The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age -- Michael Wolraich, Hardcover

The riveting story of how the murder of femme fatale Vivian Gordon in 1931 brought about the downfall of the mayor of New York City and led to the end of Tammany Hall's dominance.
Vivian Gordon went out before midnight in a velvet dress and mink coat. Her body turned up the next morning in a desolate Bronx park, a dirty clothesline wrapped around her neck. At her stylish Manhattan apartment, detectives discovered notebooks full of names--businessmen, socialites, gangsters. And something else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Led by the imperious Judge Samuel Seabury, the commission had uncovered a police conspiracy to frame women as prostitutes. Had Vivian Gordon been executed to bury her secrets? As FDR pressed the police to solve her murder, Judge Seabury pursued the trail of corruption to the top of Gotham's powerful political machine--the infamous Tammany Hall.

Author: Michael Wolraich
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Published: 02/06/2024
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.13h x 5.91w x 1.42d
ISBN: 9781454948025

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 12/18/2023
Booklist 01/01/2024 pg. 4
BookPage 02/01/2024

About the Author
Michael Wolraich is the author of the critically acclaimed Unreasonable Men (2014) and Blowing Smoke (2010). His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, the Daily Beast, New York magazine, Reuters, and CNN, and he is the founder and editor of dagblog.com. Wolraich grew up in Iowa and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts before falling in love with New York City, where he has lived since 2000.