Title: Crater,Joseph Force - (08/06/1930)
Description: New York City, New York
Description: New York City, New York
monkalup - April 12, 2006 12:32 AM (GMT)
http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricte...DA10894DD404482
METROPOLITAN DESK
Judge Crater Abruptly Appears, At Least in Public Consciousness
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM (NYT) 1277 words
Published: August 20, 2005
The box, filled with yellowing papers that detail a life cut short and a trail long cold, languished for decades in a dusty quadrant of the basement beneath Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan. It contained a jumble of leads and theories, pieces of a 75-year-old puzzle that has intrigued generations of New Yorkers. None ever led to an answer in the most storied disappearance in the city's history, that of a State Supreme Court justice named Joseph Force Crater.
But the death of a 91-year-old woman in Bellerose, Queens, this year, and notes she left to be read by her family upon her death, prompted New York City police detectives to retrieve the file and begin reinvestigating the mysterious disappearance as a murder, one perhaps authored by a city police officer and his cabdriver brother, both now dead.
While theories on the fate of Judge Crater -- a denizen of Tammany Hall, a man of punctual habits, a bon vivant and a fancier of chorus girls -- have abounded over the years since his disappearance on Aug. 6, 1930 the notes put forward a new one that detectives have been pursuing but have not fully assessed.
''As far as we know, the story we have is speculative,'' one investigator said. ''It may be some lady's scribbling.''
All police officials and investigators contacted yesterday spoke on the condition of anonymity, because they have not been authorized to talk about the case.
The woman, Stella Ferrucci-Good, who died in early April, wrote that her husband had told her that he learned over drinks with one or both of the brothers that they, along with several other men, had killed the judge and buried him under the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn.
Along with the theories, the judge's disappearance has spawned countless newspaper headlines, the most recent of which appeared yesterday in The New York Post: ''I Killed Judge Crater; Vanish Mystery 'Solved''' -- perhaps premature, the single quotation marks notwithstanding, and very likely confusing to all but the most devoted aficionados of New York lore who saw it screaming from the newsstands.
It joined others published in the last 75 years, like: ''Crater Hunt Swings to Havana''; ''Jersey Girl Insists She Saw Crater Aug. 8''; ''Ransom of $20,000 Asked for Crater''; and ''Crater Was Killed, Ex-Wife Says Again.''
The notes, which a granddaughter passed on to the police after Mrs. Ferrucci-Good died several months ago, made no mention of motive, leaving the field wide open on this most wide open of cases, police officials said. But one official, and several investigators with some knowledge of the inquiry, said yesterday that the Cold Case Squad detectives reinvestigating the disappearance have been unable to corroborate the central elements of her account.
In her notes, some of which were scribbled in the margins of more recent copies of The Daily News, Mrs. Ferrucci-Good wrote that her husband told her that Frank Burns, the taxi driver, told him that he had picked up the 41-year-old judge the night he disappeared after dining at Billy Haas's chophouse on West 45th Street in Midtown, the official said.
According to her husband's account, Mr. Burns drove a few blocks, then two accomplices jumped in the cab, and they drove to Coney Island, where they were joined by two more men. There, the judge was killed and buried beneath the Boardwalk near West Eighth Street, the official said Mrs. Ferrucci-Good wrote.
Detectives, who are still combing files, have been unable to find records of any bodies found in that area, which was excavated in the 1950's for the construction of the New York Aquarium, the official said.
Over the years, the intrigue of the judge's disappearance became so imbedded in New York City's public consciousness that the term ''Pulling a Crater'' became slang for vanishing. The conventional wisdom at the time, because of his large bank withdraws cited in newspaper reports, was that he had fled, but, in fact, his wife later acknowledged that she had found the money.
He was declared legally dead in 1939 and the Police Department's missing person's case was closed in 1979. By then, it had long been a favorite of amateur and professional sleuths, and a staple for newspapers over the years, which would revisit the mystery on the 20th, 30th, 50th and, most recently, the 75th anniversary of his disappearance.
News accounts over the years have recalled the dapper judge, wearing a brown suit, gray spats and a Panama hat, climbing into a taxi and bidding his dinner companions goodnight at about 9:15 p.m., bound for the theater.
But Richard J. Tofel, the author of an October 2004 book about the case -- ''Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater and the New York He Left Behind'' -- expressed skepticism yesterday about the version of events that Mrs. Ferrucci-Good passed on from her husband.
Mr. Tofel said he was unable to find any accounts from witnesses who saw the judge get into a taxi, adding that it was likely that he attended the theater that evening -- he had tickets to the show ''Dancing Partner,'' which he had seen before.
''My hunch is he went and saw the second act of the show because he was more interested in the showgirls,'' Mr. Tofel said.
Mr. Tofel's theory of the judge's evening is vastly different from the one set forth in Mrs. Ferrucci-Good's notes. He said he believed the judge ended his life in the arms of a prostitute at the brothel run by the celebrated madam Polly Adler.
Mrs. Ferrucci-Good's recollections also left the judge's disappearance entangled with another Coney Island mystery that has also become a staple of New York City crime lore, that of Abe Reles. Mr. Reles, a Murder Incorporated assassin -- known at the time on the streets of Brooklyn as Kid Twist, and then, after his untimely demise, as the Canary Who Could Sing but Could Not Fly -- fell, or was pushed, out a sixth-floor window of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island, where he was under guard waiting to testify against one of the leaders of the killing combine, Louis (Lepke) Buchalter.
Ms. Ferrucci-Good also wrote that her husband told her that the police officer brother of Frank Burns was indirectly implicated in the judge's disappearance.
The police official said that the brother, Charles Burns, was also Mr. Reles's bodyguard. Detectives said they had begun trying to determine whether Charles Burns was assigned to the hotel when Mr. Reles died, one investigator said.
But however Judge Crater died, the entire episode made a great many people uncomfortable, Mr. Tofel said. ''This was very close to the throne and they wanted it covered up,'' he said of the judge's Tammany Hall ties and the corruption in the city at the time. ''Even if they didn't know what happened, and this is the thesis of my book, I think a lot of people knew that no good could come of people delving into Judge Crater's affairs.''
METROPOLITAN DESK
Judge Crater Abruptly Appears, At Least in Public Consciousness
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM (NYT) 1277 words
Published: August 20, 2005
The box, filled with yellowing papers that detail a life cut short and a trail long cold, languished for decades in a dusty quadrant of the basement beneath Police Headquarters in Lower Manhattan. It contained a jumble of leads and theories, pieces of a 75-year-old puzzle that has intrigued generations of New Yorkers. None ever led to an answer in the most storied disappearance in the city's history, that of a State Supreme Court justice named Joseph Force Crater.
But the death of a 91-year-old woman in Bellerose, Queens, this year, and notes she left to be read by her family upon her death, prompted New York City police detectives to retrieve the file and begin reinvestigating the mysterious disappearance as a murder, one perhaps authored by a city police officer and his cabdriver brother, both now dead.
While theories on the fate of Judge Crater -- a denizen of Tammany Hall, a man of punctual habits, a bon vivant and a fancier of chorus girls -- have abounded over the years since his disappearance on Aug. 6, 1930 the notes put forward a new one that detectives have been pursuing but have not fully assessed.
''As far as we know, the story we have is speculative,'' one investigator said. ''It may be some lady's scribbling.''
All police officials and investigators contacted yesterday spoke on the condition of anonymity, because they have not been authorized to talk about the case.
The woman, Stella Ferrucci-Good, who died in early April, wrote that her husband had told her that he learned over drinks with one or both of the brothers that they, along with several other men, had killed the judge and buried him under the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brooklyn.
Along with the theories, the judge's disappearance has spawned countless newspaper headlines, the most recent of which appeared yesterday in The New York Post: ''I Killed Judge Crater; Vanish Mystery 'Solved''' -- perhaps premature, the single quotation marks notwithstanding, and very likely confusing to all but the most devoted aficionados of New York lore who saw it screaming from the newsstands.
It joined others published in the last 75 years, like: ''Crater Hunt Swings to Havana''; ''Jersey Girl Insists She Saw Crater Aug. 8''; ''Ransom of $20,000 Asked for Crater''; and ''Crater Was Killed, Ex-Wife Says Again.''
The notes, which a granddaughter passed on to the police after Mrs. Ferrucci-Good died several months ago, made no mention of motive, leaving the field wide open on this most wide open of cases, police officials said. But one official, and several investigators with some knowledge of the inquiry, said yesterday that the Cold Case Squad detectives reinvestigating the disappearance have been unable to corroborate the central elements of her account.
In her notes, some of which were scribbled in the margins of more recent copies of The Daily News, Mrs. Ferrucci-Good wrote that her husband told her that Frank Burns, the taxi driver, told him that he had picked up the 41-year-old judge the night he disappeared after dining at Billy Haas's chophouse on West 45th Street in Midtown, the official said.
According to her husband's account, Mr. Burns drove a few blocks, then two accomplices jumped in the cab, and they drove to Coney Island, where they were joined by two more men. There, the judge was killed and buried beneath the Boardwalk near West Eighth Street, the official said Mrs. Ferrucci-Good wrote.
Detectives, who are still combing files, have been unable to find records of any bodies found in that area, which was excavated in the 1950's for the construction of the New York Aquarium, the official said.
Over the years, the intrigue of the judge's disappearance became so imbedded in New York City's public consciousness that the term ''Pulling a Crater'' became slang for vanishing. The conventional wisdom at the time, because of his large bank withdraws cited in newspaper reports, was that he had fled, but, in fact, his wife later acknowledged that she had found the money.
He was declared legally dead in 1939 and the Police Department's missing person's case was closed in 1979. By then, it had long been a favorite of amateur and professional sleuths, and a staple for newspapers over the years, which would revisit the mystery on the 20th, 30th, 50th and, most recently, the 75th anniversary of his disappearance.
