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Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 2-14-1929
Event Description: Disguised as police officers, five operatives of Chicago gang boss Al Capone enter a downtown garage prepared to ambush Capone's arch-enemy Bugs Moran. To their surprise they find the garage apparently deserted. Moments later, seven of Moran's associates come out of hiding and kill Capone's men in a grisly machine gun fusillade. Later that day, Moran himself orders Capone's assassination
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 2-18-1929
Event Description: Al Capone is found shot to death at his Florida vacation bungalow. There are no immediate clues concerning the identity of the killers, but police suspect they were acting on behalf of Bugs Moran.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 2-19-1929
Event Description: Bugs Moran begins taking over Capone's bootleg liquor distribution network. Moran's enforcers move swiftly and mercilessly against his rivals, killing more than 215 people over a four-day period as Moran establishes a monopoly over the illegal liquor market in Chicago.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 2-25-1929
Event Description: The mystery of the whereabouts of Capone's right-hand man, Frank Nitti, is solved when his partly decomposed corpse is found in an alley near the Chicago stockyards. Nitti,a longtime member of the Capone syndicate, had disappeared shortly after Moran started seizing control of Capone's liquor network.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 3-3-1929
Event Description: A special federal task force headed by Treasury agent Elliot Ness is set up in Chicago to invesigate the Moran syndicate's activities.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 6-11-1929
Event Description: An assassination attempt by the Moran syndicate on Eliot Ness goes awry when Ness shoots the would-be assassin in the chest; moments later, the wounded suspect is arrested on charges of attempted murder.One result of the arrest is that Ness soon earns the nickname "The Untouchable" from admiring newspaper reporters; another is that interrogation of the suspect yields information suggesting the Moran syndicate may have had a mole inside Capone's organization that tipped Moran off to the garage ambush plot.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 6-16-1929
Event Description: A search of Frank Nitti's former home in Riverside yields evidence proving there was indeed a mole within the Capone organization -- and that the mole was Nitti himself. Papers recovered from the home indicate that over an 18-month period prior to the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, Nitti accepted a series of cash bribes from the Moran syndicate in exchange for providing information on Capone's operations, including the failed garage ambush plot. Based on this evidence, Ness and his team reach the conclusion that Nitti was murdered as revenge for either his betrayal of Capone or a subsequent attempt to double-cross Moran.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 7-7-1929
Event Description: A witness to Frank Nitti's murder, temporarily living in Missouri under an assumed name, gives Elliot Ness and his team a sworn deposition in which she testifies that Nitti was gunned down by two former Capone operatives as retribution for his defection to the Moran syndicate. This deposition will later play a crucial role in Moran's racketeering trial.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 9-6-1929
Event Description: Bugs Moran is arrested on charges of racketeering, bootlegging, and conspiracy to murder. Three of his top associates are also arrested, being considered accessories before and after the fact in many of Moran's worst crimes, including the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Two Moran syndicate hitmen and one agent from Eliot Ness' task force die of gunshot wounds; another Moran syndicate operative suffers a fatal skull fracture after falling off a roof while trying to escape police.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 9-10-1929
Event Description: Bugs Moran and his three top henchmen are indicted in a Chicago federal courtroom. Because of security concerns, federal agents and Illinois state troopers have cordoned off the building to keep out anyone not directly involved with the Moran hearing.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 10-31-1929
Event Description: The presiding judge in the Moran trial calls a temporary recess to accommodate the funerals of two jurors who committed suicide in despair over the stock market crash the previous day. When the trial resumes, two alternate jurors will be empanelled.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 11-15-1929
Event Description: An undercover Chicago police officer takes the stand for the prosecution in the Moran racketeering trial. In his testimony, he recalls being present at a meeting held in Moran's home three days after the St.Valentine's Day Massacre in which Moran instructed his associates not to do or say anything which might reveal that his organization was involved with the massacre or with Frank Nitti's betrayal of Al Capone. This deals a major blow to the credibility of the defense,which from the beginning of the trial has repeatedly insisted that Moran did not have any connection with Nitti and that the papers which indicate he did are forgeries planted by the prosecution.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 12-11-1929
Event Description: A handwriting expert testifies that the documents recovered from Frank Nitti's home six months earlier are genuine, effectively shattering the defense's argument that they were faked by the prosecution in the Moran trial.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 12-28-1929
Event Description: The jury in the Moran trial begins deliberations.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 1-6-1930
Event Description: Bugs Moran and his three co-defendants are found guilty on all 21 criminal counts against them; the presiding judge in the case then orders court reconvened in three days for sentencing.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 1-9-1930
