By the late 1920s, Al Capone was the rising star of organized crime in Chicago. Left in his way were only a few potent foes, chief of whom were the Aiello family of mafiosi and the depleted ranks of Dion O’Banion’s North Side Gang. The latter was bossed by George “Bugs” Moran. Although he gained his nickname from his often bizarre and flaky behavior, Bugs was known, especially to Capone, as a brutal and efficient killer.
Bugs Moran ascended in the O’Banion Gang largely due to Capone’s machinations. In 1924, Capone had engineered O’Banion’s murder, and in 1926, he got the successor, Hymie Weiss. The leadership of the North Siders next fell to Schemer Drucci who was killed by a policeman in 1927. That elevated Moran to the top spot.
Capone realized with Moran in charge, the shooting war with the O’Banion gang would escalate. That was the Bugs’s way. Through the years it would have been impossible to dredge up an O’Banion mob shooting caper in which Moran was not involved. He was said to be the first to put a bullet in the head of a riding academy horse the O’Banions snatched and “executed” after it had thrown and kicked to death their celebrated compatriot Nails Morton.
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He was the gunman who charged across the street to finish off Johnny Torrio after he had been hit four times by shots fired at his limousine (Moran’s gun misfired and Torrio lived.) Moran was also in the lead car in the famous machine-gun motorcade that sprayed Capone’s Hawthorne Inn with over 1,000 slugs.
Moran’s hatred for Capone bordered on the pathological; he often referred to him, in or out of his presence, as “the Beast” or “the Behemoth.” To vex him, Moran would frequently make peace with Capone and then break the agreement within a matter of hours.
Bugs considered Capone a lowly human, especially since he’d deal in prostitution. A regular churchgoer, Moran, like his predecessors, refused to let whorehouses operate in the gang’s North Side territory. Capone kept trying to set up shops, sending offers to split the profits evenly with Moran. Irate, Bugs once thundered, “We don’t deal in flesh. We think anyone who does is lower than a snake’s belly. Can’t Capone get that through his thick skull?”
Moran, born of Irish and Polish immigrant parents in Minnesota in 1893, grew up in the predominantly Irish North Side of Chicago. He grew up with street gangs, committing 26 known robberies and serving three incarcerations before he was 21. He was soon running with Dion O’Banion, who loved him like a brother.
A natural pair, both possessed the same sort of homicidal “wit.” Once Moran ran into Judge John H. Lyle, one of the city’s few honest and courageous jurists of the era, at a baseball game and said, “Judge, that’s a beautiful diamond ring you’re wearing. If it’s snatched some night, promise me you won’t go hunting me. I’m telling you now I’m innocent.”
Moran’s sense of humor made him rather a darling of newspapermen. Portrayed as something of a jolly good murderer, he was made out to be a likeable fellow. This good press probably put more Chicagoans on Moran’s side with hopes that he would win the war of survival with Big Al.
But the war ended in a draw. The closest Capone got to getting Moran was in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. The Capones suckered Moran into believing he was about to buy a load of hijacked booze from some Detroit racketeers and Bugs arranged to have the loot delivered to the gang’s headquarters, a garage, on the morning of February 14. Moran was late for the appointment, having overslept. Accompanied by two aides, Bugs rushed to the garage just in time to spot three men dressed as policemen and two others in plainclothes enter the garage.
Believing it to be a police shakedown, Moran decided to wait until they left. Minutes later, machine-gun fire was heard from inside the garage, leaving six Moran men and an innocent bystander dead. Moran took off. He announced, “Only Capone kills like that,” and promised vengeance. In order to get Capone, Moran allied himself with the Aiellos and some disgruntled Jewish mobsters under Jack Zuta in a plot to get some of Capone’s men to defect and kill Big Al. All their plots failed, and both Joe Aiello and Zuta died from Capone bullets.
Throughout the 1930s, Moran’s power waned even though Capone himself had gone to prison on income tax charges. In 1936 Moran may have enjoyed a measure of retaliation when Machine Gun Jack McGurn, a Capone enforcer generally held to have been one of the planners or perpetrators of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, was murdered. The press speculated that Bugs Moran had finally got his revenge; but McGurn, at that time on the outs with the mob, was more than likely killed by Capone adherents.
After that it was all downhill for Moran. His crimes turned petty compared to what they had been in the bad old days. Eventually he moved to Ohio and in July 1946 he was seized by the FBI along with two others for robbing a bank messenger of $10,000. During Prohibition Moran would have tossed around such a sum as if it were confetti. Moran got 10 years for the crime; when he was released he was rearrested for an earlier bank robbery and sent to Leavenworth for another 10-year stretch. He died there of cancer in 1957.
All his underworld chums—O’Banion, Weiss, Drucci—had lavish gangster burials. Bugs Moran outlived them all but his funeral was a quick burial in a wooden casket in a potter’s field outside the prison’s walls.
