December 2, 2008
Mixed Emotions By The Graveyard
St. John Cemetery in Middle Village is taking a hit these days.
More than a half-million Catholics are interred at the sprawling, 122-year-old diocesan burial grounds, many in gravesites that date back generations.
But the words "family plot" have taken on new meaning as St. John has become best known as the place where mobsters are laid to rest.
Anger over the designation - a tag highlighted again by John Gotti's death this week - went national yesterday when comedienne Joy Behar, one of the panelists on ABC-TV's morning chatfest "The View," said she's heard enough.
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"I'm really irritated today," she said in telling viewers that her parents, grandparents and other relatives are buried at St. John.
"I mean people who have really worked hard to build this country, and they are putting him in the same cemetery."
At stores and homes adjacent to St. John, people were less concerned.
"He was a terrible murderer," said retiree Ray Valdez, 77, who lives across from the cemetery. "But he's gone, he's just a body."
"These people, these mobsters, they are buried in all different cemeteries," said Elsa Fasolino Morano of the family-run Fasolino Memorials, which sells gravestones, on 80th Street. "They're still human beings and should be treated as such."
Alice McEnerney, 58, who runs the nearby beauty salon Sudden Impulse, said calling St. John - where her husband, William, is buried - a mob cemetery is unfair.
But she doesn't think Gotti, who is to be interred next to his son, Frank, inside a mausoleum at the cemetery, should be barred.
"What's the difference? He's a human being like everybody else," she said.
As she waited to pick up her children outside St. Margaret's School, across from the burial ground, Patricia Czyz, 40, said the mob designation won't make a difference to her kids.
"The children see it only as a cemetery where people go to be buried," she said. Since it opened in 1880, the sprawling cemetery on Metropolitan Avenue has become home to about 600,000 graves, said a spokeswoman for the Diocese of Brooklyn.
The list of mob figures there includes Lucky Luciano, Joseph Profaci, Joseph Colombo, Carmine Galante, Carlo Gambino and Vito Genovese.
The gangland association doesn't faze Cornelius Collins Jr., a Virginia man whose great-grandfather is buried at St. John. "Assuming someone doesn't put a sign on Metropolitan Avenue saying 'This is where John "the Dapper Don" Gotti is buried,' it won't bother me," Collins said.
More Than Gangsters' Paradise
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"Lucky" Luciano found their final
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