At 11:15 on a Tuesday morning, a jackhammer hit something that did not belong under a Chicago parking garage.
Matthew Smith, who had spent 15 years breaking old concrete, knew the feel of a normal slab—six to eight inches of resistance, then rebar, then dust. But in the northeast corner of this 1958 basement, the floor was wrong. One foot down, it was still concrete. Two feet, still more. At three feet, the machine was straining against a thickness that made no sense for an underground parking level.
He called over his supervisor, Carlos Martinez, who had seen every kind of mistake a builder could make.
“Keep going,” Carlos told him. “If it’s something important, we document it.”
At four feet, the sound changed. The bit hit metal.
They stopped the jackhammer, switched to hand tools, and cleared the area carefully. Under the dust, the curve of a bumper appeared—chrome, corroded but unmistakably from a late-1950s American car. Work halted. Phone calls went up the chain. Within hours, uniformed officers and detectives were standing in the garage, staring at a buried vehicle no one had known was there.
Over the next three days, a forensic team turned the corner of the garage into a controlled excavation. They cut out sections of concrete in blocks, then worked with smaller tools around the metal. Slowly, the full shape became clear: a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air, factory Frost Blue—the turquoise color that had once stood out on Chicago streets. It had been set nose-down at an angle into a rectangular pit roughly twelve feet long, eight feet wide, and six feet deep. Above the roof, someone had poured four feet of fresh concrete, then tied it into the original slab so smoothly that no seam was visible.
When they cleared enough of the driver’s side window to see through the cloudy glass, the beam of a flashlight picked out a shape inside. A human skeleton sat behind the wheel, still held in place by a seatbelt. The collapsed remains of a suit hung in tatters. Dried leather shoes gripped skeletal feet. The skull tilted slightly forward as if the driver had simply never lifted his head again.
The windshield in front of him carried two circular impact points with spider-web cracks spread outward. Laminated safety glass had held together, keeping the pattern intact.
Once the scene was fully documented, they forced the driver’s door open. The hinges complained but moved. Inside the jacket, they found a wallet. The driver’s license was dated 1959 and valid until 1963. The black-and-white photo showed a man in his early forties with dark hair and a direct gaze.
Name: Christopher James Jordano.
Address: South Side, Chicago.
In the glove compartment, registration papers listed the same name and the same 1959 Bel Air. On the left wrist of the skeleton, a gold watch. On one hand, a gold ring set with a diamond. Paper money in the wallet was dark with age but still legible.
A man who had gone missing in August 1961—spoken about in rumors, listed in old police reports, eventually declared dead without a body—had just been found in the floor of a building that had stood above him for more than six decades.
Before there was concrete over his head, Christopher Jordano had been a familiar figure in certain parts of Chicago.
He was born in 1916 in Little Italy, the son of immigrants who worked hard and trusted the few people they knew they could trust. As a boy, he watched older men move quietly through the neighborhood during the last years of Prohibition and the long aftereffects that followed. In his teens, he ran errands and carried envelopes. By his twenties, he was managing small gambling operations. In his thirties, he handled loans and “protection” arrangements in South Side neighborhoods where everyone knew who really kept order.
Christopher was tall, broad-shouldered, and always well dressed. He wore suits cut by tailors north of the Loop, shoes that shined, and a gold watch that caught the light whenever he checked the time. To many, he was a businessman who owned several legitimate enterprises: bars, small warehouses, service companies that handled cash and invoices. To others, he was someone you did not cross if you wanted to sleep peacefully.
In 1941, he married a woman named Margaret. They bought a brick house on a tree-lined street and had two children, Anthony and Maria. On Sundays, they went to church. Christopher donated to local parishes and youth programs. He shook hands at weddings, attended funerals, and quietly helped families who had fallen on hard times.
His legitimate ventures gave him cover. His presence in the community gave him eyes and ears. He remembered birthdays. He appeared at fundraisers. He was, to many people, “Mr. Jordano,” the man who could solve a problem with a word or a phone call.
But his world was not stable. By 1961, federal attention on organized crime was intensifying. Younger groups were challenging older networks. Territories were shifting. Conversations grew quieter, more cautious.
In early August that year, people close to Christopher noticed that he seemed more tense. He met with men he did not usually deal with. He made phone calls that did not sound like routine check-ins. When Margaret asked him about it, he shrugged it off as “business,” the same way he always had, but the edge in his shoulders did not disappear.
The day he vanished—Saturday, August 12, 1961—was hot and humid. He spent the afternoon at home, playing cards with his son and helping his daughter with schoolwork. The family ate dinner together. Everything looked normal.
Around 9:25 p.m., he changed into a dark gray suit, white shirt, and navy tie. He put on his watch and ring, slipped his wallet into his jacket, and headed for the garage.
Instead of his Cadillac—the car that announced him from half a block away—he chose the Bel Air. That turquoise Chevrolet was less conspicuous, easier to miss. It was the car he used when he preferred not to attract attention.
