Tammany Hall, FDR & the Murder of Vivian Gordon

Kelly  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode. And please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too.

Less than two weeks after George Washington's inauguration in 1789, a New York City upholsterer named William Mooney founded the Society of St. Tammany, taking their name from Delaware chief Tamanend. The Tammany Society was designed partly as a more democratic foil to the elitist Society of the Cincinnati, which was mostly open only to military officers of the Continental Army, and then their descendants. Notably, while the second president of the Society of the Cincinnati was Alexander Hamilton, who succeeded first President George Washington, Aaron Burr steered the development of the Tammany Society into a political machine during the election of 1800. Within a few decades, the Tammany society had basically taken over the Democratic Party in New York City. Although at its founding, Tammany stood for so called "pure Americans," the Tammany Society embraced the tide of Irish immigrants flooding into New York City in the mid 19th century, perhaps realizing that welcoming these immigrants could turn them into loyal Tammany voters. Whatever the motive, Tammany helped Irish immigrants find shelter and employment and assisted in their process of becoming naturalized citizens. Tammany Hall wasn't purely a philanthropic organization, though. Its leaders, especially William "Boss" Tweed, in the 1860s and early 1870s, often used their political power for personal enrichment. Tweed was eventually convicted of stealing an estimated 30 to $200 million from the city and its taxpayers via political corruption. But Tammany survived his downfall. In 1928, Tammany favorite, Al Smith, then Governor of New York, was nominated by the Democratic Party, as its candidate for US president. Smith convinced a reluctant Franklin Roosevelt, who wanted to continue his physical therapy in Georgia, to run for governor of New York to replace him. Early in his career in the state legislature, Roosevelt had styled himself as an anti machine progressive reformer, but he and Smith had developed a friendship after Roosevelt's offer to campaign for Smith in the 1918 gubernatorial race. Despite their differences, Roosevelt saw the effectiveness of Smith's pragmatic approach to social reform, for instance, after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, when Smith and Robert F. Wagner chaired the New York State Factory Investigating committee. Moreover, Roosevelt was ambitious, and he knew that his ability to win statewide and eventually nationwide, may be dependent on at least making peace with Tammany. Smith lost his bid for President to Herbert Hoover, while Roosevelt won the governorship over Republican, Albert Ottinger, by a slim margin of just over 25,000 votes out of the more than 4 million cast. After Roosevelt's reelection in 1930, he could no longer ignore the Tammany corruption in New York City, where elected officials were appointing their friends to powerful positions where they could in turn steer business to themselves or their friends, and where they would be in a position to accept bribes. After the high profile robbery of New York City Judge Albert H. Vitale, and the subsequent revelations about his apparent corruption, the New York State Legislature formed a committee to investigate the magistrate courts. Roosevelt appointed ex Judge of the Court of Appeals, and anti Tammany Democrat, Samuel Seabury to investigate. Seabury, who was on vacation in London with his wife when he learned from a reporter that he had been appointed, cut short his vacation and headed back to New York to get to work. On the morning of Thursday, February 26, 1931, police were called to investigate a body that had been found in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. The victim, a petite redhead, had apparently been beaten and strangled with a piece of rope. She was identified as Vivian Gordon, an escort and blackmailer. She was also connected to the Seabury investigation. Three weeks earlier, Gordon had written to the commission, and just five days before she was killed, Gordon met with Irving Ben Cooper, a lawyer on Seabury's team to tell the story of her wrongful arrest in 1923. Gordon said she would return with corroborating evidence, but she died before she got the chance. In 1923, Vice Patrolmen, Andrew J. McLaughlin had arrested Gordon, who was previously known as Benita Bischoff, near Franklin. She was arrested at the Langwell Hotel, and he charged her with prostitution. Gordon claims that the arrest was a setup done at the behest of her husband John Bischoff, who she was in the process of divorcing at the time. When she was convicted and sentenced to prison, she lost custody of their daughter. By 1931, Gordon was entangled in the New York City crime world, and there was no shortage of suspects who may have wondered her dead. The investigation into her murder, though, highlighted the corruption in New York City Government. Seabury didn't investigate the murder itself, but he and his commission did follow up on that 1923 arrest, finding that McLaughlin had deposited $35,800 into his account over two years, a sum that was more than 10 times his annual salary. Gordon's sentencing to two years in prison was unusual for a first time offender, leading to questions of whether judges were issuing lighter sentences only to those who paid them. With public outcry at a fever pitch, the City Affairs Committee called for Mayor Jimmy Walker, a flamboyant Tammany favorite, to resign. Walker, on vacation in California, denied the charges of corruption and refused to step aside. The public clamor for answers though, led Roosevelt to expand the scope of Seabury's investigation to include police corruption. This expanded investigation touched on Mayor Walker as well, in the face of evidence that Walker had accepted sizable sums of money from people seeking municipal contracts. Roosevelt, who was by then the Democratic nominee for president, finally demanded that Walker step down. Walker resigned on September 1, 1932, fleeing to Europe to avoid criminal prosecution. Two men who were part of Gordon's criminal circle, were tried for Gordon's murder, which they may have committed on the orders of John Radeloff, Gordon's lawyer and erstwhile boyfriend. However, the two were acquitted in what a Bronx District Attorney called, "a gross miscarriage of justice." In the end, no one faced justice for Gordon's murder. But the investigation changed the history of New York politics. On November 7, 1933, anti Tammany Republican, Fiorello LaGuardia, with the support of Samuel Seabury, won election to be mayor of New York City, a role he would keep for the next 12 years. Joining me now is writer Michael Wolraich, author of, "The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age."