News accounts over the years have recalled the dapper judge, wearing a brown suit, gray spats and a Panama hat, climbing into a taxi and bidding his dinner companions goodnight at about 9:15 p.m., bound for the theater.
But Richard J. Tofel, the author of an October 2004 book about the case -- ''Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater and the New York He Left Behind'' -- expressed skepticism yesterday about the version of events that Mrs. Ferrucci-Good passed on from her husband.
Mr. Tofel said he was unable to find any accounts from witnesses who saw the judge get into a taxi, adding that it was likely that he attended the theater that evening -- he had tickets to the show ''Dancing Partner,'' which he had seen before.
''My hunch is he went and saw the second act of the show because he was more interested in the showgirls,'' Mr. Tofel said.
Mr. Tofel's theory of the judge's evening is vastly different from the one set forth in Mrs. Ferrucci-Good's notes. He said he believed the judge ended his life in the arms of a prostitute at the brothel run by the celebrated madam Polly Adler.
Mrs. Ferrucci-Good's recollections also left the judge's disappearance entangled with another Coney Island mystery that has also become a staple of New York City crime lore, that of Abe Reles. Mr. Reles, a Murder Incorporated assassin -- known at the time on the streets of Brooklyn as Kid Twist, and then, after his untimely demise, as the Canary Who Could Sing but Could Not Fly -- fell, or was pushed, out a sixth-floor window of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island, where he was under guard waiting to testify against one of the leaders of the killing combine, Louis (Lepke) Buchalter.
Ms. Ferrucci-Good also wrote that her husband told her that the police officer brother of Frank Burns was indirectly implicated in the judge's disappearance.
The police official said that the brother, Charles Burns, was also Mr. Reles's bodyguard. Detectives said they had begun trying to determine whether Charles Burns was assigned to the hotel when Mr. Reles died, one investigator said.
But however Judge Crater died, the entire episode made a great many people uncomfortable, Mr. Tofel said. ''This was very close to the throne and they wanted it covered up,'' he said of the judge's Tammany Hall ties and the corruption in the city at the time. ''Even if they didn't know what happened, and this is the thesis of my book, I think a lot of people knew that no good could come of people delving into Judge Crater's affairs.''
Cheryl - May 9, 2006 03:10 AM (GMT)
I believe they found his remains under the boardwalk. I think this was posted on another list in the last couple of months.
Cheryl
Cheryl
monkalup - May 9, 2006 03:19 AM (GMT)
Thanks, Cheryl! I hadn't known that! I have a subscription to NY times, so I will see if I can find some more info on that. One of the enduring mysteries...
Cheryl - May 9, 2006 03:28 AM (GMT)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,166191,00.html
Judge Crater Disappearance Possibly Solved
Friday, August 19, 2005
By Larry Celona, Lorena Mongelli and Marsha Kranes
NEW YORK — The New York City Police Department's longest-running unsolved missing-persons case — the bizarre and legendary disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater — may finally be solved.
Judge Crater (search) — who vanished mysteriously 75 years ago — was killed by a city cop and his cab-driver brother and buried under the boardwalk in Coney Island, according to a handwritten letter left behind by a Queens woman who died earlier this year.
"Good Time Joe" Crater was a dapper, 41-year-old judge known for his dalliances with showgirls and his ties to corruption-ridden Tammany Hall (search) — until he got into a cab in Midtown Manhattan one evening in 1930 and disappeared, earning the title of "the missingest man in New York."
The case triggered one of the most sensational manhunts of the 20th century — one that had city detectives fielding more than 16,000 tips from around the country and the world, all of them unsubstantiated.
Although he was declared legally dead in 1939, and his case — Missing Persons File No. 13595 — was officially closed in 1979, Crater's vanishing act has continued to intrigue professional and armchair detectives, clairvoyants and mystery buffs around the globe.
"Pulling a Crater" became slang for vanishing without a trace. But perhaps now, a trace will be found.
Sources told The Post that the NYPD Cold Case Squad is investigating information provided by Stella Ferrucci-Good of Bellerose, Queens, who died on April 2, leaving behind what may be a key to the mystery.
It's a handwritten letter in an envelope marked "Do not open until my death" that her granddaughter Barbara O'Brien found in a metal box in her grandmother's home, the sources said.
In the letter, Ferrucci-Good claimed that her late husband, Robert Good; an NYPD cop named Charles Burns; and the cop's cabby brother, Frank Burns, were responsible for Crater's death.
She added that the judge was buried in Coney Island, Brooklyn, under the boardwalk near West Eighth Street, at the current site of the New York Aquarium (search).
The metal box also contained yellowed clippings about Crater's disappearance, with scribbled notations in the margins.
In her letter, Ferrucci-Good also claimed that Officer Burns was one of the cops guarding notorious Murder Inc. killer Abe "Kid Twist" Reles (search) when he somehow plummeted to his death from the sixth-floor window of a Coney Island hotel in 1941.
Reles had become a mob informant to escape the electric chair, testifying against a slew of Murder Inc. (search) killers. His suspicious death plunge came just hours before he was due to rat out mob boss Albert Anastasia (search).
O'Brien's father, William St. George, said the police told family members that five bodies were found when the aquarium was built. Police sources confirmed that skeletal remains had been found there in the mid-1950s. They said those remains are now being examined to see if they can be linked to Crater.
Police sources also confirmed that a police officer named Charles Burns served with the NYPD from 1926 to 1946, and that he spent part of his career assigned to the 60th Precinct in Coney Island.
O'Brien, who lives in Valley Stream, N.Y., doesn't know what to make of the letter and its claims.
When she found it, she said, "I thought it was a joke and I laughed and I gave it to police."
"I don't know if it's fact or fiction," she said, refusing to show The Post the letter or to say anything more about it.
But "the police were very interested in it," her father noted.
Asked if Ferrucci-Good had been obsessed with the Crater case, St. George said he couldn't recall her ever mentioning it.
Ferrucci-Good was 91 when she died in April. Her husband, Robert Good, a Parks Department supervisor and lifeguard, died in 1975.
Crater had been appointed to the state Supreme Court bench by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt just four months before disappearing on Aug. 6, 1930.
A few days earlier, while vacationing with his wife, Stella, at their summer cabin in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, he received a mysterious phone call that left him visibly upset. He never told his wife who called.
He left the next day for the city, telling her only that he had to "straighten those fellows out."
He stopped by their Fifth Avenue apartment and gave the maid the next few days off.
He spent the morning of Aug. 6 in his courthouse office, hastily going through his personal files.
He cashed two checks totaling $5,150, took another $20,000 — close to a year's salary — from campaign funds, and left for home with two locked briefcases.
He was last seen at 9:15 p.m. leaving Billy Haas' Chophouse at 332 W. 45th St. with two friends. He said he was going to the theater.
He climbed into a cab nattily dressed in a brown pinstripe suit, gray spats and a straw Panama hat — and that was the last anyone ever saw of him.
Could the cabby have been Frank Burns, brother of Officer Charles Burns? That's one of the questions cops are now grappling with.
It was four weeks before Crater was reported missing.
Friends and colleagues thought he was vacationing with his wife; his wife thought he was away on business. His disappearance was front-page news across the country — leading to reported sightings in every state and scores of foreign lands.
He was reported seen riding a burro and prospecting for gold in California, herding sheep in the Pacific Northwest, locked up in a Missouri mental hospital, shooting craps in Atlanta, working on a steamer in the Adriatic, and running a bingo game in Northern Africa.
His name became a punch line that guaranteed laughs for comics: "Judge Crater, call your office."
Mad magazine published a cartoon showing Lassie finding Crater.
A judge portrayed on TV in a episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" assured the sitcom's stars that he wasn't that Judge Crater — he spelled his name "K-r-a-d-a."
There were dozens of theories about his disappearance: He had amnesia; he committed suicide; he ran off with a showgirl; he was rubbed out so he couldn't testify about Tammany Hall corruption; he died in the arms of a prostitute and it was being covered up; he was killed when he didn't pay a blackmailer.
At one point, gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond's name surfaced as his possible killer.
An Albany professor said he believed Crater had been dispatched by the notorious murderer in the basement of an upstate brewery.
Crater's wife remembered his disappearance every year for the rest of her life by visiting a bar in Greenwich Village on Aug. 6.
She'd sit by herself, order two drinks and down one — after saying, "Good luck Joe, wherever you are."
If the letter left behind by Ferrucci-Good is right, he's been sleeping with the fishes all these years.
Judge Crater Disappearance Possibly Solved
Friday, August 19, 2005
By Larry Celona, Lorena Mongelli and Marsha Kranes
NEW YORK — The New York City Police Department's longest-running unsolved missing-persons case — the bizarre and legendary disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater — may finally be solved.
Judge Crater (search) — who vanished mysteriously 75 years ago — was killed by a city cop and his cab-driver brother and buried under the boardwalk in Coney Island, according to a handwritten letter left behind by a Queens woman who died earlier this year.
"Good Time Joe" Crater was a dapper, 41-year-old judge known for his dalliances with showgirls and his ties to corruption-ridden Tammany Hall (search) — until he got into a cab in Midtown Manhattan one evening in 1930 and disappeared, earning the title of "the missingest man in New York."
The case triggered one of the most sensational manhunts of the 20th century — one that had city detectives fielding more than 16,000 tips from around the country and the world, all of them unsubstantiated.
Although he was declared legally dead in 1939, and his case — Missing Persons File No. 13595 — was officially closed in 1979, Crater's vanishing act has continued to intrigue professional and armchair detectives, clairvoyants and mystery buffs around the globe.
