07.06
On this date in 1946, FBI agents arrest George “Bugs” Moran, along with fellow crooks Virgil Summers and Albert Fouts, in Kentucky. Moran once one of the biggest organized crime figures in America, he had been reduced to small bank robberies by this time. He died in prison 11 years later. Bugs Moran’s criminal career took an abrupt downturn after the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, in which his top gunmen were slaughtered by rival Al Capone’s henchmen (a lasting feud had been established after Capone’s men killed Moran’s friend and mentor, Dean O’Banion, in 1924). Moran, who just missed the massacre by a couple of minutes, was visibly shaken when reporters talked to him days later. He shouted at them, “Only Capone kills like that!” Al “Scarface” Capone established his alibi by vacationing in Florida at the time of the Valentine’s Day murders. Sitting poolside, he mocked Moran, chuckling as he told reporters, “The only man who kills like that is Bugs Moran.” Later, while Capone was serving time for tax evasion, Moran may have earned a measure of revenge by killing Jack McGurn, one of the men who had carried out the massacre. A bank robbery charge conviction eventually landed Moran in Leavenworth federal prison. He was released in 1956, but was then re-arrested for an earlier bank robbery. He died in prison of lung cancer on February 2, 1957.
