The St. Valentine's Day Massacre

A Case of Bad Timing and Poor JudgmentThe machine-gun murders of seven men on the morning of February 14, 1929, by killers dressed as cops became the gangland “crime of the century.” Or so the story went. Since then it has been featured in countless histories, biographies, movies, and television specials. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, however, is the first book-length treatment of the subject. Challenging the commonly held assumption that Al Capone ordered the wholesale slayings to gain supremacy in the Chicago underworld, authors William J. Helmer and Arthur J. Bilek assert the crime was a case of bad timing and poor judgment by a secret crew from St. Louis known to Capone’s mostly Italian mob as the “American boys.” The target of the murder squad was indeed Bugs Moran, but the American boys, who were dressed as policemen and arrived in two bogus police cars, entered the garage where the massacre took place before Moran arrived. Not knowing who Moran was or what he looked like,