THE BATTLE OF THANKSGIVING

I don’t understand why anyone believes any of the popular myths about Thanksgiving. The truth is our Puritan forefathers were a humorless bunch who showed their devotion to God by going hungry, not by eating. They would have considered our average Thanksgiving dinner an insult to their God. Their God was not interested in contentment, just punishment. And the only feasts they had were in the late  summer, when food was plentiful.  By late November they were already deep into their grain stores, and watery stew.  They would only say thanks if they were staving to death!

The real mother of Thanksgiving was actually the widow who wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and other innocent poems, Sarah Hale. She was the 19th century version of Martha Stewart. For forty years Sarah was the editor of the prestigious “Godey’s Lady’s Book” magazine. And each November Sarah would bombard her 150,000 subscribers with recipes for Roast Turkey, Turkey stuffing, Turkey gravy, and Turkey stew. Now a lot of selling and some kitchen chemistry was required because 19th century turkeys were scrawny and almost exclusively dark meat. Sarah championed the turkey because her middle class homemakers were on tight budgets, and per pound the randy, strutting bird-brain turkey cost less than half what a chicken might.

But the real revolution came when, in 1934, the United States Department of Agriculture discovered the key to making turkeys palatable; artificial insemination.  In 1932, before the breeding revolution, the average American ate just two pounds of turkey a year. Today, that amount is closer to twenty pounds. Turkey farmers across America, are very thankful for that big government intervention. So are most turkey eaters, although they don't seem to know it.

But the increased popularity of turkey has come at a price - no sex for the turkey.  Today’s buxom white breasted Tom Turkey is too obese to climb atop an equally buxom white breasted hen. Without human intervention, the Thanksgiving turkey would have have gone extinct - Ah, ceste se la guerre. But this brings us to my real topic, which is the year when Thanksgiving became a real de la guerre; 1939

It was the third year of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second term as president. And Republicans were determined (read terrified) that he might want a third term. However they were not in a good position to prevent it, holding only 177 seats in the House of Representatives (to 252 Democrats) and a paltry 23 seats in the Senate (to 69 Democrats). But then in August, Roosevelt handed Republicans an early Christmas present.

In July Franklin had received a visit from Fred Lazarus (above), head of the Federated Department Stores, at the time the single biggest retail chain by volume in America. He controlled Macy’s and Bloomingdales department stores in New York City, Filenes in Boston, and Strauss in Brooklyn. Fred pointed out to the President that in 1939, November would have five Thursdays; the second, the ninth, the sixteenth, the twenty-third and the thirtieth. And Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation calling for a day of Thanksgiving -  first issued after the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and re-issued by Presidents every year since - specifically designated Thanksgiving as the final Thursday in November. That final Thursday would be, in the case of 1939,  the 30th . The previous time Thanksgiving had fallen on the fifth Thursday in November had been 1933. 

That year the Christmas shopping season, which traditionally began the day after Thanksgiving, was just 20 shopping days long, and had proven disastrous for retailers. Of course, the Great Depression had also bottomed out that year, but retail business folks are like farmers, they always worry about the rain. Did it come too early, or too late? Is it too much, or too little? Anyway, Lazarus wanted Roosevelt to move the Turkey Day back one week, to give merchants another week to tempt their customers into spending on Christmas. The President had also heard from lobbyists at the National Retail Dry Goods Association, as well as executives from Gimbels and Lord & Taylor.

Being a long time politician, Roosevelt listened to the business community. And at a Press Conference held on Monday, 14 August,   he made a little speech.  “I have been hearing from a great many people", he began, "complaints that Thanksgiving came too close to Christmas”. Roosevelt reminded the press corps that Thanksgiving was still not an official holiday, and that each year the President picked the date for it.  And, since business "experts" believed that adding another week to the shopping season would increase sales by 10%,  Franklin announced that this year of 1939,  he was moving Thanksgiving to Thursday,  November 23rd., the fourth Thursday in November. Not the last Thursday.

