Devils of New York: The Bishop and The Butterfly Author Michael Wolraich on the Everyday Monsters of History

By Michael Wolraich  |  February 7, 2024 | 11:00am
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Devils of New York: The Bishop and The Butterfly Author Michael Wolraich on the Everyday Monsters of History
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We’re all familiar with the world’s most notorious villains, the brutal dictators and vicious psychopaths who haunt the history books. But for every Adolph Hitler and Charles Manson, there are thousands of lesser villains, neglected or forgotten, who inflicted misery within their own small corners of the world.

Martin Scorsese’s latest cinematic opus, Killers of the Flower Moon, shines a spotlight on one of those “little” devils, a man without conscience who murdered Osage Indians for profit using poison, bullets, and bombs. “This is a story that’s as close to good and evil that I’ve ever reported,” observed David Grann, author of the bestselling history book by the same name on which the film was based.

 Those who have watched the film or read the book know who the culprit was, and I won’t spoil it for the rest. Yet the villain portrayed in the movie, which covers the first two-thirds of the book, wasn’t the only little devil who preyed on the Osage in the 1920s. The last third of Grann’s book exposes a broad conspiracy by many white settlers to murder Osage people for their oil wealth.

“We like to think of crime stories as this one bad thing or person,” Grann explained. “That’s kind of the standard narrative of detective fiction and true crime stories…But this is a story where you begin to realize that that same evil lurked in the heart of so many ordinary people, and that so many people were either committing murders within their own family or they were willing executioners who went along, or they were morticians who covered up the crimes, or they were press or reporters who didn’t cover them, or they were politicians who were profiting from the crimes and ignoring them, or they were lawmen who were getting kickbacks.”

My forthcoming book, The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age, is also full of little devils. Like Grann’s book, this true story unfolds during Prohibition, but it’s set in New York City, about as far as you can get from an Oklahoma prairie. There is only one murder victim, a beautiful woman named Vivian Gordon whose body was discovered in a Bronx park in 1931 with a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. The tabloids dubbed her the “Broadway Butterfly.”

Many of the devils from my book were murder suspects—the boyfriend who manipulated her, the vice cop who framed her, the ex-husband who took her child, the gangsters who owed her money, the madam who exploited her, the businessmen whom she blackmailed. “Vivian was due to get the business,” one suspect opined, “I know a dozen reasons why she might have been rubbed out.”

Yet these people weren’t the most disturbing devils I encountered while researching the book. More nefarious were the public servants tasked with serving and protecting the citizens of New York—the dirty cops, crooked judges, and corrupt officials who abused their authority to enrich themselves at the people’s expense.

Vivian Gordon was one of their victims. Before turning criminal, she’d been an actress and a homemaker with an eight-year-old daughter. On March 9, 1923—coincidentally the same night as the bombing in Osage County, Oklahoma—she was arrested for prostitution under dubious circumstances. The magistrate at the Women’s Court sentenced her to a reformatory upstate though it was her first offense and she had a young child.

“You can’t imagine what I learned at Bedford,” Gordon later wrote her sister. “The class of women there was awful. They showed me and told me how to do everything in the underworld. Dope fiends, blackmail…In my case, the reformatory reformed me from innocence to vice—just contrary to its purpose. Oh, this is a terrible thing! Once branded, they fall deeper and deeper. I know full well the horror of my way of living, but it is the only way I know now, after that terrible experience.” 

Seven years later, in 1930, an anticorruption investigation initiated by then-Governor Franklin Roosevelt, uncovered a ring of vice cops, bondsmen, defense lawyers, and prosecutors who conspired to frame innocent women for prostitution. After making an arrest, the cops would deliver their victim to a bondsman who’d charge the woman an inflated fee and refer her to a defense attorney in the same building. If the woman paid the lawyer’s exorbitant fee, he’d distribute kickbacks to the vice cops and bondsman. Then he’d arrange with the prosecutor to dismiss the case. The unfortunate women who couldn’t afford the legal fees were invariably convicted and sentenced to the reformatory, just like Vivian Gordon.

 Of course, good stories need heroes as well as villains. In Killers of the Flower Moon, the protagonist was Tom White, the dogged F.B.I. agent in a cowboy hat who cracked the case. The hero of The Bishop and the Butterfly wasn’t a rugged lawman like White. Judge Samuel Seabury was an imperious aristocrat, born and bred in New York City. People called him “the Bishop” behind his back, a sly allusion to his pompous manner and his great-grandfather, America’s first Episcopalian bishop. The New Yorker quipped, “When he says, ‘It is raining,’ there is a sonorous majesty to his voice that gives the observation the solemnity of a Papal bull.”

F.D.R. chose Seabury to lead the anticorruption investigation because of his untouchable reputation, but the former judge was also brilliant and tenacious. After uncovering the conspiracy in the Women’s Court, he pursued the trail of corruption through the hierarchy of New York City’s government, exposing shakedowns, graft, and bribery all the way up to the mayor himself, one of the not-so-little devils who mixed power with profit. 

History narratives don’t necessarily end happily. Some of the devils who preyed on the Osage were convicted and imprisoned, but many more evaded punishment, and the terror depicted in Killers of the Flower Moon left permanent scars on the Osage people. The tale of The Bishop and the Butterfly also contains sadness and frustration, but the final outcome was favorable for the citizens of New York. The crooked mayor and the corrupt regime that had dominated the city for a century were finally deposed. The new mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, cast the devils out of city government, and New York City was reborn, a modern majestic metropolis.

Michael Wolraich is the author of The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age (Union Square & Co., February 6, 2024).

 
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