In the 1950s and 1960s, George Patey was a fixture in local gossip columns by Jack Wasserman, Barney Potts and others.
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In 1955, it was because of the magic act he had with his longtime partner Bill Eliason. In 1962, it was for an electronic model he and Eliason built for the World’s Fair in Seattle that showed “a beautiful green forest which proceeds to burn down on cue before the viewer’s eyes.”
In 1963, it was when Patey’s pet mynah bird Birdbrain was stolen from his truck.
“If you meet something that meows, whistles, speaks in four languages and talks English with a Swedish accent, that’s Birdbrain,” said The Vancouver Sun.
The story worked. The bird was recovered from a North Vancouver longshoreman who told Patey he had bought it from “a man in a beer parlour” for $10.
But that was all small-time stuff compared to Patey’s coup on Feb. 14, 1968, when he announced he had purchased the wall where the St. Valentine’s Day massacre was held in Chicago.
“The St. Valentine’s Day massacre was history’s most famous gangland shooting,” said a Province story on Feb. 15, 1968.
“Patey’s wall is complete with the machine-gun bullet marks left when ‘policemen,’ believed to be members of Al Capone’s gang, ordered ‘Bugs’ Moran’s gang members to stand up against the wall with their hands up, then opened fire.”
The shooting had occurred on Feb. 14, 1929, at a garage in Chicago. In 1967, it inspired a movie, and in November 1967, the former SMC Cartage garage was torn down in an “urban renewal” project by Chicago’s National Wrecking company.
Patey wrote or phoned Chicago’s mayor Richard Daley to see if he could purchase the brick wall where the seven gangsters had met their maker.
Daley forwarded Patey’s request to National Wrecking, which had stored the bricks and was about to auction them off. Patey had the highest bid, but no one would say what it was.
“It was a considerable amount of money,” said Jerome Mandel of National Wrecking. “After all, the thing is like a Rembrandt.”
Patey announced he was going to ship the bricks to Vancouver and put the wall up in his waterfront penthouse at 1265 Beach Ave. in the West End.
The story attracted international attention, although the initial Associated Press story misidentified Patey as George Patty.
Patey had been out of town when news of the sale hit the press. Back in Vancouver on Feb. 23, he told The Province he had a “heap of messages” awaiting him, and that “I’ve been offered as much as $1,000 for one bullet-scarred brick.”
He had an alternative plan — he wanted to set it up as a tourist attraction, “complete with a re-creation of the gangland massacre.”
But problems arose. Canada Customs wanted to change a 37 per cent duty on the bricks to come to Canada, because it was building material.
It took three months to get the bricks into Canada. Patey put together a re-creation of the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in a trailer and announced it would appear June 12, 1968 at Brentwood Shopping Centre in Burnaby.
Unfortunately, his timing was off. U.S. presidential contender Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated the previous week, and 300 protest calls wanted it to be cancelled.
“Most women said the show glamourizes violence,” said Brentwood’s general manager Jack Viner.
It was cancelled at Brentwood, but the show did go on at the 1968 Pacific National Exhibition, where Vancouver Sun columnist Alex MacGillvray said it did “surprisingly well.”
Patey set up the St. Valentine’s wall in “George Patey’s International Crime Museum” at 728 Robson in March, 1969. In 1972, Patey and Eliason installed it at a bar/restaurant they opened on Alexander Street near Main, the Banjo Palace.
The location — in the men’s washroom, at a urinal behind plate glass.
“People all over the world came to see it,” Patey said. “And some women who had too much to drink would go in, too.”
Patey died while on vacation in Honolulu, Hawaii , on Dec. 26, 2004, at 77. Three hundred bricks from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre wall are now at the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, but the whereabouts of another 117 are unknown.