Picture New York City. It's August 1930. The
heat is just stifling, clinging to the pavement.
The roaring 20s are gasping their last breath.
And the Great Depression is really just starting
to dig its claws into the city. Setting the scene.
Exactly. So you're standing on West 45th Street,
right in the heart of the theater district. It's
loud, it's chaotic, it's alive. A man steps out
of a chop house, adjusts his fedora, and walks
into the night. And then nothing. He doesn't
just leave. He basically evaporates. And we aren't
talking about some anonymous grifter here or
a tourist who took a wrong turn. We are talking
about Joseph Forrest Crater. Yeah. A sitting
justice of the New York State Supreme Court.
Which is wild. It is. One minute he is a titan
of the legal world and the next he's a ghost.
And that's the hook that grabs you, right? A
Supreme Court justice vanishing into thin air.
It became the biggest missing persons case of
the 20th century. The press dubbed him the missingest
man in America, which is just a fantastic, if
slightly grim title. But as I was going through
the stack of historical files and the old police
reports for this deep dive, I realized this isn't
really just a story about a missing person. No,
it's much bigger than that. Yeah. If you look
at the context, the sources we have on the political
climate of 1930 Crater's disappearance is really
like a core sample of a rotting city. Yeah, it's
a snapshot of the jazz age crashing into the
reality of deep political corruption. It marks
the moment when the unchecked power of the political
machines in New York finally began to crack.
So that is our mission today for this deep dive.
We are going to unpack the mystery of where he
went. Sure. But to understand the disappearance,
we have to understand the man. And Joseph Crater
was a complicated guy. On the surface, you have
the Honorable Justice Crater, the pillar of the
community. But dig a little deeper into these
witness statements and you find Good time, Joe.
Good time, Joe. I mean, here is a man straddling
two totally incompatible worlds. You've got the
high society legality of the Supreme Court bench
on one hand and the illicit underground nightlife
of Prohibition era New York on the other. Let's
rewind the tape a bit. Who was this guy before
he became a milk carton legend? Because looking
at his early life, he seems pretty pretty buttoned
up. On paper, he is the American dream personified.
He wasn't even a native New Yorker. He was born
in 1889 in Easton, Pennsylvania. His father ran
a produce market. So it was a very solid middle
-class upbringing. He was the first in his family
to go to college, the Lafayette College, and
then he went straight to Columbia University
for law. And he didn't just drift into the city
after that. He really attacked it. He opens his
law office at the equitable building in Manhattan.
Right. Which is not a cheap address for a young
lawyer. It screams ambition. It definitely does.
Oh. But Crater was smart enough to know that
in 1920s New York, a fancy office just wasn't
enough. If you wanted real power, you needed
friends. And not just any friends. You needed
the Cayuga Democratic Club. OK, we need to pause
on that because the sources mentioned this Cayuga
Club a lot. For anyone listening who isn't a
historian of New York politics, that is basically
code for Tammany Hall, right? It is. And Tammany
Hall is a phrase people hear, but I don't think
everyone realizes the sheer scale of it. Right.
It wasn't just a political party. Exactly. It
was a machine. It controlled everything. If you
wanted a job as a cop, a fireman, a contract
to build a school or a seat as a judge, you didn't
just apply based on merit. You went through Tammany.
You went through Tammany. You paid your dues,
quite literally and figuratively. Now, we are
just looking at the historical records of how
this operated at the time, not taking any sort
of political stance today. But back then, that
was just the reality of the system. And Crater
wasn't just a member. He was a mechanic for this
machine. He aligns himself with a district leader
named Martin J. Healy. He becomes the club's
lawyer handling election law cases. Right. Basically,
he's the guy making sure that the machine keeps
running smoothly in the courts. And that loyalty...
pays dividends. Fast forward to April 1930. This
is only four months before he vanishes. Just
four months? Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt,
yes, the future president, appoints Crater to
the New York State Supreme Court to fill the
vacancy. Which sounds like the absolute pinnacle
of a career. But this is where the good time
Joe persona and the corruption really start to
bleed together because the financial records
from that spring are, well, let's call them highly
suggestive. That is a very polite way of putting
it. The records show that right around the exact
time of his appointment, Crater withdrew $7 ,000
from his bank account and liquidated stock investments
worth another $16 ,000. And we have to do the
inflation math here for the listener because
$23 ,000 in 1930 doesn't sound like a massive
fortune today. But in modern purchasing power,
that is something like $400 ,000. Yeah. He pulled
nearly half a million dollars in cash out of
his accounts. And he didn't buy a house with
it. The prevailing theory, which has stood for
90 years in these sources, is that he bought
the Judge ship. That money was the price tag
paid to the Tammany bosses to secure the nomination.
