In the 1930s, New York City was at the height of its heyday.
Its population was booming, the world was watching Wall Street, and the city had become Franklin Roosevelt’s poster child for New Deal spending. This was the age of Tammany Hall, perhaps the most notorious cabal of corrupt politicians in American history.
In this New York, run by influence and connections, Joseph Force Crater worked his way from a lowly clerking job to catching the eye of Roosevelt, and, on April 6, 1930, the president appointed Crater as judge of New York’s Supreme Court.
Crater wasn’t there because of his virtue or honesty — he had allegedly paid off the Tammany Hall gang to get his position. He was the kind of guy who kept a mistress around and owned a 5th Ave. apartment and vacation home in Maine.
On Aug. 3, 1930, Crater and his wife were vacationing at that home in Maine when he informed her that he would have to return to the city to take care of some business. He promised that he would return on Aug. 9, her birthday.
From this point on, Crater began acting suspiciously. His law clerk reported that, on the morning of Aug. 6, he stopped at his office, destroyed several documents, moved others to his apartment, and cashed two checks worth more than $90,000 in today’s money.
According to witnesses, he was apparently in high spirits, buying a ticket to an evening Broadway comedy show and sharing a meal with his lawyer and friend William Klein and one of his mistresses, Sally Lou Ritz. That was the last time he was seen.
Initially, nobody seemed to have noticed that he had disappeared — until he failed to show up for his wife’s birthday three days later. His wife called a few close friends and associates to ask if they had seen him, but although none of them could tell her where to find him, she didn’t go to the police.
Nobody seems to have been concerned enough to look for him until Aug. 25, when he failed to show up at court. On Sept. 3, the story finally broke in newspapers, and it became the talk of the town — Crater was immediately dubbed “the missingest man” in New York City.
The resulting public investigation into his disappearance didn’t clear anything up. At first, Ritz and Klein said that they had last seen Crater entering a cab when leaving the restaurant, but they later changed their story, claiming that they had entered the cab and Crater had walked down the street. The documents Crater had stored in his 5th Ave. apartment completely vanished. In 1939, Crater’s wife had him declared legally dead and then claimed life insurance.
Crater’s disappearance became another unsolved mystery in New York City’s history until 2005, when a woman in Queens died, leaving behind a handwritten letter that exposed her husband, a policeman, and his brother, a cab driver, as the culprits. They had murdered Crater and buried him at the current site of the New York Aquarium.
We’ll never know if her letter is accurate — the aquarium was already built, and any trace of Crater’s body is long gone. But his disappearance left a mark on the English language. Although it is uncommonly used today, “Pulling a Crater” came to mean disappearing without a trace.
This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way, on Aug. 6, 2023.
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