The first alarm went off  the very next day, when Fred Lazarus ran into his younger brother. Simon Lazarus was ranting over the change because it had disrupted his Ohio State Universities’ Thanksgiving day football game. “What damn fool got the president to do this?” Simon barked at his brother, who, in fact, was the damn fool himself. But that was just the beginning.

The Republican attorney general for Oregon, turned to poetry. “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November; All the rest have thirty-one; Until we hear from Washington.”  A shopkeeper in Kokomo, Indiana preferred to protest in prose. He put up a sign in his shop window which read, “Do your shopping early. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas.” 

Republican Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire urged the President to simply abolish winter by fiat. And Methodist minister Norman Vincent Peal got very outraged, charging it was  “…contrary to the meaning of Thanksgiving for the president of this great nation to tinker with the sacred religious day with the specious excuse that it will help Christmas sales. The next thing we may expect Christmas to be shifted to May 1st to help the New York World’s Fair of 1940.”  Did anybody point out to Norman, that the bible never mentioned which Thursday Thanksgiving should fall on?  If they did, it seems nobody was paying attention.

Twenty-three governors went with the President’s switch, and twenty-two did not. Texas and Colorado couldn’t make up their minds and recognized both days as the holiday in question, although the Republican Governor of Colorado, Ralph Carr, announced he would eat no turkey on the 23rd. 

The 30th was labeled as the Republican Thanksgiving, while the 23rd became the Democratic Thanksgiving, or, as "Nucky" Johnson, the recently indicted Republican mayor of Atlantic City called Franklin Roosevelt’s holiday, “Franksgiving”.

There were a few real problems hidden under this haze of invented political outrage. Calendars could not be changed in time for the 1939 switch over. And schools were suddenly uncertain of vacation schedules. Some families found their bosses forced their holiday dinners to be split between the two dates. But it turned out that the real problem had been identified by Simon Lazarus, the angry brother - American football.

The headline in the New York Times said it all; “PRESIDENT SHOCKS FOOTBALL COACHES” The coach of Little Ouachita college in Arkansas warned, “We'll vote the Republican ticket if he interferes with our football.'” Chairman of the Athletic Board at New York University wrote to Roosevelt, “…it has become necessary to frame football schedules three to five years in advance, and for both 1939 and 1940 we had arranged to play our annual football game with Fordham on Thanksgiving Day…” And then Roosevelt had changed the date!

A Gallup poll found that 62% of Americans wanted the President’s decision reversed. But it was too late for Roosevelt to change his mind in 1939. And FDR was too stubborn to admit defeat in November 1940, which also had five Thursdays, and was a Presidential election year. Despite the addition of even more politics into the mix, nine states switched from the Republican Thanksgiving (the fifth Thursday) to the Democratic one (the fourth Thursday) in 1940. 

That left just sixteen celebrating the “old” Thanksgiving. And that seems to have been enough of a victory for Roosevelt, that looking ahead to November 1941 (which surprisingly also had five Thursdays), he asked New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to study the sales figures. Was that extra week of shopping really helping the economy? In fact it had, but not very much; certainly not enough, considering all the angst and confusion the move had cost.

In early May of 1941, LaGuardia’s report informed the White House that “the early Thanksgiving date has not proved worthwhile".  So on  20 May 1941, Roosevelt set Thanksgiving 1941 back to the last Thursday in November. And in a rational world, that would have settled that. But, of course, politicians are not rational beings, anymore than the people who vote for them.

Being lawmakers the politicians in the House of Representatives decided to get involved by writing a law. House joint resolution 41 justified itself by pointing out that there was nothing to designate the day as a holiday except the annual President's Proclamation (which Roosevelt had mentioned at the start of this mess!). Henceforth, said the Representatives, the last Thursday in November would legally be Thanksgiving.  But when HR 41 got to the Senate, those gentlemen felt compelled to improve upon it.  

They did this by changing one little word. Thanksgiving would now be not the last Thursday in November as the House had intended, but the fourth Thursday in November, as Fred Lazarus had wanted.  As Connecticut Senator John A. Danaher pointed out, in four out of five years, the last Thursday in November was the fourth Thursday in November, anyway. The House went along and Roosevelt signed the new law into effect on 26 December, 1941. And amazingly, since that date, the Republicans had been determined not to notice that Roosevelt and the merchants had won.

