the most beautiful of all…

09/29/09

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The Armada is eternal and forever changing, one must never become stagnate, yet one must never forget where one came from. Moving in circles yet growing closer to the heavens we are the dream of Brahma and the perfect creature that mankind was born from in the Snowy lands. Visions of us are what legends are made of. The wise monkey still laughs in the face of adversity. We are reminded in our darkest hour of a legend;

Jupiter issued a proclamation to all the beasts of the forest and promised a royal reward to the one whose offspring should be deemed the handsomest. The Monkey came with the rest and presented, with all a mother’s tenderness, a flat-nosed, hairless, ill-featured young Monkey as a candidate for the promised reward. A general laugh saluted her on the presentation of her son. She resolutely said, "I know not whether Jupiter will allot the prize to my son, but this I do know, that he is at least in the eyes of me his mother, the dearest, handsomest, and most beautiful of all."

In order to be free you must access your Monkee Mind; you must leave behind the corrupt hue-man hive mentality. Shed your false humanity and swing from the trees. Inside each of us lurks a beast be it Monkee or Panda, Squirrel or Penguin. You must shed your false mortal coil and recognize your Monkee heritage, remember that we are the descendents of Sun Wu Kong, we come from the same lineage as Hanuman, Thoth, we bring knowledge and light, and the hue-man race was born from our genes, we are the founding fathers of the earth itself. The trees are our kingdom and all the world is our domain, there is nothing we cannot do, nothing we cannot out shine. We are the Vanara who dwell in the midst of the forest of Kishkindha.


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Once You’ve Seen the Lights

06/30/09

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There is an old saying that goes; “how can you go back to the farm, once you’ve seen the lights of gay Perris.” Yet in less than 48 hours God willing I will be back in good old North Carolina. My home and my birth place. I can’t believe it, but this is it ladies and gentlemen, my last blog for awhile. I know, I know, whatever will you do without my adorable musings. For the last several years I have been away from the party life, from going out every night, and I substituted my animal lifestyle for one behind the keyboard. I joined every social networking site I saw and copied and pasted my erratic ramblings across the inter-webs. Now I am off across country (again), and I’m not sure as to when I will be able to set up my desktop next. I don’t particularly care to access my shit from other people’s computers, so you providing my plane doesn’t crash it may be a few weeks or even a few months before I’m settled. Who knows where I will be or what will have happened.  It may be a few days, a few weeks, or a few years. I have to work some things out and figure out where I went wrong. There is a lot that I have been going through mentally over the last few months and hopefully I can work some of it out before I make it back out to the Left Coast… And let it be known I will return. I will not accept defeat. I will not be beaten by California.  I have had a lot of wild and crazy experiences since I left North Carolina. I can’t believe I’m even going back. In the meantime there are a lot of friends that I have missed and that hopefully have missed me. Those of you that give a fuck be ready when my plane touches down, and those of out that have been happy to have me gone, start quaking in your boots. I would like to say thank you to those who have helped me along through the last bit and to my former lover and forever friend who brought me out here. I wish that I would have been a better hustler and more adept to making shit happen. I kind of lost interest after you left and I just gave up. Next time kid.

The universe is weird the way it works. I never expected to make it this far. When I was 16 my high school teachers all agreed I would be lucky to reach 18, but I proved them all wrong by reaching 31. I have fought tooth and nail to get as far away from those days as I could. The pain of loss, and rejection, has driven me, now they drive me back home. I would laugh but only to keep from crying. The sweet sticky California bud is rolling round my mind now guiding my hands across the keyboard as it has so many late nights blogging till I fell asleep. The future is uncertain, but then again hasn’t it always been. Years ago when I stepped out of prison on the faithful mountain in Ohio I had no clue as to where I was going to end up. Since then I have lived in New York, Atlanta (twice), St. Louis, and now Oakland, California. And I did it with the help of friends, and people who loved me. I hope to see the rest of my days the same. I feel something is pulling me backwards though, as if I need to be home to set a few things right The Universe doesn’t like unfinished business after all. So until we speak again-keep up the Monkee Business.

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The History of Porn part 3

03/16/09

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The introduction of the VCR in the late 70’s caused a reversal in the adult movie world. The VCR allowed millions of consumers who would in no way be caught dead in a porno theater to enjoy adult films in the privacy of their own homes. The adult video industry exploded. The inventions of new technologies have always been helped along by porn. The photograph, film, video and internet have seen porn emerge as one of their first – and most popular – subjects. In 1978, less than 1% of all American homes had VCRs, but over 75% of VHS tapes sold were porn. It has been said that Sony’s Beta-Max lost the format wars to VHS, because Sony had refused to allow the pornography industry to use their format. Today, there are over 10,000 new titles released a year; there are industry associations, trade fairs, and a multitude of publications and guides to the adult film world. Most notably Adult Video News which holds an annual Oscar style award show honoring performers each year. The boom in home video produced many of the industry’s top stars, such as Nina Hartley, Vanessa Del Rio, Ron Jeremy, and Seka. It also allowed for ordinary people to get in on the act with their home equipment, spawning the amateur porn market that would take flight seriously when the internet entered the picture.

