Gravesend, Brooklyn, is a seven-thousand-acre swath of land sandwiched between Bensonhurst and Coney Island. The area initially drew its name from a small graveyard located at McDonald Avenue and Neck Road. Beaten and battered and worn down now, the graveyard is still there today. Gravesend was settled by the Dutch in 1640. Between the years 1641 and 1645, before the area was an English settlement, the Dutch had a campaign to rid the area of its indigenous peoples. The Dutch remorselessly murdered them, beheaded them, dismembered them, and gleefully burned them alive at the stake.
Gravesend was strategically close to estuaries fed by the nearby Atlantic Ocean. It was well located for importing and exporting various goods and commodities. The forests of Gravesend were abundant in all manner of game, moose, deer and beaver, wild pig, and huge numbers of rabbits. (Nearby Coney Island is Dutch for “Rabbit Island.”) The waters of the Atlantic were teeming with many varieties of fish. During the summer months, the pristine, unpolluted Atlantic literally boiled with huge schools of anchovy, cod, mackerel, bluefish, bass, fluke, and flounder. Tons of succulent lobster and blue claw crabs were there for the taking. Mountains of oysters, mussels, and clams were easily accessible. The vast, blue skies of seventeenth-century Brooklyn were filled with edible fowl—quail, duck, and geese. The dark, fertile soil was ideal for bountiful crops. With the exception of the brutal and unforgiving winters, Gravesend was a place of sweet abundance.
As Brooklyn grew to be a large, bustling metropolis, so did Gravesend. In the early twentieth century, the New York Mafia began using the more desolate areas of Gravesend as a convenient dumping ground for bodies. Joe “The Boss” Masseria, Salvatore Maranzano, Lucky Luciano, Murder Incorporated, the five New York crime families—Genovese, Profaci, Bonanno, Lucchese, and Anastasia—all gladly used Gravesend as a convenient place to leave their victims—stabbed, ice-picked, butchered, beaten, battered, and shot to death.
Up to the day of his arrest, Sammy “The Bull” Gravano had his office smack in the heart of Gravesend, at Highland and Stillwell avenues. The Lucchese, Genovese, Gambino, Colombo, and Bonanno crime families all had secretive black-windowed social clubs in Gravesend and Bensonhurst. Here, mafiosi played cards, drank strong espresso, planned new crimes, murders and hijacks, settled disputes. Thus, Gravesend, Brooklyn, took on a more sinister, morbid connotation to its inhabitants and to the people in nearby Bensonhurst and Coney Island. Here, people minded their own business. Here, no one saw anything. The citizenry could readily be likened to the three wise monkeys…they saw no evil, spoke no evil, heard no evil.
Because Gravesend and its neighbor Bensonhurst had larger populations of “made men” than anywhere else in the world, including Sicily, one of the by-products of their work—bodies—was always a concern. Where to hide them; how to get rid of them permanently; whether or not to blatantly leave them out in the open. These were decisions that either had to be made quickly, on the spot, or planned in advance. As vacant lots all across Brooklyn were filled with two- and three-story red-brick homes, the impromptu burial grounds of the area systematically disappeared. The mob, as a collective whole, had to look for new places to hide their victims.
Thus, it was logical that nearby Staten Island came into play. On Staten Island, there were still huge tracts of uninhabited land, blackened swamps, fields covered with tall green grass in the summer that turned a golden, wheatlike hue in the winter. Here, too, were thousands of acres of thick forests of oak, hickory, maple, and beech trees. More important, though, were the state wildlife sanctuaries, which were protected by the government from any kind of development. No construction was allowed; no utility lines would be laid. Surrounded by hundreds of acres of empty land, there was little threat someone idling by would stumble across a body or members of the mob burying one. Inadvertently, the government had invented the perfect place to get rid of bodies for the Mafia, and it didn’t take long for particularly cunning members of La Cosa Nostra to take advantage of this convenience.
Always wily, always quick to exploit a situation, the Mafia turned Staten Island’s wildlife sanctuaries into its private burial grounds. Interestingly, all five New York crime families used the sanctuaries. One would think members of the mob would keep secret cemeteries private, not tell anyone about them, but just the opposite proved true. They actually shared the sanctuaries with one another. Members of all the five families came to Staten Island with bodies in the trunks of their cars. They drove Cadillacs and Lincolns, Mercedeses and Jaguars, and arrogantly made their way to private burial grounds scattered all over Staten Island, in the south, the north, the east, and the west. They were so sure and confident that they often came across the Verrazano Bridge in broad daylight with bodies and long-handled shovels in the trunks of their cars, as Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, and golden oldies came from their radios. Never speeding, always carefully abiding by traffic rules and regulations, signs and lights, they made their way to these prearranged burial sites, sometimes singing along with Sinatra. Occasionally, there were graves already prepared; most often, however, shallow graves would be quickly dug in the secret-holding sanctuaries.
One such place was the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge, some eight miles as the crow flies from the great-grand Verrazano Bridge. A caporegime in the Bonanno crime family out of Gravesend, Brooklyn, had made this sanctuary his private burial ground. Here were bodies that had suffered tremendous trauma while the person was still alive—here were bodies that had been neatly cut into six pieces: the legs, arms, head, and torso, all separated by skillful cuts that showed no tears. Whoever dismembered these bodies was experienced, methodical, as cold and efficient as a butcher in the meatpacking district of lower Manhattan.
Here there were no tombstones, no reminders of the many who had lost their lives.