The 20th Century is full of famous people who, at the end of their careers, simply vanished. Ask anyone on the street about them and you're likely to hear about Amelia Earhart, Judge Crater, or Michael Rockefeller. Yet another case, which attracted almost as much attention at the time, was the mysterious disappearance of American industrialist Andrew Ryan. Ryan's career was meteoric, catapulting him from penniless immigrant to titan of industry to complete oblivion in less than three decades, and his fate remains the subject of speculation even today.

We know almost nothing of Andrey Rijanofskiy before his arrival at Philadelphia in March of 1919. Any surviving records are locked behind the Iron Curtain and Ryan himself absolutely refused to discuss this period of his life- once even storming out of a live radio interview when Dorothy Thompson refused to stop asking about his experiences in the Russian Revolution. We know that he named a small farming village near Minsk as his birthplace and that he sailed from the port of Odessa on the Black Sea, at the time one of the last White Russian enclaves holding out against the Bolsheviks. On his immigration application Rijanovskiy stated that he was an orphan, his parents dead in the Russian Civil War, and that he had no brothers or sisters. If that story wasn't true no one ever challenged it, even at the height of Ryan's career when he had both great wealth and more than his share of enemies. He also told immigration officials he was bound for Scranton to stay with an uncle in the Russian emigre community- but if that story was true no one ever managed to find the uncle, or any record of Ryan living in Scranton. Since immigrants without money or family in the States were routinely shipped home it's likely Rijanofskiy simply made him up. As far as anyone was ever able to establish, Andrey Rijanofskiy was a man completely without a family.

When Rijanofskiy surfaces again it is not in Scranton but in the shipbuilding town of Chester, PA just down the river from Philadelphia. The first of his patents listed a Chester roominghouse as his address, and in 1922 "Andrew Ryan" appears for the first time on the rolls of Sun Shipbuilding as an associate engineer. An agreement assigning three of Ryan's patents to Sun is generally seen as the reason for this promotion, though in later years some of his former workmates claimed Ryan was given the job as a reward for his outspoken opposition to an attempt to unionize Sun's workforce. For the rest of his time at Sun Ryan filed no more patents but showed a knack for persuading others to follow his lead on technical questions- and more often than not, being right. His colleagues at Sun remember him as "brilliant", "charismatic", "arrogant", "insufferable", and in other, less printable terms.

During this period Ryan also began to formulate the basis of his philosophy. Not surprisingly he seems to have always been right-wing and rabidly anticommunist, but during his tenure at Sun he grew more and more radical. He joined the Philadelphia Ethical Society, a major secular humanist organization, in 1923 and soon filled their bulletins with columns and letters extolling the virtues of selfishness and free will. Free will, to Ryan, had to be absolute to be meaningful. Only when inventors, scientists, and innovators were allowed to work without interference by what he termed "petty morality", he wrote, would they be able to deliver the technological Utopia he saw within reach.

Other members of the Society disagreed, and in 1925 Ryan quit in disgust over their "dangerously softhearted attitude towards the steps that must be taken [emphasis his] in order to perfect human society." About this time he also became increasingly outspoken about his unhappiness with Sun's management and began criticizing the Catholic Church- no small step in heavily Irish Philadelphia. When Ryan left Sun in 1926 to found his own company it's not hard to imagine his former bosses breathing a sigh of relief.

The company he founded, Ryan Steelworks & Shipbuilding (later Ryan Industries) was one of the last great success stories of the Roaring Twenties. Fueled by easy capital from the booming (and dangerously overheated) stock market, the company grew astronomically. Much to the displeasure of his former employers Ryan also resumed his flow of patents, this time with advanced techniques that serve as the forerunners of what today we call "modular construction". In 1929 Sun launched a lawsuit in Philadelphia Federal District Court, claiming that Ryan's new patents were based on the ones he had assigned to Sun in 1922 and therefore belonged to the company. The suit dragged on for several years and seems to have considerably embittered Ryan. Surviving writings from this period are full of venom for the "leaches", "moochers", and "parasites" at Sun, who Ryan believed were trying to shut down by legal means what they could not compete with.

The court ultimately agreed and found Sun's claims without merit, but for Andrew Ryan the damage had been done. His adopted country, to his mind, had tried to take away his livelihood just as his old country had. A few months after the suit was dismissed in mid 1932 came the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal, seemingly confirming Ryan's worst fears. He became a leading opponent of the New Deal, denouncing it as "killing the golden goose because everyone can't have an egg" and drawing comparisons to Joseph Stalin's forced collectivization of farmland in the Soviet Union. The increasingly strident tone of his criticisms earned him the nickname "Jeremiah" in New York society and caused columnist Walter Winchell to denounce him on air as "a veritable John the Baptist of selfishness." He came to national prominence in 1935 when he burned 5,000 acres of Oregon forest rather than hand it over to the National Park Service. Following this there was even talk of drafting Ryan to run against FDR in 1936, but Ryan quickly ended such talk by stating that he would never hold any kind of government office.

His conduct during this time earned him another society nickname- "The Lonely Millionaire." On the surface Ryan became famous for his lavish parties and even established himself as something of a ladies' man, but seems to have formed very few lasting friendships. One former friend remembers that "Andrew could be very charming when he cared to be, but he was completely uncompromising and a bit of an egomaniac. Couldn't put himself or his desires second, not even for a moment, and so he parted ways with everyone sooner or later. And once you were done that was it- you were one of the devils, the parasites, and he'd have nothing more to do with you." Another remembers that Ryan's social circle "ran like a regiment. Always losing people and recruiting fresh blood until it was the same size as before." And although Ryan was romantically linked to any number of Manhattan socialites and Hollywood starlets he remained a confirmed bachelor throughout his life.

