By: History.com Editors

1929

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

History.com Editors

Published: November 13, 2009

Last Updated: February 18, 2025

Four men dressed as police officers enter gangster Bugs Moran’s headquarters on North Clark Street in Chicago, line seven of Moran’s henchmen against a wall, and shoot them to death. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as it is now called, was the culmination of a gang war between arch rivals Al Capone and Bugs Moran.

Al Capone

There's more than meets the eye to Al Capone, the Prohibition-era leader of organized crime in Chicago.

George “Bugs” Moran was a career criminal who ran the North Side gang in Chicago during the bootlegging era of the 1920s. He fought bitterly with “Scarface” Al Capone for control of smuggling and trafficking operations in the Windy City. Throughout the 1920s, both survived several attempted murders. On one notorious occasion, Moran and his associates drove six cars past a hotel in Cicero, Illinois, where Capone and his associates were having lunch and showered the building with more than 1,000 bullets.

A $50,000 bounty on Capone’s head was the final straw for the gangster. He ordered that Moran’s gang be destroyed. On February 14, a delivery of bootleg whiskey was expected at Moran’s headquarters. But Moran was late and happened to see police officers entering his establishment. Moran waited outside, thinking that his gunmen inside were being arrested in a raid. However, the disguised assassins were actually killing the seven men inside.

The 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre: 5 Unsolved Mysteries

It's the most spectacular unsolved crime in gangland history. Mobster Al Capone had an airtight alibi.

Victims of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre

By: Melinda Beck

The murdered men included Moran’s best killers, Frank and Pete Gusenberg. Reportedly Frank was still alive when real officers appeared on the scene. When asked who had shot him, the mortally wounded Gusenberg kept his code of silence, responding, “No one, nobody shot me.”

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre actually proved to be the last confrontation for both Capone and Moran. Capone was jailed in 1931 and Moran lost so many important men that he could no longer control his territory.

On the seventh anniversary of the massacre, Jack McGurn, one of the Valentine’s Day hitmen, was killed in a crowded bowling alley with a burst of machine-gun fire. McGurn’s killer remains unidentified, but was likely Moran, though he was never charged with the murder. Moran was relegated to small-time robberies until he was sent to jail in 1946. He died in Leavenworth Federal Prison in 1957 of lung cancer.

Timeline

Also on This Day in History

Discover more of the major events, famous births, notable deaths and everything else history-making that happened on February 14th

270

St. Valentine beheaded

On February 14, around the year A.D. 270, Valentine, a holy priest in Rome in the days of Emperor Claudius II, is said to have been executed.

FEBRUARY 14 - SAINT VALENTINE

1779

Patriots defeat Loyalists at Kettle Creek

On this day in 1779 at Kettle Creek, Georgia, a Patriot militia force of 340 led by Colonel Andrew Pickens of South Carolina, with Colonel John Dooly and Lieutenant Colonel Elijah Clarke of Georgia, defeats a larger force of 700 Loyalist militia commanded by Colonel James Boyd.

1779

Captain Cook killed in Hawaii

On February 14, 1779, Captain James Cook, the great English explorer and navigator, is killed by Native Hawaiians during his third visit to the Pacific island group.

1818

Frederick Douglass is born

Frederick Douglass, a towering figure of American history, is born enslaved as Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1818 in Talbot County, Maryland. He would go on to make a daring escape North and become one of the most famous people in 19th-century America. As a celebrated orator, author and activist, he became a powerful and eloquent voice not only for the abolition of slavery, but for broader human rights.

1884

Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother die

Future President Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and mother die, only hours apart, on February 14, 1884.

1886

First trainload of oranges leaves Los Angeles

Destined to become one of the state’s major exports, the first trainload of oranges grown by Southern California farmers leaves Los Angeles via the transcontinental railroad.

1943

Battle of the Kasserine Pass begins

On this day, German General Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps launch an offensive against an Allied defensive line in Tunisia, North Africa. The Kasserine Pass was the site of the United States’ first major battle defeat of the war.

1950

USSR and PRC sign mutual defense treaty

The Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the two largest communist nations in the world, announce the signing of a mutual defense and assistance treaty.

1957

Noam Chomsky publishes his groundbreaking book “Syntactic Structures”

Noam Chomsky presents his groundbreaking theory about human speech with the publishing of Syntactic Structures on February 14, 1957 (although some scholars debate the exact date). The book launches his career as the father of modern linguistics and helps to trigger the "cognitive revolution" in psychology and other fields.

1980

Lillian Hellman sues Mary McCarthy for libel

In one of the most caustic literary feuds of the 20th century, playwright Lillian Hellman sues novelist and critic Mary McCarthy for libel, demanding $2.25 million in damages. The case poses the question of where the legal line stands between a critic's free speech and malicious libel.

1988

Olympic speed skater Dan Jansen falls after sister dies

On February 14, 1988, U.S. speed skater Dan Jansen, a favorite to win the gold medal in the 500-meter race at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, falls during competition, only hours after learning his sister had died of cancer. Jansen suffered disappointment after disappointment in the Olympics, earning him a reputation as “the heartbreak kid,” before he finally captured an Olympic gold medal in 1994.

1989

Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini calls on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses”

On February 14, 1989, Iran's Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini decrees a death sentence for author Salman Rushdie after publication of his novel The Satanic Verses ignited a storm of outrage among Muslims, many of whom consider the book blasphemous. The controversy would test the limits of free speech in a multicultural, multifaith world.

1989

Sandinistas agree to free elections

At a meeting of the presidents of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica and El Salvador, the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua agrees to free a number of political prisoners and hold free elections within a year; in return, Honduras promises to close bases being used by anti-Sandinista rebels. Within a year, elections in Nicaragua resulted in the defeat of the Sandinistas, removing what officials during the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) referred to as a “beachhead of communism” in the Western Hemisphere.

1990

“Pale Blue Dot” photo of Earth is taken

On Valentine's Day, 1990, 3.7 billion miles away from the sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft takes a photograph of Earth. The picture, known as Pale Blue Dot, depicts our planet as a nearly indiscernible speck roughly the size of a pixel.

2018

Teen gunman kills 17, injures 17 at Parkland, Florida high school

On February 14, 2018, an expelled student entered Parkland, Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and opened fire, killing 17 people and wounding 17 others, in what became at the time the deadliest shooting at a high school in United States history.

People are brought out of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after a shooting there on February 14, 2018.

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Citation Information

Article title
The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre
Website Name
History
Date Accessed
March 21, 2025
Publisher
A&E Television Networks
Last Updated
February 18, 2025
Original Published Date
November 13, 2009

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