Pop culture has always had a fascination with mobsters and the lives they lived. They were not figures that we looked up to for their morality and ethics, but it's the intriguing stories that surrounded their lives that draw interest.
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00:00Getting a job in the mafia is always a dangerous prospect.
00:03It's generally a job for life, as in you could totally lose your life because of your job.
00:08But the fates of some gangsters are a little less clear, like the following who vanished
00:12and were never found.
00:14In 1921, Chicago gangster Thomas O'Connor was on death row in the Cook County Jail,
00:19sentenced to hang for killing a police officer.
00:22Four days before the scheduled execution, he escaped by getting ahold of a pistol and
00:26threatening a guard.
00:27He then stole a car and was never seen again.
00:30There were plenty of theories about what happened to him.
00:32Some of them include returning to his native Ireland to fight the British, fleeing to Mexico,
00:37or becoming a Trappist monk.
00:39But there's a grave in Illinois reputed to be his that claims that he died in 1951.
00:45O'Connor's disappearance was a problem for Chicago.
00:47Cook County discontinued hanging and moved on to the electric chair in 1927.
00:52But terrible Tommy's sentence specified that he was to be hanged.
00:56That meant if he ever turned back up, he couldn't legally be killed any other way.
01:00So just in case, the gallows gathered dust in a basement until 1977, when the county
01:05finally gave up on killing O'Connor, who would have been 96 by that point.
01:10Maybe he ended up like Robert De Niro at the end of The Irishman.
01:13I ain't going nowhere.
01:16Anthony Zizzo's 5-foot-3 height earned him the nickname Little Tony, although he managed
01:20to pack 200 pounds on that small frame.
01:23He was a member of the Chicago Outfit, the Italian-American mafia in that city.
01:27In 2006, a major mob trial was about to begin, but Zizzo conspicuously wasn't charged.
01:33There's a theory that this may have made him look like a snitch.
01:37He was also in the middle of an intense beef with the powerful gangster Michael Sarno over
01:41a video poker machine business.
01:43So it wasn't that surprising when he suddenly vanished.
01:46On August 31st, Zizzo left his house, telling his wife he had a business meeting.
01:50He stopped for gas and went to a restaurant where he was seen by numerous employees, though
01:54he never made it inside.
01:56His car was later found in the parking lot, but without Zizzo.
01:59There was no sign of foul play.
02:02His wife filed a missing persons report, and the FBI eventually offered $10,000 for information.
02:07Many people think that he was murdered, either by his own crew for the rumors he'd snitched
02:11to the government, or by his nemesis, Sarno.
02:14One mob expert suspects he was probably killed and his body was disposed of in a way that
02:19would make it nearly impossible to locate.
02:21Sarno, for his part, swears that he had nothing to do with Zizzo's disappearance, and the
02:25FBI thinks it's possible that Zizzo went on the run to avoid possible prosecution.
02:30In mid-20th century New York City, garbage collecting was one of the Cosa Nostra's main
02:35rackets.
02:36In 1957, a Senate committee revealed that fruit peddler-turned-gangster Vincent James
02:44Squillanti was considered the absolute czar of greater New York's private sanitation industry.
02:49I have recently been placed in charge of garbage.
02:53Do you have any that requires disposal?
02:55But Squillanti wasn't just on the business side of things.
02:57That same year, he was alleged to have ordered his goons to kill a guy and cut him up into
03:01tiny pieces, as reported by another Senate committee.
03:05Being investigated by the Senate is never a good sign, as it means the law is onto you.
03:09In 1960, Squillanti was indicted on extortion charges.
03:13On September 23rd, he was last seen driving a new Chevrolet car, and then he vanished.
03:18He may have been murdered by the mob for personal misconduct, or so that he couldn't squeal
03:22at a trial.
03:23While no one knows for sure what happened to him, there's a rather disturbing rumor
03:27that says he was stuffed into a car, which was then placed into a crusher, and was melted
03:31down in an open furnace, with Squillanti still inside.
03:35Anthony Strollo, aka Tony Bender, was the right-hand man of New York mob boss Vito Genovese
03:41for many years.
03:42He was placed in charge of operations when his boss had to flee to Europe in the 1930s,
03:47and he ordered more murders than possibly any other mobster.
03:50Being Strollo's friend didn't mean much.
03:53In one instance, Genovese made sure Strollo wasn't involved in a hit, since the target
03:57was Strollo's best friend.
03:58But Strollo cheerfully volunteered to help when he found out about the plans.
04:02Years later, he tried to kill another friend as well.
04:05Strollo's loyalty was just as flexible as his friendships.
04:08He tended to align himself with whomever had the most power at the time.
04:11In 1958, he switched families and set up his old boss Genovese in a drug bust.
04:17Genovese went to jail, where he realized Strollo had betrayed him.
04:20On April 8th, 1962, Strollo left his home, telling his wife he would be gone for only
04:24a few minutes.
04:25He was never seen again.
04:27There are rumors that he's under New York's West Side Highway, or that his body was dumped
04:31in a cement mixer and became part of a skyscraper.
04:34When Genovese was asked why Strollo had vanished, he vaguely alluded to ordering his death,
04:38saying that it had been a kindness, since Strollo wouldn't have been able to handle
04:42prison.
04:44By the time Frederick Tenuto was 16, he already had a criminal record.
04:47But his continuous trips to prison weren't that big a deal to him, as he was extremely
04:51good at breaking out.
