Green-Wood Cemetery doesn’t need any more shooting victims.
Brooklyn’s biggest burial ground put out a public service announcement on June 22, allying itself with Mayor DeBlasio’s call for stronger gun-control regulations and cheekily mentioning it doesn’t need more bullet-riddled bodies in its rolling hills.
“Green-Wood is proud to join with Mayor DeBlasio in his call for every New Yorker and American to be able to live in a nation free from gun violence. As the PSA says, less business is fine with us,” Green-Wood president Richard Moylan said.
Indeed, it has its share of gun-violence victims — here are a few famous ones we dug up:
No. 1 with a bullet
Notorious mobster and Gambino crime family leader Alberto Anastasia — founder of Murder Inc. known as “The Lord High Executioner” — was gunned down in a Manhattan barbershop in 1957.
Beer and a shot
William “Bill the Butcher” Poole — leader of the infamous Bowery Boys and a nativist political enforcer that inspired Bill Cuttings in Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” — was shot in the chest by a rival in a Manhattan bar in 1855. His funeral procession to Green-Wood drew a record crowd. His grave was not marked until 2003, when the cemetery put in a head stone and even had a bugler play “Taps”.
Baptism by gunfire
The adulterous Rev. Edward Wheeler Hall was found shot in the head alongside his choir-girl lover in New Jersey in 1922. Hall, a Brooklyn native, is buried in a family vault alongside his wife and brother-in-law, who went to trial for the unsolved murders.
Turkey shoot
Red Hook gangster Joe “Crazy Joe” Gallo was gunned down in a Manhattan restaurant in 1972. Gallo is known locally for ordering his ramshackle gang to hole up in a Columbia Waterfront District home for protection in his underdog fight against the Profaci crime family between 1961 and 1963.
Brooklyn’s JFK
Ascendant councilman James E. Davis was shot dead on the floor of City Hall by political rival Othniel Askew in 2003 — a slaying the media compared to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Askew did not have to pass through metal detectors, because he entered as a guest of the councilman. The Fort Greene legislator’s family laid him to rest at Green-Wood, but later moved him upon finding out that Askew had been buried there as well.