Coinciding with the dawn of porn being introduced to family households across the world, a conservative backlash began. Stemming from anti-porn movement in the 1960’s and perpetuated by the feminist movement of the seventies, porn was under attack in the media just as its sales and availability increased. In 1978 Hustler Publisher Larry Flint was shot in an assignation attempt that left him paralyzed from the Waste down. Conservatives (who were mainly radical Christian Fundamentalist) and Feminist joined forces and by 1984 when Ronald Regan took office he immediately appointed a commission to be headed by his Attorney General to determine the effect of pornography on society. In 1986 the findings of the Meese Commission were released. The commission found that: "substantial exposure to sexually violent materials . . . bears a causal relationship to antisocial acts of sexual violence and, for some subgroups, possibly to unlawful acts of sexual violence." However, the commission was politically, not scientifically, constituted. The Meese Commission was primarily composed of nonscientists who did no research of their own and commissioned none. It solicited testimony mainly from specific parties and organizations which it knew would be sympathetic to its goals, while ignoring testimony from those it suspected would be disagreeable. It was published in 1986 and contained 1,960 pages. The findings of the Meese Commission along with several severe controversies led to United States Code Section 2257 enacted in 1987, demanding certain obligations on producers of “graphical representations of actual, explicit sexual conduct”. It does so under penalty of criminal prosecution and the imposition of a criminal sentence. The Attorney General, established regulations for the enforcement of Section2257, has propagated a series of regulations found at 28 CFR Part 75, the validity of some portion of which has been rejected by the federal courts considering them. More recently, in 2004, the Attorney General published proposed, newly amended Regulations which change some of the existing duties and which squarely address the Internet for the first time.

The controversies began with the September, 1984 issue of Penthouse Magazine which contained a nude pictorial of the reigning Miss America Vanessa Williams, engaged in simulated interracial lesbian acts taken from a shoot conducted before she won the crown. This was all over page-one news in 1984, and the ensuing outcry compelled Miss Williams to turn the Tiara back in to the pageant. Also included in that issue, was emerging porn star Kristie Elizabeth Nussbaum, who went by the stage name Traci Lords. Lords had begun her career as a nude model in 1984 and that same year she starred in her first porno film “What Gets Me Hot”, which was released in 1985, she went on to star in 107 films over the next two years. In 1987 it was discovered that she her real name was not Kristie Nussbaum, but Nora Louise Kuzma, and she was in fact only 15 years old when she began her career. The public outcry over the scandal caused millions of her videos to be forcibly removed from stores and destroyed often publicly. The public backlash caused Congress to get involved; working off the founding’s of the Meese Commission they began passing laws that would try to restrict the porn industry.

Simultaneously in California the courts were trying the case of Harold Freeman. In California v. Freeman the state tried to prove that the producer and director of pornographic films were guilty of pandering under state laws. It was an attempt to shut down the industry which was rapidly growing in the state. Although he was initially convicted, he appealed his case all the way to the California Supreme Court. The Supreme Court eventually overturned his conviction and effectively legalized hardcore pornography in California.  Prior to the case porn had often been filmed in secret locations, due to the ruling though porn was taken out of the shadows and cemented itself in southern California creating the now infamous “Porn Valley” in the San Fernando Valley area where 90% of all U.S. pornography is either filmed or owned by companies  operating from there.

The federal anti-porn crusade proved short-lived. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he and his attorney general, Janet Reno, had little interest in devoting attention and resources to new obscenity prosecutions (which declined dramatically during the first few years of the Clinton administration). The video-rental industry continued to boom throughout the Meese Commission years. Movie Gallery, the first major rental chain to carry adult videos, launched in 1985, with only five stores in 1987, expanded to 37 stores in 1992, and had 73 stores two years later—all the while continuing to carry adult product. The government’s campaign had virtually no impact on the consumer, when mail-order companies were driven out of business, the video companies expanded their mail-order business, and new companies came in to replace the old mail-order companies. Prosecuting porn would become even more problematic when the adult industries, and the would-be porn warriors, were overtaken by another set of new technologies: pay-per-view, satellite television, and then the Internet. Like video, pay-per-view and satellite offered consumers a new way to watch a wide variety of adult films on demand. Unlike video, though, you didn’t have to leave your home at all. I personally watched channels like American XXXstacy and Spice on my grandmother’s enormous yard satellite throughout the late eighties and early nineties. Though they began scrambling the reception around 1993 and you needed to buy illegal decoders to find the ever shifting signals. Then in came the Internet, and as it got cheaper, faster, and easier to use it further expanded the variety of and ease of access to porn. Both technologies were cheaper, safer, and even more anonymous than renting or purchasing videos, continually shrinking the distance between producers and consumers of adult material.

Just as it had with video, the porn industry quickly realized the possibilities of the internet. Firms that had grown big and profitable off of the home video boom such as Vivid Video, VCA Pictures, and even Playboy could repackage and resell their product almost endlessly and distribute it cheaply, via several media nationwide: rental and mail-order video, home and hotel pay-per-view, websites, porn magazines, and satellite TV. During the mid-1990s, they had begun to form partnerships with big mainstream firms like AT&T, Marriott, and even General Motors (which owns DirecTV). By the end of the 1990s, film produced by Vivid could be rented in a video store, bought through the mail, watched on the AT&T-owned Hot Network, or ordered in a hotel room. The ease of consumption made porn more popular and more profitable than ever. Between 1992 and 1999, pay-per-view revenues went from $54 million to $367 million according to research by Showtime Event Television. During 1998, the adult content market earned an estimated $1 billion. By 2001, the total was up to $14 billion bigger, than football, baseball, and basketball combined. With the birth of the World Wide Web in the mid 90’s,   pornography had gained a potent new medium. Back then porn was distributed via the Usenet newsgroups and the BBS Bulletin Board System.

