Tammany Hall Pt. 2: "The Missingest Man in New York"
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Due to the nature of this story, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder and sex work. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. On August 6th, 1930, law clerk Joe Marra was hard at work when the office door abruptly swung open. It was Marra's boss, New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater. Crater breezed past Marra and into his office.

Mara was confused. Crater was supposed to be on vacation with his wife in Maine. He wasn't expected back until late August. Mara followed the judge into the office, where he found him rifling through filing cabinets, pulling out reams of folders and tossing them haphazardly on his desk. Mara coughed lightly and Crater whirled around, startled.

But seeing Mara, he relaxed. Crater laughed and apologized for being such a rube. Then Crater handed Mara two checks. He asked his clerk to cash them and bring him the money. When Mara glanced down at the checks, he nearly fell over. The judge was asking him to withdraw $5,100, equivalent to about $96,000 today. As he hustled to the bank,

Mara couldn't help feeling suspicious. It seemed like his boss was preparing for the worst. But what was it? Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy.

You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram @theconspiracypod. And we would love to hear from you, so if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Today we're covering one of the biggest unsolved mysteries to ever come out of the Big Apple. Weaving through dark hallways filled with political corruption and organized crime.

The 1930 Disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater. There are a few theories about what happened to him, ranging from a political assassination to a murder cover-up to him abandoning everything to start a new life. If you haven't listened to last week's episode on Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall, you might want to check it out to understand the political machine implicated in his disappearance.

Stay with us.

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- Hello there, I'm Mike Flanagan, and welcome to Spectre Vision Radio's production of "Director's Commentary." "Director's Commentary" is a deep dive into a film through the eyes of the filmmaker or filmmakers who made it. It combines an in-depth interview format with a classic "Director's Commentary" track, the likes of which used to be common on physical media releases, but sadly are becoming more and more rare these days. Filmmakers talking about film with filmmakers for people who love film.

and filmmakers. In 1915, Stella Wheeler was embroiled in a harrowing divorce case. Fortunately, she had a skilled young lawyer on her side, Joseph Force Crater. Crater was a rising star in the New York City law scene, and after a long dispute, he secured the divorce for Stella Wheeler. In the spring of 1917, Stella Wheeler became Stella Crater.

The next year, her new husband became a law secretary for the New York State Senator and later New York Supreme Court Justice Robert F. Wagner. While working for Wagner, Crater met many of the judge's associates. The majority were members of the same powerful political group, Tammany Hall.

Though nominally legal, the democratic political machine Tammany Hall operated much like a crime syndicate. They didn't peddle protection or traffic drugs and alcohol. No, their contraband was power itself. Buying and selling office appointments mostly to Irish-American candidates. Crater was a natural fit for the Hall.

Not only was he an up-and-comer in the legal world, he was the son of Irish immigrants. Alongside his new political friends, Crater developed a taste for the nightlife of New York City. Tammany Hall used its back rooms as the locations of soirees, popular with showgirls, sex workers, and infamous gangsters.

Over the next decade, Crater continued to make political connections and earn a healthy living. But it wasn't long before he made his most significant career leap yet. In April of 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Crater to the New York Supreme Court. The Supreme Court was not the most powerful tribunal in the state. It could still be overridden by higher state courts like the Appellate Court.

but it had the broadest jurisdiction in New York. And the Supreme Court heard a variety of cases, from civil disputes to contested divorces to felony trials. They could even overturn lower court rulings if they found them unreasonable or unlawful. As an associate justice, Crater had the ability to vote on cases, write decisions, and set legal precedents.

But his appointment was highly surprising. At 41, not only was he comparatively young for the position, he also might not have earned it. Before his nomination, Crater withdrew $20,000 from his bank account, the equivalent to about $367,000 today.

Since he was associated with Tammany Hall, this large sum suggests that Crater bought his new judgeship. No hard evidence links this money to the Tammany Democrats, they were experts at covering their tracks. But soon enough, their political deals would come back to bite them. Even though Tammany aided Roosevelt in his election, he wanted to end their reign of corruption.

He finally had his chance when authorities accused Magistrate George Ewald of buying his office for $10,000, about $183,000 today. To address the scandal, Roosevelt had State Senator Samuel H. Hofstadler form a commission to investigate corruption in New York City.

