George Moran
George Moran, byname Bugs Moran, (born 1893, Minnesota, U.S.—died February 25, 1957, U.S. Penitentiary, Leavenworth, Kansas), Chicago gangster and bootlegger of the Prohibition era.
He was a childhood friend and, later, right-hand man of Dion O’Bannion. Moran and Earl (“Hymie”) Weiss inherited O’Bannion’s gang in Chicago when the chief was killed in 1924. Moran became sole leader after Weiss was killed in late 1926. For the next three years Moran’s gang and Al Capone’s were locked in bloody warfare, climaxed in 1929 by the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, in which several members of Moran’s mob were slaughtered in a garage. (Moran narrowly avoided being killed. As he neared the building, he saw a police car arrive; unbeknownst to him, the men inside were actually associates of Capone. Thinking it was a raid, Moran immediately left.) His power reduced, he drifted into petty crimes, ending his days in prison for bank robberies (Ohio Penitentiary, 1946–56; Leavenworth federal penitentiary, 1957). He died of lung cancer.
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gangster…associated with the gang of Bugs Moran to stand against a garage wall with their hands raised and then shot them down. Because such killings were carefully planned, and also because the criminals had influence with local political leaders, gang murderers were rarely identified, still less often prosecuted, and almost… -
Al Capone…in which seven members of Bugs Moran’s gang were machine-gunned in a garage on Chicago’s North Side on February 14, 1929. Also in 1929, Capone served some 10 months in Holmesburg Prison, in Philadelphia, after being convicted of possessing a concealed handgun. Many Americans were fascinated by the larger-than-life image…
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Nucky JohnsonAl Capone and Bugs Moran from Chicago. Some historians have claimed that bosses from all over the country attended the conference and founded a national crime syndicate; however, accounts at the time of the conference indicated that it was only about a peace settlement between Moran and Capone…
