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 filled with
hundreds of names—businessmen, socialites, gangsters, and bootleggers. And some-
thing else: a letter from an anti-corruption commission established by the governor of
New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Led by the imperious Judge Samuel Seabury, the
commission had uncovered a police conspiracy to frame women as prostitutes; many
suspected that Vivian Gordon had been executed to bury her secrets. As FDR pressed the
police to solve her murder, Judge Seabury doggedly pursued the trail of corruption to the
top of Gotham’s powerful political machine—the infamous Tammany Hall. A final dramatic
showdown between Seabury and playboy mayor Jimmy Walker precipitated Tammany’s
downfall and cleared the way for FDR’s presidency.