When a gangster issued the order “take him for a ride,” foot soldiers had no trouble decoding the meaning: the boss wanted them to snatch someone, kill them, and dump the body.
It’s a gruesome thought, yet rides and body dumps are a big part of Pittsburgh’s organized crime history. A trip to any Halloween fright house might pale in comparison to the surprises sprung on ordinary citizens when mobland life (and death) collided with their own.
Some of Pittsburgh’s “rides” didn’t end in murder, and the passengers lived to tell their stories to newspaper reporters and true-crime authors. Most, though, were ordinary one-way “rides” to out-of-the-way places where, oftentimes, some unfortunate person later found them. These included out-of-state mob killers, thieves, turncoats, and suspected snitches tracked to Pittsburgh, like Aaron Meyerowitz, whose killers left him in Highland Park seated in a stolen car and still holding a cigarette in his dead hand…