Hi, Michael, thanks so much for joining me today.

Michael Wolraich  10:54  
Hi, Kelly, thanks so much for having me on.

Kelly  10:56  
Yes, I'm excited to talk to you. So I want to start by asking how you got interested in this topic and decided to write this book?

Michael Wolraich  11:07  
Yeah, so I was, I was looking for a topic to write about after after, my last book was about was called, "Unreasonable Man." It was about Theodore Roosevelt and the birth of the progressive movement. And it can be tricky writing about,  writing about political history, because, you know, people tend to only read about, about the big famous names: Theodore Roosevelt, FDR, Kennedy, people like that. But those people have also been written about to death, so that it's hard to find kind of a unique angle, or you know, why, why am I writing this book? So I decided to dig in a little bit into FDR's time as governor, because, you know, much has been written about his presidency, not not as much about his four years as Governor of New York State. And there's a reason for that. He didn't, he didn't do a lot during this time. But as I was digging into it, I started looking into the Seabury investigations, which, which he initiated and he had a complicated relationship with those that we'll probably talk about. But he did, he kicked off those investigations into the corruption in New York City and Tammany Hall. And so I'm digging more into these and thinking about this as a topic and came across this name, Vivian Gordon, who was a victim of a murder in the Bronx in 1931. And I had never heard of her and she seemed almost barely to exist on the internet or anywhere else, really not in the history books. So I dug into her. And it turned out that she had this really fascinating story, and in fact, played this fairly significant role in these investigations that changed the face of New York and changed New York politics and had so much impact on on FDR. So then I, you know, so I was like, wow, this is a great story, this is you've got the sexiness, you've got the you've got the true crime to kind of build suspense and bring people along. And at the same time, I can weave in the politics and the political history, which is my wheelhouse, to give people both stories. And I modeled it a bit off of "Devil in the White City," which had these these two threads that had the, the the serial killer, and it had this architect developing the World Fair in Chicago. In my opinion, the World Fair Chicago thread, the narrative was actually much more interesting than the serial killer. But if I'd just written this book about the World Fair, nobody would have, you know, nobody, few people would have read it. So so I tried to do the same thing. And so the story we used to get at it was it was challenging to do, but I think it worked out really nicely to be able to, you have this kind of personal angle with Vivian Gordon, and that really brings you into the Prohibition Era and what was happening in the Jazz Age. And then you have the more macro level political changes that are going on.

So I know you looked a lot at newspapers from the time in doing this research. I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you do that research, how you figure out, how you find the stories you want to find. And in particular, I read an old article that you had done search algorithms through Hillary Clinton's old emails, so I wanted to see if there were, you know, like things about how you can figure out the keywords you need it you know, like how to find the stuff you actually want.

Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I mean, it was, I think I wrote that article about it, must have been like seven years ago and the actual the, the here's the work in Hillary Clinton's emails, wasn't from from, you know, when she was running for president. It was during, you know, Bill Clinton's administration in the 90s. It was a whole different world there. But I was coming up with keywords to filter these filter emails and determine which ones were government related and which ones were personal related. So, uh, yeah, I see a lot of connections between what I was doing and now. I mean, it was, a lot of it was not, it wasn't too challenging to find the kind of general articles about this case, because this case it was it was everywhere. It was the that was headlining for months, not only in New York, but it was covered, you know, all over the country. In fact, I even found newspapers in Singapore and Sydney, Australia that would cover you know, the highlights of this story. It was really big story. So I used, you know, so I tracked through the narrative, I did get a lot of information from newspapers about the about the murder case. I mean, with politics, that's with what was going on with FDR, you know, I had more sources available to me, but with Vivian Gordon, a lot of it was from the newspapers. And the Daily News, which was all over the story, was a huge source. They were, you know, that they that was the heyday of the Daily News. They were the first tabloid in the US, and they made crime, sex and crime and photos and lurid stories, they made that their, that was their bread and butter. They actually did very good reporting as well. So you know, I, I write in the book about their prime reporter, Grace Jones, who was a phenomenal reporter. And so I was able to get a lot of just great detail from the Daily News, which I then you know, was able to supplement with, you know, many other papers. So, you know, I started with just tracing the story, which was fairly easy to do, there were articles everywhere. The harder part was then winnowing down and kind of figuring out which parts of the story I needed to tell people and in what order I needed to tell people. And so once I kind of once I had that laid out, then I dug into, you know, some of the other in more detail about, you know, I need like, oh, I want this detail here. Where can I find that? And then, so I would be kind of running searches on those on those details. But just to find the stories, it's, you know, you go into, you know, any digital art archive and search on Vivian Gordon, they'll all pop right up.

Kelly  17:15  
So let's talk a little bit about the sort of basic setting. What is New York, like? We're talking about 1931. Like, what, especially the world that someone like Vivian Gordon is living in, what does this look like? What are what are the kinds of things that are happening?

Michael Wolraich  17:32  
So New York City, of course, for, for most of its history, at that point, from the early 1800s, through this period, 1931, was essentially ruled by Tammany Hall. The political bosses would choose who would be nominated for which positions in the Democratic Party and because New York City was so heavily Democratic, and because the organization's get out the votes and the mobilization efforts were so strong, they could, for the most part, determine who were the people who are highest in the government, and then those people would would appoint loyalists below them. So you had this municipal political machine that basically controlled most levels of government and even occasionally, they would get a mayor or somebody, you know, people would get fed up and another alternative mayor would come in, but they wouldn't last very long. And so for the most part, New York City was it was a Tammany Hall shop. And Tammany Hall had a lot of corruption. I mean, the people were appointed, many of them were promoted not for their expertise or abilities, but for their loyalty. And part of that loyalty meant, you know, providing money to the bosses above them. So you had a lot of people skimming off the system, however they could. They would, they would, you know, a building inspectors would take bribes, and judges would buy their seats on the bench. And it became particularly bad during Prohibition, because there was there was so much crime, there's so many opportunities, because of the you know, with all the speakeasies and gambling flourished, the brothels flourished. And so the police could go and, you know, shake down these places and say, like, you know, "We'll let you we'll let you go as long as you pay us off." So there was a lot of that going on. But that also meant there was a lot of crime happening that was you know, people were not happy about but the times were good and the money was money was coming in it was the roaring 20s. Everybody was out partying all night at the at the nightclubs and the speakeasies. So nobody was was all that worried about it as long as the as long as the times were good before the market crashed.

Kelly  19:54  
And so Vivian Gordon, then she ends up going to prison and that kind of changes the whole trajectory of her life. Could you talk a little bit about the corrupt policing of the time and how that leads to her imprisonment?