04:52While he wasn't an important mobster, he got the nickname Angel of Death because he was
04:56the go-to guy if you wanted a hit done.
04:59He was even added to the FBI's Most Wanted list in 1950, but his carelessness would be
05:03his downfall.
05:05Albert Anastasio was a mafia don whose answer to everything was violence and killing.
05:10When a man named Arnold Schuster did his civic duty and turned in a bank robber in 1952,
05:14Anastasio announced that he hated squealers and ordered Schuster killed.
05:18The job fell to Tenuto.
05:20He did the deed in the open on a New York street, and there was at least one witness.
05:25When Anastasio heard his triggerman had been seen, he panicked.
05:28Tenuto could be connected to him, so he ordered his hitman killed to clean up the messy situation.
05:33Tenuto vanished, almost certainly because he'd been killed, though his body was never
05:37found.
05:38Some police informants say that he'd been given a double-decker funeral, in which a
05:41body is placed in a false bottom underneath a different corpse.
05:45Abraham Bo Weinberg entered the world of organized crime as a young man, and by the time Prohibition
05:50rolled around, he was working for major New York bootlegger Dutch Schultz.
05:55Weinberg rose to be his right-hand man, personally killing many of Schultz's competitors and
05:59running his empire when Schultz went on the run to avoid tax evasion charges.
06:03But the feds were getting close, and this concerned Weinberg.
06:06If his boss fell, he risked losing it all.
06:08So Weinberg conspired with rival Lucky Luciano.
06:11He gave the other mob boss tips on how to bring down his current don in exchange for
06:15a cut of any future action.
06:17But before Luciano could move in and take over, Schultz found out about Weinberg's betrayal.
06:22On September 9, 1935, Weinberg left a friend's house, got in a car, and was never seen again.
06:27While one story says that Schultz killed his betrayer with his bare hands, a different
06:31tale of his death is the one that went down in history.
06:34After being beaten almost senseless, Weinberg's feet were encased in cement, and he was dumped
06:38in the East River while still alive.
06:41America wasn't the only place that banned alcohol for a time.
06:44The Ontario Temperance Act of 1916 was pretty much a blanket ban against booze, which led
06:49to some north-of-the-border gangsters involved in bootlegging, including a mobster named
06:54Rocco Perry.
06:55One night in 1923, Perry was on the scene as more than 2,500 bottles of whiskey were
07:00unloaded from a boat.
07:02The cops busted him, but he swore that he was just in the area and had nothing to do
07:05with it.
07:06The charges were eventually dropped.
07:08A year later, he wasn't so shy about his work.
07:11In 1924, Perry confessed his illegal activities to a reporter, and his wife called him the
07:15King of the Bootleggers.
07:17But he couldn't be charged with anything just for bragging.
07:20On April 23, 1944, Perry got a headache while visiting a cousin.
07:24He went for a walk to try and shake it, saying that he'd be back by lunch, but he never returned.
07:30There's a theory that he was killed by underworld rivals for control of his territory and dumped
07:34in the Hamilton Harbor, but there's some evidence that he might have learned about a plot to
07:37kill him and fled.
07:39Perry's biographer claims to have proof that he lived in Messina, New York under a different
07:43name until he died of natural causes in 1953.
07:47Paolo Renda was right in the middle of Canada's violent underworld.
07:50In the 1970s, Nicolo Rizzuto took over the mafia in Montreal by killing another Don.
07:56Renda married Rizzuto's daughter and got heavily involved in the family business, including
08:00handling the finances.
08:02Renda had numerous run-ins with the law, and things started to go south for his mob family
08:06in general.
08:07A rival gang began fighting them for power, sending messages that included kidnapping
08:11Rizzuto's gangsters, who would later reappear safe and sound.
08:15That wasn't the case for Renda.
08:17On May 20, 2010, while he was on conditional release from jail, a black car with a removable
08:22siren on top pulled the gangster over.
08:25Two men posing as plainclothes police officers bundled him into their car.
08:29Renda's wife discovered his SUV abandoned, with the key still in the ignition.
08:33He was never seen again.
08:35The real police thought the hit might have been part of a vendetta dating back to the
08:3870s.
08:39Normally, it takes seven years to declare someone dead when they vanish, but Renda's
08:42wife tried to get closure in 2013.
08:45The judge rejected her petition, though, saying that there wasn't enough proof that
08:49he'd been killed.
08:51Joseph Artisone was a man of many faces.
08:53He was an immigrant fruit peddler just trying to make a living in turn-of-the-century Los
08:57Angeles.
08:58He was also a civic leader in the Italian community.
09:01But there was another, sinister side to Artisone.
09:03In the early 20th century, two gangs emerged in L.A., with Artisone heading one, known
09:07as the Black Hand.
09:09Artisone's crew started killing people in the rival mob, and by 1906, he had to go on
09:14the lam.
09:15But soon, he was back in L.A. and back to his old habits.
09:18When Prohibition rolled around, he got involved in bootlegging, and he kept killing people,
09:22although the law never got any charges to stick.
09:25But the violence of the liquor business caught up with Artisone.
09:27He wanted to muscle in on other gangs' bootlegging operations, and they wanted to take over his.
09:32He was shot in a drive-by in February 1931 and barely survived.
09:36Then in October, he went for a drive to go pick up a cousin, but never arrived.
09:41No one ever found out what happened to him.
09:42His wife had to wait years until he was officially declared dead.