Showing posts with label unsolved murders. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unsolved murders. Show all posts

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Henryk Siwiak (1965-2001)

The New York Times reports that the last man killed in the city on September 11, 2001 was Henryk Siwiak, an undocumented immigrant from Poland who was city's only homicide unrelated to the terrorist attacks. He had arrived in the US the previous October to look for work, leaving his family behind in Poland. A few days after his 20th wedding anniversary, he found a job mopping floors at night in a supermarket. September 11 was to have been his first day at work.

He donned his favorite outfit, purchased from the Salvation Army, and set out for the supermarket. He was armed with bad directions, however, and he ended up in a particularly bad section of a bad neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant. He was shot and died on someone's doorstep about 15 minutes before midnight. No witnesses have surfaced in the decade since his death and his murder remains unsolved. His death may have been a robbery gone wrong, though he still had money and belongings on his body. He may have been mistaken for someone else, stumbled into a robbery or drug deal, or shot by some idiot who thought he was a terrorist in those hysterical hours after the attacks.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Sam Giancana (1908-1975)

Sam Giancana was a Chicago mob boss. In his teens he was already a notorious triggerman and by twenty he was the prime suspect in three murder investigations, including one of a candidate for ward committee. The WWII draft board declared him 4F (unfit for service) not for physical health, but because he said he was a psychopath. By the 50s, he was running the show.

But this success brought intense FBI scrutiny. He used Frank Sinatra to try to get the Kennedys off his back, but when Sinatra failed to deliver (he couldn't "get change for a quarter" from the Kennedys, the gangster said), he even contemplated having Sinatra killed. After ending up in prison again in 1965, he fled to Mexico and was forced out of the boss' chair. Mexico kicked him out in 1974 and back in the US he was repeatedly forced to testify to a federal grand jury. On June 19, 1975, shortly before yet another grand jury appearance, he was cooking Italian sausage in his basement kitchen. The housekeeper found his body there. He had been shot seven times, once in the back of the head and six times around the mouth - the traditional way to shoot a squealer. The murder remains unsolved.