Crime Stories of the Century
The awful acts of the past 100 years forced America to look at itself in the mirror
It was never clear that his union membership played a role in his conviction, but the IWW turned Hill into a martyr for the cause. Messages of support poured in from around the world. Even President Woodrow Wilson asked that Hill be spared--to no avail. On Nov. 19, 1915, Joe Hill was shot in the heart by a five-man firing squad. Just before his execution, Hill wrote to union leader Big Bill Haywood: "Don't waste any time mourning--organize!"
Haywood knew a thing or two about organizing--and about trouble. In 1907, he was tried for allegedly having ordered the assassination of former Idaho Gov. Frank Steunenberg, who was despised by labor for having called in federal troops to quell union violence. Steunenberg was blown to bits by a bomb. Haywood was acquitted of the crime after his lawyer, Clarence Darrow, delivered an 11-hour closing argument that left some in the courtroom weeping.
In the end, though, it was the itinerant songwriter, not the flamboyant union boss, who was most remembered. In 1925, a young poet named Alfred Hayes wrote the ballad, "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night." It became a classic, popularized by Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.
THE 1920S
St. Valentine's Day Massacre
On the morning of Feb. 14, 1929, neighbors heard loud blasts coming from a garage at 2122 N. Clark Street in Chicago. They thought it was construction drilling. When Highball, the German shepherd inside the garage, barked mournfully, a neighbor went to investigate. "The place is full of dead men!" the man cried. Thus was discovered what forever after would be known as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
The garage was the headquarters of George "Bugs" Moran. It was there, during Prohibition, that the gangster received crates of illegal hooch, doling it out to speak-easies around the Windy City. Moran wasn't in the garage when the bullets started to fly, but afterward, when he was asked who had ordered the hit, he yelled: "Only Capone kills like that!"
By then, Al Capone had eliminated almost all his rivals, except his archenemy Moran. The feud between the two was mortal. Moran once tried to knock off Capone by slipping prussic acid into his soup.
It was personal, but it was also about money--big money. Prohibition began on Jan. 16, 1920. Banning booze, it was believed, would cure all the country's social ills. Many Americans didn't see it that way, and they turned to sipping bathtub gin and frequenting speak-easies. People hid liquor in hip flasks, fake books, and hollow canes, and beneath babies in carriages. Some 200,000 speak-easies sprouted across the nation, requiring huge bootleg operations.
That's where Capone came in. A sixth-grade dropout who once beat up his teacher, he became the nation's most notorious gangster, with an army of maybe a thousand henchmen. Nicknamed "Scarface" after his left cheek was slashed in a fight over a girl, Capone once boasted: "I own the police!"
He wasn't kidding. On that fateful Valentine's Day, author Jay Robert Nash says, Capone's men, some dressed as cops, staged a bogus police raid on Bugs Moran's garage. "I'm gonna send Moran a Valentine he will never forget," Capone reportedly vowed. And he did. There were seven men in the garage at 10:30 that morning. Capone's boys lined them up against a wall. Evidently thinking the "police" were about to search them, the men complied. Capone's soldiers opened up with submachine guns.
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