 

As of 2004 approximately 347,000,000 web pages of pornography were created, compared with 62,900,000 political web pages; with the pornographic pages still growing. One of the biggest cultural changes in the United States over the past 25 years has been the widespread acceptance of sexually explicit material – pornography. Jenna Jameson is a household name, and Sasha Grey graces the cover of mainstream magazines. Beginning with the video boom pornography began to become more diverse for the first time small start-up companies where able to widely distribute to specific fetishes.  This expanded exponentially once the internet entered the picture. Every imaginable fetish culture was given its day and rival companies exploded to exploit each nitch market. This had a profound effect on the industry which saw its more straight-heterosexual companies take a serious loss. It paved the way for an invasion of sorts by European companies (mainly Eastern-European) to not only invested heavily in American porn, but they began importing their starlets and ways. It began as simply “gonzo” has moved into the most debasing hardcore extremes from the Old Country.

Now in doing my research for this article I could find nothing on this, but as someone whom has spent countless hours over the last 20 years watching porn I can attest to the facts I have witnessed with my own eyes. I distinctly recall reading about it in AVN many years ago, and now it seems to be erased from the history books. Though the evidence is there, not just the women imported from Prague and Hungary that litter the online porn I see daily, but the men as well. Most notably Manuel Ferrara and any of his boys, their thick Slavic accents barking order over the almost sad moans of the women they triple penetrate.   It’s actually almost frightening that I can’t find any information on what happened. I first noticed it at the turn of the new millennium. We first began seeing American stars making movies in Budapest and Hungary, then almost overnight the Eastern-European men began popping up in the valley. Now it seems they have completely dominated the landscape.  Where as in the  AIDs scare has caused more mainstream porn to institute condoms and veer away from more hard core acts like double and triple penetration, double anal, and double vaginal, the boys from across the pond openly and gleefully practice them exclusively. This has opened the door for a plethora of films that involve slapping, spitting and treating women as less than objects. Their behavior borders on BDSM without the costumes and props. While there has been many who have objected to this new direction it appears to be here to stay. Much like the Japanese Bukkake that has also had a profound effect on American porn.

Now more than ever, modern porn no longer has any borders or boundaries. From the cave paintings of old to the early stag films and bondage comics, the internet has eradicated the lines between localized tastes. The Europeans predisposition to group orgies and gangbangs are far more common to the American teen with internet access than in my day when the pages of Private magazine where a shock to my system. The infinite money to be made online and the ability for anyone with a camera to broadcast their sex lives has led to average people to display every twisted notion that comes to their mine. 50 men cum slams is no longer a joke. We live in an age, of Web cams and there is no telling where the future will take us. A Chinese company recently announced the production of the first 3D porn, bringing us closer to virtual sex technologies touted in the mid nineties.  Porn is now a $14 billion dollar global industry. The demand for those of us who are (at heart) voyeurs, to watch strangers engage in sexual acts will never go away. In fact as porn stars mingle evermore with mainstream stars and a generation grows up with porn only a mouse click away we can safely say that porn’s history has just begun.


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The History of Porn Part 2.

02/25/09


The History of Porn part 2

In the mid 1960s the first full color, high quality, pictures of explicit sex emerged out of Scandinavia. A colorful car salesman by the name of Berth Milton began publishing the infamous Private Magazine in 1965; it was the first periodical in the world to legally show sexual penetration. It at first began tamely, the first vagina did not appear until issue four, and the first man did not even appear until issue nine. Then the cum shot, heard round the world, came with issue 14 in the summer of 1968. By that time, the Danish capital of Ko had achieved international acknowledgment as the center of the world’s porn industry. Also in 1965, thirty-four-year old Robert Guccione, a Brooklyn-born artist and actor living in London, defied British censors to found Penthouse magazine. Four years later, after a great deal of difficulty in finding financial support and a distributor, Guccione launched the U.S. edition of the magazine as a rival to Playboy, which was already taking on the attitude of respectability. For years, "nudist" magazines like Jaybird had been going far further than Bob Guccione had dared to, while the homoerotic "physique" magazine publishers such like MANual Enterprises had already been winning court cases since the 1950s. The real outlaws, hippies and the homosexuals paved the way for the smut peddlers to take over. With the market, already saturated with girlie magazines, Guccione believed he had an ace up his sleeve: In April of 1970, Penthouse became the first American "men’s magazine" to show pubic hair.

It was the high quality Scandinavian stag films formed the transition to the full-blown adult feature. The acceptability of sex in art house films slowly increased throughout the 1960s, until the Motion Picture Association of America’s rating system was introduced replacing the old Hayes Code from the 1930s The Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), was seized by U.S. Customs in 1968, but was released in theaters the following year with the new X rating. The new ratings system legitimized the distribution of films that otherwise would not have been shown, and if anything, the X rating helped the movie’s box office receipts. I Am Curious grossed over $20 million in the United States, a huge take for a foreign film featuring endless discussion of Swedish politics interspersed with some simulated intercourse. The stag film and the art-house film intersected in Deep Throat, a full-length movie, shot on expensive thirty-five millimeter film, it had not only a plot and characters, but explicit sex as well. Deep Throat was shot in just six days on a budget of around $25,000. Though not the first such production, it was by far the most profitable. Deep Throat was one of the most profitable films of the 1970s, grossing $3.2 million by the end of 1972. It seemed for a while, that the success of Deep Throat and "porno chic" would create new possibilities for mainstream movies. In 1972, the New York Film Festival premiered Bernardo Bertolucci’s X-rated Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando and the openly bisexual, barely twenty-year-old Maria Schneider. However, the revolution never actually arrived; producing a film in the vein of Last Tango was not a risk that American filmmakers were willing to take.

