Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

“The 1931 murder of 'Broadway Butterfly' Vivian Gordon exposed an explosive story of graft, corruption and entrapment that went all the way to the top of the state. Wolraich brings a journalist’s eye and a novelist’s elegance to this story of Jazz Age New York.”—New York Times Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Led by the imperious Judge Samuel Seabury, the commission had uncovered a police conspiracy to frame women as prostitutes. Had Vivian Gordon been executed to bury her secrets? As FDR pressed the police to solve her murder, Judge Seabury pursued the trail of corruption to the top of Gotham’s powerful political machine—the infamous Tammany Hall.
Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks filled with hundreds of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters, and bootleggers. And something else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by the governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Led by the imperious Judge Samuel Seabury, the commission had uncovered a police conspiracy to frame women as prostitutes; many suspected that Vivian Gordon had been executed to bury her secrets. As FDR pressed the police to solve her murder, Judge Seabury doggedly pursued the trail of corruption to the top of Gotham’s powerful political machine—the infamous Tammany Hall. A final dramatic showdown between Seabury and playboy mayor Jimmy Walker precipitated Tammany’s downfall and cleared the way for FDR’s presidency.