Overview
O'Hare, born in St. Louis, making his lucrative way there as an attorney defending mobsters, before moving to Chicago in the late-1920's. In that city, O’Hare became the wealthy president of Sportsman's Park racetrack in Chicago, then the home of corrupt dog racing and later horseracing. He did much business with Al Capone and the Chicago Outfit from 1928, in and around Chicago at Sportsman’s Park, and at Capone’s Hawthorne dog track in Stickney, as well as at dog tracks in Boston and Miami. The association with Capone made O'Hare rich: at the time of his death, he was reported to be worth more than a million dollars (the equivalent of over $22.5 million in 2024).
But in 1930, as the authorities began to seriously go after Capone in the wake of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and Capone's increasing public profile, O'Hare, to save his own skin, cooperated with US authorities against Capone, ensuring his conviction for tax evasion. O’Hare turned over a key Capone bookkeeper, Leslie A. Shumway of Miami, to Treasury investigator Frank J. Wilson, who led the team tasked with ensnaring Capone. O’Hare also aided the authorities in deciphering the codes in which Outfit financial ledgers were written.
The resulting trial in 1931, at which Shumway gave evidence, led to Capone being convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to eleven years in prison. Frank J. Wilson later wrote that O’Hare was ‘the best undercover man I have ever known.’
While Capone was locked away in the Atlanta Penitentiary and the notorious Alcatraz, the Chicago Outfit was fronted by Frank Nitti (real name Nitto), and Tony 'Joe Batters' Accardo was the head of enforcement. In the mid-1930's, there were a number of prominent mob hits in and around Chicago, including that of Capone's once No.1 gunman 'Machine Gun' Jack McGurn, the killing of whom at a bowling alley is widely thought to have been carried out by the Outfit, as the down-on-his-luck McGurn was getting out of line. Accardo is likely to have lured McGurn to his death.
Then, eight years after Capone was convicted, Edward O’Hare was gunned down as he drove along Ogden Avenue near Western Avenue in Chicago, on 8th November 1939, a week before Capone was released from Alcatraz.
This incredible story has never been told in detail before….
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