Broadway Butterfly: Vivian Gordon
The Lady Gangster of Jazz Age New York
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- ¥1,800
発行者による作品情報
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 was 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 damning: 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-endinginvestigation 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 demimondeduring Prohibition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this entertaining account, Pulitzer winner DeStefano (The Deadly Don) paints Jazz Age fixture Vivian Gordon as both victim and criminal. Eighteen months after escort and aspiring actor Gordon—born Benita Franklin and nicknamed the "Broadway Butterfly"—was found dead in a Bronx park in 1931, New York City mayor Jimmy Walker resigned, and the political influence of the once unassailable Tammany Hall came to an end. The key was Gordon's diaries, in which she meticulously catalogued the secrets she'd learned from her high-end clients and recounted being extorted by corrupt judges and cops to pay for dropped prostitution charges. While DeStefano's account lacks the scope of Michael Wolraich's The Bishop and the Butterfly, which takes on the same case, or the pace of Sara DiVello's Broadway Butterfly, which fictionalizes it, he wrangles the sprawling implications of Gordon's still unsolved murder into an entertaining package. DeStefano paints an alluring portrait of Prohibition-era New York and the mobsters and millionaires who ran it. Photos.