While the ratings system had made owners more comfortable, it had no legal standing so far as the obscenity laws were concerned. In 1967, Denmark became the first Western country to rescind all laws against pornography. The decision made news around the world, especially when government statistics showed a decrease in sex crimes the year after the abolition. Alex deRenzy and a partner traveled to Copenhagen to film Denmark’s first sex fair and in 1969 they released the first feature film showing sexual intercourse called Censorship in Denmark. Made for $15,000, the documentary grossed $25,000 the first week on its way to an eventual box office of over $2 million. Documentaries first broke through the hardcore feature barrier in 1969 in San Francisco with Censorship in Denmark. Sexual Freedom in Denmark from LA’s John Lamb followed in 1970. In New York that same year, Gerard Damiano made SEX U.S.A. starring Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems. While Donn Greer’s film 101 Acts of Love gives the education approach. Alex deRenzy gathered classic stags into A History of the Blue Movie followed by Bill Osco’s inferior Hollywood Blue. The first advertised porn feature in the major New York newspapers was Mike Henderson’s Electro Sex ‘75 released on Labor Day weekend 1970. Freddy Hanson made Animal Lover in Denmark with a farm girl Bodille having sex with a dog, pig and horse.

New York’s (then) Mayor John Lindsay decided in late 1972, that it was time to once again clean up Times Square. Through academic endorsement, the porn film produced with $25,000 of Mafia money became high art. UCLA film professor and Saturday Review film critic Arthur Knight testified for the defense."This is one of the first sexploitation films to show that a woman’s sexual gratification is as important as a man’s." sex researcher John Money said that "It puts an eggbeater in people’s brains and enables them to think afresh about their attitudes and values". The court apparently agreed Judge Joel J. Tyler remarked: "It’s worthwhile to me, if nothing else happens, to have gotten this education,", after one witness had to explain to him exactly what the "missionary position" was. Prosecution witnesses included a retired psychologist Max Levin who said that the film’s "anatomical absurdity," distorted "the true nature of female sexuality," because "vaginal orgasm is superior to the clitoral." Worse than pointing out his adherence to outdated Freudian doctrine, Newsweek strongly implied that Dr. Levin, symbol of the, was senile. Dr. Levin, who was seventy-one and partially deaf, was excused from further testimony after it turned out that he had confused Deep Throat with some of the other short films that were shown with it. Another witness for the prosecution, named Ernest van den Haag a psychoanalyst, compared porn makers to Nazis, arguing that pornography caused progressive desensitization, “until one would be willing to put another person in a concentration camp or exploit his teeth and hair."

 

Judge Tyler sided with old school of morality, and declared on March 1, 1973 that Deep Throat was "the nadir of decadence" and fining the Mature World Theater $3 million. Though it was a hollow victory for censorship, the Hollywood establishment was afraid of the heat, Deep Throat’s box-office success had created an entire new shadow industry. Behind the Green Door, starring Marilyn Chambers, whose likeness had once adorned Ivory Soap boxes, which was received ardently at the Cannes Film Festival and went on to become the second highest-grossing pornographic movie of all time. Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano, meanwhile, achieved another success with The Devil in Mrs. Jones. Countless other films followed, beginning a "golden age of porn" that lasted until the 1980s, when the growing affordability of video-cassette players heralded the death of movies shot on film for theaters, and the rise of cheaply-produced videos.

