The Crushout

Technology marches on. even in gangland. The automobile made possible the invention of The Ride--in which the rider could be transported alive to a place convenient for his execution. But there was still the body, and the wearisome investigation that it could bring. The next advance was the concrete block, in which the body could be encased, then given the deep six. It was still possible, though, to retrieve it, if some detective hit upon the right place to grapple.

New York mobsville, reported the New York Daily News last week, has solved this nagging problem of the corpus delicti. Solution: the hydraulic press, used in automobile junkyards to reduce dead jalopies to manageable cubes of crushed metal for shipment to steel mills to be melted down. Victims are taken for a ride in the good old-fashioned way. The car is then driven to a cooperating junkyard with the cadaver in its baggage compartment. A crane lifts the car into the steel-lined pit of the hydraulic press, where it takes just 90 seconds to reduce a 1962 Cadillac to a cube 36 in. high, 24 in. long and 24 in. wide. The result is then cleaned, coated with a metal preservative, and shipped off to the melting pot.

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