Judge Joseph Force Crater

For decades after 1930, if someone in America didn’t show up when they were supposed to, people would joke: “Judge Crater, call your office.”

Nightclub comedians used the line. It appeared in cartoons and newspaper columns. It became part of the American language, so familiar that people who’d never heard of the case knew what it meant. For half a century, Joseph Force Crater was known as “the missingest man in New York.”

He walked out of a restaurant on a hot summer night, got into a taxi — or maybe he didn’t — and vanished.

The Judge

Joseph Force Crater was forty-one years old in 1930, a tall, elegant, well-connected lawyer who had recently been appointed to the New York State Supreme Court by Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was a law professor, a skilled political operator, and a loyal member of Tammany Hall, the powerful and famously corrupt Democratic political machine that ran New York City.

He was married to Stella Crater, and the couple had a summer home in Belgrade Lakes, Maine. He also, it later came out, had a fondness for nightlife, Broadway shows and showgirls.

The Summer

In the summer of 1930, Judge Crater was spending his vacation with his wife in Maine when, in late July, he received a phone call. He told Stella he had to go back to New York to “straighten those fellows out.” He didn’t explain who he meant. He promised to be back in a few days.

On the morning of August 6, Crater went to his office at the courthouse. He spent hours going through his files. He had his assistant carry several bundles of documents out to his apartment. He also had his assistant cash two checks at the bank for him, totaling more than five thousand dollars — a large sum in 1930. He put the money in his pockets.

That evening, he went to a theater ticket agency and bought a single ticket for a Broadway comedy called Dancing Partner, playing that night. Then he went to dinner at Billy Haas’s chophouse on West 45th Street, where he ran into a lawyer friend, William Klein, who was dining with a showgirl named Sally Lou Ritz. Crater joined them.

They ate together and talked. Crater seemed relaxed and in good spirits. At around 9:30 p.m., they left the restaurant. According to Klein and Ritz, Crater got into a taxi on the street outside, waved goodbye, and was driven off toward the theater.

That was the last confirmed sighting of Judge Crater.

Missing

The strange thing about the Crater case is how long it took for anyone to raise the alarm.

When Crater didn’t return to Maine, his wife wasn’t immediately alarmed; he had told her he might be delayed. She began making calls to his friends, who told her not to worry and not to go to the police. Crater’s political friends seemed to want to keep the matter quiet. It wasn’t until early September — nearly a month after he disappeared — that his absence was reported to the police.

By then, the news exploded. Crater’s disappearance became one of the biggest stories in the country. It happened at a moment when Tammany Hall was under investigation for corruption, and many people believed that a judge with secrets had either fled or been silenced.

The Theories

Investigators spent years on the case. A grand jury heard testimony from nearly a hundred witnesses. Thousands of tips poured in from around the world. There were sightings of Crater in Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean and all over the United States.

Some believed Crater had fled to avoid being implicated in Tammany Hall’s corruption — perhaps to escape testimony about how he obtained his judgeship. There were rumors that he had paid a large sum, about a year’s salary, for the appointment.

Some believed he had been murdered by gangsters, or by people who feared what he might say.

Some believed he had been killed by someone connected to his romantic life. Investigators learned that he had been involved with a showgirl who was being blackmailed by a gangster.

And some believed he had simply died — of natural causes, perhaps in the company of someone who didn’t want to explain how he got there — and that his body was disposed of to avoid scandal.

The Envelope

In January 1931, months after the disappearance, Stella Crater found something in her home in New York. In a dresser drawer that police had searched earlier, she discovered an envelope addressed to her in her husband’s handwriting. Inside were checks, stocks, bonds and cash, along with a three-page list of people who owed the judge money. At the end of the list, he had written: “I am very weary. Love, Joe.”

No one could explain how the envelope had gotten there, or when it had been placed in the drawer.

Declared Dead

In 1939, Joseph Force Crater was declared legally dead. His wife remarried. The case officially remained open until 1979.

The Letter

In 2005, more than seventy years after the disappearance, the case took one more strange turn.

A woman in New York named Stella Ferrucci-Good died, and left behind a handwritten letter, which her granddaughter brought to the police. In it, she wrote that her late husband had told her that a police officer named Charles Burns, along with Burns’s brother and a cab driver, had killed Judge Crater and buried his body under the boardwalk at Coney Island, near West 8th Street.

That area had been dug up in the 1950s during construction of the New York Aquarium. If anyone had been buried there, the remains would have been removed or lost. Police were never able to confirm the letter’s claims.