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St. Valentines Day massacre

02/14/09

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via FoxyTunes    [close] Wikipedia Main Page | About | Help | FAQ | Special pages | Log out The Free Encyclopedia Languages: Deutsch | Español | Français | Bahasa Indonesia | Italiano | עברית | Nederlands | 日本語 | Русский | 中文 Categories: 1929 crimes | 1929 in the United States | Chicago Outfit | Deaths by firearm in Illinois | History of Chicago, Illinois | History of the United States (1918–1945) | Organized crime events | Prohibition | Unsolved murders | Crime in Chicago, Illinois | Murdered mobsters | Murder in Illinois Hidden categories: Articles that may contain original research since March 2008 | All articles that may contain original research | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2009 | Articles with unsourced statements since May 2008 Printable version | Disclaimers | Privacy policy Saint Valentine’s Day massacre From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia For other uses, see Saint Valentine’s Day massacre (disambiguation). This article may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (March 2008) Aftermath of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre The Saint Valentine’s Day massacre is the name given to the death of seven people as part of a Prohibition Era conflict between two powerful criminal gangs in Chicago, Illinois, in the winter of 1929: the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone and the North Side Irish gang led by Bugs Moran. Former members of the Egan’s Rats gang were also suspected to have played a large role in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, assisting Capone. Contents [hide] * 1 The Massacre * 2 The victims * 3 The investigation * 4 Aftermath * 5 The Bolton revelations * 6 Other suspects * 7 The murder weapons * 8 The crime scene and bricks from the murder wall * 9 Fictional depictions and allusions * 10 References * 11 External links [edit] The Massacre On the morning of Thursday, February 14, 1929 St. Valentine’s Day, six members of the "Bugs" Moran gang and Dr. Reinhardt H. Schwimmer were lined up against the rear inside wall of the garage of the SMC Cartage Company (2122 North Clark Street) in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side. They were then shot and killed by the men, possibly members of Capone’s gang, possibly "outside talent", most likely a combination of both. Two of the men were dressed as Chicago police officers, and the others were dressed in long trenchcoats, according to witnesses who saw the "police" leading the other men at gunpoint out of the garage (part of the plan). 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. The St. Valentine’s Massacre resulted from a plan devised by a member or members of the Capone gang to eliminate the Polish Bugs Moran, the boss of the North Side Gang, formerly headed up by Dion O’Banion, who was murdered nearly five years earlier. Jack McGurn is the person most frequently cited by researchers as a suspected planner. 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’s 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 plan the hits and the O’Banion’s gang demise. The plan was to lure Moran and his men to the SMC Cartage warehouse on North Clark Street. It is assumed usually that the North Side Gang was lured to the garage with the promise of a cut-rate shipment of bootleg whiskey, supplied by Detroit’s Purple Gang. However, some recent studies dispute this. All seven victims (with the exception of John May) were dressed in their best clothes, hardly suitable for unloading a large shipment of whiskey crates and driving it away. The real reason for the North Siders gathering in the garage may never be known for certain. A four-man team would then enter the building, two disguised as police officers, and kill Moran and his men. Before Moran and his men arrived, Capone stationed lookouts in the apartments across the street from the warehouse. Wishing to keep the lookouts inconspicuous, Capone had hired two unrecognizable thugs to stand watch in rented rooms across the street from the garage. At around 10:30 a.m. on St. Valentine’s day, four men arrived at the warehouse in two cars: a Cadillac sedan and a Peerless, both outfitted to look like detective sedans. Two men were dressed in police uniforms and two in street clothes. The Moran gang had already arrived at the warehouse. However, Moran himself was not inside. One account states that Moran was supposedly approaching the warehouse, spotted the police car, and fled the scene. Another account was that Moran was simply late getting there. The lookouts allegedly confused one of Moran’s men (most likely Albert Weinshank, who was the same height, build and even physically resembled Moran) for Moran himself: he then signaled for the gunmen to enter the warehouse. The two phony police, carrying shotguns, exited the Peerless and entered the warehouse through the two rear doors. Inside they found members of Moran’s gang, a sixth man named Reinhart Schwimmer who was not actually a gangster, but more of a gang "hanger-on" and a seventh man, John May, who was a mechanic fixing one of the cars, and technically not a member of the gang, but an occasionally hired mechanic. The killers told the seven men to line up facing the back wall. There was apparently not any resistance, as the Moran men thought their captors were real police, and it was likely a "show" bust merely to garner good press for the police department. Then the two "police officers" let in two men through the front door facing Clark Street. This pair, riding in the Cadillac, were dressed in civilian clothes. Two of the killers started shooting with Thompson sub-machine guns, one containing a 20-round magazine and the other a 50-round drum. All seven men were killed in a volley of seventy machine-gun bullets and two shotgun blasts according to the coroner’s report. To show bystanders that everything was under control, the men in street clothes came out with their hands up, prodded by the two uniformed cops. The only survivor in the warehouse was John May’s German Shepherd, Highball. When the real police arrived, they first heard the dog howling. On entering the warehouse, they found the dog trapped under a beer truck and the floor covered with blood, shell casings, and corpses. Photographs of the scene were taken immediately after the shooting by Jun Fujita and published in the Chicago Daily News. [edit] The victims The seven men killed that morning were: * Peter Gusenberg, a front line enforcer for the Moran organization. * Frank Gusenberg, the brother of Peter Gusenberg and also an enforcer. Frank was miraculously still alive when police first arrived on the scene. He died three hours later, saying only, "Nobody shot me." * Albert Kachellek, alias "James Clark", Moran’s second-in-command. * Adam Heyer, the bookkeeper and business manager of the Moran gang. * Reinhart Schwimmer, an optician who had abandoned his practice to gamble on horse racing (unsuccessfully) and associate with the Moran gang. He would, in contemporary parlance, be referred to as a "gang groupie". Though Schwimmer called himself an "optometrist" he was actually an optician (an eyeglass fitter) and he had no medical training. * Albert Weinshank, who managed several cleaning and dyeing operations for