Happy St Valentine’s Day (Massacre)
Yeah, well, you can’t expect cupids and flowers from yours truly on Valentine’s Day, right? Something a bit more twisted is on offer here, but it does involve asteroid Valentine 447.
It’s the infamous St Valentine’s Day massacre, perpetrated in 1929, when seven gang members were slain in a Chicago garage by associates of a rival gang, competing for dominance in Prohibition-era Illinois. The killers have never been positively identified, but suspicion rests with former members of Egan’s Rats, now working for Al Capone, in the mass shooting at 2122 Clark Street in Chicago’s Lincoln Park section. Competition for bootleg liquor smuggled from Canada was the proximate cause of the feud between the North Side Gang and Capone’s Chicago Outfit; some of the killers were disguised as police and the rival mobsters were slain with Thompson submachine guns, the romanticized “Tommy gun,” the most powerful weaponry of the period.
