Broadway butterfly Vivian Gordon, the lady gangster of Jazz Age New York
Book - 2024
"The definitive book on one of the most notorious murders in Jazz Age New York history, that of Vivian Gordon, the high-end escort, con artist, and blackmailer connected to gangsters like "Legs" Diamond and Arnold Rothstein, whose death exposed the dark underbelly of police corruption throughout the city--from the Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist who is one of the foremost Mafia experts writing today. Like so many other pretty butterflies, Indiana-born Vivian Gordon fluttered to New York in 1920 looking for fame and fortune. Before long, the flame-haired chorus girl parlayed her youth, beauty, and ambition into more profitable means as a tough and glamorous symbol of Prohibition-era excess. She w...as a speakeasy owner, blackmailer, high-end escort, extortionist, racketeer, and con woman. But given her dangerously intimate associations--from ruthless underworld gangsters to corrupt high-ranking city officials--Vivian was also a woman who knew too much and who rightfully feared for her life. On February 26, 1931, Vivian's bludgeoned and garroted body was found dumped in Van Cortland Park in the Bronx. Now, in the first in-depth biography of its kind, Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award-winning journalist Anthony M. DeStefano unravels her tumultuous life and the headline-making murder that became an obsession for many, including then-Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The evidence Vivian left behind was a diary with more than three-hundred names implicating powerful officials, philanthropists, businessmen, and every major gangland figure in collusion and corruption. The investigation eventually resulted in the career-ending investigation of James "Jimmy" Walker, disgraced mayor of New York City. Ultimately, Broadway Butterfly finally finds a place in history for Vivian, a woman with a rare legacy in gangster lore, whose demise was as tragically inevitable as the brutality of the city's demimonde during Prohibition." --
- Subjects
- Genres
- True crime stories
Biographies - Published
-
New York :
Citadel Press, Kensington Publishing Corporation
[2024]
- Language
- English
- Main Author
- Physical Description
- viii, 246 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
- Bibliography
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-230) and index.
- ISBN
- 9780806543147
- Introduction: The Woman in the Park
- 1. Catholic Hill
- 2. "From Innocence to Vice"
- 3. The Redheaded League
- 4. "Beauty and the Blackjack"
- 5. The Gathering Storm
- 6. A Coldhearted Dame
- 7. "That Is How We Make Democrats"
- 8. "They Are Killing Me!"
- 9. "I Am Going to End It All"
- 10. "The Sheik of the Vice Squad"
- 11. "She Only Made One Cackle"
- 12. "More or Less Shocked"
- 13. "God, I Don't Want to Burn"
- 14. "She's Got Me by the Balls"
- 15. "No! No! No!"
- 16. "A World Gone Mad"
- 17. "I Love Beer"
- 18. "I Am Still the Mayor of New York"
- 19. "Jim, You Are Through"
- 20. Karma Can Be a Bitch
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Whatever Happened to Them?
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgments
- Index