“Experts say the waterway itself — long rumored to be a Mafia burial ground — is probably not the final resting place for the Marylanders.”
Never know what you’re going to find when you start digging up Brooklyn. The authorities may be thinking it’s sometimes best to let sleeping dogs lie, and don’t want to dig around too much looking for revolutionary heroes if a bunch of mob murders surface which will have to be investigated. The overwhelming majority of mob hits never have been solved or prosecuted, and once bodies start getting digged up they’re hard to avoid.
I have a few family members that were or currently are in the NYPD. One, a detective in Brooklyn in the 1930s, told me back in the 1960s that the Gowanus Canal was where the cops in the neighboring precincts would throw the guns and knives they took off the perps.