On February 14, 1929, in Chicago, seven members of the Bugs Moran Northside gang were gunned down by Al Capone’s Southside gang in a crime that would forever become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The garage on Clark Street was demolished in 1967. The bricks from the wall against which the gangsters died were bought by a Canadian businessman from Vancouver, British Columbia. His name was George Patey.
Patey (1927-2004) was a born entertainer, first as a dancer, then as a magician, actor, and promoter of shows including the Haunted House at the Pacific National Exhibition, and traveling storybook caravans (Pinocchio, Alice in Wonderland) set up in shopping centers throughout North America. He worked with stars like Marilyn Monroe, Milton Berle, Lena Horne, Mitzi Gaynor, and the Royal Family. While critics chided him as a trust fund baby a few bricks shy of a full load, no one could deny that Patey had style.
While the building’s history was detailed in Part 1 of this story, there was one creepy detail I neglected to add. The February 16, 1939 Chicago Tribune ran a photo of Steve Nelson, nightman of the Anaconda Van Lines storage company. Nelson slept at 2122 North Clark street with the headboard of his bed against the massacre wall. Nelson reported that there were no ghosts attached to the wall. According to police records, 25 jacket fragments and 22 bullet cores were found on the floor near the bodies, most after having passed through the bodies and hitting the wall.
Thirty-eight years after the massacre, Patey bought the 6’ x 10’ section consisting of 417 bricks, some of which still contained slugs fired during the massacre, for an undisclosed price. In February of 1970, the Montreal Gazette quoted the vice-president of the wrecking company, “It was a considerable amount of money. After all, this thing is like a Rembrandt.” A 1983 Chicago Tribune article quoted Patey as saying he “paid several thousand dollars for it” and when pressed for a specific figure, Patey admitted that he paid “$1,000 more than the highest bidder.” According to Patey offers quickly rolled in to buy individual bricks for $1,000 each or the whole lot for $25,000. While Patey declared the bricks as construction material at a few pennies apiece, the news coverage uncovered that deal and Canadian customs officials charged the entrepreneur 37% duty.
In 1978 Patey told Time magazine that he had each brick “wrapped like fine china” and transported to the great white north “in seven barrels accompanied by an affidavit from the demolition company vouching for their legitimacy” for display at the Pacific National Exhibition. Before Patey could claim his bricks, Chicago detectives removed the remaining bullets and shrapnel from the wall on Halloween night, October 31, 1967. After all, the crime remains unsolved and there is no statute of limitations for murder.
The wall was irregular as many bricks broke apart during the fire-fight, leaving empty gaps on the sides resulting in a zig-zag effect. The common wall was shared by the Schneider dry cleaners next door. The row of bricks touching the floor was destroyed during demolition. Only seven of the bricks were hit by shrapnel from the estimated 72 shots fired (most of the executioner’s bullets hit their targets).
After the sale in 1967, the bricks were lettered and numbered. A hastily drawn onion skin diagram was given to Patey by the demolition crew so that he could “accurately” reconstruct the wall. How accurate that diagram was remained an open question, especially after it was revealed that several of the bricks were pried out and carried away over the years.
One of those bullet-scarred bricks was sold on eBay years ago for $3,000. This brick was removed by a collector who visited the Werner storage company at 2122 North Clark Street and pleaded with Mrs. Werner to sell him one. The collector even photographed its removal. Legend states that actor George Segal, who portrayed gangster (and victim) Pete Gusenberg in the 1967 eponymous movie about the massacre, removed one himself and displayed it in his Santa Rosa, California home until his death in March of 2021. Still another unconfirmed rumor states that Al Capone’s brother Ralph, a.k.a. “Bottles” (who died in 1974), had a brick over his mantelpiece in his Mercer, Wisconsin home.
While Patey’s display at Canada’s Pacific National Exhibition was successful, protestors demanded that the word “Massacre” be stricken from the exhibit. “We took in more money than any other show,” Patey claimed. Undeterred, George followed that up with public displays in traveling crime shows at shopping malls. Patey tricked out a trailer with the artifact he now called “Al Capone’s Famous Wall” in a trailer rigged with seating for 60. He built a diorama around it which included hitmen and machine guns, piped-in sound effects, and charged a modest admission fee for the creation he billed as an “anti-crime monument.”
Unfortunately, the exhibit opened on June 6, 1968, the same day that Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, and just weeks after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The public’s appetite for gun violence was nonexistent. In Vancouver, where Patey placed the bricks on display at a shopping mall, 300 ladies called every store in the center to protest what they considered a glorification of violence, threatening to picket the stores and cancel their credit cards. Patey was forced to remove his mall display.
When Patey told reporters that he would simply take his bricks home to decorate the den of his Beach Avenue penthouse, Esquire Magazine awarded him its combined “House Beautiful/American Home Award” for home decorating and the domestic arts. To add injury to insult, the magazine purposely misspelled his name. By the spring of 1969, Patey rented a storefront in downtown Vancouver and opened a crime museum. Turned out that the ticket-buying public was not thrilled about paying an admission fee to view the erstwhile brick albatross. Patey might as well have been selling advertising on an iceberg. He closed his museum after only a few months and moved his precious pile of bricks back home again.