"Pulling a Crater" became slang for vanishing without a trace. But perhaps now, a trace will be found.
Sources told The Post that the NYPD Cold Case Squad is investigating information provided by Stella Ferrucci-Good of Bellerose, Queens, who died on April 2, leaving behind what may be a key to the mystery.
It's a handwritten letter in an envelope marked "Do not open until my death" that her granddaughter Barbara O'Brien found in a metal box in her grandmother's home, the sources said.
In the letter, Ferrucci-Good claimed that her late husband, Robert Good; an NYPD cop named Charles Burns; and the cop's cabby brother, Frank Burns, were responsible for Crater's death.
She added that the judge was buried in Coney Island, Brooklyn, under the boardwalk near West Eighth Street, at the current site of the New York Aquarium (search).
The metal box also contained yellowed clippings about Crater's disappearance, with scribbled notations in the margins.
In her letter, Ferrucci-Good also claimed that Officer Burns was one of the cops guarding notorious Murder Inc. killer Abe "Kid Twist" Reles (search) when he somehow plummeted to his death from the sixth-floor window of a Coney Island hotel in 1941.
Reles had become a mob informant to escape the electric chair, testifying against a slew of Murder Inc. (search) killers. His suspicious death plunge came just hours before he was due to rat out mob boss Albert Anastasia (search).
O'Brien's father, William St. George, said the police told family members that five bodies were found when the aquarium was built. Police sources confirmed that skeletal remains had been found there in the mid-1950s. They said those remains are now being examined to see if they can be linked to Crater.
Police sources also confirmed that a police officer named Charles Burns served with the NYPD from 1926 to 1946, and that he spent part of his career assigned to the 60th Precinct in Coney Island.
O'Brien, who lives in Valley Stream, N.Y., doesn't know what to make of the letter and its claims.
When she found it, she said, "I thought it was a joke and I laughed and I gave it to police."
"I don't know if it's fact or fiction," she said, refusing to show The Post the letter or to say anything more about it.
But "the police were very interested in it," her father noted.
Asked if Ferrucci-Good had been obsessed with the Crater case, St. George said he couldn't recall her ever mentioning it.
Ferrucci-Good was 91 when she died in April. Her husband, Robert Good, a Parks Department supervisor and lifeguard, died in 1975.
Crater had been appointed to the state Supreme Court bench by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt just four months before disappearing on Aug. 6, 1930.
A few days earlier, while vacationing with his wife, Stella, at their summer cabin in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, he received a mysterious phone call that left him visibly upset. He never told his wife who called.
He left the next day for the city, telling her only that he had to "straighten those fellows out."
He stopped by their Fifth Avenue apartment and gave the maid the next few days off.
He spent the morning of Aug. 6 in his courthouse office, hastily going through his personal files.
He cashed two checks totaling $5,150, took another $20,000 — close to a year's salary — from campaign funds, and left for home with two locked briefcases.
He was last seen at 9:15 p.m. leaving Billy Haas' Chophouse at 332 W. 45th St. with two friends. He said he was going to the theater.
He climbed into a cab nattily dressed in a brown pinstripe suit, gray spats and a straw Panama hat — and that was the last anyone ever saw of him.
Could the cabby have been Frank Burns, brother of Officer Charles Burns? That's one of the questions cops are now grappling with.
It was four weeks before Crater was reported missing.
Friends and colleagues thought he was vacationing with his wife; his wife thought he was away on business. His disappearance was front-page news across the country — leading to reported sightings in every state and scores of foreign lands.
He was reported seen riding a burro and prospecting for gold in California, herding sheep in the Pacific Northwest, locked up in a Missouri mental hospital, shooting craps in Atlanta, working on a steamer in the Adriatic, and running a bingo game in Northern Africa.
His name became a punch line that guaranteed laughs for comics: "Judge Crater, call your office."
Mad magazine published a cartoon showing Lassie finding Crater.
A judge portrayed on TV in a episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" assured the sitcom's stars that he wasn't that Judge Crater — he spelled his name "K-r-a-d-a."
There were dozens of theories about his disappearance: He had amnesia; he committed suicide; he ran off with a showgirl; he was rubbed out so he couldn't testify about Tammany Hall corruption; he died in the arms of a prostitute and it was being covered up; he was killed when he didn't pay a blackmailer.
At one point, gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond's name surfaced as his possible killer.
An Albany professor said he believed Crater had been dispatched by the notorious murderer in the basement of an upstate brewery.
Crater's wife remembered his disappearance every year for the rest of her life by visiting a bar in Greenwich Village on Aug. 6.
She'd sit by herself, order two drinks and down one — after saying, "Good luck Joe, wherever you are."
If the letter left behind by Ferrucci-Good is right, he's been sleeping with the fishes all these years.
Cheryl - May 9, 2006 03:30 AM (GMT)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9006026/
Judge Crater, is that you?
Old note may lead to 'missingest man in America,' newspapers say
• New lead in NYC cold case
Aug. 19: Author Richard Tofel talks to MSNBC-TV’s Contessa Brewer about the case of the infamous Judge Joseph Crater, who mysteriously disappeared 75 years ago.
MSNBC
MSNBC
Updated: 4:26 p.m. ET Aug. 19, 2005
NEW YORK - Are New York cops about to find “the most missingest man in America?” Yes, if Friday reports in Big Apple newspapers prove true.
The man is Judge Joseph Force Crater, a New York State Supreme Court justice. And “missingest” is what newspapers called him when he vanished in 1930. The case has been the subject of rumors and butt of jokes ever since.
The clue that may lead to the discovery of his remains is a note left by a woman who died earlier this year. According to the New York Post, Stella Ferrucci-Good of Bellerose, N.Y., left the note in an envelope marked “do not open until my death” when she died at age 91 in April.
“Ferrucci-Good claimed that her late husband, Robert Good; an NYPD cop named Charles Burns; and the cop's cabby brother, Frank Burns, were responsible for Crater's death,” the Post said. “She added that the judge was buried in Coney Island, under the boardwalk near West Eighth Street, at the current site of the New York Aquarium.”
Ferrucci-Good’s husband died in 1975.
In checking a number of the claims made in the letter, the Post found that “a police officer named Charles Burns served with the NYPD from 1926 to 1946, and … spent part of his career assigned to the 60th Precinct in Coney Island.” Also, the Post said, police sources confirmed that skeletal remains had been found when the aquarium was being built in the 1950s and are now being examined to see if they can be linked to the missing judge.
Crater was declared legally dead in 1939 and the city’s police department closed his case in 1979.
The judge, who was appointed to the bench by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt just months before he vanished at age 41, was a colorful and well-known figure in Manhattan at the time. According to the New York Daily News, 95 witnesses were called before a grand jury that amassed nearly 1,000 pages of testimony while investigating the case but never learned what happened to him.
Speculation on the cause for his disappearance ranged from mob connections to a love triangle. Others thought he might have been silenced because he planned to expose political corruption. Still others said he had committed suicide or run off with a showgirl.
He was last seen Aug. 6, 1930, after he got into a cab on West 45th Street.
According to the Post: “Crater's wife remembered his disappearance every year for the rest of her life by visiting a bar in Greenwich Village on Aug. 6. She'd sit by herself, order two drinks and down one — after saying, ‘Good luck Joe, wherever you are.’"
Judge Crater, is that you?
Old note may lead to 'missingest man in America,' newspapers say
• New lead in NYC cold case
Aug. 19: Author Richard Tofel talks to MSNBC-TV’s Contessa Brewer about the case of the infamous Judge Joseph Crater, who mysteriously disappeared 75 years ago.
MSNBC
MSNBC
Updated: 4:26 p.m. ET Aug. 19, 2005
NEW YORK - Are New York cops about to find “the most missingest man in America?” Yes, if Friday reports in Big Apple newspapers prove true.
The man is Judge Joseph Force Crater, a New York State Supreme Court justice. And “missingest” is what newspapers called him when he vanished in 1930. The case has been the subject of rumors and butt of jokes ever since.
The clue that may lead to the discovery of his remains is a note left by a woman who died earlier this year. According to the New York Post, Stella Ferrucci-Good of Bellerose, N.Y., left the note in an envelope marked “do not open until my death” when she died at age 91 in April.
“Ferrucci-Good claimed that her late husband, Robert Good; an NYPD cop named Charles Burns; and the cop's cabby brother, Frank Burns, were responsible for Crater's death,” the Post said. “She added that the judge was buried in Coney Island, under the boardwalk near West Eighth Street, at the current site of the New York Aquarium.”
Ferrucci-Good’s husband died in 1975.
In checking a number of the claims made in the letter, the Post found that “a police officer named Charles Burns served with the NYPD from 1926 to 1946, and … spent part of his career assigned to the 60th Precinct in Coney Island.” Also, the Post said, police sources confirmed that skeletal remains had been found when the aquarium was being built in the 1950s and are now being examined to see if they can be linked to the missing judge.
Crater was declared legally dead in 1939 and the city’s police department closed his case in 1979.
The judge, who was appointed to the bench by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt just months before he vanished at age 41, was a colorful and well-known figure in Manhattan at the time. According to the New York Daily News, 95 witnesses were called before a grand jury that amassed nearly 1,000 pages of testimony while investigating the case but never learned what happened to him.
Speculation on the cause for his disappearance ranged from mob connections to a love triangle. Others thought he might have been silenced because he planned to expose political corruption. Still others said he had committed suicide or run off with a showgirl.
He was last seen Aug. 6, 1930, after he got into a cab on West 45th Street.
According to the Post: “Crater's wife remembered his disappearance every year for the rest of her life by visiting a bar in Greenwich Village on Aug. 6. She'd sit by herself, order two drinks and down one — after saying, ‘Good luck Joe, wherever you are.’"
monkalup - May 9, 2006 03:32 AM (GMT)
Wow! that was quick! thanks, Cheryl! What a story!