It was a purely transactional appointment. But
he's sitting on the bench, he's got the robes,
he's made it. Why is he so stressed out? Because
the reports from the summer of 1930 describe
a man who was constantly looking over his shoulder.
Because the bill was coming due. At this exact
moment, the heat was turning up on Tammany Hall.
You had the Seabury Commission starting to form.
Right. This was a massive, aggressive anti -corruption
investigation, specifically looking into the
magistrate courts. They were hunting for exactly
the kind of backroom deal Crater likely made.
And Crater had actually put a target on his own
back years earlier. I found a note in the research
that back in 1927, he gave a speech celebrating
another judge. George Ewald. Oh, yeah. And Ewald
became the absolute poster boy for this corruption
scandal. All right. So imagine Crater's mindset
in the summer of 1930. He has achieved his life's
ambition, but he knows it's built on a bribe.
He knows investigators are snishing around his
friends. He is walking a tightrope. And how does
a man like Crater deal with that kind of pressure?
He parties. He parties hard. This is the good
time Joe's side. He was married. He met his wife,
Stella, back at Columbia, but that didn't slow
him down at all. The marriage story is wild on
its own. He helped Stella get a divorce from
her first husband and then married her seven
days later. The man moved fast. He did, but he
wasn't faithful. He had a long -term mistress
named Connie Marcus, and he was a fixture in
the Broadway scene. He loved the nightclubs,
he loved the jazz, and he specifically loved
the showgirls. Right. He was living a double
life. Judge by day, playboy by night. Which brings
us to the timeline of the disappearance. This
is where the story shifts from a political biography
to a straight -up noir thriller. It really does.
It's late July 1930. Crater and Stella are on
vacation in Belgrade, Maine. It's supposed to
be idyllic, a cabin by the lake, but Crater is
just pacing the floor. He's completely restless.
And then the phone rings. We don't know who was
on the other end, but the effect on Crater was
immediate. He hangs up and... tells Stella he
has to go back to New York City. And I want to
quote him directly here from the records because
his choice of words is chilling. He says, I have
to straighten those fellows out. Straighten those
fellows out. That isn't the language of a man
going back to sign some routine court paperwork.
No. That implies a conflict. It implies a threat.
So he gets on a train and heads back to the sweltering
city, but he doesn't go to the courthouse to
work. He goes to his apartment at 45th Avenue,
drops his bags, and then immediately heads to
Atlantic City with the showgirl named Sally Lou
Ritz. It's such erratic behavior. He's supposed
to be handling a major crisis, but he's taking
a beach trip with a mistress. Yeah. It screams
of someone who is spiraling. Yeah. He actually
goes back to Maine on August 1st, then turns
around and goes back to New York again on August
3rd. He promises Stella, I'll be back for your
birthday on the 9th. A promise he definitely
did not keep. Let's zoom in on August 6, 1930.
The day he vanishes. The details here are so
specific it's frustrating. We can track his movements
almost hour by hour until the very end. The morning
starts in his judicial chambers. He spends two
hours there. But he's not writing opinions. No.
He's destroying documents. His assistant reported
that he was shredding files and filling waste
baskets. He was cleaning house. And not just
paper. He calls his law clerk Joseph Mara. He
writes two checks to cash, totaling $5 ,150.
He sends Mara to the bank to get the money. Right.
Again, adjusting for inflation, that's roughly
$80 ,000 to $90 ,000 in today's money. Just walking
around money for good time, Joe. Right. So he
has nearly 100 grand in his pocket. He has destroyed
his personal files. And then, and this is the
detail that keeps me up at night, the briefcases.
The two locked briefcases. He and Mara take them
from the office to Crater's apartment. He dumps
them there, and then he dismisses Mara. He tells
him, take the rest of the day off. Wow. That
is the last time his staff ever sees him. But
the day isn't over. This is where it gets weirdly
mundane. He goes to a ticket agency and buys
a single seat for a comedy called Dancing Partner
at the Belasco Theater. Which makes no sense.
