From the St Valentine’s Day Massacre to modern ballistics analysis

It was mid-morning on 14 February 1929 when seven men gathered in a Chicago, Illinois garage. One man was a mechanic who reportedly worked on cars for a lucrative but criminal enterprise five of the remaining six men were involved in – the syndicate headed by mobster George ‘Bugs’ Moran. The final man was an optometrist who reportedly ‘found excitement in associating with gentlemen reported to be “tough”’. Bugs Moran, a rival to fellow Chicago mobster Al Capone, was supposed to attend but failed to show. Criminal enterprises like those run by Moran and Capone were trafficking in an array of illegal products and services during one of the most infamous periods of US history – Prohibition. The much debated movements to dry out America saw the prohibition of ‘the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors’. The ‘noble experiment’ of Prohibition is often pointed to as having ‘produced crime, violence, and a flourishing illegal liquor trade’. 

The illegal liquor trade was seemingly the real business that went on in the aforementioned garage, which was described as a Moran gang ‘whisky depot’. So perhaps it was unsurprising to neighbors when a car ‘of the type used by police squads in Chicago’ arrived on that February morning. Four or five men in uniform exited the vehicle, half of whom ‘were carrying weapons resembling riot guns’. What happened next, however, sent shockwaves across the US. The seven men in the garage were lined against an interior wall and shot in what became known as the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.