A staple of cartoons is the Mafia victim with his feet encased in concrete.[1] It is an image that registers immediately with everyone. What is fascinating is that there is only one confirmed case, and it happened in May 2016. Brooklyn gang member Peter “Petey Crack” Martinez’s head was wrapped in duct tape and his feet and shins were encased in concrete set inside a five-gallon bucket. It was a failure – his body floated to the shore due to air in the concrete because it was not given enough time to cure before being thrown into the ocean.
This has always been the drawback to “concrete shoes.” They take a lot of time to work correctly. But it is possible that they work better than we think – there have long been rumors of Mafia victims who had concrete used in their disposal and their bodies have never been recovered. A story from the 1930s has a victim’s entire body put in a box that was filled with concrete but that must have been extremely heavy. Concrete shoes are much more sensible. To be truly efficient, attach concrete blocks to various body parts (it has been done numerous times).
Perhaps “concrete shoes” grabs our imagination because it involves imminent, but not immediate, doom. You are watching it slowly cure and you know what is going to happen next. Many of our anxieties in life are like this. The problems accumulate and seem unsolvable. The dread of disaster grows.
The Psalms often portray this feeling. Psalm 69:2 is especially poignant: “I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me.” Verse 15 adds, “Do not let the floodwaters engulf me or the depths swallow me up or the pit close its mouth over me.” Notice the claustrophobia of catastrophe.
Inundation is not a foregone conclusion. The Psalmists always expected God to come to their rescue. Psalm 40:2 says, “He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.” Instead of feet in solidifying rock, he put our feet on top of solid rock.” I live in New Jersey so “concrete shoes” are often on my mind. If my feet are ever encased in a pair, Psalm 40:2 will be on my lips. There are no problems I can have that God cannot pull me out of. God doesn’t just rescue, he can give us a triumph. Hold on to his solid rock!
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[1] Ten “Concrete Shoe” cartoons from the New Yorker magazine:
http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/When-did-last-requests-take-over-our-lives-New-Yorker-Cartoo n-Prints_i8472494_.htm
http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/It-s-easier-to-make-em-talk-when-you-just-cement-the-feet-New-Yo rker-Cartoon-Prints_i8472980_.htm
http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/No-more-last-requests-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i12761022_.htm
http://www.radosh.net/archive/002693.html
http://www.radosh.net/archive/002582.html
http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/Mobsters-wheel-out-a-clown-with-a-long-block-of-cement-around -his-shoes-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i14137729_.htm
http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/A-man-at-the-ocean-floor-tied-up-wearing-cement-shoes-and-surr ounded-by-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i12592463_.htm
http://attemptedbloggery.blogspot.com/2014/01/my-entry-in-new-yorker-cartoon-caption.html
http://www.condenaststore.com/-sp/Man-in-cement-shoes-underwater-thinking-If-I-had-known-I-coul d-hold-my-b-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Prints_i8540572_.htm
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More articles on “concrete shoes”:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2824/were-concrete-shoes-a-favored-technique-of-mob-hitmen
Were “concrete shoes” a favored technique of mob hitmen?
November 14, 2008
Dear Cecil:
I’m sure you’ve heard the term “concrete shoes,” mobsters’ choice of swimwear for fellas with rodent traits and other individuals that ran afoul of them. Is there any truth to it?
— Ale, Bangkok
Cecil replies:
When your question came in, Ale, I thought: At last, a chance to have it out with E.L. Doctorow.
You remember the opening of Doctorow’s award-winning 1989 novel Billy Bathgate , right? (Play along here, slackers.) Evil crime lord Dutch Schultz motors across New York harbor in a tugboat while a henchman sticks the feet of doomed underling Bo Weinberg into a tub of concrete in preparation for shoving him overboard. Billy, the narrator, watches this and thinks: “I had of course seen … how the tubbed cement made a slow-witted diagram of the sea outside, the slab of it shifting to and fro as the boat rose and fell on the waves.” Cool line, but a little voice in the back of your head, or anyway in the back of mine, is saying: Right, like some mob boss bent on murder is going to wait two hours for the concrete to dry.