Cheryl - May 9, 2006 03:57 AM (GMT)
Yes, it is a good story. I knew I had read this but couldn't remember where.
Cheryl
Cheryl
monkalup - June 3, 2006 10:36 PM (GMT)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion...pinionfront-hed
chicagotribune.com >> Editorials
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cold-case chronicles
Published June 3, 2006
The tall, dapper man walked out of a restaurant one summer evening many years ago, got into a taxicab and was never seen again. No, we're not talking about Jimmy Hoffa. We're talking about New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, whose mysterious disappearance in New York on an August night in 1930 once captivated the nation. He's all but forgotten now, but he's a reminder that Jimmy Hoffa isn't the only mystery in the cold-case files.
The FBI wrapped up another fruitless search this week for the remains of the former Teamsters boss, who disappeared in 1975. Federal agents dug up parts of the Hidden Dreams horse farm near Detroit for two weeks before giving up. The search had been based on a tip from an incarcerated, aging informant who claimed to have seen Hoffa rolled up in a carpet and dumped in a grave there.
Alas, like the search that required excavation of a back-yard pool more than 100 miles north of Detroit and the one that left ripped up floorboards in a Detroit house, this one, too, led nowhere. Over the years, Hoffa's body has been rumored to be buried beneath a football stadium in New Jersey, chopped up and left in a Florida swamp and dissolved in a mob-connected fat-rendering plant.
The prevailing theory has been that the mob killed Hoffa, who had just gotten out of prison on corruption charges, to prevent him from trying to regain the presidency of the Teamsters. But after nearly 31 years, all we know for certain today is that he disappeared without a trace.
Like Crater. And like Amelia Earhart. She took off from Oakland, Calif., in May 1937, hoping to become the first pilot to fly around the world on an equatorial route. Like D.B. Cooper. He hijacked a Northwest Airlines jet in 1971 and parachuted out of the plane with $200,000 in cash. They all vanished into mystery.
People disappear all the time, but usually they are found fairly quickly. Writer and actor Spalding Gray's body was found two months after he disappeared. It took six years for Madalyn Murray O'Hair's remains to be identified after her 1995 disappearance.
But then there are the legends of the missing. Conspiracy theories still swirl around Crater. Was he murdered? Did he go on the lam? Was Tammany Hall, the New York political machine, involved in his disappearance?
Crater got a phone call in late July 1930, while he was on vacation in Maine. He told his wife, Stella, he had to go back to New York to "straighten those fellows out." The night of Aug. 6, he was wearing a double-breasted brown suit, gray spats and a high collar. He cashed checks for $5,000, jauntily waved goodbye to some friends and disappeared into the night. That was nearly 76 years ago. Few disappear forever, but some trails get very, very cold.
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
chicagotribune.com >> Editorials
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cold-case chronicles
Published June 3, 2006
The tall, dapper man walked out of a restaurant one summer evening many years ago, got into a taxicab and was never seen again. No, we're not talking about Jimmy Hoffa. We're talking about New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, whose mysterious disappearance in New York on an August night in 1930 once captivated the nation. He's all but forgotten now, but he's a reminder that Jimmy Hoffa isn't the only mystery in the cold-case files.
The FBI wrapped up another fruitless search this week for the remains of the former Teamsters boss, who disappeared in 1975. Federal agents dug up parts of the Hidden Dreams horse farm near Detroit for two weeks before giving up. The search had been based on a tip from an incarcerated, aging informant who claimed to have seen Hoffa rolled up in a carpet and dumped in a grave there.
Alas, like the search that required excavation of a back-yard pool more than 100 miles north of Detroit and the one that left ripped up floorboards in a Detroit house, this one, too, led nowhere. Over the years, Hoffa's body has been rumored to be buried beneath a football stadium in New Jersey, chopped up and left in a Florida swamp and dissolved in a mob-connected fat-rendering plant.
The prevailing theory has been that the mob killed Hoffa, who had just gotten out of prison on corruption charges, to prevent him from trying to regain the presidency of the Teamsters. But after nearly 31 years, all we know for certain today is that he disappeared without a trace.
Like Crater. And like Amelia Earhart. She took off from Oakland, Calif., in May 1937, hoping to become the first pilot to fly around the world on an equatorial route. Like D.B. Cooper. He hijacked a Northwest Airlines jet in 1971 and parachuted out of the plane with $200,000 in cash. They all vanished into mystery.
People disappear all the time, but usually they are found fairly quickly. Writer and actor Spalding Gray's body was found two months after he disappeared. It took six years for Madalyn Murray O'Hair's remains to be identified after her 1995 disappearance.
But then there are the legends of the missing. Conspiracy theories still swirl around Crater. Was he murdered? Did he go on the lam? Was Tammany Hall, the New York political machine, involved in his disappearance?
Crater got a phone call in late July 1930, while he was on vacation in Maine. He told his wife, Stella, he had to go back to New York to "straighten those fellows out." The night of Aug. 6, he was wearing a double-breasted brown suit, gray spats and a high collar. He cashed checks for $5,000, jauntily waved goodbye to some friends and disappeared into the night. That was nearly 76 years ago. Few disappear forever, but some trails get very, very cold.
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune
oldies4mari2004 - August 1, 2006 05:11 PM (GMT)
Ell - August 7, 2006 03:05 AM (GMT)
Judge Crater Vanishes Forever
Judge Joseph Force Crater and his wife three days before his disappearance.
(Bettmann/Corbis)
On August 6, 1930, Judge Joseph Force Crater walked out into a warm New York night and was never seen again. An intensive manhunt and a grand jury investigation failed to penetrate the clouds of mystery surrounding his disappearance, and it has become one of the enduring puzzles of American history. His story, featuring showgirls, gangsters, and politicians against a background of corruption, would prove a source of juicy speculation and easy humor for decades to come.
The politics of the big city as it emerged from the Roaring Twenties was byzantine to say the least. Tammany Hall, originally an eighteenth-century social club, had long been synonymous with the local Democratic Party. Even before the days of William M. "Boss" Tweed, who ran the club from 1860 to 1872, Tammany had also been redolent of bribery, influence-peddling, and freelance venality.
More lately, reformers like Franklin Roosevelt had challenged Tammany, muting some of its power. But even Roosevelt, elected as New York's governor in 1928, needed to tread carefully when dealing with the Tammany tiger.
In the spring of 1930 Roosevelt had rejected the official Tammany candidate put forth to fill a vacancy as justice of the state Supreme Court (New York's trial court). Instead he appointed the 41-year-old Crater to the lucrative position, with the knowledge that Crater had the approval of the Democratic Party power Robert F. Wagner, then a U.S. Senator. Crater had served as Wagner's law secretary for six years in the 1920s while climbing the lower rungs of New York politics.
By August 1930 both the weather and the political climate in the city were heating up. Mayor Jimmy Walker, a former songwriter, had been linked to a Tammany district leader under investigation for selling a judgeship. It was rumored that such practices were widespread in the city, and that candidates traditionally coughed over one year's salary to the political kingmakers. It would later turn out that Crater himself had converted stocks and checks into $22,500 in cash, the exact yearly salary of a justice before a recent raise (judges received today's equivalent of $265,000).
On August 2 Crater had gone to Maine to spend time with his wife, Stella, away from the stifling city. He returned to New York by train the next day, telling Stella he needed to attend to pressing business. He would be back in a few days.
On the morning of August 6, he asked his assistant to cash checks for just over $5,000. He had an assistant help him remove six portfolios of papers from his office to his posh Fifth Avenue apartment. None of the documents was ever seen again.
That evening the dapper judge, who favored spats and high stiff collars like those worn by President Hoover, joined his lawyer friend William Klein and a showgirl named Sally Lou Ritz for lobster cocktails and chicken at Billy Haas's chophouse, on West 45th Street. He had ordered a ticket to see Dancing Partner, a comedy at the nearby Belasco Theater. Afterward Klein and Ritz headed for Coney Island, while Crater presumably went to the theater; at least someone picked up his ticket. He may or may not have hailed a cab. In any event, he disappeared off the face of the earth.
Not knowing exactly when her husband intended to return, Stella did not immediately raise an alarm. She made inquiries over the next few weeks, but Crater's friends and colleagues discouraged her from going public with the disappearance, given the incendiary political climate.
The news finally broke on September 3. Crater's judicial appointment four months earlier and his position as leader of a powerful Democratic club fueled speculation that his disappearance had a political motive. Senator Wagner, returning from Europe, said that he and Crater were "never more than mere acquaintances" and claimed he had supported another candidate for the post. The journalist Walter Lippmann wrote that the mystery "will continue to add to the deep uneasiness of the public concerning the judiciary."
New Yorkers, who had been pummeled with gloomy economic news ever since the stock market crash the previous autumn, were eager for distraction. "By Friday, September 5, Judge Crater was New York's latest obsession," writes the author Richard J. Tofel, in Vanishing Point, his study of the case. The papers dug into Crater's love life. Thousands of copies of his picture were circulated. A reward was offered. The district attorney convened a grand jury to look into the matter. The police followed up 16,000 leads from around the world. Crater had become "the missingest man in New York."
Stella didn't return to the city until January 1931, after the grand jury had given up and declared that "the evidence is insufficient to warrant any _expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead." She immediately uncovered four envelopes in a dresser that had been thoroughly searched by police. They contained $6,690 in cash, which may have included the money her husband had withdrawn on August 6. Checks and bank books indicated he had left behind nearly $25,000 in cash. He had also left a list of people who owed him money.
