1884 – Founding Outfit leader Donato "Johnny" Torrio, nicknamed "The Fox", who the source author would call "the father of modern gangsterism", emigrated from Italy to New York City with his family, at age two.
A Washington, D.C., special prosecutor, Dwight H. Green, was dispatched to Chicago to "send Chicago gangsters to prison", specifically Al Capone. Any government ammunition Green needed to bring down Capone was at Green's disposal, as long as he could prove the need.
As a nascent mobster, Nelson stole tires, drove bootlegging trucks and mugged the wife of William “Big Bill” Thompson, the mayor of Chicago (she's the one who compared his face to that of a baby). That was not his only high-profile target. In 1930, he invaded the home of magazine bigwig Charles M. Richter, tying him up with adhesive tape.
Nobody was charged with this massacre, but seemingly everyone known to be allied with a gang in the U.S., in the late 1920s, has been broached as a suspect in the Chicago gangster crime biographies written through the decades since the bloodbath.
Edward Joseph O'HareEdward Joseph O'Hare, aka "Easy Eddie" (September 5, 1893 – November 8, 1939), was a lawyer in St. Louis and later in Chicago, where he began working with Al Capone, and later helped federal prosecutors convict Capone of tax evasion.
Edward J. O'HareEdward O'Hare / FatherEdward Joseph O'Hare, aka "Easy Eddie", was a lawyer in St. Louis and later in Chicago, where he began working with Al Capone, and later helped federal prosecutors convict Capone of tax evasion. In 1939, a week before Capone was released from Alcatraz, O'Hare was shot to death while driving. Wikipedia
O'Hare's final action took place on the night of November 26, 1943, while he was leading the U.S. Navy's first-ever nighttime fighter attack launched from an aircraft carrier. During this encounter with a group of Japanese torpedo bombers, O'Hare's Grumman F6F Hellcat was shot down; his aircraft was never found.
Later in the war, Butch O'Hare was killed off Tarawa while flying a pioneering night intercept against attacking Japanese torpedo planes —an exceedingly dangerous mission, employing tactics that were in their infancy.
O'Hare became famous during the jet age, holding the distinction as the world's busiest airport from 1963 to 1998; today, it is the world's fourth-busiest airport, serving 54 million passengers in 2021.
Walter Payne was the bookeeper of Al Capone and an important figure in his downfall in 1932, granting the government a ledger containing names and numbers representing the amount of cash that each of Al Capone's businesses paid him for protection money, solidifying the case that he had no legitimate source of income ...
1949: Chicago City Council renames Orchard Field as Chicago O'Hare International Airport (O'Hare) to honor naval aviator Lieutenant Commander Edward H. “Butch” O'Hare, a Medal of Honor recipient from Chicago.
noun. an airport in Chicago.
five Japanese planesButch O'Hare won the Medal of Honor for single-handedly shooting down five Japanese planes and probably saving the carrier Lexington.
Battle of MidwayIn 1949, the airport was renamed Midway in honor of the hard fought Battle of Midway in the Pacific during World War II. By 1950, Midway became home to 15 scheduled airlines.
A history of O'Hare Airport The 7,600-acre airport we know as O'Hare started as a factory in 1942 for Douglas C-54 aircraft during World War II.
Break "O'Hare" down into sounds: [OH] + [HAIR] - say it out loud and exaggerate the sounds until you can consistently produce them. Record yourself saying "O'Hare" in full sentences, then watch yourself and listen.
because of his actions, he was exiled and died in poverty. His name may be the longest in this list of WWII unknown heroes but his actions merit to be remembered.
A Japanese diplomat who served in Lithuania, Sugihara risked his life and that of his family when he went against the decree of the Japanese Empire and saved Jews by issuing them handwritten visas. It was even said he wrote and threw visas out of the window when he traveled through train. Because of his selflessness, he was able to save 6,000 Jews. He and his wife Yikiko were honored Righteous Gentiles.
A food purchasing manager for the Italian Army in during WWII, Giorgio was put into a position where he had to pretend he was the substitute for the Spanish ambassador in Budapest. When the ambassador was asked to leave the country, he again took to his impersonating talents – this time, as a Spanish consul. he then proceeded to naturalize thousands of Hungarian Jews into Spanish citizens through the Rivera Law, thus, saving them from deportation and harm. It was not until many years after the war that Giorgio’s story became known to the world. It seemed that after he returned to Italy, he never spoke about what he did back in Hungary even to his family. Fortunately, some Hungarian girls went on a quest to find the Spanish consul who saved them.
