Leslie De Loza

When I was first introduced to this project, I had no idea what I wanted to focus on. When we were doing our independent research, I was looking at the subjects that were up on Jeffs DP, and I was a little frustrated because I didn’t know about almost all of the people and events that were on there, but “organized crime” caught my eye. I have always enjoyed reading mystery books, specifically on crimes or murders and stuff like that, I remember hating to read anything and one day my cousin told me to read one of her books, The Boxer and the Spy on the back seat of her moms car as we were on our way to school. I didn’t want to read it because I always get car sick but she just kept insisting until I did. After reading a couple of pages, the book really caught my attention. The book was about a murder, and a boy that is training and learning how to box. It is a story of how all these random events lead the boxer to find out who it was that killed a guy from his school. When we finished reading that book, my cousin and I, started sharing mystery books and reading them together.

I recently started watching “criminal minds” and it is about FBI profilers and very interesting crimes, so,  all of that is really fresh on my mind, and it is something new and interesting to me so I figured why not learn about real crimes? After typing in, “organized crimes in google search and clicked on the “st. Valentines day Massacre” because it sounded like something really interesting since valentine's day is supposed to be all about love, and massacres aren’t really something you would think of when you hear the word Valentine. What interested me the most about the St. Valentines day massacre, was the plan that Jack McGurn had came up with. I never thought that gang killings or massacres had any actual planning behind them, I always thought it was an “in the moment” type of thing, so the when I read about this massacre, I was really surprised that the whole thing was actually planned out.

I don’t know much about Chicago's gang\ history in the 20th century but I do know that the 1920s chicago gangs started growing and spreading.  By the late 1920’s there were only two gangs left. The first gang was run by Al Capone and the other was lead by George Moran. One day, one of Al Capone's friend introduced him to a plan on how to destroy Moran and his gang.

Step one: Find Moran’s headquarters, step two: contract shooters from out of the area so that if there were any men spared they would not be able to identify the shooters as part of Al Capone’s gang, Step three: Get some men to be lookouts from apartments that were located next to the headquarters, Step four: Get a hold of a cop car and two cop uniforms, and last but not least, convince a known booze hijacker to call Moran and tell him about some “Old Log Cabin Whiskey” that he had gotten a hold of and that he would sell it to him for a really good price. Naturally, Moran agreed to seeing the booze hijacker in his headquarters the following day.

The gang was all gathered in the headquarters, then the lookouts that were located in the apartments next door, informed the shooters that someone that looked like Moran, so the shooters walk out of their positions and the others dressed in cop uniforms got out and went into the headquarters. Moran’s gang thought that it was a routine cop raid so they did as they were told and let the cops take their guns and faced the wall. They were all shot in the head and chest.

The men in cop uniforms walked out with the other gunmen in handcuffs so the people outside that heard the gunshots also thought it was just a raid. When the bodies were found, it was said that Moran was not any of them. It turned out that he had gotten there late and noticed the cop car so he decided to wait until they left.

Even though they didn’t get to kill Moran, I think that the plan was still really cool and well thought of. This is basically all I know so far about Chicago and its history of gangs in the 20th century but, I am interested in researching and learning about it. I would like to know how Al Capones and Morans gangs got to be the two biggest gangs in Chicago. The reason why I was so intrigued by this topic is because I have almost no knowledge on gangs and I thought that is I found the massacre and the plan and time but into it interesting, that there should be more things I find interesting.