Whispers in the Dirt: A Definitive Guide to the Mafia Graves of New York City is the second of John Kiriakou’s cemetery books, following Remains of the Day. In November 2025 he described it as about seventy percent complete and due with his editor by the end of the year.[1][2]
The book is organised cemetery by cemetery — Kiriakou lists St. Stephen’s and Holy Cross among those “just overflowing with mob guys”, going back to Joe the Boss Masseria, the Clutch Hand, and Lucky Luciano, whose private mausoleum he calls magnificent.[3] A closing chapter covers what he calls non-traditional burial grounds: the Gowanus Canal, “where they’re pulling bodies out of all the time”; a vacant lot in the Bronx known locally as the mafia graveyard; and the Meadowlands.[3][4]
The body in the barrel
The episode Kiriakou uses to explain the book’s appeal began in prison. He had asked one of the mafia inmates what he was in for, and got an answer he took as deflection: they found a body in a barrel in his storage unit, he did not know how it got there, and a hundred people had access to the unit. Kiriakou laughed it off with “no judgment from me. I was just curious.”[5]
Years later, photographing graves in the Bronx with his girlfriend, he could not place the man whose headstone he needed. Pulling up his own manuscript, he read the entry: the victim had been a driver, initially assumed to be the hitman in his boss’s killing because he could not be found, and discovered six months later in a barrel in a storage unit in New Jersey. “Oh my god. It was the first time I put it together. It’s the body from the barrel.”[6]
The manuscript also contained the part the inmate had left out: the driver had been too tall to fit in the barrel and was cut in half, and the barrel was full of glue, which took the coroner roughly four months to remove before an autopsy could be performed. The remains were reassembled for burial. Kiriakou’s conclusion was about the inmate rather than the crime: “Oh, dang. He was telling me the truth.”[7][8] He does not use the man’s name in the book, on the grounds that he is out of prison.[8]