Event Description: Bugs Moran and his three top associates are sentenced to terms of 25 years to life without parole at Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas. Eliot Ness and his team, having successfully closed the Moran case, begin work on their next assignment: finding the men who killed Al Capone.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 4-27-1930
Event Description: Acting on a tip provided by an ex-Moran syndicate bookie turned state's evidence, Eliot Ness and two of his senior agents arrest Dion O'Banion at a Miami barber shop for the murder of Al Capone. O'Banion,a longtime friend of Moran's, had given Moran his start in organized crime with the infamous North Siders gang and had personally volunteered to carry out Moran's assassination order the day after the St.Valentine's Day Massacre.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 8-29-1930
Event Description: Dion O'Banion is indicted for the murder of Al Capone. The prosecution recommends the death penalty; a trial date is set for early March.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 10-9-1930
Event Description: Hymie Weiss, Dion O'Banion's closest friend and his co-conspirator in the murder of Al Capone, is arrested at a boarding house in Oklahoma after one of its guests recognizes him from a photo accompanying a newspaper article about O'Banion's trial. Weiss, who along with O'Banion fled Chicago shortly after Bugs Moran was arrested and has been on the run from the law for over a year prior to his capture, is subsequently extradited back to Illinois to stand trial on conspiracy charges.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 12-2-1930
Event Description: Hymie Weiss is indicted on charges of conspiracy to murder and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 3-6-1931
Event Description: Opening arguments are heard in the Dion O'Banion trial.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 5-21-1931
Event Description: Hymie Weiss' trial begins.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 8-7-1931
Event Description: Dion O'Banion is convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the electric chair. O'Banion's fate was sealed when a forensics expert testified that casts taken of footprints at the scene of Capone's murder were found to match a pair of leather shoes Bugs Moran had given O'Banion as a Christmas present in 1928.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 11-8-1931
Event Description: Hymie Weiss, having been found guilty on conspiracy to murder and as an accessory before and after the fact in the assassination of Al Capone, is sentenced to thirty years in prison.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 4-10-1934
Event Description: His appeals rejected, Dion O'Banion is executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York. His last words before his death are: "Say goodbye to Hymie and Bugs for me."
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 12-10-1955
Event Description: Bugs Moran is shot to death while trying to escape Leavenworth. This was his fourth and final attempt to break out of the notorious federal penitentiary; on three previous attempts he had been caught and placed in solitary confinement. Life magazine observes of his passing: "With his demise the bootlegger, like the dinosaur, now fades into extinction."
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 10-15-1959
Event Description: The Untouchable, a TV series based on Elliot Ness' exploits in Chicago and Miami, premieres on ABC; the new series, starring Robert Stack as Ness and a young Carroll O'Connor as Bugs Moran, goes on to have a five-year run and later inspires two feature films.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 8-10-1962
Event Description: Hymie Weiss, the last surviving major figure from the St.Valentine's Day Massacre, dies in San Luis Obispo,California of a heart attack at the age of 64. Ironically,at the time of his death, the former gangland enforcer, who was paroled in 1951, had been working as a security guard at a local bank.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 7-22-1985
Event Description: Movie director Brian DePalma acquires the film rights to the classic Untouchable TV series and teams up with acclaimed playwright David Mamet to begin work on a screenplay for a cinematic version of the show.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 3-3-1986
Event Description: Shooting begins in Chicago and Hollywood for Brian DePalma's adaptation of The Untouchable.The film stars Kevin Costner as Elliot Ness,Sean Penn as Bugs Moran,John Turturro as Hymie Weiss,Alec Baldwin as Dion O'Banion,and Robert DeNiro in a cameo role as the ill-fated Al Capone.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 8-15-1986
Event Description: Famed TV investigative reporter Geraldo Rivera brings a camera crew to an abandoned warehouse on Chicago's South Side to tape the opening of a recently discovered strongbox which rumor has it is supposed to contain a fortune in cash and gold belonging to the late Bugs Moran.When the box is finally opened,however,it turns out to contain nothing but a handful of old newspapers and an empty beer bottle.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 1-29-1987
Event Description: The Untouchable opens in wide release in the US and Canada.Sean Penn earns rave reviews for his portrayal of Bugs Moran,particularly for a chilling sequence in which Moran shoots an underling he caught taking bribes from a rival bootlegger."This is what happens to anybody who crosses me...so endeth the lesson."Penn's Moran warns his surviving cohorts at the end of the sequence.
Timeline Number: 78
Event Date: 5-11-1994
Event Description: Shooting begins in Hollywood and Chicago for a syndicated remake of the old Untouchable TV series.The new show features former Miami Vice Don Johnson as Elliott Ness and newcomer Philip Seymour Hoffman as Bugs Moran.
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