While his political allies were feeling the heat in the summer of 1930, Crater and his wife Stella escaped to their summer home in Belgrade, Maine. But around the 24th of July, the Crater's holiday was interrupted. Stella Crater heard her husband answer the phone, but she couldn't decipher his conversation. When he hung up, Crater told her he needed to go back to the city to "straighten those fellows out."

Crater traveled to New York for a week and returned to Maine on August 1st. He assured Stella he'd finished his business. But just two days later, Crater went down to New York again. He promised his wife that he would return by her birthday on the 9th. But the day came, and still, there was no sign of Crater. Stella was worried, but she assumed the best.

Perhaps her husband was hung up on some difficult business. She called their friends in the city and began to make private inquiries. But the more people Stella questioned, the more concerned she became. Nobody had seen Judge Crater anywhere. On August 10th, Stella finally reached out to Crater's New York offices. She talked to her husband's assistant, Joseph Mara.

Mara was at a loss. He'd last seen his boss four days earlier and had assumed the judge had already returned to Maine. Stella listened anxiously as Mara told her what had happened. On the morning of August 6th, Crater entered his offices and started packing up files. While he did this, he had Mara cash two checks worth a total of $5,100. After Mara brought the money to his boss,

Crater had him carry several locked briefcases to his apartment in Greenwich Village. Once they put the cases away, Crater gave Mara the rest of the day off. And that was the last time Mara saw the judge. Nine more days passed after Stella and Mara spoke, and Crater still didn't appear. So on August 19th, Stella sent their chauffeur down to the city to find him,

but his search turned up nothing. Stella continued her investigation, hoping to keep it under wraps, lest the press catch wind of the scandal. But she couldn't keep her husband's disappearance a secret for long. On August 25th, 1930, the New York Supreme Court reconvened, only to realize they were missing one of their members.

They finally notified the police of Crater's disappearance, and the official investigation began on September 3rd, three weeks after he was supposed to return to Maine. It didn't take long for the story to explode in the papers. Crater's disappearance drew eyes from across the nation, and people wildly speculated as to what might have happened. But no one was prepared for what the search would actually uncover.

A web of lies, criminals, blackmail, and possibly even murder.

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Police got to work investigating Judge Crater's disappearance and quickly uncovered something strange. On the day Crater first left Maine and returned to the city, around July 24th, he didn't go to his offices in Manhattan. Instead, he went to Atlantic City, New Jersey, the upscale socialite hotspot of the tri-state area. And he wasn't alone.

A woman named Sally Lou Ritzy accompanied Crater to Atlantic City. Ritzy was a Broadway showgirl who often went by her stage name, Sally Ritz. Crater was known to socialize with showgirls, so the police assumed Ritzy was his mistress. While his evident infidelity wasn't a surprise, it did shed light on the call he received earlier in the day at his summer home.

he could have been speaking to Ritzy, making arrangements for their getaway. In which case, his remark that he would sort those fellows out was a lie meant for his wife. After spending a week in Atlantic City with Ritzy, Crater returned to his wife in Maine on August 1st. Two days later, he took the fateful trip from which he would never return.

The police interrogated Mara, who told his account from August 6th. Mara told the police how he had withdrawn the money and helped Crater deposit the briefcases at the apartment before receiving the afternoon off. Police found that after Mara left, Crater had called a Broadway box office. He bought one ticket for the show Dancing Partner, which had just opened. But as far as they could tell, Crater never made it to the performance.

Someone sat in the seat he purchased, but no witnesses saw him in the crowd. Instead, Crater went to Billy Haas' chop house on 45th Street. And he wasn't alone. He dined with his friend, attorney William Klein, and his alleged lover, Sally Lou Ritzy. At 9:15 p.m., Crater left his two companions and hailed a taxi.

Ritzy asked where he was going, and Crater told her that he was "going to Westchester for a swim." Both Klein and Ritzy testified that they saw the judge get into the cab, but the next time anyone would see him was on the front page of the New York Times. What had everyone talking was Crater's strange behavior on the night of his disappearance.

To mysteriously withdraw over $5,000 and purchase a ticket to a Broadway show without attending, it all seemed so suspicious, like Crater was in on something. The police searched Crater's apartment, but they couldn't find the documents Mara had told them about. Someone must have taken or even destroyed them.

Meanwhile, the public thought it suspicious that Crater's disappearance coincided with the intense investigation of corruption in New York City politics. Newspapers picked up on this thread, linking Crater's disappearance with Magistrate George Ewald, who had recently been accused of buying his office. The state of New York ultimately launched a grand jury to go through all the evidence on the missing judge.

