Redemption and Legacy The Story of Easy Eddie and Butch O'Hare

I'll tell youtwo short stories. The first is set in the 1920s. It's a true story.

There was a man in those days called Al Capone. I don't know if you know the name, but he was a very famous gangster. He dealt in illegal trade alcohol, gambling, trafficing, drugs etc and he was a very violent man.

And he had a friend known as Easy Eddie, who was a lawyer. And Easy Eddie had a great talent. He knew exactly how to bribe, persuade or threaten to get what he wanted.

for example, he would bribe judges, police sergeants, jurors, witnesses. And what it meant, at one point, to give you an example, Al Capone beat a man to death with a baseball bat in a restaurant that was filled with over 100 people and there was not a single witness willing to come forward to testify against Al capone. And that was down to the skills and threat of Easy Eddie.

So Al Capone recognized his abilities and he gave him everything. Cadillacs, jewellery. At one point he gave him an entire Chicago city block as his own.

And the problem was Easy Eddie had a son. And as the son grew up, he started to ask difficult questions. Questions like, what do you do for a living, daddy? And the answer that I keep violent psychopaths out of prison by bribing the police and judges was not one that he felt comfortable giving. 

And this bothered him. As a father, it bothered him as he watched his son grow. Until eventually Easy Eddie decided that he could not do it any longer.

And he went to the authorities and he was part of the tax trial that they eventually got Al Capone with and so that he spent the last years of his life in Alcatraz near San Francisco. And Easy Eddie knew very well that to do that in Chicago in the 1920s was a death sentence. He would not survive.

And sure enough, a few months after the court case, he was machine gunned to death in a street. And in his pocket was a few lines of poetry that I'll read for you. The clock of life is wound but once and no man has the power to tell just when the hands will stop at late or early hour. Now is the only time you own so live and love and toil with will and place no faith in time for the clock may soon be still.

 And the second of those two stories is set in World War II. Back to World War II again.

And it was in the Pacific around the carrier Lexington where a flight of American fighters took off and one of them, a young man called Butch O'Hare, discovered that his fuel tank had not been properly topped up and he could not therefore go on the mission. And he signalled to the squadron leader that he was going back and he turned back towards the carrier. And what that meant was that he was the only one in the air at the right range when a flight of Japanese Zeros fighters came in to attack the carrier.

And he was the only one who had a chance at fighting them off. Now we know exactly what happened. This isn't one of those stories with poor sources.

There were cameras mounted on his wings that they were using for reconnaissance work. So we have the film of this. We know that he emptied his 303 guns into the first two Japanese Zeros and sent them down.

And he then was out of bullets, but they were still heading towards the carrier. So he decided to use the flight surfaces of his plane, the wings, to smash up their planes. And he used his wings to rip off the tails of their planes.

And all the time they were weaving around him and pouring machine gun fire into his plane. Now, there's a very limited amount of time for any fighter to reach the destination and go. And they had used up all of their own fuel in fighting him.

So eventually they peeled off and he landed, crash landed, on the Lexington carrier. And the plane was riddled with machine gun holes from one end to another, but he got out without a scratch. He was the first official naval air ace, as defined by five kills in combat of World War II of the American Navy.

He was given the Medal of Honour. And after the war, the local people of his city, when they were building a new airport, they wanted to honour him by calling it O'Hare Airport in Chicago. And if you go between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2, there's a statue there of him.

And they have replicas of his medals and all the images of that day, that extraordinary day. And he was an extremely brave man. The connection between the two stories is that Butch O'Hare was Easy Eddie's son.

That was the young man that Easy Eddie hoped he would grow up to be.