up to him. By the time he was released he was a broken man.
The St. Valentines’ day Massacre has a number of different paranormal stories attached to it. The first is the site itself. The building was torn down in 1967 and is currently an empty lot ( just like the Levee and the flower shop), People passing by the site at night have reported hearing screams as well as the sounds of machine guns. There is an indescribable feeling of fear that even animals seem to notice. Dogs bark and howl at the spot.
In addition to this, the bricks from the wall that the murder victims stood against seem to carry some kind of curse. A club in Canada had purchased the bricks after the building was demolished and had rebuilt the wall in the men’s bathroom. When the wall closed, the owner decided to sell the bricks off one at a time. However, people started sending the bricks back. They claimed that bad things started happening to them because they owned the bricks. The bricks somehow became filled with negative energy causing illness, financial ruin, divorce. and death. The bricks, rebuilt as a wall, can now be seen at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas.
The story doesn’t stop there. When Al Capone was in prison in Philadelphia, he apparently started being haunted by one of the massacre victims James Clark. Capone would start screaming in his cell, begging “Jimmy” to go away and leave him alone. The ghost followed him back to Chicago. Capone’s body guards frequently would hear him screaming and when finding him hear the story of Clark’s ghost.
Was Capone involved in the massacre? No one knows for sure. In fact it’s one of the great mysteries of the era. There were members of the mob who supposedly confessed to it. However Capone’s niece has recently told anyone who would listen that his was not her uncle but the actual police. Author Jonathan Eig in his book “Get Capone” also claimed it was the police. But what about the ghost that haunted Al? A couple of years ago I had spoken to someone who said that he had spoken to many mobster ghosts and claimed that he also spoke to Jimmy Clark. He asked Clark why he had haunted Capone. Clark had a very simple answer - he too thought Capone was guilty and didn’t find out until later that he wasn’t. Clearly ghosts are also prone to making mistakes!
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