The grand jury heard over 95 witnesses testify, including Crater's former boss, Senator Robert Wagner, Crater's assistant, Joseph Mara, his attorney friend, William Klein, and Sally Lou Ritzy. But Stella Crater refused to be involved. Meanwhile, the press dubbed Judge Crater the "missingest man in New York," and hypotheses ran rampant as to what became of him.

The first of these theories was that Crater bristled under the heat from Governor Roosevelt's Hofstadler Committee, so he skipped town. The evidence largely supports this theory. The Hofstadler Committee had threatened the Tammany Hall Democrats, and although the grand jury on Judge Crater's disappearance was separate from the corruption hearings, many Tammany politicians seemed reluctant to cooperate.

When the court called Senator Wagner to testify, he said he didn't know Crater very well. All this contradicted their extensively documented friendship and working relationship. If there really was no connection between the Hofstädtler investigation and Crater's disappearance, Wagner's sudden disavowal of his protégé makes little sense. More strangely, while delving into the night of his disappearance,

The investigators could not locate the taxi driver who picked Crater up from Billy Haas' chop house. No cab company reported having driven him from the restaurant at that time. Also suspicious was the $5,100 that Crater withdrew from the bank in two separate checks. Crater often kept his money in multiple accounts, which already appeared underhanded.

And people theorized that he did this to pay off Tammany Hall more easily. With a divided fortune, illegal payments were harder to track. The investigators believed the 5100 didn't go to Tammany, but straight into Crater's pockets. Many on Crater's grand jury suspected that the Tammany Hall bosses could have had dirt on the judge.

He may have withdrawn the travel money and fled to escape their wrath. In fact, as early as September, the New York Times reported alleged sightings of Crater in Ohio and Havana, Cuba. He could have already changed his name and been living a new life.

Though the tips were unverified, the theory that Crater fled to Havana was reinforced by two pieces of evidence. First, the missing money, and second, Sally Lou Ritzy, who vanished a month after the investigation began. Eager to learn more, authorities attempted to interview any other showgirls the judge knew. One of these was June Bryce. But like Ritzy,

Bryce had disappeared without a trace. Perhaps Ritzy and Bryce ran off with Crater to start a new life away from Tammany Hall. If they had, they'd covered their tracks well. By the end of 1930, the police still hadn't found them. Over the subsequent years, there were many supposed sightings of Joseph Crater, but none have been verified.

Still, the theory that Crater skipped town under pressure from Tammany Hall feels plausible. All the judge's actions on August 6th paint a very specific picture: that of a man looking to burn whatever bridges lay behind him. Still, after receiving over 975 pages of testimony,

The grand jury ruled that there simply wasn't enough evidence to determine whether Crater was alive, dead, ill, or lost. But there were more clues to come. In January of 1931, Stella Crater found three envelopes in her apartment. They contained over $6,000 in cash. A list of people who owed the Craters money

and a note which simply read, "I am very weary," and signed, "Joe." The police felt gobsmacked. They had thoroughly searched the Crater's apartment and hadn't found these envelopes. So either they had overlooked a key piece of evidence, or more likely, the cash had been snuck in by a third party. This definitely accounted for the money that Crater withdrew from the bank,

So, if he was the one who put it there, he likely didn't have any cash with him and couldn't have fled the country. To add another wrinkle, police found Sally Lou Ritze. Early reports suggested she had disappeared when, in fact, she had just gone to take care of her parents in Ohio. Authorities were skeptical of why she would run away at such a critical time, but over time, they took her at her word.

The other showgirl, June Bryce, was found years later in 1948. Investigators located her at a psychiatric hospital. She wasn't able to supply information on Crater's whereabouts. The idea that Judge Crater fled New York is still possible, but unlikely. The money he withdrew was accounted for, and none of his known mistresses went with him.

As far as the sightings, these could have been false reports. Desperate grabs at the $5,000 reward offered for tips. The only positive evidence that Crater left New York is the absence of a cab driver. If no legit cab company had taken him anywhere, he could have easily slipped the state with the help of a pal. On June 6th, 1939, after nine years of uncertainty,

Judge Crater was declared legally dead in absentia. Stella Crater had already remarried, but she was finally able to collect Crater's life insurance policy of $21,000.

And even though she had moved on, Stella still honored her missing husband. Every year until her death in 1969, she marked the anniversary of his disappearance. At a bar in Greenwich Village, Stella would order two cocktails. She would then toast one of them and say, "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are." Still, suspicion hung in the air.

