Researching Thomas Egan

The son of an Irish-American saloonkeeper, Egan was born and raised in Kerry Patch, then known as the riverfront Irish ghetto of St. Louis. With some of his childhood pals, he began running with a local gang of thugs, known as the Ashley Street Gang. Egan's best friend, Thomas "Snake" Kinney, was a local street tough and Democratic politician. During an ill-fated burglary attempt on October 17, 1894, Egan was shot through the face by a policeman. Tom survived but was left with an ugly scar on his jaw. Throughout the years, his stock in the gang climbed. By 1904, when Snake Kinney was elected to the Missouri State Senate, Tom Egan had taken over leadership of the street gang.

On the night of January 15, 1907, Tom Egan shot one of his longtime enemies, Willie Gagel, to death in the Jolly Five Club. While his men were booked at the police station, the desk sergeant snarled that they were all a bunch of "rats", thereby giving the Egan Gang their famous moniker; Egan's Rats. Acquitted of Gagel's murder, Egan was soon confronted by one of his top men, James "Kid" Wilson, whom he suspected was having an affair with his wife Nellie. Egan shot Wilson dead on October 22, 1907 and was eventually acquitted.

Serving as both a city constable and leader of the St. Louis Democratic City Committee, Egan was one of the most powerful gangsters in all the Midwest by the time of the death of his brother-in-law Tom Kinney on May 15, 1912.

That same year, Egan gave an interview to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in which he flaunted his power and clout in the underworld. In one famous sentence, Egan boasted, "...we don't shoot unless we know who is present," sounding eerily like Bugsy Siegel saying forty years later, "We only kill each other."Knowing that the up-and-coming Prohibition movement would become the law of the land, Tom Egan set up a liquor smuggling network as early as the mid-1910s.

In January 1916, Egan's saloon headquarters at Broadway and Carr streets was padlocked by police after one of the original Egan's Rats, William "Skippy" Rohan, was shot dead on the premises. Despite this, Tom Egan remained on top of the St. Louis underworld until he was diagnosed with Bright's Disease in late 1918. Egan died at the age of 44 on April 20, 1919. Tom's younger brother William took over leadership of the Egan's Rats.

Egan was born in London, the son of John Egan. He was admitted to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge on 29 June 1833. In his college days at Cambridge he was cox for the winning Cambridge boat in the Boat Races in 1836, 1839 and 1840 and was well known as an "aquatic coach". In 1841 and 1842 he coxed the Cambridge Subscription Rooms eight which won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta.Egan was an umpire at Henley Regatta for 12 years and was an editor of Bell's Life in London for many years.

Egan criticised the use of watermen as coaches, advocating the longer and smoother stroke of amateurs rather than the waterman's choppy stroke. When Cambridge insisted on using a waterman as coach in the 1852 race, Egan in protest trained the Oxford crew which went on to win. He coached the Cambridge crew in the 1854 race, both crews in the 1856 race and the Cambridge crew in the 1858 race. In 1865 a lifeboat was presented to the lifeboat station at Tramore, Southern Ireland, called the Thomas Egan.

Egan was a German scholar and translated Schiller's Don Carlos, Infant of Spain, Heine's Börne, and other poems.

Egan died at 42, Marine Terrace, Margate, Kent, the home of Mrs. Harriette Mary Powell, with whom he lodged for a number of years, at the age of 78, and was buried in Margate Cemetery.

He first practised medicine in Galway, where he married Sarah Gibbon, a choice that was not approved by his friends and led to their relocation to Dublin in about 1793. There he made an important contribution to the city's hospitals and to the establishment of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, where he was a professor. In 1806, he was elected Physician to the Meath Hospital. Dr. Egan was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy 23 July 1791 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London 4 April 1811.

He read a paper to the Academy on 6 March 1805 entitled "Experimental Inquiry into the Nature of Gravelly and Calculus Concretions, in the Human Subject; and the effects of Alkaline and Acid Substances on Them, in and out of the Body." Egan had been a physician for several years at the Cork Street Fever Hospital and Simpson's Hospital and had been conducting experiments on urinary diseases since 1799. Dr. Egan and his family lived in Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street). He died in December 1818 in Mullingar presumably while visiting his daughter who had married Captain Henry Faunt. Egan's son, Thomas Henry Egan, and his grandson, John Cruice Egan, were also prominent Dublin physicians.