Body With Cement Shoes Washes Up On Brooklyn Waterfront
A body with cement shoes has washed up on the New York City waterfront in Brooklyn. Police are calling it a homicide, as the hands were tied up, the body wrapped in plastic, and the feet had been embedded in cement. NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said the man’s body was found in a bag with his hands and arms tied behind his back. His feet had been completely submerged in concrete.
The body was found at around 10:30 a.m. on Monday near Sheepshead Bay at Oriental Boulevard in Manhatten Beach. According to NBC New York, a student at Kingsborough Community College found the body. The Brooklyn bay location where the body washed up is very near the Kingsborough campus.
Body with ‘cement shoes’ washes up on Brooklyn shore https://t.co/ukhnqVqhLM pic.twitter.com/MCMwjFYPfD
— PIX11 News (@PIX11News) May 4, 2016
The victim has a large tattoo on his back, says a report by KWWL Channel 7 News. It features the Virgin Mary holding a rose. Police are hoping someone in the Brooklyn area will recognize the description of the tattoo and be able to identify him. Authorities are also hoping the autopsy results and other forensic findings will tell them how long the body was in the water, when it washed up, and possibly point to other evidence which will help them solve the case. But a law enforcement source says the murderer, or murderers, as the case may be, failed to do their job properly.
“They botched the cement shoe job because air got in and he floated to the surface.”
Others have suggested it was less than cautious for the murderers to have buried the body with tattoos intact, specifically the large, significant tattoo on the man’s back of the Virgin Mary holding a rose. Such a tattoo would be one of the quickest and most obvious means of identifying the victim.
According to a report on DNA Info, authorities have identified the victim, tentatively, based on the tattoos and fingerprints. They claim the victim is a 28-year-old male who has a criminal background for various charges, including fraud and narcotics. If this is the man they believe he is, he also survived a shooting earlier this year. Police are not yet ready to release the name of the victim as family members have not been notified yet. Autopsy results and other findings are still pending.
The term concrete shoes, or cement shoes, is where a victim’s feet have been submerged in wet cement before being dumped in a body of water and is part of several mob legends, as is the term “sleeps with the fishes.” There are times, however, when a body is actually handled and disposed of by the same means.
The victim found in Brooklyn is certainly not the first to be found under such circumstances and not the first to have washed up in this manner. Historically, it’s been a mafia underling who’s done something to upset the “family,” as a branch of the mafia is called, or the mob boss himself. A couple of examples, reported by the Daily Mail, occurred in New Jersey and New York. Johnnie “Chink” Goodman’s body was found in a New Jersey creek in 1941 weighted down with a heavy block of cement. Goodman was a known mafia racketeer. Ernest “The Hawk” Rupolo, a mafia hitman, was found with his feet in concrete blocks in Jamaica Bay in New York in 1964.
It is unknown when the victim was murdered in relation to the time he was dumped into the bay or how long that occurred before his body washed up on the Brooklyn waterfront in cement shoes. Police are continuing the investigation, hoping forensic findings will yield more information that will lead them to the killers. Anyone with any information regarding this case is encouraged to contact NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS.
[Photo by Sergio TB/Shutterstock Images]