What did it all mean? No one could say for sure. Had Crater vanished intentionally, or had he been abducted? Was his disappearance linked to the corruption hearings that would lead to Mayor Walker's resignation in 1932? Did it have something to do with his predilection for chorus girls? His habit of visiting nightclubs frequented by mobsters like Jack "Legs" Diamond and Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll? All inquiries ended in mystery.
Plenty of witnesses saw Crater after August 6. Someone said he was herding sheep in the Pacific Northwest. Another was sure he had been locked up in a Missouri insane asylum. He was spotted shooting craps in Atlanta, manning a steamer in the Adriatic, operating a bingo game in North Africa. In 1936 a California gold prospector named "Lucky Blacky" Blackiet told Los Angeles police he had met Crater in the desert looking for gold. "I'm done with civilization," Crater had told him. New York detectives, dispatched to investigate, found no trace of the missing jurist.
Stella had Crater declared legally dead in 1939 and collected his life insurance. Rumor had it that every August 6 she visited a Greenwich Village bar to toast her missing husband: "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are." She died in 1969.
Groucho Marx often joked that he was going to "step out and look for Judge Crater." "Judge Crater, call your office" became a standard gag of nightclub comedians. To "pull a Crater" meant to vanish. In the 1950s a Dutch psychic determined that Crater was buried in a Yonkers backyard, which was duly dug up. No Crater.
In August 2005, the death of a 91-year-old Queens woman breathed new life into the saga. Stella Ferrucci-Good left behind a letter that claimed her husband had learned over drinks that Crater had been murdered on the night of his disappearance by several men, including a taxi driver whose brother was a New York City police officer. They had buried the body under the Coney Island boardwalk at the spot where in the 1950s the New York Aquarium was built.
Has Judge Crater been sleeping with the fishes all these years? Or has one more layer of mystery been added to his story? No one can say for sure.
—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/w...eme-court.shtml
__._,_.___
Judge Joseph Force Crater and his wife three days before his disappearance.
(Bettmann/Corbis)
On August 6, 1930, Judge Joseph Force Crater walked out into a warm New York night and was never seen again. An intensive manhunt and a grand jury investigation failed to penetrate the clouds of mystery surrounding his disappearance, and it has become one of the enduring puzzles of American history. His story, featuring showgirls, gangsters, and politicians against a background of corruption, would prove a source of juicy speculation and easy humor for decades to come.
The politics of the big city as it emerged from the Roaring Twenties was byzantine to say the least. Tammany Hall, originally an eighteenth-century social club, had long been synonymous with the local Democratic Party. Even before the days of William M. "Boss" Tweed, who ran the club from 1860 to 1872, Tammany had also been redolent of bribery, influence-peddling, and freelance venality.
More lately, reformers like Franklin Roosevelt had challenged Tammany, muting some of its power. But even Roosevelt, elected as New York's governor in 1928, needed to tread carefully when dealing with the Tammany tiger.
In the spring of 1930 Roosevelt had rejected the official Tammany candidate put forth to fill a vacancy as justice of the state Supreme Court (New York's trial court). Instead he appointed the 41-year-old Crater to the lucrative position, with the knowledge that Crater had the approval of the Democratic Party power Robert F. Wagner, then a U.S. Senator. Crater had served as Wagner's law secretary for six years in the 1920s while climbing the lower rungs of New York politics.
By August 1930 both the weather and the political climate in the city were heating up. Mayor Jimmy Walker, a former songwriter, had been linked to a Tammany district leader under investigation for selling a judgeship. It was rumored that such practices were widespread in the city, and that candidates traditionally coughed over one year's salary to the political kingmakers. It would later turn out that Crater himself had converted stocks and checks into $22,500 in cash, the exact yearly salary of a justice before a recent raise (judges received today's equivalent of $265,000).
On August 2 Crater had gone to Maine to spend time with his wife, Stella, away from the stifling city. He returned to New York by train the next day, telling Stella he needed to attend to pressing business. He would be back in a few days.
On the morning of August 6, he asked his assistant to cash checks for just over $5,000. He had an assistant help him remove six portfolios of papers from his office to his posh Fifth Avenue apartment. None of the documents was ever seen again.
That evening the dapper judge, who favored spats and high stiff collars like those worn by President Hoover, joined his lawyer friend William Klein and a showgirl named Sally Lou Ritz for lobster cocktails and chicken at Billy Haas's chophouse, on West 45th Street. He had ordered a ticket to see Dancing Partner, a comedy at the nearby Belasco Theater. Afterward Klein and Ritz headed for Coney Island, while Crater presumably went to the theater; at least someone picked up his ticket. He may or may not have hailed a cab. In any event, he disappeared off the face of the earth.
Not knowing exactly when her husband intended to return, Stella did not immediately raise an alarm. She made inquiries over the next few weeks, but Crater's friends and colleagues discouraged her from going public with the disappearance, given the incendiary political climate.
The news finally broke on September 3. Crater's judicial appointment four months earlier and his position as leader of a powerful Democratic club fueled speculation that his disappearance had a political motive. Senator Wagner, returning from Europe, said that he and Crater were "never more than mere acquaintances" and claimed he had supported another candidate for the post. The journalist Walter Lippmann wrote that the mystery "will continue to add to the deep uneasiness of the public concerning the judiciary."
New Yorkers, who had been pummeled with gloomy economic news ever since the stock market crash the previous autumn, were eager for distraction. "By Friday, September 5, Judge Crater was New York's latest obsession," writes the author Richard J. Tofel, in Vanishing Point, his study of the case. The papers dug into Crater's love life. Thousands of copies of his picture were circulated. A reward was offered. The district attorney convened a grand jury to look into the matter. The police followed up 16,000 leads from around the world. Crater had become "the missingest man in New York."
Stella didn't return to the city until January 1931, after the grand jury had given up and declared that "the evidence is insufficient to warrant any _expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead." She immediately uncovered four envelopes in a dresser that had been thoroughly searched by police. They contained $6,690 in cash, which may have included the money her husband had withdrawn on August 6. Checks and bank books indicated he had left behind nearly $25,000 in cash. He had also left a list of people who owed him money.
What did it all mean? No one could say for sure. Had Crater vanished intentionally, or had he been abducted? Was his disappearance linked to the corruption hearings that would lead to Mayor Walker's resignation in 1932? Did it have something to do with his predilection for chorus girls? His habit of visiting nightclubs frequented by mobsters like Jack "Legs" Diamond and Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll? All inquiries ended in mystery.
Plenty of witnesses saw Crater after August 6. Someone said he was herding sheep in the Pacific Northwest. Another was sure he had been locked up in a Missouri insane asylum. He was spotted shooting craps in Atlanta, manning a steamer in the Adriatic, operating a bingo game in North Africa. In 1936 a California gold prospector named "Lucky Blacky" Blackiet told Los Angeles police he had met Crater in the desert looking for gold. "I'm done with civilization," Crater had told him. New York detectives, dispatched to investigate, found no trace of the missing jurist.
Stella had Crater declared legally dead in 1939 and collected his life insurance. Rumor had it that every August 6 she visited a Greenwich Village bar to toast her missing husband: "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are." She died in 1969.
Groucho Marx often joked that he was going to "step out and look for Judge Crater." "Judge Crater, call your office" became a standard gag of nightclub comedians. To "pull a Crater" meant to vanish. In the 1950s a Dutch psychic determined that Crater was buried in a Yonkers backyard, which was duly dug up. No Crater.
In August 2005, the death of a 91-year-old Queens woman breathed new life into the saga. Stella Ferrucci-Good left behind a letter that claimed her husband had learned over drinks that Crater had been murdered on the night of his disappearance by several men, including a taxi driver whose brother was a New York City police officer. They had buried the body under the Coney Island boardwalk at the spot where in the 1950s the New York Aquarium was built.
Has Judge Crater been sleeping with the fishes all these years? Or has one more layer of mystery been added to his story? No one can say for sure.
—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/w...eme-court.shtml
__._,_.___
monkalup - September 29, 2006 03:05 PM (GMT)
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...fea_floyd.shtml
1998 article about Judge Crater's disappearance.
www.doenetwork.us/cases/626dmny.html
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...,166191,00.html
2005 story on a discovered letter purporting to reveal the fate of Judge Joseph Crater.
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...dge_crater.html
Photo and information about his disappearance
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...com/id/9006026/
Video and information on Judge Crater's disappearance and possible fate.
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9....php?storyid=44
Photos, vital statistics, and information on Judge Crater's disappearance.
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...blatt_8-11.html
1998 essay by Roger Rosenblatt, in which he considers some people who have disappeared.
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...com/crater.html
Information about the "missingest man in New York."
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...11vq5fDiscusses possible reasons for Joseph's Crater's vanishingc6d/*http%3A//ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/asaucci/crater.htm
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...udgecrater.html
Brief biography and links
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...ki/Judge_Crater
Hyperlinked biography of the New York City judge who vanished in 1930.
1998 article about Judge Crater's disappearance.
www.doenetwork.us/cases/626dmny.html
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...,166191,00.html
2005 story on a discovered letter purporting to reveal the fate of Judge Joseph Crater.
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...dge_crater.html
Photo and information about his disappearance
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...com/id/9006026/
Video and information on Judge Crater's disappearance and possible fate.
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9....php?storyid=44
Photos, vital statistics, and information on Judge Crater's disappearance.
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...blatt_8-11.html
1998 essay by Roger Rosenblatt, in which he considers some people who have disappeared.
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...com/crater.html
Information about the "missingest man in New York."
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...11vq5fDiscusses possible reasons for Joseph's Crater's vanishingc6d/*http%3A//ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/asaucci/crater.htm
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...udgecrater.html
Brief biography and links
http://uk.srd.yahoo.com/S=97123512:D1/CS=9...ki/Judge_Crater
Hyperlinked biography of the New York City judge who vanished in 1930.
