LABOR DAY - Chapter One

Grains of sand showered upon the smooth iron rails, as the 30 ton hissing beast desperately sought purchase. 

 Like a magician of old, with his gloved hands the engineer coxed the 7,000 horses of the Rodgers  locomotive forward.  As the sand was crushed beneath the 6 foot drive wheels, the metal and wood millipede jerked at it's couplings, and laboriously began to move. 

Thirteen stories above, the tower clock read 9:30pm, Tuesday, 26 June 1894. When the number seven train pulled out of the Illinois Central Terminal (above) at Michigan Avenue and 12^th Street, it was half an hour late.

Behind the coal filled tender the locomotive pulled two dark green Pullman cars, each 48 feet 4 inches long and 9 feet 3 inches wide, carrying 64 passengers, bound via the Main Line for St. Louis, Missouri, 260 miles and 6 hours away. 

But on this night, the number seven train would achieve only seven miles, getting only as far as the Grand Crossing, at 75^th street in South Chicago. What would stop this iron age dragon was not magic, but the collision of massive egos and  the dreams of common men being crushed like those grains of sand.

The first ego was 63 year old George Mortimer Pullman, "The Sleeping Car King".  He was, says Brandon Weber, “...the kind of capitalist hated by his employees, his staff, and even some fellow capitalist and government officials."  But, by 1880,  his name was synonymous with luxury rail travel. His company was worth $30 million, and regularly paid stock dividends of 9 ½ %. 

His hand made chandler graced Pullman Palace cars “floated” on “paper wheels”, offering a ride so smooth the passengers slept soundly in their fold down berths (below) while traveling at 40 miles an hour. 

 In 1880 George Pullman consolidated his monopoly, building a new huge factory 12 miles south of Chicago. And he built a 100 acre town to house his 5,000 workers.

But it was a pantomime. The “paper wheels” were compressed for 3 hours under a 650 ton press, then dried for 6 to 8 weeks. Bolted between iron plates these cushions produced a marginal improvement. 

But George Pullman's advertising convinced the public to willingly pay a premium for not only his ubiquitous sleepers, but regular passenger and freight cars as well, even intercity trolleys – all emblazoned with the proud name of Pullman.

The 20,000 men, women and children of Mr. Pullman's town lived in attractive cottages, in neat repetitive rows, with a town hall, grocery stores, a library, even churches, all just across the railroad tracks from the factory.

But the “town” was another capitalist shadow play. It was built to make a profit.  There was no city hall, only an Arcade building (above), filled only with Pullman approved shops. There were  no elected officials, only Pullman managers.  There was only one bar, for visitors and Pullman managers only. To the workers, beer was available only from street vendors. At a premium price, of course.

Workers were required to rent the cottages (above), at premium prices, well above rents charged in surrounding cities.  Amenities, such as window blinds, were extra. Pullman even made $21,000 a year by overcharging for tap water and natural gas. Pullman inspectors could terminate an employee if the wife's housekeeping did not meet Pullman standards. The offenders were evicted with 10 days notice. 

The village had no independent newspapers. Groceries offered credit, but at usury rates. The library (above) did not loan books, it rented them. 

And as one critic pointed out, George Pullman, "...wasn't a man to let you pray for free" - the churches rented only to Protestants for $60 a month - and mostly stood empty. 

As one worker explained, “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from a Pullman shop, taught in a Pullman school (above), catechized in a Pullman church, and when we die we shall be buried in a Pullman cemetery and go the Pullman hell.”

And then in 1893 the Argentinian wheat crop failed, which set off a cascade of English banks calling in loans, including operating loans made to American companies like Pullman. Pullman Vice President Thomas H. Wickes announced 3,000 layoffs, and the income for Pullman carpenters was cut from $13 to $7 a week. 

However, the rent for a Pullman cottage remained the same. The price for Pullman water and gas lighting stayed the same. Worker Thomas Healthcoate swore under oath that “...the average (pay after deductions)...was only 8 cents over the rent, and a man would have to keep his family for two weeks on it.” Finally, on 11 May, 1894, some 2,500  workers in the  Pullman plant peacefully walked away from their tools (above),   As another desperate worker explained, “We struck at Pullman because we were without hope.”  George Pullman, being an autocrat, then locked out the remaining 3,100 "loyal" workers who had stayed on the job. 

