Gecko Pirates

Moria once led this earlier crew, long since disbanded, in the years that preceded his time at Thriller Bark. By his own telling, those who followed him were celebrated far and wide and counted among the most capable fighters of their day. Moria too, back then, could match Kaidou blow for blow.

None of that skill saved them. A single crushing loss to Kaidou's forces wiped the crew out almost entirely. Twisted by grief, Moria decided afterward that the flaw had been their mortality itself, a bitter lesson that would sour his idea of loyalty for years to come.

Twenty-four years before the current story, Moria was among those who watched Gold Roger's execution, seeing the pirate era begin with his own eyes. Twelve months later his crew had already driven deep into the far side of the Grand Line. Their journey led them to Ringo, a district within Wano, where they ran headlong into Kaidou's Beasts Pirates.

That encounter proved a slaughter. Of everyone aboard, Moria alone is confirmed to have walked away. Having lost his whole company, he later resolved never to bind himself to mortal comrades again, and this trauma directly steered him toward a successor crew built from zombies, empty followers whose loss could cost him nothing.

Gecko Moria stands as the crew's captain and its lone named figure. Ringo's residents chose to honor the dead by interring them in the local Eternal Grave tradition, and they erected a shrine to the man they knew as Kouzuki Moria, whom they revered as a heroic pirate of justice believed to have died against Kaidou. Moria had in fact survived, yet shame over the defeat drove him to leave Wano quietly, so his people went on assuming he perished in that last stand. Manga panels imply the crew's members wore a variety of horns atop their heads.