1929 - Crime

Crime

Former Kansas and Arizona lawman Wyatt Earp dies at Los Angeles January 13 at age 80. He has lived in recent years on income from mining and real-estate interests.

Gang warfare in Chicago reaches a peak of brutality the morning of February 14 in the "St. Valentine's Day massacre" (see 1927). Seven members of the George "Bugs" Moran gang are rubbed out at 10:30 in a North Clark Street garage and bootleg liquor depot, but Moran escapes as mobsters vie for control of the lucrative illicit liquor trade; police suspect that members of the Al Capone gang who include Chicago-born mobster Anthony Accardo, 22, have done the killing; Capone and one of his confederates have themselves arrested on minor charges to avoid reprisals and are confined until year's end at Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary, where Capone buys uniforms for the inmates' baseball team and is permitted to have his cell furnished with oriental rugs, antique furniture, and a cabinet radio (see 1931).

Chicago has 498 reported murders, New York 401, Detroit 228, Philadelphia 182, Cleveland 134, Birmingham 122, Atlanta and Memphis 115 each, New Orleans 111.

Oklahoma-born convict Charles Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd, 25, is paroled after serving a 5-year term for armed robbery. Unwilling to pick cotton and unprepared to make a living any other way, he returns to crime (see 1931).

Colorado State Prison has an escape attempt October 3 in which seven guards are killed, but the five convicts involved commit suicide when their jail break is aborted; Auburn State Prison inmates at Auburn, N.Y., kill the chief keeper December 11 and hold the warden hostage until he is rescued by state troopers.

A diplomatic conference at Geneva adopts a convention that establishes uniform rules with regard to counterfeiting (see Interpol, 1914; 1923). Signed by 12 major powers, the convention targets counterfeiting as a crime separate from forgery and makes it a felony calling for mandatory imprisonment, with lesser penalties for those convicted merely of possessing counterfeiting equipment, passing phoney money, or possessing such money.