A Judge Crater Nugget With a California Twist

Gold prospector “Lucky Blacky” Blackiet walked into Los Angeles Police Department headquarters in 1936 and claimed he’d hit the mother lode in the lost-and-found department. While riding his burro near Julian, Calif., he said, he had run into the most hunted man in the country: New York state Supreme Court Judge Joseph Force Crater.

Blackiet told police that he had “swapped yarns” with the jurist, who told him his name and said: “In one more year, I will be legally dead. I hope I can stick it out that long.”

Six years earlier, Crater had grabbed a cab outside a Manhattan restaurant, waved goodbye to friends and said he was going to a Broadway show. His ticket was picked up at the box office, but no one remembered seeing him there.

His disappearance and 16,000 alleged sightings from the Adriatic Sea to Alaska sparked a 49-year investigation that remained open until 1979.

“Pulling a Crater” became slang for chucking it all or vanishing without a trace. Nightclub comedians joked about “paging Judge Crater.” Mad magazine ran a cartoon of Lassie finding the judge.

Even as late as the 1960s, the joke worked. During an episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” an actor playing the role of a judge reassured Rob and Laura Petrie, played by Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore, that he wasn’t that jurist -- his name was K-R-A-D-A.

Appointed to the trial court bench by then-New York Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Crater, 41, had been a judge just four months when he vanished. If he were still alive, he’d be 116 years old.

On Aug. 6, 1930, he cashed two checks amounting to more than $5,000 and took along an additional $20,000 in campaign money (equivalent to about $250,000 today). He hastily packed up files in his office and, as he left his chambers, told his assistant: “Don’t forget to turn out the lights, Johnson.”

That evening, the tall, 200-pound judge, with slicked-back graying hair parted down the middle, dined with two friends. After dinner, “Good Time Joe” -- his moniker because he loved to dance -- hailed a cab and waved his straw Panama hat out the window.

His wife, Stella, thought he was away on business. Colleagues thought he and his wife were on vacation. But soon jurists and friends made discreet inquiries on her behalf. Four weeks after Crater vanished, a friend reported him missing.

Crater made front pages around the nation. Over the years, more than 3 million photos of him were distributed.

Everyone had a theory. Maybe he was silenced by the mob for dallying with a gangster’s girlfriend. Maybe one of the criminals he put behind bars put out a contract on him. Maybe he checked out for a better, anonymous life. Despite all the speculation, an investigation into his background found nothing illegal.

Results of a grand jury inquiry released in January 1931 stated that there was insufficient evidence to say whether Crater was alive, dead, had “absented himself voluntarily,” had suffered amnesia or had been the victim of a crime.

More than a week after the grand jury was dismissed, Stella Crater found documents in a hidden drawer of her dresser. They included life insurance policies worth more than $30,000 and a promissory note for a loan he’d made to a friend. There was also a list of dozens of people and companies who owed the judge money. He’d written a note at the bottom of one paper: “Am very weary. Love, Joe.”

This discovery only added to the mystery.

Decades later, Stella Crater’s attorney, Emil K. Ellis, told a Times reporter he believed that those papers had been found on Crater’s body and somehow “spirited” into the couple’s New York apartment, “possibly by a policeman,” because the apartment was under 24-hour guard.

Ellis argued in the 1952 interview that Crater had been blackmailed by a showgirl and murdered by her gangster boyfriend when the payoff wasn’t enough (thus accounting for the money Crater took with him). The showgirl had been found in a mental institution in 1939, hopelessly demented, and had died nine years later. Ellis didn’t say what the judge’s supposed secret might have been.

Over the years, “The Missingest Man in New York” was reportedly sighted running a bingo game in Africa, locked up in a Missouri mental institution, shooting craps in Atlanta and prospecting for gold near Julian. That’s where Blackiet came in, along with others who backed up his story.

Blackiet, 84, was a familiar sight around Julian, a San Diego County town where gold mines had produced $2 million from 1870 to 1875. Like many during the Depression, he went looking for more.

After Blackiet’s tip, Capt. W.C. Allen of the LAPD’s Missing Persons Bureau said: “Five years ago, we had a tip about Crater being at National City .... And that information tends to correspond with what Blackiet has told us.”

A short distance from Blackiet’s home site at the Julian-area hamlet of Santa Ysabel, Blackiet told the LAPD, he ran into a man on foot pulling a pack mule that was loaded with supplies.

“He asked me to stop and talk awhile,” Blackiet said. “He told me that he was that Supreme Court justice who disappeared six years ago in New York. ‘I’m done with civilization -- one more year and they will think I’m dead for sure.’ ”

A search team including two LAPD officers, two NYPD detectives, a San Diego County sheriff’s deputy and several reporters combed the area between Warner Hot Springs and Julian. A National Guard airplane joined the hunt.

The searchers failed to spot Crater, but they did find several people who said they had seen a man resembling him.

“We prospected [together] for several months near Julian,” Mike Morani said. “He was well educated, but a poor miner.”

Walter and Marie Eisenmenger, who owned a grocery store about five miles outside Julian, recognized a photograph of Crater as the man who had purchased $5 worth of food.

But in late August, as the heat exceeded 110 degrees and witnesses dwindled, NYPD officers tossed in the towel, saying further searching would be futile.

Blackiet grew disgusted too. “I’m tired of being called a liar,” he said. “I’ll find that fellow myself.” He rode off into the hills, and out of news coverage.

In September 1937, reporters headed back to Julian after another alleged Crater sighting. This time it came from the wife of the San Diego County sheriff’s deputy who had assisted in the earlier search. The deputy’s wife owned a small cafe in Julian. She said Crater had been there six weeks earlier.

“Sure he was here,” she said. “He sat at that table with another man, and both of them had on red corduroy shirts. I didn’t bother much about it because I thought it was all but forgotten.”

Crater was declared legally dead in 1939. His widow had to sue to get the life insurance companies to pay up.

She wrote a book with Oscar Fraley, “The Empty Robe,” published in 1961. In it, she maintained that her husband had been murdered “because of a sinister something that was connected with politics.”

Before her death in 1969, Stella Crater was seen every Aug. 6 for more than three decades at a bar in Greenwich Village.

Sitting alone, she would order two drinks. Raising her glass, she’d say, “Good luck, Joe, wherever you are,” and chug it. The second drink always remained untouched.