Today’s word of the day, thanks to wordsmith.org, is testudinal. According to the website, this adjective can mean slow, arched, or old, and that is comes from the Latin testudo, meaning “tortoise,” and entered the language in 1823 (https://wordsmith.org/words/today.html). Dictionary.com defines it as “pertaining to or resembling a tortoise or tortoise shell” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/testudinal). It also gives an etymology: “1815–25; <Latin testūdin– (stem of testūdō) tortoise (see testudo) + -al).

Etymonline.com does not give an etymology for this word, which perhaps says how unusual the word is.

Today is, of course, St. Valentine’s Day, and you might think that I plan on talking about St. Valentine and who he really was, or maybe about love, or something like that, but, alas, no. On this day in 1929, seven members of the North Side Gang in Chicago were gunned down by members of the Chicago Outfit.

Here’s the background. Organized crime has been a problem in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century at least. Early on, such gangs were mostly associated with things like train robberies or coach robberies and occurred in the Wild West. We associate names like Jesse James and Billy the Kid with such gangs. But there were organized groups of criminals in the cities as well, though they were not that well known (other than the politicians).

Then in 1920, Prohibition went into effect, and suddenly the gangs had an opportunity to grow. Since producing, transporting, or selling alcohol was outlawed, only outlaws could produce, transport, and sell alcohol. And that is what they did. In many cities across the United States, multiple gangs worked against each other to dominate the sale of bootleg booze, as well as to control other vices: gambling, prostitution, and even drugs.

The Chicago Outfit was run by Johnny Torrio in the early ‘20s, but in ’24, he was shot and almost killed by the rival North Side Gang, Torrio retired and moved to Florida. He put the Outfit into the hands of his bodyguard, former bouncer Al Capone, aka Scarface. Capone had been born in New York and joined an Italian gang as a teenager, so he had been in the life a long time. When he took over, he wanted to control Chicago, and his approach was brutal. In 1924, there were 16 gang killings in Chicago; in 1929, the number was 64 (https://www.history.com/topics/crime/saint-valentines-day-massacre).

On this date, at about 10:30 am, seven of the members of the North Side Gang, which was run by George “Bugs” Moran, were waiting inside a garage on North Clark Street on the north side. They were waiting to receive a hijacked shipment of Canadian whiskey (Prohibition did not apply north of the border). They were also waiting for Moran, but he had not shown up yet.

Four men, two dressed in police uniforms, arrived in a police car and entered the garage. Carrying guns, they yelled at the seven men to line up against the wall. Moran’s men cooperated because they thought it was a police raid. They were told to face the wall and stand shoulder to shoulder, hands up. Moran’s men were probably expecting to be searched, but instead, they were shot down in cold blood.

After they left, police, who had been called at the sound of gunshots, arrived on the scene to see the devastation. Only one of the seven was still alive, Frank Gusenberg, who was an enforcer for Moran. Despite over 20 gunshot wounds, Gusenberg lived to get to the hospital. The police tried to question him, but they didn’t get much out of him. He told them that the police did it.

Moran was on the way to the garage at 10:30 on the 14^th, but he got there after the massacre. He blamed Capone, of course. Capone denied involvement, claiming that he was in Florida, though there were telephones in the 1920s. Some people claim that the killers may actually have been the police, killing Moran’s men in return for the killing of the son of a police officer. But nobody really knows for sure.

All we know for sure is that seven men were killed, and the result of the massacre was outrage throughout Chicago and the country as a whole. Prior to the St. Valentine’s Massacre, gangsters were treated like heroes. But the people’s attitudes changed. Herbert Hoover, who became president in January of 1929, demanded that federal law enforcement agencies do everything they could to get Al Capone. Eventually, Capone went to prison for tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in prison. While in prison, Capone began to feel the effects of syphilis, which eventually destroyed his brain and killed him. Bugs Moran also ended up in prison, but not because of his activities in Chicago. He left Chicago after the massacre and became a small-time hood. He died in prison.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is one of the most infamous unsolved crimes in American history. The police did arrest a suspect, but he had an alibi which may or may not have been true. We Americans love to watch police shows on television—CSI, NCIS, Law and Order, Chicago Blue, etc. In those shows, the cops always (or almost always) find the bad guys and get them convicted, usually in less than 50 minutes. But the real pace of justice in America is testudinal. Then again, maybe that is for the best.

As Cato has said, “The American system, grounded in the British Common Law, has long erred on the side of protecting innocence. Thus we presume an accused person’s innocence until they are proven guilty. As the preeminent English jurist William Blackstone wrote,’[B]etter that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.’⁷⁴ This principle can also be found in religious texts and in the writings of the American Founders.⁷⁵ Benjamin Franklin went further arguing ‘it is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer’” (https://www.cato.org/policing-in-america/chapter-4/blackstones-ratio). Even if the tortoise does not actually defeat the hare, perhaps we are all better off if there is not a rush to judgment.

Today’s image: “’Massacre of Moran Gang’; shooting of seven people as part of Prohibition Era Conflict; between the Italian South Side gang led by Al Capone (1899-1947) and the Irish German North Side under George ‘Bugs’ Moran (1891-1957). Photo credit: Peter Newark American Pictures / Bridgeman Images” (https://www.bridgemanimages.com/en-US/american-school/st-valentine-s-day-massacre-front-page-of-the-chicago-daily-news-14th-february-1929-newsprint/newsprint/asset/251791).