The irony is that the 39 year old founder of the American Railroad Union, Eugene Victor “Gene”Debs (above), disliked strikes, “...except as a last resort...”. He warned his members, “...if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are...You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition..” So in the spring of 1894, when George Pullman refused to submit the worker's complaints s to arbitration, Debs still counseled compromise.  But on 21 June, a majority of union members voted to issue an ultimatum. Unless Pullman agreed to arbitration in five days all ARU men were to respect the strike by Pullman workers - even tho barely a third of Pullman workers were ARU members. 

Early on the afternoon of that Tuesday, 26 June, five members of the The Switchmen Mutual Aid Union,  walked into the red brick and terra-cotta Ashland Block (above), at the corner of North Clark and West Randolph streets in Chicago. 

Sitting as it did, catty-cornered from the Cook County Court House, the Ashland Block was filled with lawyers (including Clarence Darrow) and corporations, including railroad offices. The ground floor Illinois Central ticket office faced Randolph Street (above right), the Pennsylvania Railroad was in the Mezzanine, and the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad ticket office faced Clark Street (above, left). The five switchem, all employed by the I.C. rode the elevator to the 4^th floor and entered suite 21, headquarters of the American Railway Union.

They had come to ask the union officers just what they were authorized to do when ordered to switch a train carrying a Pullman Car. The Switch Men were willing to support the Pullman factory workers and their starving families. But if they were fired – as they surely would be – would the American Railway Union support the members of the smaller Switchmen Mutual Aid Union,  with "strike pay" ? 

The elected officers of the ARU , including Eugene Debs (above, right), gathered in conference. It was, as the saying goes, “Crunch Time”, time for the ARU to put their money and the future of their union on the line - to pledge their lives, their fortunes and sacred honor, to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence – to support their  fellow workers, even if they were not members of their union. Were they willing to do that?

The answer, when it came, was a thunderclap. Yes. If ordered to allow any train including Pullman Cars, to cross any switch point, ARU members nationwide were to refuse. ARU engineers were not operate any locomotives pulling Pullman cars, until the Pullman Company ended the lockout and  agreed to submit worker complaints to arbitration. Although Union President Eugene Debs might be opposed to direct confrontation with railroad management, the union he had created just a year ago, was now committed to it. And it would happen first on the Illinois Central Railroad.

The I.C. was crucial because it leased it's tracks to Cornelius Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroads as well as his Michigan and his St. Louis lines. These 4 pairs of tracks ran south along the edge of Lake Michigan, before at 53^rd street angling westward. Then, less about a mile after the Woodlawn Street station at 63^rd street, boom barriers required all trains to halt before the Grand Crossing at 75^th street.

The Grand Crossing had come into existence after The Michigan Southern Railroad merged with the Northern Indiana and Chicago Railroad, in 1850. The  purpose of this corporate merger, and the completion of the new line's terminal at South LaSalle Street Station (above), was to block the expanding Central Illinois from reaching downtown Chicago. 

But the Construction Chief for the I.C. was a 53 year old bull headed man named Roswell B. Mason. (above)  Mason kept his crews laying track until, in April of 1852, they were within a hundred yards of the four parallel Michigan Southern's tracks at 75^th Street and Woodlawn Avenue.  The M.S refused to negotiate with the I.C. for a right-of-way.

So, after the sun set one night, thugs kidnapped the sole guard posted along the Michigan right of way. And when the first Michigan Southern train arrived the next morning they discovered the Illinois Central tracks now passed right through the Michigan rails, on junctions called frogs.

They called what followed a frog war, but it was really a year long game of Russian roulette played with other people's lives. As soon as the I.C. had built it's new station (above) both railroads began to run trains through the 90 degree crossing at speed, with no warning between the companies.

Then on the Monday evening of 25 April, 1853, the game ran out when two passenger trains collided at the Grand Crossing, killing 18 out right and injuring another 40 souls. 

The political reaction was regulations which required  wooden gates - "boom barriers"-  blocking access to the crossing from all four directions. All trains now had to stop short of the Grand Crossing and wait until switchmen - hired by both railroads -  could verify the crossing was clear before lifting the barriers and allowing each train to safely continue.

And that is how the Grand Crossing became the flash point in the Pullman Strike of 1894.

