Were “concrete shoes” a favored technique of mob hitmen?
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 g
