CALLING JUDGE CRATER Chapter One

It was just after nine on a warm humid Wednesday evening,  6 August 1930.  A few hundred feet from Eighth Avenue, two men and a woman walked out of Billy Haas's Chophouse, a restaurant at 332 West 45th 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 an arrogant smirk, weighing a fit 185 pounds, 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 straw panama hat tipped at a jaunty angle, stepped into a waiting cab,  As the car headed into the night toward Ninth Avenue, Judge Joseph Force Crater (above) dropped off the face of the earth, never to be seen again. The social shockwaves would reverberate for years.

Just a year earlier, on 3 September, 1929 the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a measure of the $109 billion American economy,  had 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 to 8.5%.  Thanks to a slight rebound, on 6 August, 1930, the Dow closing was at  234.38.  But no one was panicking yet. The Wall Street experts expected a full recovery by the middle of 1931. 

Judge 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" displayed a penchant for liquor and 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.

An old prospector and a country store owner (above, left) reported seeing him prospecting for gold east of San Diego. 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 his wife  Stella, spent the July of 1930,   as they had most summers during their 14 years of marriage, 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. Once in the third week of July, and again in the first week of August, after a phone call.

The judge (above, left) 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 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 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 Judge Crater took in a Broadway show and then had 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 Joe stopped by his office in the Foley Square Courthouse. He then had lunch with 2 Appellate Court Judges he had argued 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, probably at the Abbey Club, again. 

At about 11:00 am on Wednesday, 6 August,  Crater returned to the Foley Square Courthouse (above), where 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 cash.  He left with the files and the cash in two locked briefcases and the 6 cardboard files, heading for his 40 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 this evening  Bill was acting as  Joe's "beard" for this public outing. The trio ate cool lobster cocktails and cold chicken for dinner.

The judge had ordered a single ticket for the 9:00 pm show at the Belasco Theater, at 111 West 45th 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 near the end, staged in the interior of an airplane. The set swayed side-to-side as clouds could be seen passing by the windows.  The effects got applause, the script did not.  So why did Judge Crater want to sit through this play again? 

His decision might have been influenced by the cost. 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 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 45th street, he was only  1,100 feet away from the Chop House at 332 West 45th Street.  At the average walking speed of 3 miles an hour, or 264 feet per minute, on foot 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, and on odd numbered streets runs 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" had already gone up at 9:00pm. When they left the Chophouse, Judge Crater was already fifteen minutes late. 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 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 - such a 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.”  They last saw him, they both now said, walking eastbound on West 45th Street. That was the most logical story. The most likely explanation for the confusion was that the police detectives had made a simple mistake in making 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, saying he was going 30 miles to Westchester, New York,  to take a swim.  And a close friend like William Klein and an even closer friend like Sally Lou Ritz, both of whom accepted that illogical statement from the Judge without question.

So a little after nine 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, on his way to the theatre.  On foot. To see a bad play he had already seen. Or he was going 30 miles to take a 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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SENATOR WETBACK, Anti-immigrant hatred in the 1950's

I prefer to refer to him as Senator Wetback. His real name was Patrick Anthony McCarran, and this bitter xenophobic, contemptuous narcissistic windbag, represented the very worst in the American character. He  preached fear of the future, fear of our enemies,  fear of our friends and even fear of ourselves. It was Pat McCarran who gave the Health Insurance Industry their anti-trust status, allowing them to collude in setting drug prices.  It was Pat McCarran who fed America’s vile dead end phobia of Mexican immigration.  It was Pat McCarran who first used the Senate of the United States to bully and terrorize loyal American citizens. It was Pat McCarran who turned Joe McCarthy’s bungling histrionics into the best weapon the Communists had in the cold war. In short, it was Pat McCarran who was the wellspring of much that poisons American politics to this day.

Pat McCarran was born the same year that George Custer died on the Little Big Horn; 1876. He was raised on an isolated sheep farm outside of Reno, Nevada, 15 miles from his nearest human playmate. He remained an isolationist his entire life. He attended the University of Nevada Law School, but had to drop out when his father was injured. Pat would later pass the bar, studying on his own.

As a new lawyer Pat McCarran made two big mistakes. The first was in 1907 when Nevada Governor John Sparks offered the thirty year old an appointment as a judge. But Pat’s paranoia drove him to reject the appointment. He later admitted ruefully, “That was the first and only appointment that was ever offered to me.”

