Broadway Butterfly: Vivian Gordon
The Lady Gangster of Jazz Age New York
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
A riveting, uniquely in-depth account of the sensational murder that captivated Jazz Age New York City, obsessed its then-governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and led to the downfall of its mayor, from Pulitzer Prize and Emmy Award–winning investigative journalist and author of The Deadly Don, Anthony M. DeStefano.
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 Cortlandt 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 300 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 cozy relationship between the Mob and the NYPD.
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.
