A roadside discovery of the body of a beautiful, would-be starlet; an investigation into a city’s underbelly to find her killer; a cat-and-mouse game between detectives and criminals reminiscent of an early 20th-century detective noir. For many, this may call to mind the 1947 case of the Black Dahlia, a gruesome Los Angeles murder that lives on in the popular imagination. The crime at the center of Michael Wolraich’s The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age occurred 16 years earlier, across the country amid the freewheeling glamour of 1931 New York City, and held the public just as in thrall.
Prohibition helped to nurture corruption throughout the government of New York, with the political machine of the Democratic Party, Tammany Hall, holding crucial positions in its fist. As America was pivoting from the glitter and excess of the Jazz Age to the scarcity of the Great Depression, the organization increasingly demanded loyalty, including from one Franklin D. Roosevelt, a young, charismatic politician with aspirations to the governorship of New York.
With a concise voice schooled by years of reporting, Wolraich describes how the Tammany Hall empire of power began to teeter when Vivian Gordon was found strangled by the side of the road in Van Cortlandt Park. As police sought to learn more about the victim, details emerged: She was a small-time starlet, she had gangster ties, she made a living by blackmailing the wealthy men who hired her for sex work—and she had been days away from delivering damning information about the police, the courts and politicians to Samuel Seabury, a former judge charged with investigating corruption in the city. So straight-laced and impervious to corruption himself that he was nicknamed “The Bishop,” Seabury posed the first legitimate threat to Tammany Hall. Gordon’s murder became the catalyst for a series of events that would change the face of New York City forever.
In this meticulously drawn account of the crusade against unscrupulous characters deeply embedded in the halls of power, The Bishop and the Butterfly shares a glimpse into a fight for decency and fairness that continues to this day.