Some who examined Crater's case turned a close eye to his other, seedier associates. People like the gangster Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein and his enforcer Jack "Legs" Diamond. Crater even had connections to the notorious mob hit squad known only as "Murder, Inc." If Joseph "Force" Crater didn't make a miraculous getaway on August 6, 1930,

then perhaps his enemies had caught up with him and disposed of him. The disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater was one of the most inexplicable missing person cases in American history. But after nine years of investigation, he was declared legally dead in 1939. As it didn't appear that the judge had fled the city, other theories emerged.

People hypothesized that instead of leaving town, Crater was the target of a political assassination. Stella Crater, for one, always believed her husband had been murdered, but she refused to testify in the grand jury. The investigators sincerely considered her concerns, but they still had to look into every possibility.

Crater was not behaving like a clueless victim on his final night, and they wanted to know why. In 1930, New York City was in the throes of corruption. Not only did Tammany Hall buy and sell government offices, they also had ties to organized crime. Jewish, Irish, and Italian mobsters held the city's illegal gambling and alcohol industries in an iron grip.

The theory is this: During his well-documented association with other corrupt Democrats, Judge Crater learned compromising information about his political friends. To keep him quiet, Tammany Hall ordered a hit. With Governor Roosevelt's investigation, Tammany politicians were feeling the heat.

They would be vulnerable to anybody who had dirt on them, and Crater could have been preparing to sacrifice his friends for immunity, thus saving his career. With their lives on the line, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that the other politicians enlisted mobsters to do them a favor and take care of the judge.

One of the most notorious gangsters at the time was Arnold Rothstein, known as "The Brain." Rothstein was a racketeer who infamously paid members of the Chicago White Sox to throw the 1919 World Series. And one of Rothstein's chief lieutenants was Jack Leggs Diamond,

A ruthless thug who survived so many assassination attempts, he earned himself the nickname "The Clay Pigeon of the Underworld." Both Rothstein and Diamond were known associates of Tammany Hall, specifically the branch Crater belonged to.

Rothstein was assassinated in 1928, so he couldn't have been responsible for Crater's disappearance. However, Legg's diamond was still at large in August of 1930. If someone wanted Crater dead, Legg's could have been the one to pull the trigger. If we believe this theory, then Crater's suspicious behavior made perfect sense. He wasn't withdrawing money and burning documents to escape.

he was securing protection from his colleagues. The materials Joseph Mara helped Crater with may have been evidence of his associates purchasing their seats or other illegal activity. And perhaps Crater never made it to his Broadway show because his assassins caught up to him on the way. Theoretically, once sources reported that Crater was back in the city,

The Tammany politicians would have called Legs Diamond, or perhaps a hitman from the notorious Murder, Inc. hit squad. Neither Legs Diamond nor Murder, Inc. were known for their subtlety. They openly gunned people down in public locations, and Murder, Inc. had been known to use ice picks to bludgeon their victims, or even set them on fire. But in the case of Joseph Crater...

they could have made an exception to be discreet. Still, there were lines that the mafia did not normally cross. One of these was the murder of prominent political figures. In fact, gangster Dutch Schultz was publicly gunned down in 1935, allegedly just for suggesting a hit on a prosecutor.

So if Tammany did order an assassination for such a high-profile target, the killers would need to employ an uncharacteristic amount of discretion. They also had more than enough time to do the deed and get rid of the evidence

Crater was alone in the city and nobody even noticed he was missing for three days. In that time, they could have disposed of Crater's documents and either buried the body or dumped it in the Hudson. Even though this theory seems plausible, there are still flaws. The most obvious is the lack of evidence.

The police never found a body. And even though associates of Legs Diamond and Murder Inc. were known to visit Tammany Run social dens, we don't have direct evidence of anyone calling the hit. Such a high-profile murder would have been an enormous risk for the mafia, so they would have needed sufficient justification of their own to carry it out. But if it was indeed a mob assassination,

than it was the most successful hit New York gangsters ever pulled off. The evidence didn't lead anyone back to Diamond or Murder, Inc. and other accounts seemed to raise questions as to whether this was a murder at all. Judge Crater didn't only run with showgirls, he also socialized with sex workers through Polly Adler. Adler was a brothel madam with many clients from Tammany Hall,

She didn't testify during the grand jury, but rumors would later suggest that she had more to do with the case. Apparently, in early drafts of her memoir, she referenced a particular story, one that might have solved Crater's disappearance. On August 6th, 1930, Polly Adler was presiding over her bordello. It was a wild night at her house of ill repute,

Those that darkened her door on weeknights didn't need to worry about early mornings or punching a clock. Allegedly, a horrifying scream came from one of the private rooms. Adler rushed in and found Joseph Force Crater lying naked on the bed. One of her employees trembled in a corner, terrified. The madam quickly checked the judge's pulse. It was too late.