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THE GREAT DARKNESS - God and Nature

I suspect the citizens of New Englander were primed for the end of days. The winter of 1780 had been brutal. In Sudbury, Connecticut seven feet of snow had kept widower Samuel Savage from reaching his own barn. He complained to his diary, “…one snow upon another…and it keeps coming still…” In the core of what would later be called "The Little Ice Age", Chesapeake Bay had frozen over, as had the Hudson River and New York and Boston harbors. Record cold and record snows were recorded from the Mohawk valley to the coast of Maine. Then, in a sudden thaw during the first week of March, bridges were carried away by rivers crowded with ice. April was cold and wet, with late snows. And then in the middle of May, the days abruptly turned warm.In Sudbury Mr. Savage’s diary recorded six days of “fair and pleasant “weather. The merchant Samuel Phillips of Weston, Massachusetts, observed that the air was remarkably “thick” with vapors and mists. “The sun rises and sets very red”, he wrote. And others in New England say the waning moon was blushed, and odd fogs rose from the frozen north facing slopes of the White Mountains. But these odd atmospheric phenomena proved merely the setting stage for the morning of Friday, 19 May, 1780.

At six a.m. when the sun rose over Hager’s Brook in West Rupert, Vermont, a haze was already gathering from the southwest over the New York border. On the other side of the White Mountains, one hundred miles to the northeast, in the little village of Lancaster, New Hampshire, workmen were digging a cellar for Jonas Wilder’s new two story home. They felt the gathering gloom, beginning about 10:00 A.M.. A half hour later, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard College professor Samuel Williams noticed the twilight and decided to take notes on the phenomena. The widower Savage had noticed after nine that morning the sky had “…a light grassy hue, nearly the color of pale cider… By ten o'clock the sun had almost entirely disappeared…songbirds, that cheered the day only hours before, now fell silent. Fowls retired to their roosts, or collected together in clusters”. wrote Savage, “…while cocks crowed and crickets shook their fiddles. It was all as if night was falling”.About 11:00 that morning the darkness was so thick the laborers in Lancaster could not see to dig. A ship’s captain 200 miles southeast of Boston reported that at the same hour, under a light rain, the day was so dark he was obliged to steer by candle light. In Ipswich Hamlet, Mass, several amateur scientists noted that at half past “…in a room with three windows…all open toward the southeast and south, large print could not be read by persons of good eyes. About twelve o'clock…a candle cast a shade so well defined on the wall, as that profiles were taken…” And on Boston Common a nervous crowd had gathered when a man rushed up shouting that the tide in the harbor had “…ceased to flow.” A panic almost ensued from this declaration, but for a Mr. Willard who calmly drew his pocket watch and dryly observed, “So it has…for today. It is past twelve o’clock.”At Harvard, Professor William’s recorded a light rain had begun to fall “..thick and dark and sooty”. Noted a Maine observer, “... fowls went to their roost. Cocks crowed in answer to one another…Woodcocks…whistled as they do only in the dark. Frogs peeped. In short, there was the appearance of midnight at noonday”. In Ipswich the amateurs noted that “About one o'clock…the darkness was greater than it had been for any time before…We dined about two…two candles burning on the table.” Attempting to explain the blackness at midday, one man pleaded, “I could not help conceiving, at the time, that if every luminous body in the universe had been shrouded in impenetrable darkness, or struck out of existence, the darkness could not have been more complete.”Approaching two o’clock now the darkness grew even blacker. Samuel Savage could no longer read his watch. A man riding through the wooded hills above Penacook, New Hampshire suddenly found himself amongst black clouds so thick he could barely breathe. Mr. Sammuel Tenny noted that a sheet of paper “…held within a few inches of the eyes was as black as velvet.”

