CALLING JUDGE CRATER Chapter Three

 

It was about 7:45pm, on Wednesday 26 February, 1930 - 6 months before Judge Crater took “a Crater” on West 45^th Street in Manhattan.   A middle aged blond woman and a tall, slightly balding man casually walked out of the 8 story apartment building at 1521 Sheridan Avenue in the Bronx (above). They were lightly dressed, and the sidewalks were crowded with people enjoying the unseasonable warmth of 75 degrees.  The pair sauntered north for a block to a small coup parked on the west side of the street. 

As the man opened the passenger side door for the woman, a solitary figure appeared out of the shadows and spoke. The man started to smile a greeting. As he did the figure lifted a sawed-off double barreled shotgun. For an instant the surprise on the man's face was lit by the flash of the discharge, followed by the hollow ugly thud.

The man dropped to the pavement (above). The woman screamed. The assassin tossed the weapon under the car and disappeared up a passage way between buildings. Residents recognized the screaming woman as four year tenant Maria Ennis. 

A good Samaritan cab driver drove Maria (below, left) across the Harlem River to the Montefiore Hospital, at West 138^th Street (above), where they eventually brought the body of the man murdered in front of her.

While Maria (above, left)  was treated for shock, police emptied the dead man's pockets. They found a loaded revolver and $804 in cash, at a time when a yearly middle class income was a little over $1,000.  But this was explained by the corpse's driver's license. The dead man's name had been Gaetano “Tommy” Reina (above, right),  also known as the Bronx Ice King.  

Tommy was the third ice distributor murdered in the last few months. The press was calling it the “Cut Rate Feud”, fought over territories for delivery of the once ubiquitous 5 pound slabs of ice required every 4 to 6 days for every ice box in a city of over 3 million residents.

But the refrigerator revolution had already begun. At 2393 Grand Concourse and Fordham Road, within blocks of The Ice King's assassination, his usurper, engineer and salesman Rex Cole, was selling General Electric home refrigerators - from this and a half dozen other sites across New York City - for a little as $215.00 apiece. In 1930, out of the 12,000 retail stores in NYC, only 63 sold kitchen appliances. But that year refrigerators made up 6% of all home appliance sales. And those numbers were rapidly growing.

The introduction of electricity to New York City tenements was supported by reformers because home refrigerators allowed working class families to improve their diets and health. Delivering electricity was also cheaper than ice delivery, and bypassed the multi- layered corruption that insulated gangs from reformers. And by regulating utilities as public/private combinations, the gangs could be completely shut out of the new market. So the ice war the newspapers were obsessed with, was a battle over the past, and the Bronx Ice King had supposedly died for a vanishing kingdom.

No, the murder of the Ice King was about something more. Every teamster who left the Colonial Ice and Coal Company, on Eighth Avenue and 151st Street, and the other "ice houses" across the city, carried pass keys for every apartment building, speakeasy, market and restaurant across the Bronx and around Times Square. Their daily meanderings were camouflage for bootleg liquor distribution, numbers running and extortion rings, as well as a hidden in plain sight laundry for the prohibition profits from all of those and prostitution, which filled the pockets of the Lucchese's crime family, of which Gaetano Reina was a major player.

In the early morning hours of Thursday, 28 February 1930, the police brought Tommy's 40 year old wife, Angelina (above, left) , to identify her husband (above right) in the morgue. Somehow the grieving widow spotted the shaken mistress in a treatment room. Angelina pounced on Maria like a hungry puma on sleeping chipmunk. 

Angelina used Maria's throat as a handle to toss her around the room, all the while screaming that the mistress was a tramp who had stolen the father of her nine children. Eventually the police were able to restrain Angelina. To the newspaper writers the two devastated women provided comic relief in an otherwise unpleasant assignment.

The real background to the murder was that Tommy Reina had aligned himself with Joe “The Boss” Masseria (above) . But Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who cultivated allies on all sides, warned Joe that Tommy had been talking to opposition gang leader, Salvatore “Little Caesar” Maranzano. The hot headed Joe hit the roof, and ordered the “hit” on The Ice King, his own man.