Moran. His physical and even clothing resemblance to Moran is what allegedly set the massacre in motion before Moran actually arrived. * John May, an occasional car mechanic for the Moran gang, though not a gang member himself. May had two earlier arrests for safeblowing (no convictions) but was attempting to work legally. However, his desperate need of cash, with a wife and seven children, caused him to accept jobs with the Moran gang as a mechanic. [edit] The investigation The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time. At first, it was thought that police may have indeed been responsible for the killings, but 255 detectives were soon cleared. Chicago Police scrambled to figure out who had been responsible. Since it was common knowledge that Moran was hijacking Capone’s Detroit-based liquor shipments, police focused their attention on the Purple Gang. Mug shots of Purple members George Lewis, Eddie Fletcher, Phil Keywell and his kid brother Harry, were picked out by the landlady across the street as the phony roomers. Later, the women who identified them wavered, and, Fletcher, Lewis, and Harry Keywell were all questioned and cleared by Chicago Police. Nevertheless, the Keywell brothers (and by extension the Purple Gang) would remain ensnared in the massacre case for all time. A week after the massacre, a 1927 Cadillac sedan was found disassembled and partially burned in a garage on Wood Street. It was determined that the car was used by the massacre killers. The garage was located two blocks from the Circus Café, which was operated by Claude Maddox, a former St. Louis gangster and member of the Capone mob. Detectives checking leads in St. Louis discovered that former members of the Egan’s Rats mob may have played a part. They soon announced they were seeking Fred "Killer" Burke and James Ray as the two uniformed police officers in the garage. Burke and other members of the mob had been known to use police uniforms to lull victims. Police also proposed that Joseph Lolordo may have been one of the machine gunners, mostly likely because his brother Pasqualino had recently been murdered by the North Side Gang. Police also announced they suspected Capone gunmen John Scalise and Albert Anselmi, as well as Jack McGurn himself, and Frank Rio, a Capone bodyguard. Police eventually charged McGurn and Scalise with the massacre. John Scalise was murdered before he went to trial and the charges against Jack McGurn were downgraded to a violation of the Mann Act, stemming from taking the main witness against him, girlfriend Louise Rolfe (who became known as the "Blonde Alibi"), across state lines to marry. The case stagnated until December 14, 1929, when Berrien County sheriffs raided the St. Joseph, Michigan bungalow of “Frederick Dane”. Dane had been the registered owner of a vehicle driven by Fred "Killer" Burke. Burke had been drinking and rear-ended another vehicle in front of the police station. Officer Charles Skelly ran outside to investigate. When Burke attempted to drive away, Officer Skelly hopped on the running board and was shot off. He died of his wounds a short time later. When police raided Burke’s bungalow, they found a bulletproof vest, bonds recently stolen from a Wisconsin bank, two Thompson submachine guns, pistols, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Both machine guns were determined to have been used in the massacre. Unfortunately, no further concrete evidence would surface in the massacre case. Burke would be captured over a year later on a Missouri farm. As the case against him in the murder of Officer Skelly was strongest, he was tried in Michigan and would be sentenced to life imprisonment. Fred Burke died in prison in 1940. [edit] Aftermath Public outrage over The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre marked the beginning of the end to Moran’s power. Although Moran suffered a heavy blow, he still managed to keep control of his territory until the early 1930s, when control passed to the Chicago Outfit under Frank Nitti. The massacre also brought the belated attention of the federal government to bear on Capone and his criminal activities. In 1931, Capone was convicted of income tax evasion and was imprisoned for 11 years. The massacre ultimately affected both Moran and Capone and left the war they had with each other a stalemate. The massacre did severely cripple the North Side gang, a blow from which they never fully recovered. But the primary target of the massacre, Moran, escaped, and the public and police pressure brought to bear on the Capone organization hampered their operation almost as badly. Though Jack McGurn would beat the massacre charges, he would be murdered himself on February 15, 1936. The two most widely accepted theories credit either Bugs Moran or the Chicago Outfit itself under Frank Nitti with the killing, as McGurn had become a public relations liability to the Outfit. [edit] The Bolton revelations On January 8, 1935, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents surrounded a Chicago apartment building at 3920 North Pine Grove, looking for the remaining members of the Barker-Karpis Gang. A brief shootout erupted, resulting in the death of bank robber Russell Gibson. Also taken into custody were Doc Barker, Byron Bolton and two women. When agents began interrogating the two men, they got nothing of value from Dock Barker, but Bolton (a hitherto obscure criminal) proved to be a “geyser of information” as one crime historian put it. A former Navy machine gunner and member of the old Egan’s Rats gang, Bolton had for years been the valet and sidekick of a slick Chicago hit man named Fred Goetz, who was also known as “Shotgun George” Ziegler. Byron had been party to many of the Barker Gang’s crimes, and even pinpointed the Florida hideout of Ma and Freddie Barker (who were killed in a shootout with the FBI a week later). Bolton kept on talking, and to the agents’ surprise, claimed to have taken part in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre with his pal Goetz, Fred Burke, and several others. The FBI (having no jurisdiction in a state murder case) attempted to keep Bolton’s revelations confidential, until the Chicago American newspaper somehow got their hands on a second-hand version of the bank robber’s confession. The newspaper declared that the crime had been “solved”, despite being stonewalled by J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau, who did not want any part of the massacre case. Garbled versions of Bolton’s story went out in the national media. Pieced together, his tale went like this: Bolton claimed that the murder of Bugs Moran had been plotted in “October or November” 1928 at a Couderay, Wisconsin resort owned by Fred Goetz. Present at this meet were Goetz, Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Fred Burke, Gus Winkeler, Louis Campagna, Daniel Serritella, and William Pacelli. The men stayed two or three weeks, hunting and fishing when they weren’t planning the murder of their rival. Byron Bolton claimed he and Jimmy Moran (or Morand) were charged with watching the S.M.C. Cartage garage and phoning the signal to the killers at the Circus Café when Moran arrived at the meet. Police had indeed found a letter addressed to Bolton in the lookout nest (and possibly a vial of prescription medicine.) Bolton guessed that the actual killers had been Burke, Winkeler, Goetz, Bob