However, that was before I assigned the case to my assistant Gfactor, Straight Dope gumshoe par excellence. Having seen the results of his investigation, I realize I’m going to have to cut Doctorow some slack. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying the cement shoes thing actually happened. But it’s solidly grounded in rumor.
As evidence I present an Associated Press clipping from June 3, 1935, on the fate of Danny Walsh, a bootlegging kingpin from Providence, Rhode Island. Danny had disappeared in 1933. The AP now offered an explanation: Walsh “was stood in a tub of cement until it hardened about his feet, and then thrown alive into the sea.” But the body hadn’t been recovered, nor had witnesses to the crime come forward. Rather, the story was a “grisly underworld tale” that authorities were trying to confirm.
They didn’t, at least not exactly. The following month the Sunday-paper supplement American Weekly ran a sensational spread about a police raid on a Rhode Island “murder mansion” owned by a wealthy Walsh associate named Carl Rettich. The money detail was the cops’ discovery of a secret dungeon below the basement, accessible only via a hidden stairway revealed by cranking a phonograph handle in a concealed socket. According to unnamed “stool pigeons,” Walsh had been taken down there and clubbed on the head; his body (maybe dead, maybe not) was laid in a coffinlike box that was then filled with concrete and dumped in the ocean. When Walsh’s girlfriend later got too vocal with suspicions regarding her man’s disappearance, informants said, she was herself hustled down to the dungeon and given the feet-in-wet-cement treatment, the thugs having learned from experience with Walsh that head-to-toe encasement produced a needlessly heavy burden. But no bodies were found.
After that, stories about underworld cementwear became common, and terms like “cement shoes,” “cement boots,” and “cement overcoat” took their place in the crime writer’s lexicon. A news story from later in 1935 cited “underworld report” to the effect that the body of Bo Weinberg (he and Dutch Schultz, I should clarify, were real people fictionalized in Doctorow’s book) had been sealed in a barrel of concrete; in another article police speculated that he’d been given concrete shoes and dumped in the East River. Weinberg’s corpse was never found either. The body of gambler Charles Morris was found encased in concrete beside the Connecticut River in 1938 — but the guy that killed him wasn’t, it happens, a gangland type. A 1940 AP story about Murder, Inc., the famed mob hit squad, claimed gangster Harry Westone had been tossed into a cement mixer; his unrecovered remains allegedly lay somewhere beneath an upstate New York highway. In cases where bodies did emerge, concrete has functioned more as accessory than garment: the corpse of Philadelphia racketeer Johnnie “Chink” Goodman was discovered in a New Jersey creek in 1941, weighted down with a 40-pound block of concrete; hit man Ernest “the Hawk” Rupolo was fished out of Jamaica Bay in New York in 1964, also weighted down with concrete blocks.
So let’s review what we know: (1) Underworld gossips have repeatedly insisted that mob hit men sometimes encase a victim partially or completely in concrete. (2) However, the one confirmed instance of a concretized corpse we’ve been able to turn up wasn’t a mob hit. (3) In cases of mob hits definitively known to involve concrete, we’re not talking concrete shoes so much as concrete anchors, in the form of blocks used to keep the body submerged. We have no evidence of a mob hit in which the killer mixed up concrete, planted a victim in it, and (not to fixate on this, but one has to consider the practical aspects) waited for the stuff to dry. Conclusion: Either custom concretewear is 100 percent effective, and the victim invariably vanishes forever from the ken of man, or the whole thing’s a myth.
— Cecil Adams
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http://northerncobblestone.blogspot.com/2013/09/did-mafia-ever-use-concrete-shoes.html
23 September 2013
Did the Mafia ever use Concrete Shoes?
Or concrete wellies, boots or overcoats for that matter? It is an image we’re all familiar with from TV, films and books, but is there any truth in it?
