Getting a job in the Mafia is always a dangerous prospect.
It's generally a job for life.
As in, you could totally lose your life because of your job.
But the fates of some gangsters are a little less clear, like the following who vanished
and were never found.
In 1921, Chicago gangster Thomas O'Connor was on death row in the Cook County jail,
sentenced to hang for killing a police officer.
Four days before the scheduled execution, he escaped by getting ahold of a pistol and
threatening a guard.
He then stole a car and was never seen again.
There were plenty of theories about what happened to him.
Some of them included returning to his native Ireland to fight the British, fleeing to Mexico,
or becoming a Trappist monk.
But there's a grave in Illinois reputed to be his that claims that he died in 1951.
O'Connor's disappearance was a problem for Chicago.
Cook County discontinued hanging and moved on to the electric chair in 1927.
But Terrible Tommy's sentence specified that he was to be hanged.
That meant that if he ever turned back up, he couldn't legally be killed any other way.
So just in case, the gallows gathered dust in a basement until 1977, when the county
finally gave up on killing O'Connor, who would've been 96 by that point.
Maybe he ended up like Robert De Niro at the end of The Irishman.
"Well, I ain't going nowhere."
Anthony Zizzo's 5'3" height earned him the nickname "Little Tony," although he managed
to pack 200 pounds on that small frame.
He was a member of the Chicago Outfit, the Italian-American mafia in that city.
In 2006, a major mob trial was about to begin, but Zizzo conspicuously wasn't charged.
There's a theory that this may have made him look like a snitch.
He was also in the middle of an intense beef with the powerful gangster Michael Sarno over
a video poker machine business.
So it wasn't that surprising when he suddenly vanished.
On August 31, Zizzo left his house, telling his wife he had a business meeting.
He stopped for gas and went to a restaurant, where he was seen by numerous employees, though
he never made it inside.
His car was later found in the parking lot, but without Zizzo.
There was no signs of foul play.
His wife filed a missing person's report, and the FBI eventually offered $10,000 for
information.
Many people think that he was murdered, either by his own crew for the rumors he'd snitched
to the government, or by his nemesis Sarno.
One mob expert suspects he was probably killed and his body was disposed of in a way that
would make it nearly impossible to locate.
Sarno, for his part, swears that he had nothing to do with Zizzo's disappearance.
And the FBI thinks it's possible that Zizzo went on the run to avoid possible prosecution.
In mid-20th century New York City, garbage collecting was one of the Cosa Nostra's main
rackets.
"I'm in the waste management business.
Everybody immediately assumes you're mobbed up."
In 1957, a Senate committee revealed that fruit-peddler-turned-gangster Vincent James
Squillante was considered the absolute czar of Greater New York's private sanitation industry.
"I have recently been placed in charge of garbage: Do you have any that requires disposal?"
But Squillante wasn't just on the business side of things.
That same year he was alleged to have ordered his goons to kill a guy and cut him up into
tiny pieces, as reported by another Senate committee.
Being investigated by the Senate is never a good sign, as it means the law is on to
you.
In 1960, Squillante was indicted on extortion charges.
On September 23, he was seen driving a new Chevrolet car, and then he vanished.
He may have been murdered by the mob for personal misconduct or so that he couldn't squeal at
a trial.
While no one knows for sure what happened to him, there's a rather disturbing rumor
that says he was stuffed into a car, which was then placed in a crusher that was melted
down in an open furnace with Squillante still inside.
Anthony Strollo, aka "Tony Bender," was the right-hand man of New York mob boss Vito Genovese
for many years.
He was placed in charge of operations when his boss had to flee to Europe in the 1930s,
and he ordered more murders than possibly any other mobster.
Being Strollo's friend didn't mean much.
In one instance, Genovese made sure Strollo wasn't involved in a hit, since the target
was Strollo's best friend.
But Strollo cheerfully volunteered to help when he found out about the plans.
Years later, he tried to kill another friend as well.
Strollo's loyalty was just as flexible as his friendships.
He tended to align himself with whomever had the most power at the time.
In 1958, he switched families and set up his old boss Genovese in a drug bust.
Genovese went to jail, where he realized Strollo had betrayed him.
On April 8, 1962, Strollo left his home, telling his wife he would be gone for only a few minutes.
He was never seen again.
There are rumors that he's under New York's West Side Highway, or that his body was dumped
in a cement mixer and became part of a skyscraper.
When Genovese was asked why Strollo had vanished, he vaguely alluded to ordering his death,
saying that it had been a kindness, since Strollo wouldn't have been able to handle
prison.
By the time Fredrick Tenuto was 16, he already had a criminal record.
But his continuous trips to prison weren't that big a deal to him, as he was extremely
good at breaking out.
