Then, There Was Edward O'Hare, Butch's Father-- Part 2

On November 8, 1939, Butch's father, Edward O'Hare, who was president of Sportsman's Park Racetrack in Stickney, was gunned down in a gangland execution. He was also frontman for Al Capone's gang syndicate.

He had evidently double-crossed Capone. When Capone went to prison in 1932, he appointed O'Hare to run the racetrack. But five years later, while in federal prison, Capone learned that it was O'Hare who had cooperated with the government to send him to Alcatraz.

O'Hare lived in fear for his life the last two years of his life after he learned that Capone knew. About a week before Capone was released from prison, O'Hare was killed by two shotgun blasts in a high-speed chase along Ogden Avenue. His car crashed into a lightpole just west of Rockwell Street. Eight years later, Frank Wilson, one of the federal investigators who got Capone (and later chief of the Secret Service) wrote of O'Hare: "On the inside of the gang, I had one of the best undercover men I have ever known, Eddie O'Hare."

--DaCoot