Willie Sutton

• Born: June 30, 1901
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: November 2, 1980
• Place of death: Spring Hill, Florida

American bank robber

Major offense: Bank robbery

Active: 1920’s-1952

Locale: East Coast of the United States

Sentence: Many, culminating in one for 105 years, another for life

Early Life

Born in Brooklyn in 1901, Willie Sutton (SUH-tuhn) was the fourth of five children in an Irish American family. He began his schooling at Public School 1 in Brooklyn but left the school the same day he entered it. He transferred to St. James’s Parochial School; when he was ten years old, he was again transferred, this time to St. Anne’s Parochial School. He was frequently in trouble as a child, robbing grocery stores, and left St. Anne’s after getting into a fight and refusing to name his opponent. He then attended Public School 5, where he was caught stealing money from teachers’ purses.

After the Sutton family moved, he was enrolled in Public School 10 and graduated in 1916 after completing the eighth grade. He got a job at the Title Guaranty and Trust Company, then worked for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and then went to Providence, Rhode Island, to work in a war plant. After World War I, jobs were scarce, and he was employed for a short time by a gardening company. He then stole sixteen thousand dollars from the firm owned by Tom Hurley, his girlfriend’s father.

Criminal Career

After a week, Sutton and his girlfriend were arrested in Poughkeepsie, New York, but because Hurley did not want his daughter to go to jail, he got Sutton a suspended sentence. Sutton then served as an apprentice to Eddie “Doc” Tate, an accomplished safecracker. Although Sutton was charged with the first-degree murder of “Happy” Gleason, the jury acquitted him. When he was accused of the attempted robbery of the South Ozone National Bank, however, he was convicted and sentenced to five to ten years in Sing Sing Prison but was transferred to Dannemorra Prison after an altercation with a prison guard.

After his release in September, 1929, he married Louise Leudeman (she later divorced him) and returned to crime. In his robbery of a Western Union office, he used the first of many disguises he would employ throughout his career. His daughter, Jeanne, was born in September of 1930, and he continued to rob. After his arrest for the robbery of Rosenthal’s Jewelry Store, he was sentenced to thirty years in Sing Sing. He escaped on December 11, 1932, by scaling the prison walls with a makeshift ladder and then began his career in earnest.

In 1933, Sutton, disguised as a mailman, entered the Corn Exchange Bank and Trust in Philadelphia, but he and his accomplice had to abort their planned bank robbery when a passerby became suspicious. Undaunted, on January 15, 1934, Sutton and two accomplices entered the same bank, this time through a skylight, rounded up the employees, handcuffed them, and put them in a small room. The robbers then gathered up the money. Two weeks later, Sutton was apprehended and sentenced to twenty-five to thirty years in the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. On April 3, 1945, after he had made four previous attempts to break out of prison, he and eleven other prisoners escaped, but Sutton was caught the same day. As a fourth-time offender, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and transferred to the maximum-security Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia.

On February 10, 1947, disguised as a prison guard, Sutton carried a ladder to a prison wall and again escaped. Before he was captured in February of 1952 by police acting on a tip by Arnold Schuster, who was murdered for informing, Sutton had a career total of more than one hundred bank robberies, most of them involving his disguises as a messenger, policeman, or maintenance man, had stolen more than two million dollars, and had been placed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s “Ten Most Wanted List” on March 20, 1950.

Legal Action and Outcome

When he was arrested in 1952 and tried for the robbery of the Manufacturers Trust Company in Sunnyside, Long Island, Sutton already owed the legal system one life term and a 105-year sentence. At his trial in the Queens County Court, the jury tacked on an additional thirty years, which he was to serve at Attica Prison in New York State. While incarcerated, Sutton read law books and became a “jailhouse lawyer.” When a liberal Supreme Court’s decisions in the 1960’s granted some concessions to convicts and instituted some curbs on police procedures, Sutton and his determined lawyer succeeded in getting the New York penal system officials to free “Slick Willie” on Christmas Eve, 1969. At the time Sutton was ill, suffering from emphysema and facing an impending operation on the arteries in his legs. After his release he moved to Spring Hill, Florida, where he lived with his sister. Ironically, before his death the Manhattan Bank and Trust Company of New Britain, Connecticut, hired him as their spokesman to promote the company’s credit card. Sutton died on November 2, 1980, in Spring Hill. His family later moved his body to Brooklyn, where he was buried in the family plot.

Impact

Willie Sutton was a nonviolent criminal who appealed to the masses despite his crimes. He was even seen as a kind of Robin Hood figure. Sutton’s notion of “where the money was” later became the “Willie Sutton Rule” of accounting, which states that, in business management, activity-based costing should be applied where the greatest costs are incurred (where the money is) in order to lower costs. His indirect impact involved a gangland decision not to murder a “citizen,” a non-Mob member who is an informer, again.

Bibliography

Reynolds, Quentin. I, Willie Sutton. 1953. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993. Sutton’s life story, complete with “lessons” and justifications for his criminal behavior.

Sutton, Willie, with Edward Linn. Where the Money Was. New York: Broadway Books, 2004. Update of Reynolds’s book to Sutton’s release in 1969. Also provides some new material.

Swierczynski, Duane. This Here’s a Stick-Up: The Big Bad Book of American Bank Robbers. New York: Alpha, 2002. Contains a short discussion of Sutton.