While he wasn't an important mobster, he got the nickname "Angel of Death" because he was
a go-to guy if you wanted a hit done.
He was even added to the FBI's Most Wanted list in 1950.
But his carelessness would be his downfall.
Albert Anastasia was a mafia don whose answer to everything was violence and killing.
When a man named Arnold Schuster did his civic duty and turned in a bank robber in 1952,
Anastasia announced that he hated squealers, and ordered Schuster killed.
The job fell to Tenuto.
He did the deed in the open on a New York Street, and there was at least one witness.
When Anastasia heard his triggerman had been seen, he panicked.
Tenuto could be connected to him, so he ordered his hitman killed to clean up the messy situation.
Tenuto vanished, almost certainly because he'd been killed, though his body was never
found.
Some police informants say that he'd been given a "double-decker funeral," in which
a body is placed in a false bottom underneath a different corpse.
Abraham "Bo" Weinberg entered the world of organized crime as a young man, and by the
time Prohibition rolled around, he was working for major New York bootlegger Dutch Schultz.
Weinberg rose to be his right-hand man, personally killing many of Schultz's competitors, and
running his empire when Schultz went on the run to avoid tax evasion charges.
But the feds were getting close, and this concerned Weinberg.
If his boss fell, he risked losing it all.
So Weinberg conspired with rival Lucky Luciano.
He gave the other mob boss tips on how to bring down his current don in exchange for
a cut of any future action.
But before Luciano could move in and take over, Schultz found out about Weinberg's betrayal.
On September 9, 1935, Weinberg left a friend's house, got in a car, and was never seen again.
While one story says that Schultz killed his betrayer with his bare hands, a different
tale of his death is the one that went down in history.
After being beaten almost senseless, Weinberg's feet were encased in cement and he was dumped
in the East River while still alive.
America wasn't the only place that banned alcohol for a time.
The Ontario Temperance Act of 1916 was pretty much a blanket ban against booze, which led
to some north-of-the-border gangsters involved in bootlegging, including a mobster named
Rocco Perri.
On one night in 1923, Perri was on the scene as more than 2,500 bottles of whiskey were
unloaded from a boat.
The cops busted him, but he swore that he was just in the area and had nothing to do
with it.
The charges were eventually dropped.
A year later, he wasn't so shy about his work.
In 1924, Perri confessed his illegal activities to a reporter, and his wife called him the
"king of the bootleggers."
But he couldn't be charged with anything just for bragging.
On April 23, 1944, Perri got a headache while visiting a cousin.
He went for a walk to try and shake it, saying that he'd be back by lunch.
But he never returned.
There's a theory that he was killed by underworld rivals for control of his territory and dumped
in Hamilton Harbour.
But there's some evidence he might've learned about a plot to kill him and fled.
Perri's biographer claims to have proof that he lived in Massena, New York under a different
name until he died of natural causes in 1953.
Paolo Renda was right in the middle of Canada's violent underworld.
In the 1970s, Nicolo Rizzuto took over the Mafia in Montreal by killing another don.
Renda married Rizzuto's daughter and got heavily involved in the family business, including
handling the finances.
Renda had numerous run-ins with the law, and things started to go south for his mob family
in general.
A rival gang began fighting them for power, sending messages that included kidnapping
Rizzuto's gangsters, who would later reappear safe and sound.
That wasn't the case for Renda.
On May 20, 2010, while he was on conditional release from jail, a black car with a removable
siren on top pulled the gangster over.
Two men posing as plainclothes police officers bundled him into their car.
Renda's wife discovered his SUV abandoned with the keys still in the ignition.
He was never seen again.
The real police thought the hit might've been part of a vendetta dating back to the 70s.
Normally it takes seven years to declare someone dead when they vanish, but Renda's wife tried
to get closure in 2013.
The judge rejected her petition, though, saying that there wasn't enough proof he'd been killed.
Joseph Ardizzone was a man of many faces.
He was an immigrant fruit peddler, just trying to make a living in turn-of-the-century Los
Angeles.
He was also a civic leader in the Italian community.
But there was another, sinister side to Ardizzone.
In the early 20th century, two gangs emerged in L.A., with Ardizzone heading one, known
as The Black Hand.
Ardizzone's crew started killing people in the rival mob, and by 1906, he had to go on
the lam.
But soon he was back in L.A. and back to his old habits.
When Prohibition rolled around, he got involved in bootlegging.
And he kept killing people, although the law never got any charges to stick.
But the violence of the liquor business caught up to Ardizzone.
He wanted to muscle in on other gangs' bootlegging operations, and they wanted to take over his.
He was shot in a drive-by in February 1931 and barely survived.
Then in October, he went for a drive to go pick up a cousin but never arrived.
No one ever found out what happened to him.
His wife had to wait years until he was officially declared dead.
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