Schools were dismissed, and in Hartford the Connecticut Colonial House of Representatives voted to adjourn. A similar motion was introduced for the upper house, which was debating a bill to regulate Shad fishing. But the Councilman from Stamford objected. Abraham Davenport insisted, “I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.”John Greenleaf Whittier was inspired to write, “'Twas on a May day of the far old year Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell, Over the bloom and sweet life of the spring,  Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon, A horror of great darkness... All ears grew sharp, To hear the doom blast of the trumpet shatter, The black sky... Meanwhile in the old Statehouse, dim as ghosts, Sat the lawgivers of Connecticut, Trembling beneath their legislative robes. 'It is the Lord's great day! Let us adjourn,' Some said; and then, as with one accord, All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport” Meanwhile in Boston Reverend David Hall noted, “People came flocking to the Meetinghouse requesting my presence (to guide them in prayer)." You could almost hear the reverend smile as he added,"The people were very attentive.”When the superfluous night fell the full moon was due to rise at nine, but did not appear, high in the sky, until 1:00 A.M., and blood red. Shortly afterward dim stars began to appear. Then, “About three o'clock the light in the west increased, the motion of the clouds [became] more quick, their color higher and more brassy…There appeared to be quick flashes…not unlike the aurora borealis.... About half past four our company (of amateur scientists), which had passed an unexpected night very cheerfully together, broke up.”With the dawn on Saturday, 21 May, 1780, the world returned to normal. The day was light and the night was dark. And a great many people spent a great deal of time and energy attempting to explain the Great New England Darkness of 1780. But the workmen in Lancaster, New Hampshire merely returned to their labors, and by the 26th of July they were able to raise the frame for Jonas Wilder’s new home, now called The Wilder-Holton House. That home, now a museum, still stands (along with the words of Abraham Davenport) as testament that the best of us continue to build for the future, even when the futility of our brief exsistence seems as black as the night, right before our eyes.  Evidence  would appear a century later that the ominous darkness was nothing more than smoke from a massive forest fire in the Canadian wilderness.   

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MOTH TO THE FLAME - Molls and Dolls

“I'm a lady of the evening. And while youth and beauty last, I never worry who will pay my rent. For a while I'll be in clover, And when easy days are over, I know I'll go the way that all, My predecessors went.”

Our poet, Benita Franklin, was born in Joliet, Illinois in 1891. Her father was a strict disciplinarian, and when the young drama queen rebelled, he dispatched her to the Ladies of Loretto Convent School in nearby Wheaton.  Benita was so miserable there she claimed to have tried to commit suicide, but the nuns labeled her behavior as “insubordinate”. So Benita ran away, looking for an audience who would appreciate her performance.  And being young and beautiful,  she found a way to make her way, working as a chorus girl on the nightclub circuit, and using the name, Vivian Gordon.  In Charleston, South Carolina, in 1912 the 21 year old met a dull accountant named Joseph E.C. Bischoff.  Perhaps it was her need for security, or perhaps she really fell in love,  but within a few months they were married. And in 1913 Benita/Vivian gave birth to a girl,  Benita Frederica.

The new family moved to the Philadelphia suburb of Audubon, New Jersey, and Joseph went to work for the United States Marshal service, as an office manager.  Benita/Vivian was left at home with little Benita Frederica .  But Benita/Vivian's search for drama reasserted itself after Joesph secured a promotion to the D.C. Woman’s Reformatory, in Lorton, Virginia.  The money was good, but Joseph was away from home for weeks at a time.  Eventually Benita/Vivian sought out the attention of Al Marks, a lingerie salesman, from Long Branch, New Jersey.  And in 1923, while the couple was having a dramatic tryst in the seedy Langwell Hotel (above), on West 44^th street, just above Manhattan’s Time Square, Vice Patrolman Andrew J. McLaughlin dramatically burst in on them. Under pressure Al Marks confessed he had paid Benita/Vivian for the sex, so she could be charged with prostitution.

Shuffled abruptly through the Brooklyn night court of Magistrate H. Stanley Renaud,   Benita/Vivian came to the realization she had been set up. Of the 219 women the Brooklyn night court convicted of prostitution in 1923,  72% were first time offenders, like Vivian, and one in ten was pregnant – which should have told officials they were not really prostitutes, but inconvenient wives and girlfriends. But judge Renaud never asked such questions.  Benita/Vivian was convicted of prostitution on the statements signed by Al and detective McLaughlin, and even though she was a first time offender (at least in New York City), she was sentenced to three years at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women, in Westchester County.  Even before she left Brooklyn , Benita/Vivian was served divorce papers, filed by her husband Joseph, who was seeking custody of Benita Frederica .  That quickly the previous decade of her life was simply wiped out.

“I'm a lady of the evening, With a morning glory's beauty. The payment for my raiment, I get in devious ways. When some big and wealthy brute, Wants to love me 'cause I'm cute, I admit that I submit, Because it pays.”

