Cement shoes

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For the independent record label, see Cement Shoes Records.

Cement shoes is a slang term adopted by the American Mafia crime world for a method of execution that involves weighting down a victim and throwing him or her into the water to drown. It has become adopted in the US as a humorous term representing any exotic threat from criminals. This gives rise to the term of someone who "sleeps with the fishes", a euphemism for the deceased. Mainly used by the notorious Gambino crime family in the prohibition era, and also used by the Battalliga crime Family.

Cement shoes traditionally involves a victim placing each foot into the two spaces of a cinderblock, which is then filled with wet cement. When the cement hardens, the victim is thrown into a river, lake or the ocean. It is unclear how often such a cumbersome and time-consuming method of execution was actually used, outside of Hollywood movies.

[edit] In popular culture

In the 1968 Frank Sinatra film Lady in Cement the discovery of the body of a young woman drowned and chained to a cement block is a key plot device.
In the Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action", Scotty gets the phrase wrong and says: "You mind your place, mister, or you'll be wearing concrete galoshes."
In the Futurama episode "Bender Gets Made" the Robot mafia member "Clamps" says: "So I finally get this guy a pair of cement shoes which he likes 'cause they're lighter than his lead ones."
In South Park episode "The Tooth Fairy Tats 2000", Kenny gets thrown in the river with his feet in cement, but nothing happens to him as the Platte River is too shallow.
In the video-game Super Smash Bros. Melee, Cement Shoes is a type of "bonus" awarded after matches.
Australian rock group After the Fall have released a single titled "Concrete Boots."
Rock band AC/DC makes references to concrete shoes in the song "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap."
In an episode of Making Fiends, overly optimistic Charlotte sings of the joys of having concrete shoes.
Thrash metal band Megadeth mentions concrete shoes in the song "Sleepwalker."
In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, in between Prawn Island and Starfish Island you may find a man wearing concrete boots at the bottom of the Ocean.
In the 1990 film Dick Tracy, the main villain, Big Boy Caprice overthrows his boss by taking him to a warehouse built on a bridge and placing him in a box which fills with concrete, then dropping him into the water, in a fate known as "the bath", similar to cement shoes.
In the video of "Glücklich" by Farin Urlaub Farin's character is executed by this method.
The Far Side, using its known spoof of animal traits, shows a reverse of the situation where a fish is seen rising to the ocean's surface, which reads "Embedded in Styrofoam shoes, Carl is sent to sleep with the humans."
A Don Edwing cartoon showed a man condemned by this method by two Mafia types who tell him "This is what happens when you do not pay your gambling debts in Miami, creep!". However, the man's concrete lands on the tail of an alligator, which enrages it and makes the alligator kick the man back the other way. Meanwhile, the mobsters are laughing to themselves "Can you believe they actually called that guy Mr. Lucky?", unaware the victim has been propelled back to the surface and is about to land on them.