The last mob hit, on Aug. 31, 2006, meant the end of the road for underboss Anthony “Little Tony” Zizzo. When Zizzo said goodbye to his wife that day, neither of them knew it would be forever.
Authorities and organized crime experts believe Zizzo was rubbed out, killed without a trace exactly two decades ago. He now rests in the piece of gangland history books as the target of the last mob hit.
The late Frank Culotta, an ex-Chicago hitman, summed up the Outfit’s take on killing people.
“Most guys who got whacked, or got killed, I’d say the majority of them probably deserved it,” Culotta said in 2007. The last Chicago mob murder had just happened, a year earlier. Mob underboss Anthony Zizzo disappeared on this day in 2006.
At five-foot three and 200 pounds, Zizzo was known as “Little Tony.” But he had a big promotion to second in command, filling a power vacuum in the Outfit after sweeping arrests during the feds’ Operation Family Secrets.
Zizzo lived in an unassuming complex in suburban Westmont. On that morning 20 years ago, he kissed his wife Susan goodbye and said he was going to a lunch meeting on Rush Street. Zizzo never made it.
His vehicle, a 2005 Jeep Cherokee Laredo, was found abandoned near a Melrose Park restaurant, far from Chicago’s Rush Street. No signs of violence, no witnesses. But no evidence of the rising star hoodlum.
“As the underboss, he’s a very important guy…” said mobologist John Binder, who has authored several books on the Chicago Outfit. Binder said early speculation that Zizzo might have become a secret government witness eventually gave way to a more final fate.
“The Outfit itself killed him, for one reason or another, and they decided at that time, there was just way too much heat, especially to be dumping the underboss’s body out of the street somewhere, or blowing him up with shotguns, probably, something like that,” Binder said. “They decided, and they made a, maybe call it a tax dealer’s strategic judgment. This one was, make him disappear. You don’t want the body to be found.”
After the Zizzo hit 20 years ago, Binder said Chicago mob bosses made a business decision, changing course from the 1,200 gangland killings on the books in Chicago since the Al Capone Era.
As professional killer Frank Culotta said of his tradecraft: “Friends kill friends. I mean I’m talkin’ a lot of guys that were murdered.”
Twenty years later, Binder says murder has become a sordid part of Outfit history.
“They’re very, very careful in terms of what they do and how they do it. In my mind, they made a policy saying we don’t want bodies on the streets. We don’t want bodies in the trunks of cars. It’s not like the old days anymore. It doesn’t benefit us. It can hurt us quite a bit in the current environment.”
For Chicago law enforcement, without a body, the Zizzo disappearance is technically a missing person investigation, still carrying a $10,000 reward. Suburban Westmont police turned over the case to the FBI years ago and the Bureau offered no new comment on the Zizzo case.
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