Only the most studious Sopranos viewers will recognize Michael “Big Mike” Squicciarini, who briefly played low-level enforcer “Big Frank” Cippolina in the show’s second season. The 6-foot-5, 305-pound actor, who died of natural causes in 2001, was determined to hit it big on the HBO mob drama: “Just give me one year on that show—give me nine or 10 episodes—and I’ll be a household name,” Squicciarini, also known as “Scuch,” told the New York Observer. But Scuch, a former debt collector for the DeCavalcante family—the New Jersey mob crew upon which The Sopranos’ DiMeo family is loosely based—who had spent years in prison behind multiple aggravated assault charges, also had a back-up plan, one that would prove deadly. “Let me put it this way,” Squicciarini told the Observer. “If the movie business doesn’t work out, I always got something to fall back on. I got my mask and gun at home.” True to his word, Squicciarini never quite put his mobster past behind him.

In 2002, the actor was posthumously implicated in a cold-blooded gangland execution that had taken place 10 years prior. According to documents filed by Manhattan District Attorney John Hillebrecht (via The Guardian), Squicciarini and others lured a rival drug dealer named Ralph Hernandez into a Brooklyn nightclub owned by DeCavalcante capo Joseph “Joe Pitts” Conigliaro. Conigliaro, who was wheelchair-bound due to a paralyzing wound sustained in a prior shootout, pulled a piece on Hernandez and shot him in the forehead. The capo was then wheeled over to the dying drug dealer, whom he shot thrice more in the head. Conigliaro’s henchmen rolled Hernandez’s body up in a carpet, dumped it in an abandoned lot nearby and returned to clean the blood-stained nightclub floor. One of these men was likely Squicciarini, though his exact role in the killing is uncertain. Scuch was linked to the crime by sources who knew his nickname, and was ultimately implicated by witnesses who, in an absurd twist of fate, recognized him in a Sopranos clips shown to them by investigators. Bada bing!