Bismarck Tribune, 14 February 1929, page 1: 7 gangsters trapped, killed

Front page of the Bismarck Tribune, Thursday, 14 February 1929. The two-line banner reads “7 Gangsters Trapped, Killed” above a story about a North Dakota fire. The Chicago account is in the right-hand column, headed “Murderers Pose as Police; Line Men Up and Loose Bullets,” with the decks “Five Executioners Herd Unarmed Victims Against Wall” and “Wholesale Killing Most Sensational in History of Bloody Chicago Gang Wars.” The banner is only partly legible in the OCR; the dispatch text confirms the story.

The dispatch, datelined Chicago, 14 February, says the bodies were found in the rear room of the S. M. C. Cartage company, 2122 North Clark street, as the page prints it, by police summoned by a woman living nearby, and that the attackers arrived in two automobiles, displayed stars and ordered the occupants to raise their hands. It says six bodies were found along a wall and two men still living but fatally wounded lay in an outer room, and that the bodies bore from six to ten wounds each.

The page’s list of victims, which it says police gave out, and its labels for them are the paper’s and the police’s and are not repeated here. The dispatch calls the killings a mass execution unlike earlier Chicago gang killings in which victims were taken “for a ride”; that comparison is the writer’s.