Luciano gave the job to his trusted soldier, Vito Genovese (above).  After gunning down Reina, Vito escaped by running between buildings to the Grand Concourse where Joseph Micheal “Cargo Joe” Valachi, was waiting with a get away car.  Two years later, Tommy Reina's daughter Carmela, would marry Joe Valachi.

The “hit” was actually the first shot in a war between the old guard “Mustache Pete's” who wanted the American Mafia to remain strictly Italian and Sicilian, and the young Turks, like Luciano, who were willing to do business with anybody, even Jews like Arthur Simon Flegenheimer (above). Young Arthur had first worked for the Schultz Trucking Company, smuggling beer and liquor across the Canadian border. He quickly established a reputation as smart and violent, and became known as the German who worked for Schultz – or, Dutch Schultz.

It was Luciano who introduced Schultz to a little pug nosed Russian firecracker named Pearl “Polly” Adler (above, left). Having decided to become a madam at age 20, Polly Adler never looked back. “My feeling is,” she wrote years later, “that by the time there are such choices to be made, your life already has made the decision for you”. 

By 1928, the “Jewish Jezebel” had been running brothels for a decade, and was earning $1,100 a week. But despite the hundred dollar bills she passed in every handshake to politicians and cops, she was still forced to move her "whore houses" 11 times in 10 years. Luciano thought Dutch and Polly (above, right) might be able to help each other.

So, bankrolled by Dutch - in exchange for 50% of her profits - Polly opened her most famous house in the brand new Majestic Hotel (above)  at 215 West 75^th street.  She turned down 40 women for every one she hired, and then treated them the same way she treated the customers – with respect. As one writer put it, “She strove to cultivate an atmosphere that was more clubhouse than cat house...” Her wealthy clientele also provided a layer of protection. 

On almost any night you might discover politicians like Mayor Jimmy Walker, or high priced lawyers like William Klein or even a judge Like Joe Crater, in her new "house". The only thing that worried Polly was that Dutch often stopped to visit, and the territory surrounding Polly's nest was controlled by the competing Irish gangster and loose cannon, John Thomas Diamond. But that was why Dutch had invested in the property. Polly's house was a wedge to pry apart Joe Diamond's little Manhattan territory.

Nobody trusted Diamond. By 1930 the 5 foot 9 inch tall, 140 pound sociopath had earned the nickname of “Legs” because of the three assassination attempts he already walked away from. 

Jack had started in 1919 as a body guard for Arnold Rothstein (above), also known as “the Brain”, “The Big Bankroll”, “The Man Uptown”, “The Fixer”, and simply “Mister Big” - the man who rigged the 1919 World Series. The rumor was A.R. liked Jack so much, he set him up in the heroin business – for a cut of course. But in November of 1928, rumor also had it that “Gentleman Jack” was involved in the assassination of his own boss at the Park Central Hotel.

After the death of Rothstein, Jack became known as “Big Boy”, a flashy dresser, a big spender, seen every weekend at high end “speaks” like “21” and “The Stork Club,”, with showgirls like Constance “Connie” Markus...

 ...or more regularly the red haired Ziegfield chorus girl, Marion “Kiki Roberts” Strasmick (above)...

...or his own wife, Alice Schiffer (above)  - and lately with Kiki and Alice at the same time. 

In early 1929 Jack joined with his muscle man, Charles Entratta, and front man Hymie Cohen, in opening their own speakeasy, a dark dive on the second floor of 1721 Broadway between 54^th and 55^th Streets, called “The Hotsy-Totsy Club” (above, single door next to "used cars" shop). It was a significant investment.

About 3:00am on Friday, 13 July, 1929 – just about a year before Judge Crater took a cab - 3 strangers saunter into the “Hotsy-Totsy Club”. About an hour later they picked a fight with the bouncer, ex-boxer Ruby Goldstein. Jack recognized one of the men as Simon Walker, a thug working for Dutch Schultz and assumed the Dutchman had sent the trio to “break up the joint”, maybe enough to keep the club from opening for that weekend. So Jack decided to meet the threat head on, as only Jack Diamond would.