Bedford Hills had been built by well intentioned do-gooders, who had designed the facility to be communal, and to emphasize reform.  The 3-400 prisoners, each between 16 and  30 years old, some along with their infants and newborns, were housed in two story cottages, each with their own kitchens. Mornings everyone worked on the 300 acre farm, but in the afternoon there were classes in secretarial work and sewing. However, time had converted Bedford Hills into an understaffed prison devoid of much good. Inmates were isolated and allowed only one letter a month. And the last note Benita/Vivian received from her daughter read, “Dear mama. I am very sorry you are sick. I hope you will be better soon. I miss you very much.”  The pressure on her to be dramatic must have been overwhelming, but dramatic prisoners were reclassified as Mentally Defective, and chained to beds in what had once been the infirmary.  Their sentences were now indeterminate, meaning the doctors decided when and if to release them. Under this threat, Benita/Vivian quickly became just another dull inmate. Her father would have been proud.

The woman who came out of Bedford in 1926 had a single goal, to get her daughter back. And a single name, Vivian Gordon (above). She went into the only profession now open to her, and as she noted in her poem, she was good at it. She was still beautiful and looked far younger than her age. Vivian was a "high class" hooker, and quickly branched out to blackmailing her wealthier customers. As the roaring twenties approached their end, Vivian Gordon was often seen at Manhattan speakeasies with Jack “Legs” Diamond, the gangster who ran New York City.

Vivian “loaned” Jack (above) thousands of dollars, to enlist his help.  On his advice she hired crooked lawyer John Radeloff, to get her conviction overturned.  Radeloff took her money, but all three of his  attempts to nail McLaughlin, failed.  On Radeloff's advice she even hired a dope named Sam “Chowder-head” Harris to kidnap her daughter in New Jersey and bring her to New York, where the judges could be bribed.  All “Chowder-head” managed to do was to terrify the 15 year old Benita. Vivian began to suspect that Radeloff was only interested in sucking her dry.  And then Vivian saw another way to get back at the crooked cop, and get her daughter back..

In August of 1930 State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater disappeared on West 45^th street. Press reports about the mob connections of  “the missingest man in New York” were so explosive that New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt was able to pressure Mayor Jimmy Walker to accept an independent and wide ranging investigation of graft in city government.  The man Roosevelt pushed on Walker to lead the committee was above suspicion, retired judge Samuel Seabury.  He was so honest he could barely get elected. Early in February of 1931 Vivian wrote to the Seabury committee (below), saying she had “some information in connection with a 'frame up' by a police officer and others which . . . will be of great aid to your committee.” 

Lead counsel Irving Cooper met with Vivian at committee offices at 80 Center Street, on Friday, 20 February,  1931.  He was impressed, and thought Vivian would make a good witness, as she was beautiful and articulate.  She was an intimate of Jack Diamond's.  Her story was filled with the names of her male customers,  from Mayor Jimmy Walker to dozens of judges and city officials who were  "on the  take".  But Cooper wanted more.  He asked Vivian to come back with corroboration, paperwork, photos and letters, the kind of thing she used in her blackmail. And Vivian agreed to return with “the goods”.  But, of course, she still had to keep her "day job".

Shortly after eleven on the night of Wednesday,  25 February, 1931,  Vivian Gordon (above) was seen leaving her three room apartment at 156 East 37^th Street in Manhattan. She was wearing a black evening dress with white lace trim and a matching handbag, which was covered by an ankle-length mink coat and topped off with a black straw hat. On her left wrist she wore a platinum watch and on her right hand a two caret diamond ring.  Thus attired, Vivian Gordon got into a waiting Cadillac and disappeared into the night.

Nine hours later on Thursday morning an oil company employee on his way to work spotted her body in a ditch (above) beside a lonely section of the Mosholu Parkway, adjacent to the golf course in the Bronx's Van Courtland Park 

 Vivian (above) had been beaten about the head, but the cause of death was the clothesline knotted about her throat.  Her hat and one of her sued shoes were found not far away. Her coat, her watch and her pocketbook were all missing.

The New York papers lit up like the Fourth of July. A beautiful prostitute, a witness for the Seabury Commission, had been murdered just six months after Judge Crater had gone missing. And it turned out Vivian and Crater knew many of the same people, including Jack "Legs" Diamond and Mayor Jimmy Walker. All of that made her murder front page news, even in the papers out in the sticks (above).. The reporters noted the autopsy of the “Queen of the Courtesans” (as they now called her) revealed that about one Thursday morning Vivian had eaten sauerkraut, raisins and some egg whites – a “working girl's” dinner, heavy on the protein.  And over the course of the evening Vivian had consumed five or six stiff drinks. But that was as far as the facts could take them.  Still having a paper to fill, the reporters switch to speculation.

