Murder of William 'Willie' Egan was a Indian Wars and Frontier Conflicts engagement fought in Missouri, 1921.
The murder of William 'Willie' Egan, leader of the powerful Egan's Rats gang, outside his Franklin Avenue saloon ignited the open war between the Rats and the rival Hogan Gang. Egan was shot down by gunmen believed sent by the Hogan faction after a bootleg-whiskey dispute drove a key member to defect, and his killing prompted the Rats, reorganized under William 'Dint' Colbeck, to launch a campaign of retaliation. The Egan's Rats had grown from a political-machine street gang into a formidable Prohibition bootlegging and robbery organization, and their founder's assassination set St. Louis on a course of tit-for-tat shootings that would kill roughly a dozen men over the next two years. Egan's death is the starting point of one of the deadliest local gang wars of the early 1920s.
Approximate location. The nearest recorded settlement is shown; the exact site is unrecorded.
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