Around Town: It happened here
Wed Jan 30 2008
Today, visitors to the New York Aquarium coo over Akituusaq, the 300-pound Pacific walrus calf born last June. But when the marine attraction was being built in the mid-1950s, a somewhat less cute discovery captured the NYPD’s attention: skeletal remains at West 8th Street by the Boardwalk, found by construction workers laying the aquarium’s foundation. The body went unidentified until 2005—when an undated letter found among the effects of recently deceased Queens native Stella Ferrucci-Good claimed it was that of Judge Joseph Force Crater, dubbed “the Most Missingest Man in New York” after he vanished in August 1930. In the note, Mrs. Ferrucci-Good implicated three men in the jurist’s death—her late husband, NYPD officer Robert Good, his cabbie brother Frank and fellow cop Charles Burns (known to moonlight as muscle for Murder, Inc.). Her account has yet to be confirmed, but given that Crater was a Tammany Hall crony, there’s a good chance he was made to sleep with the fishes.
—Tina-Marissa Riopel