While the band played loudly, Jack (above) told the three men, “If you don’t calm down, I’ll blow your fucking heads off.” The trio's response was unsatisfactory, and the band's rendition of “Alexander's Rag Time Band” failed to drown out the barrage of gunshots.

By the time the police arrived, Simon Walker and a second thug were dead on the floor. Later that morning, the third would be delivered to a hospital, where he was pronounced D.O.A. The only people still breathing in the club were the Manager Hymie Cohen, the bartender, a cashier, the hat check girl, a chorus girl and a waiter named Walter Volgast. They all swore they had not seen or heard anything. 

But Jack had gotten his picture in the newspapers too many times. The press identified the Hotsy-Totsy as “his” club. Worse, rather than use the back room usually reserved for such purposes, Jack had killed three men in full view of  witnesses. The cops closed the Hotsy-Totsy, cutting the spend thrift Jack off from a significant source of bribe money. Jack was forced to use another approach to protect himself.

On 19 July Walter Volgast's bullet ridden body was found in Bordentown, New Jersey.  Shortly thereafter, Hyme Cohen was also found dead. The other 4 witnesses simply vanished. And only then did Jack turn himself in to answer questions. In the end, nobody was ever charged with the death of the three thugs, nor the supposed deaths of the 4 witnesses. But Jack Diamond was now not only a hot head, he was just “hot”. He now carried a the new nickname, “The Clay Pigeon”.

Over the next year, Jack started selling his legitimate investments in Manhattan, so he could invest in new Heroin operations upstate, around Albany. He wouldn't be making as much money, but he would likely live a lot longer. And at some point he found he needed some pull with a civil court trial judge. In particular, a new judge, just appointed to the New York City Supreme Court by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That judge was Joseph Force Crater.

Since 1923, “Connie Markus” (above, right)  had been an occasional mistress of “Good Time Joe Crater”, and more recently, Jack Diamond. Rumor said that Connie asked Judge Crater to decide a civil case in Jack's favor. According to the account by writer Stephen Ellis, it was papers related to that case which Judge Crater went through in his office on Wednesday, 6 August, 1930. Those papers had gone into the two locked brief cases Joe Crater had left the office with that afternoon. And the $5,100 in cash he took with him was meant as a payoff to Diamond, because the Judge had to tell Jack no. With the feds and reformers sniffing around, Judge Crater felt he could not decide the case the way Diamond wanted, not without drawing attention and raising suspicions.

And that, said the rumors, was what led to Judge Crater's mysterious disappearance on West 47^th Street, that muggy August evening, just after 9:15pm.

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CALLING JUDGE CRATER Chapter One

 

It was just after eight on a hot, humid Wednesday evening,  6 August 1930.  A few hundred feet off of Eighth Avenue, two men and a woman walked out of Billy Haas's Chophouse, at 332 West 47th street. The trio paused for a few moments to chat on the narrow sidewalk.  Then one of them, a dapper, six foot tall middle aged man with a perpetual smirk (above) stepped into a waiting cab, and vanished.

He weighed a fit 185 pounds, and was wearing a dark brown double-breasted coat and matching trousers, a bow tie, a Masonic ring and a gold wristwatch, a pair of pearl-gray pinstriped spats and all set off by a straw panama hat tipped at a jaunty angle, After the taxi headed into the night toward Ninth Avenue, Judge Joseph Force Crater dropped off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. The shockwaves would reverberate for decades.

Just a year earlier, on 3 September, 1929 the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a measure of the $109 billion American economy,  hit an all time high of 381.17 points.  Unemployment was at 3%. Then came Black Thursday - 24 October - when "The Dow" dropped 38 points, followed by Black Tuesday -  29 October - when it lost another 30 points. Over those 5 days $11 billion, 25% of the nation's wealth, simply evaporated.  Unemployment jumped overnight to 8.5%.  Thanks to a slight rebound, on 6 August, 1930, with the Dow closing was at  234.38, no one was panicking yet. The Wall Street experts expected a full recovery by the middle of 1931. Then, in February of 1930, came a string of bank failures, followed by the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, passed on June 17, 1930. U.S. exports dropped from $5.4 billion in 1929 to $2.1 billion in 1933. It was called the Great Depression and the U.S. had dragged the world down with us.

