Disappearing Acts

One evening in August 1930, Judge Joseph Crater simply dropped out of sight. His disappearance is one of the enduring mysteries of New York City history. No body was recovered, and his case remained open on New York police records for a half century. The mystery has never been solved.For years, it was something of a parlor game in New York to speculate on the fate of Crater, a well-connected judge on New York’s trial level Supreme Court and a former colleague of the powerful lawyer and United States Senator Robert F. Wagner Sr. In his new book “Vanishing Point” (Ivan R. Dee, 216 pages, $24.95), the assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Richard J. Tofel, explores the contending theories of Crater’s disappearance, and offers one of his own.With a newspaperman’s eye for drama, Mr. Tofel covers the known facts and likely possibilities without getting bogged down in detail. He also uses the story of Crater’s disappearance as a window into New York’s culture and politics just as America was heading into the worst of the Great Depression. For just as Judge Crater vanished into thin air, the astonishing political phenomenon known as Tammany was beginning its disappearing act as well.The decade before Crater’s disappearance was one of the periodic heydays of Tammany Hall, this time under the control of the brilliant and disciplined Charles Francis Murphy. Although in retrospect Tammany, with its “Grand Sachems,” elaborate medallions, and Native American imagery, seems faintly ridiculous, there was nothing trifling about it. As late as 1961, Robert F. Wagner Jr. ran on an anti-Tammany platform to silence concerns over a revival, which had arisen because of his father’s long association with Tammany. Today, except for the Tweed Courthouse, that vastly over budgeted tribute to graft near City Hall and the old Tammany headquarters at Union Square, now a theater, there are few reminders of the glory days.Tammany had originally been a bastion of Protestant nativist strength. By the 1920s, however, it had become the engine for promotion and patronage for the masses of immigrants – largely Irish – who had arrived in the city over the preceding decades. The great critic and 19th-century New York reformer John Jay Chapman once said of machines like Tammany that the nation was lucky that their energies were devoted to acquiring money; their ambitions ultimately were financial, not political. Murphy’s predecessor, Richard Croker, summed up the Tammany credo when he said, “I am in politics for what I can get out of it.”Nevertheless, politics in that age was a ready source of cash and power, and Tammany played its cards to the hilt. Mr. Tofel reminds us how far the city has come in refusing to treat “honest graft” as business as usual.In the opening of his book, Mr. Tofel outlines the lives and careers of the central personalities of the era, including Wagner, Mayor Jimmy Walker, Governor Alfred Smith, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. Each had their history with Tammany, and each had a role in the Crater drama. Tammany had tapped Smith and Wagner, when young men, to be its voice in Albany. The bet paid off: Each remained loyal, at least until it was clear the machine’s days were numbered.Roosevelt, for his part, for decades played a cat-and-mouse game with the machine. La Guardia is largely credited with sealing the end of Tammany by implacable opposition during his three terms as mayor. Mr. Tofel also does not neglect other figures, less well known now but important to the Crater story, such as the lawyer Samuel Seabury and colorful figures like Ciro Terranova, the Artichoke King.Crater was no exception to Tammany’s reach. Then-Governor FDR appointed him to the Court to avoid an embarrassing political fight; Crater’s nomination was possible only because of his loyalty to Tammany and closeness to Wagner. By late summer 1930, however, Tammany was in disarray. Murphy had died in 1924, and his successor, George Olvaney, had been unable to hold the machine to its traditional discipline.Mr. Tofel painstakingly recounts the judge’s last days, from Crater’s early return from his summer home in Maine to the city, to the last time he was positively seen, in a restaurant on 45th Street, a few days later. All this sets the stage for Mr. Tofel’s educated guess as to how Crater disappeared, and why some seemed to have little interest in pushing the investigation along too quickly. The author carefully recreates Crater’s actions, but questions remain. What were the voluminous papers Crater and his law clerk burned just before his disappearance? What was the explanation for several large checks written just prior to his disappearance? Why did Crater’s wife withhold from the police for months a letter supposedly written by the judge before his death, which she discovered in their home?After sifting the evidence, Mr. Tofel offers a somewhat prosaic, but not completely improbable, answer. More provocatively, he suggests that Crater may have been implicated in one of the larger scandals of the day: making payoffs in exchange for being named to the bench. Crater, after all, was a player in a judicial system characterized by corruption; it is not improbable he was at least aware of the practice, which received headlines in an investigation conducted by Seabury that same year.Mr. Tofel’s account is just believable enough to have happened. But whether you agree with Mr. Tofel’s explanation of how Judge Crater disappeared or not, and wherever you think he ended up, “Vanishing Point” is a great tale about a New York just beyond our living memory.Mr. Russello last wrote for these pages on Russell Kirk.

Disappearing Acts

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