Carey, Raymond Nugent, and Claude Maddox (four shooters and two getaway drivers). Bolton gave an account of the massacre different from the one generally told by historians. He claimed that he saw only “plainclothes” men exit the Cadillac and go into the garage. This indicates that a second car was used by the killers. One witness, George Brichet, claimed to have seen at least two uniformed men exiting a car in the alley and entering the garage through its rear doors. A Peerless sedan had been found near a Maywood house owned by Claude Maddox in the days after the massacre, and in one of the pockets was an address book belonging to victim Albert Weinshank. Bolton’s mistake was when he mistook one of Moran’s men for the man himself, after which he telephoned the signal to the Circus Café. When the killers (who had expected to kill Moran and maybe two or three of his men) were unexpectedly confronted with seven men, they simply decided to kill them all and get out fast. Bolton claimed that Capone was furious with him for his mistake (and the resulting police pressure) and threatened to kill him, only to be dissuaded by Fred Goetz. His claims were corroborated by Gus Winkeler’s widow Georgette, in both an official FBI statement and her memoirs, which were published in a four-part series in a true detective magazine during the winter of 1935-36. Mrs. Winkeler revealed that her husband and his pals had formed a special crew used by Capone for high-risk jobs. The mob boss was said to have trusted them implicitly and nicknamed them the “American Boys”. Byron Bolton’s statements were also backed up by William Drury, a maverick Chicago detective who had stayed on the massacre case long after everyone else had given up. Bank robber Alvin Karpis later claimed to have heard second-hand from Ray Nugent about the massacre and that the “American Boys” were paid a collective salary of $2,000 a week plus bonuses. Karpis also claimed that Capone himself told him while they in Alcatraz together that Goetz had been the actual planner of the massacre. Despite Byron Bolton’s statements, no action was taken by the FBI. All the men he named, with the exceptions of Burke and Maddox, were all dead by 1935. Bank robber Harvey Bailey would later complain in his 1973 autobiography that he and Fred Burke had been drinking beer in Calumet City at the time of the massacre, and the resulting heat forced them to abandon their bank robbing ventures. Claude Maddox was questioned fruitlessly by Chicago Police, and there the matter lay. Crime historians are still divided on whether or not the “American Boys” committed the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. [edit] Other suspects Over the years, many mobsters, in and out of Chicago, would be named as part of the Valentine’s Day hit team. Two prime suspects are Capone hit men John Scalise and Albert Anselmi; both men were lethal killers and are frequently mentioned as possibilities for two of the shooters. In the days after the massacre, Scalise was heard to brag, “I am the most powerful man in Chicago.” He had recently been elevated to the position of vice-president in the Unione Siciliana by its president, Joseph Guinta. Nevertheless, Scalise, Anselmi, and Guinta would be found dead on a lonely road near Hammond, Indiana on May 8, 1929. Gangland lore has it that Al Capone had discovered that the pair was planning on betraying him. At the climax of a dinner party thrown in their honor, Capone produced a baseball bat and beat the trio to death. One recent addition to the roll of suspects is Tony Accardo, then a twenty-two year old gangster and driver for Jack McGurn. Many years later, Accardo would boast to his fellow gangsters that he had taken part (FBI agent William Roemer overheard him on a wiretap.) Most historians believe that while Accardo may have played a peripheral role in the murders, he was probably not one of the actual shooters. Another suspect was future mob boss Sam Giancana, then a twenty-year old member of the 42 Gang. Giancana was arrested in the days after the massacre on a charge of general investigation, and most familiar with the case don’t believe he played a major role. New York mob informant Dominick Montiglio would later claim in the book Murder Machine that his uncle Anthony ‘Nino’ Gaggi, intimated that his uncle Frank Scalise had been one of the killers in the massacre. While not likely, this shows how the massacre continues to capitivate people to this day. Some people today speculate that perhaps Capone really was innocent after all. Maybe it was a bunch of crooked cops or an internal beef amongst the Moran Gang. One historian suspects a bunch of "hillbilly gangsters."[citation needed] The true identities of the shooters may never be known with certainty. [edit] The murder weapons The two Thompson submachine guns (serial numbers 2347 and 7580) found in Fred Dane’s (an alias for Fred Burke) Michigan bungalow were personally driven to the Chicago coroner’s office by the Berrien County DA. Ballistic expert Calvin Goddard tested the weapons and determined that both had been used in the massacre. One of them had also been used in the murder of Brooklyn mob boss Frankie Yale, which confirmed the NYPD’s long-held theory that Burke, and by extension Al Capone, had been responsible for Yale’s death. Gun No. 2347 had been originally purchased on November 12, 1924 by Les Farmer, a deputy sheriff in Marion, Illinois, which happened to be the seat of Williamson County. Marion and the surrounding area were then overrun by the warring bootleg factions of the Shelton brothers and Charlie Birger. Deputy Farmer was documented as having ties with the Egan’s Rats gang, based 100 miles away in St. Louis. By the beginning of 1927 at the very latest, the weapon had wound up in Fred Burke’s possession. It’s possible he used this same Tommygun in Detroit’s Milaflores Massacre on March 28, 1927. Gun No. 7580 had been sold by Chicago sporting goods owner Peter von Frantzius to a Victor Thompson (aka Frank V. Thompson) in the care of the Fox Hotel of Elgin, Illinois. Some time after the purchase the machine gun wound up with James "Bozo" Shupe, a small-time hood from Chicago’s West Side who had ties to various members of Capone’s Outfit. Both submachine guns are currently in the possession of the Berrien County Sheriff’s Department in St. Joseph, Michigan. [edit] The crime scene and bricks from the murder wall The garage, which stood at 2122 N. Clark Street, was demolished in 1967; the site is now a landscaped parking lot for a nursing home. There is still controversy over the actual bricks used to build the north inside wall of the building where the mobsters were lined up and shot. They were claimed to be responsible, according to stories, for bringing financial ruin, illness, bad luck and death to anyone who bought them.[1] The bricks from the bullet-marked inside North wall were purchased and saved by Canadian businessman George Patey in 1967.