A Salvadorian army colonel, Contreras was assigned as a diplomat in Geneva, Switzerland during the Second World War. In partnership with Gyorgi Mandl, a Jewish-Hungarian businessman, the colonel was able to save about 40,000 Jews and Central Europeans from the harsh Nazi by giving them fake Salvadorian visas.
18. Abdol Hossein Sardari. Known as the Schindler of Iran, Iranian diplomat Sardari was in-charge of Iranian Consular office in 1941 when war broke out. He argued with Nazi generals and troops to save Iranian Jews which he did so successfully.
Oskar Schindler. Thanks to a Steven Spielberg biopic, the world knows the deeds of German businessman Oskar Schindler. Schindler was a German spy and a Nazi Party member yet he spent his fortunes saving 1,200 Jews during WWII by employing them in his enamelware and ammunition factories.
25. Ge org Ferdinand Duckwitz. Mr. Duckwitz was a member of the German forces during WWII but he chose to save Jews instead of sending to concentration camps to be gassed. A German attache, he warned Danish Jews about their coming deportation in 1943.
A deadly mix of embezzlement, arson and homicide has scarred a New Hampshire Masonic lodge.
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Batista offered Lansky an annual salary of $25,000 to serve as an unofficial gambling minister. By 1955, he had changed the gambling laws once again, granting a gaming license to anyone who invested $1 million in a hotel or $200,000 in a new nightclub.
In the 1930s, Lansky and his gang stepped outside their usual criminal activities to break up rallies held by the pro- Nazi German-American Bund. He recalled a particular rally in Yorkville, a German neighborhood in Manhattan, that he and fourteen other associates disrupted:
In music. Wu-Tang Clan affiliated rapper Myalansky derived his stage name from Meyer Lansky. Jewish-Israeli musician Sagol 59 has released the song "The Ballad Of Meyer Lansky" on his 2011 album Another Passenger. The song chronicles Lansky's life from birth to death, including his time spent in Israel.
Meier Suchowlański was born on July 4, 1902 in Grodno, Russian Empire (now Belarus ), to a Polish-Jewish family who experienced antisemitism and pogroms from Imperial authorities. When asked about his native country, Lansky always responded " Poland " (Grodno was in the former lands of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland ). In 1911, Lansky emigrated to the United States through the port of Odessa with his mother and brother Jacob, and joined his father, who had immigrated in 1909, and settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York.
In the 2005 film The Lost City, which presents a fictionalized account of Lansky's involvement in Cuba, Meyer Lansky is portrayed by Dustin Hoffman.
Lansky would place himself at the center of Cuba's gambling operations. He immediately called on his associates to hold a summit in Havana. The Havana Conference was held on December 22, 1946, at the Hotel Nacional. This was the first full-scale meeting of American underworld leaders since the Chicago meeting in 1932.
In the HBO series Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014), Meyer Lansky is played by British actor Anatol Yusef in all five seasons. In the 2013 TNT series Mob City, Meyer Lansky is played by Patrick Fischler. (Jeff Braine plays a younger Lansky in a flashback sequence.)
1910 – Chicago police arrested over 200 known Italian gangsters and known Black Hand members in a raid in Little Italy. However, none of them were convicted as many of the notes of extortion threats could not be traced to those men.
The bribes totalled $60,000 a year, $10,000 more a year than when the aldermen hosted the, "First Ward Ball". 1920 – Perfected in this year, the Thompson submachine gun, or the "Tommy Gun", aka, "the Chicago typewriter", became the weapon of choice for at least some of the city's mobster gangs.
May 15, 2010 – Hitman Harry Aleman died in state prison during his 300-year sentence, after being retried for the murder of Teamster William Logan, for which, at first, Aleman was acquitted. In a historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling following the first trial, the U.S. Constitution's "Double Jeopardy" clause, which originally forbade Aleman to be retried for the murder, was found not to apply in his first court case, because of judicial corruption in the first trial. So, Aleman was retried and found guilty.
Nov. 8, 1924, Legitimate Unione Siciliana President Mike Merlo died of cancer. Of all of the Chicago "talking heads" of the day people would gravitate to, Merlo was one who tried to foster "peace" and civility among the warring Chicago gangs. Unione Siciliana was then taken over by "Bloody Angelo" Genna.
