Cement shoes, concrete shoes, or Chicago overcoat [1] is a method of murder or body disposal, usually associated with criminals such as the Mafia or gangs. It involves weighing down the victim, who may be dead or alive, with concrete and throwing them into water in the hope the body will never be found. In the US, the term has become a tongue-in-cheek euphemism for a threat of death by criminals. While a common trope in fiction, only one real-life case has ever been authenticated.
Cement shoes involve first binding, incapacitating or killing the victim and then placing each foot into a bucket or box, which is then filled with wet concrete (a mixture of cement powder, rock, water and sand), or even simply cement powder and water. Typically in films and novels, the victim is still alive as they watch the concrete harden, heightening the torture and drama. [2] [3] After the concrete sets, the victim is thrown into a body of water such as a river, lake or the ocean.
Despite being a theme in Hollywood movies like Lady in Cement and books like E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate , whether such a cumbersome and time-consuming method of execution was practical remained in question. [2] Cement takes many hours or even days to fully 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. [4]
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, the immediate cause of his death. 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 dry before being thrown into the ocean. [5] [6] [7]
Concrete has been used as a weight to dispose of a body. In 1941, the body of Philadelphia racketeer Johnnie Goodman was found by a crab fisherman in a New Jersey creek, weighed down with an 18-kilogram (40-pound) block of concrete. [2] On August 24, 1964, the body of Ernest Rupolo, aged 52, a trigger man who informed on Vito Genovese in 1944, was found in Jamaica Bay, New York, with concrete blocks tied to his legs. [8] It is also speculated that bootlegger Rocco Perri was murdered by being fitted with cement shoes and thrown into Hamilton Harbour in 1944. [9]
The French Army allegedly used cement shoes on Algerians who were murdered on so-called "death flights" during the Algerian War. The victims were called "crevettes Bigeard " 'Bigeard shrimp' after General Marcel Bigeard, who allegedly ordered the procedure. Bigeard put his victims' feet in a basin, poured quick-setting cement in and threw the person into the sea from the top of a helicopter, said Paul Teitgen, secretary general of the French police in Algiers in 1957, and notable opponent of torture during the war. [10]
Concrete is a composite material composed of aggregate bonded together with a fluid cement that cures to a solid over time. Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water, and is the most widely used building material. Its usage worldwide, ton for ton, is twice that of steel, wood, plastics, and aluminium combined.
A cement is a binder, a chemical substance used for construction that sets, hardens, and adheres to other materials to bind them together. Cement is seldom used on its own, but rather to bind sand and gravel (aggregate) together. Cement mixed with fine aggregate produces mortar for masonry, or with sand and gravel, produces concrete. Concrete is the most widely used material in existence and is behind only water as the planet's most-consumed resource.
Mortar is a workable paste which hardens to bind building blocks such as stones, bricks, and concrete masonry units, to fill and seal the irregular gaps between them, spread the weight of them evenly, and sometimes to add decorative colours or patterns to masonry walls. In its broadest sense, mortar includes pitch, asphalt, and soft mud or clay, as those used between mud bricks, as well as cement mortar. The word "mortar" comes from Old French mortier, "builder's mortar, plaster; bowl for mixing." (13c.).
Anthony Joseph Bevilacqua was an American cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as archbishop of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia from 1988 to 2003. Bevilacqua previously served as bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh from 1983 to 1987 and as an auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Brooklyn from 1980 to 1983. He was elevated to the cardinalate in 1991.
A concrete mixer is a device that homogeneously combines cement, aggregate, and water to form concrete. A typical concrete mixer uses a revolving drum to mix the components. For smaller volume works, portable concrete mixers are often used so that the concrete can be made at the construction site, giving the workers ample time to use the concrete before it hardens. An alternative to a machine is mixing concrete by hand. This is usually done in a wheelbarrow; however, several companies have recently begun to sell modified tarps for this purpose.
In geotechnical engineering, a caisson is a watertight retaining structure used, for example, to work on the foundations of a bridge pier, for the construction of a concrete dam, or for the repair of ships.
Plasterwork is construction or ornamentation done with plaster, such as a layer of plaster on an interior or exterior wall structure, or plaster decorative moldings on ceilings or walls. This is also sometimes called pargeting. The process of creating plasterwork, called plastering or rendering, has been used in building construction for centuries. For the art history of three-dimensional plaster, see stucco.