At 9:30 p.m., a neighbor saw him back down the driveway, wave, and drive off. Margaret stood at the front window and watched the car turn the corner and disappear into the late-summer night.
He said he would be back. He did not return.
By half past midnight, Margaret was pacing. By 1:30 a.m., she was calling every associate she could reach. Their surprise sounded real. By morning, worry had hardened into fear. By Sunday afternoon, after long hesitation about involving the police, the family filed a missing person report.
Detectives did what they could. They asked where he had last been seen, who he had been planning to meet, what his routines were. They checked hospitals and arrest records. No car accidents matching his description had been reported. No unidentified man matching his features lay in a city morgue. The FBI, already watching several figures in his world, added his name to their lists of questions.
For years, nothing surfaced. The turquoise Bel Air seemed to have vanished along with him.
Rumors traveled. Some said rivals had taken him. Others whispered that he might have staged his own disappearance. A few believed that he had been dealt with inside his own organization. None of the stories came with proof. There was no scene, no car, no body.
In 1968, with no new information and no sign of him anywhere, a court declared him legally dead. The ruling let Margaret manage property, accounts, and the future of her children. She never remarried. She kept, for the rest of her life, a space beside her own name reserved on a headstone.
The building that eventually gave up its secret had gone up three years before Christopher disappeared.
Completed in 1958, it had been a symbol of modern commercial ambition: six stories of retail and office space over a basement parking level that, at the time, seemed impressively forward-thinking. Over the decades, its ground floor hosted a grocery store, then a furniture outlet, then different offices. People drove up and down its ramps, parked their cars in the painted stalls, followed arrows, and never questioned the thickness of the concrete under their wheels.
Decades later, after the Bel Air was found, investigators dug through old city records. Among them was a work permit filed for the same building, dated the week after Christopher disappeared—August 14–18, 1961. It authorized nighttime concrete work in the lower garage, described as “reinforcement” and “foundation repair.” The contractor was a company with a familiar name to anyone who knew the history of mid-century construction in Chicago, and the payment had been made in cash.
There was nothing illegal about pouring more concrete onto a garage floor. Nighttime work was common. What made this job different was what had been under the new pour: a twelve-by-eight-foot pit, a car, and a body.
Concrete does not shift the way soil does. It does not erode easily or settle in a way that reveals what is inside. When it is poured level over an existing floor, cured, and painted, it becomes just another part of the slab. For 62 years, no one had any reason to suspect that one corner was four feet thicker than the rest.
It took a renovation plan, a demolition crew, and one persistent jackhammer to bring that design to an end.
The car and its driver did not just offer a name—they also carried the story of what had happened that night.
The skeleton was still buckled in. The seatbelt and the lack of soil movement had kept the body from shifting over time. Damage on the skull at the left temple showed a round defect consistent with a bullet coming in from the outside. A rib in the upper left chest carried its own sign of impact. The windshield in front of the driver had two distinct impact points, each radiating cracks outward but still intact because of the laminated glass.
From these details, investigators could reconstruct the basics: Christopher had been behind the wheel when someone fired at least two shots through the front of the car—one toward his head, one toward his chest. There was no sign he had moved afterward. The evidence suggested he had died in the driver’s seat.
Transporting the car and concealing it required planning. Someone had to arrange access to the building, bring in a crew capable of opening the slab, creating a pit, lowering the vehicle nose-down, and filling and finishing the floor so that it would look original. The permit filed that week, the choice of contractor, and the cash payment all pointed toward people who knew both construction and the underworld environment of the time.
Who exactly made the decision, who stood in the garage while the Bel Air was lowered into the ground, who watched the concrete level out and knew that a man and a car were disappearing under their feet—those names are missing. The individuals who arranged it are almost certainly long gone.
But the operation itself is clear: a man left his house in a less noticeable car, was intercepted, shot, and entombed with his vehicle in a place no one expected to disturb.
In March 2023, when Chicago police contacted the family listed in the old file, the call traveled across decades.
Anthony, now an elderly man with a long career in a very different line of work, had spent his life moving away from the world that had once surrounded his father. Still, he had never lost the habit of wondering. He had requested documents, read old stories, and carried questions that had no real answers.
Maria, living in another state, had built a life with some distance from her childhood. The news pulled the past into sharp focus again.
In April, after the forensic team finished its work, the remains were released. On April 22, 2023, the man whose status had been a question mark for 62 years was buried beside the woman who had kept a space waiting for him. The simple line added to the gravestone said what needed to be said: found after 62 years, finally at rest.
The Bel Air, once a symbol of quiet mobility and then a sealed chamber of silence, became an object of interest in its own right. Preserved after examination, it stood as evidence of how a city can build over its own unresolved stories and how, sometimes, those stories come back to the surface when no one expects them to.
Above the garage where it had been hidden, new concrete was poured, new pipes were run, and fresh lines were painted for a new generation of cars. People parked, locked their doors, and went about their lives, unaware of the fact that the floor beneath them had once given up a secret that concrete had held for more than half a century.