Ell - October 22, 2006 02:45 AM (GMT)
http://www.nndb.com/people/907/000031814/
Joseph Force Crater
Born: 1889
Birthplace: Easton, PA
Died: 6-Aug-1930
Location of death: Manhattan, NY
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Missing
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Victim
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: NY State Judge vanished
Appointed by Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to the New York State Supreme Court, Judge Joseph Force Crater disappeared entering a taxicab on 6 August 1930. He was declared legally dead on 6 June 1939 by the State of New York.
Wife: Stella Wheeler (socialite, m. 1917)
Girlfriend: Sally Lou Ritz (showgirl, age 22, adulterous affair)
Joseph Force Crater
Born: 1889
Birthplace: Easton, PA
Died: 6-Aug-1930
Location of death: Manhattan, NY
Cause of death: unspecified
Remains: Missing
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Victim
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: NY State Judge vanished
Appointed by Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt to the New York State Supreme Court, Judge Joseph Force Crater disappeared entering a taxicab on 6 August 1930. He was declared legally dead on 6 June 1939 by the State of New York.
Wife: Stella Wheeler (socialite, m. 1917)
Girlfriend: Sally Lou Ritz (showgirl, age 22, adulterous affair)
monkalup - November 14, 2006 04:44 PM (GMT)
NEWS & COLUMNS
By William Bryk
The Empty Robe
Every Aug. 6 for more than three decades, an attractive older woman entered a Greenwich Village bar, a place that had been a restaurant back in the Jazz Age. She sat alone in a booth and ordered two cocktails. She raised one, murmured, "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are." She drank it slowly, rose and walked out, leaving the other drink untouched.
Thus Stella Crater mourned her vanished husband, Justice Joseph Force Crater, who became famous on Aug. 6, 1930, when he, as the Daily News later said, "disappeared efficiently, completely, and forever."
Born to Irish immigrants in Easton, PA, in 1889, Joe Crater worked his way through Lafayette College and Columbia Law School. He opened his office at 120 Broadway (the Equitable Bldg., a huge white marble pile that was once the largest office building in the world) and joined the Cayuga Democratic Club, the power base of Tammany district leader Martin Healy, where Crater spent thousands of hours organizing election workers and representing the club in election law cases. He also married Stella Wheeler, whom he had represented in her 1912 divorce.
State Supreme Court Justice Robert F. Wagner Sr., who became a United States senator in 1926, appointed Crater his secretary in 1920. Joe was also an adjunct professor at Fordham and New York University law schools. But most of his income came through his law practice, which was enriched by his political connections. At first, he received the usual minor appointments from the courts: receiverships, refereeships, guardianships. Over time, Crater’s pieces of pie were cut large. In February 1929, he was appointed receiver in foreclosure of the Libby Hotel. Four months later, the hotel was auctioned for $75,000 to the American Mortgage Loan Co. Two months after that, the City of New York condemned the hotel, paying American Mortgage Loan $2,850,000–a profit of $2,775,000 on its two months’ investment of $75,000. Some cynics suggested American Mortgage Loan’s managers knew about the city’s plans before buying the building.
Crater could afford a new apartment: a two-bedroom cooperative at 40 5th Ave. He became president of the Cayuga Club and Martin Healy’s right-hand man. And on April 8, 1930, Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to a vacancy on the state Supreme Court (among New York state courts, the Supreme Court is actually the lowest court, comparable to superior courts in other states). Politics had everything to do with it. So did ability: even the respectables at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York supported Joe’s appointment.
He was 41 years old–young for a Supreme Court justice in New York. Crater was a well-tailored 185-pound 6-footer, with fleshy features and slicked-down iron-gray hair that made him seem older than he was. He was a fine pianist, a good dancer and liked theater.
When the courts recessed in June 1930, the Craters went to their summer home in Belgrade Lakes, ME, six miles from the nearest telephone. In July, they read that New York County District Attorney Thomas C.T. Crain was charging Healy with selling judgeships. Crater seemed undisturbed then, although he went away for two days in late July to confer about Healy’s legal problems. On Sunday, Aug. 3, one of the locals dropped in with a message that the judge had received a long-distance telephone call at the town’s drugstore. Crater went into town to return the call. When he returned, he told Stella he had to go to New York for a few days. "I’ve got to straighten out a few people," he said. Then, promising to return for her birthday on Saturday, Aug. 9, he left for the city. He arrived at their apartment on Monday. Crater gave the maid a few days off and saw his doctor about an index finger crushed in a car door some weeks before.
On Tuesday, he worked in his chambers at the New York courthouse at 60 Centre St. On the morning of Aug. 6, he spent two hours going through the files in his chambers. He had his personal assistant, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for him amounting to $5150, worth roughly $50,000 in today’s money. He and Mara went by cab to the Crater apartment with locked briefcases containing five large portfolios, which Mara left on a chair. The judge then dismissed Mara for the day.
That evening, Crater bought a ticket for that night’s performance of a new hit comedy, Dancing Partners, at the Belasco Theater on W. 44th St. He had dinner nearby at Billy Haas’s chophouse, with two friends, William Klein, a lawyer specializing in entertainment law, and Klein’s girlfriend, Sally Lou Ritz, a showgirl generally considered one fine-looking babe. Afterward, the trio stood on the sidewalk chatting and laughing. Although the curtain had gone up on Dancing Partners, Crater seemed unhurried. Between 9 and 9:15, he hailed a passing cab. Klein later recalled it was tan. Crater waved his Panama out the window to his friends.
On the record, no one saw Joe Crater again.
Someone called for the ticket at the Belasco’s box office. No one knows if that person was Crater.
At first Stella had been miffed that he had missed her birthday but thought he had been detained on political or legal business. His friends and colleagues thought he was in Maine. After a week, though, she began telephoning his friends in New York such as Simon Rifkind, who had succeeded him as Wagner’s secretary. Rifkind reassured her that everything was all right, that the judge would eventually turn up.
The Supreme Court opened on Aug. 25. Justice Louis Valente telephoned from New York to ask whether Joe was still in Maine. His fellow justices arranged a discreet inquiry. On Sept. 3, when the inquiry proved fruitless and the court remained one justice short, the police were notified. Joe Crater became front-page news, with the tabloids suggesting he had been murdered, had vanished with a showgirl mistress or disappeared to avoid the Healy scandal.
In October 1930, District Attorney Crain empanelled a grand jury to dig into bankbooks, telephone records and safety deposit boxes. None of those inquiries led anywhere. Mrs. Crater, bewildered by her husband’s disappearance, revolted by the sensational press coverage and enraged by Crain’s suggestions that she knew of her husband’s whereabouts, refused to go before the grand jury and remained in Maine, outside his jurisdiction.
The grand jury was dismissed on Jan. 9, 1931, after hearing hundreds of witnesses and taking 2000 pages of testimony, concluding: "The evidence is insufficient to warrant any expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead, or as to whether he has absented himself voluntarily, or is a sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of a crime."
Mrs. Crater then returned to 40 5th Ave. on Jan. 18. Three days later, while going through her dresser, she found four manila envelopes in a hidden drawer containing his will, which left everything to her, plus $6619 in cash, several checks, life insurance policies worth $30,000 and a three-page note, listing 20 companies or persons who supposedly owed the judge money. On the bottom of the list was penned a note: "Am very weary. Love, Joe."
The police had already searched the apartment several times, and, although Mrs. Crater insisted that they could not have searched the hidden drawer that held the newly discovered documents, this incident merely deepened the mystery.
The investigation lasted for years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some said he was the victim of amnesia, while a few concluded that he had simply run away with a secret lover. Other theories linked the judge’s fate to organized crime. Crater had known Arnold Rothstein, the man believed to have fixed the 1919 World Series, and other criminals. Perhaps he had known too much about something or other and had to be silenced; some whispered that Jack "Legs" Diamond had done the job and buried the body in the sub-basement of the Diamond-controlled Peter Barmann Brewery in Kingston, NY.
No one ever found anything illegal in Crater’s role as receiver of the Libby Hotel. Yet some persisted in believing some party to the transaction had not received his share of the profits and had taken it out on Joe. Others thought he was abducted and slain by a criminal gang disappointed with one of his rulings. A few thought he had been murdered by some stickup man who had successfully disposed of the remains.
Emil K. Ellis, who represented Stella Crater in litigation against her husband’s insurance company, argued that Crater had been murdered in a blackmail scheme engineered through June Brice, a showgirl. Ellis said the large sum of money her husband had withdrawn the day before he disappeared was probably a payoff. He believed a gangster friend of the showgirl then killed the judge when he refused to give her more money. One incident lent this plausibility: on the evening of his disappearance, Judge Crater had been seen talking to Brice, who vanished the day before the grand jury had convened. In 1948, investigators working for Ellis tracked her to a Long Island mental hospital: she was hopelessly demented. Others tied Crater to Vivian Gordon, a prostitute and blackmailer found garroted in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park on Feb. 26, 1931. As seems to be often the case, the tabloids suggested that "a red hot diary" found in her apartment listed her wealthy politician and businessmen friends, including Joe Crater.
Gordon had been due to testify before a special state commission investigating the Healy scandal. Even that came to nothing: Healy was acquitted three times.
Yet Crater’s actions from Aug. 3-6 seem to foreshadow his disappearance. He purged his personal files, obtained a large amount of money and wrote the letter describing the debts owed to him found five months after his disappearance. Police Commissioner Edward Mulrooney simply expressed common sense when he said, "Crater’s disappearance was premeditated."
