CALLING JUDGE CRATER Chapter One

 

It was just after nine on a hot, humid Wednesday evening,  6 August 1930.  A few hundred feet west of 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 a perpetual smirk (above) stepped into a waiting cab.

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

Just a year earlier, on 3 September, 1929 the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a measure of the $109 billion American economy,  hit an all time high of 381.17 points.  Unemployment was at 3%. Then came Black Thursday - 24 October - when "The Dow" dropped 38 points, followed by Black Tuesday -  29 October - when it lost another 30 points. Over those 5 days $11 billion, 25% of the nation's wealth, simply evaporated.  Unemployment jumped to 8.5%.  Thanks to a slight rebound, on 6 August, 1930, the Dow closing was at  234.38.  No one was panicking yet. The Wall Street experts expected a full recovery by the middle of 1931. Then the bottom fell out. 

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

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

Joseph Force Crater and 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 that summer. Once in the third week of July, and again in the first week of August, both times after a phone call.

The judge (above, left) 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 degrees plus temperatures.

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

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

On Tuesday, 5 August, Joe again stopped by his office in the Foley Square Courthouse (above). He then had lunch with two Appellate Court Judges he had argued in front of before.  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 in cash.  He left with the files and the cash in two locked briefcases and with the 6 cardboard boxes of other files, headed back for his Fifth Avenue apartment.   

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

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

The story that Judge Crater left the Chophouse in a taxi was established when the New York City Police interviewed Bill Klein and Sally Ritz, 6 weeks later.  But that story simply made no sense. If Joe Crater was heading to the Belasco Theatre, at 111 west 45th street, he was only  1,100 feet away.   At the average walking speed of 3 miles an hour, or 264 feet per minute, Crater would have arrived at the theater in less than 5 minutes.  And anyone familiar with the mid-town Manhattan street grid would know, traffic on even numbered streets runs east, and on odd numbered streets run west.  Why would the Judge take a taxi headed in the opposite direction from the theater?

Besides the price of the cab ride, there was the time factor. The curtain on "The Dancing Partner" 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 or south before a final block westbound. With midtown traffic in 1930 being only slightly less crowded than it is today, that stop and go trip would have taken at least half an hour in a hot cab.  And although Joe tried to avoid exercise - Stella said he hated to swim -  the quicker and cheaper walk should have presented no challenge. 

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

"He was standing near the restaurant, smiling. He said he was going to Westchester for a swim, and was going to Maine the next day to see his wife.”  When they last saw Judge Crater, they both now said, he was walking eastbound on West 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 writing down their notes.  And it is possible it was a simple mistake. 

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

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 - either in a cab or on foot - either to see a bad play he had already seen, or to take swim, when he hated to swim.

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

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