Oct. 8, 1871 – Much of the city's population lost everything, including for 300 people their lives, to a fire that lasted 36 hours and brought rampant looting. 1879 – Michael Cassius McDonald, lived in the midst of what was called "Hair-Trigger Block," was a gambling kingpin who understood the power of a bribe.
1892 – Born in this year, future North Side Gang leader Dion O'Banion was raised on Chicago' s Near North Side, in "Little Hell", a section of the city that was later used to build the Cabrini-Green housing project, now demolished to make way for urban renewal.
1890s – The Valley Gang formed in the city, beginning with pickpocketing and armed robbery. Aug. 21, 1891 – Born in this year in Minnesota, future North Side Gang boss through gangland attrition George "Bugs" Moran grew up on Chicago's North Side.
An underling and eventual puppet successor to Al Capone, Nitti ran the Outfit's bootlegging operations, channeling whiskey from Canada into Chicago speakeasies. In The Untouchables, Kevin Costner threw him off a roof, an in other films he has been portrayed by Sylvester Stallone and Stanley Tucci.
An opera enthusiast sometimes known as "Johnny the Fox," Torrio was the man who brought Capone in from Brooklyn. He was the one who really built the empire Capone ended up in charge of.
Esposito grew from a Black Hand extortionist and bootlegger in Little Italy to the elected Republican head of the 19th Ward. (And people say our politicians today are corrupt.) A sort of talent scout for the Outfit, Esposito brought Paul Ricca, Frank Nitti and Jack McGurn into the mob.
First making the news after taking daring leap over the Michigan Avenue bridge while it was being raised during a car chase, Drucci was known for coming up with zany schemes such as running for mayor and going to London to steal the crown jewels. His favorite trick was to dress as a priest and mess with people on the street.
Obsessed with the Wild West, Alterie never went without a pair of Colt 45 pistols in holsters at his side, hence his nickname. A thug for Dean O'Banion, the temperamental hitman challenged rival gang members to a shootout on State Street and once punched a horse in the face. He pretended to be insane as a defense, but probably was.
One of Capone's top hitmen, McGurn (born in Sicily as Vincenzo Gibaldi) actually may not have been the shooter at the famous St. Valentine's Day Massacre (it's one of those cases where there's a new theory every six months), but local gangsters certainly blamed him for it.
The Genna Brothers officially worked for John Torrio, but wanted to branch out. They're generally blamed for having killed O'Banion and starting the gang war. By the time Tony Genna was shot to death outside of a Grand Avenue grocery store in July 1925, he was so unpopula no one's sure which gang killed him.
A Polish politician, Slawik saved about 30,000 refugees from Poland including 5,000 Hungarian Jews by issuing them fake Polish passports Catholic designation. When the Nazis uncovered his deed, he was arrested and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp where he was executed on August 26, 1944.
This report is known as Witold’s Report. He was able to do this by taking in a false identity and posing as one of the Auschwitz prisoners. While there, he managed to establish an intelligence network that allowed the military forces outside know what was happening inside the concentration camp.
Techow was a German right-wing assassin, one of the men who killed German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. However, American journalist George W. Herald wrote a story about him entitled My Favorite Assassin where he stated he met a French foreign legion captain by the name of Tessier in 1940 who, according to Herald, had helped saved numbers of Jews in Marseilles in 1941. Herald further claimed Tessier was actually Techow, reformed, changed and had denounced antisemitism. However, Herald’s narrative was proven to be unfounded later on.
Finnish sniper Hayha was known among the Red Army as “White Deaath” during the Winter War. He has the highest confirmed numbers of sniper kills in any major wars numbering to 505 using a modified Mosint-Nagant. Winter War is the Soviet-Finnish skirmish at the start of WWII. He was struck on the jaw by a Soviet counter sniper but managed to live through it.
Jack Churchill. Known in WWII history as Fighting Jack Churchill and Mad Jack, this British trooper was known for his eccentricity in the war. He fought WWII armed with a longbow, arrows and a Scottish broadsword without any guns or other ammunition.
Peshev held a high position in the Bulgarian cabinet before WWII broke. However, when Bulgaria’s King Boris decided to have an agreement with German dictator Adolf Hitler and agreed to his anti-semitic leanings, he rebelled against him and majority of the cabinet and prevented the deportation of about 48,000 Jews in the country. As a result he was stripped of his position.
He lied about his age just so he could enlist and get drafted in the army during the war. 1. Irena Sendler. The only woman in this list of WWII heroes, the actions of this Polish social worker who took on the identity of a nurse with an ID to match benefited countless of Jewish children during the Holocaust.