The source material notes that he had already
seen a preview of that exact show. Yeah. Why
go see a mediocre comedy alone on the night you
were supposedly straightening fellas out and
carrying a fortune in cash? Maybe he needed a
public place to meet someone or maybe he just
needed to kill time. Anyway, he buys the ticket.
Then he goes to dinner. Billy Haas' chop house
on West 45th. He's with his lawyer friend, William
Klein, and the showgirl we mentioned, Sally Lou
Ritz. And this is where the narrative completely
fractures. For decades, the accepted story was
that they finished dinner around 9 -1 -5 p .m.
They walk outside. Crater hails a taxi. He waves
goodbye to his friends, gets in. The cab drives
west. And he is never seen again. Exactly. Judge
Crater, call your office. That's the image everyone
has. The man getting into the taxi. But we have
to be really careful with that image. Because
that account relies entirely on the initial testimony
of Klein and Ritz. And later, when the investigation
turned up the heat on them, they changed their
story. They recanted. Essentially, yes. Later,
they claimed that they were the ones who got
in a taxi to go to Coney Island, and they left
Crater just standing on the sidewalk. That is
a massive discrepancy. I mean, if he got in a
cab, the driver is a witness, though no driver
ever came forward, but he was standing on the
street. Anybody could have grabbed him. Or he
could have just walked away into the crowd. It
muddies the water significantly. It suggests
Klein and Ritz might have been trying to distance
themselves from whatever happened next. So August
6th ends. August 7th begins. And silence. But
nobody hits the panic button. This is the good
time show tax. Because he was so known for disappearing
on benders or spending weekends with women, nobody
panicked. Stella waited 10 full days before she
even called his friends to ask if they'd seen
him. Ten days. I mean, I panic if my pizza delivery
is ten minutes late. A Supreme Court justice
is missing for ten days and nobody calls the
cops. The court didn't even realize he was missing
until August 25th when the new session started
and his chair on the bench was just empty. Unbelievable.
The police weren't officially notified until
September 3rd. That's almost a full month after
he vanished. The trail wasn't just cold, it was
frozen solid. And when the police finally kicked
down the doors, what they found confirmed everyone's
worst fears. They opened his safe deposit box.
Empty. They searched the apartment for those
two locked briefcases he'd brought home. Gone.
It was a completely clean sweep. Someone had
sanitized his life. Which leads to the grand
jury in October. They call 95 witnesses. They
produce nearly a thousand pages of testimony.
And the result? Insufficient evidence. They couldn't
even determine if a crime had been committed.
They didn't know if he was dead, if he had amnesia,
or if he had run away to start a new life in
Brazil. But there were people who seemed to know
something. We really have to talk about the dangerous
women aspect of this case, because every time
the police got close to a woman in Crater's life,
she either ran or bad things happened. Start
with Sally Lou Ritz, the dinner companion. As
soon as the investigation starts, she flees New
York. She goes to Ohio, then California, claiming
her father is sick. She effectively runs for
the hills. Then there's Jean Bryce. Another showgirl.
She was seen talking to Crater the day before
he vanished. The theory from Stella's lawyer
was that Bryce was part of a blackmail scheme.
Perhaps that was the reason Crater needed that
cash. Right. But just as the grand jury is about
to subpoena her, she vanishes too. And she wasn't
found until 1948. They found her years later
in a mental hospital. But the most explosive
connection, and the one that really links Crater
to the broader history of New York, is Vivian
Gordon. This part of the story blew my mind.
Vivian Gordon wasn't just a showgirl. No, she
was a high -end madam. She ran a very exclusive
prostitution ring. She was connected to Polly
Adler and the gangster Jack Legs Diamond. And
we know Crater socialized with Diamond. And didn't
they find Crater's jacket in her apartment? Reportedly,
yes, but here is the real connection. Vivian
Gordon was furious about a conviction that cost
her custody of her daughter. She decided to flip.
She offered to testify to the Seabury Commission
about police graft and corruption. She was going
to name names. Five days after she made that
offer, she was found murdered in Van Cortlandt
Park in the Bronx, strangled. And that murder
wasn't just swept under the rug? No. Her death
caused a massive public outrage that actually
brought down the entire city government. It led
directly to the resignation of Mayor Jimmy Walker.
So you have to look at Crater in this context.
Vivian Gordon knew too much and got killed. Crater
likely knew even more. It connects the dots.
If he was straightening fellows out, maybe he
was threatened to talk to. He was a loose end.
Exactly. He was a liability of the Tammany machine.
Amidst all this mob violence and political collapse,
you have poor Stella Crater. She's stuck in Maine
waiting for a husband who never shows up. Stella
is really the tragic figure here. She's totally
in the dark. She comes back to the city and actually
gets evicted from their Fifth Avenue apartment
because she can't pay the rent. She is destitute.
But then six months later, this is January 1931,
the story takes a weird turn. She's searching
the apartment and she finds something. She finds
a hidden stash in a dresser drawer. Right. Envelopes
containing checks, stocks, bonds, and a note
from Joe. Now hold on. The police had turned
that apartment upside down. They searched for
weeks. They checked every drawer, every nook,
and suddenly, six months later, there's a pile
of money sitting there. It is incredibly suspicious.
The police insisted that money wasn't there during
their initial search. So was it a plant? That's
the big question. Did someone sneak back in and
plant it to help Stella out? Or... And this is
the darker theory. Did they plant it to frame
the narrative? How so? If he left a goodbye note
and money for his wife, it supports the theory
that he fled voluntarily. It takes the heat off
a murder investigation. Wow. It kept her alive,
financially speaking, but just barely. Just barely.
She ended up working as a telephone operator
in Maine for $12 a week. She lived in poverty
for years. She finally had him declared legally
dead in 1939 and got the life insurance, about
$20 ,000. But she went to her grave believing
he was murdered. She even wrote a book about
it called The Empty Robe. So the case officially
closes in 1979. It becomes a legend, a punchline
really, pulling a crater. But then in 2005, we
get one last gasp of evidence from the grave.
The deathbed letter. A woman named Stella Ferrucci
Good dies at age 91. She leaves behind notes
claiming her husband, who was an NYPD detective,
had learned the truth years earlier. And this
truth is straight out of a Scorsese movie. The
notes allege that Crater was killed by Charles
Burns, an NYPD officer who doubled as a bodyguard
for A. Brielis. A. Brielis. The Hitman for Murder,
Inc. The very same. The Enforcer. So you have
a cop working for the mob. The letter claims
Burns and his brother killed Crater and buried
him near West 8th Street in Coney Island. Which
is a very specific location. That's where the
New York Aquarium is today. It is. So is Judge
Crater sleeping with the fishes? Literally under
the shark tank. It is a compelling image and
it fits the mob hit theory perfectly. But we
have to apply some historical skepticism here.
When they built that aquarium in the 1950s, they
dug deep. They did massive excavations for the
foundations. The records show no skeletal remains
were ever found at that site. So the geography
doesn't quite match the story. Right. And historians
like Richard J. Toffle point out that this letter
ties things up a little too nicely. It feels
like a story a detective might have told his
wife to impress her rather than hard evidence.
It lacks real corroboration. So we're back to
square one. No body, no briefcases, just the
legend. But the legend matters. I think Crater's
disappearance is important because it broke the
spell. You had a Supreme Court justice swallowed
whole by his own city. It showed everyone that
nobody, not even a judge, was safe from the corruption.
Yeah. In a strange way, his disappearance accelerated
the cleanup of New York politics. He had to vanish
for the truth to finally come out. It's a hell
of a legacy. I disappeared so you could see the
rot. It really is. It forced the city to look
in the mirror. Before we wrap up, I want to leave
you, the listener, with a thought, a loose thread
that really bothers me about this whole thing.
Go for it. We know he took $5 ,000 cash and those
two locked briefcases. If he was murdered that
night, the money and the cases presumably disappeared
with him. But if that note Stella found six months
later was planted, it means someone had access
to his personal effects after he vanished. That
is the chilling part. It means the killers didn't
just dump the body. They came back. They had
keys. They walked into his house while his wife
was crying in Maine. Or he gave him the keys.
So ask yourself this. Was the note a genuine
goodbye from a man fleeing the country to sit
on a beach in Brazil? Or was it a receipt left
by the people who silenced him? And more importantly,
what was in those briefcases that was worth killing
a Supreme Court justice for? That is the question
that keeps this story alive 90 years later. That's
it for this deep dive into the missingest men
in America. Thanks for listening. Stay curious.