Saint Valentine's Day Massacre - Crime Scene and Bricks From The Murder Wall

Crime Scene and Bricks From The Murder Wall

The garage, which stood at 2122 N. Clark Street, was demolished in 1967; the site is now a landscaped parking lot for a nursing home. There is still controversy over the actual bricks used to build the north inside wall of the building where the mobsters were lined up and shot. They were claimed to be responsible, according to stories, for bringing financial ruin, illness, bad luck and death to anyone who bought them.

The bricks from the bullet-marked inside North wall were purchased and saved by Canadian businessman George Patey in 1967. His original intention was to use them in a restaurant that he represented, but the restaurant's owner did not like the idea. Patey ended up buying the bricks himself, outbidding three or four others. Patey had the wall painstakingly taken apart and had each of the 414 bricks numbered, then shipped them back to Canada.

There are different reports about what George Patey did with the bricks after he got them. In 1978, Time Magazine reported that Patey reassembled the wall and put it on display in a wax museum with gun-wielding gangsters shooting each other in front of it to the accompaniment of recorded bangs. The wax museum later went bankrupt. Another source, an independent newspaper in the United Kingdom, reported in February 2000 that the wall toured shopping malls and exhibitions in the United States for a couple of decades. In 1968 Patey stopped exhibiting the bricks and put them into retirement.

Patey opened a nightclub called the Banjo Palace in 1971. It had a Roaring Twenties theme. The famous bricks were installed inside the men's washroom with Plexiglas placed right in front of them to shield them, so that patrons could urinate and try to hit the targets painted on the Plexiglas. In a 2001 interview with an Argentinian journalist, Patey said, "I had the most popular club in the city. People came from high society and entertainment, Jimmy Stewart, Robert Mitchum." The bricks were placed in storage until 1997 when Patey tried to auction them off on a website called Jet Set On The Net. The deal fell through after a hard time with the auction company. The last known substantial offer for the entire wall was made by a Las Vegas casino but Patey refused the $175,000 offer.

In 1999, Patey tried to sell them brick by brick on his own website and sold about a hundred to gangster buffs. These came with signed certificates by Patey. Patey died on December 26, 2004, having never revealed how much he paid to buy the bricks at auction. The remaining bricks of his massacre wall were given as an inheritance to his niece. She ended up selling them to the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, which opened February 14, 2012. While the wall is no longer complete because of Patey selling a few dozen from it, it still remains the original massacre wall against which the seven men were lined up and killed by Capone-hired killers.