His second mistake was when he served as counsel in a divorce case, Wingfield v Wingfield. The husband, George Wingfield, was the Democratic political boss who ran Nevada politics. And by representing the wife, Mae Wingfield, Pat McCarran earned the undying enmity of the Nevada Democratic Party leadership. When he tried to run for U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 1908 he was black balled. One party leader noted, “His reputation as a double-crosser is too well established throughout the state.” Twenty years later the black ball still denied him a nomination for a Senate run.

Pat McCarran was finally allowed to run for the for U.S. Senate in 1932, at the age of 56, primarily because nobody else wanted what seemed like a useless nomination. But in the general election this “ rotund man with a double chin, wavy hair and a high-pitched voice, who often says "My hide yearns for the alkali dust and the desert"— was swept into Washington on Franklin Roosevelt’s coat tails. And then proceeded to spit on them.

But the new Junior Senator (left - second row) from Nevada opposed every element of the New Deal. “The innovations of executive power, indulged in by Jackson, promoted by Lincoln, expounded by Garfield, declared righteous by Roosevelt and philosophically promulgated by Wilson, appear to have been but forerunners, rivulets, as it were, contributing to a flood that now sweeps on, submerging the Utopian doctrines and theories of Jefferson and conferring unheard of and unfettered expansion to the executive” That kind of rhetoric got him re-elected in 1938 with 73% of the vote.

Now secure in his seat, McCarran made speech's along side fellow Catholic Charles Lindberg, preaching isolationism. “I think one American boy, the son of an American mother, is worth more than all central Europe.” He condemned Roosevelt’s “secret plan” to push America into WW II, and it was the desperate attempt to justify his prewar opposition to increased military budgets, which gave birth to the conspiracy myths that FDR had purposefully ignored Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor. In fact it was McCarran's stinginess over military budgets that left the Army and Navy short planes and radar to intercept the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

After Pearl Harbor, however, Senator McCarran was certain that Nevada got it’s share of war spending, including the third largest manufacturing facility built during the war, Basic Magnesim’s $140 million plant, built at government expense, and the town of Henderson, built to house the plant’s 15,000 workers. Pat won re-election in 1944 with 68% of the vote.

The war and time made Pat McCarran one of the nation’s most powerful senators, by making him one of its most senior Senators. By 1945 he had become the new political boss of Nevada, the new George Wingfield. Pat even filled the U.S. capital building with so many graduates from Nevada Universities that they became known as “McCarran’s Boys”. And after a couple of years working in Washington, many of the “boys” became part of the McCarran Machine, back home in Nevada.

Pat McCarran handed out just as many “black balls” as he had been handed. Federal Marshal Les Kofed explained to the Senator that Federal law prevented political appointees like him from making speeches in support of a local politician. Marshal Kofed explained, “Out of a clear blue sky, shortly thereafter,…I received a call from the chief deputy at Carson City, that a new marshal had been appointed, that I had better come in and turn in my key.”

By 1950 Time magazine had begun describing the 73 year old Pat McCarran as “pompous, vindictive and power-grabbing”. According to the magazine he “staged a one-man committee filibuster against an “Emergency Immigration bill” to admit (250,000) D. P’s to the U.S  The D.P.’s were Displaced Persons, who had survived the Nazi death and work camps, but whose identification papers had been lost or destroyed. They were people without homes or a nation willing to accept them. What concerned Pat McCarran was that many of them were Jews. He argued that the “Emergency Immigration Bill” was supported by a particular “pressure group” with “unlimited money” - code words for Jews.

The DP bill had the support of President Eisenhower. But when it was first introduced into a subcommittee in the spring of 1953, Senator McCarran “demanded” a ten day delay while his wife sought medical treatment. But when “Senator Wetback” instead surfaced in Los Angles, holding hearings for his own Senate Security and Intelligence Sub Committee, and asked for three more weeks of delay, the immigration hearings finally began.

Three weeks into the hearings McCarran managed to snooker the Judiciary Committee (parent committee to the subcommittee) into voting to delay any further action by the subcommittee. When most of the Senators realized they had been tricked, fisticuffs almost broke out. It took a week, but the delay was eventually overturned. Still, in the end, McCarran managed to kill the bill. And tens of thousands of desperate people were turned away from America's shores because of one biggott.

In June of 1952 Pat McCarran co-sponsored a rewriting of immigration law, declaring that “…we have in the United States today hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated..." More code words for Jews. "Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain… I do not intend to become prophetic, but if the enemies of this legislation succeed in riddling it to pieces, or in amending it beyond recognition, they will have contributed more to promote this nation's downfall than any other group since we achieved our independence as a nation.”