Herbert Mitgang, in The Man Who Rode the Tiger: The Life and Times of Judge Samuel Seabury, notes that Seabury’s investigation of the Healy scandal (which led to other investigations, ultimately forcing the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker) found Crater had raised more than $20,000 shortly before his disappearance. This was equal to a Supreme Court justice’s annual salary: some noted the Tammany tradition that someone appointed to high office contributed a year’s salary to the party leadership. Roosevelt-haters whispered that FDR’s friends had killed Crater because his possible testimony before a grand jury about the sale of judgeships to swell party funds would hurt FDR’s presidential hopes: "Mr. Roosevelt hoisted himself into the presidency on the body of his friend."
Sightings of Judge Crater were reported all over the country, and for a while, the police followed up every lead. He was seen on trains and ships, driving a taxi in a dozen towns, panning for gold in California and Alaska, sighted in the South Seas or the French Foreign Legion. In the 1950s, a Dutch clairvoyant "sensed" Crater’s body buried near Yonkers; in 1959, Westchester authorities dug up a Yonkers backyard in search of Crater’s bones.
Eventually, detectives would interview more than 300 people and review thousands of letters, telegrams and depositions. They never found a trace of Crater or the papers that he had taken from his files.The state of New York declared Joe Crater legally dead on June 6, 1939, nine years after he went missing. Stella Crater sued three insurance companies to collect her husband’s death benefits. Ellis, her lawyer, argued that gangsters had murdered the judge. Eventually, the insurance companies settled the suit.
He became a cultural figure, "the Missingest Man in New York," and the butt of nightclub jokes ("paging Judge Crater..."). As late as the 1960s, the name of Judge Crater was invoked as a symbol of the missing. His name even became popular slang: to pull a Crater is to vanish.
Stella Crater remarried, divorced and never stopped looking for her husband. The police closed the case in 1979. On the record, no one knows what happened to him. In this life, no one will.
http://www.nypress.com/15/25/news&columns/oldsmoke.cfm
By William Bryk
The Empty Robe
Every Aug. 6 for more than three decades, an attractive older woman entered a Greenwich Village bar, a place that had been a restaurant back in the Jazz Age. She sat alone in a booth and ordered two cocktails. She raised one, murmured, "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are." She drank it slowly, rose and walked out, leaving the other drink untouched.
Thus Stella Crater mourned her vanished husband, Justice Joseph Force Crater, who became famous on Aug. 6, 1930, when he, as the Daily News later said, "disappeared efficiently, completely, and forever."
Born to Irish immigrants in Easton, PA, in 1889, Joe Crater worked his way through Lafayette College and Columbia Law School. He opened his office at 120 Broadway (the Equitable Bldg., a huge white marble pile that was once the largest office building in the world) and joined the Cayuga Democratic Club, the power base of Tammany district leader Martin Healy, where Crater spent thousands of hours organizing election workers and representing the club in election law cases. He also married Stella Wheeler, whom he had represented in her 1912 divorce.
State Supreme Court Justice Robert F. Wagner Sr., who became a United States senator in 1926, appointed Crater his secretary in 1920. Joe was also an adjunct professor at Fordham and New York University law schools. But most of his income came through his law practice, which was enriched by his political connections. At first, he received the usual minor appointments from the courts: receiverships, refereeships, guardianships. Over time, Crater’s pieces of pie were cut large. In February 1929, he was appointed receiver in foreclosure of the Libby Hotel. Four months later, the hotel was auctioned for $75,000 to the American Mortgage Loan Co. Two months after that, the City of New York condemned the hotel, paying American Mortgage Loan $2,850,000–a profit of $2,775,000 on its two months’ investment of $75,000. Some cynics suggested American Mortgage Loan’s managers knew about the city’s plans before buying the building.
Crater could afford a new apartment: a two-bedroom cooperative at 40 5th Ave. He became president of the Cayuga Club and Martin Healy’s right-hand man. And on April 8, 1930, Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to a vacancy on the state Supreme Court (among New York state courts, the Supreme Court is actually the lowest court, comparable to superior courts in other states). Politics had everything to do with it. So did ability: even the respectables at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York supported Joe’s appointment.
He was 41 years old–young for a Supreme Court justice in New York. Crater was a well-tailored 185-pound 6-footer, with fleshy features and slicked-down iron-gray hair that made him seem older than he was. He was a fine pianist, a good dancer and liked theater.
When the courts recessed in June 1930, the Craters went to their summer home in Belgrade Lakes, ME, six miles from the nearest telephone. In July, they read that New York County District Attorney Thomas C.T. Crain was charging Healy with selling judgeships. Crater seemed undisturbed then, although he went away for two days in late July to confer about Healy’s legal problems. On Sunday, Aug. 3, one of the locals dropped in with a message that the judge had received a long-distance telephone call at the town’s drugstore. Crater went into town to return the call. When he returned, he told Stella he had to go to New York for a few days. "I’ve got to straighten out a few people," he said. Then, promising to return for her birthday on Saturday, Aug. 9, he left for the city. He arrived at their apartment on Monday. Crater gave the maid a few days off and saw his doctor about an index finger crushed in a car door some weeks before.
On Tuesday, he worked in his chambers at the New York courthouse at 60 Centre St. On the morning of Aug. 6, he spent two hours going through the files in his chambers. He had his personal assistant, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for him amounting to $5150, worth roughly $50,000 in today’s money. He and Mara went by cab to the Crater apartment with locked briefcases containing five large portfolios, which Mara left on a chair. The judge then dismissed Mara for the day.
That evening, Crater bought a ticket for that night’s performance of a new hit comedy, Dancing Partners, at the Belasco Theater on W. 44th St. He had dinner nearby at Billy Haas’s chophouse, with two friends, William Klein, a lawyer specializing in entertainment law, and Klein’s girlfriend, Sally Lou Ritz, a showgirl generally considered one fine-looking babe. Afterward, the trio stood on the sidewalk chatting and laughing. Although the curtain had gone up on Dancing Partners, Crater seemed unhurried. Between 9 and 9:15, he hailed a passing cab. Klein later recalled it was tan. Crater waved his Panama out the window to his friends.
On the record, no one saw Joe Crater again.
Someone called for the ticket at the Belasco’s box office. No one knows if that person was Crater.
At first Stella had been miffed that he had missed her birthday but thought he had been detained on political or legal business. His friends and colleagues thought he was in Maine. After a week, though, she began telephoning his friends in New York such as Simon Rifkind, who had succeeded him as Wagner’s secretary. Rifkind reassured her that everything was all right, that the judge would eventually turn up.
The Supreme Court opened on Aug. 25. Justice Louis Valente telephoned from New York to ask whether Joe was still in Maine. His fellow justices arranged a discreet inquiry. On Sept. 3, when the inquiry proved fruitless and the court remained one justice short, the police were notified. Joe Crater became front-page news, with the tabloids suggesting he had been murdered, had vanished with a showgirl mistress or disappeared to avoid the Healy scandal.
In October 1930, District Attorney Crain empanelled a grand jury to dig into bankbooks, telephone records and safety deposit boxes. None of those inquiries led anywhere. Mrs. Crater, bewildered by her husband’s disappearance, revolted by the sensational press coverage and enraged by Crain’s suggestions that she knew of her husband’s whereabouts, refused to go before the grand jury and remained in Maine, outside his jurisdiction.
The grand jury was dismissed on Jan. 9, 1931, after hearing hundreds of witnesses and taking 2000 pages of testimony, concluding: "The evidence is insufficient to warrant any expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead, or as to whether he has absented himself voluntarily, or is a sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of a crime."
Mrs. Crater then returned to 40 5th Ave. on Jan. 18. Three days later, while going through her dresser, she found four manila envelopes in a hidden drawer containing his will, which left everything to her, plus $6619 in cash, several checks, life insurance policies worth $30,000 and a three-page note, listing 20 companies or persons who supposedly owed the judge money. On the bottom of the list was penned a note: "Am very weary. Love, Joe."
The police had already searched the apartment several times, and, although Mrs. Crater insisted that they could not have searched the hidden drawer that held the newly discovered documents, this incident merely deepened the mystery.
The investigation lasted for years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some said he was the victim of amnesia, while a few concluded that he had simply run away with a secret lover. Other theories linked the judge’s fate to organized crime. Crater had known Arnold Rothstein, the man believed to have fixed the 1919 World Series, and other criminals. Perhaps he had known too much about something or other and had to be silenced; some whispered that Jack "Legs" Diamond had done the job and buried the body in the sub-basement of the Diamond-controlled Peter Barmann Brewery in Kingston, NY.
No one ever found anything illegal in Crater’s role as receiver of the Libby Hotel. Yet some persisted in believing some party to the transaction had not received his share of the profits and had taken it out on Joe. Others thought he was abducted and slain by a criminal gang disappointed with one of his rulings. A few thought he had been murdered by some stickup man who had successfully disposed of the remains.
Emil K. Ellis, who represented Stella Crater in litigation against her husband’s insurance company, argued that Crater had been murdered in a blackmail scheme engineered through June Brice, a showgirl. Ellis said the large sum of money her husband had withdrawn the day before he disappeared was probably a payoff. He believed a gangster friend of the showgirl then killed the judge when he refused to give her more money. One incident lent this plausibility: on the evening of his disappearance, Judge Crater had been seen talking to Brice, who vanished the day before the grand jury had convened. In 1948, investigators working for Ellis tracked her to a Long Island mental hospital: she was hopelessly demented. Others tied Crater to Vivian Gordon, a prostitute and blackmailer found garroted in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park on Feb. 26, 1931. As seems to be often the case, the tabloids suggested that "a red hot diary" found in her apartment listed her wealthy politician and businessmen friends, including Joe Crater.
Gordon had been due to testify before a special state commission investigating the Healy scandal. Even that came to nothing: Healy was acquitted three times.