In 1971, Patey opened a Roaring Twenties-themed nightclub called the Banjo Palace at 157 Alexander Street in the Gastown section of Vancouver. In the men’s restroom of his nightclub, Patey painstakingly re-reconstructed the Massacre’s wall as a backsplash for the urinals, inviting patrons to try and hit targets by urinating on the plexiglass covered bricks. A large sign above the bricks encouraged patrons to “Pee on it. It’s history down the drain!” Fake blood stains dotted the reconstructed wall to delineate where the blood once was, fake sirens and machine-gun sound effects rewarded those who hit the targets. A bullseye would set in motion puppets and animated figures amid a shower of fountains and waterfalls. How could you resist not taking a turn?
For the sake of fairness, every Monday and Tuesday on “Ladies Night” at the bar, women were invited in to view the famous wall. According to Patey, that didn’t stop them, “on some nights the women got so excited about seeing the wall that they went right in there while the men were using it.” The bar featured Canada’s largest circular barbecue, closed in 1976. “It was a fun place, but we never made a profit; so after about four or five years I closed it down,” Patey stated.
The bricks were placed in cold storage in a warehouse for a year before Patey moved them into his home to keep a closer eye on them. This time, Patey re-re-reassembled the bricks in his penthouse den, added a mantel, and surrounded it with gangster memorabilia: two replica Thompson submachine guns, two sawed-off shotguns (replicas of course), photographs, newspaper clippings, slides, a staged tape recording of the event and a documentary recreating the massacre.
In 1982, Sault Ste. Marie Ontario Star reporter Bruce Levett revealed that Patey was offering his ghastly pile of bricks for sale at $25,000, a price that included his personal memorabilia display. But there were no takers. “Not all the bricks are salable,” Patey told Levett, “Some are broken. The rest are chipped or cracked. Only about 307 (out of 417) are in shape to be sold. And of those, only one has a genuinely certifiable .45 caliber hole in it.” And that one was not for sale. Ever the showman, when it was revealed that some of the bricks had disappeared from the wall before his retrieval, Patey told reporters, “Seven men were lined up against the wall and shot to death; when the wall was torn down it fit nicely into just seven barrels, and exactly just seven bricks are missing.”
Patey also told reporters that he had “14 or 15 hard offers” including “nibbles” from all across England, Canada, and the United States, but “none from Chicago.” He boasted of interest from a “major” television company shooting a “Crime in America” documentary who wanted to “shoot it” before it disappeared forever. In 1996, the Vancouver Sun called the bricks “the greatest knickknack and conversation piece in the world.” Patey announced plans to auction his bricks off on a Web site called Jet Set on the Net. Starting bid: $200,000.
Strangely during this time, the usual media-savvy Patey refused to speak to the press about the sale. Instead referring all inquiries to a business associate named Bill Eliason. The bricks were listed for sale in the financial pages of the Chicago Tribune on St. Valentine’s Day. The deal with the auction company fell through (likely because Patey didn’t like being out of the limelight) and he decided to sell them individually on his own personal Web site. Patey was once again center-stage telling reporters, “There is only one Great Wall of China. Only One Berlin Wall. Only one Wailing Wall. And only one St. Valentine’s Day Massacre Wall.”
Patey placed an engraved brass plaque on each brick explaining the significance. Each brick came in a display case with an audio cassette featuring a dramatic reconstruction of the crime. On February 12, 2002, Patey told syndicated columnist Dave Rasdal that he had 417 bricks, each priced at $750 apiece. Two years later, Patey told a Chicago AP reporter that he had 400 bricks left “priced at $800 each.” Patey added, “I have sold them to a variety of people, including a mobster and a doctor who wanted to use one in a DNA experiment.”
Like all bricks, the St. Valentine’s bricks were made from clay dug from the surrounding area. That clay contained ash, debris, and char remainders of the burned-out buildings from the great Chicago fire, most of which were dumped in the Chicago River. The bricks retained a yellowed whitewash hue caused by layers of chalky plaster applied to the wall as concealment by previous owners. The wall was plastered over in the late 30′s early 40′s to dissuade curiosity seekers and to hide any gruesome reminders of what happened there. Likewise, the building site has been similarly “whitewashed” over time. These days the site in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood once home to the S.M.C. Cartage Company garage at 2122 North Clark street has vanished. It is now an empty green space populated by a few lonely trees and a wrought-iron fence beside a nursing home’s parking lot.
At 5:09 a.m. on December 26, 2004, brick owner George Patey died of a heart attack while on holiday at the Hawaiiana Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii. The remaining bricks were awarded to his niece in Las Vegas in George’s will. After unsuccessfully trying to auction them herself on eBay, she ended up selling them to the Las Vegas Mob Museum. The museum claimed they bought 331 bricks for $300,000. Which means they paid $906 per brick. It also means that there are 86 bricks held in private collections.
The museum, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, opened on February 14, 2012. It is housed in the former Las Vegas Post Office and Courthouse on Stewart Avenue. Built in 1933, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and is located two blocks from Fremont Street, the heart of the downtown casino district affectionately known as “Glitter Gulch.” Along with the wall, the museum has original bullets, shrapnel fragments, cartridges, and coroner’s reports from the Massacre. Today, the wall stands 6 by 10 feet with 324 bricks on display and an additional seven bricks held in storage. George Patey would smile at the thought of those seven secreted bricks. Tickets to see George’s wall range from $29.95 to $48.95. George would smile at that too.
Al Hunter is the author of the “Haunted Indianapolis” and co-author of the “Haunted Irvington” and “Indiana National Road” book series. His newest books are “Bumps in the Night. Stories from the Weekly View,” “Irvington Haunts. The Tour Guide,” and “The Mystery of the H.H. Holmes Collection.” Contact Al directly at Huntvault@aol.com or become a friend on Facebook.
