FINAL SALUTE
Beloved ‘Tombstone Cop’ Cashman dies at 91
John Cashman, a retired NYPD officer who issued the city’s first jaywalking ticket and later became known as the “Tombstone Cop” for tours he gave of a Brooklyn cemetery, died Wednesday. He was 91.
Cashman, a Brooklyn native, was a cop for 36 years, retiring in 1989. He spent much of his career in his beloved Brooklyn, but also worked for 15 years at 1 Police Plaza, the department’s headquarters, according to his son, Robert Cashman, who is a supervising fire marshal with the FDNY. Cashman said his dad issued a jaywalking ticket in the mid-50s, the first such offense in a city known for traffic dodgers.
Decades later the elder Cashman found himself on the front page of the Daily News, for helping to save the life of a detective after a New Year’s Day terror bombing attack on Police Headquarters in 1983. Cashman applied a tourniquet to the cop’s leg. It was not Cashman’s last brush with fame. By the time he retired, he had beome a loal expert en Brookyn’s GreenWood cemetery and the notable people buried there, including mobster Albert Anastasia, conductor Leonard Bernstein and Brooklyn Dodgers owner Charles Ebbets.
He conducted the tour every Sunday.
“He had hundreds of people coming at one point,” Robert Cashman said. “He was known as the ‘Tombstone Cop.’”
Cashman’s colorful cemetery tours earned him enough notoriety to get appearances on talk-show host Joe Franklin’s TV program and “Late Night with David Letterman.”
Cashman was the father of six boys and three girls. His funeral will be held at 10:30 a.m. Saturday at St. Patrick’s Church on Fourth Ave. in Bay Ridge.