Willie Sutton: The Gentleman Bank Robber and the Quote He Never Said

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William Francis Sutton Jr. was born on June 30, 1901, in the Irishtown section of Brooklyn, the son of a blacksmith, and left school after the eighth grade. Over a 40-year career he stole an estimated $2 million and spent more than half his adult life in prison, yet the public came to see him as a folk hero. He robbed banks in costume, arriving just before opening as a postman, police officer, or messenger, and he kept the pistol or Thompson submachine gun he carried unloaded. The papers called him Willie the Actor and Slick Willie.

This episode follows the escapes that built the legend, the fixation on one Philadelphia bank that undid him, and the strange respect he commanded among mobsters who shared none of his scruples. It also follows the cost of his fame: the young man who spotted him on a New York subway in 1952 was shot dead weeks later. Sutton left Attica on Christmas Eve 1969, became a bank security consultant, and died in 1980 at 79, attached forever to a maxim taught to medical students that he insisted he never coined.

• In December 1932 he took a guard hostage with a smuggled gun and went over a 30-foot prison wall on a 45-foot ladder.
• In 1945 he and 11 other convicts tunneled out of Eastern State Penitentiary, surfaced in daylight in front of a police patrol, and were all quickly recaptured.
• At Holmesburg in 1947, dressed as a guard and caught in a searchlight while carrying a ladder, he called out that it was all right and the light moved on.
• After clothing salesman Arnold Schuster described the capture on television, Albert Anastasia ordered his murder, and Schuster was killed outside his home on March 9, 1952.
• Sutton wrote that a reporter invented the line about banks being where the money is, and that he robbed them because he felt more alive inside a bank than anywhere else.