As with many other opponents of FDR it was only Pearl Harbor that made Ryan fall into line, at least on the surface. In fairness to the man, Ryan had as little use for National Socialism as for any other kind and during the 1930s denounced the Nazis just as much as he did the Communists. But he seems to have been deeply uneasy with the mass mobilization of American society and industry for war, and on occasion was heard openly worrying whether "Roosevelt's crowd" would ever hand control back to private industry. At the same time he showed no compunction in taking war production contracts, and even lent his expertise in rapid construction to refine wartime designs such as the Liberty Ship and Landing Craft, Tank.

Almost everyone agrees, however, that beginning in 1943 something else began to absorb Ryan's attention. His work with Ryan Industries, previously almost all-consuming, dropped off to a trickle. He even began to sell parts of the business, seemingly always in need of cash but never showing anything for what must have been immense outlays. He left the United States for the first time since his arrival, expending fantastic amounts of money and influence to visit places ranging from war-torn China to newly liberated France. People who asked questions were fobbed off with vague talk of "plans for after the war", a war Ryan seems to have regarded as history ever since the Nazi collapse at Stalingrad in late 1942. When news of the D-Day landings broke he remarked that a yoke was a yoke whether it was blue or red. He famously responded to reports of the German surrender with "Yes, all right, now go away and let me work."

The only thing that seems to have drawn Ryan's attention back to the world was the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent Japanese surrender in August of 1945. His denunciations of the bombing as "a monstrous act of barbarity" stood in stark contrast to the general mood of jubilation at the war's end, and few paid attention to Ryan's warnings that "Atomic weapons make it possible to destroy the world, and once something is possible someone will do it" or that "the Bomb will give the meanest slave power to destroy the work of countless better men." Some of his quotations have even gone on to become popular slogans for the antinuclear movement- usually in the hands of people who would have reduced Ryan to frothing rage.

After the end of the war Ryan slowed down not a bit- indeed, he went on a veritable buying spree of steel, glass, concrete, and other materials suddenly made surplus by the premature end of the war with Japan. When the shareholders of Ryan Industries demanded an explanation Ryan sold his shares and walked away from the work of twenty years, defiantly telling the Board that "Ryan Industries is wherever I am." As 1946 drew on Ryan was seen less and less, his once glittering social life disappearing entirely.

The last time anyone saw Andrew Ryan was on Halloween Night of 1946. Ryan had been invited to a party in the New York mansion of shipping magnate Henry Kaiser, who probably did not expect Ryan to show up after several months spent as a virtual recluse. But at 8 PM Ryan's limousine pulled up to the curb and the great man himself stepped out, wearing a natty black tuxedo and an elegant white Carnival mask. Invitation in hand, he mounted the steps and strode in as though he owned the place.

Precisely what happened at Kaiser's party has been the subject of many accounts, all different. Numerous witnesses who spoke with him that night have stated Ryan was extremely drunk, laughing wildly and talking in an almost incomprehensible voice. But Kaiser himself- who probably knew Ryan the best- never agreed with that. "He wasn't stumbling or slurring his words at all," the millionaire later remembered. "Just the opposite. He was hard to understand because he was talking so fast, and he seemed to be everywhere at once. It was like there was a fire lit in him, he was throttling a huge head of steam and couldn't slow down for fear he'd explode."

Ryan talked to various guests for about an hour, mostly old colleagues from his shipbuilding days. As he circulated through the room there was an increasing murmur of discontent among the crowd. Ryan, it seemed, was telling virtually everyone they were a fool, as well as giving his unvarnished opinion on a number of past incidents and disagreements. His conversation at the party reportedly made the next day's New York Post gossip column into a full-page spread and lead to two suicides, four messy high-profile divorces, and socialite Nan Adams eventually abandoning Manhattan to enter a convent in upstate New York. As the rumbling reached its peak about 10 PM Ryan tapped his glass and gave a long, rambling toast to the crowd, no two versions of which are alike. All agree, however, that it was witty, venomous, and ended with the phrase "So be damned to all you little mice who play at being men." In the dead silence that followed, Ryan finished his drink, shattered his glass on the floor, and turned to go. On the way out he said loudly to his stunned host, "Goodbye Henry. You always were an asshole." With that, he yanked the door to Kaiser's mansion open and strode out into the foggy New York night.

That was the last time anyone ever saw Andrew Ryan. What was left of his bank accounts after several large cash withdrawals stayed untouched, and neither his few remaining friends nor his then-girlfriend Sylvia Fisher could say where he might have gone. The theories started immediately. Ryan's fellow anticommunists weren't sure if he'd been killed by the Soviets, to deprive the Western world of a brilliant industrialist, or by Harry Truman to silence his criticism of the government. No, he'd gone undercover to work for the government because he was the only man who could make the new missile program work. That's too far-fetched, he just changed his name and retired to a farm in Canada or someplace. Inevitably there were sightings from Juneau to Buenos Aires to Cairo, notably by a California farmer who swore he'd hired Ryan to dust his crops in the spring of 1950. Quietly, most of the people who knew Ryan pointed to his bizarre behavior at the party and a certain unidentifiable John Doe body fished out of the Hudson in the first week of November, and suggested he'd committed suicide.

And there the trail ends. Ryan was declared legally dead in 1954 and apparently died intestate, setting off a court battle over his remaining assets that seems bound to continue until there's nothing left to fight over. As frustrating as it is as an ending to his story, the fact is that Andrew Ryan, America's mayfly titan of industry, vanished into the New York fog and has not been seen since.