[citation needed] His original intention was to use it in a restaurant that he represented, but the restaurant’s owner didn’t go for the idea. Patey ended up buying the bricks himself, outbidding three or four others. Patey had the wall painstakingly taken apart and had each of the 414 bricks numbered, then shipped them back to Canada. There are various different reports about what George Patey did with the bricks after he got them. In 1978, Time Magazine reported that Patey reassembled the wall and put it on display in a wax museum with gun-wielding gangsters shooting each other in front of it to the accompaniment of recorded bangs. The wax museum later went bankrupt. Another source, an independent newspaper in the UK, reported in February 2000 that the wall toured shopping malls and exhibitions in the United States for a couple of decades. In 1968 Patey stopped exhibiting the bricks and put them into retirement. Patey opened a nightclub called the Banjo Palace in 1971. It had a Roaring Twenties theme. The famous bricks were installed inside the men’s washroom with Plexiglas placed right in front of it to shield it, so that patrons could urinate and try to hit the targets painted on the Plexiglas. In a 2001 interview with an Argentinian journalist, Patey said, "I had the most popular club in the city. People came from high society and entertainment, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum." The bricks were placed in storage until 1997 when Patey tried to auction them off on a website called Jet Set On The Net. The deal fell through after a hard time with the auction company. In 1999, Patey tried to sell them brick by brick on his own website. The last known substantial offer for the entire wall was made by a Las Vegas casino but Patey refused the $175,000 offer.[citation needed] Patey died on December 26, 2004, having never revealed how much he paid to buy the bricks at auction. [edit] Fictional depictions and allusions * The massacre was used as a plot device in the 1959 film Some Like it Hot and was the subject of Roger Corman’s 1967 film The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. This film, possibly the most well-known of all portrayals of the incident, is a mixture of solid historical facts and absolute fiction. * The massacre is also featured in a scene from the original Scarface. * In the "Diamond Brothers" book "Public Enemy Number Two" by Anthony Horowitz, the antagonist Johnny Powers is talking about how his mother (a criminal) makes good cooking, for instance moussakas. Johnny says she "sent him one back in February", to which Nick Diamond replies "The St Valentine’s day moussaka?" * The TV series Early Edition included a final season episode named “Everybody Goes to Rick’s” whose story was based around this event. * Ska artist Mark Foggo made an album and a song called "St Valentines Massacre" * It also inspired the song "Valentine’s Day" by singer/song-writer James Taylor and rapper 50 Cent’s 2005 album The Massacre. * It also gave its name to WWF St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, a pay per view event held in 1999. * In an episode of The Simpsons (Bart the Murderer) aired October 10, 1991, there is a reference to the massacre when Bart shows Fat Tony an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon where Itchy lines up a bunch of cats in front of a wall and shoots them with a machine gun. Fat Tony then replies (laughing) "It’s funny because it’s true." And the character of Johnny Tightlips, who hardly gives any information to anyone, even his own gang, is based on Frank Gusenberg. His catchphrase is "I ain’t sayin’ nothin’," which he says even after he has been shot by a stray bullet, and was asked where it hit. * In an episode of the TV show MAS*H, the staff of the 4077th are trying to pick a date that their families can get together for a party back home. BJ Hunnicutt suggests Valentine’s Day and Dr. Charles Emerson Winchester sarcastically replies: "Perfect, they can meet in a garage in Chicago!" * The 1991 movie Oscar, starring Sylvester Stallone, includes a reference to the massacre as well. Stallone plays "Snaps" Provolone, a prominent gangster in Chicago in 1931. In a scene early in the movie, his accountant reminds him, "You were in Chicago… It was Saint Valentine’s Day," at which Stallone and one of his goons exchange a knowing smile and a chuckle. * The nickname of the "St. Valentine’s Day massacre" has also been used to refer to the sixth, and final match-up, between boxers Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta. This is due to the fact that it took place on Valentine’s Day in 1951, and because of the beating that LaMotta took, which caused the fight to be stopped in the 13th round. * In the web comic Sluggy Freelance, a Valentines Day card is given to Zoe that says "Happy Saint Valentines Day… Massacre!" The card also has a depiction of bun-bun with a machine gun and several blood stains on a brick wall. * In a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, Hobbes teases Calvin about liking Suzie while Suzie walks up and yells at Calvin for sending her a mean Valentine. Calvin says, "I’d say we’re about due for another Saint Valentine’s Day massacre." * Wu-Tang Associate/Rapper Cilvaringz has a song called "Valentine’s Day Massacre". * In an episode of The Golden Girls titled "Valentine’s Day", Sophia recalls a Valentine’s Day spent with her husband and father while on a road trip in 1929. While in Chicago their car breaks down right before the massacre. The mechanic killed in the massacre is shown lending his tools to Sophia’s husband. * At the Disney’s Hollywood Studios’ Great Movie Ride attraction a set of the ride is Chicago in the 1920s where a shootout takes place. One of the gangster’s cars has a license plate of 021429, the date of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. * Since 1963, an annual route-finding contest played out entirely on Rand McNally Road Atlases is called the St Valentine’s Day Massacre, as entrants must register by February 14.[2] * 50 Cent’s second major label album "The Massacre" was initially titled "The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre". * Bungie is releasing a Valentine’s day hopper (In matchmaking) for Halo 3 called "Valentine’s Day Massacre". * Nike recently released a skateboarding shoe designed by Paul Rodriguez titled "Valentine’s day Massacre" * An annual golfing fixture played between the American Golf Association (AGA) Delhi and the British Golf Society (BGS) Delhi is called the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. * "Valentine’s Day Massacre" is the title of a song by Rustic Overtones featuring Imogen Heap on the album Viva Nueva. * The upcoming movie The Untouchables: Capone Rising will feature a heavily fictionalised version of the massacre, with fictional police detective Jim Malone (played by Sean Connery in the original movie and by Gerard Butler in the prequel) leading the Irish Gangsters against Al Capone in revenge for Capone killing a witness he had promised not to harm. * "The St. Valentines Day Massacre" is a song by Starling Electric off their 2005 album Clouded Staircase. [edit] References 1. The St. Valentine’S Day Massacre 2. Old Maltese’s Competitions: Massacre, Trophy Dash, Almaniac, and Fireworks 3. The Chicago Shimpo newspaper, The Chicago Japanese American News, Friday, October 10, 2008 volume 6732 page 7. * Helmer, William and Arthur J. Bilek. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre: The Untold Story Of The Bloodbath That Brought Down Al Capone Nashville: Cumberland House, 2004. [edit] External links * Haunted Chicago * Mystery.net * FBI file * FBI file * Mario Gomes Capone Museum * MisterCapone.com. Official Site of Mr. Capone author, Robert J. 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