CALLING JUDGE CRATER Chapter Four

  

Stella Crater had been married to Joe since 1917,  after he handled her divorce from her first husband. And over that 12 years she had tolerated Joe's womanizing by not asking questions. She learned of Joe's appointment as judge from the newspapers. She had no income of her own, but Joe's approximately $75,000 a year income as a divorce attorney. and stock benefits,  allowed her to live a  life of comfort. 

 But with the Stock Market Crash 9 months earlier,  lawyers like Joe had seen their incomes cut by 40%.  It explained why Joe had been eager to move to the judiciary since it meant at least a regular salary, which could be easily supplemented by bribes and kickbacks.  But on Monday, 11 August, Stella decided she could wait no longer.  She walked into Belgrade where she would have access to a telephone, and called Maria, the  maid for their 40 Fifth Avenue apartment. Maria was surprised to learn that the Judge had not returned to Maine the previous Thursday. 

Next Stella called Frederick Johnson, the Judge's law secretary at the Manhattan Court  House (above).  Fred assured Stella that the Judge was fine, although he could offer no evidence to support that claim.  In fact the last time Frederick had spoken to his boss was that previous Wednesday.

Crater had arrived at the Court House about 11:00am.  After sending his attendant Joseph L. Mara  to a brokerage house to collect $5,100 cash from 2 investments,  the Judge went into his office and locked the door.  Half an hour later, he stepped out to borrow Fred's brief case, and returned behind the locked door again.  A little after noon Judge Crater asked Joseph Mara to help him carry two briefcases and six fully stuffed cardboard folders out to a taxi. On his way out the door, Crater had said, "Don't forget to turn off the lights, Johnson." 

Joseph Mara had ridden uptown in the taxi with the Judge, and lugged the six cardboard briefcases up to the Crater's five room condominium at 40 Fifth Avenue (above left, awning) . The Judge had said to Mara, "You may go now, Joe.  I'm going up to Westchester way for a swim. I'll see you tomorrow." 

While Fredrick had not gone into the details of the Judge's Court House activities,  he did take the time to warn Stella against pressing the issue of the Judge's whereabouts, by saying it might make things professionally unpleasant for her husband.  The unstated hint was that there might be women or gangsters involved. And this hint proved enough to convince Stella to return to the cabin. For the time being, Judge Crater had a great deal in common with  Doctor Schrodinger's  cat. He might be missing, but only if somebody couldn't find him. So it was better if nobody went looking. 

Joe Crater had been a surprising appointment to the New York Supreme Court because he was not openly affiliated with New York Mayor Jimmy Walker (above), or his friends at Tammany Hall (below) -  the center of graft and corruption in New York government since the 1840’s.

But Crater was connected to the hall (above).  The proof was that in April of 1930, just after Governor Franklin Roosevelt had announced Crater’s surprise appointment, Joe had withdrawn $23,000 (about $250,000 today) from his bank. 

The standard and unspoken rule in New York state was that any appointment required the payment of one year’s salary to the lions of Tammy Hall. Lowly trial court - Supreme Court - judges were paid $23,000 a year. No record was ever found of where Joe's $23,000 went.

But Governor Roosevelt (above) was already positioning himself for a possible run for the White House and he could not afford to be connected to anyone connected to Tammany Hall, because of the murder two years earlier of Arnold Rothstein.

It was 13 minutes before midnight, Sunday, 4 November 1928, when elevator operator Vince Kelly (above, re-enacting for the newspapers), just coming to work, discovered a well dressed man lying on the concrete floor of a service corridor of the Park Central Hotel on West 56^th Street. Vince bent down and asked, “Are you sick?” The man held out a dollar bill. “Get me a taxi”, he said. “I've been shot.”

Before the ambulance had even pulled up to the service entrance on 7^th Avenue, word of the shooting was being whispered into the mayor's ear. Recently elected dapper Irish pixie, 40 year old James John “Jimmy” Walker was drinking and dancing at the hotel's Park Lounge. Clearly the management thought it would be better for the hotel and the mayor if he was not discovered without his wife in the vicinity of a shooting. While Walker waited for his girlfriend, Ziegfeld Follies girl Betty Compton (above), to get her coat, Big Band Leader Vincent Lopez asked the ashen faced mayor if he was alright. “Not Exactly”, Jimmy replied. “Rothstein's been shot, Vince. And that means trouble from here on in.”