She put an arm around her employee's shoulder, assuring the shocked woman that it wasn't her fault. Then Adler guided her out of the room. She had a call to make. Polly Adler was a keen businesswoman, and she knew what would happen if someone found the deceased judge in her place of work. If she was lucky, her business would only be shut down. If she was unlucky,

She and her employees could face lengthy prison sentences. Adler was also well connected. With one call, she brought some mobster colleagues to her office where they examined the body, determining that Crater died of natural causes. The gangsters waited until Adler's brothel was closed for the night. Then they took the body away to be buried or thrown into the Hudson

where it would never be found again. Though shocking and salacious, Adler's account is hardly reliable. It makes sense that Adler would think twice about publishing her involvement in a scandalous cover-up, and investigators also haven't been able to locate any copies of her original memoir draft, so this story is basically a rumor. That's even before getting into the technicalities of it.

We have no evidence that Crater was anywhere near Adler's place the night of August 6th. Also, he was only 41, with no known history of illness. Unless Crater was engaged in some dangerous activity during this rendezvous, it's unlikely he would drop dead. But Polly Adler wasn't the only woman who believed she held the answer to the decades-old mystery. In 2005,

Queens native Stella Ferrucci Goode died at the age of 91. The old woman left behind a safe deposit box. Inside was an envelope sealed and labeled, "Not to be opened until my death." In the letter, Ferrucci Goode claimed that her husband, a police detective, had discovered Crater's true killers. According to him,

Cab driver Frank Burns picked up Joseph Crater from Billy Haas' chop house. Burns then picked up two other men, and the three of them murdered Crater before burying him under the pier in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Ms. Ferrucci-Good didn't say why the man had committed this horrific deed. However, her husband also told her that Frank Burns had a brother in the NYPD named Charles Burns.

This Officer Burns was a corrupt cop and a bodyguard to Abe Aurelis, a known assassin from Murder, Inc. Frank and Charles Burns, already connected to Murder, Inc., may have been contracted to kill Crater on the mob's behalf. That way, Tammany got rid of Crater and the mafia wasn't connected to this high-profile hit.

It also explains why they never found Crater's cab driver. And no one would think to look for a body under a pier in Brooklyn when Crater vanished in midtown Manhattan. Supposing the story Ferrucci Good's husband heard was accurate, it aligns perfectly with the theory that Joseph Crater was rubbed out by gangsters at the behest of Tammany Democrats. However, this account is distinctly unprovable.

The supposed burial site no longer exists. In the 1950s, builders demolished the portion of the Coney Island Pier where Crater was allegedly buried to make way for the New York Aquarium. If that was indeed the final resting place of Judge Crater, then his body would have been exhumed by construction.

And while some tabloids reported that workers found human skeletons below the pier, no major news outlets verified these claims. Still, it's important to note that unlike the people who claimed to see Crater on the Lamb, Ferrucci Good had nothing to gain by her story. She literally waited until she was dead to reveal the truth. It's such a specific story that it's easy to believe.

But it's also a second-hand account and could very well have been a tall tale from the bottom of a beer glass. Without a body, no one can confirm it. Ultimately, we're left with three possible explanations. Crater became a fugitive, he was assassinated, or his accidental death was covered up.

And aside from the Polyadler theory, most agree that there is one reason for Crater's disappearance: Tammany Hall. Joseph Crater was in deep with very corrupt individuals at a time of massive political reform. With so much on the line, there was bound to be collateral damage.

Over the next few decades, Tammany Hall's power waned. By the late 60s, it was nothing but a memory. Judge Joseph Force Crater could have been an early casualty of the decline, and no amount of bribery could save him from the political beast that gave him his name. He'd made a deal with the devil, and the devil sold him out first.

Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystoriesatspotify.com. Until next time, remember...

The truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth. This episode was written by Matthew Teamstra with writing assistance by Ali Wicker and sound design by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.

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