The disappearance of Judge Joseph Crater nearly 75 years ago led to one of the most famous missing-persons cases of the 20th century. In his new book, published next month by Ivan R. Dee, the assistant publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Richard Tofel, tells this amazing story. This is the final of three excerpts from “Vanishing Point” appearing in The New York Sun.

Polly Adler was perhaps the leading madam in the New York of 1930.

She was born Pearl Adler in the White Russian town of Yanow, near the Polish border, in 1900, the oldest of nine children. Young Pearl was sent alone to America by her parents at the age of twelve, and lived for two years with friends of friends in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She left there for the home of distant relatives in Brooklyn at the age of fourteen, and went to work in factories. At eighteen she was the victim of what we would now call “Date rape” by her supervisor, became pregnant, and had an abortion. By the time she was twenty, she was sharing a room in Manhattan with a woman who introduced her to opium parties.

But Adler, by now known as “Polly” rather than Pearl, was ambitious and strong-willed. She chose commerce over drugs and alcohol, and was set up in her next apartment by a gangster who soon became the backer of her first venture into prostitution, and her first customer as well. Adler was never a prostitute herself, but by 1922 she had amassed about $6,000 in savings (about $65,000 today) from her new work. She tried to use this nest egg to fund a lingerie shop, but it failed, and in 1923 she returned to life as a madam.

Through the 1920s Adler’s business thrived, and she prospered. She was occasionally raided, and sometimes arrested, but never prosecuted or convicted of anything. She moved from one good Manhattan address to another better one; in 1927 she set up shop in an apartment at Fifty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue. By her own later account, her customers included George McManus (the man who had shot Arnold Rothstein), the owner of one of the American League baseball clubs, a leading boxer, a chain store magnate, the noted writers Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman, and any number of public officials and other Tammany figures.

That was where the life of Polly Adler stood on August 6, 1930.

Much later, when she had “retired,’ Adler, with the unacknowledged assistance of the novelist Virginia Faulkner, wrote a memoir, “A House Is Not a Home,” in which this remarkable life is detailed. Meyer Berger of the New York Times wrote that “The personal experience story Miss Adler tells – or more likely, has had someone put down for her – had better have been left unrecorded.” But “A House Is Not a Home” became the tenth-best-selling nonfiction work of 1953.

A gossip column-style “blind item” in a 1960 book, however, indicates that there may have been more to Adler’s story. One “theory” on Crater’s disappearance, it indicates, had been “already set in type” but “was sliced out of the autobiography of one of New York’s celebrated house-is-not-a-home madams.” Why the passage would have been excised is not clear, but what it purportedly said is laid out, albeit continuing in the same sort of purpose prose:

“Crater suffered a fatal heart attack at the moment of peak enjoyment while indulging in the unique pleasures of the establishment. Thrown into a state of terror by the demise of such an important man on her premises, the madam appealed hysterically to underworld friends. They removed the body, giving it a full cement-coffin burial in the Hudson River.”

Allen Churchill, the author who passed along this “theory” decades ago, dismissed it in his next paragraph on the grounds that it should not have been necessary to make the body disappear. But if Polly Adler did include this account in the manuscript of “A House Is Not a Home,” as it seems Churchill believed she had, this dismissal seems misplaced.

The Adler story squares with all of the evidence in the Crater case. First, Crater’s casual relationships with numerous showgirls and his visits to places such as Club Abbey and similar clubs in Atlantic City make clear that frequenting a house of prostitution would hardly have been out of character for him.

Next this would logically complete the timeline of Crater’s activities on the evening of August 6. He might have walked from Billy Haas’s restaurant to see the last act of Dancing Partner nearby, which would explain both why no taxi driver ever came forward to say that he had picked up Crater in front of the restaurant and how the ticket left for him by the Arrow agency was picked up. Following the show, Crater might have gone to Club Abbey and from there to Polly Adler’s apartment a few blocks away, or directly to Adler’s. Perhaps Crater had then intended to slip away for a few days or weeks, or perhaps he simply hadn’t yet figured out how to deal with the pressure, or “weariness,” he was feeling as the Libby Hotel transaction came under scrutiny and judgeship-buying allegations dominated the front pages.

With respect to the disposal of Crater’s body, there is no question that Polly Adler knew men who could have and would have attended to this for her. For one, in later years, her leading patron was Dutch Schulz. Adler insists that she did not meet Schulz until June 1931, and that may be so. But even if it is, making a judge who died in the act while investigations of judicial corruption swirled around him literally disappear most certainly would have been in her interest. And, if she had done so, rumors of it would almost certainly have reached Crater’s associates, explaining why they quickly concluded that he was dead – and the less investigated, the better.

In the published version of “A House Is Not a Home,” Adler did make one reference to Judge Joseph Crater. In a book of clear sentences and plain meaning, she used an unusual turn of phrase, perhaps one with multiple meanings. Crater, she wrote, was “apparently overmastered by a disinclination to stand up and be counted.”

As inquiries into various sorts of corruption intensified in November 1930, Polly Adler received a warning of an impending raid, and then advice that she leave town for a while. She did so, and didn’t return until May 1931. The day after she came back to New York she was subpoenaed by Samuel Seabury’s investigators. She spent much of a month testifying. Although she steadfastly refused to name her clients, a policeman who had been her silent partner was unmasked and forced to resign from the NYPD. But Adler was back in business by July 1931, and remained so until the end of World War II. Investigators shifted their attention to other matters.