There Goes Da Judge

JUDGE ALEXANDER HOLTZOFF SERVED ON the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia during the 1950s. He was not known for his sense of humor. However, he did smile whenever a lawyer cited as a persuasive precedent a case from one of the New York state courts. The judge was raised in New York City. He knew all about Tammany Hall’s longstanding corrupt control over the New York state court judgeships, and the strange disappearance of Judge Joseph F. Crater, one of Tammany’s own.

Judge Holtzoff’s smile represented his uncertainty whether the lawyer was naive, or whether the lawyer was joking with the judge.

Richard J. Tofel uses Judge Crater’s disappearance on August 6, 1930, as a pickup for bringing on stage a colorful cast of New York public figures during the 1920s and ’30s. The cast includes Jimmy Walker, New York’s darling roguish mayor, Judge Samuel Seabury, the self-righteous special prosecutor, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who presided over the burial of the old Democratic organization, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the governor of New York who needed, but had no use for, Tammany Hall.

Judge Crater was an insignificant figure when he was alive, but his disappearance has given him as much ink as all the others. He attended Columbia Law School (as did Judge Holtzoff), then hooked up with Tammany Hall and got its support for an appointment to the New York State Supreme Court. While he was alive, Judge Crater was just another judge who, it was assumed, had friends at Tammany Hall. It was not until he disappeared that he became the public figure, the mythical figure, that he continues to be. Even now, police are combing through records and contemplating a new search based on a posthumous letter received recently by the NYPD from a woman who claimed her husband knew who murdered Judge Crater, and when and where he was buried.

The investigation into his disappearance had three working theories. First, Judge Crater had been murdered. Second, he had to get out of town because of his mounting personal problems. Third, he had committed suicide. After his disappearance, there were reports that he had been seen at various places, reports that turned out to be like the sightings of Elvis Presley in the Safeway long after he died. In Judge Crater’s case, however, the mystery continues because he never was heard from again, and there was no corpus delicti.

In time, the newspapers made public everything there was to know about Judge Crater’s bizarre personal life. It turned out that he had large, unexplainable bank accounts. He had connections with New York’s criminal element. He had a fondness for Broadway showgirls, and he was on a first-name basis with Polly Adler, proprietor of an upscale Manhattan brothel and, subsequently, author of A House Is Not a Home (1953). The manipulation of his bank accounts gave rise to an inference that he was putting money in place to square things with Tammany Hall for getting him the judgeship.

The investigation of Tammany Hall led to Mayor Jimmy Walker. James J. Walker was the embodiment of New York in the Roaring Twenties. He was born in Greenwich Village in 1881. He first gained public notice as a songwriter. In 1908, he wrote “Will You Love Me in December As You Did in May?” It was an immediate smash hit. He played the piano. He had a passable singing voice, and he was quick with a wisecrack. He had a desire to show off. Despite these theatrical gifts, he decided to go to law school. Thereafter, he went into law practice and hooked up with Tammany Hall as a source of business. That connection brought him along in various political offices and to the State Senate. In 1925, Tammany ran him for mayor of New York. He won.

He, like Judge Crater, liked the company of showgirls. In the first year of his mayoralty, he commenced an affair with Betty Compton, star of

Oh, Kay! (1926) and Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929). This affair, which became public, combined with Jimmy Walker’s other problems, overlapped the ongoing Crater/Tammany Hall investigations conducted by Special Prosecutor Samuel Seabury.

Like Judge Crater, Jimmy Walker had unexplainable big-money bank accounts. In order to explain it, he had to resort to a variation of the so-called “little tin box defense.” Thomas M. Farley, a Tammany insider, was sheriff of New York County in the early ’30s. In the investigation of corruption that led to Walker’s resignation, Judge Seabury discovered that Farley had deposited close to $400,000 in his bank accounts over a six-year period. His total salary for that time was $90,000.

Here is Seabury’s cross-examination of Farley:

The 1959 musical Fiorello! has a clever song called “In a Little Tin Box.”

After Mayor Walker was questioned by Judge Seabury, he appeared on the courthouse steps to meet his friends in the press. “Boys,” he said, “I’ve learned you do three things in life alone. You are born alone. You die alone. And unfortunately, you testify alone.” He changed this quotation when he heard a vaudevillian say that “the first time I opened my eyes in this world I found myself in bed with a strange woman.” In later renditions Walker dropped “You are born alone” and substituted “You putt alone,” accompanied by a Johnny Carson-style golf swing. He resigned as mayor in 1932 and took off for Europe with Betty Compton.

Bob Hope played the lead in the 1957 movie about Jimmy Walker called Beau James. It is a mistake to dismiss Hope as a mechanical joke-telling machine. Long before he adopted that role he was a talented song-and-dance man appearing in vaudeville and musical comedy between the wars. If you want to know what those days were really like, take a trip to the Library of Congress in Washington and visit the Bob Hope vaudeville exhibit, where you will find the stars performing on old restored film clips. You will see Eddie Cantor singing “Making Whoopee,” which alone is worth the trip.

You might even get a glimpse of one or two of the showgirls who kept company with Judge Crater.

Jacob Stein practices law in Washington, D.C.