History Book: New York mysteries

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Monday, August 4th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Up next, the WORLD History Book. Today, three stories from New York City. A flight attendant’s job tips him over the edge and a famous detective meets a deadly end.

REICHARD: But first, the cold case of the “missingest man in New York.”

Here’s WORLD’s Paul Butler.

PAUL BUTLER: We begin today on August 6th, 1930, New York State Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater gets into a cab near Manhattan's Times Square. He’s never seen again.

JOHN TEFFT: The disappearance of Crater is huge. It's probably the equivalent of a Jimmy Hoffa or even Amelia Earhart.

Retired detective John Tefft is a Crater case enthusiast and was featured in a History Channel documentary on his disappearance.

So who was Joseph Crater? He was the son of Irish immigrants. His father owned a produce market and orchard. But Joseph had other aspirations: the law. He graduated from Columbia University in 1916. He began as a humble clerk but worked his way up to becoming a successful lawyer.

Crater met his wife Stella while in college. She was married at the time and he helped her get a divorce. The two tied the knot in 1917. Crater became well connected politically in New York City and caught the eye of Governor Franklin D Roosevelt, who appointed Crater to the state bench in 1930.

Crater was associated with the corrupt Tammany Hall and its political machine. Many believe Crater essentially paid for his position on the court. It was not his only scandal. He was often seen in public with women, not his wife.

JOHN TEFFT: And it's not uncommon for him to sometimes be gone for several days at a time with other women.

While vacationing with his wife in August 1930, he received a call from New York. When he hung up all he told Stella that he needed to return to “straighten a few guys out.” He promised to be back in Maine by her birthday the week following.

His clerk later told authorities that while Crater was in New York the judge destroyed documents, moved files from his office to his apartment, and made arrangements to withdraw $5,000 from his bank account.

Then on August 6th he ate a meal with a lawyer friend and a showgirl at one of his usual haunts. When he left dinner, he got into a cab and disappeared, though it wasn’t reported for days.

Many of his friends thought he’d returned to his vacation with his wife, she thought he was still taking care of business in New York when he didn’t return for her birthday Stella began making calls, but no one seemed that willing to talk. Historian Sami Jarroush from the same History Channel documentary:

SAMI JARROUSH: They honestly don't really know where he is, but they're just assuming that he's off with one of his girlfriends…

Eventually it got out that Judge Crater was missing. Some thought he fled the country with a mistress. Others believed it was foul play.

By September a dramatic manhunt began. City detectives fielded more than 16,000 tips from around the country and the world, all dead ends.

The disappearance and resulting investigation filled newspapers and became an international story, leading to a popular culture reference to “pulling a Crater”... synonymous for going AWOL.

Officials declared Crater legally dead on June 6th, 1939, and forty years later, the state closed Missing Persons File No. 13595. A letter unearthed in 2005 claimed that he had been killed by a cop and his cabby brother, then buried at the current site of the New York Aquarium. But no remains were ever found, and 90 years after his disappearance, his ultimate end remains a mystery.

Speaking of mysteries, next, the death of a famous detective on August 6th, 50 years ago. The New York Times bestowed a high honor by publishing his obituary on the front page.

NYT OBITUARY: At the end of his life, he was arthritic and had a bad heart. He was in a wheelchair often, and was carried from his bedroom to the public lounge at Styles Court, a nursing home in Essex, wearing a wig and false mustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity.

Why was it such an honor? Well, he wasn’t actually a real detective.

NYT OBITUARY: His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, his creator, was one of the most illustrious in fiction.

Poirot rose to fame as the dignified, charming protagonist of Christie’s crime novels. She hated him, saying his character was “insufferable.” But her devoted readers loved him. And when Christie announced she was killing him off, New York Times book critic Thomas Lask had to honor his memory.

Poirot died of a heart condition at the end of Christie’s detective novel Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. And it was the first, and last, time the New York Times published an obit of a fictional character.

Finally, fifteen years ago, flight attendant Steven Slater quits his job in a fit of rage and literally takes the emergency exit. Audio from Daily Mail World.

DAILY MAIL WORLD: Outside his home in New York City, neighbors say he did what a lot of people think about doing … but don’t.

The August 9th JetBlue flight from Pittsburgh to New York City began like any other.

But it didn’t end like one.

Slater was onboard, a 20 year veteran of the skies. And he was a little tipsy during the trip. Audio from an ABC News interview with Slater.

SLATER: Truthfully, I will admit that it was one of those days that drove me to drink and I admit that I did have a little sip.

But Slater had more than just a sip. While the plane taxied to a terminal at the John F. Kennedy Airport, he claimed that a passenger tried to get out of her seat and grab her luggage in the overhead compartment. After Slater told her not to. She snapped at him, and her luggage fell, hitting Slater in the head.

So, he grabbed the microphone for the overhead PA system and started cursing at her.

SLATER: I was angry, I was in a little bit of a state of rage. I’d had it. I was absolutely done at that moment.

Slater swiped two cans of beer from the beverage cart, and pulled the lever for the inflatable emergency slide. Then he slid down, threw his uniform tie on the tarmac, walked calmly to his Jeep, and drove back to his house in Queens.

Slater became an overnight sensation. Many blue-collar Americans considered him a folk hero. And late night TV show hosts joked about his great escape, like Jimmy Kimmel.

JIMMY KIMMEL: If we all had an inflatable escape slide at our jobs, I bet 80% of us would escape like that.

And Jay Leno.

JAY LENO: Anybody out there looking for jobs, there’s an opening for flight attendant at JetBlue, that’s right!

Others criticized Slater’s behavior. JetBlue fired him, and he only narrowly avoided prison. Investigators determined his account of the tussle with a female passenger was false.

Slater later encouraged people not to praise his actions, and instead see them as a cautionary tale.

SLATER: Address your concerns, address your issues, work to the best of your ability to better your position … but keep it in check.

For WORLD, I’m Paul Butler with reporting from Emma Eicher.

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