Joseph Crater was about to make a dramatic exit.

Wednesday, August 6, 1930 was a hot and humid day in New York City.

Joseph Force Crater was 41 years old and one of the city's most prominent and well-connected judges,

serving on the Supreme Court of New York County.

He was also a bit of a playboy.

On this steamy morning, Judge Crater was frantically rifling through papers in his office

at the New York County Courthouse on Center Street in Lower Manhattan.

He filled up his waistbasket several times with discarded documents. He had planned to

still be with his wife Stella up at their summer cottage in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, but a few days

before, he'd received an urgent phone call, after which he told Stella that he'd be returning

to New York in the morning by train, because as he told her,

I've got to straighten those fellows out.

Stella went along with it.

She'd learned not to ask too many questions.

She'd watched her husband's rapid assent in New York's legal world.

He'd worked for the state's current senator, Robert Wagner,

and he became one of Tammany Hall's most trusted legal advisors, and his loyalties had paid off.

Just a few months before, he had been appointed a justice on the New York Supreme Court

by New York's governor, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

And the job paid very well, $23,000 a year, or about $450,000 a year today.

Now this was an interim appointment, but he was now on track to be elected to that position

in the fall, which came with a cushy 14-year term.

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