George "Bugs" Moran was the last of Chicago's spectacular North Side gang leaders, a colorful and violent dynasty that began with Dean O'Banion in 1920. In The Man That Got Away, author Rose Keefe provides the first in-depth look at the enigmatic gangster's charmed and wacky life from his Minnesota childhood to his early years as a horse thief. She chronicles his two marriages, his rise and fall in Chicago's Prohibition-era underworld, his life as an independent outlaw in the 1930s and '40s, and his last days in Leavenworth Penitentiary. In the process of telling Moran's story, some of the twentieth century's most fascinating and bewildering gangland figures are revisited: Al Capone, Johnny Torrio, Dean O'Banion, Vincent "the Schemer" Drucci, Earl "Hymie" Weiss, showboating Chicago Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson, the gang-hating but oddly pro-Moran Judge John H. Lyle, Virgil Summers, and Albert Fouts. History did not record the details of Moran's Last confession, but the public record and Rose Keefe's interviews with Moran's former associates now allow us to form an educated guess.

Selig Harry Lefkowitz, alias Big Jack Zelig, was New York's first great gangster boss. Like many of his pre-Volstead contemporaries, his historic impact has been overshadowed by Al Capone and Murder Inc. He is listed in today's crime anthologies primarily because four members of the gang, along with corrupt cop Charles Becker, died in the electric chair for the July 1912 murder of gambler Herman Rosenthal. In New York City from 1908 to 1912, however, Zelig inspired admiration and fear, and he was synonymous with the word 'gangster.' New York editor Herbert Bayard Swope recalled that "The Starker (Yiddish for 'Big Boss') threw terror into the heart of the New York underworld like no one has before or since." Based on dozens of interviews and years of painstaking research, "The Starker" introduces readers to a story from New York's criminal past that is dazzling in its audacity and criminal in the success of the people responsible for the murders in covering up their own crimes.

Reverend Spracklin was a gangster's worst nightmare. Known to the press and public as the 'Fighting Parson', he and his handpicked squad of dry agents burst into the roadhouses of Essex County with pistols drawn and fists clenched. They chased liquor-laden vehicles through dark city streets and along rough country roads, and intercepted rumrunners on the Detroit River in their high-powered speedboat, the Panther II. The minister went, often alone, into the most dangerous nightspots of 1920s Windsor, and responded to opposition by punching, not preaching. He thought nothing of carrying around a stack of blank search warrants and filling them out himself as needed. He could not be scared or bought, and he survived one assassination attempt after another. It was only when a roadhouse owner who also happened to be a long-time enemy died at his hands that the campaign was finally stopped. His life is told in this short book.