Judge Joseph Force Crater was, until Jimmy Hoffa, “the missing-est man in America”, AKA, "The Most Missingest Man in New York".  One biographer has described him as a man with multiple personalities:  He was a respected and successful lawyer - earning $75,000 a year, the modern equivalent of a million dollars. He was also a talented pianists, a Tammany Hall politician, and a devoted husband.  But he was also “Good Time Joe”, who under the sad pseudonym of "Joe Crane" and displayed a penchant for liquor and an endless hunger for showgirls. After he disappeared, rumors said he had committed suicide or (more likely) run off with a show girl, or that he had died in bed with a prostitute or was killed for reneging on a debt.

After he was reported missing an old prospector and a country store owner (above, left) reported seeing him digging for gold east of San Diego, California.  He was also reported shooting craps in Atlanta, on a steamer in the Adriatic and running a bingo game in North Africa.  Elevator operators, responding to call lights on vacant floors, would amuse their riders by sticking their head out and asking, " Judge Crater?" Theatrical producers would spice up a dull hotel lobby scene by adding a bell boy wandering about, calling, "Phone call for Judge Crater. Judge Crater call your office."  Groucho Marx's best exit line for a burlesque routine was to announce, "I'm going out to look for Judge Crater".  But for all the hoopla over his disappearance, nobody even reported him missing for three weeks.

Joseph Force Crater and Stella, his wife of 14 years, spent the July of 1930 at their cabin ten miles north of Augusta, Maine, in the pretty little village of Belgrade Lakes (above).  The Supreme Courts - or trial courts -  of New York were out of session at the time,  and the newly appointed Judge only had to make 2 trips back to the city that summer. Once in the third week of July, and again in the first week of August, both times after a phone call.

The judge (above, left) last left on Sunday, 3 August, telling Stella he had to go back this time just for a day or two to “straighten those fellows out”.  But he promised to be back in Maine by her birthday, Saturday, 9 August.  In fact he had already ordered her present, a new red canoe.

Joe took the overnight train to New York City, arriving on the afternoon of Monday, 4 August, 1930 at Grand Central Station (above), just in time for the start of a humid heat wave of ninety degrees plus temperatures.

Joe went immediately to their two bedroom co-op at 40 Fifth Avenue where he cleaned up and told the maid she could take a few days off.  But he asked her to return on Thursday, 7 August to clean up after he had left again for Maine.

That night, 4 August, 1930,  Judge Crater took in a Broadway show and then had a late dinner at the Abbey Club.  It was a new speakeasy in the basement of the Hotel Harding at 205 West 46th Street near 8th Avenue, The popular emcee was an openly gay drag queen, Gene Malin (above), and The Abbey was a notorious gangster and "pansy" bar,  as well as a Tammany Hall hangout.  It was just another example of the open social horizons about to be crushed by the economic depression already tightening its grip on people's throats. 

On Tuesday, 5 August, Joe stopped by his office in the Foley Square Courthouse (above). He then had lunch with two Appellate Court Judges he had argued cases in front of.  Then he stopped by his stock brokers' office where he instructed him to cash out 2 accounts. Late into the evening he played poker with friends, again at the Abbey Club. 

At about 11:00 am on Wednesday, 6 August,  Crater returned to the Foley Square Courthouse (above), where, alone in his office, he began collecting files, eventually filling 6 cardboard folders.  He also ordered his secretary Joseph Mara,  to collect 2 checks from his stock broker and cash them at the bank. The total was $5,150 in cash.  He left with the files and the cash in two locked briefcases and with the 6 cardboard boxes of other files, and headed back for his Fifth Avenue apartment.   