Next came the program which, for me, earned the Senator his nickname, “Operation Wetback.” That was really its name, and it was launched in 1954 after Senator McCarran’s prodded the bureaucrats of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The program contrasted with the ten year old “Bracero” system, in which Mexican recruiters contracted to supply workers for American farmers and railroads.

By 1954 some 300,000 Mexican citizens were legally working in the United States on temporary “Bracero” visas. Few stayed in the United States at the end of their contracts. However those programs, which protected worker’s rights and wages, were disliked by employers. Racists forces in Texas had prevented that state from participating in the program for five years. But in 1954 this successful program was killed, in favor of mass deportations - the same program favored by the Republican Party now.

The INS would later claim to have expelled 1.3 million Mexicans (not the 13 million claimed in recent mythology) under Operation Wetback.  But a closer examination of the data shows the service could only prove some 80,000 were expelled. The addition half a million were an estimate of those who left the country out of fear, but the number was more hopeful than accurate.

The U.S. Army succesfully resisted joining Operation Wetback, and in an internal report written later carried the notation, "Thank goodness"   The program ended abruptly when seven “illegals” being deported by ship, drowned while trying to swim back to the American shore. The crew of the steamer transporting them, then mutinied against their captain, and against the entire program. In the conservative myth the mutiny may get mentioned but never discussed.

But Pat McCarran’s most powerful weapon was his anti-communism. In this he was merely echoed by Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarran also supported Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, to the point that he was called “The Senator from Madrid.” He was an equally fierce supporter of Chiang Kai-Shek, after Chiang and his supporters were driven out of mainland China and retreated to the island of Taiwan. So rabid was McCarran's defense that it was not until Richard Nixon visited China in the 1970’s that some sanity and common sense return to American foreign policy in the region.

The McCarran’s Internal Security Act (of September 1950) required members of the communist party to register with the Attorney General. So onerous were the details of the act that between 1965 and 1967 almost all of it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Walt Kelly, who drew the popular "Pogo" comic strip chose to memorialize McCarrain with "Mole J. Macarney", a blind, paranoid creature, who spread tar on everything and everyone within reach.

Pat McCarran died of a heart attack in September of 1954, proving once again that politics is not about being right. It is about being re-elected. To most politicians, nothing else matters.

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ITS A WONDER, or Opps, We executed 3 innocent people.

I might have voted with the rest of the jury in the Perry trial, voted for guilt, even though one of the defendants had been charged with being a witch, and I don’t believe in witches. That was Joan Perry. She and her sons, John and Richard, were all hanged, but she was hanged first. The authorities were hoping the older boy, Richard, freed from Joan's witchcraft, would confess. But he did not. Which leaves me to wonder if being a witch was just an ‘eggcorn’ for that other crime women are often accused of being guilty of.  And then to everyone’s surprise, after Richard, too, was dead, the youngest boy, John, whose confession had led to the prosecution of his entire family, recanted. Still the judges remained certain. So John was duly hanged as well. If I had been the judge, I like to think that John's recantation would have led me to have second thoughts. Of course, by then it a little was too late. (http://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/eggcorn.html)

The story behind the trial takes place in Chipping Camden, in the Cotswold of England. "Chipping" is an old Welsh word for market, and “wold” is Welsh for an upland meadow, so this was a market town amidst the rolling limestone hills and open fields which were once the property of the Saxon King, Harold.

Under the Normans it became sheep country. In 1340, in Chipping Camden, the wool merchants were already so wealthy they built a hall on the High Street, using the honey-colored “Cotswold stone” as facing.

Even today Chipping Camden looks as if it were untouched since the middle ages. In fact, this western corner of England was a violent incubator for the industrial revolution.

It is human nature that wealth surrounded by poverty requires a justification. So it was no accident then that the Nuevo-rich Calvinist wool merchants in the Cotswold welcomed a belief in predestination – the certainty that they were wealthy and successful because God predestined them to be wealthy and successful before they had even been born. Thus the will of the successful was God’s will. Of this the Calvinists were certain. And they were certain that opposing them was to oppose God’s will.

Thus, in 1649, after seven years of civil war, these dead-certain Calvinists were comfortable in beheading their intransigent King, and suspected Catholic, Charles I. But the Calvinist experiment in government came to an end on January 1st, 1660 when soldiers under Colonel George Monck crossed the River Tweed at the village of Coldstream, thus earning the regiment supporting the restoration of the monarchy the eternal and future title “The Coldstream Guards”.