Lime mortar or torching is a masonry mortar composed of lime and an aggregate such as sand, mixed with water. It is one of the oldest known types of mortar, used in ancient Rome and Greece, when it largely replaced the clay and gypsum mortars common to ancient Egyptian construction.
Death flights are a form of extrajudicial killing in which the victims are dropped to their death from airplanes or helicopters into oceans, large rivers or mountains. Death flights have been carried out in a number of internal conflicts, including by France during the 1947 Malagasy Uprising in Madagascar and the 1957 Battle of Algiers, and by the junta dictatorship during the Argentine Dirty War between 1976 and 1983. During the Bougainville conflict, PNGDF helicopters were used to dispose of corpses of detainees that had died under torture, and in some cases, still-living victims.
Rocco Perri was an Italian-born organized crime figure in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He was one of the most prominent Prohibition-era crime figures in Canada, and was sometimes referred to as "King of the Bootleggers" and "Canada's Al Capone."
Since August 20, 2007, at least 20 detached human feet have been found on the coasts of the Salish Sea in British Columbia, Canada, and Washington, US. The first discovery, on August 20, 2007, was on Jedediah Island in British Columbia. Feet have been discovered on the coasts of islands in British Columbia, and in the US cities of Tacoma and Seattle.
Concrete degradation may have many different causes. Concrete is mostly damaged by the corrosion of reinforcement bars due to the carbonatation of hardened cement paste or chloride attack under wet conditions. Chemical damage is caused by the formation of expansive products produced by chemical reactions, by aggressive chemical species present in groundwater and seawater, or by microorganisms Other damaging processes can also involve calcium leaching by water infiltration, physical phenomena initiating cracks formation and propagation, fire or radiant heat, aggregate expansion, sea water effects, leaching, and erosion by fast-flowing water.
The Red Hook Grain Terminal is an abandoned grain elevator in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, adjacent to the mouth of the Gowanus Canal. It is 12 stories tall, 70 feet (21 m) wide, and 429 feet (131 m) long, containing sixty 120-foot-tall (37 m) cement silos. As the neighborhood's tallest structure, it is highly visible from the elevated Gowanus Expressway and New York City Subway's IND Culver Line viaducts over the Gowanus Canal.
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Rajee Narinesingh is an American actress, LGBT activist, author, singer, and reality television personality, most widely known for her appearances on the E! Entertainment docu-series, Botched, which documented her struggles to remove cement from her face, breasts and hips after previous mismanaged fillers by a fake doctor. Most of the concrete-like substance was removed from her face after her second appearance on the show.
The Papalia crime family also known as Papalia 'ndrina, is a 'Ndrangheta organized crime family based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, as well as Platì in Southern Italy and Buccinasco in Northern Italy. Another branch of the family is based in Griffith, New South Wales, Australia.
DNA Doe Project is an American nonprofit volunteer organization formed to identify unidentified deceased persons using forensic genealogy. Volunteers identify victims of automobile accidents, homicide, and unusual circumstances and persons who committed suicide under an alias. The group was founded in 2017 by Colleen M. Fitzpatrick and Margaret Press.
Tales from the Hood 3 is a 2020 American horror-comedy anthology film written and directed by Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott, executive-produced by Spike Lee, and starring Tony Todd, London Brown, Cooper Huckabee, Patrick Emmanuel Abellard, Sage Arrindell, and Lynn Whitfield. The film is the sequel to Cundieff and Scott's 2018 horror anthology Tales from the Hood 2 and tells the story of a lumbering man and a young girl on the run from "bad things" as the young girl tells him different stories to distract him from the impending danger.
The Gentleman of Heligoland is the nickname of an unidentified decedent whose body was found in the waters off Heligoland in 1994. His body showed signs of having been beaten and his death is a suspected case of murder. Another name for the unidentified decedent is North Sea Man.
Kenyatta "KeKe" Odom, formerly known as Christmas Doe and Ware County Jane Doe, was a formerly unidentified murder victim whose decomposed remains were found in Millwood, Georgia on December 21, 1988. Her body was discovered inside a suitcase filled with cement that was placed inside of a television console and discarded on the side of a road. She was unidentified for 34 years until she was identified in November 2023.
"There's a lot of urban legend to this — cement shoes, concrete shoes, concrete gloves, whatever you want to call it — but it all has some sort of truth to it," said Reppetto, [...] "It started somewhere real and took off."