Broadway Butterfly: Vivian Gordon: The Lady Gangster of Jazz Age New York

In this entertaining account, Pulitzer winner DeStefano (The Deadly Don) paints Jazz Age fixture Vivian Gordon as both victim and criminal. Eighteen months after escort and aspiring actor Gordon—born Benita Franklin and nicknamed the “Broadway Butterfly”—was found dead in a Bronx park in 1931, New York City mayor Jimmy Walker resigned, and the political influence of the once unassailable Tammany Hall came to an end. The key was Gordon’s diaries, in which she meticulously catalogued the secrets she’d learned from her high-end clients and recounted being extorted by corrupt judges and cops to pay for dropped prostitution charges. While DeStefano’s account lacks the scope of Michael Wolraich’s The Bishop and the Butterfly, which takes on the same case, or the pace of Sara DiVello’s Broadway Butterfly, which fictionalizes it, he wrangles the sprawling implications of Gordon’s still unsolved murder into an entertaining package. DeStefano paints an alluring portrait of Prohibition-era New York and the mobsters and millionaires who ran it. Photos. Agent: Jill Marsal, Marsal Lyon Literary. (July)