A month later they were in London, and in late April Charles Stuart, son of the last King of England, was crowned Charles II, the next King of England. But if anybody thought the restoration of the monarchy was going to return a certain stability to Britain, they were about to suffer a very rude awakening.

Three months later, on Thursday, 16 August,  1660, the estate manager for a wealthy Calvinist merchant left his home in Chipping Camden, tasked to walk the two miles to the village of Charingworth. His name was William Harrison and he must have been an amazing fellow, as he was already 70 years old, and facing an eight mile hike to collect rents for his merchant master and return home by dark; except, he did not return.

 At about 9 p.m. his servant, John Perry, was sent out to look for the old man at Charingworth and Paxford. The next morning Harrison’s son went out to search for them both. The son found John Perry, who explained he had been looking all night for Mr. Harrison  - and his purse filled with collected rents.  Together they continued looking, and later that morning found William Harrison’s hat, slashed by a knife, and his shirt, caked in blood.

Suspicion quickly fell on Harrison's servant , John Perry.  Over several days of constant questioning and torture, John Perry told several stories but finally admitted he had suggested his own mother and brother should rob Mr Harrison and then murder him.  And even though Joan and Richard both insisted on their innocence, the investigators felt certain that John had not lied, since he had implicated himself . No sane person would admit to that, even under torture.  Ponds and streams and wells were searched for poor Mr. Harrison's  body, or the rents he had collected. No trace of the old man or the money was found. The Perry family were  held over the winter for trial.

On Sunday, 6 January, 1661, fifty lunatics (most of them ex-soldiers from Oliver Cromwell’s Calvinist army), calling themselves Fifth Monarchists, stormed into St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and started roughing people up. They shot one poor fellow who talked back to them. They were preparing the way, they said, for the return of Jesus Christ, whom they intended to crown the next King of England.  It took an armed band of militia to chase the loonies out of the church.

Three days later the same loonies  stormed a prison and tried to free the prisoners. None of the prisoners was insane enough to follow the fanatics. They stayed in their cells. This time it took the loyal Coldstream guards to trap the loonies in a couple of taverns.  Muskets and the bayonet, finished off the religious revolutionaries.  The leaders were captured, tried for treason, hanged, drawn and quartered. It seemed there was such an air of un-certainty hanging over England, the citizens had become inspired to begin to demand certainty.  And these loonies at least were certainly dead.

In April of 1661 the Perry family were brought to trial and duly hanged, one after the other. And if there were second thoughts after John's gallows conversion to innocence, they were put aside.

For even if Joan and Richard Perry had not killed poor Mr. Harrison, then John Perry, the self confessed murderer, certainly had. - even if he had recanted.  And it was certainly important that justice was seen to be done. than that un-certainly be tolerated.   Without the certain avenging hand of justice there would be no respect for the law, and English society would return to the rule of the beast, the rule of eat or be eaten.  And then in 1662, wonder of wonders, William Harrison walked back into to the village of Chipping Camden, certainly alive and allegedly well.

When questioned the old man (he was now seventy-two) told a murky tale of being set upon, stabbed, kidnapped, hustled aboard a ship, and sold in a Turkish slave market. He escaped, he said, when his new master died.  Mr. Harrison claimed he then caught a ship back to England.   As others have noted, “The story told by Harrison is conspicuously and childishly false.”  And as a Mr. Paget noted, “much profit was not likely to arise from the sale of the old man as a slave…especially as the old man was delivered in a wounded and imperfect condition.”

So where did Mr. Harrison disappear to in the summer of 1660?  Given that transportation in that age was mostly limited to “shanks mare”, William Harrison might have walked far enough that no one would recognize him,  But he must have been close enough to Chipping Camden to have heard, in the eight months after his disappearance, of the trial and the hanging sentence of his accused murderers. And yet the old man did not return to save those three lives.

But why did Mr. Harrison wait two years to return? Why not sooner? Why did Harrison return at all? And why did John Perry tell such wild tales?  Why did he send his own mother and brother to the gallows? Why did he not recant until the last moments of his life?  Could torture, the standard method used for questioning at the time, have produced  false testimony?  Perhaps. Perhaps the human soul is the real mystery, and not certain at all,   

In the end, all we know for certain is that John Perry, Richard Perry and Joan Perry were slowly strangled at the end of a rope, as punishment for a crime which they did not commit and which never happened.  Every thing else about this case is a mystery and a wonder. It is the Camden Wonder.

It is a wonder that, 300 years later, juries remain so certain that they continue to take the lives of those accused, when they have no earthly reason to be so certain, and certainly no heavenly justification either.

http://www.campdenwonder.plus.com/

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