The tall, dapper man walked out of a restaurant one summer evening many years ago, got into a taxicab and was never seen again. No, we’re not talking about Jimmy Hoffa. We’re talking about New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Force Crater, whose mysterious disappearance in New York on an August night in 1930 once captivated the nation. He’s all but forgotten now, but he’s a reminder that Jimmy Hoffa isn’t the only mystery in the cold-case files.
The FBI wrapped up another fruitless search this week for the remains of the former Teamsters boss, who disappeared in 1975. Federal agents dug up parts of the Hidden Dreams horse farm near Detroit for two weeks before giving up. The search had been based on a tip from an incarcerated, aging informant who claimed to have seen Hoffa rolled up in a carpet and dumped in a grave there.
Alas, like the search that required excavation of a back-yard pool more than 100 miles north of Detroit and the one that left ripped up floorboards in a Detroit house, this one, too, led nowhere. Over the years, Hoffa’s body has been rumored to be buried beneath a football stadium in New Jersey, chopped up and left in a Florida swamp and dissolved in a mob-connected fat-rendering plant.
The prevailing theory has been that the mob killed Hoffa, who had just gotten out of prison on corruption charges, to prevent him from trying to regain the presidency of the Teamsters. But after nearly 31 years, all we know for certain today is that he disappeared without a trace.
Like Crater. And like Amelia Earhart. She took off from Oakland, Calif., in May 1937, hoping to become the first pilot to fly around the world on an equatorial route. Like D.B. Cooper. He hijacked a Northwest Airlines jet in 1971 and parachuted out of the plane with $200,000 in cash. They all vanished into mystery.
People disappear all the time, but usually they are found fairly quickly. Writer and actor Spalding Gray’s body was found two months after he disappeared. It took six years for Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s remains to be identified after her 1995 disappearance.
But then there are the legends of the missing. Conspiracy theories still swirl around Crater. Was he murdered? Did he go on the lam? Was Tammany Hall, the New York political machine, involved in his disappearance?
Crater got a phone call in late July 1930, while he was on vacation in Maine. He told his wife, Stella, he had to go back to New York to “straighten those fellows out.” The night of Aug. 6, he was wearing a double-breasted brown suit, gray spats and a high collar. He cashed checks for $5,000, jauntily waved goodbye to some friends and disappeared into the night. That was nearly 76 years ago. Few disappear forever, but some trails get very, very cold.
