Valentine the Destroyer

It's Valentine's day once again. The day which we celebrate the St. Valentine's Day massacre each year.
If you don't know the ledgend it goes something like this:

On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929 St. Valentine's Day, five members of George 'Bugs' Moran's gang, a gang "follower", and a mechanic who happened to be at the scene were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the SMC Cartage Company in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago's North Side. They were then shot and killed by four members of Al Capone's gang (two of them dressed as police officers). When one of the dying men, Frank Gusenberg, was asked who shot him, he replied, "I'm not gonna talk - nobody shot me." Capone himself had arranged to be on vacation in Florida at the time.

The St. Valentine's Massacre resulted from a plan devised by Al Capone and various members of his gang, for Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn, Fred “Killer” Burke and Fred Goetz, to eliminate Bugs Moran, the boss of the North Side Gang and Capone's main rival. The massacre was planned by the Capone mob for a number of reasons; in retaliation for an unsuccessful attempt by Frank and his brother Peter Gusenberg to murder Jack McGurn earlier in the year; the North Side Gang's complicity in the murder of Pasqualino "Patsy" Lolordo as well as Antonio "The Scourge" Lombardo, and Bugs Moran muscling in on a Capone-run dog track in the Chicago suburbs. Also, the rivalry between Moran and Capone for control of the lucrative Chicago bootlegging business led Capone to accept McGurn's plan (McGurn was the primary architect of the plot).


And that's why we give heart shaped candies to the people we love on this special day, to signify that at any moment we could be gunned down like dogs in an abandoned warehouse.

It's a beautiful sentiment, don't you think.

"It's a lonely, lonely feeling when your Valentine is wrong" - Old 97s