At 46 years of age Arnold Rothstein was a living legend.  The son of a banker, A.R. applied his natural talent for math to making a lot of money, quickly.  In his twenties he opened an underground gambling club in Manhattan's Tenderloin district, then a horse track in Maryland, and made a million dollars by the age of thirty.  He was, rumor said, the man who rigged the 1919 World Series. It was Rothstein who used prohibition profits to organize crime, and train the next generation of mobsters -  people like Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Arnold's own body guard and partner, Jack “Legs” Diamond.  

Rumor had it that Jack had either pulled the trigger on Arnold, or helped lure him into the hotel without other body guards.  But the murder of Arnold Rothstein was to shake New York City's hidden financial infrastructure until it almost fell apart, in part because Tammany Hall District Attorney Joab Banton was thin skinned.   During the 1928 campaign for mayor, 40 year old Republican Fiorello LaGuardia had charged that Arnold Rothstien was still running the city from beyond the grave.  In response Banton dared the Republican to name a single city official who had any ties to the late A.R., and back came the booming response – Bronx Superior Court Judge  Albert Vitale. According to LaGuardia, Rothstein had loaned Vitale $20,000. 

LaGuardia's charge had no impact on the Tuesday, 6 November 1928 election. Walker won in a landslide. But shortly thereafter United States Attorney Charles Tuttle revealed the source of the accusation – a little black notebook, seized from a known Rothstien heroin dealer, containing the phone number of Albert Vitale. That revelation opened up an investigation by the N.Y. City Bar Association. Their January 1930 report noted that on his $48,000 a year salary, Vitale had $165,000 in the bank. From the witness stand the bombastic Albert Vitale (above) declared "I have absolutely nothing to fear or conceal." But on 14 March, 1930,  the New York Bar Association ordered Vitale removed from office,

Immediately Tuttle opened an investigation into a case Vitale had passed judgment on, the unexpected collapse of the $400,000 Columbia Finance Corporation.  The cause of the fund's failure was their financing the purchase of a series of lots used for piers along the Brooklyn waterfront, leased by United American Lines, a steamship company. The owner of record of one of the lots was Chorus girl Miss Anne McVicker. But the check she used to buy the lot was drawn from the account of Joseph F. Boyle, a political buddy of....guess who? Yes, Albert Vitale. This lease, along with others, had been used by United American Lines to transfer a $250,000 payoff  to Tammany Hall, through Vitale. But once the payoff had been made, the lots returned to the original owners and the leases had to be renegotiated, and Columbia went bankrupt. 

Joseph Crater (above) had decided only two cases during his brief tenure on the Manhattan bench, a liability case against the Park Central Motors Service garage over a wrecked stolen car, and a civil case demanding restitution over the fraudulent transfer of money in a mortgage foreclosure fraud.  Good Time Joe began his written decision of that case this way,  "The evidence presented upon the hearing of this cause points so conclusively to judgment in favor of defendants that we may, without prejudice....overlook some of the technical issues raised...".   But there were other cases on the Judge's docket he had not yet decided.  And with State and Federal investigators already sniffing around, looking for an opening, it suddenly looked like Joe had picked a bad time to transfer to the other side of the bench.

Finally, on Friday, 16 August 1930 -  10, ten days after her husband was last seen -  Stella Crater sent her chauffeur to the city to look for him. He reported that the Judge had left their apartment in perfect order - Maria the maid had already cleaned up of course -  but  none of his clothes were missing and his luggage was still in the closet, hinting he had not left town again.  The driver checked Joe's usual hangouts, places he had driven the judge to and from in the city, places he may not have mentioned to Stella. But no one recalled seeing the Judge all summer. Stella then called Simon Rifkind, another lawyer friend of Joe's. He assured her again that everything was fine, and that Joe would soon turn up.  

The Supreme Court's fall session opened on 25 August, and Justice Louis Valente telephoned from New York to ask Stella if Joe was still in Maine. Stella became hysterical, and Judge Valente assured her that he would find her wayward husband.  He then set New York Police Detective Leo Lowenthal unofficially on to the case.

