The Bishop and the Butterfly

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 journalists eye and a novelists 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 namesbusinessmen, 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 Gothams powerful political machinethe infamous Tammany Hall.