Canadian businessman George Patey, plotting and scheming in his swank office in Vancouver, B.C., is a few bricks shy of a full load, so to speak.
Patey has all that is left of the ugliest Valentine Al Capone ever sent, packed in seven musty barrels of history.
Almost all, that is.
What the 60-year-old Patey has is the bricks from the wall that seven associates of the Bugs Moran gang were lined up against when they were machine-gunned to death by the Capone mob on the morning of Feb. 14, 1929.
All but seven bricks. And what happened to them is a mystery to this day. The St. Valentine`s Day Massacre, as the 1929 carnage became known, took place in an unheated, grease-smelly garage at
2122 N. Clark St.
In a futile effort to live down one of the most shameful chapters of the Prohibition Era, the city of Chicago ordered the old garage demolished in 1967, as if that could erase from the history books what happened inside its dingy walls.
”Generally we try to preserve buildings that are of historical significance to the city, but this is something we`d rather not remember,”
George Stone, director of the Lincoln Park urban renewal project, who ordered the gangland murder monument obliterated, explained at the time.
Patey heard the startling news all the way out in British Columbia, and put in a call to Mayor Richard J. Daley. The mayor`s office put Patey in touch with the National Wrecking Co., which was knocking down the garage.
After a secret negotiating session, the wrecker agreed to sell Patey the 7 1/2-foot-wide by 11-foot-high section of bullet-riddled north wall for an undisclosed sum.
The wall was painstakingly disassembled, and each of the 417 bricks was numbered and packed in sequence like fine china. They filled seven barrels.
The forward-thinking businessman saw all kinds of possibilities for his new acquisition.
When Public Enemy No. 1 Clyde Barrow and his cigar-smoking gun moll Bonnie Parker were shot to death in Gibsland, La., in 1934, someone had the foresight to buy the bullet-riddled car that they had driven into the ambush. Over the ensuing years thousands of curiosity seekers plunked down good money to look at the death car and count the bullet holes as it criss-crossed the USA in traveling road shows.
In 1973 the blood-spattered 1934 Ford brought a then-record $175,000 at an antique automobile auction.
Little wonder that Patey figured he could make a bundle on the wall. He wasted little time in offering it to a fellow Canadian who was opening a Prohibition Era type saloon and restaurant.
Unfortunately the restaurateur wasn`t interested. ”I plan to serve food in this place, and I don`t want to ruin the diners` appetites,” he said.
So Patey reconstructed the wall as a touring ”anti-crime monument,” but when he tried to show it at a shopping center, public outcry caused the exhibit to be banned.
Then he took it to the Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver, but it was unwelcome there as well.
After that Patey offered the bullet-scarred wall as the main draw in a crime museum, but the museum failed.
Then he had another idea. If people didn`t want to stand and gawk at the wall, perhaps it would inspire them to do something else.
The extraordinary entrepreneur had it installed in the gent`s room of the Banjo Palace, a Roaring Twenties-style nightclub he opened in Vancouver.
The historic wall, protected by a sheet of plate glass, served as a most unique urinal.
”P— On It. It`s History Down the Drain!” a large sign encouraged.
”It was great! Everyone wanted to see it,” Patey enthused. ”We had to start Ladies Nights on Mondays and Tuesdays in the men`s room. But on some nights the women got so excited about seeing the wall that they went right in there while the men were using it.
”It was meant as a conversation piece and that`s what it became. It was a fun place, but we never made a profit; so after about four or five years I closed it down.”
Patey now is considering taking the wall on tour or selling it brick by brick as souvenir items.
It was after disassembling the wall once more for storage that Patey disclosed, for the first time, that he is missing seven bricks. In trying to locate them he has become something of a historian as far as the murder wall is concerned.
”I originally was told that the bricks were taken away as evidence because they contained bullets that were fired by the killers,” He said.
”About 45 slugs were supposed to have been lodged in the bricks.”
But a recent search by The Tribune for the missing bricks was fruitless. No police department inventory records could be found to indicate that investigators removed any bricks from the wall.
A check of a warehouse used by the Cook County Medical Examiner`s office to store outdated files also failed to turn up any sign of the bricks or any record that they were ever stored there.
”We`ve had a few floods here and leaking ceilings, and a lot of records have been lost over the years, but you could hardly lose seven bricks,” said an office spokesman.
Patey said he has heard other stories about the missing bricks. One is that they were taken during the filming of ”The St. Valentine`s Day Massacre” in 1967, starring Jason Robards and George Segal.
”A lot of scenes were shot in the actual garage,” Patey said. ”One story I heard is that Segal was given one of the bricks.”
A check with Segal`s agent brought an amused denial. ”He has never owned such a brick,” the agent said.
So where are they, those seven pieces of history that would make George Patey`s Chicago monument complete?
Patey points out an interesting series of sevens in the mystery: Seven men were lined up against the wall and shot to death; when the wall was torn down it fit nicely into just seven barrels; and exactly seven bricks are missing.
