On the night of August 6, 1930, Joseph Force Crater, a newly appointed
judge and prominent figure in many circles of Manhattan, hailed a taxi
in the heart of Broadway and vanished into thin air. Despite a
decades-long international manhunt led by the New York Police
Department's esteemed Missing Persons Bureau, the reason for Crater's
disappearance remains a confounding mystery. In the early months of the
investigation, evidence implicated and imperiled New York's top
officials, including then-Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mayor Jimmy
Walker, as well as the city's Tammany Hall political machine, lawyers
and judges, and a theater mogul.
Drawing on new sources, including NYPD case files and court records, and
overlooked evidence discovered years later, Riegel pieces together the
puzzle of what likely happened to Joseph Crater and why. To uncover the
mystery, he delves into Crater's ascension into the scintillating and
corrupt world of Manhattan in the Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age. In
turn, the story of the judge's vanishing amid the Great Depression
unfolds as a harbinger of the disappearance of his lost metropolis and
its transformation into modern-day New York City.