Free Island of the Damned by Alix Kirsta

rope coiled around her neck. Her head had been beaten in and her body thrown from a car. Several weeks after Gordon’s murder, her distraught sixteen year-old daughter committed suicide.
    Although over a hundred investigators were assigned to track down the killer, the hunt led nowhere. A man earlier suspected of the crime was tried but acquitted for lack of evidence: two other men who alleged they had seen the man carry out Gordon’s murder were evidently lying, suggesting a probable cover up. The tabloid press went to town over the killing, claiming – not so fancifully – that Vivian Gordon had been involved with many low life characters and mobsters, including the late Arnold Rothstein whose own murder remained unsolved. In a diary, she mentioned that she knew Arnold Rothstein and feared him, also making notes of many of the gambler’s secret business “interests”. The press wallowed in seamy half-baked “revelations” about Vivian Gordon, portrayed as everything from “a girl with five hundred sugar daddies” to “a misled woman who followed the tinsel path.” When the name and phone number of New York’s leading madam, Polly Adler, was found in Gordon’s address book, Adler wryly dismissed her as “just another attractive woman out to feather her own nest.”
    It later emerged that Gordon may herself have been running a lucrative racket, which seemed to account for her wealth, put at between $30,000 and $50,000 at her death. A search of her apartment revealed lists of names of about fifty pretty young women, accompanied by their nude photographs. It was alleged that Gordon introduced the girls to men looking for escorts: Gordon also kept the addresses and phone numbers of these men, adding them to a “client list”, many of whom she later blackmailed into handing over considerable amounts of money in return for her discretion. Although an enraged former client may, as some believed, have sought revenge by killing her, investigators thought it more probable that Gordon had extensive inside knowledge of the world of vice and racketeering, and paid with her life before she could tell the authorities all she knew. That is almost certainly the likeliest explanation, since the timing of Vivian Gordon’s murder was highly significant. Tragically, she would not have attracted so much coverage and intense police attention had she not agreed to give evidence at one of the most sensational and unprecedented judicial enquiries in New York’s history: the ground-breaking Seabury investigations.

 
    Chapter Five - Hunting the Tiger
     
    Early rumblings of a move to smash organised crime in New York had begun in August 1930, when one of America’s most distinguished judges, fifty seven year-old Judge Samuel Seabury, was appointed by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court to conduct an investigation into the magistrates’ courts of New York City. The investigation, which had been recommended by U.S Attorney Charles Tuttle and backed by Governor Roosevelt, who endorsed Judge Seabury’s appointment, received enthusiastic support from the New York Bar Association. It also had wholehearted approval from the city’s reform and religious groups who were becoming more vociferous in their demands for governmental and judicial transparency. In the black days following the Wall Street crash in 1929, New York’s Patrick Cardinal Hayes had publicly denounced Mayor Walker’s pleasure seeking pursuits, suggesting that the current economic devastation was just retribution for Walker’s and other “wayward” leaders’ immoral ways. Walker, who garnered more headlines being a playboy than a hard working politician, had provoked outrage by raising his own annual salary from $25,000 to $40,000. When challenged about his pay, he raised further hackles by quipping: “Why that’s cheap! Think what it would cost if I worked full time”. U.S. Attorney Charles Tuttle also warned that New York City was