The terrifying story of how the bricks became such a coveted possession is Capone`s legacy to Chicago.
On St. Valentine`s Day morning in 1929 four men, two of them wearing police uniforms, wheeled up in front of the Clark Street building housing the S.M.C. Cartage Co. They arrived in a Cadillac touring car, with a large gong on the running board similar to those used by police detectives.
Barging into the long, narrow garage the four men surprised seven members or followers of the Moran gang and got the drop on them with tommyguns and shotguns.
The seven were lined up against the north wall with their hands raised above their heads.
The occupants of the garage turned and faced the bricks with a minimum of protest, no doubt thinking it was just another innocuous police raid.
Then the counterfeit cops opened fire with military precision, sending as many as 100 rounds of ammunition into the unsuspecting victims as they collapsed in bloody heaps.
Police Capt. Thomas Condon, Sgt. Thomas J. Loftus and Detectives Joseph Connelley and John Devane of the old 36th District, who were assigned to investigate the savage homicides, turned in the following report:
Death:
Peter Gusenberg, 434 Roscoe St., 40 years, American, no occupation.
Frank Gusenberg, 2130 Lincoln Park West, 36 years, American, no occupation, married.
John May, 1249 W. Madison St., 35 years, American, mechanic, married.
Adam Heyer, 2024 Farragut St. (Ave.), 40 years, American, accountant, married.
Albert Weinshank, 6320 Kenmore Ave., 26 years, American, cleaner and dyer, married.
Albert Kachellek, alias James Clark, 40 years, German, no occupation, married, 6036 Gunnison St.
Reinhardt Schwimmer, 2100 Lincoln Park West, 29 years, American, optometrist, single.
Time of Death:
Frank Gusenberg, 1:30 p.m. Feb. 14, 1929.
All others at 10:40 a.m. Feb. 14, 1929.
Place of Death:
Frank Gusenberg at Alexian Brothers Hospital.
All others at 2122 N. Clark St.
Cause of Death:
Numerous Bullet Wounds.
The press of the day described the bloody garage as ”headquarters for booze-running operations of George `Bugs` Moran`s crew of prohibition pirates and all-around racketeers.”
Frank Gusenberg, alias ”Hock,” who lived nearly three hours with 14 bullets in him, but refused to tell his friend, Sgt. Loftus, who shot him, was a top Moran lieutenant. His brother, Pete, known as ”Goosey,” had been a member of the North Side mob for three years.
May was identified as a North Side gangster with a lengthy police record, who worked as a $50 a week mechanic on Moran`s beer trucks. Heyer, alias Frank Schneider, the gang`s business manager, leased the garage where Moran maintained his fleet.
Weinshank did cleaning work for the gang. Kachellek (Clark) was Moran`s brother-in-law and an associate since early gangster days.
Dr. Schwimmer, who had offices at Wabash Avenue and Congress Street, was a gangland aficionado who had apparently just stopped by to chat with the guys he might have considered folk heroes.
Police investigating the massacre determined that the Moran group was set up by the Capone mob. Six of Moran`s henchmen had assembled in the garage to await what they had been led to believe would be a clandestine shipment of high-grade hooch.
Moran should have been the seventh victim, but he was late. He spotted the ”police car” in front of his place as he came down the street, and took off in the opposite direction. The unfortunate optometrist took his place in death.
After the shooting the killers in police uniforms marched their two accomplices out at gunpoint, as though they were making an arrest. When they got to their bogus squad car, one of the ”prisoners” in civilian clothes got behind the wheel as the other three climbed in, and they drove off.
The mass murder all but wiped out Moran`s North Side gang, leaving the territory wide open for the ambitious Capone.
Loftus, who was the first legitimate lawman at the scene, found the bleeding Frank Gusenberg crawling across the floor.
”For heaven`s sake, Tom, get me to a hospital,” he said Gusenberg pleaded.
”Who did this?” Loftus asked the dying man.
”I won`t talk,” Gusenberg said, true to the code of the underworld.
As the result of the police investigation, ”Machine Gun Jack” McGurn, a Capone trigger-man, and John Scalisi, Capone`s bodyguard, were charged with the sevem murders.
Both were indicted, but neither ever went to trial.
On May 8, less than three months after the St. Valentine`s Day massacre, the bodies of Scalisi and two other men were found near Wolf Lake, just over the Indiana line.
A subsequent investigation determined that Capone had invited them over for dinner, and had personally beaten the men senseless with a baseball bat, after which they were stabbed and shot to death.
On Feb. 15, 1936–seven years after the massacre (another seven)–the dapper McGurn was gunned down in a bowling alley at 805 N. Milwaukee Ave. There is little doubt that it was a revenge killing by the remnants of the old Moran mob.
As the three gunmen left the bowling alley, with 20 slack-jawed witnesses looking on, they left behind a comic valentine.