The Last Shoes You’ll Ever Need
In episode 295 of The Simpsons, Fat Tony, the resident Mafia boss, is seen pouring cement into a bucket around the feet of a nervous looking man while a pair of goons observe.
Above Fat Tony’s head, a sign informs us that he is selling cement shoes, touted to be ‘the last shoes you’ll ever need’.
Season two, episode 17 of Star Trek: The Original Series , has an irate (when wasn’t he irate?) Scotty threatening a 1930s mobster with a pair of ‘concrete galoshes’.
Meanwhile, the 2006 short film featuring Dylan Moran, Tell it to the Fishes , involves a pair of gangsters, whose feet are encased in concrete, arguing on the beach at low tide.
Sleeping With the Fishes
If there’s a link between these depictions of the infamous ‘concrete wellies’, it’s the use of the image for entertainment purposes.
Nobody in The Sopranos was thrown off a bridge with their feet encased in concrete.
Likewise, The Godfather might have featured the line ‘sleeping with the fishes’ but Don Corleone never poured cement around his enemies’ feet, waiting a day for the mix to cure before taking a leisurely drive to the nearest pier and dumping them over the edge.
Mafia godfathers are business men (albeit with guns). He’d never have allowed that sort of slack in the system!
Cement Overcoat
The entire premise of concrete shoes, or cement overcoats, arose after a couple of sensationalist stories printed in America in 1935.
There was talk of hits involving encasement in cement or, as in the Simpsons parody, someone standing in a tub of cement while it hardened so that they could be thrown into the sea.
No evidence of these murders was ever found, but that didn’t stop the idea spreading into popular culture, and in particular to the minds of writers of crime spoofs and parodies.
A Glimmer of Truth
Historically, there has long been a tradition of weighting down bodies, alive or dead, to ensure death or disposal.
In the age of sail, cannonballs were tied to the feet of deceased crew to ensure their bodies sank to the seabed.
During the Reformation, Anabaptists were sewn into sacks with bricks and thrown into rivers or lakes.
Over the years, many bodies have been discovered weighted down in some way, with heavy chains or concrete blocks attached to them, including some Mafia hits, but never where the victim’s body was in any way encased in the concrete itself.
Unless, of course, they do it so efficiently that the evidence has never surfaced (no pun intended!).
Nuisance Footprints
So, concrete wellies remain the stuff of fiction, for the most part. But shoes and wet concrete are two things better kept apart as separating footwear and concrete can require specialist tools.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement_shoes
It has long been unclear whether such a cumbersome and time-consuming method of execution was practicable outside of Hollywood movies and books like E. L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate . Cement takes hours to harden and, until 2016, there was never a documented case — although crime historian Thomas Reppetto said there have probably been real-life examples that have never been found.
In May 2016, the first and only documented case of “cement shoes” was reported. The body of Brooklyn gang member Peter Martinez, aged 28, better known on the streets as Petey Crack, washed up near Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn. His head was wrapped in duct tape. His feet and shins were encased in concrete set inside a five-gallon bucket. His body floated to the shore due to air in the concrete because it was not given enough time to cure before being thrown into the ocean.
Concrete has been used as a weight to dispose of a body. In 1941, the body of Philadelphia racketeer Johnnie Goodman was found by crab fisherman in a New Jersey creek, weighed down with a 40-pound block of concrete. On 24 August 1964, the body of Ernest Rupolo, aged 52, a triggerman and informer on Vito Genovese in 1944, was found in Jamaica Bay, New York, with concrete blocks tied to his legs.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/nyregion/mans-body-feet-encased-in-concrete-washes-ashore-in-brookly n.html
“Man’s Body, Feet Encased in Concrete, Washes Ashore in Brooklyn”
By Ashley Southall, May 3, 2016
In August 1964, the body of Ernest Rupolo, a 52-year-old triggerman turned informant, was found in Jamaica Bay with two concrete blocks tied to his legs.
Before Mr. Rupolo, several mobsters and gamblers and at least one rumrunner were believed to have been encased in or weighed down with concrete. Some of them have never been found.