Michael Wolraich, Author of The Bishop and the Butterfly

In this lecture and book signing, best-selling author Michael Wolraich relates the incredible history of New York in the Roaring Twenties. The Jazz Age in New York City is famous for excess, from drunken revelries to brutal gang wars. The city's appalling corruption is less well-known. In 1930, a state investigation uncovered a shocking NYPD conspiracy to frame innocent women for sex crimes. One of the whistle-blowers, a prostitute and blackmailer named Vivian Gordon, was strangled to death days after meeting with investigators. Wolraich’s new critically-acclaimed book, The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of Jazz Age, recounts the gripping murder investigation and its explosive consequences—revealing a trail of corruption that led all the way to the mayor’s office. The book is a finalist for the prestigious Edgar Allen Poe award for mystery non-fiction by the Mystery Writers’ Association of America.

A Conversation with Dan Slater, Author of The Incorruptibles

Called “mesmerizing” and “exuberant,” The Incorruptibles by Dan Slater is a fast-paced book recounting the story of Eastern European-Jewish mobsters such as Arnold Rothstein (who notoriously fixed the World Series), and the German-Jewish immigrants in NY who formed a vigilante group to stop them. They were worried not only about crime in their community, but of how these notorious gangsters would bolster the anti-immigration lobby of the 1920s. Their efforts, however, led to unforeseen consequences in the form of a new mobster class who realized, in the country’s burgeoning reform efforts, unprecedented opportunities to amass power. Dan showed some never-before-seen images in the lectures, and some of his photos are on display in the exhibition.