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

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

Michael Wolraich
$28.99
Publication Date: February 6th, 2024
Publisher:
Union Square & Co.
ISBN:
9781454948025
Pages:
352
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Description

"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.

About the Author

Michael Wolraich is the author of the critically acclaimed Unreasonable Men (2014) and Blowing Smoke (2010). His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, New York magazine, Reuters, and CNN, and he is the founder and editor of dagblog.com. Wolraich grew up in Iowa and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts before falling in love with New York City, where he has lived since 2000.