No matter what conservative or liberal sympathizers may chortle about on their blog posts, the merchants' got their earlier date for Thanksgiving, and that extra week of Christmas shopping..  They got it by allowing the politicians to choke on their own press releases. Money always wins every political argument. And most moral arguments, too.  And the great political storm of 1939 - 1940 seems quaint and gentle, in a world where the Christmas shopping season begins shortly after Halloween!.

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VICKSBURG Chapter Ninety – Two

And hour after dawn, the boys of the 36^th Arkansas scrambled up the slope of Graveyard Hill, directly into the gunfire of the 33^rd Iowa infantry and bronze cannons manned by members of the 33^rd Missouri. Thirty-three year old Brigadier General Dandridge McRae, noted the cost paid by the Confederate officers. “Major Davie...fell, shot through the thigh...Captain Robinson, acting major, fell mortally wounded...There also fell Captain Garland....” And still the rebels pressed forward, “yelling like demons”.   After repelling two charges, the Iowa boys fell back, allowing the Arkansas boys to capture the pair of 6 pound guns of Battery “C”. As planned, General McRae immediately turned them, intending to fire upon the retreating Yankees.

On this same spot, 30,000 years earlier, when the Gulf of Mexico almost reached as far north as Cairo, Illinois,  Graveyard Hill was the southern end of an island chain, later called Crowley's Ridge. 

On Saturday, 4 July, 1863, it looked down upon the Yankee occupiers of the strategic town of Helena, Arkansas - 70 miles down the Mississippi River from Memphis, and 230 river miles north of Vicksburg. 

In May, there had been 20,000 Yankees guarding Helena. By the beginning of July there were only 4,000 left – 7 infantry regiments of the 1^st Division, XIII corps under Prussian immigrant and surveyor, 37 year old Brigadier General Frederick Charles Salomon.

A veteran of the 36^th Iowa, Sargent Minos Miller, sought to reassure his mother by describing the trenches and defensive works which ran from the river north to the river south of town. Across a half mile wide plain to the north and west were 3 one hundred foot high bluffs, each defended by infantry and artillery batteries. 

Tucked behind the bluffs was the earthen Fort Curtis (above) , containing five 24 pounder and two 32 pounder guns mounted on turn tables so they could quickly fire upon any point on the perimeter. Every artillery piece had 200 rounds stocked within reach, and each soldier carried 200 musket rounds on his person. 

The streets of the town had been barricaded, and in the river was the 180 foot long, 575 ton reinforced sidewheeler gun boat the USS Tyler, carrying a 32 pound cannon and 6 eight inch guns.

Over the previous ten days 43 year old over all commander, Major General Benjamin Mayberry Prentiss (above), had noted that southern sympathizers in Helena had stopped talking to his soldiers. In addition his cavalry patrols were running into more rebel pickets along all three roads leading into Helena. So for the last week, Prentiss had ordered the garrison to rise at 2:00 a.m every day. And at 4:00 the morning of Saturday, 4 July, 1863, John Williams of the 28^th Wisconsin remembered, “...the gun (in) Fort Curtis thundered forth its warning that the enemy was coming...We had not long to wait – the butternuts soon came pouring in, and the ball opened in earnest.”

The dance instructor for the Confederacy that morning was Lieutenant-General Theophilus Hunter Holmes (above) , a 58 year old, mostly deaf , "grim-featured man" who gave “the impression of an inattentive elderly man”.  Asked to defend his inaction at the battle of  Malvern Hill in 1862, Holmes said, “I thought I heard firing.”   The only man who believed in Holmes was the only man who counted – Jefferson Davis. It was Davis who, in summer of 1862, promoted Holmes to command the Trans-Mississippi, and then had to replace him with Lieutenant General Kirby Smith in December.

In June Smith put Holmes in command over Arkansas, and ordered him to support Pemberton at Vicksburg by taking the Yankee supply base at Helena. Holmes responded with bombast. “The invaders have been driven from every point in Arkansas save one—Helena. We go to retake it.”