After showering ,Judge Crater then caught a cab for dinner at a Times Square restaurant called Billy Haas’ Chophouse, with his friend, the successful theatrical lawyer William Klein and the 22 year old showgirl Sally Lou Ritz (above, right).  Sally was one Crater’s mistresses, as well as Klein's. But for this evening Klein was apparently acting as  Joe's "beard".  The trio ate cool lobster cocktails and cold chicken for dinner.

The judge had ordered a single ticket for the 8:00 pm show at the Belasco Theater, at 111 West 47th Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues. It was only a three block walk from the Chop House, a little over a half a mile.  For a fit man like Crater, an easy jaunt.

The show was "The Dancing Partner" staring Lynne Overman and Irene Purcell.  Joe Crater had seen the show during tryouts in Atlantic City just the month before.  According to Edward Cushing, the reviewer for the Brooklyn Eagle, the play and the production, "...lacks the grace, the deftness, the spontaneity that might have made it palatable...". 

The only piece of the play to draw favorable reaction from the audience was a single scene which opened Act II....

...set in the interior of an airplane. The set swayed side-to-side as clouds could be seen passing by the windows. 

While the stage effects got a round of applause, neither the script nor the performances did.  So why did Judge Crater want to sit through this play a second time? 

His decision might have been influenced by the price. The spreading depression had forced producers to slash prices to a dollar or even 50 cents for a balcony seat.  Joe also may have been interested in one of the actresses in the play.  But we will never know. Thanks to the lackluster production, and the deepening depression, the play would close on the first day of November after only 119 performances. But it lasted longer than the story that after the Chop House, Joe was going to the theater.

The story that Judge Crater left the Chophouse in a taxi was established when the New York City Police interviewed Bill Klein and Sally Ritz, 6 weeks later.  But that story simply made no sense. If Joe Crater was heading to the Belasco Theatre, at 111 west 47th street, he was only  1,100 feet away.   At the average walking speed of 3 miles an hour, or 264 feet per minute, Crater would have arrived at the theater in less than 5 minutes.  And anyone familiar with the mid-town Manhattan street grid would know, traffic on even numbered streets runs east bound, and on odd numbered streets they run west. Why would the Judge take a taxi headed in the opposite direction from the theater?

Besides the price of the cab ride, there was the time factor. The curtain on "The Dancing Partner" went up at 8:15pm - the delay because of the heat. Taking a taxi would have required him to travel a block west, then a block north or south, then five or six blocks east, then a block north or south before a final block westbound. With midtown traffic in 1930 being only slightly less crowded than it is today, that stop and go trip would have taken at least half an hour in a hot cab.  And although Joe tried to avoid exercise - Stella said he hated to swim -  the quicker and cheaper walk should have presented no challenge. 

When presented with this conundrum at their second interview, both Klein and Ritz insisted they had never claimed Joe took a cab. They had said that they took the cab. Joe walked. Bill Klein now said 

"He was standing near the restaurant, smiling. He said he was going to Westchester for a swim, and was going to Maine the next day to see his wife.”  When they last saw Judge Crater, they both now said, he was walking eastbound on West 47th Street. Toward the Belasco Theater. That was the most logical story. The most likely explanation for the confusion was that the police detectives had made a simple mistake in writing down their notes.  And it is possible it was a simple mistake. 

As long as you forget the part about the man who hated to swim, now taking a cab to either a hotel at Bowery and Broome streets (above) once called the Westchester, which had last been a Tammany Hall  hangout twenty years earlier, or a ride 30 miles north to the town of Westchester, New York, where their was a private club he had visited in the past. 

So a little after eight, on this hot humid evening, the three friends, Joseph Crater, Sally Lou Ritz and Bill Klein stepped out of Billy Haas' Chophouse. They spoke for a few moments before Judge Crater disappeared into the night, either on his way to the theatre - either in a cab or on foot - to see a bad play he had already seen, or to take swim, when he hated to swim.

Before he had even gone missing, something about Missing Person File # 13595, the disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater , was already very wrong. 

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