Back at the Court House, Lowenthal learned of the two brief cases stuffed with money and the six cardboard file folders Crater had removed from the office.  From the Court House, the detective went to the 40 Fifth Avenue apartment.  Not only were the brief cases not there, neither were the cardboard folders. But hanging in the bedroom closet, Detective Lowenthal found the vest Judge Crater had been wearing when he left the courthouse, validating Joseph Mara's story.  But what had happened to all those files, and those two briefcases? There were no ashes in the fire place, and Maria insisted there had been none. So the files had not been burned in the apartment, but when the Judge left the apartment, the files, the briefcases and the money had all gone with him.   But neither Bill Klein nor Sally Ritz reported seeing them at the Chop House.  It seemed somebody was lying, And that is what he told the judges of the Supreme Court. 

So finally,  on 3 September, 1930, the dam broke. Judge Louis Valenti called the Commissioner of Police,  At last, four weeks after Judge Joseph Force Crater had been seen alive and well on West 45th Street, the public alarm was raised.  Mayor Walker and the city council immediately posted a $5,000 reward. It was never claimed.

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VIVIAN GORDON - Moth to the FLAME

 

“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 about as far from bright lights and murky darkness of Manhattan as a young girl could - in Joliet, Illinois (above) in 1891.  She never got the chance to know her mother.

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, Illinois (above).  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. She found appreciation as a chorus girl in the seedy Vaudeville Blue circuit.  

Perhaps it was her need for security, or perhaps, in 1912,  she really fell in love with a dull Charlestown South Carolina accountant named Joseph E.C. Bischoff (above). Within a few months Benita went back to using her birth name, and the couple were married. Then in 1913 Benita gave birth to a girl,  Benita Frederica Bischoff.

The new family moved to the Philadelphia (above) suburb of Audubon, New Jersey, and Joseph went to work as an office manager for the United States Marshal service.  Benita's new role as a housewife and mother, raising little Frederica, was mostly conducted in private.  But Benita's need for drama reasserted itself after Joseph secured a promotion to the D.C. Woman’s Reformatory, in Lorton, Virginia.  The money was good, but the decision meant that Joseph was away from home for weeks at a time.

Eventually Benita sought out the romantic attention of Al Marks (above), a lingerie salesman, from Long Branch, New Jersey.

And in 1923, while the couple were 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 (above) dramatically burst in on them. Supposedly under pressure Al Marks confessed he had paid Benita for sex, and McLaughlin charged the young mother with prostitution.

Even though she had been arrested in Manhattan, Benita was shuffled through the Brooklyn night court of Magistrate H. Stanley Renaud (above). 

Of the 219 women the Brooklyn night court convicted of prostitution in 1923,  72% were , like Benita,  first time offenders, and 10% were pregnant – which should have told officials they were more likely inconvenient wives and girlfriends. It did not matter. Benita was convicted of prostitution purely on the statements signed by Al Marks and Detective McLaughlin.

Benita must have come to the realization she had been set up when, even before she left Brooklyn, she was served with divorce papers, filed that day in New Jersey by her husband Joseph, who also sought custody of  Frederica.   In a single stroke a decade of Benita's life was wiped out.  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.

“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 (above) 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 all inmates worked on the 300 acre farm, but in the afternoon there were classes in secretarial skills and sewing.

However, time and budget cuts had converted Bedford Hills into an understaffed prison devoid of much good. Inmates were isolated and allowed only one letter a month. The last note Benita 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 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 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 new  name: Vivian Gordon (above). She went into the only profession now open to her, prostitution.  She was still beautiful and looked far younger than her age. And Vivian quickly branched out to blackmailing her wealthier customers. As the roaring twenties approached their end, Vivian Gordon was often seen at Manhattan speakeasies in the company with John Thomas Moran,  AKA "Gentleman Jack", AKA Jack "Legs" Diamond - the mobster and bootlegger who ran lower Manhattan and parts of Harlem.

Vivian “loaned” Jack Diamond (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 supposed attempts to nail the dirty cop McLaughlin, failed. 