Michael Wolraich  20:07  
Yeah, so let me so let me start off with just that, that moment that she went that she was convicted. She had been she was not a career criminal at that point. She was she was married, she an eight year old daughter. She lived she had been living in Philadelphia, the and you know, essentially homemaker. But she and her husband separated and her daughter was a very talented dancer. So she took her to New York to audition for Broadway shows. And it was during this time, that she was in 1923, that she was arrested for prostitution. When she was taken to the women's court, which was there's a there's a courthouse in New York City that's now a library, it was this old courthouse, there was a it was court specifically for women. You know, I think the idea originally was to provide some protection for them, but it ended up being a spectacle a lot of times, like, you know, men would would come into the night, you know, especially the night courts would come in and just sit in the gallery just to ogle the prostitutes being convicted. So, Vivian Gordon, under the advice of her lawyer, pleaded guilty. But despite that plea, despite the fact that was her first offense, despite the fact that she had a young daughter, the judge sentenced her to reformatory upstate. And it was that at that reformatory, you know, she so once she was sentenced, she lost custody of her daughter, saw her only once again, her in her whole life, her beloved daughter, who she'd been devoted to. She, she was branded a prostitute, which prevented her from getting the kind of respectable jobs that she might have been able to do. And she, just after this, this time, in the reformatory, she turns to a life of crime. Her name originally was actually Benita, and her married name is Benita Bischoff. And after the reformatory, she she took this alias on, Vivian Gordon. And so everyone knew her as Vivian Gordon. But she always felt that she'd been framed. She had she told her parole officer she wrote in letters to she said to her friends, that she she believed that her ex husband, or at that time husband's estranged husband, had conspired with a vice cop to frame her for prostitution. Now it turned out seven years later, once the the Seabury investigation started, they found some interesting things going on at the women's court. Seabury had been you know, his his mandate from from Governor FDR was to investigate judicial corruption, and he started with that. But then one day, a man walked into his office, he was from Chile, Chile Akuna and said that he had some story to tell. He was what was called a stool pigeon. As a stool pigeon, the police would use him to solicit suspected prostitutes. He would give them money and then the police would rush in and arrest them. Now, he did quite well, paid out of pocket by the police officers. Well, how do these police officers who did not have high salaries pay for this this stool pigeon to find and to arrest women? It turned out Seabury uncovered a racket. The police officers were arresting women at this is what Hakuna had told Seabury arresting women, they would take them to the women's court. They would drop them off with a bondsman who they knew would you know, was in on the racket. The bondsman would charge a woman like an exorbitant fee and then pass them off to a defense attorney who was also part of the racket. The defense attorney would also charge a very high fee, which if the woman paid, then then he would just distribute kickbacks to the cops, to the bondsman, possibly the prosecutor, and he would say, "You know, if you pay my fee, I'll get you off." And he would. Either the cop wouldn't show up for the hearing or he'd pay off the prosecutor. And he'd get any, get them off. For women who couldn't pay, they went off to the reformatory. And what really set people off and what was really outrageous was that a lot of these women as Hakuna testified were innocent. The you know, he was this guy and the reason he was talking to Samuel Seabury is because he had a guilty conscience. He'd been part of arresting all these innocent women. He told the cops that that you know the women were innocent or even sometimes he didn't even give them money. They didn't even take the money that he was offering it. The cops would say shut up and they would go in and they would make the arrest. And this was because there was money in it for them. And in fact later on when Grace Robinson, that Daily News reporter I mentioned, she went to see the apartment of the vice cop who had arrested Vivian Gordon. His name is Andrew McLaughlin. And she, you know, she found he had this luxurious apartment in Washington Heights with beautiful furniture. His wife was beautifully dressed. They had this very nice lifestyle. He was, you know, he had just was was on a trip to Bermuda. So clearly, this guy was crooked. And clearly, you know, many of the people that Seabury discovered were crooked.

Kelly  25:39  
Keen- eared listeners who have the Hamilton soundtrack memorized, like I do, probably recognize the name Samuel Seabury. This is not the same Samuel Seabury. But he is related, right? Like let's talk a little bit about who is Samuel Seabury? And how does he get in this position to be investigating corruption?

Michael Wolraich  25:57  
So yes, Samuel Seabury was the great great grandson. We're gonna double check my number of greats there, but a descendant of the Right Reverend Samuel Seabury, who tangled with Hamilton, you know, before the American Revolution. He was America's first Episcopalian bishop toward later after he, after the revolution, he was able to come back to the US and you know, served as as Episcopalian bishop. And so Samuel Seabury, had descended from these, this long line of clergymen, mostly, mostly Samuel Seaburys, were his ancestors. And he had their, you know, his, he'd grown up with all their paintings on the wall, you know, looking very distinguished and so he felt he had a lot to live up to. He was not attracted to the church, unlike all of his direct ancestors. He instead went into practice law. But even as a lawyer and later a judge, he had this he had a very, he had a pious element to him. He was very, he was very moral, he was very self righteous. He, you know, spoke with this very, you know, this kind of deep, resonant voice, very serious. And people behind his back, they called him the bishop, partly partly a reference to his ancestor, partly mocking his his seriousness. And that's that that's why the bishop in the book title is the bishop and the butterfly. He's the bishop and the butterfly is Vivian Gordon, who is known as the Broadway butterfly.

