Ray “the Fox” Renard, former gangster with Egan’s Rats, enjoying a Prohibition-era swig in February 1925, shortly after testifying against his former cronies in federal court.(St. Louis Star)
ST. LOUIS • The courtroom’s cast-iron shutters were slammed shut. Only people with passes were admitted. A phalanx of federal agents surrounded their star witness.
Ray “the Fox” Renard, one-time wheelman for the notorious gang called Egan’s Rats, was back in town.
Renard, 26, became a Rat as a teenage pickpocket. The gang formed in Kerry Patch, the hardscrabble Irish neighborhood northwest of downtown. When Prohibition began, Egan’s Rats muscled into bootlegging. But their specialty was big-time stickups.
Renard drew seven years for a freight-car robbery. While sitting in federal prison, he heard the gang planned to quiet him permanently. Renard got the jump, telling prosecutors he knew all about two big Rat capers — the robbery of $2.4 million in cash and bonds from a mail truck at Fourth and Locust streets on April 2, 1923, and the heist of a $54,000 coal company payroll at the Staunton, Ill., train station two months later.
read full story –Click here: A Look Back • Gangster turns stool pigeon in 1924 trial
Hollywood goodfella 
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