Yet Crater’s actions from Aug. 3-6 seem to foreshadow his disappearance. He purged his personal files, obtained a large amount of money and wrote the letter describing the debts owed to him found five months after his disappearance. Police Commissioner Edward Mulrooney simply expressed common sense when he said, "Crater’s disappearance was premeditated."
Herbert Mitgang, in The Man Who Rode the Tiger: The Life and Times of Judge Samuel Seabury, notes that Seabury’s investigation of the Healy scandal (which led to other investigations, ultimately forcing the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker) found Crater had raised more than $20,000 shortly before his disappearance. This was equal to a Supreme Court justice’s annual salary: some noted the Tammany tradition that someone appointed to high office contributed a year’s salary to the party leadership. Roosevelt-haters whispered that FDR’s friends had killed Crater because his possible testimony before a grand jury about the sale of judgeships to swell party funds would hurt FDR’s presidential hopes: "Mr. Roosevelt hoisted himself into the presidency on the body of his friend."
Sightings of Judge Crater were reported all over the country, and for a while, the police followed up every lead. He was seen on trains and ships, driving a taxi in a dozen towns, panning for gold in California and Alaska, sighted in the South Seas or the French Foreign Legion. In the 1950s, a Dutch clairvoyant "sensed" Crater’s body buried near Yonkers; in 1959, Westchester authorities dug up a Yonkers backyard in search of Crater’s bones.
Eventually, detectives would interview more than 300 people and review thousands of letters, telegrams and depositions. They never found a trace of Crater or the papers that he had taken from his files.The state of New York declared Joe Crater legally dead on June 6, 1939, nine years after he went missing. Stella Crater sued three insurance companies to collect her husband’s death benefits. Ellis, her lawyer, argued that gangsters had murdered the judge. Eventually, the insurance companies settled the suit.
He became a cultural figure, "the Missingest Man in New York," and the butt of nightclub jokes ("paging Judge Crater..."). As late as the 1960s, the name of Judge Crater was invoked as a symbol of the missing. His name even became popular slang: to pull a Crater is to vanish.
Stella Crater remarried, divorced and never stopped looking for her husband. The police closed the case in 1979. On the record, no one knows what happened to him. In this life, no one will.
http://www.nypress.com/15/25/news&columns/oldsmoke.cfm
monkalup - November 14, 2006 04:45 PM (GMT)
monkalup - March 7, 2008 01:40 AM (GMT)
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal...,4760138.column
7 decades later, judge's vanishing still a mystery
Frederick N. Rasmussen
January 5, 2008
An old friend, Howard R. Simpson of Roland Park, an inveterate newspaper reader who appreciates the craft of journalism and relishes its stories and practitioners, gave me a wonderful book for Christmas, Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater, and the New York He Left Behind.
Its author, Richard J. Tofel, former assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal, breathes life into one of the most celebrated vanishing acts in the nation's history.
The disappearance of Joseph Force Crater, a judge on the New York Supreme Court who became known as "the most missingest man in America" after he vanished in 1930, is one of those stories that editors like to dredge up now and again, and that the public never tires of.
Seven decades later, it still has staying power and is certainly right up there with what happened to D.B. Cooper and Jimmy Hoffa, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and who really killed Starr Faithfull, Black Dahlia or Chandra Levy.
Crater, who was 41, stood 6 feet tall and parted his hair razor-straight down the middle, had been appointed to the bench by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
On Aug. 6, 1930, Crater dressed in pearl-gray spats, a high starched linen collar and a brown suit, and, after buying a ticket to Dancing Partner, a musical, he arrived at Billy Haas's restaurant on West 45th Street in midtown Manhattan.
Crater, who even though married preferred the company of showgirls and Manhattan's leading madam and brothel owner, Polly Adler, joined William Klein, a lawyer for the Shubert theatrical interests, and Sally Lou Ritz, a showgirl, for dinner.
After dinner at 9:15 p.m., Crater stepped into a cab and permanent enrollment on the city's missing-persons list.
This is the standard account, Tofel writes; however, during the subsequent investigation, no cab driver could be found who had picked up the judge.
"That is almost certainly because there was no such cab," he writes, and the cab theory was largely based on the grand jury testimony of Klein and Ritz.
"Yet, if we can be confident that Crater did not hail a cab, we cannot be at all sure of what he did do," he writes. "The fact is that Joseph Crater's trail runs cold at Billy Haas's restaurant. After his dinner there, no one has convincingly admitted to having seen him again."
After her husband's disappearance, his wife found cash-stuffed envelopes and a letter dated Aug. 6, 1930, on which he had written: "I am very weary. Love, Joe."
Tofel applies the old gumshoe theory of following the money trail.
Crater, a faithful member of Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that controlled patronage and nominations to state court judgeships and held sway over New York politics from 1786 to the 1960s, owed Tammany for making his nomination to the court possible.
Tofel writes that Tammany had made the "Supreme Court posts the largest plums on offer."
Crater, who lived in a Fifth Avenue co-op with his wife, Stella, was known to have multiple bank accounts, which he juggled with regularity, in order to probably pay back Tammany for his judgeship.
The morning of his disappearance, he cashed checks worth $5,150, and "no one has ever been able to say for certain what that money was intended for," Tofel writes.
The subsequent investigation of Tammany Hall by special prosecutor Judge Samuel Seabury, in the wake of Crater's disappearance, ended the career of New York's colorful Mayor James J. Walker, who told reporters, "There are three things a man must do alone: Be born, die and testify."
Theories abound about what happened to Crater - none provable - because no corpse was found. Some suggest that he killed himself rather than testify against political friends before Seabury or, as his wife suggested, was the victim of a political murder.
"The evidence is insufficient to warrant any expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead, as to whether he has absented himself voluntarily, or is a sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of a crime," concluded the grand jury.
Crater was declared legally dead in 1939, and the New York Police Department officially closed the case in 1979.
Until her death in 1969, the New York Post reported that on the anniversary of her husband's disappearance, Stella would visit a Greenwich Village bar where she'd sit by herself and order two drinks.
After lifting one of the glasses, she was heard to say, "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are," and then would down the drink.
7 decades later, judge's vanishing still a mystery
Frederick N. Rasmussen
January 5, 2008
An old friend, Howard R. Simpson of Roland Park, an inveterate newspaper reader who appreciates the craft of journalism and relishes its stories and practitioners, gave me a wonderful book for Christmas, Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater, and the New York He Left Behind.
Its author, Richard J. Tofel, former assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal, breathes life into one of the most celebrated vanishing acts in the nation's history.
The disappearance of Joseph Force Crater, a judge on the New York Supreme Court who became known as "the most missingest man in America" after he vanished in 1930, is one of those stories that editors like to dredge up now and again, and that the public never tires of.
Seven decades later, it still has staying power and is certainly right up there with what happened to D.B. Cooper and Jimmy Hoffa, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and who really killed Starr Faithfull, Black Dahlia or Chandra Levy.
Crater, who was 41, stood 6 feet tall and parted his hair razor-straight down the middle, had been appointed to the bench by then-Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
On Aug. 6, 1930, Crater dressed in pearl-gray spats, a high starched linen collar and a brown suit, and, after buying a ticket to Dancing Partner, a musical, he arrived at Billy Haas's restaurant on West 45th Street in midtown Manhattan.
Crater, who even though married preferred the company of showgirls and Manhattan's leading madam and brothel owner, Polly Adler, joined William Klein, a lawyer for the Shubert theatrical interests, and Sally Lou Ritz, a showgirl, for dinner.
After dinner at 9:15 p.m., Crater stepped into a cab and permanent enrollment on the city's missing-persons list.
This is the standard account, Tofel writes; however, during the subsequent investigation, no cab driver could be found who had picked up the judge.
"That is almost certainly because there was no such cab," he writes, and the cab theory was largely based on the grand jury testimony of Klein and Ritz.
"Yet, if we can be confident that Crater did not hail a cab, we cannot be at all sure of what he did do," he writes. "The fact is that Joseph Crater's trail runs cold at Billy Haas's restaurant. After his dinner there, no one has convincingly admitted to having seen him again."
After her husband's disappearance, his wife found cash-stuffed envelopes and a letter dated Aug. 6, 1930, on which he had written: "I am very weary. Love, Joe."
Tofel applies the old gumshoe theory of following the money trail.
Crater, a faithful member of Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that controlled patronage and nominations to state court judgeships and held sway over New York politics from 1786 to the 1960s, owed Tammany for making his nomination to the court possible.
Tofel writes that Tammany had made the "Supreme Court posts the largest plums on offer."
Crater, who lived in a Fifth Avenue co-op with his wife, Stella, was known to have multiple bank accounts, which he juggled with regularity, in order to probably pay back Tammany for his judgeship.
The morning of his disappearance, he cashed checks worth $5,150, and "no one has ever been able to say for certain what that money was intended for," Tofel writes.
The subsequent investigation of Tammany Hall by special prosecutor Judge Samuel Seabury, in the wake of Crater's disappearance, ended the career of New York's colorful Mayor James J. Walker, who told reporters, "There are three things a man must do alone: Be born, die and testify."
Theories abound about what happened to Crater - none provable - because no corpse was found. Some suggest that he killed himself rather than testify against political friends before Seabury or, as his wife suggested, was the victim of a political murder.
"The evidence is insufficient to warrant any expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead, as to whether he has absented himself voluntarily, or is a sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of a crime," concluded the grand jury.
Crater was declared legally dead in 1939, and the New York Police Department officially closed the case in 1979.
Until her death in 1969, the New York Post reported that on the anniversary of her husband's disappearance, Stella would visit a Greenwich Village bar where she'd sit by herself and order two drinks.
After lifting one of the glasses, she was heard to say, "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are," and then would down the drink.