The operation began on Monday, 22 June, 1863 when the troops of 38 year old Brigadier General James Fleming Fagen set off from outside of Little Rock. His men were closest and able to travel mostly by boat down the White River and then by rail.

The men under 52 year old Major General Sterling “Old Granny  Price - called by Jefferson Davis the most conceited man  he'd ever met.....

...and 33 year old Brigadier General John Sappington Marmaduke,  were not only farther away but  had to make the entire 10 day journey on foot.  Four days of rain turned the roads to mud and forced crossings of the rain swollen Grand Prairie and the Bayou De View on improvised ferries. On 3 July the 7,600 weary rebels came together 3 miles from Helena.  

Holmes (above)  was there to personally direct operations. Although one of his subordinates had admitted the "old dear" should be kept as far from a battlefield as possible.  Though he admitted he had very little intelligence on the Yankee positions he issued instructions for an attack to begin “at daylight”. 

General Fagen (above) would attack from the southwest, Price from the west and Marmaduke from the north.

The first problem with Holmes' plan became apparent before dawn when the Confederates discovered hundreds of trees had been felled across the roads. Infantry could go around, but artillery had to wait until axes could clear the way. The second problem was a definition of “daylight”. “Did that it mean dawn? Or first light? 

General Fagen thought it meant dawn, and his men were the first to throw themselves up the slopes of Rightor Hill. Without support, their attack was crushed.

An infuriated General Holmes demanded that General Price attack immediately. That was not going to happen.   By the time Price got his men moving, General Marmelduke's assault was bogged down and neutralized. It was almost an hour later that the center of the rebel line charged up Graveyard Hill. 

Their first two assaults were thrown back, but the final one sent the Iowa boys running back to Fort Curtis. His own artillery still struggling to even get to battlefield, Price intended upon using the captured Yankee cannon to bombard the fort. It was an absurd idea that two 6 pound cannon might overcome 7 guns in Fort Curtis and 7 more guns on the USS Tyler. And he discovered one of the guns had been spiked and on the other the firing mechanism had been removed. They were useless.

As Sargent Miller, in Fort Curtis, told his mother, “...by this time the Rebels....charged down a hollow towards Fort Curtis, but our batteries poured the grape and canister to them so fast they tried to shelter in a large brick house about a hundred of them got into it and some of them under it when our cavalry... took 150 of them prisoner...” 

By 10:30 a.m. even Holmes had to confess,  the effort had failed, and the Confederate troops began to withdraw. As he admitted in his official report, “The expedition failed which should have succeeded.”  But it had been too little, too late. 

Confederate losses were over 1,600 – 169 killed, (the Yankees reported burying 400 rebels) 659 wounded and 786 captured or missing – over 20% of Holmes 7,600 man force. On the defence, the Yankees suffered 57 men killed, 146 wounded and 36 missing. And by the time the attack on Helena fell apart, Yankee troops were entering Vicksburg.

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CALLING JUDGE CRATER Chapter Seven

The two week heatwave was mercifully breaking. Nine days after Judge Joe Crater had stepped into a cab on West 45th Street,  a cool rain was sweeping the trash down the gutters of Italian Harlem along 2nd Avenue.  It was Friday, 15 August 1930, two weeks before the judge's disappearance would be reported, and two men, their hats pulled low and their collars pulled high, shuffled up the back stairs of a Speakeasy  and slipped past the shadow holding the door open for them.

The larger man,  Albert "The Mad Hatter" Anastasia (above), was carrying a nondescript brown leather bag,  instantly recognizable to 150,000 Italian immigrants crammed into the slums between 96th and 125th streets, Lexington Avenue to the west and the East River. 

His shorter companion, Frank "Don Ciccio" Scalise (above), kept his hands in his coat pockets, as if to warm them. In truth each gloved hand cradled a loaded revolver.  Inside they followed the stream of puddles across the floor of the "Speak", past the board looking hoodlums playing cards.

It seemed they had come like so many others  to genuflect before the Peter "The Old Fox" Morello, (above)  waiting in the small room ahead, sitting behind his counting table, counting that week's numbers take.  