Kelly  27:38  
So FDR, then, you mentioned earlier, this sort of fraught relationship with the Seabury investigations. You know, FDR asks Seabury to do these investigations, but, you know, maybe isn't always quite sure he wants Seabury to be doing it wants investigations to be happening. Could you talk a little bit about that? That's sort of the many different motivations that FDR has in this.

Michael Wolraich  28:02  
So the year was, you know, when this started was 1930, and FDR was already planning to run, he didn't admit it, but he was planning to run for president in '32. And he essentially saw the governorship as a stepping stone, you know, New York was the big, you know, by far the biggest state in the country. There'd been many New Yorkers, New York governors who had gone on to become president, including his cousin Theodore Roosevelt, who had who had followed a similar trajectory. So he was with that in mind. He also had this complicated relationship with Tammany Hall. He had at the very start beginning of his political career, he had challenged Tammany Hall and run for election claiming that he was going to you know, stop the corruption of Tammany Hall. He later realized that that really was not going to that wasn't gonna work for his political career, that he really needed Tammany Hall support. So he made his peace with the boss of Tammany Hall at that time, Charles Murphy, and they worked together. So there was a different boss by the time by this time in 1930, someone who was not quite as reform minded as the previous boss, Charles Murphy. His name was was John Curry and he was very old school. Grew up politics type of boss, but still Roosevelt, he needed Tammany support. He did not want to make the make Curry and the other Tammany bosses angry. They controlled a lot of delegates, you know, going into the Chicago convention. On the other hand, he didn't want to look weak. And so what was happening was that there were there were a number of scandals that came out after the market crashed, scandals about judges buying their seats or taking bribes. And he felt as governor of New York, even though this was all happening in the city, he had to do something. And so he picked Samuel Seabury, who was the same party, they were both Democrats. But Samuel Seabury had this very upright reputation, and  tried, as I mentioned earlier, tried to contain the investigation, keep it focused on judges. Now, Samuel Seabury was not the kind of man to be easily contained. He he had many ambitions himself. He had he had previously run for governor of New York state before this. And when the opportunity arose to expand the the the investigation into what was going on in women's court, he seized it. Now that put more pressure on FDR, because now everyone's saying, "Well, what is going on here? We need more investigations." And FDR, again, tried to resist this political pressure. And then Vivian Gordon, Vivian Gordon's murder happened. And that murder case was so sensational, that it basically took over kind of the news and the newspapers, and FDR felt that he could not ignore what was happening. There were more and more calls for him to investigate other people in Tammany Hall, more and more calls for him to investigate the mayor himself, Mayor Jimmy Walker. So FDR kind of hemmed and hawed and delayed, but eventually reached such a crisis point that he felt obliged to expand the authority of Samuel Seabury, and Samuel Seabury took that authority. And he went, you know, he talked to everyone in Tammany Hall, he hauled them into his hearing room in the state Supreme Court building, which is the building you see with the big pillars on "Law and Order," and grilled them, you know, and they had, he had this whole team, and they like, found all this, you know, they go through their bank accounts, and he would, you know, talk about, you know, all this money that they had that was far greater than their salaries, and you ask how, you know, where did this money come from? And they came up with excuses, "Oh, I won it on horses, my uncle gave it to me," the, you know, and it became kind of a joke, almost, you know, it was some of these excuses that people would give. And he took it, you know, finally took the case, you know, finally, they uncovered slush fund that the mayor himself had. And now that was really FDR was now really stuck. Because to take, you know, to, for him to take on the mayor for him, he you know, he actually had the power to remove the mayor if he chose to use it, that would have you know, caused such an explosion at Tammany Hall, that he felt that it could destroy his chances in the presidency. He was getting all these letters, some people were saying, "You have to you have to remove the mayor. Otherwise, you're gonna lose the election." And other people would say, "You, you cannot remove the mayor or otherwise you'll lose the election." And so he was really straddled this and challenged by these events that had occurred.

Kelly  33:03  
Let's talk about this mayor, Jimmy Walker, because he's you know, New York City has had lots of larger than life mayors. He is larger than life. I you know it the way you describe him, even though he's clearly corrupt and has some problems, it's still like, you want to get to know him. He seems like he'd be a really fun guy to hang out with. So can you talk a little bit about him and the presence he had in the city? 