On Radeloff's advice she even hired a dope named Sam “Chowder-head” Harris (above) 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 win revenge on 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 launch an independent and wide ranging investigation into graft in city government.

The man Roosevelt pushed on New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker to lead the committee was retired judge Samuel Seabury (above).  He was so honest he could barely get elected. 

Early in February of 1931 Vivian wrote to the Seabury committee (above), 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 (above) 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.  And she was filled with information. 

She was an intimate of Legs Diamond.  Her story was filled with the names of her 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 up 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 a woman's 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. The body was all that remained of Vivian Gordon.

 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 rings 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 found murdered just six months after Judge Crater had gone missing.  And it turned out Vivian and Crater knew each other and many of the same other 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. The reporters noted the autopsy of the “Queen of the Courtesans” (as they now called her) revealed that about 1:00am that 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 switched to speculation.

The cops searched Vivian's apartment (above) for the corroboration she had promised the Seabury Committee. They reported finding no 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 (above), who had busted her for the framed prostitution rap back in 1923, and her ex-husband and all the men who had cheated her. There were also the names of 200 of New York's richest and most dishonest politicians and officials. 

The most telling passage in her diary was when she dramatically called her own lawyer, John Radeloff (above, left),  “the only man I fear...who, if he wanted......could get (Chowder-head) Cohen (above, right) 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 Frederica (above)  was discovered by her stepmother, near death on the kitchen floor of their New Jersey home. 

The previous weekend, members of Benita's prep school hockey team had refused to practice with the daughter of the infamous and dead 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.  The newspapers even followed Benita's body out of the hospital's morgue (above). 

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 Herald Tribune editorialized, "'In the tangled web of clues uncovered in the investigation of the strangle murder of beautiful Vivian Gordon, three things stood out in sharp relief against the murky background of the dead girl's past: Dope. Stock racketeering. Vice. "

The weekly, "Time Magazine" covered the story this way: "In New York last fortnight someone knotted a clothesline (above) around the shapely neck of Benita Franklin Bischoff, alias Vivian Gordon, strangled her and threw her dead body into the bushes of Van Cortlandt Park. She had been about to testify in the city's vice investigation. Vivian Gordon became the story of the week....

Continued Time: " In Audubon, N. J., Vivian's daughter, Benita Bischoff, a dark, homely, boyish girl of 16, read the newspapers. In her diary she wrote: "What an awful mess mother got herself into. . . . They are saying such terrible things. . . . I just can't live any longer. This has got to be too much for me. I am going to end it all. . ." Then Benita lay on the kitchen floor and inhaled gas from the stove until she was dead" 

The Seabury investigation focused on Detective McLaughlin. But the night Vivian and been murdered the enterprising detective had been 800 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, aboard the Cunard liner S.S. California, on a six-day cruise to Bermuda. How lucky for him.  Still, Seabury investigators also discovered that over the last three years, on his $60 a week salary, the detective had managed to accumulate $35,800 in savings.  Andrew McLaughlin would be indicted for graft. He would escape conviction, but he was through as a New York City cop. Not that the job had paid him that well.

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 Radeloff, 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, although she never made a dime from any of them. Were they actually owned by Jack Diamond or maybe even New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker (above, on the stand)?   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 for Vivian's murder, and their trial shut down all other investigations.

Harry Stein (above) was a small time crook and occasional partner in Vivian's scams. In the past 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 later the cops arrested Harry Stein's (above, right) tailor,  Sam Greenhauser, (Above, left) for the murder.

And for a topper, the cops arrested the small time hood Harry Schlitten. In exchange for immunity, Harry confessed to driving the Ford coupe (above) in which Vivian had been beaten and strangled, or so said the cops.

But there was no back seat in that coupe (above), which meant the killer would have to drive and strangle Vivian at the same time.  And that did not even consider the effort to beat Vivian's head in.  The only other problem with the case was that both Stein and Greenhauser had solid alibis for the night of murder.

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.  When the corrupt Mayor Jimmy Walker (above) returned from his California vacation,  he observed that in this case,  “There were more frames than there were pictures”.   

But the ultimate judgment on Vivian, may have been delivered by Polly Adler (above), 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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