The Fox, aka Giuseppe Morello (above in 1900), AKA "The Claw", was born with only one finger on his right hand. He had survived the heartless world of the Sicilian Mafia for 64 years by thinking faster than his physically fit enemies.  But age and greed had made him fat and slowed his thinking.  And as the pair approached the table, Morello's eyes were fixed on the bag swinging in Anastasia's left hand. Did it look heavy? Did it look full?  He failed to notice that the Sicilian, Scalise,  had paused to turn the lock, as he closed  the door behind them.  The signal was when the Italian Anastasia dropped the bag on the table. Morello's fixation allowed Scalise to free both his hands from his pockets and begin shooting into the Mustache Pete's chest from just an arm's length. The last thought Peter Morello had was that they had not opened the bag.

Anastasia killed the guard, and then joined Scalise in pumping more lead into the old man's chest. There must be, there would be could be no doubt the best brain in the Masseria mob was dead. Anastasia paused to sweep the blood spattered money into the bag. Richer by thirty grand,  the pair walked swiftly out the Speakeasy's front door while the guards were still breaking down the back door to reach Morello.  

It was all part of a "Mob War" engineered by Lucky Luciano.  With Morello eliminated, Luciano's boss, Joe "The Boss" Masseria was isolated. 

He would die in another hail of bullets in the summer of 1931, while sitting in a Coney Island restaurant (above), thumbing through a deck of cards. Within a year Lucky Luciano would remake American organized crime in a corporate image. 

One week after Morello's assassination  on Friday, 22 August, 1930, Jack "Legs" Diamond climbed the gangplank of the 27,000 ton Red Star liner Belgenland (above). With him came his loving wife Alice, and his red-haired girlfriend Marion "Kiki Roberts" Stasmick. 

Jack  (above) told the inquisitive reporters that he was going to sample the waters in Vichy, France. But, if the truth be told, what made the slick waters of Vichy so attractive was that Jack  Diamond was under indictment for the murder of an upstate trucker. And when news of Judge Crater's disappearance finally broke at the end of August, Jack meant to be out of sight, and out of mind. 

However, one month later, Jack would be back in America, after being deported by first the French and then the German governments. As he stepped off the boat in Philadelphia, he was arrested again, and then ordered to leave town. He arrived back in New York City, only to be gunned down in his hotel room, on Sunday,  12 October, 1930.  Shot five times, Jack  now "The Clay Pigeon" Diamond (above with Alice) again survived, and was released from the hospital on 30 December,  

On 18 December, 1931, Jack's enemies came back, catching him asleep in his girl friend Kiki Robert's bed.  She was not with him at the time. But this time the assassins were taking no chances that Jack would leg out an escape. The pistol barrel was pressed so hard behind Jack's  left ear that it scorched his scalp as the three bullets plowed into his brain.

 After the New York County Grand Jury had disbanded, Stella Crater (above) returned to her 40 Fifth Avenue, apartment on Sunday, 18 January 1931.  Three days later, while going through a dresser drawer, she "discovered" 4 manila envelopes containing $6,619 in cash - over $100,000 today - Joe Crater's will,  two life insurance policies, and a 3 page note listing 20 companies and individuals who owed Joe money.  And at the bottom of that list, supposedly in Joe's handwriting, were the words, "Am very weary. Love, Joe." Stella decided to call the cops.

It was a smart move. It meant the money was not "hers" but "theirs", the taxes divided as joint property. But the cops were confused. They had searched that dresser several times, almost taken it apart. As of Halloween 1930,  there had been no envelopes in that drawer. To the cops it looked like a care package from a lawyer - perhaps from William Klein -  and they thought it was meant to buy off Stella, to keep her mouth shut.   If it was, it worked. 

Now she did not have to give up the house in Belgrade  Lakes, Maine. And as quickly as she could, Stella Crater returned there, and returned to her $12 a week job as a telephone operator.  

Over the next year the city and state of New York spent $4 million, looking for Stella's husband, Judge Joe Crater, They looked in Maine, in Canada, in Mexico, in Cuba and California. Good Time Joe was seen on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, in a Virginia Sanatorium,  shaved by a barber in North Dakota, gambling in a bar in South America and drinking cocktails at a European spa. 

