Jonathan Eig

seven people in a garage, including some people who were not involved in gangland activities at all.

You know, there's a letter I found in the FBI archives that showed that a state employee had tried to alert J. Edgar Hoover to what he thought had really happened.

And in many ways, it's a simple, plausible solution.

This letter said that it was really a crime of passion, that a young man had been killed in a bar fight.

Gang members had been involved in that bar fight.

and that the young man's father, who was a police officer, then arranged for his revenge.

And that involved some gangsters.

It involved some well-known killers.

It's a complicated theory.

It has a problem in that the main figure identified as the leader of that attack was in jail at the time.

So there's some speculation that perhaps he was able to buy a pass from jail, get out for a while, long enough to commit this crime.

But it's messy, and there's still not any clarity about whether that or any other theory holds up.

What's really fascinating about the Valentine's Day massacre is what happened as a result of it.

The crime itself, because it's unsolved, really tells us nothing.

But it does tell us how the government used this crime to forward its own agenda.

You know, at this point in 1929, Al Capone was incredibly famous, but his activity and his power were on a decline, actually.

He was beginning to find it more and more difficult to operate.

He was spending more time in Miami and Los Angeles.

But the FBI and other branches of the federal government were on his tail.

They were looking to find a way to take him down, in part because the new president, Herbert Hoover, wanted to prove to Americans that he was going to be tough on crime.