Dear Cecil:
When your question came in, Ale, I thought: At last, a chance to have it out with E.L. Doctorow.
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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.
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.
