Famous Gangsters Who Vanished And Never Found Again
Famous Gangsters Who Vanished And Never Found Again
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.