But the tone in the coverage changed when one detailed tip claimed that Joe was holed up in a Montreal hotel room. The Mounties burst through the door to discover a couple enjoying their honeymoon.  That popped the bubble, and the snickering public began to laugh out loud.  Prohibition had made corruption so common the practiced ineptitude of the police and courts had become a joke. A year after Joe's disappearance, despite the headline, Judge Crater was never found.

In September of 1933,  First National Studios in Los Angeles, released a 76 minute long film titled, "Bureau of Missing Persons", staring Pat O'Brian and Glenda Farrell, with Bette Davis in a minor role.  

It was a police procedural into the techniques used to locate missing people like Joe Crater, and offered to pay Joe Crater $10,000 if he turned himself in at the Strand Theater box office during the picture' New York City run.  Needless to say, he did not.

In June of 1936, 79 year old "Lucky Blacky" Blackiet (above) walked into the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department and declared that he had "swapped yarns" with the Missing-est man in America, while out prospecting near his homestead at Santa Ysabel, four miles from Warner Hot Springs.  The colorful "Lucky" said Joe Crater told him, "In one more year, I will be legally dead. I hope I can stick it out for that long."

Why the police believed "Lucky Blacky" is unclear, but it seems at least one San Diego Sheriff's Deputy thought the old prospector resembled the Crown Prince Archduke Johann Orth Salvator of Tuscany, who had gone missing off Cape Horn in 1911.  As proof of his campfire meeting with the judge ,  "Lucky" introduced 2 asses he claimed had belonged to Joe Crater.  County Commissioner R.A. Radifer,  two Los Angeles police officers and a couple of reporters went trudging off into the scrub bush mountains, following Lucky.   But after a week spent in the pounding August heat, swallowing dust and sleeping with scorpions  the expedition returned to civilization, firmly convinced they had been "had" by the old prospector.  Reduced to a laughing stock, they then suffered the gall of having "Lucky" present them with a voucher for $10 a day for his services as a "guide".  Needless to say, "Lucky" never got paid. 

In July of 1937, Stella won her petition to have Joe declared legally dead. She could now collect the $20, 000 in life insurance - over a quarter of million dollars today.  Stella moved to Elkton,  Maryland, and married a wealthy electrical engineer named Carl Kunz (above). They took their honeymoon cruise on the French cruiser “Normandie”.  With his money she could hire a lawyer to prove  Joe had died violently, which would qualify for a double indemnity payout. 

Stella hired attorney Emil K. Ellis, who spent years tracking down the loose ends left by the Grand Jury.   One of the women subpoenaed was a chorus girl named June Brice, who had supposedly met with Joe in her midtown apartment after he left West 45th Street on the night of 6 August, 1930. But June had vanished and never told her story under oath. Ellis eventually found a friend of June's, who told him, "Miss Brice said she was carrying a secret concerning the disappearance of Justice Crater. She said her life had been threatened."  

It was enough to keep Ellis digging until September of 1940, when he found June had been admitted to the Pilgrim State Hospital (above), in Brentwood, Long Island, New York, under the name of Jean Covel. 

Reporter Fred Menagh recorded the dramatic scene when a court order finally gave Ellis access to the mystery woman. "Four ghost-like figures," wrote Menagh, "shrouded from head to foot in spotless white surgical masks, caps, and gowns, gathered at the bedside of the hollow- cheeked girl with the glassy, staring eyes...Ellis, brief case clutched in one rubber gloved hand, stepped forward...His voice was slightly muffled by the gauze mask covering the lower half of his face, "Do you know what happened to Justice Joseph Force Crater?" 

"The girl on the cot shrank back. She dug at thin, bloodless lips with claw like dreadful hands, so emaciated they seemed almost transparent against the light that streamed in through the barred and grated windows of her room. "We must not," she whispered hoarsely, "remember the things that make us mad." Ellis produced a packet of letters, clippings and photographs from his brief case. The girl's staring eyes darted from side to side in their deep sunk sockets. "Don't write letters," she admonished in her rasping voice, "They don't explain anything." 

