| PROFILE |
This is the story of what became an obsession.
Sometime last fall, I slit the last of the Monday mail and found the text of an executive's speech. I skimmed the document for news. There it was, a few pages into the text, "it" not being news, but "THE QUOTE," which I have read and heard, even borrowed, hundreds of times in 18 years of writing about banks.
If you've ever been to a banking conference, you've heard, or even used it, yourself. With many variations, it goes like this:
"As Willie Sutton the bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks, 'because that's where the money is'."
I can't say what triggered the two questions that morning, but neither would leave me alone:
1. Who the heck was Willie Sutton, anyway, and why did people keep quoting him?
2. Did this Sutton ever really say this quote--or was this just one more in the long line of myths and legends of banking?
A search of the records
Though I had plenty of more important things to do at lunch I connected my computer to the Nexis/Lexis research database and searched the system for a clue.
What I found was impressive, if one considers that a bank robber is a fairly heavy-duty criminal. This robber's words, if they were his, had been borrowed by hundreds of people to illustrate all sorts of points just in 1996.
Indeed, THE QUOTE has been used in articles and speeches about bond issues, religious matters, Medicaid fraud, alcohol on campus, mutual-fund investment strategies, and even, in a surprisingly small number of cases, bank robberies.
Back in the 1980s, Walter Wriston used to enjoy quoting Sutton in speeches calling for financial modernization. Once, he pointed out that Sutton couldn't regard banks as the only place to get money.
But who was Sutton, to be quoted so authoritatively?
The quest continued over the next couple of months, taking me from databases to sites on the World Wide Web to the files of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to bankers association records to--you get the idea.
The source of the best information? Willie Sutton himself.
| "The robber's words, if they were his, had been borrowed by hundreds to illustrate all sorts of points" |
When apprehended for the last time, in 1952, Sutton wrote, in cooperation with a well-known newspaperman of the day, a streamlined tale of his life of crime called I, Willie Sutton (reprinted in 1993 by Da Capo Press, New York).
Years later, after his final "escape," Sutton and another ghostwriter came up with Where the Money Was: The Memoirs of a Bank Robber (Viking Press, New York, 1976).
Meet Willie Sutton
Willie Sutton was a refreshing hood. He robbed banks and he was good at it. He made no bones about that. He usually packed a gun, either a pistol or a Thompson submachine gun--"You can't rob a bank on charm and personality"--but took a professional's pride in never using it. Sutton stole from the rich and he kept it, though in later years he was popular with the public through some misplaced Robin Hood idea.
A tough Irish kid born in 1901 and raised near the Brooklyn, N.Y., docks, he actually preferred to be called "Bill," when a life lived mostly on the lam didn't make an alias necessary. The "Willie" was bestowed by the police, who apparently thought it went better with the nicknames they devised.
Sutton's criminal activity started early, with pilferage when he was nine or ten, graduating up to breaking and entering the business of a girlfriend's father so the pair could elope.
Even an early dose of incarceration didn't quell the criminality in Sutton. He said he tried, but somehow the temptation was always too much for him.
Though he was to gain his fame as a bank robber, his first experience in unauthorized withdrawals from banks and jewelry stores was learned at the knee of a crook named "Doc" Tate, an expert safecracker. In time, Sutton went on his own with another partner, still cracking safes with all the traditional burglar tools of his day plus a few of his own invention.
Willie the Actor
Sutton was musing on a botched burglary when an idea came to him, as described in I, Willie Sutton:
"I thought about my failure when I tried to relieve the Ozone Park Bank of the contents of its vault. Doc Tate was right. The acetylene torch was not the answer...
"Late that afternoon I was walking along Broadway when I saw an armored truck stop in front of a business establishment after closing hours. Two of the uniformed guards approached the door, rang the bell, and were admitted. In a few moments they marched from the store, climbed into their truck and drove off.... I doubted very much if the clerk who admitted them to the store looked at their faces. He saw the uniforms and waved them in. The right uniform was an open sesame.... that would unlock any door. That afternoon 'Willie the Actor' was born."
Sutton, a bit of a rake, spent some of his flusher days as a safecracker hanging out with showgirls and in the process he learned a great deal about makeup. Putting rented uniforms and the makeup together with a devotion to casing a bank until he had its routine--and its weaknesses--down pat made for a mostly unbeatable combination.
Sutton's technique, with its variations, was used to take roughly 100 banks over a career spanning from the late 1920s to Sutton's final arrest in 1952--with a number of prison terms in between.
The robber had several stays with the law, including a stint in Sing Sing, which was one of three prisons he escaped from in ingenious ways, and in Attica, which he left through other talents.
Was it worth it, at least in terms of money? Sutton maintained that nobody could beat "the game." He spent more of his adult life behind bars than out. Sutton "withdrew" roughly $2 million in the course of his career, but enjoyed the high life when he could live it without attracting attention. He also helped out fellow cons on the run, and often had to maintain multiple apartments or homes so he could lay low when necessary. In any event, when he was released from prison in 1969, he had to apply for welfare for a time just to live.
His release came about as a result of a series of decisions made by the Supreme Court in the 1960s relating to legal procedures and treatment of arrested persons. Sutton, who always made a point of getting all the education he could while incarcerated, had become a sort of jailhouse lawyer.
His own release required the assistance of a hard-as-nails woman lawyer who helped him. Through a convoluted process of decisions too intricate to recount here, in 1969 Willie Sutton was a free man.
No longer living on the lam
There is surprisingly little to be found about Willie Sutton once he was released. He spoke from time to time on prison reform. He consulted with some banks about anti-robbery efforts. And, in a step that amounted to sheer audacity, he made a television commercial for New Britain Bank and Trust Co. in Connecticut.
The bank is buried beneath several layers of merger now, but The Encyclopedia of American Crime (Facts on File, Inc., N.Y.C.) says he promoted the bank's credit card in this way:
"Now when I say I'm Willie Sutton, people believe me."
Sutton died in 1980 at the age of 79. He had been living with his sister in Florida in his last years and the family arranged for a quiet burial back in Brooklyn in the family plot.
The final irony
So, what about THE QUOTE?
In his second book, Sutton tells, with pride, of how the medical profession adopted "Sutton's Law"--the idea of looking for the obvious, before going further afield, when diagnosing. The "law" was coined by a medical professor who recalled that Sutton, when asked by a reporter why he robbed banks, had answered with his famous line.
Except it never happened that way. As he describes in the book, Sutton:
"The irony of using a bank robber's maxim as an instrument for teaching medicine is compounded, I will now confess, by the fact that I never said it. The credit belongs to some enterprising reporter who apparently felt a need to fill out his copy...
"If anybody had asked me, I'd have probably said it. That's what almost anybody would say. ...it couldn't be more obvious.
"Or could it?
"Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I'd be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that's all."
Yet, by appropriating the quote sufficiently for a title for his second book, Sutton started a chain reaction that continues to this day. This is not the first time the truth was pointed out. Yet the myth persists.
Ironically, for the man who could bust out of high-security prisons, escape from a fiction has proven not only impossible, but self-inflicted as well. The day Where the Money Was took its name, Willie Sutton was handcuffed to a lie for eternity.
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