Over the last couple of days I saw some Joe Pesci movies and they involved digging cornfield and desert graves to dispose of a murder victim.
Has the mob ever had access crematoriums? It seems at one time they had their fingers into everything else. Wouldn’t that be the best way of getting rid of a body? Is it possible that’s what happened to Hoffa? Or is there something about operating a crematorium I’m ignorant of?
Disgusting bonus question: What would happen if they put a living person in one? Would they burn alive or die of smoke inhalation first like other fire victims do?
It’s been a long time since I read the book. But if I recall correctly, this was a minor plot point in The Godfather. Like in the movie, Amerigo Bonasera (a funeral home owner) approaches Don Corleone and asks for revenge. Don Corleone agrees and says that he may someday ask Bonasera a favor in return.
Now in the movie, the favor ended up being fairly innocuous. After Sonny was killed, Don Corleone asked Bonasera to clean up his body. But in the book, I believe Bonasera was “asked” to step out for the night while some of Don Corleone’s men used his crematorium to burn some bodies.
As to your second question, there’s the infamous, probably apocryphal, story about the GRU showing new officers a film of a traitor being wheeled into a crematorium while conscious. The traitor may have been Oleg Penkovskiy, although the guy famously making the claim in his book Inside the Aquarium, “Viktor Suvorov,” later disclaimed it. Not that Suvorov is all that trustworthy anyway.
It’s been a while so my memory of the book is definitely foggy. Don’t remember this.
I think the fanciest, funeral home-related “trick” is the 30s era was to “double up” on a casket. Joe Schmoe on top and the “Hey, whatever happened to Tony G?” guy under him.
The NY mobs in recent years have not done a great job of completely disappearing many bodies. Some were buried in an empty lot in Ozone Park, Queens. Others in the basement of one of their “social clubs”, etc. The discovery of these sites lead to convictions.
But still, the vast majority end up dumped in one of NYC’s many scenic waterways. Weights on the body, optional.
Yes, according to Selwyn Raab’s “Five Families”, it has been done. One fo the families, I forget which now, owned a funeral home. Also, it is believed “double stack” burials were done where a body was covertly hidden under the body of a legitimate customer.
The same book also cites a case much earlier on of where the feet in a tub of cement trick was actually done. But this was more a form of torture-death as opposed to just a way to dispose of a body so it would hard or impossible to find.
Does a crematorium destroy a body so completely as to remove all DNA identification? Seems like it would if everything is reduced to ash. But who knows what might happen if the body had a pacemaker, artificial hip or some other more durable item in it. I wonder if these parts might have serial numbers on them that could be traced to the victims ID.
Yeah, but a burnt-up pacemaker can be discreetly tossed into a trash can much easier than a whole body could…
I do remember remember hearing a theory that Hoffa’s body may have been cremated at a Detroit funeral home that supposedly had Mob connections. Of course, anything regarding what happened to Hoffa needs to be taken with [del]a grain of salt[/del] the entire shaker of salt.
A pacemaker has a battery in it, so it might cause a small explosion. I think if you knew the body had a pacemaker (or something like an insulin pump or vagus nerve stimulator), you’d want to remove it prior to cremation. Identifying parts like artificial hips I would think would be pretty obvious after the body was burned, and you could pick them out. Ditto for the jaw, if it didn’t burn completely. I’d probably be pretty easy to toss those in a lake, or in someone else’s coffin, and have them gone for good, than it would be to do so with a whole body.
I used to work with the Chevra Kadisha at my synagogue, so I have prepared bodies for burial according to Jewish ritual, and put them in coffins. I can see squeezing two bodies in one coffin, if neither one was very big, and it would probably be even easier with a gentile coffin, because they have all sorts of linings and paddings that you could remove, but the problem is that the coffin would weigh twice as much. Your pallbearers would have to be in on it.
However, tossing a jawbone and an artificial hip in a casket wouldn’t really add any weight.
Definitely not an answer worthy of GQ, but I can’t imagine it hasn’t been used.
Google ‘abandoned funeral home’ to see articles on the one in Texas where bodies were left inside after the operators were evicted. See also the case several years ago in GA of the crematory that was dumping bodies on their property instead of burning them. These stories go to show how little oversight there is on funeral homes and crematories. With examples such as these of just plain neglect and incompetence falling through the cracks, it seems beyond belief that organized people with nefarious intentions haven’t figured out how to cheat the system even if it hasn’t been documented.
Well, and then there are veterinary crematoria. I’ll bet there’s even less oversight on those, and they have to be able to accommodate some pretty big dogs. There’s a place for abuse if you need to get rid of a body.
Using a place designed to get rid of bodies is not a smart way to hide the fact that you are getting rid of bodies. Intuitively, the law and the mobsters themselves would know that they kill people and dispose of bodies… so they are already under suspicion and being somewhat monitored. It’s a lot less risky to kill someone in a remote private place and dispose of them asap essentially on the spot than to transport them long distances involving a bunch of additional hours transporting a corpse, potential check points to get pulled over, and so on… than to transport them to a known body-destroying location with permits, building plans, gas meters, extra witnesses in the back alley, surprise visits by the law to check who’s in the freezer, and so on.
Murderers not only want the physical bodies to disappear, they don’t want others to know where to look. There’s no way to guarentee you didn’t leave some little scrap of evidence behind… but if nobody ever looks where it happened the chances of it being found are drastically reduced. Better to have nobody find the disposal site than to try to eliminate all physical and witness traces from a likely disposal site.
Yes, this is the right way of thinking for a smart mobster. The problem is, the average street guy isn’t very bright. The top guys, sometimes. But below that, there’s a whole lot of dumb.
E.g., outside one of the “social clubs” in the 80s there was a pay phone the Feds had tapped. The boss ordered everyone to not use that pay phone. They still did. He ordered it damaged. The Feds would have the phone company come out and fix it pronto.
Now with “burner” cell phones, such things are impossible, right? The mooks are told to only use the cell phones for family business and only to certain numbers. But they start calling their girlfriends and family. The Feds id the phone, get a warrant, start tracking it and whoever else they call, etc.
So don’t expect these guys to generally make good decisions on disposing of bodies.
Teeth are extremely durable, and can withstand cremation. Heard a talk by Dr. Henry Lee, who recounted the case of a woman who has her mother cremated, but thought there was something odd about the cremains. Dr. Lee simply counted the teeth. “You have one-and-a-half people in this bag” he told her.
Assuming that you’re smart (and don’t confess) just how hard would it really be to get rid of a body and have it never be found?
Feet in a block of cement, take it off shore in a speed boat and dump it - even if the police knew where you went - would they have any real chance of finding the body after a month or so? I know that for even your basic trailer sailer of leisure boat - the water area you could cover would be massive, not to mention currents etc etc, let alone getting something slightly bigger that a mobster would be able to afford.
Same for burial in the desert or paddock somewhere - again, assuming there were no witnesses, if I buried someone 5 or 6 foot deep in a cornfield somewhere - is there any real prospect that body will be found short of a search in a very very specific area? It’s not hard to dig and fill a 6’ hole overnight - even by myself.