The cops searched Vivian's apartment (above) for the corroboration she had promised the Seabury Committee. They reported finding no little black book, or photos, or hotel receipts or love letters, not even any business cards. They may have found them, they just didn't report them. What they did find and report was $50,000 in cash and Vivian Gordon's dramatic diary.  In it she railed against Detective McLaughlin, her ex-husband and all the men who had cheated her. There were also the names of 200 of New York's rich and dishonest. The most telling passage in her diary was when she dramatically called her own lawyer, John Radeloff,  “the only man I fear...who, if he wanted, could get (Chowder-head) Cohen and a couple of his henchmen to do away with me.”

Those with something to hide waited for the story to fade. But just six days later, at about 4:30 pm on Tuesday 3 March, 1931, 16 year old Benita Frederica was discovered by her stepmother, near death on the kitchen floor. The previous weekend, members of Benita's prep school hockey team had refused to practice with the daughter of the now infamous Vivian Gordon. The newspapers turned that into the headline, “Squeeler's Daughter Unable to Face Schoolmates.” According to her own diary, that was why Benita had turned on the gas. She died a few hours later in a Camden hospital. The story, which had been hot the week before, was white hot now. A Daily News editorial screamed, “The rope that jerked tight about Vivian Gordon's neck to keep her from talking, is about to jerk the lid off a sizzling pot of scandals, frame ups, charges and counter-charges in New York's city government.”

The Seabury investigation focused on Detective McLaughlin. He had an iron clad alibi, being aboard the Cunard liner S.S. California, on a six-day cruise to Bermuda.  He was 800 miles out in the Atlantic on the night Vivian was murdered.  But investigators also discovered that over the last three years the $60 a week detective had managed to accumulate $35,800 in savings.  Andrew McLaughlin would be indited, and although not convicted,  he was through as a New York City cop.

The local cops meanwhile zeroed in on Vivian's diaries, which showed she was no madam. The diary said attorney John Radeloff had been her pimp, while his brother Joe had been her boyfriend and partner in a stock scam, funded by Vivian's various skills.  But the year before Vivian had turned on Joe, testifying against him in front of a grand jury.  For some reason, the records of that grand jury had disappeared, but reporters suspected hard feelings remained between Vivian and Joe.  Reporters also discovered that Vivian had been the owner of record for gambling houses in Queens and Brooklyn. Were they actually owned by Jack Diamond and other mobsters?  Or maybe even Mayor Walker? Vivian Gordon it seemed, had been the Donald Trump of the roaring twenties underworld.  And just when it seemed the publicity would bring down the whole rotten structure of New York city politics, the cops came up with a trio of the usual suspects who shut down all other investigations.

Harry Stein was a small time crook and occasional partner in Vivian's scams. He had also once been accused of strangling a woman. But the primary justification for his arrest was that he sold Vivian's mink coat and ring the day after her murder, or so the police said. A few days after his arrest, his tailor Sam Greenhauser was indicted. And for a topper, the cops arrested the small time hood Harry Schlitten. In exchange for immunity, he confessed to driving the Ford coupe (above) in which Vivian had been beaten and strangled, or so said the cops.

But Stein and Greenhauser had alibi's. And the front seat of the coupe looked too small to fit more than two people, which meant the killer would have to drive and strangle Vivian at the same time. There was no back seat in that car. And that did not even consider the effort to beat Vivian's head in. How could you do that to the person sitting beside you, with a escape right behind them?   The trial began on 18 June,  1931, just 16 weeks after Vivian's murder, and it ended two weeks later, on July 1^st .  After just three hours of deliberation, the jury declared all the defendants “not guilty”.  And that was that.  

Nobody would ever be convicted of Vivian's brutal murder. As corrupt mayor Jimmy Walker (above) would observe, when he returned from his California vacation, “There were more frames than there were pictures”. But the ultimate judgment on Vivian, may have been delivered by Polly Adler, the most infamous "Vice Entrepreneuse" in New York City. Vivian Gordon, the infamous madam said, was “just another woman out to feather her nest quickly.”

“I'm a lady of the evening, Just like Cleopatra was. The Queen of Sheba also played my game. Though by inches I am dying, There's not any use in crying. I stay and play 'cause I'm that way, A moth that loves the flame.”

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