On August 6th, 1930 a respectable judge in dinner clothes left a Manhattan restaurant, hailed a taxi cab, and disappeared off the face of the earth.

His name was **Judge Joseph Force Crater**. He was a New York State Supreme Court Justice at the age of 41. He was successful, well liked, and well connected to some of the most powerful political entities in NYC.

But he vanished into thin air. Poof. Without a word. Without a trace.

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**Background**

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Joseph Crater put himself through Columbia Law School and cultivated a prosperous career in New York City that was heavily involved with **Tammany Hall**, the NYC Democratic political machine that ran the city for years. Come April of 1930 he was appointed to the NY State Supreme Court bench by none other than Governor **Franklin D. Roosevelt**.

Crater had a wife named **Stella**, lived comfortably in Manhattan, spent summers at his cabin in Maine — everything appeared, to the outside observer, to be rooted down quite nicely.

Except for one wild secret life that he led. And nobody knew about it until he disappeared…

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**Week of Disappearance**

Crater and his wife were spending the summer at his cabin in **Belgrade Lakes, Maine**. He received an unknown phone call on August 3rd. We’ll never know who it was or what was said on the other line. All we know is what happened next.

Crater insisted he needed to return to New York City to take care of business. He would be back in a couple days.

When he got back to NYC he stopped at his courthouse office. Worked for hours going over documents, pulled **$5,150 in cash** from the bank and packed up two large briefcases full of papers to take back to his office. He had someone carry them out to the sidewalk for him.

The briefcases were never recovered.

Neither were the papers.

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**Night He Left**

On the night of August 6th Judge Crater had dinner with some friends at **Billy Haas’s Restaurant** on West 45th Street. He was jovial. Laughing. There was nothing about his demeanor that night that would indicate he was a man about to skip town or a man who was afraid of his life.

After dinner he waved goodbye to his friends outside the restaurant. He walked down the street to the corner and hailed a taxi. He jumped in. The cab drove away into the night.
No one who claimed to have seen him ever saw him again.

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***The Search***

Stella waited in Maine. Days turned into weeks. She didn’t report him missing until **September 3rd** — almost a month after he disappeared.

And what they uncovered when they looked into his life was far more complicated than the tale of a missing judge. He had mistresses. There were rumors of graft and if he bought his judgeship — not unheard of in Tammany Hall politics but certainly not something anyone wanted investigated. He had ties to mobsters in New York who weren’t going to enjoy someone poking around either.

Lines were followed. They all seemed to lead to dirt. None of them led anywhere.

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***The Theories***

There have been three theories floating around for ninety some odd years.

Theory one — he was eliminated by someone or some group with ties to Tammany Hall because he knew too much, owed too much or was simply inconveniencing someone who decided Framton didn’t need to ever come back.

Theory two — he faked his own disappearance. He had the money. He had the connections. A man with enough of both could have literally vanished into thin air back in 1930 in ways that would be impossible now.

Theory three —organized crime knew Crater too well — knew his ties to politics ran too deep to allow him to just simply disappear so they killed him and tossed his body where no one would think to look.

In **2005** a woman in Queens passed away and left behind a note claiming her late husband, a retired cop, knew whodunnit with respect to Crater’s disappearance and that his body was buried underneath the **Coney Island boardwalk. **

The area was searched. Nothing turned up.

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Crater was officially declared dead in **1937. ** Stella lived until **1969,** thirty nine years after her husband got into that cab, never remarried and never stopped wondering what happened to him.

The NYPD officially had the case open for decades. Some say it can still be opened today.

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A well dressed man left a restaurant on West 45th street one summer evening in 1930. He got into a cab and was never heard from again.

His body was never found. The mystery of where he went remains one of New York City’s greatest.

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Judge Joseph Crater · Disappeared August 6, 1930 · Manhattan, NY
Declared dead 1937 · Case unresolved