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.

Looks at the life and times of Judge Crater, a New York State Supreme Court justice who disappeared in 1930.

In September 1939, as a 10 year-old boy, Michal Giedroyc watched the Russian security police seize his home in Eastern Poland. His father, a senator and judge, was imprisoned while his mother, with Michal and his two sisters, were left on the streets of the local town to fend for themselves. Later they were transported in cattle trucks to the wastes of Soviet Siberia, with hundreds of thousands of other deportees. "Here, by the will of the rulers of the Soviet Empire, we were to toil and die." Eighteen months of deprivation and hunger on a collective farm brought them to the brink of extinction. Exhausted, half starved, and ill, Michal's mother and her children set off on a second grueling journey that would take them across Central Asia to Persia, the Middle East, and finally England. In one dramatic incident their survival hinged remarkably on the just two simple objects—a potato and a penknife.

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.

The lawyer's trade--from its noblest moments to its greatest blunders--is examined with rigor, insight, and wit by one of America's foremost commentators on the law, New York Times columnist David Margolick.

From the New York Times bestselling author of I Was Anastasia and The Frozen River comes a “genuinely surprising whodunit” (USA Today) that tantalizingly reimagines a scandalous murder mystery that rocked the nation. One summer night in 1930, Judge Joseph Crater steps into a New York City cab and is never heard from again. Behind this great man are three women, each with her own tale to tell: Stella, his fashionable wife, the picture of propriety; Maria, their steadfast maid, indebted to the judge; and Ritzi, his showgirl mistress, willing to seize any chance to break out of the chorus line. As the twisted truth emerges, Ariel Lawhon’s wickedly entertaining debut mystery transports us into the smoky jazz clubs, the seedy backstage dressing rooms, and the shadowy streets beneath the Art Deco skyline. Don't miss Ariel Lawhon's new book, The Frozen River!

"Here is a work that emphasizes the full view of the lives of those young people that Gacy took. . . . It is essentially the Gacy story in reverse. Victims first." —Jeff Coen, author of Murder in Canaryville As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978–79, he became known as one of many so-called "sex murderers" who had begun gaining notoriety in the random brutality of the 1970s. As public interest grew rapidly, victims became footnotes and statistics, lives lost not just to violence, but to history. Through the testimony of siblings, parents, friends, lovers, and other witnesses close to the case, Boys Enter the House retraces the footsteps of these victims as they make their way to the doorstep of the Gacy house itself.

*Includes pictures *Profiles Spangler's life and looks at the theories and suspects regarding her disappearance *Includes online resources, footnotes, and a bibliography for further reading "Can't wait any longer, Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away," - An unfinished letter found in Spangler's purse after her disappearance The Hollywood culture of the 1940s served as a symbol of fantasy for a country at war. The American population, steeped in a dark global reality, lived vicariously through the film industry's fantasy offerings on the big screen, and eagerly embraced the advent of television in the latter part of the decade. On the stage, images of idealized feminine beauty thrived in the Ziegfeld Follies tradition, Radio City Music Hall, Las Vegas, and the fantastical world created by Earl Carroll in his Hollywood theater. The marketing of American fantasy made for a spectacular outward show, but the interior of Hollywood's entertainment industry was at the same time experiencing its most corrupt decade. Mob bosses vied for power over the drug, alcohol, prostitution, and "protection" markets interconnected with the larger Hollywood image, and for women trying to get ahead in the movie or stage business, the environment was a dangerous one. Beauties came from all over the country to take their chance with fame, but for several, being abducted and gruesomely murdered was the best they could do to attain name recognition. Beginning with the mid-decade murder of actress Elizabeth Short, dubbed the Black Dahlia, a series of murders thought to be the serial work of one perpetrator became emblematic of Hollywood's hidden dangers. The mysterious case of actress and dancer Jean Spangler remains one of the most enduring such riddles in the annals of Hollywood crime. The nature of the case itself still evokes a public fascination many decades after her disappearance. Spangler found herself in southern California as a beautiful actress and dancer trying to land movie roles, a common story among the many young women gravitating to American entertainment centers from more conservative towns and cities. As a high-profile celebrity event, Spangler's case does not match the sensationalism attributed to figures such as Amelia Earhart, who sought to circumnavigate the globe by air, the political importance of union boss Jimmy Hoffa, or the fate of Judge Crater, a likely victim of the New York underworld. However, the Spangler story differs in that it carries no dearth of rational possibilities or relevant clues with which to accommodate all of the leading theories. In fact, in the minds of investigators, the difficulty of finding the best path to pursue was that there were "too many good clues, pointing in different directions." Likewise, where Earhart, Hoffa, and Crater intentionally pursued goals with inherent hazards, Spangler was publicly perceived as a professional if not personal innocent, hoping to make a living and to be discovered for greater things. The Disappearance of Jean Spangler: The History of One of Hollywood's Most Enduring Unsolved Mysteries looks at the life of Jean Spangler and the mysterious events behind her disappearance. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Jean Spangler like never before, in no time at all.

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Soon to be an FX Docuseries from Emmy® Award-Winning Producer Marc Smerling (The Jinx) featuring the author Errol Morris! Academy Award–winning filmmaker Errol Morris examines one of the most notorious and mysterious murder trials of the twentieth century In this profoundly original meditation on truth and the justice system, Errol Morris—a former private detective and director of The Thin Blue Line—delves deeply into the infamous Jeffrey MacDonald murder case. MacDonald, whose pregnant wife and two young daughters were brutally murdered in 1970, was convicted of the killings in 1979 and remains in prison today. The culmination of an investigation spanning over twenty years and a masterly reinvention of the true-crime thriller, A Wilderness of Error is a shocking book because it shows that everything we have been told about the case is deeply unreliable and that crucial elements of case against MacDonald are simply not true.