Michael Wolraich  33:27  
Yeah, he was. He certainly was one of the kind. He, he was, he was this this charming rogue. Basically, he was a playboy, he had he openly comported with his mistress, who was a Broadway star, half his age. He dressed he, you know, he dressed beautifully. You like he had a personal tailor, and they would, you know, he would help pick out all the ensembles. And he would change his clothes three times a day, he would change his, you know, once in the morning, once in the middle of the workday, and then once before he went out at night, and an out at you know, at night, he would go to the Broadway shows or even to nightclubs and that sort of thing. He loved to travel. He loved the pageantry, he loved parades. A European queen came over and he was flirting with her, you know, and in the roaring 20s, everyone loved him. I mean, he he, he didn't wasn't didn't just govern during the 20s. He embodied the spirit, that hedonistic spirit that came through, you know, that happened, while the stock market was booming and during Prohibition. He he was perfect for that moment, and was enormously popular. You know, we know he's not forgotten we know. But Fiorello LaGuardia who who came after, is of course famous. He's got the airport. He LaGuardia challenged him during Walker's re election in 1929 and got crushed. Even with all these rumors swirling around, people just loved him. And so he had it looked as if he would, you know, carry on further to the end of his term and perhaps even have higher office after that.

Kelly  35:13  
I want to talk a little bit about Vivian Gordon, after she gets out of prison. You mentioned, you know, she, she turns to a life of crime, because she doesn't have a lot of other choices. But she has such an interesting place in the criminal world. And she keeps these amazing diaries that, you know, I think a lot of people probably wouldn't have wanted her to be keeping, you know, wouldn't have wanted to know that she was writing down all these things. Could you talk a little bit about her the kinds of things she's doing in the criminal world, and how that probably upset people at the time?

Michael Wolraich  35:50  
Sure. So you know, as you mentioned, they found these these diaries, these three date books actually but she used them as diaries, and would kind of scroll a lot of it, a lot of some of it was just business. It was just, you know, who owed her money, and some of it was, you know, warning that about people who had threatened her, specifically, the man she was dating, who was also her lawyer. And she also had a list of names of all of these very prominent New Yorkers, you know, these rich businessmen, and she, the reason she had these names, she was targeting them. She would target them in part for gold digging, just to, you know, try to develop a relationship with them and, and, you know, receive their gifts. And then some of them she also blackmailed, or both. She would, you know, have, you know, have either one night or a relationship with him, and then she would blackmail them and was able to make a fair amount of money this way, not only herself, but she also had a number of young women who she called her 49ers, young 49ers, because they would be, you know, digging for gold. And she would instruct them about, you know, how to, you know, how to meet, you know, these these wealthy men and, and how to exploit their relationship with with them. So, you know, that was that was what she was infamous for. And that's what made her such, her murder such a sensation, because the murderer could have been anyone, it could be any of these like, well to do well connected men in New York. But she had other she had other gigs, too, she ran financial fraud schemes. She financed a a bank robbery, or an attempted bank robbery in Oslo, Norway, of all places. She, she had a she had a list of call girls. And so she was involved in prostitution, both as a madame and also running this call service and trafficking these younger women, for male clients. And yet she made a lot of money for that time. I mean, she was she had real estate investments worth $80,000. And she had stock market investments and ended up doing quite well for herself at least until the market crashed and she, like many New Yorkers lost everything.

Kelly  38:13  
Well, so I don't want to give away all of the murder mystery that drives part of the book. So let's encourage people to read the book itself, how can people get a copy? 

Michael Wolraich  38:24  
So it's, it's available from from all your major book, sellers, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and all the rest. I also have all the links and more information about the book on my website, which is my my name, MichaelWolraich.com. But if you Google "The Bishop and the Butterfly," you'll you'll easily find many copies of the book. 

Kelly  38:46  
Michael, thank you so much for speaking with me. It was a true page turner. I you know, I also loved  "Devil in the White City." And you know, that that I think is a I would read a straight political history. But you know, I think it helps, you know, sort of drive the story. So I really appreciate it. Thank you for speaking with me.

Michael Wolraich  39:04  
Thank you very much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

Teddy  39:27  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on twitter or instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode suggestions, please email Kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai