Joseph Force Crater (January 5, 1889 – disappeared August 6, 1930; declared legally dead June 6, 1939) was an American lawyer who served as a New York State Supreme Court Justice and mysteriously vanished shortly after the state began an investigation into corruption in New York City. Despite massive publicity, the missing person case was never solved and was officially closed forty years after Crater was declared dead.
Early life and
education
Joseph Crater was
born in Easton, Pennsylvania, the
eldest of four children of the former Leila
Virginia Montague and Frank
Ellsworth Crater, a produce market operator and orchard owner. Both had emigrated
from Ireland. He was educated at Lafayette College (class of 1910) and Columbia University, where he was a
member of the Sigma Chi fraternity.
During his time at Columbia, he met Stella
Mance Wheeler, who was at the time married and helped her get a divorce.
They married seven days after her divorce was finalized, in the spring of 1917.
Career
Crater opened an office at the Equitable Building in Manhattan,
joined Tammany Hall district leader
Martin J. Healy's Cayuga Democratic Club, and spent time organizing
election workers and representing the club in election law cases.
Four months before his disappearance, on April 8, 1930, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then New York governor, appointed Crater as Justice of the New York Supreme Court for
New York County, which is a trial court, despite the designation "supreme" (New York State's highest court is the Court of Appeals). He issued
two published opinions: Rotkowitz v.
Sohn, July 11, 1930, involving fraudulent conveyances and mortgage foreclosure
fraud; and Henderson v. Park Central
Motors Service, dealing with a garage company's liability for an expensive
car stolen and wrecked by an ex-convict.
Attention was later drawn to Crater's liquidating
investments worth $16,000 and withdrawing $7,000 from his bank account that
spring (together equivalent to about US$402,912 in 2022), a possible pay-off
for his judgeship. He had also given the congratulatory speech at the dinner
celebrating George Ewald's judgeship
in 1927; accusations of Tammany Hall
corruption in that appointment was an initial impetus in the opening of what
would become the Seabury Commission
in mid-1930.
Disappearance
In the summer of 1930, shortly after the anti-corruption inquiry
began, Crater and his wife were vacationing at their summer cabin in Belgrade, Maine. In late July, Crater
received a telephone call. He told his wife nothing about the call other than
to say that he had to return to New York
City "to straighten those
fellows out". The next day, he arrived at his apartment at 40 Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, but instead of dealing with business, he went to Atlantic City, New Jersey with showgirl
Sally Lou Ritz.
After returning to Maine on August 1, Crater traveled back
to New York on August 3, promising
his wife that he would return by her birthday on August 9. She stated that he
was in good spirits and behaving normally when he left. On the morning of
August 6, Crater spent two hours going through his files in his chambers,
reportedly destroying several documents. He then had his law clerk, Joseph Mara, cash two checks for him
that amounted to US$5,150 (equivalent to about US$90,217 in 2022). At noon,
Crater and Mara carried two locked briefcases to Crater's apartment, where
Crater told Mara to take the rest of the day off.
That evening, Crater went to a Broadway ticket agency run by
a friend, Joseph Gransky, and
reserved one seat for a comedy called Dancing
Partner at the Belasco Theatre;
Gransky was surprised because he and Crater had already seen a preview of the
show. Crater then ate dinner at Billy
Haas's Chophouse at 332 West 45th
Street, with Ritz and William Klein,
a lawyer friend. Crater's dinner companions gave differing accounts of his
departure from the restaurant. Klein initially testified that "the judge got into a taxicab outside
the restaurant about 9:30 p.m. and drove west on Forty-fifth Street." This
account was initially confirmed by Ritz: "At
the sidewalk, Judge Crater took a taxicab." Klein and Ritz later
changed their story and said that they had entered a taxi outside the
restaurant, but Crater had walked down the street.
Crater's disappearance did not elicit any immediate
reaction. When he did not return to Maine after ten days, his wife began making
calls to their friends in New York, asking
whether anyone had seen him. His fellow justices became alarmed when Crater
failed to appear for the opening of the courts on August 25; they started a
private investigation but failed to find any trace of him. The police were
notified on September 3, and after that, the missing judge was front-page news.
Investigation
Detectives discovered that the judge's safe deposit box had
been emptied and the two briefcases that Crater and Mara had taken to his
apartment were missing. These promising leads were quickly lost amid thousands
of false reports from people claiming to have seen the missing justice. A grand
jury convened in October 1930 called 95 witnesses and amassed 975 pages of
testimony. Mrs. Crater refused to appear. The jury concluded that "the evidence is insufficient to
warrant any expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead, or as
to whether he has absented himself voluntarily, or is the sufferer from disease
in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of crime."
Crater enjoyed the city's nightlife; in addition to a
long-term mistress, Connie Marcus,
he socialized with many showgirls. Two of these women left town abruptly in the
aftermath of his disappearance. Sally
Lou Ritz (real name, Sarah Ritzi;
1907/1908–2000), who had dined with Crater the evening that he vanished and was
also rumored to be his mistress, left New
York in August or September 1930. She was found in late September 1930,
living in Youngstown, Ohio, with her
parents; she said that she had left New
York because she had received word that her father was ill. She was still
being subjected to interviews by police investigating the Crater case in 1937,
by which time she was living in Beverly
Hills, California. June Brice, another showgirl, had been seen talking to
Crater the day before he disappeared. A lawyer acting for Crater's wife argued
that Brice had been at the center of a scheme to blackmail Crater (the reason
for the bank withdrawals on the day of his disappearance) and that a gangster
boyfriend of Brice had killed the justice. Brice disappeared the day that a
grand jury was to convene on the case. In 1948, she was discovered in a mental
hospital.
Crater's jacket was reportedly found in the apartment of a
third woman, Vivian Gordon. Gordon
was involved in high-end prostitution and linked to Madam Polly Adler. Gordon had liaisons with a large number of
influential businesspeople, and was the owner, on paper at least, of a number
of properties believed to be fronts for illegal activity. She was also seen
around town with gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond, with whom
Crater was rumored to socialize. Crater had known Diamond's former boss,
organized crime figure Arnold Rothstein,
and had been extremely upset at Rothstein's murder. Gordon was angry about a
conviction that had resulted in her losing custody of her 16-year-old daughter.
On February 20, 1931, she met with a lawyer for the Seabury Commission and
offered to testify about police graft. She was murdered five days later. The
publicity surrounding Gordon's killing led to the resignation of a policeman
whom she had accused of framing her, and the suicide of her daughter. The
scandal also refocused attention on the corruption investigation, which
ultimately led to the resignation of Mayor
Jimmy Walker and largely eliminated Tammany
Hall's hold on the city, previously weakened by Rothstein and the conflict
over his former empire.
On January 20, 1931, six months after Crater's disappearance,
his wife found envelopes containing checks, stocks, bonds, and a note from the
justice in a dresser drawer that had been empty when searched by police. The
discovery led to new but ultimately inconclusive leads, and no further trace of
Crater was ever found. The case was officially closed in 1979.
Subsequent events
Mrs. Crater remained at their vacation home in Maine during the search for her
husband, until her discovery of the hidden envelopes. She was evicted from the Fifth Avenue apartment for non-payment
of rent. In July 1937, when she was reportedly living on $12 per week
(approximately $239.26 in 2022) working as a telephone operator in Maine, she petitioned to have the justice
declared officially dead. She married Carl
Kunz, a New York City electrical
contractor, in Elkton, Maryland, on
April 23, 1938. Kunz's first wife had hanged herself eight days before the wedding.
Crater was declared legally dead in 1939; his widow received $20,561 in life
insurance (approximately $430,751.46 adjusted in 2022). She separated from Kunz
in 1950 and died in 1969 at age 70.
Mrs. Crater expressed her belief that her husband had been
murdered in her own account of the case, The
Empty Robe, which was written by freelance writer and journalist Oscar Fraley and published by Doubleday in 1961.
On August 19, 2005, authorities revealed that after Queens resident Stella Ferrucci-Good's death at age 91, they had received notes she
wrote in which she claimed that her husband, NYPD detective Robert Good, had learned that Crater was killed by Charles Burns, an NYPD officer who also worked as a bodyguard of Murder, Inc. enforcer Abe
Reles, and by Burns' brother, Frank. According to the letter, Crater was
buried near West Eighth Street in Coney Island, Brooklyn, at the current
site of the New York Aquarium. Police
reported that no records had been found to indicate that skeletal remains had
been discovered at that site when it was excavated in the 1950s. Richard J. Tofel, the author of a 2004
book on the Crater case, Vanishing
Point, expressed skepticism of Ferrucci-Good's account.
Popular culture
The phrase "to
pull a Judge Crater", or simply "to
pull a Crater", means to disappear. It is no longer widely used. For
many years following Crater's disappearance, "Judge Crater, call your office" was a standard gag of
nightclub comedians. As a publicity stunt for their 1933 film Bureau of Missing Persons, First National Pictures promised in
advertisements to pay Crater $10,000 (equivalent to $230,000 in 2022) if he
claimed it in person at the box office. Crater's last letter, possibly written
on the day of his disappearance, was sold at auction on June 22, 1981, for $700.
The letter was marked "confidential"
and began: "The following money is
due me from the persons named. Get in touch with them for they will surely pay
their debts." It was incorrectly reported that this letter was
Crater's will.
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