"...the once beautiful showgirl, her once blond hair turned totally white, her gorgeous complexion now the color and texture of parchment, could remember only disjointed fragments of her past...June's most normal response occurred when Ellis...showed her a picture of herself as she looked when she was a Broadway butterfly. "I was pretty, wasn't I?" remarked the former showgirl, pathetically, a wisp of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth...Ellis, for more than an hour...vainly probed the fear-shattered mind o£ a once beautiful Broadway showgirl...At last he threw up his hands in despair. "It is no use," he said simply."  In 1942, June Brice died, her mind still confused.

During the 1930's, New York City Police Officer Charles Burn picked up a second job - as a bodyguard for one of the Brownsville Boys most prolific traveling assassins,  "Abe Kid Twist" Reles.  By 1939, Kid Twist had escaped 6 homicide charges. But while he was jailed for beating a African-American parking lot attendant, he realized the cops finally had the goods on him. Facing execution he decided to turn State's Evidence and admitted to committing 11 murders and provided information allowing for the closing of 85 more murder cases.  And suddenly, the secret operations of Murder Incorporated were public knowledge . Abe would prove to be an excellent witness, with an amazing memory for detail, and a believable testimony.

One by one, The Brownsville Boys were convicted  and later executed - Lepke Buchalter, Louis Capone, Mendy Weiss, Harry Strauss, Frank Abbandando, Irving "The Plug" Nitzberg.  Abe even helped convict his childhood friend "Bugsy" Goldstein for murder. But on Wednesday, 13 November, 1940, he was to testify at the most important trial yet, that of Albert Anastasia, AKA "The Lord High Executioner", for the murder of a Longshoreman.  But unlike all the others, Albert was a "Made Man", a member of the Mafia with a seat at Lucky Luciano's unifying council

About ten minutes after seven that Wednesday morning,  NY Detective Victor Robins entered Room 623 of the 14 story Half Moon Hotel, at West 29th Street and the Coney Island Boardwalk. He expected to wake Abraham Reles, to prepare him for his first day of testimony at the Anastasia trail. But the bed was empty.  

After a minutes long search of the suite of rooms,  Robins noticed a string of bed sheets tied to a radiator, and draping out the window (above). Looking down he saw a clump of clothing on the roof of the kitchen extension, four stories below. 

Upon closer inspection, they found the body of Abe Reles, the man who may have shoved an ice pick into Judge Joe Crater's brain.

 The newspapers named the dead killer, "The Canary who Could Sing but Could Not Fly".  Albert Anastasia was immediately released. Five of the officers guarding Reles were immediately demoted. But one of those cops was Charles Burns. Did he take the $100,000 being offered to kill Abe Reles? Or did Kid Twist mistake his bronchitis as cancer, and commit suicide? Or was he trying to reach some hoard of cash he had hidden? However, in 1951, a grand jury concluded it was an accidental death during an attempted escape, and maybe that was the truth. But I do not think so.

And still stories about the missing Judge Joseph Force Crater kept floating across the public view. During the 1950's, a reporter in a San Antonio, Texas police station gave a cigarette to an filthy, raggedly dressed old man being processed for release. The reporter noticed the man's manicured fingernails.When asked about his background the man became taciturn. Later, the reporter found a note left in the bathroom, scribbled on a paper towel  and addressed to him.  It read, " “Thanks for the cigarette. You almost got a scoop. Remember that judge in New York?"  

Stella never got the Double Indemnity payments, but she did squeeze a settlement out of the insurance companies.  After her 1950 separation from  Carl Kunz - the couple never divorced - , Stella  made a modest living in New York City, off her husband's notoriety.  

In 1961 Stella finally co-wrote a book about about the man she now realized she had never really known. She called it “The Empty Robe : The Story of the Disappearance of Judge Crater,"  In it Stella painted a fond image of the vanished jurist. And every 6 April after that,  she stopped in a Greenwich Village bar. She sat at a table and ordered two drinks. After finishing the first, she would then raise the second class, saying, "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are." She would then swallow the second and quietly leave.

Still married, Stella Crater Kunz died in 1969,  at 70 years of age.

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